Authors: Michael Meyer
The street is a pedestrian-only thoroughfare and Harbin’s chief tourist site. It begins at a Holiday Inn and ends at a Walmart bordering Stalin Park on the banks of the Songhua River, where old men flying kites fill its promenade. One man shuffling along in cloth shoes smiled and showed me the pet goldfish he carried in a transparent plastic bag. “I’m taking him out for a walk,” he announced.
Nearby, a tinny bullhorn set on repeat bleated, “Boycott Japanese products!” University students sitting at a table set in front of the Russian-built Modern Hotel passed out flyers urging us to stand up for the Diaoyu Islands, claimed by both China and Japan since the First Sino-Japanese War. The students competed for attention with a campaign whose table faced them directly across the cobblestones. Its bullhorn blared a trebly recording that ordered us to “resolutely smash illegal electronic games!” Behind the tables, I spied a fairy-tale storefront obscured by vines in bloom. Its evergreen wood façade framed a plate glass window with lace curtains. I ducked inside, silencing the bullhorns by closing the heavy wooden door. The room smelled of cabbage piroshki
and espresso. Black-and-white photos of ruddy Russians adorned the yellow walls. The café’s name, Sufeiya, meant
Sophia
in Chinese.
Its owner, Hu Hong, was in his fifties, with short black hair flecked with sawdust. “I was just renovating my new restaurant,” he said, raising a shot of vodka in a toast. “I trained as an architect but I’d rather spend my time on the job site, making things. Sitting in a meeting room seeking approval of a design from an official who is not even from your town, but was assigned from far away, is just absurd. It’s one correction after another, one suggestion that you have to implement, no matter how ridiculous. Just today, I was chiseling a rose into a slab of oak—hard work. The building inspector came, looked around approvingly, then on his way out stopped at my table and said, ‘You should carve a different flower. A chrysanthemum would be better.’” Mr. Hu laughed. “Northeasterners can’t help themselves. We’re never happy with the present state of things.”
Hu grew up in Harbin, the “mixed-blood” child of a Chinese father and a Russian mother. “All of these pictures on the wall are my ancestors,” he said. “This was their house.” A Tchaikovsky suite tinkled faintly on the stereo as Hu walked me around the room, past his family’s old grandfather clock to snapshots of a beautiful woman with bobbed hair and a broad smile that matched the one of the man proudly pointing at her image. “This is my mom,” he said. “I built this café in her memory, and named it for her. She died during the Cultural Revolution. The Soviet Union and China had split then. I was sent away.” He paused. “Another vodka.”
He handed me a newsletter that showed a steam locomotive next to the title
Russia’s News
. “I put this together every month. It’s sort of an émigré newsletter. I include translated excerpts from my mother’s
1920
s diary.” Mr. Hu said the project was more than just a way to spend time with her memory. It kept Harbin’s memory alive, too.
“Everyone in this city—the people who grew up here, the natives—are mixed, if not by blood, then by culture,” he said. “It might not be apparent to young people or tourists. Stalin Park? That’s the last one in China, maybe even in Russia. Why is it still named that? People have no idea who Stalin was or what he did. We may as well have named it Hitler Park. But all people know is that Stalin is Russian and now Russia is our friend. But Russia was not always China’s friend, and history isn’t as simple as ‘First it was like that, but now it is like this.’”
Hu was an architect and showed me a magazine article about his design to commemorate Harbin’s Saint Nicholas Cathedral, which had been razed during the Cultural Revolution. A traffic roundabout stood on its former site. “We could put some onion domes there as statues, at least, to remind people of what was the city’s most prominent building. I doubt that city leaders will agree.” They would argue, he said, that Saint Sophia had been restored and opened as a museum. Preserving one relic was the same as restoring many.
Hu studied architecture in Japan, making him, as he put it, “an historical Northeasterner”—Chinese with Russian and Japanese components. I brought up the notion of Chinese one day hyphenating their ethnicities. Hu didn’t think a hyphen was necessary. “I’m just Chinese. Most Chinese know that our country is a mix of many cultures and peoples.”
