Authors: Michael Meyer
The train outpaced civilization. The roads turned to gravel, roofs to thatched straw, rivers to an unpolluted clarity that showed their bottoms. Beside a hut-size station stood a water tower whose narrow stone base and bulbous wooden basin didn’t look Chinese but like a prop from Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard
. The Russian play about modernity colliding with the pastoral begins: “The train has come, thank God. What time is it?”
1901
, said the water tower’s keystone.
Manchzhuriya Station opened that year. On the train heading here then, a British passenger recorded sitting bored in the dining car, watching the French consul’s wife playing waltzes on the piano as the fat Russian conductor waved along with his “delicate pink handkerchief loaded with perfume.” Behind them, in the open-topped boxcars, stood “crammed Chinese humanity, and some horses.”
Another English writer pronounced the Chinese Eastern Railway a “pantomime,” a Potemkin Pullman. “Has ever the world seen such a spectacle? Some say three or four thousand Russian employees, some say five thousand, to run fifteen hundred miles of railway in an Eastern country. The idea that the railway is going to build up a new Manchuria, peopled with white Russians and carrying on a white man’s trade entirely separate from the twenty million Chinese in the country, is the idea of a maniac who has no conception of what the Far East really is.”
At last, Manchzhuriya Station! Exiting in
1903
, the Englishman found the station square crowded with rickshaws and droshkies, Mongolian horse dealers, lama priests, red-turbaned Sikhs, Russian officers, and Chinese coolies. Boomtown morals, too: “In Manchuria the lady with a past is, with few exceptions, the lady who is always present.”
I exited the station to find the unpaved square coated in blowing sand and filled only with tumbleweeds.
A grid of dirt roads led to another wooden water tower. Nearby, a row of birch trees fronted the former Russian consulate, whose lemon-yellow façade brightly reflected the Manchurian sun. I pushed open its tall wooden doors, surprised to find them unlocked. My footsteps echoed off shoulder-high wainscoting, and I stood still in a room where tall gauzy curtains billowed in the breeze. Dusty shafts of sunlight angled toward an emerald-colored rug. I expected to hear a telegraph tapping out the news from St. Petersburg. Instead I heard a gentle voice repeating in Chinese, “What are you looking for?”
“The past.”
“Have you seen the Lenin Room?”
I was standing in the city museum. Its docent led me past glass cases filled with hundreds of pewter miniatures of Vladimir Ilyich. He doffed his cap, stared resolute, sat in a rocking chair, touched his lapel, read against a bookshelf, walked with a child, and lay with his hands behind his head. Listlessly, the docent said, “The next room is all samovars.”
The museum held few artifacts: a rusting bell, a wooden cart, and black-and-white photos that showed the railroad’s construction. Russian soldiers in double-breasted tunics, fur hats, and mustachios oversaw pickax-wielding Chinese with their hair braided in queues.
But history was being made outside, where jeeps bearing Russian plates idled next to Chinese taxis, their trunks ballooning with stuffed animals. Thick Russian traders in tracksuits walked alongside women in black tights and bulbous sweaters, lugging bags filled with plungers and extension cords. A billboard trumpeted:
MANZHOULI IS ASIA
’S LARGEST IN INLAND PORT
.
A century before, the Russians built Manzhouli to move goods and settlers to farthest Siberia. Now trade moved the opposite direction. The markets sold everything a person needed, and then some. One stall displayed car seats, boxing gloves, doorknobs, calculators, ice skates, fur coats, box cutters, clocks, and bikes. Its proprietor had migrated from southern China. His neighbor came from the next province over. Chatting with the traders at a dozen stalls elicited ten different regional accents. All had moved to Manzhouli via the train. The advertisements seen most on a walk around town were for long-distance mobile phone plans and domestic remittance rates.
Architecturally, Manzhouli didn’t look particularly Chinese the way other Manchurian railway towns were touched up after colonials had handed back the keys. There were no recently added Buddhist temples or tiled roofs upturned at the eaves, or even the Communist aesthetic of cement buildings covered with white bathroom tiles. There was no public square. Everything looked new, right down to the plastic deer grazing in the city park. It had been made by fencing off a patch of grassland.
