Illustrious Musings: Harbin

Traveling by hard sleeper train is a guaranteed way to make five new friends. The compartments have two sets of facing lower, middle, and upper bunks. What hard sleepers lack is not so much the softness of soft sleepers (both are comfortable enough) but doors. The compartments face into a hallway through which beverage, noodle, and flashlight vendors pass. Besides those who stand between the train cars and chain smoke, most passengers sit together on the lowest bunks, chat, and share food (and so I always reserve the top bunk, not to avoid the social rituals, but to make sure no one spills noodles or alcohol on my bed). On my way to Harbin, as I sat on someone else's bed and ate peanuts, organic apples, lamb dumplings, cucumbers, spiced chicken, and anything I was offered without visible claws, I met, among others:

1) a 42 year old male civil engineer from northeastern China, specializing in project management, wearing a "孝" pin to symbolize that he is in mourning for his recently deceased father. He was excited to learn that Jews also have mourning rituals.

2) a woman in her 40s originally from Ningbo, on her way to visit a 44 year old friend who just had her first (and only...) child. She is in the process of emigrating to Canada, somehow made easier by her husband's naval career, and she was excited to share that her daughter was applying to study abroad programs in Germany and Australia. She immediately promised me (in no less certain terms) four different legal assistant positions with her lawyer friends in Beijing.

3) a 24 year old female recent college graduate, fluent in English, currently not working, while studying for graduate school entrance exams. Her preparation on the train consisted of reading an English language magazine about China's lunar aspirations. The rest of the train car offered her endless advice on how she could find a job in today's ruthless economic conditions (about 30% of recent college graduates are unemployed).

4) an ~18 year old boy wearing tight white jeans and an earring in the shape of a necktie, who did not say anything and listened to us for hours. This is not rude.

My ADHD cab driver from the train station to Angela's dorm explained what year nearly every one of Harbin's several dozen universities was founded, apologized for the trash falling from the truck in front of us (and was relieved that I answered yes, in the US this is theoretically punishable by fine), and informed me that real estate in China is much more expensive than in the US, according to his sister in Atlanta.

Much of Harbin's architecture shows the influence of the Russians who largely built the city at the turn of the 20th century. One Harbin museum referred to this in English as "western influence," but in Chinese as something that roughly translates to "western cultural contamination" or "pollution." Still, I spoke at length with three Chinese men who had lived in Harbin since at least the 1940s, all of whom praised the Russians' contribution to the city's layout and lamented that when Mao expelled the Russians in 1956 or so, something of the city's livelihood was lost. Between the bustle of the commercial streets and the copious underground drag bars, the town seems back on track.

Angela participating in the illicit Russian chocolate trade.

I have a bad habit of engaging shopkeepers in lengthy discussions about the provenance of their clearly counterfeit goods. As soon as I saw the bottle of "JoensDanhse" (ostensibly Jack Daniels) in a "Russian Commodities Store," I couldn't resist. The attendant diligently explained that the liquor was imported, although she wasn't sure from where. I suggested that the whiskey may have been distilled in China, as per the English label ("Shandong of China," also "Made in Tenderness.") She would have none of it, although she declined to produce an import certificate akin to those affixed to the plentiful bottles of Russian vodka.

Overemployment.

One of Harbin's two historical museums is housed in a gorgeous former synagogue from the turn of the last century and holds mostly photographs of Jewish life from that era. One of the frustrating qualities of the museum was that there was little explanation of the larger events surrounding the photos. Hundreds of photos were labeled something like "Rosenthal's bakery in 1924," but I struggled to connect the dots into a story about why Jews came to Harbin in droves, how they lived while there (other than by posing for portraits and opening shops), and why they left. A brief history in the shape of a torah scroll listed census figures without any context, and so, from the dates, I was able to infer that the migration seemed to begin in the late 19th century as a result of pogroms in the Pale and to increase after the Bolshevik Revolution, and that after Japanese annexation of the region (Manchuria) in 1931, the Jews left in droves.

