In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  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.

  On this part of the journey, to Manchuria’s western steppe, Liang—ethnically Han Chinese—was disgusted by Chinese colonization of the Mongols’ pastures, which he equated to Japan’s encroachment into the Northeast. “I found a great and significant parallel between the Mongol-Chinese and the Chinese-Japanese situation,” he wrote. “The facts, the method, and the psychological attitude involved were just the same . . . [T]he Chinese aggression and penetration were very persistent and vital. The Mongols were regarded as backward and uncivilized. Their land was regarded as wasted and sought to be opened to Chinese cultivation . . . The officials coddled them, but butted in whenever and wherever possible. And the merchants cheated them, pure and simple. As for the Mongols, they hated and feared the Chinese, and above all distrusted them. They very gradually but nevertheless perceptibly retreated into the more desert part of the land.”

  By 1930 the Russians had largely retreated, too, as Japan’s position increased. Out in remote Manchuria, seated in an “extraordinarily clean and orderly” third-class carriage, Liang recorded the shift: “Here was seen the Japanese influence,” he wrote. “Everything was run after the Japanese manner, from the behavior of the conductor down to the manner of the candy-seller.” He passed new stations whose high roofs and large windows in this region of extreme cold showed that “the Japanese architects who designed them had forgotten to take geography into consideration in their plans—one had the feeling of seeing a Spanish summer villa in Siberia.”

  In the dunes outside Ang’angxi’s salmon-pink station he found, in a trough excavated by that persistent northern wind, stone chips and pottery fragments, and then a skeleton. The next day he uncovered “an undisturbed Neolithic burial with the skeleton in comparatively good condition and all the funerary furniture intact.”

  Around the description of his finds, Liang punctuated the journal with dry humor. He sat atop his overloaded expedition cart “like the Santa going on his Xmas trip.” After a day “wading through more than 6000 paces of marsh” in water “that chilled my foot bones until they ached” through “clouds of mosquitoes,” he noted that the lack of drainage and flatness of the land “was one of the important factors in hastening railway construction in Manchuria. There wasn’t really very much engineering work to do, and the heaping up of dirt for the road-bed and the laying of the rails was extremely easy. Whatever may be said of this it is not a favorable place to hunt for the remains of ancient man.”

  A recent relic still survived an hour north of Ang’angxi, if only barely. The Northeast’s last native speakers of Manchu lived in a village whose name, Sanjiazi, meant “Three Families.” Its residents descended from a trio of bannermen—Qing military administrators—dispatched in the seventeenth-century to defend the frontier against Russian incursions.

  On the dirt road leading to the village, the cabdriver—an ethnic Manchu—warned that there was nothing to see. “It’s a very backward place,” he said. “This road wasn’t built until the 1950s, so until then, the village really was on its own, which is how the Manchu language survived. There was little contact with outsiders.” Out the window, cows and sheep grazed the open grassland. Their herder, a young boy, sat under a willow tree, staring at a cell phone screen.

  “During the Cultural Revolution, we were told that people who spoke Manchu could be spying for the Soviets,” the driver said. “So any remaining speakers switched to Chinese. Only the old folks kept speaking Manchu, but they’re dying off.” According to Chinese linguists and historians, only three fluent native speakers, all in their eighties, remained.

  Half of the world’s 6,800 languages are predicted to go extinct by the end of the twenty-first century, but none were once as prominent as Manchu, the “national language” of the vast Qing Empire. Even though Mandarin had remained its lingua franca, official documents were written in Manchu and Chinese. But an estimated 20 percent of the ten million archived Qing-era documents were penned in Manchu alone, making them unintelligible to all but a handful of specialists.

  The road turned to dirt, leading past the first house
made of sod that I had seen outside of a Woody Guthrie song. Subsequent houses were fashioned from mud and thatch; Wasteland looked like a boomtown in comparison. The driver stopped at a sign at the village entrance, written in Manchu and Chinese. The latter said:

  SANJIAZI WELCOMES YOU!

  Here is a tribe of Manchu speakers.

  Here are the remains of Manchu culture.

  I could read the Chinese, but could make no sense of the Manchu, a phonetic script based on the Mongolian alphabet. To my untrained eye, its thick, dark lines, loops, and dots looked like vertical Arabic. “Does the Manchu caption say the same?”

  “I can’t read it,” the driver said. “Manchu wasn’t taught in school.”

  But here, uniquely, it was. A thirty-four-year-old villager named Shi Junguang had learned the language from his grandmother. After compiling an oral archive of the village elderly speaking it, he received official permission to teach Manchu at the village elementary school for a few hours each week.

  In Chinese newspaper stories, I had seen Sanjiazi described as a “living fossil,” but today the village looked dead. The elementary school had emptied for summer vacation. It was one of the tidiest rural schools I had seen, and the first whose playing field had pockets of shade, courtesy of willows that made a palisade around its perimeter. Pasted on its notice board was a poster written in Manchu and Chinese that read PASSING ON MANCHU CULTURE BEGINS WITH ME.

  A child pointed me to the teacher’s house, tucked behind a furrowed front yard growing onions. Shi Junguang opened his front door, and if he was surprised to see a foreigner, he didn’t show it. Instead, he asked if I had received official permission to talk to him.

  “It’s a complicated situation,” Mr. Shi said, looking embarrassed.

  “Village politics?” I guessed.