Given the nationwide urgency to raze old and build new, I was surprised to find remnants of Russian tenancy. Across from the train station and past the former consulate, a dirt lane led to the former headquarters of the Russo-Chinese Bank, which had financed the railroad. No sign identified what the building had once been—or since become—but that morning two pasted strips of white paper made an
X
across its double doors, giving notice of eviction.
On the sidewalk, a tout asked if I wanted to see Russian ballerinas and Chinese hip-hop dancers on a nightclub stage, with the understanding, “my friend,” that their tops may be loose. I hailed a waiting cab.
“You want to see
what
?” the driver asked, then repeated my request. “The
old
trains.” She looked out the windshield. “If we’re going out there”—she gestured to the ocean of dusty grass that lapped at Manzhouli on all sides—“you’re going to have to pay an extra ten yuan, so I can have my car washed afterward.”
The driver pulled her tiny CityBaby sedan onto a new highway that ran flat off the horizon’s edge. In the Chinese way of spelling, she traced her name’s characters on my left knee: Sun Di. The wind buffeted the car, pushing us from lane to lane like a boat over choppy seas. As she passed trucks hauling coal, Miss Sun dodged the jagged chunks that spilled in our path, laughed with her head thrown back, and said she loved to drive.
“That’s Russia.” She pointed at grassland that looked indistinguishable from all the rest. The only object out the window was on the Chinese side: a cathedral, under construction. “Actually, it’s fake,” Miss Sun said. “The tourism bureau is building it as a backdrop for wedding photos.”
Miss Sun was thirty-one and grew up here. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “most people worked at the coal mine. After layoffs, they worked in the markets. I wasn’t pretty enough to get hired there. So I learned how to drive. No meetings. No boss.” Another full-throated, head-tilting laugh.
She earned enough to buy her own two-bedroom apartment and put away savings. “I like driving by myself. I don’t listen to the radio or drink tea. I think about what I want to achieve next. I like the American way of thinking: that a person should depend on oneself.”
She had never married and worried that time was running short. “It’s hard to meet men here,” she said, echoing the sentiment of border towns worldwide. “The bars are bad places.”
“You offered to take me to one.”
The laugh again. “Speaking truthfully, Manzhouli’s getting safer and more civilized. Now we even have a stoplight.” A five-star Shangri-La Hotel was being built, too.
Miss Sun exited the highway to pass through a series of soot-covered, late-Socialist-era matchbox-style buildings affiliated with the coal mine. The CityBaby fell into, then climbed out of, a pothole. We rolled over cracking bits of coal to the lip of a strip mine whose furthest limit was obscured by blowing dust. It descended five stories into the earth. Each level held train tracks.
“I hear we are one of the last places in the world where you can see those,” she said, pointing down. White clouds billowed from steam locomotives pulling coal-topped hoppers. An engineer saw us staring from above, waved back and honored the code, which knew no borders. The steam whistle went
woo-WOO
. I waved, and the engineer tooted again. The guttural sound of the churning black engines pulsed through us, coal dust clung to our cheeks, and Miss Sun bolted for the car. I stood transfixed by the near-extinct trains, feeling transported, imagining riding one of them at fifteen miles an hour from Moscow to Manchzhuriya Station. A worker sidled up and offered to take my photo for five yuan. We’re back in China, now.
It was nine hundred miles to the opposite end of the line, ending at the eastern border town of Suifenhe, en route to Vladivostok. That trip, equivalent in distance to Milwaukee to New York City, would take twenty-eight hours, broken by a stop midway, in Harbin. As my train chugged east, the setting sun cast a pink glow over log cabins, gravel roads, and the rising moon. The train passed a lone man shepherding a row of geese, and then a small elementary school whose fenced-in rectangle of trampled grassland held a basketball court with backboards made from railroad ties, and bicycle rims for hoops. How happy this would have made the game’s inventor, James Naismith, who wrote, “I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place.”
