In Manchuria
Page 30
At September’s end, a flatbed truck deposited a sedan-size pink granite slab beside Red Flag Road. Drivers about to enter our hamlet now saw, in carved characters painted red: Wasteland Village. On the reverse, in smaller characters painted green, I read: Brief Introduction.
The rock said the village was founded in 1722, during the reign of Kangxi, the Manchu emperor who established the Jilin city shipyards. The next carved date was a century later, in 1823, when a temple was built to a goddess that attracted revelers from across the plains to its New Year’s carnival.
The following entry leapt ahead another hundred years, to 1931, when Japanese occupied the region. From 1946 to 1947, the Chinese Nationalists took over administration, falling in 1948 to the Communists. In 1956, it became a village.
I expected history to end at that familiar line. But three more dates were listed below it. Kneeling in the squishy new sod to see them, I read that in 1958 Wasteland became part of the Ninth Platform People’s Commune. In 1962 its name changed to the Wasteland Battalion.
I was on all fours now, tilting my head low and sideways. The final entry said: In 1984, Wasteland was named a village yet again.
Like its fields, Wasteland’s history spun through seasons, cycling back to the start.
CHAPTER 17
Dalian’s Display Cases
There was one last museum I wanted to see, located at Manchuria’s southern tip. For the past century, the cities of Dalian and neighboring Lüshun (Port Arthur) passed between Russia, Japan, and China, while the Northeast’s rail traffic had funneled down to its terminus. History and artifacts had accumulated here over time, I assumed, like residue caking a drain.
After four hundred miles, the slow train from Wasteland dropped me at Dalian’s station, still the austere white stone building erected during Japanese occupation. Axial roads connected the dots made by roundabouts, leading me to the former South Manchuria Railway hotel. The century-old structure showed its age: the concierge asked if I would share a cold-tap bath, as the building’s pipes kept bursting, and few rooms had functioning plumbing.
The hotel was part of a chain of Japanese-designed buildings ringing the city’s central plaza, previously crowned by a memorial for the soldiers who died in the Russo-Japanese War. In her memoir a young daughter of a Japanese clerk recalled watching a parade through the plaza in 1932 to celebrate the founding of Manchukuo:
“The marching high school students following their school bands waved Japanese flags in the daytime, but at night they held up lighted paper lanterns, which, with big red dots painted on a white background to represent the Japanese flag, lit up the streets like waves of thousands of illuminated red balls flowing into the park.”
The memorial was gone, and glassy office towers overshadowed the plaza’s squat, stone colonial buildings. The Japanese memoirist’s former house, on the terraced avenues of Singing Crane Heights, was among those being renovated by nouveau riche Chinese. The villas still showed—as she had recorded—cream-colored walls with red-tiled roofs, “as bright as a children’s storybook illustration.” Her former Japanese elementary school yet sat “quietly in the shadows of tall acacia trees at the edge of the park,” only now it taught Chinese.
A sliver of the Russian district survived. Set behind the train station, the block of wooden two-story homes had been repainted in pistachio and lemon yellow and christened Scenic Russian Street. On the pedestrian shopping block, umbrella-toting Chinese tourists bargained over binoculars, Baikal cigarettes, and vodka.
A scrap of the original settlement, built in 1903, hid behind the stores. Slipping between panels of blue tin sheeting, I stepped squarely into the past, and a puddle of sewage. The onetime mansions had rotting wood frames and weather-beaten brick; lean-tos filled former gardens. A neighborhood built for one hundred families now held ten times that number.
A group of elderly women chatted beneath the archway of a former carriage house. One invited me inside.
“Did your ancestors live here?” she wondered as the stairs creaked under our weight.
Sometimes, she said, foreigners walked slowly through the neighborhood. Middle-aged people with white skin. Often they could not speak Chinese. She didn’t understand Russian. The sun was setting, and bats looped in the dusk. I asked the old woman what the people did.
“They just look,” she said, motioning to her walls.
And then?
“And then they walk away.”
