Article by John Derbyshire |
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| China
Diary, Part 2
[Note: These diaries are made up of notes I jotted while travelling in China during the summer of 2001 with my wife Rosie (who is Chinese) and our two small children. They appeared on NRO only in part. Here I have included the full diaries.] Baihe,
Eastern Manchuria; July 14th "Where
ev'ry prospect pleases, And
only Man is vile..." Being
among tourists reminds me of all those other mass activities — sport
spectatoring, political conventioneering, demonstrations, revolutions —
that bring out the worst in humanity.
No, I am not much of a sightseer.
I have to admit, though, that Heaven Pool got my attention, even to
the degree that for a while I forgot the milling, yapping, clicking mob of
Chinese and South Korean tourists I saw it with. I
dearly wanted to go down to the lake shore, but the crater walls are so
steep this cannot be done from any accessible point on the rim without
special gear. From down below
lake level there is a way, but it is closed.
The lake overflows at just one point, over a spectacular waterfall,
the beginning of the mighty Songhua River.
From the base of this waterfall a stepped path has been made to
take you up the side of the fall and through the gap into the crater, to
the lake shore. However, this
path was partly swept away by a rock slide two years ago, and has not been
rebuilt. We
satisfied ourselves with strolling — mostly clambering, actually —
along the crater rim for different views of the lake below. Eventually we came to a faded, weather-beaten sign that
declared itself as marking the border with North Korea.
You need to be careful here: the
southeastern half of Heaven Pool and its mountain (which, by the way, is
named Chang Bai Shan — "Ever-White Mountain") belongs
to North Korea. In 1998 a
British hiker attempting to circumambulate the lake was picked up by
border guards and spent a month in a North Korean jail — not, I imagine,
the part of one's vacation most likely to be recalled with warm nostalgia
in years to come. We saw no border guards, however, so, feeling reckless, we
passed beyond the sign and climbed an inviting crag on the North Korean
side, chuckling to ourselves that we had succeeded in penetrating into Kim
Jong Il's Hermit Kingdom. Our
chauffeur, like all the people in these border regions, knows all about
North Korea's problems. "They
have trouble holding on to border guards in these remote areas," he
said. "First chance they
get, they defect to China." North
Koreans are now coming into China from their disintegrating homeland in
considerable numbers all along the border, in spite of formidable terrain
and ferocious penalties if caught, and in spite of an agreement between
the two countries this past May declaring that refugees were
"breaking international law" and would be subject to
repatriation. Unofficial
estimates — there are no official ones, since both China and North Korea
deny that the issue exists — put the number of refugees currently in
China at 200,000. One
difficulty is that the border regions on the Chinese side are already
heavily Korean: Koreans are
one of the fifty-odd "national minorities" the Chinese
government makes so much of, along with Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongolians and
so on. A North Korean refugee
reaching one of their villages is likely to find a sympathetic reception,
and may actually encounter blood relatives.
You hear about these things all over eastern Manchuria, and even in
Changchun the people know all about it.
North Korean refugees are a by-word for poverty, destitution and
ignorance, dressed as they are in thin rags, gawping as they apparently do
at such forgotten wonders as bean-curd and fresh fruit. The
chauffeur, when we asked him what he actually did for a living, told us he
was a policeman. What on
earth is there for a policeman to do, I asked him, in a sleepy Manchurian
town deep-frozen for six months of the year?
Not much, he allowed: some
petty crime, hu-kou issues. (The
hu-kou is a Chinese person's residence permit, specifying where he
may live. To move from one
place to another involves endless bickering with the authorities over the
transfer of your hu-kou.) However,
he proved as adept at exploiting his status as are small-town policemen
everywhere else in the world. Taking
us around various establishments in the town while we waited for the
late-evening train back to Changchun, none of them asked him to pay for
the food, drink, ice creams or facilities we consumed.