At sunrise, train relations took on the tinge of a morning after a passionate fling: intimacy had been replaced by embarrassed proximity. Due to a neighboring bunkmate’s snoring, I had not slept and could barely look in the man’s rested eyes. Outside, the view had changed, too: gravel roads had turned to pavement, thatched straw to cement, unpolluted rivers to murky ones, and grassland became rows of concrete apartment blocks. The train crossed the Songhua River over a bridge built by Russians in
1901
. The noise of traffic, of honking, of the crowd: Harbin.
Frances joined me there for a sort of rolling conjugal visit. Our overnight train passed through sooty one-road towns whose names evoked a once-promising past: Jade Spring, Duckweed River, Timbersea, Scenic Summit, Horse Crossing Bridge, and Red House. Anyone can come up with “Northern Capital,” Beijing’s meaning, but what was so special about that red house that gave that place its name? Frances thought I was reading too much into it; they were just names. “Why is it named Wasteland?” she asked, but other than repeating that it had become a village in
1956
, I couldn’t say.
For eleven hours, the train limped three hundred miles east to the Russian border. Cockroaches wandered the carriage. The food cart sold deep-fried soybeans, corn stewed with pea pods and a knockoff version of Tsingtao beer, named Qingtao, that tasted like ammonia. The attendant took my crisp notes pulled from a Harbin ATM and for change plopped a wad of limp bills in my hand. The further you go from a big city, the more the money resembles a palimpsest.
Frances shrouded herself in the horse blankets provided to each thin-padded bunk. Hong Kong was making her soft, she said. The carriage reverberated with raspy coughs, irrigating sniffles, and, after the lights went off at ten, rumbling snores. Frances pounded the berth above her. The man woke and yelled, “I’ll show you the colors, bitch!”
“I’d like to see you try,” she icily replied. The man backed down, rolled over and ceased his performance.
“Hong Kong’s not making you soft,” I whispered.
In Suifenhe, we exited to see a town clinging to the low hills like it was trying to hold on to China and not slide across the border. Aside from the old train station, nothing looked Russian save for the passengers lugging sacks of plastic buckets, tennis rackets, ski jackets, teddy bears, and swimsuits onto buses that would shuttle them home.
At Suifenhe’s small museum, the docent refused to charge us an entrance fee and paced slowly behind us. Aside from color-added photos of railroad workers, the only displayed Chinese Eastern Railway artifacts were pocket watches and inkwells. The docent asked us to please wait. Over the years I’ve learned that this meant an historian has been called, or a local official who would be eager to showcase his town for a foreigner. It usually pays to wait for whoever will arrive.
In Suifenhe, the roles had reversed: I was the person waited for. “I called the newspaper,” the docent said. “They’re sending a reporter over.”
He had mistaken us for someone else, we said. “No, he wants to see you. We never have tourists here, let alone Americans.”
How did he know? He heard our English. He watched a lot of
Friends
.
The reporter arrived, and I made a joke about this being a slow news month. He nodded without laughing and asked us to wait. “The photographer is on his way.”
Our visit recorded for posterity, we boarded the train back to Harbin. One thing I loved about the Northeast was its ease of travel. The trains ran frequently, and nearly everywhere. Stations garlanded the tracks like the stars of Orion’s sword and belt, from Siberia to the Yellow Sea. There was never a need to take a long-distance bus.
I had sworn off them in
2001
after an overnight ride in far western China while suffering from dysentery. No matter how much I had pleaded, then cursed, the driver would not pull over in the desert night. I percolated back to my bunk, suddenly remembering that, three weeks earlier, I had stuffed a wrapped blanket into my backpack when exiting the airplane. It was a fortunate grab: the blue cloth made a pliant diaper. The smell from my upper bunk had woken the surrounding passengers, including an infant, who howled. “Your baby stinks to death!” a man cursed its mother. I balled up the blanket, pulled up my pants, pushed the fetid bundle down by my feet, and lay still. Always take the airplane blanket. Never take an overnight bus.