Authors: Michael Meyer
The sister city movement—“town twinning” in Europe—dates to the ninth century, when Le Mans, France, formed a partnership with Paderborn, Germany. In
1931
, Toledo, Ohio, invited Toledo, Spain, to form North America’s first twinning. The trend accelerated after World War II as a form of reconciliation and Cold War propaganda. In
1956
the Eisenhower administration founded Sister Cities International (SCI), now a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.
In these post–Evil Empire days, twinning’s rationale, according to SCI’s mission statement, was to “build global cooperation at the municipal level, promote cultural understanding, and stimulate economic development.” In other words, it’s for our friendship. American cities often had multiple partners, but SCI’s website cautioned against playing the field. “Having more than one sister city should only occur if your community feels that it has the necessary resources to support multiple affiliations.” I imagined a personal ad titled
DESPERATELY SEEKING CITY
:
Single, attractive, mixed metropolis seeking foreign partner for long-term ties and travel. Size matters: No townships, please.
Since China’s first pairing—Shanghai with San Francisco,
1980
—sister cities had, like UNESCO World Heritage Sites, become an imprimatur that evinced development. Chinese metropolises clamored to add partners to their rolls (and have them break up with Taiwanese mates: Mobile dumped Kaohsiung to pick up Heze
and
Tianjin). Beijing—with forty-seven sister cities—was the fulcrum of degrees of civic separation; it was how one could connect Islamabad to Tel Aviv. Some of the pairings were intuitive: Lhasa with Boulder; industrial Wuhan with Pittsburgh; the tiny Jilin town of Jiaohe with equally forlorn Folsom, California. Making friends with cities that looked or produced like yours was one thing, but it took chutzpah for the rusting Northeastern port of Huludao to hook up with glamorous Las Vegas. The port was already bringing culture back home via its annual International Swimsuit Festival.
Our tour group trudged upstairs, past a yarmulke meant to evince that Harbin’s Jewish community was once the largest in the Far East. We stared at a rusting flatiron, proof that “Harbin flourished as a modern, open, and inclusive city.” No connection was made to the synagogues, to Saint Sophia’s, to the restored cobblestone street, or the district of former Russian tenement homes crumbling nearby. No mention was made of the czar and emperor and warlords and armies that had battled for Harbin, once home and refuge to people from fifty-three countries, speaking forty-five languages.
Instead we saw displays from Chiang Mai (tapestries), Cagayan de Oro (an ostrich egg), Sunderland (a photo of George Washington, whose parents emigrated from there). Griffith had also sent an egg—an emu’s—along with kangaroo skins and bottles, now empty, of Yellow Tail wine. Asahikawa’s beer bottles were drained, too, as was the vodka from Sverdlovsk Oblast. The children stared at a boomerang behind glass. The hall was silent, and dimly lit. We were looking at dry bottles, locked-up weapons, and there in the corner, at Rovaniemi, a pile of unopened letters to Santa Claus.
“The most favored person residing in Rovaniemi is Santa Claus,” the guide recited. “Every year there are hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting his office at the Santa Claus Village on the Arctic Circle.” Those who couldn’t make it, such as a child named Max Lee of
139
Boundary Street, Kowloon, sent letters instead. Here was his now, on display in Harbin.
The guide led us downstairs for a summing-up—
Harbin, international city, friendship, development, modern, friendship
—and the children stared at me and smiled, and I thought:
This beats being called
laowai.
The museum was closing, the kids filed past Minneapolis, whose items did not disprove critics who sniped that the sister city movement was a gloss on doing business, on increasing trade. But I dropped the sense of wizened expat irony and did as the tour guide asked, enthusing in Minnesota-accented Mandarin how Mill City life on the
Mixixibi
(Mississippi) river was illustrated by the displayed box of Pillsbury Funfetti brownie mix.