Back on the other side of the blue tin sheeting, Dalian was filled with beach-holiday tourists, moving in pairs or groups. The worst part of traveling alone was eating solo amidst a crowd. The sun was setting, and women in dresses and heels stepped from doorways to whisper, “Massage?” in English, followed by “Lady bar?” I missed the tamer pitches of Jilin city, where aunties selling hosiery innocently attempted: “Hello socks?”
On Tianjin Street I popped into a bookstore to buy a city map, passing a shelf of new releases that included Practical English for Badminton, parenting books titled Don’t Be Scared, My Child and Failure Is Not an Option, before stopping to flip through Fifty Selected Letters Between U.S. Presidents and Their Beloved. Who knew that Rutherford Hayes was such a softie? The book ended with a missive to Bill Clinton: “Dear Handsome. I feel disposable, used and insignificant.”
Me, too, Monica. Me, too.
In one long tracking shot of lonesome road fatigue, I ate oyster pancakes and chicken-heart kabobs from street vendors, boarded a public bus to Starfish Beach, bought a cold beer, took off my shoes and socks, and walked over the cold, grainy sand into the Yellow Sea. Standing calf-deep in the pulsing waves, I felt homesick for the paddies of Wasteland.
Remarkably, Dalian has no civic history museum/patriotic education base. In the 1990s, when the city was run by the reformist mayor Bo Xilai, it strove to present itself as China’s most modern metropolis, the “Hong Kong of the North.” An oceanfront scenic drive that had been open only to officials was made public; beaches were cleaned and linked to town by a new trolley; statues of revolutionary martyrs were replaced by ones of soccer balls; Dalian was then home to the country’s best team. Mayor Bo had promised a city free of traffic jams, adding left-turn signals (then a rarity in China) to stoplights, and creating a corps of horse-mounted traffic cops. The all-woman squad, dressed in tight white blouses and navy skirts, drew media attention from around China, and the world. Dalian was not your average Chinese city. Dalian was different. Its annual festival was a Fashion Week.
Mayor Bo built a museum not to the city’s variegated past but to its future. Set near Starfish Beach, the white columns of the Dalian Modern Museum echoed the Japanese design of Dalian’s train station. Mayor Bo was said to have vetted the plans himself, right down to the degree of shine on the black marble floors. He was the son of a famous revolutionary general and raised in the system. He knew that museums were, in essence, advertisements for the Communist Party. But Dalian’s would pitch development instead of orthodoxy.
I had visited in 1999, its inaugural year. “Welcome to the future,” the smiling docent had said then. The future looked simulated. The docent whispered encouragement at video screens as I used a joystick to steer a tanker into the city’s port, sped a car down empty streets, and soared on a flying carpet above its coast. From this perspective Dalian shrank amidst its rolling hills. My carpet rose higher, away from the Modern Museum’s displays of tomorrow: Romantic Beach City, City of No Traffic Jams, Fashion City, Soccer City, Seafood City. Who wanted to see Dalian’s past? The screen showed only a boundless, cloud-free sky.
Mayor Bo’s makeover campaign brought foreign investment, a UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour Award for greenswards and affordable housing, and accolades for transforming what had been an industrial port into a tourist draw. After seven years running Dalian, Mayor Bo was promoted to provincial governor, then to China’s minister of commerce, then appointed to run China’s largest city, a southwestern Yangtze River town named Chongqing. In 2012 the cit
y’s police chief fled town and sought refuge in the region’s American consulate, alleging that Bo’s wife had murdered a British businessman over a broken business deal. She confessed and received a suspended death sentence. Prosecutors charged Bo with bribery and abuse of power as mayor of Dalian. In 2013 he was sentenced to life in prison.
So it was not surprising that the Modern Museum’s new director was scrubbing the building of Bo. The mounted policewoman mannequins went into storage, as did the flying carpet simulator, UN award, and soccer balls. (The tycoon who owned the city’s team had been charged with bribing the former mayor, including gifting his wife a $3 million villa in the south of France.) Gone, too, were the few South Manchuria Railway artifacts, including rusting signs and station bells.