The hyphens were silent. Transparent, he said. But in Manchuria, you could see them clearly.
CHAPTER
9
Tunnels in Time, Sidings to Space
Before returning to Wasteland and San Jiu’s ripening rice, I followed old railroad sidings to four relics, of a sort, from Manchuria’s cosmopolitan era. The first stop was to a ghost town. The second, a ghost village. The third, a ghostly museum. The fourth stop was to meet a man who swore he had sex with an alien.
To the ghost town: two hundred miles west of Harbin, I exited the train at Qiqihar. Saying its melodic name was the best thing about the place.
Chee-chee ha-ER
. The train station was a chocolate-colored monolith built by the Japanese during their occupation. Now it was China’s last to wear a crown of red characters greeting arrivals with
LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT
.
During the Qing dynasty, Qiqihar was a military garrison and home to a Muslim community whose three-hundred-year-old mosque looked marooned between new wide boulevards in the city center. The Manchu court would not allow the Russians to run their train line near existing cities, so the Chinese Eastern Railway station was built twenty miles southwest of town, linked by a narrow-gauge shuttle train. The shuttle was gone, replaced by an hourlong bus ride over rutted cement-and-dirt roads to a town named Ang’angxi.
Its station still remained, looking like a Black Sea dacha: tall windows, gabled roof, and a bright exterior painted salmon pink. There were no bustling passengers, no tooting trains. Aside from the cicadas’ thrumming drone, all was still. Across the street, dirt lanes led past brick cottages with carved wood porticos. The fifty-odd homes—painted yellow and robin’s-egg blue—buckled under rotted rooftops. Weeds reached into broken windows. Volunteer corn filled the former sidewalks. On the main road, which formerly echoed with the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and squeaking carriage wheels, four elderly Chinese women squatted next to standing puddles. The blankets before them displayed limp cucumbers and broad beans. Like the vegetables on sale, the women looked wilted. “If you’re looking for history,” one said, “you’ve come too late.”
Actually, I had arrived just in time. The pink crenellated fortress that was once the Russian Railway Club showed open doors. Inside, playing cards were scattered on tables, with chairs pushed away, suggesting that everyone had folded and run to catch the train back to the fatherland. Standing in this stillness sent a shiver up my spine. I asked aloud if anyone was there, but the question bounced off the thick walls and returned to me in reply.
Now only three passenger trains stopped at the station each day; most of the traffic was passing oil tankers and timber-filled boxcars. The ticket window’s lone worker pointed me toward the Chinese plaque hanging on the station’s front that said it had been built in
1903
and had “the railroad’s best surviving wood platform bridge,” roofed against the Manchurian snows. Even today, the barren view was one that would give a traveler pause before getting off a warm train. No wonder the stations on this line were painted in such bright colors.
In
1930
a Harvard graduate named Liang Siyong disembarked here alone. Railway workers had uncovered a tomb containing carved stones that, in their words, “looked old.” At the site, Liang performed one of China’s first scientific excavations, discovering that the artifacts dated back seven thousand years. Liang was twenty-six.
A small museum devoted to the site sat five miles outside town, beside a road that cut razor-straight through wetlands. In the first exhibit room, a tour guide spoke in practiced enthusiasm before a life-size diorama of Asiatic hunter-gatherers. “This settlement was the cradle of northern fishing and hunting civilization,” the guide intoned. “The hominids who lived here created a brilliant culture with their great wisdom and hardworking hands. They made significant contributions to Chinese civilization.”
They did not have any concept of what China was; they were sparking fire with stones. But the guide continued, “The Ang’angxi hominid created the harmonious state between human and nature with firm, indomitable, and pioneering spirit. They remind us how we can contribute to the strengthening of our nation.” The archaeology site was a patriotic education base. Even hominids could serve the national narrative.