He told us if we cared to stay overnight in Baihe, he could get us
a nice hotel room for free. Heaven
Pool is, for my money — the entire return trip from Changchun cost less
than US$200 for the four of us, though admittedly we ate mostly for free
on droit de gendarme — one of the natural wonders of the world.
I was sorry not to be able to get to the lakeside and put a hand
into that clear unspoiled water, but glad none of the other tourists could
do so, either, to foul it with their disgusting touristy garbage and
litter. The place will
shimmer away in my imagination as long as I live, circled by its crater
walls up there on that cruel border, its icy waters tranquil and unbroken
under a July sun. However, we
heard from someone in the town that a Chinese man from Dalian plans to
swim the width of Heaven Pool next month, if negotiations with the North
Korean authorities can be completed on time.
How I envy him! I
am going to take back some of the praise I lavished on Chinese railways
last week. That was after
riding "soft sleeper" class from Beijing to Changchun.
Alas, "soft sleeper" is only available on the big
inter-city routes. For the
15-hour overnight local train from Changchun to Baihe we rode "hard
sleeper", in a train indistinguishable from those I recall from the
early eighties. A "hard
sleeper" carriage is divided by nine walls, which go about two thirds
of the way across the width of the carriage.
This makes ten compartments open to a common corridor.
Each compartment has six beds, three on each side, designated
"upper", "middle" and "lower".
Everything is grimy and beaten-up, and the lie-zhangs
(carriage supervisors) are the old sour-faced crew I remember so well.
My spoiled American brats, after one look at the carriage's toilet,
declared there was no way! they were going to use it — a refusal
eventually over-ridden by Ma Nature, of course.
There is no air conditioning and no non-smoking section, though in
practice most Chinese smokers are considerate if approached.
At night the lie-zhang shuts all the windows to keep out bugs.
There are, of course, compensations for all the grime, noise and
discomfort. For me, the
opportunity to mingle with ordinary travellers and hear about their lives. For the kids, the jungle-gym aspect of getting up to and down
from the top bunks -- seven feet from the floor -- via the metal ladders
provided. And for Rosie?
A grimace and a shake of the head:
"Some things never change." As
well as the local Korean-Chinese of eastern Manchuria, there are many
South Korean tourists, and you are as likely to hear Korean as Chinese on
the slopes of Chang Bai Shan. ("They
think it's their damn mountain," muttered our cop-chauffeur in
disgust.) There are some hot
springs below the waterfall, and a local Korean has built a fine
bath-house where one can enjoy the mineral waters.
Afterwards, back in Baihe, we went to a local Korean restaurant,
where the menu included several dog meat dishes.
I urged the kids to try it, but they would not, thinking of our
treasured terrier mutt Boris back at home.
We had venison instead, served by two of the most beautiful girls I
have ever seen. Extrapolating
from this in my coarse-minded way, and having noticed that the place
contained rather a large number of curtained private rooms, I suggested to
Rosie that the place was in fact a whore-house for South Korean business
types. We later found out
that this is very far from being the case.
The restaurant is owned by a Korean-Chinese who also owns the
nearby "Swimming Pool Hotel" — a delightful family place with
water slides and so on, and clean spacious rooms.
The restaurant is also a family establishment, and I am deeply
sorry for my base thoughts. The
owner in fact escorted us round with great courtesy, gave the kids bathing
suits so they could play in his pools, and fed us again in the restaurant
at a discount (our cop was not with us at this point).
The beauty of the girls is, apparently, only incidental.
Good luck to this gentleman — I have forgotten his name —
building up his business in this remote place, in a very tough
entrepreneurial environment. If
capitalism had heroes, he would be one. Here
is a pretty Manchu legend about Heaven Pool.
There was once a fairy, who was very beautiful but unfortunately
barren. The thought of her
infertility caused her to weep; and eventually she had wept so much she
had filled Heaven Pool with her tears.
At this point the King of Heaven took pity on her.
His name is Manjushri, a Buddhist deity.