Instead, I looked at a room filled with traditional Chinese paintings and another of cloisonné vases. The museum’s four floors swallowed these small displays; even the exhibit of National Significant History Themes—paintings and sculptures depicting “Feudalism,” “Privation,” “War,” and “Liberation”—felt dwarfed.
“The Modern Museum served its purpose,” its newly appointed director told me in his gallery-size office. “Even before Comrade Bo met his troubles, I hoped to change the museum into a true museum, not a public relations campaign.”
I sank in a plush chair adorned with an antimacassar. Steam rose from the porcelain teacups set wordlessly on the long polished mahogany table before us. I regretted wearing shorts.
The museum director, an officious middle-aged man named Liu Guangtang, spoke rapid-fire Chinese. He pointed at my bare legs and said, “You’re wet.”
“I didn’t pack a change of clothes.”
“It’s raining out.”
“That’s why I was late. I’m very sorry.”
“Did your driver get lost?”
“I took the public bus.”
Director Liu’s sixty-year-old face broadened into a smile. “Where are you staying? The Nikko? The Shangri-La? The Conrad?”
“Home Inn,” I said. It was China’s equivalent of a Motel 6.
Director Liu shot me a grin, keeping the laugh within. “You’re a cheapskate!” he exclaimed. “Come, come, come, let’s have lunch. You need to eat. Do you like sushi? There’s a very good place next door.”
Ten minutes later, we sat side by side with our shoes off. “No drinking during work hours,” Director Liu said to his menu. He ordered barley tea.
I had traveled to Dalian to meet Director Liu because for thirty years he had run the history and art museum in nearby Lüshun (Port Arthur). I was curious what Manchuria’s upheavals looked like when viewed through a display case, changing the exhibits with every shift of the political winds.
Lüshun’s museum was particularly vulnerable to revisionism. After sinking the czar’s navy off this coast and winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Japanese transformed Port Arthur’s former officers’ club into evidence of its appreciation for Chinese culture—a colonizer’s PR campaign not unlike the Dalian Modern Museum.
“You’ve never visited the Lüshun Museum?” Director Liu asked between bites of yellowtail.
“The last and only time I went to Lüshun was in 1999. I was picked up by the cops and fined for being there without a permit.”
Director Liu laughed. “Yes, that was a scam they used to run then. Where did they find you?”
“Exiting a public toilet.”
He snickered. “Did you pay? How much?”
“I bargained them down to 200 yuan and made them take me to the post office to wire the fine so I’d have a receipt for an expense claim.”
Director Liu exploded in laughter. “Very wise! You’re a cheapskate!”
His assistant scampered to settle the bill, and he dispatched me to his former post with her, saying I should “return with questions.” A staff car took us twenty-five miles down the coast along a scenic, snaking two-lane road and into a long tunnel that ejected us into Lüshun. Manicured lawns led down to the waterfront and naval yard. I recognized the latrine where the police had busted me. Old buildings got razed in China, but not old toilets.
“There’s no profit in tearing them down and building new ones,” the assistant guessed. “Public toilets are free.”
Our driver stopped at the center of town, a tidy grid of three-story masonry buildings that made a bookend with those lining Harbin’s cobblestone street, six hundred miles north. I stepped into the former South Manchuria Railway hotel where for three months the Japanese had hidden Puyi before bringing him to Changchun to install him as sovereign of Manchukuo in 1931. The hotel looked like its staff had departed with him; cigarette butts and stiff roaches carpeted the creaking wooden floors. No plaque marked Puyi’s former room.
At the Lüshun Museum entrance, I crunched over a driveway of groomed pea gravel. “It looks like we’re in Vienna,” I said, and the docent agreed.
“The Japanese wanted to show how civilized they were when they took over the city from Russia,” she said. “This building was unlike anything in China—or Japan, even.” It reminded me of a Hapsburg palace. Tall, arched windows lined both stories of its unadorned marble façade, bracketed by towers resembling rook chess pieces. Only the surrounding cypress trees looked Asian.