  “Uh.” He nodded. Chinese reporters had recently visited, upsetting the village leader because they had not asked for permission to enter the school and observe the Manchu class. The reporters also had pestered the elderly Manchu speakers, goading them to talk on-camera. Mr. Shi said the reporters had complained to the county, then the provincial, propaganda bureaus. The matter boomeranged back to him, and he caught criticism from the village leader, who himself had been scolded from above. Mr. Shi felt it had been a strike against his experiment. The national slogan had changed from “Build Socialism” to “Build a Harmonious Society,” and expressions of minority culture—unless they attracted tourist revenue—could be branded “sensitive,” and shut down.

  “All I want is to continue teaching the kids Manchu,” Mr. Shi said in Chinese. “If I don’t help to preserve it, the village children will one day blame their elders—myself included.”

  How to describe the sound of a dying language? To my ears it was a rapid, more sibilant Korean. As the tutorial ended, I asked Mr. Shi how to say Farewell in Manchu. He voiced it, I repeated, and he said it twice more: “Sirame achaki. Sirame achaki.” It sounded like a horse galloping away.

  Mr. Shi switched to Chinese. “Zài jiàn.” Good-bye.

  In Harbin, on a gorgeous morning under a high blue sky, I walked past signs for the Harbin Pharmaceutical Group’s Old Cadre Hall and the same company’s real estate corporation offices. It was a very twenty-first-century-Manchuria walk, never passing the original thing, but rather its suggestion: the restored brass doors of hotels whose keystones said 1903, the synagogue’s repainted façade, Saint Sophia’s green onion domes. HARBIN PHARMACEUTICAL GROUP WELCOMES YOU TO HARBIN! read the sign at its plaza. On the cathedral’s redbrick exterior you could still just make out the faint outline of the anti-imperialist slogans painted in yellow during the Cultural Revolution.

  But history had cycled back to the promotion—not smashing—of Harbin’s cosmopolitan past. Two blocks away, at the world’s only International Sister Cities Museum, a guide led a group of middle school students past displays for each of their hometown’s twenty-seven twins. “Our government’s friendship with these cities promotes peace and understanding,” the guide intoned. The children stared at silver-plated spoons from Sunderland, Punta Arenas postage stamps, sake made in Asahikawa, and a Zohar from Giv’atayim. “Forgetting about history means betrayal.”

  The kids shuffled across the museum’s polished marble floor and ran their fingers along its walnut wainscoting, evidence of the building’s past as the Danish consulate when Harbin had been an international railway hub a century before. The students halted at Rovaniemi’s stuffed lemming, sniffed at wool scarves from Daugavpils, then sidled to the jersey of Ping-Pong champion Werner Schlager, proud son of Weiner Neustadt.

  “Where is that?” asked a boy, breaking the silence. “What country are these cities in?” Typically for China, the museum displayed no maps, and the students were confused and restless—until the tour guide spotted me, puzzling over the display of Harbin’s newest buddy, my hometown of Minneapolis. “Here is our American friendship city!” she exclaimed. “This must be our American friend!” After the admiring ooohs died down, I explained in Chinese that I was not part of the exhibit, then turned to the jewels the Minneapolis mayor’s office had sent to represent my proud city, home of the Walker Art Center, Prince, an elegant skyline, and a chain of lakes downtown. The students and I stared at an arrowhead, Target and Best Buy logos, a stuffed Goldy Gopher, and boxes of Tuna Helper and Betty Crocker angel food cake mix. “It gets very cold there, just like here,” I added, seeking common ground. “Winter is long, and many people drink too much.” The guide interrupted to recite that Minneapolis had twenty-one universities and thirty theaters. But the children’s eyes had already drifted away, to the neighboring puppets of Ploiesti.

  China loved friendship, especially the official yet personal sort. Anyone who spent time here heard weile womende youhao—“It’s for our friendship”—enough to head for the exits before learning what Our Friendship wanted this time. (It’s never a quiet night at home with a book.) In the Peace Corps, I learned that—due to an earlier anti-imperialist propaganda campaign—I had been repainted as a “United States–China Friendship Volunteer.” For those two years I had been entreated into doing anything—English Corner, karaoke of Carpenters’ songs, hot pot, heroin—with the assurance that it was for Our Friendship. You knew a phrase had saturated the masses to the point of meaninglessness when even junkies invoked it.

  To attract tourists, both domestic and foreign, Harbin had resurrected its photogenic backdrops. Shaded by trees and set back from a busy downtown street, the International Sister Cities Museum’s two-story, lemon-colored building looked like it boarded the train in St. Petersburg, got off in Harbin, and decided to settle down.

  Inside, the children filed past the displays over a floor so polished it seemed illuminated, reflecting the chandelier light. The windows were shaded by the heavy red drapes that always caught fire in movies, and the marble stairs ascended in a cinematic sweep; someone in a gown should be stepping down them any second now. As this building had been in use through the Russian, republican, warlord, Japanese, and Communist eras, I was about to ask a schoolgirl if she thought we might see a ghost. The guide hushed us and warned not to “nibble, litter, or spit. Do not take pictures or use your cell phone. Keep silent.”

  We looked at some coins from Edmonton, and a hoodie with the price tag on it from MacEwan University (Go Griffins!). Arras displayed a rocking chair and a handwritten letter from Mayor Jean-Marie Vanlerenberghe, whose penmanship put that of South Taranaki mayor Ross Dunlop to shame. The last time I had seen handwriting like his was when opening a note passed during eighth grade math. But then I read Mayor Dunlop’s looping words—expecting hearts to dot the i’s—and learned that not only is South Taranaki home to the world’s largest dairy plant, but that its people knew the Sister Cities Museum will “help citizens of Harbin learn more about customs, cultures, landmarks and location of your international friends.” To a jaded visitor, this was eye-rolling stuff. But the room was so still, you could hear a child’s stomach g
rowl, and felt even quieter because no one laughed.

  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.