I grew up eagerly anticipating the latest issue of
National Geographic
for the maps, which wallpapered my bedroom. When you’re from a place like Minneapolis, surrounded by a continent on all, nearly equidistant sides, you naturally wonder what holds you in—one reason Midwesterners make up a disproportionate number of Peace Corps volunteers. It’s a ticket Out There.
And here’s what it looked like this gorgeous morning in our sister city of Harbin: at Saint Sophia’s square, I sat on a green wooden bench next to a planter of yellow marigolds being bothered by black butterflies. A little girl fed pigeons, a boy blew bubbles, women walked past holding parasols, a couple wore matching Angry Birds T-shirts, and bus honks and dialect filled the air:
ayamaya
and
en’e
. Dumpling house employees stood in rows for their post-lunch group exercises and pep talk. Dragonflies buzzed the marigolds, a woman leaned against the former cathedral to be photographed, and a man strutted past with his hand purse tucked in his arm like a riding crop. Another followed him, holding a brown, string-sealed
FILES
envelope with both hands. The smell of hot dogs and popcorn wafted from a cart. When you travel, everything can look new, and the mundane becomes interesting. The city is on display, and travelers—in China especially—are also an exhibit. A grandfather cradling an infant hurried toward the marigolds, spread the slit of the boy’s pants, and held him as the baby watered the flowers. I watched them; they watched me. Our expressions were exactly the same. We’re twins.
I had last seen the lumberjack Meng Zhaoguo at the Red Flag Logging Commune, eighty miles north of Wasteland, set among the remains of a forest of oak, birch, and Manchurian ash that once covered an area twice the size of Wyoming. Back then, he had directed me to find him in the last house on the village lane. Now he told me to come to a Harbin university and walk to the last building on campus. “If you can’t find me, just ask anyone,” he said. Everyone knew the man who had been abducted by aliens.
I stood at the gate of the Harbin University of Commerce, feeling like I had arrived in another ghost town. The campus was part of a pump-priming project to build a new Harbin city center as large in area as New York City. The scheme had stalled: people simply did not want to move across the Songhua River, and some halted building sites had been reclaimed by rows of corn and soybeans. The university’s main classroom building stood empty but for a group of students shouting phrases from a popular textbook series named
Crazy English
, which was an excellent lesson in yelling, if not communication. As I walked past transplanted pines propped up in planters, the voices chorused: “It’s better than nothing! You can’t please everyone! Time will tell!”
But at the back end of campus, in full grin, stood Meng Zhaoguo. “I am very happy to work here,” he said. “It’s quiet. I’m in charge of the boiler and watch the steam pipes.” It was a better job than felling trees, he said. Logging had been curtailed at his former post; only
10
percent of the trees remained, protected as part of the Dragon Mountain National Forest Park. The workers at Red Flag Logging Commune had either left or stayed to farm soybeans.
Mr. Meng wore a clean white tunic, slacks, and loafers, with short black hair pushed neatly to the side. He looked thinner, healthier, and just as earnest as before. But he was tired of retelling what became known as the Meng Zhaoguo Incident. Talking with him is how I imagined it would be to interview a former adult film star embarrassed about his past. “When students say they recognize me from television,” he said, “I tell them that was someone else who looks like me.”
But his notoriety had landed this job. “A friend told me about it, and when I came for the interview, the boss had seen me on the news. The college provides an apartment with heating, my wife and daughter are working on campus as well, and my son attends a good Harbin middle school. He’s studying English. Life is better for him here than in the forest.”
Mr. Meng was the best example of Manchurian self-invention I had ever met. Chinese characterize Northeasterners as bighearted, industrious, and sometimes a bit touched in the head. So it was not a shock when the nation’s first person claiming to sleep with an extraterrestrial came from up here.
When I previously visited him at the Red Flag Logging Commune, Mr. Meng was living in a two-room timber-frame house he had built with his own hands. Bare yellow light bulbs dropped from the ceiling, there was no phone—or cell reception—and the wall over the
kang
’s barley-stuffed pillows was filled with a fading map of the world. “I put that up a long time ago,” he explained, “when I dreamed of seeing more places.”
