The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  Along with the Daur, the Oroqen suffered under the Japanese too, some being conscripted into the army while others were used as forced labour. But the Oroqen were hunters, not a river people like the Hezhen, and many escaped into the forests that cover the Dongbei borderlands. Even so, there are fewer than 9,000 Oroqen left in China and almost all live around Tahe and in neighbouring Huma County.

  Finding them was easier said than done. There are few Oroqen, whom the Chinese refer to as the Elunchuzu, in Tahe itself, and the local Han are not complimentary about those that do reside there. ‘I don’t like Elunchuzu people. The women are fat and drink baijiu,’ one man told me dismissively. Asking exactly where the Oroqen villages are proved fruitless too; everyone in Tahe knows there are Oroqen living near by but no two people could agree on a place to direct me to.

  Finally, I was advised to visit a small town named Shibazhan, south of Tahe and surrounded by boggy, unpromising land through which now frozen streams ran. Everyone appeared to be Han and, at first, I thought I had been given yet another erroneous tip. But soon I realised that Shibazhan is as divided as any Uighur or Tibetan settlement and that the Oroqen district was on the far southern edge of town.

  Horse-drawn carts trotted through narrow alleys lined with one-storey brick and timber buildings all painted yellow and with red roofs, but there were few pedestrians. I wandered around until I was accosted by two men staggering like cartoon drunks. One was Han, his companion Ewenki, another of the minorities found in the former Outer Manchuria. Linked ethnically and linguistically to the Oroqen, around 30,000 of them live in China, mostly in Inner Mongolia.

  Both men reeked of baijiu, although it was not even midday. After they had discovered I was English, they kept shaking my hand, shouting ‘Hello’ and insisting I join them for a drink. As I struggled to extract myself from their clutches, two women emerged from a nearby house to see what all the fuss was about. Plump with pear-shaped bodies and round faces, they matched the Han stereotype of the Elunchuzu and, after I had asked, confirmed they were indeed Oroqen.

  Conversation was difficult with the two drunks bawling in my ear, and the women soon got tired of standing outside. But before they returned to their house, they told me I should visit Baiyinna, a town in between Tahe and Huma, if I wanted to see Oroqen living in their traditional environment. ‘There are lots of Elunchuzu in the villages around Baiyinna,’ one said. ‘Many more than there are in Shibazhan.’

  Baiyinna is a few hours east of Tahe along roads lined with pine trees that lead to the border with Russia. It is designated as an Oroqen township because their numbers are too small to warrant them being assigned their own county. I was the only person to get off the bus and, as it pulled out, I looked around in dismay. Baiyinna is tiny, its main street no more than a few hundred metres long – an anonymous collection of box-like brick buildings and wooden structures.

  Heavy snow was falling as the odd tractor chugged noisily up and down the road, their drivers wrapped up in thick green army greatcoats and balaclavas, but everyone else was presumably hibernating inside their homes. I was burdened by my pack, having decided to abandon Tahe and move on to Huma, and wondered where to find someone to direct me to the Oroqen villages.

  Pushing open the door to what I thought might be a restaurant I was confronted by well over a hundred people, jammed together around tables piled high with food and drink. The room was so crowded I couldn’t see a path through to a spare seat, even if there was one, and I backed out in alarm just as I heard someone shout, ‘Weiguoren’, or westerner. Before I could say a word, two people were standing on either side of me taking my arms and escorting me back inside. I was divested of my pack, a chair was found and I was seated at a table.

  It was a wedding banquet and I was now the involuntary guest of honour. A bowl, chopsticks and a bottle of beer were put in front of me, and I was invited to start eating from dishes so numerous they were stacked on top of each other. The eyes of every single person in the room were on me and I could hear that I was the topic of conversation at each table. The Chinese can never contain their curiosity when they encounter a lone foreigner far from the big cities. Within minutes, many of the guests were gathered around the table firing questions at me. ‘Where are you from?’; ‘Why are you in Baiyinna?’; ‘Why are you on your own?’