(Or at any rate, Lamaist — the Manchus got their religion from
Tibet via the Mongols ... though, like those other peoples, they fortified
that gentle faith with infusions of their own aboriginal shamanism and
animism.) He caused the fairy
to give birth to a beautiful boy child, whom she named Aixin Guoruo, which
means "Golden One" in the local language.
This child became the ancestor of a race, whose people, in
gratitude to Manjushri, named themselves "Manchu", and founded a
dynasty that eventually conquered all of China. That
is to some degree an unfair judgment of course. They will say, if you ask them: "What do you expect?
Conditions are not bad, and are still improving.
I have a life to live, and I just don't want to live it in a
dungeon. Would you?"
Chinese people, from millennial experience, think of politics as
being something like the weather — you just have to put up with it and
make the best of it. There is
nothing you can do. The fate
of the 1989 student movement confirms this, in their minds, though one
could equally well argue that it proves the opposite.
The Party is not loved, by anyone I have asked about it, but they
have delivered some modest progress and prosperity, stand up for the
nation against foreign ill-wishers, and pretty much any TV channel is
showing some Party-patriotic extravaganza in prime time, or else a
two-hour report on the production of hog bristles in Shanxi Province.
I understand, I understand. Still,
I wish I had not found my sister-in-law watching that dreadful program.
Where
their nationalist passions are not engaged, the Chinese people can see
through their goverment's propaganda with no difficulty. I
have mixed feelings about Chinese hospitality.
The first Chinese family I was ever the guest of lived in an
old-style courtyard house behind a wall in Taipei City, Taiwan. A taxi deposited me at a door in the wall one hot July
afternoon. I rang the bell.
In due course the door was opened by a small, bent, oldish man
wearing faded pajamas and plastic house slippers.
Greeting me effusively in Chinese (of which at that point I could
not understand a word), he tried to grab my two large suitcases.
I assumed he was some sort of family retainer, a butler perhaps, as
I knew the family was well off. Still,
butler or not, chivalry forbade me letting this feeble old party totter
off with my bags. He might
have had a heart attack. So
there commenced one of those Chinese courtesy fights:
"Let me do it! It's
my responsibility!" — "No, no, it's mine!
I insist!" ...
which would probably still be going on today if the young son of the
family had not turned up and taken my bags.
I then learned that the pajamaed old "butler" was in fact
the patriarch of the family, a learned man of high standing in Taiwan,
with a long and distinguished career in public service — the equivalent
of a senior federal judge. This
kind of thing is charming at first, but soon becomes irksome.
You weary of being fussed over, and smiled at, and paid for.
You do not want to engage in yet another banal conversation about
food, travel or local customs. You
tire of the endless ritual arguments over who's going to pay the bill, and
begin to yearn for the frank simplicities of the West.
("Do you want to get this one, or shall I?" —
"I'll get it. You get
the next one.") You
start to feel the way pre-modern travelers in China felt:
that all the elaborate courtesy is a cloak for deceit and
insincerity and what economists call "rent-seeking" — that is,
they hope to get something out of you.
You become boorish, suspicious and contrary, and succumb to that
ailment that anyone who has lived in this country for more than a few
months knows very well, usually at first hand:
China fatigue. Not infrequently, it all ends in violence. I
know all about that. I have
been through it all, and out the other side.
This last few days with my wife's family in Manchuria were nothing
like that. The courtesies
were sincere, the warmth genuine. A
cousin who is a busy professional man spent most of a day getting me a
visa extension at the local police station.
An uncle arranged train tickets for us — an arduous process in
China — and persuaded a friend of his in the far east of the province to
chauffeur us round for the day on a visit to see the sights of that
district. My brother-in-law
took the kids to the local zoo and amusement park, spending (we later
computed) about half his month's salary on them.
This, after taking his own wife and son off to his father's
two-bedroom apartment, in a district of the city where water was rationed,
so that we could have free use of theirs, which was in an unrationed part
of town. When my wife
mentioned that I like to eat a banana with my breakfast, suddenly all my
relatives' apartments filled up with bananas, and I was having bananas
thrust on me every time I went calling.