The layout of the museum at the former headquarters of Japanese Unit 731, aka "Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory," also left something to be desired, but the horror of the site was still evident. Unit 731 organized germ warfare throughout China during World War II, and carried out vivisection and other experiments (studies on frostbite, the effects of vacuums, the courses of bacterial infections, etc.) on captured human subjects. Because the retreating Japanese army destroyed most of the evidence (and handed the US army the rest), the museum is hard pressed to mount a comprehensive exhibit and often errs on the side of defensive pleas to the visitor to believe that the documentary evidence is really really true.

Still, there are at least two features that effectively gesture toward the terror of the place. The first is a video exhibit of testimony by former Japanese army officials involved in the biological warfare and human experiments. Most spoke in matter of fact terms, as if the only way to distance themselves from their actions was to renounce any emotion. A caption explained that one had also refused his army pension in an attempt to repent. The second is the barrenness of the land surrounding the former military compound, left that way as if in recognition of the inability to account for the past with text or monuments or by any other means than letting the ruins of the old buildings continue to collapse.

In defense of the thoughtfulness of at least some of Harbin's curators, I offer the following poorly photographed musing on the arrangement of the photographs in another museum:

Elsewhere in Harbin, these rusting walls were a burst of color in a sea of flashy glass and steel construction.

This old advertisement(?) (nearly illegible) was reused as a piece of a wall at the ferocious animal park mentioned below.

As pervasive as overemployment, these handwritten phone numbers can be found on the walls in any neighborhood of any Chinese city. At least in Beijing, they are usually the numbers of agents who will arrange for migrant workers to obtain forged work permits, to subvert the requirement that only legal residents of a city can receive certain social services, such as public education and health care. Paint is always layered, with the city or building owner wiping out the numbers, before someone else comes along to paint in another color. This is a dormitory at a HeiLongJiang University in Harbin.

Cabbage drying and for sale on the street.

It does not take long for someone from Harbin to point out how "standard" their Mandarin is, i.e. accent-less (if this is a coherent concept). The street calligraphers on the bank of the Songhua river were distraught to hear that I was studying in Beijing, where the accent of some locals could taint my tongue, and they implored me to join Angela and Leslie and study in Harbin. I tried to explain that my teachers speak the most standard of Mandarin in class, that some are even from Harbin, that unlike Harbiners, native Beijingers generally don't speak other dialects, and that besides, it's useful to become accustomed to hearing different accents.

There must have been some gap between my meaning and how it was understood, because they began to chide me for what they understood to be my project to master every single one of China's dozens of dialects, something that only linguists could do. I was about to whip out the complex compound sentence that I had memorized from my textbook that states that a linguist only need study language's form and does not actually need to be able to speak multiple languages (and the corollary sentence, using some fancy grammar patterns, that even someone who knows 10 languages is not a linguist unless she studies the form of language), but somehow the conversation had quickly turned to China's four ancient inventions, and which one of the four some government bureau recently removed from the official list. The calligraphers began to fight about which was cut from the list, and I deftly stepped away before the argument grew so loud that a policeman jumped in.

Those of you who have read this far are probably waiting for me to talk about the world famous Harbin Siberian Tiger Reserve, where for $270, one can purchase a large cattle to be fed to a tiger. A chicken only costs about $8. I did not read much about the reserve before eagerly handing my admission ticket to the bus driver, and I was a bit surprised when I found myself riding a vehicle in loops through several Siberian tiger, jaguar, and lion habitats. Right next to the animals. Our driver more than once made a sharp turn and explained that sometimes, the tigers like to attack the doors. None of my fellow tourists (15 Chinese, 2 Korean, and my friend Angela) opted for the chickens or cattle. After about an hour of (successfully) practicing every anti-anxiety technique I have ever learned, we were released to a stunning pedestrian walkway through the reserve.