  A capable young Han man named Jiang Feng, the restaurant owner, took it on himself to be my protector and started introducing me to the more important guests. They included the groom’s mother, a cheerful lady in a black leather jacket with shocking, jagged stumps for teeth. I had to toast everyone I met, as well as those people I wasn’t introduced to but who came up to me anyway because they wanted to be able to say they had drunk with the westerner.

  Chinese toasts are formal affairs, with little glasses filled with either beer or baijiu held daintily between the thumb and forefinger and sometimes supported by the palm of the other hand. It is obligatory to down the glass in one with a shout of ‘ganbei’, the Chinese equivalent of ‘bottoms up’, so I made sure to insist on drinking only beer, rather than risk getting catastrophically drunk on baijiu. Soon I was toasting so many people I had no time to eat.

  My inadvertent arrival at the celebration resulted in the bride and groom, who had already departed, being summoned back. They were both very young: no more than twenty-one. The bride was pretty with her artfully curled hair and in the traditional red dress worn by Chinese women on their wedding day, her husband smart and self-conscious in a brand-new bright-blue suit.

  We posed for photos together, with some of the other guests also recording the moment on their cellphones and a few filming it as well. The mantelpieces and walls of homes in and around Baiyinna are possibly still adorned with pictures of a scruffy, slightly drunk westerner standing next to a newly married couple. I felt embarrassed at being the centre of attention on their big day and told them so, as well as apologising for crashing their lunch. ‘No problem,’ said the groom. ‘My mother is very pleased to have a foreign guest at my wedding.’

  Most of the people were Han but a few were Elunchuzu, including one old man with twinkling eyes set deep in his round and lined, high-cheekboned face. He taught me how to say ‘ganbei’ and ‘hello’ in Oroqen, information I forgot almost immediately. But the real surprise came near the end of the lunch, when a solidly built middle-aged man with blond hair, watery-blue eyes and a straggly moustache walked into the restaurant and sat next to me.

  Hou Xue Ming was born and raised in a village near Baiyinna to parents who had moved across the border from the Russian Far East in the 1950s. I knew that enough ethnic Russians live in Heilongjiang, as well as some in Xinjiang, for them to be classified as an official minority numbering around 15,000 people. But I had never met one before. Just as I had gawped at Kamil, the Russian-looking Chinese Tatar I met in Urumqi, it was hard to take my eyes off Hou Xue Ming – a man so obviously western in appearance yet Chinese-born and bred.

  Like all the minorities in Dongbei, the ethnic Russians are dying out as they intermarry with the Han. There are only a tiny number left who retain the blond or red hair of their ancestors. I was lucky to encounter Hou Xue Ming, and he seemed to believe it was more than just chance that had brought me to the wedding party. ‘We are friends,’ he said, raising another toast to me. ‘You and I are Europeans.’

  He had been at the banquet earlier, returning after he heard the news that I was here, and was already the worse for wear after too many beers and shots of baijiu. He spoke slowly and carefully, fighting against the alcohol to enunciate his words. I asked if he could speak Russian, or if he had ever been across the frontier, and he shook his head with what I interpreted as a gesture of regret.

  As we carried on drinking, Hou Xue Ming grew more sentimental about his heritage. Later, I thought my presence had resurrected memories of his dead parents and the stories they must have told of their lives in Russia. They gave him a Chinese name, probably chosen with the assistance of the local
CCP, to help him fit in. But it was easy to imagine how bizarre school must have been for a first-generation Chinese Russian surrounded by Han and Oroqen children who looked so radically different.

  Yet his presence in Baiyinna would not have been considered strange in the days when there was no border and the different peoples of the former Outer Manchuria traversed across the region. And the journey his mother and father made mirrored those being taken by the new wave of Russian immigrants to China. Many will return home one day but, unless the Russian Far East’s economic freefall is reversed, more than a few will remain in China for the rest of their lives.

  By mid-afternoon, most of the guests had departed for home or, like Hou Xue Ming, to continue drinking next door in Baiyinna’s only karaoke club. This too was owned by Jiang Feng, who was clearly the town’s mover and shaker. I sat with him in a beer daze, while his crew of waitresses began the Sisyphean task of cleaning up the immense array of dishes and bottles littered across the tables and a floor ankle deep in debris.