The museum’s other exhibit room was shuttered. A docent unlocked the doors, flicked on the lights, then left. Displayed behind glass I saw a hand-knit cardigan, a safety razor, and an inkstone. Initially, I thought that the hominids actually did have great wisdom and hardworking hands. But a black-and-white photograph of a young man with oiled black hair, spectacles, and a starched collar and tie revealed that this was a memorial hall for Liang Siyong, the “father of Chinese archaeology.”
From my years researching Beijing’s planning, I knew about his brother, Liang Sicheng, considered the father of Chinese architecture. I had interviewed his son and read much about his father, a famous court official who had urged the Manchu empress dowager—unsuccessfully—to modernize. But not once had I heard mention of the brother, Liang Siyong.
I paced past photographs of him through the years, and shots of the dig here at Ang’angxi, before reaching a glass case whose caption tag read: “Treatise and job logging of Liang Siyong.” A stack of papers sat within. Neatly typed in English, the top page was titled
Expedition Journal
.
My eyes swelled and I felt, perhaps, similar to how Liang had in
1930
, traveling all the way out here and hitting pay dirt on his first dig. I had read Westerners’ accounts of traveling through Manchuria, but what had a Chinese explorer made of the place?
The docent, playing solitaire on her cell phone, didn’t share my excitement. She couldn’t read English, she said, so had never lifted the cover page to see if the rest of the journal was there or if this was a prop, like the books on an Ikea showroom floor. She didn’t have the key to open the display case. “Mine only open doors. I don’t even know who can open the displays.” Her high heels clicked away, leaving me forlorn in the wetlands, outside the ghost town of Ang’angxi.
The original of Liang’s journal sat seven thousand miles away, in a rare book room at Harvard. Written entirely in English, it was the sort of artifact that, had it remained in China, could have been burned during the Cultural Revolution, like the papers of his famous architect brother. Liang Siyong died before then, of a heart attack aged fifty, in
1954
.
The journal was more personal than scientific, providing a unique glimpse into Manchuria on the eve of Japanese occupation: Liang’s train north from Beijing kept getting shunted to sidings to make way for troop trains. His writing covered two months of
1930
, navigating the Russian, Japanese, republican Chinese, and warlords who held shifting sway along the route.
The economy was just as splintered. Shopping for supplies in Harbin, Liang wrote: “I was positively bewildered and appalled by the different kinds of bills and paper money. Besides the Big Money and the Japanese dollar, there was the Harbin dollar, the [Heilongjiang] dollar, the Tiau Piau (a written document),” plus two more. “Each had its own exchange rate and the rate was different at each store where one used the money! Further, the last four kinds could not be used outside the limits of the Province.”
To dig, Liang first needed permission from both the Russian railway boss and the Chinese provincial governor. The red tape was cut by a letter of introduction written by a local strongman, whose description matched so many men I had met across the Northeast. Of the warlord, Liang wrote: “He was quite a representative specimen. He had the short round head, a squarish face, was bull-necked, thick chested, in short a solidly built man of a little over thirty. He was very domineering in his manner and also very rough, almost coarse, but he was very straight forward and showed even in his way of talking a man of great energy, efficiency, and endurance, a typical man of action of this land. The official side of the matter was finished in less than ten minutes—I had formally obtained the permission to excavate.”
Bandits, however, did not read. A gang on horseback chased Liang until he found shelter in a house that was a “veritable fort, with walls
20
-
30
feet tall and gun holes. Reports of guns sounded all through the night in all parts of town like fire-crackers.”
Throughout the expedition, sleep came hard; if it wasn’t bandit fire, it was lying on a
kang
that grilled Liang’s back and nauseated him with the smell of cow dung burned as fuel. Often he was roused to beat the rats rummaging his supplies. And it was cold: “The northwester was so forceful that it penetrated my heaviest coat. My nose seemed to be frozen and I could hardly breathe. My fingers became so stiff that I could hardly write my notes and take photographs.”
His two-hundred-page journal includes eighty-four hand-developed photos showing excavation sites and the people he encountered on the way. Liang is visible only in his shadow, cast from behind the camera into the frame’s foreground. I imagined him grinning; the people he photographed smiled widely, unusual for subjects seeing a camera for the first time.