A big-screen Sony television filled one end of the room. “Out here, it only picks up two channels,” he said. “So it’s a waste of money, but I didn’t buy it. A businessman brought it, after he heard about my story.” Another visitor, from Malaysia, had brought him a cow. “I sold that,” Mr. Meng told me. “Cows cost money to take care of. What am I going to do with a cow out here?”
We had stepped outside, boots crunching snow, and faced the Dragon Mountains, veiled in purple mist as the day’s light faded. Meng said that on a night much like this in
1994
, he saw a metallic glint shimmer off those peaks. “I thought a helicopter had crashed, so I set out to scavenge for scrap.” He made it to the lip of a valley, spying the wreckage in the distance, when “
Foom!
Something hit me square in the forehead and knocked me out.”
He awoke at home, with no memory of how he got there. A few nights later he woke to find himself floating above the
kang
. As his wife slumbered beneath him, a three-meter-tall, six-fingered alien woman with thighs coated in braided hair straddled his waist. Mr. Meng and the alien had copulated for forty minutes. “She then disappeared through the wall and I floated back down to bed. She left me with this.” He undid his trousers to reveal a two-inch-long jagged mark that he insisted bore only a coincidental resemblance to a scar resulting from a saw accident.
The next morning Meng told his wife what happened. She did not feel betrayed, he said. He had been helpless, after all, abducted in his own bed by an alien.
I asked him to draw the creature, and he took my pen and tore off a sheet from a roll of rough, unbleached paper (“This could be made from a tree I cut”). To my surprise, I recognized the alien. She looked like the carved round-eyed figurines excavated by a young Liang Siyong at the Neolithic sites near here. Actually, she looked more familiar than that. As he made tiny
x
’s on the alien’s inner thighs, I realized Mr. Meng was sketching a hairy cousin of the Michelin Man.
His smiling, puffy white face waved from atop an auto repair shop at the base of Red Flag Logging Commune. I thought of that, and the empty crates of Five Star beer stacked just outside Mr. Meng’s front door, and the remote loneliness of a Northeast winter. But he told the story calmly, not in an anxious or pleading tone, cajoling the listener to believe. I kept my deductions internal, and Mr. Meng suggested we go outside with his kids and light off the fireworks I had brought for them. That night I slept fitfully on his
kang
.
The government monitored faith in anything but the Communist Party, but an expression of belief in extraterrestrials was permitted, as it fell under the purview of astronomy, and the “scientific socialism” the Party supported. A UFOlogy journal had a circulation of
200
,
000
, and the China UFO Research Center boasted
50
,
000
members and held annual conferences before splintering—as organized groups of believers tended to do—into rival factions. Once Mr. Meng’s story started making the rounds via text messages and the Internet, the media came calling, leading to his appearance in national newspapers and on television. He was even the subject of a debated Wikipedia page, which listed different versions of his story, including being taken to the aliens’ home planet of Jupiter, and “ongoing harassment” from the extraterrestrials.
“Journalists look for discrepancies in my story,” he told me at the logging commune. “I get tired of telling it. In the end, I’m just a peasant.”
But the next morning he had continued the tale: a month after the alien had visited him in bed, he again awoke to find his body passing through the world map over the
kang
. He levitated through the stratosphere and into a spaceship, where a circle of aliens cloaked him in a robe of flesh.
“A robe of what?”
“Of flesh,” he repeated. “They said in Chinese, but with a heavy accent so it was hard for me to understand at first, that they were refugees. Like me, they wanted to escape their former lives, so they left their dying home.”
That echoed the tales of many migrants to Manchuria.
Mr. Meng asked to see his alien paramour, the one with braided hair on her inner thighs.
“‘Impossible,’ they replied. But then they said something that made me hopeful. ‘In sixty years, on a distant planet, the son of a Chinese peasant will be born.’”