  I told Jiang Feng I had come to Baiyinna in search of a more authentic version of Oroqen life, and immediately he suggested we visit an Elunchuzu friend of his. It was a chance to show off his car, a newish Volkswagen he was obviously delighted with. We drove out of Baiyinna along tiny side roads, where snow was piled waist-high at their edges and tall pine trees bunched close together obscured the country behind them. Jiang Feng stopped by a frozen stretch of water. ‘This is the Huma River. Isn’t it beautiful?’ I nodded my assent. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, which was how lifeless the Heilongjiang landscape is in winter.

  His friend lived in a hamlet rather than a village. Icy tracks branched off the road running through it and along them were small wooden houses surrounded by high fences. Confined behind them are the Oroqen, a traditionally nomadic people. Until as recently as sixty years ago, the Oroqen were hunters who lived in the uplands of northern Heilongjiang and across the frontier in Russia. Animists who revered the Siberian tiger and the local brown bear, they moved from place to place in search of the animals which provided them with food and clothes, trading fur pelts with the Daur for other essentials.

  After the communist takeover, the Oroqen’s untethered existence in the wild had no place in the new China. Not only were they armed clans, and thus seen as resistance groups in the making, but their wandering lifestyle meant they could evade the strict controls on society introduced by the CCP. Itinerant hunters can’t be tied to a work unit, or monitored by a neighbourhood official. Just as the CCP continues to fear the Khampa nomads of eastern Tibet, so the Oroqen were regarded as a threat.

  From the early 1950s, the Oroqen were corralled in villages and their belief in shamans characterised as primitive superstition. To the Han, moving them into log cabins was progress; they were fulfilling the Confucian man’s burden by giving the Elunchuzu permanent homes and replacing their animal skins with Mao jackets. China justifies its relocation of Tibetan nomads to isolated villages on the high plateau in the same way, insisting that they are lifting the Khampa out of poverty by getting them to substitute their tents for houses.

  But neither the Oroqen nor Tibet’s nomads have any tradition of being sedentary tillers of the land, and few have learned how to do so. The farmers around Baiyinna are all Han, leaving their Oroqen neighbours with few alternatives other than manual work. There is no obvious sign of tension between the Elunchuzu and the Han in Baiyinna, with both socialising together, but there is a marked income gap between them illustrated by the difference in their homes.

  Jiang Feng’s friend worked sporadically on building sites in Huma and more distant Heihe. He lived with his wife, their new baby and his parents in a two-room house with an outdoor toilet. His father was asleep when we arrived, and didn’t stir despite us all sitting on the end of his bed. To supplement the family income, his wife and mother made wooden vanity boxes decorated with elaborate patterns imprinted on the soft wood by using the bone of an animal tapped with a small hammer. They sold them for 20 yuan (£2) and I bought one, out of guilt at intruding into their home and because I felt sorry for them.

  When we left I asked Jiang Feng what he thought would happen to the Oroqen in the future. He shrugged and said there would be fewer of them. Their language has almost gone already, spoken only by older people like the man I had met at the wedding lunch. Jiang Feng’s friend could understand what his parents said, but couldn’t speak Oroqen fluently. His child would grow up speaking only Mandarin and, with so few Elunchuzu left, would likely marry someone Han. Before long, perhaps in less than thirty years, the Oroqen will be like the Manchu – a people in name only who have been absorbed by the Han.

  Back in Baiyinna, Jiang Feng waited with me for the evening bus to Huma. He invited me to return one day and stay with him, and I told him I would try, although I knew I never would. Saying thank you for all his help seemed desperately inadequate, just as the hospitality shown to me when I walked by mistake into the wedding party was inconceivable to someone raised in a western culture. But for rural Chinese it is a natural thing to invite a strange Englishman to join them at an intimate celebration, an expression of both their conviviality and their belief that any foreigner who comes to their home deserves to be treated as a guest.

  Huma was another Tahe, a small town becalmed on the border with Russia. I arrived in a swirl of snow. The following morning was crisp and bright – the sun shining, the snow clouds gone. But the heavy overnight fall had made the roads too dangerous to drive and the bus to Heihe had been cancelled. Along with a couple of locals, I found a taxi driver willing for a hefty fee to risk the ice hidden beneath the snow.