I declared a fondness for kidney:
every meal thereafter included a dish of kidney, cooked in many
different and imaginative ways. Cars
and drivers were commandeered from people's work units whenever we wanted
to go anywhere. (None of my
Chinese relatives owns a car, though one has a driver's license.) We
were not allowed to pay for anything, other than those items — train and
plane tickets, forward hotel bookings, visa fees — that were obviously
our responsibility. The
cousin who got us our plane tickets to Xi'an also ran some other errands
on our behalf, all involving fees and expenses he paid for out of his own
pocket. Adding it all up
before we left, and converting at a rate I knew he could get, I calculated
that we owed him US$561. Not
wishing to seem stingy, and figuring that his time and trouble were worth
something, I slipped six bills into his shirt pocket and thanked him at an
appropriate point during our last evening's banquet.
In an arrived-safely call to Rosie's Dad our first evening in Xi'an,
we learned that our cousin had done the same calculation I had done, come
to precisely the same result, subtracted it from six hundred, and already
given the balance to Dad, to be forwarded to us ASAP.
That's my family: proud,
honest people. Whose
lives are not always easy — are, in fact, sometimes very hard.
Fourth Uncle, who fed us a sumptuous meal the night of our arrival
in Changchun, worked for a unit that recently went bankrupt.
His wife worked for the same unit.
(Because the "work unit" is still the center of life for
most Chinese people, and because they do not socialize much outside the
family, most Chinese people marry someone from their own unit.
If the unit goes bust, both breadwinners are out of work.)
Fourth Uncle and his wife currently scrape along on unemployment
pay, a flat US$28 a month each, together with help from other family
members. Life is not secure
or prosperous for any of my family here.
yet these people pulled out all the stops for us, slew the fatted
calf for us, eagerly and joyfully, from simple family feeling and the
pleasure of greeting a long-absent sister.
Banquets were laid on every night.
The kids were spoiled disgracefully.
We were spoiled disgracefully. Monday
night, the night before we left, I threw a return banquet for them all,
and took the opportunity to make a little speech in my clunky Mandarin,
thanking them for their innumerable kindnesses and expressing my heartfelt
gratitude for the good fortune to have acquired such a warm, close and
generous family. At the time
I married Rosie, fifteen years ago, my father-in-law — who had bitterly
opposed the marriage until the last minute — had taken me by the hand
and said: Women shi yi jia
ren — "We are one family."
I reminded the company of that and affirmed that we are, indeed,
one family. The Chinese family has not always had a good press. Young Chinese intellectuals in the early years of the twentieth century felt that the traditional "big family" system, in which three or four generations lived together in a sprawling old-style house — "breeding like oysters", as Orwell said of the Victorian British — was a bar to the nation's progress and an oppression of the human spirit. This sentiment found literary expression in Ba Jin's late-1920s novel Jia — "The Family", still worth reading today in this context (there are at least two English translations). Mao Tse-tung, who did not get on with his own family, did his best to wreck the institution. Well, I understand all that, too. Yes: the old ideals of filial piety and family solidarity covered up a multitude of sins. I also appreciate Francis Fukuyama's point, that a society whose "radius of trust" does not extend far beyond the blood family is not well equipped to develop consensual politics or rational economics. I might even admit, at the point of a sword, that the attentions of my family this past few days were occasionally stifling. And even darker things: "anti-foreignism" — to be blunt, loathing and envy of the white race — are never far beneath the surface in China, and from this point of view I may be just a foreign Jew married into a family of Weimar Germans. Yes, yes, I know all this. But "speak as you find", as we say in Northamptonshire, here is how I feel about my Chinese family: I adore them. I long to see them all again. Should any of them turn up at my door in Long Island, I shall attend to their comfort and convenience with the same indefatigable zeal they have brought to mine. "We are one family," and I am thankful for it. |
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