Inside, we—the only visitors on this rainy Tuesday—passed through twenty galleries showing a Colonizer’s Greatest Hits collection of Chinese civilization. Ancient bronzes! Oracle bones! Sanskrit sutras! Silk Road mummies! Paintings of Genghis Khan! Delicate Qing ceramics! The museum’s sixty thousand objects were housed in chandelier-lit rooms in tall, polished walnut cases inlaid with chrysanthemums: the Japanese imperial crest.
Once again I was struck by how much of the past one can enter—and touch—in Manchuria. Next door, in the former Japanese army headquarters, I ran my finger over their maps of Manchukuo. There was the First Pass Under Heaven through which the Manchu stormed the Great Wall and all of China, and there was where the Willow Palisade made a wishbone over the region that had peaked just above Wasteland. Here was Manchzhuriya Station and the railway to Vladivostok. There was Harbin, and here was Port Arthur, renamed Ryojun after Japan sank the czar’s fleet off its coast. Changchun became Xinjing—at map’s center—the capital of Manchukuo. Over here was where a young private named Akira Nagamine was sent to defend the border, and there was the town where Japanese mothers left their babies on the Songhua riverbank. Here was where Hal Leith floated down into a cabbage patch to free POWs, and over there was the Yalu River’s broken bridge. The red YOU ARE HERE dot marked the city of Dairen, soon renamed Dalian, where a man named Director Liu waited in his museum office for a cheapskate wearing shorts to return with questions.
I asked him how, over the decades, the Lüshun Museum had managed to escape damage, or looting, or eviction, or even remodeling? Had an army never bivouacked there? Had no stray bombs ever fallen? Had the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards somehow forgotten that there, in sleepy Lüshun, was a treasure chest filled with examples of the “Four Olds”—customs, culture, habits, and ideas—they sought to destroy? Had Premier Zhou Enlai placed a phone call ordering Red Guards to leave the Lüshun Museum alone? After hearing that apocryphal anecdote repeated at heritage sites across China, I had always wanted to ask a museum curator if it was true.
Director Liu smiled. “That’s a popular story, but it’s not what happened in Lüshun. We crated up all the priceless artifacts and put them in storage. We emptied most of the display cases. Then my staff and I painted revolutionary slogans on the building’s façade, strung up some red banners, and locked the front doors. I came to work every day during that time, going in through a side entrance, waiting for the Red Guards to come. When they finally did, they wanted to smash the statues outside, but the staff had already put barricades around them. Then they wanted to come inside. I told them they were too late, the place had been gutted. I handed over some comparatively worthless artifacts, which they made a show of smashing, then left.”
“I spent my entire career, my entire life, protecting that museum and everything inside,” he said. “In the final analysis, I love my country, and the meaning of that is that I am an historian. I love China’s history, all of it, good and bad, glorious and low. The Lüshun Museum—its grounds, its building, its contents—represents so much of the Northeast’s unique history, and Chinese history.”
It was the first time I had heard an official speak of history in an endearing and not bombastic tone. “What are museums for?” Director Liu asked. “Are they advertisements? No. They are living stories of what our ancestors created.”
Now tasked with transforming the Modern Museum into a lowercase modern museum exhibiting art and artifacts, Director Liu said that the one thing he wished he could have brought from Lüshun was not its collection but the tall standing cabinets that displayed it. In their glass a viewer leaning close to see a relic often was startled to notice someone staring back: the faint reflection of his or her own face.
CHAPTER 18
Frost’s Descent
The dew on the rice straw piled against our home froze at October’s end. Around the outhouse, the flies buzzed languidly. For the first time all year, I could swat them. “The flies have fighter genes from the days of resisting the Japanese,” Frances said via Skype, “but no one can defeat the cold.”
Mr. Guan admitted that he preferred spending his days at his new workplace instead of at home. Eastern Fortune’s warehouse was centrally heated, whereas our bedroom windows bled frigid air. He suggested buying a new roll of duct tape to patch my kang. “This will be the last winter spent in this house,” he said, sounding relieved.