  For the first time since I had left Yanji, there was blue sky above me. It was invigorating, the sun’s rays glancing off the snow crystals so they sparkled like thousands of diamonds lining our route. We trailed the contours of the Amur, with the densely forested Russian side across from us, for much of the way, winding carefully around sharp corners for three hours until we entered Heihe.

  Sean was waiting for me, a tall twenty-nine-year-old whose shaggy hair and casual clothes belied a sharp entrepreneurial streak. A friend of a friend, he had spent two years living in Luton as a student and four more in Brisbane designing websites – completely polarised experiences which had left him with a twangy Anglo-Australian accent. Han and originally from Bei’an, a city further south in Heilongjiang known for its high-security jail, large psychiatric facility and a preponderance of criminal gangs, he was now running his own English school in Heihe.

  ‘There are lots of schools teaching Russian here but none teaching English,’ said Sean, as we drove through Heihe towards the Amur in a new Japanese land cruiser. ‘I did a lot of market research before I set up my school, and Heihe is perfect. It’s smaller than other cities, but it’s full of wealthy people because of the trade with Russia and they all want their kids to learn English so they can study abroad like I did.’

  Cindy, Sean’s stunning, big-eyed girlfriend, was at the wheel of the car. Her father was one of Heihe’s new rich, the owner of a construction company erecting the riverside apartments being snapped up by those prospering from the city’s proximity to Russia. Cindy was a former member of the PLA’s elite dance troupe, a collection of beauties who tour military bases entertaining the soldiers, as well as performing at major state functions. When he wasn’t screwing China, Mao used to select his mistresses from the dancers. I thought Sean had done well for himself in every sense.

  Heihe’s population is minute in Chinese terms, a mere 250,000 people, but like Pangshang in Wa State there are an awful lot of expensive vehicles jamming the roads and it took a while to reach the Amur. We walked along the promenade, looking down on the frozen river – wider here than at any other point I’d previously seen. A small pool had been carved out of the ice and a couple of hardy swimmers gave us a wave before jumping in. On the other side of the river, perhaps 500 or 600 metres away, was Blagoveshchensk.

  The cl
osest place to Russia of any size along the entire Heilongjiang–Russian border, Heihe is China’s principal trading post with the former Outer Manchuria, just as Dandong is with North Korea. Russians come from Blagoveshchensk to take advantage of far cheaper prices, as well as for weekends of fun in the restaurants and clubs. Cyrillic signs are as common as those in Mandarin, and every foreigner walking into a shop is greeted by an assistant who can say at least a few words in Russian.

  Only in the late 1980s did the frontier between Heihe and Blagoveshchensk reopen, after being closed for twenty years following the border clashes between the PLA and the Soviet Army in 1969. Back then, the commercial traffic headed north, as people from across Dongbei flocked to Russia to buy household items that were not available in China at the time.

  That shopping spree ended soon after the fall of the Soviet Union and its subsequent break-up – a spectre that haunts Beijing as it nervously eyes the obstinate peoples of Tibet and Xinjiang. For the CCP, the collapse of the USSR, and Russia’s rapid decline from global superpower to the gangster state it has become, is further justification for its unwillingness to tolerate either unruly minorities or dissent – a vast empire gone in a matter of months, its former leaders forgotten or reviled.

  Now China has taken Russia’s place as the world’s second strongest nation. In Heihe, one of the signs of that status is Da Dao, literally ‘Big Island’ but in fact a promontory jutting into the Amur housing markets and warehouses. Set up solely to cater to Russians – Chinese are mostly barred from the shops here – Da Dao is the true heart of Heihe and the first stop for almost all the people who travel across the river.

  Anything and everything is available at Da Dao – with coffee machines, cosmetics, furs, fishing equipment and liquor particularly popular. So cheap were the bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Johnnie Walker on display that I assumed they must be fake. ‘I don’t think the Russians care if it isn’t real,’ said one store owner, guffawing when I asked him if the whisky was genuine.