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Editor’s
note: Click
here to read the previous installment of Derbyshire's China
dispatches. This edition was filed prior to the International Olympic
Committee's Friday decision to award Beijing with the 2008 Olympics.
Changchun, NE China, Week of July 7th to
July 14th, Part I
No trouble
getting some practice at conversational Chinese here. Just find
yourself a city where few foreigners go, seek out a neighborhood
where they never see a non-Chinese face from one end of the year
to another, sit down on one of the stools set in the street outside
a little dumpling shop, and wait. In less than five minutes some
bold spirit will take the stool opposite you and inquire: Nin
shi na-gou ren? — "What country are you from?" The
remainder of the interrogation follows a pretty standard format.
"Are you here on business?"
"No, just
a vacation."
"You're
very tall. How tall are you?"
"Hundred
eighty-eight." [I.e. centimeters.]
"How old?"
"Thirty-nine."
[Like Jack Benny, I stopped counting at thirty-nine.]
"What
kind of work do you do in America?"
"I work
with computers."
"What's
your monthly salary?"
"Hard
to say in Chinese. Living expenses are all different."
This last is a perfectly normal, perfectly polite inquiry.
Everybody in
China knows how much everybody else makes. If you don't know, you
ask. My brother-in-law, a high-school librarian, makes a thousand
yuan a month (i.e. U.S. $125). I know because I asked him. His wife
makes the same, helping supervise standards for a construction firm.
Their family income is therefore U.S. $3,000 a year, which puts
them squarely in the middle class by urban Chinese standards. They
have a pleasant airy apartment near the city center, every electronic
gadget you could think of (including a cell phone each) and plenty
of savings. They pay income tax at four percent. Nor do they work
very hard: My brother-in-law goes in at eight thirty, breaks at
eleven thirty, goes back at two thirty, and leaves for the day at
four!
 The
main drag in Changchun has been renamed. It is now People's Boulevard.
When I first came here in the Eighties, it was Stalin Boulevard.
This was something of an imposition on the people of Manchuria,
who suffered grievously during the brief Soviet occupation that
followed Japan's defeat in 1945. The Soviets stripped Manchurian
industry of such assets as it possessed and hauled them back to
Russia, pausing now and then from their exertions to go on sprees
of rape and private looting. Eventually a deal was cut; Stalin pulled
out his troops and handed over Manchuria to Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists.
Stalin never liked Mao, whom he thought heterodox. On the principle
that an infidel is always less dangerous than a heretic, he preferred
Chiang, even though that gentleman had been slaughtering his own
communists for twenty years and routinely referred to Communism
as "poison". When Chiang departed the Chinese mainland
for his exile in Taiwan, the last person to shake his hand was the
Soviet ambassador. Even after the Communists took Manchuria, Stalin
supported the local warlord Gao Gang rather than Mao. (During the
early years of communist rule, Mao had a lot of trouble with some
of his own generals who did not grasp that the warlord period was
over — or, to put it more precisely, that one warlord, Mao, was
more cunning and ruthless than the rest of them put together.) Gao
declared Manchuria an autonomous state under Soviet protection and
actually issued his own currency at one point. He was an old Party
warhorse, had in fact been in charge of the communist base at Yan-an
when Mao arrived there with the remnants of his battered, exhausted
forces at the end of the Long March. "If not for me, Mao would
be nothing," Gao later boasted. "He came to me a beggar
in rags!" This may have been true, but a wise man would not
have said it. Out-maneuvered at a Party meeting in 1954, Gao disappeared.
The official version is that he committed suicide: "His final
act of anti-Party betrayal," hisses the communist encyclopedia.
It goes without saying that in the current flood of movies and TV
docudramas about the Party's history, inconvenient characters like
Gao Gang (not to mention Mao's wife, and Lin Biao, and Wang Shi-wei,
and a score of others) have been carefully air-brushed out.
Walking
the streets of a north Chinese city you come face to face — or rather
nose to nose — with one of China's most pressing problems: A lack
of water. The place stinks, and the main reason it stinks is that
there is not sufficient water to keep the drains flushed. There
is periodically no water in the apartment we have borrowed, and
some districts of the city are on a strict rationing regime. In
other parts of north China, one hears, things are even worse. The
quantity of water currently delivered to the ocean by the might
Yellow River is ... zero. Earlier this year a vast dust storm from
the Gobi desert crossed the Pacific and dumped particulate matter
on the U.S.A. Then it crossed the Atlantic and dumped the remainder
on Europe! Nobody seems to know what to do about this.
The
two indispensable books to read as background before visiting Manchuria
are H.E.M. James's Long White Mountain and Peter Fleming's
One's Company. James was an officer in the British Indian
army who took a long sabbatical to trek around Manchuria in the
1880s. As a companion he took a brother officer, one Lieutenant
Younghusband, who twenty years later led the famous expedition into
Tibet. Long White Mountain is one of the small masterpieces
of Victorian travel writing, full of wry observation and an amused,
fatalistic attitude to danger, truculent natives, and gross physical
discomfort. James was also a keen naturalist, and kept a log of
all the interesting flora and fauna he encountered. (I know nothing
about these things myself, but apparently Manchuria is a naturalist's
paradise.) Fleming was of the post-WWI school of British travel
writers, whose outstanding exponent was Robert Byron (The Road
to Oxiana). Even more detached than a Victorian, even more insouciant
towards local hazards and horrors, Fleming toured Manchuria in 1933,
when the Japanese had occupied the region and set it up as the "independent"
state of Manchukuo. Fleming was contemptuous of the Japanese, but
only because he thought they were lousy colonialists, who, in their
hearts, wished they had stayed at home. (This is the opposite of
the British attitude. There is apparently no Japanese poem equivalent
to "Mandalay".) As well as being informative and opinionated,
Fleming is a very funny writer.
Well,
I said I would, so I will. First Aunt — Taiye's eldest daughter
— herself has three daughters, a pair of twins and a spare (this
was in the days before the one-child policy). The twins are happily
married (no, not to each other — sit down at the back there and
pay attention). The youngest, however, got divorced after a brief
marriage. Divorce is not uncommon in China, but still a bit disgraceful.
However, no one in the family blames the girl. When I asked my father-in-law
why she got divorced, he explained in that blunt Chinese way: "The
guy was a useless jerk. He knew how to spend money all right, but
had no idea how to make a living." The girl has now apparently
developed a grudge against all Chinese men. She wants to marry a
foreigner. "What kind of foreigner?" I asked, a bit nonplussed
by all this directness. "One like you," she replied. I
wish I didn't blush so easily. Anyway, the family is lobbying me
to find an American husband for her. In vain I have protested that
no American man will marry sight unseen; that to take an animus
against all 600 million Chinese persons of the male persuasion on
the basis of one bad instance is stretching the principle of induction
to breaking point; and that being utterly unable to speak English,
the girl is going to face large difficulties living abroad. Their
faith in my powers to conjure up a husband for this woman is total,
and I cannot bear to let them down. So please, if there are any
honest men out there in need of a wife they cannot communicate with,
who possesses no marketable skills and is not particularly pretty
(though some cosmetic dentistry and a decent hair stylist would
do wonders), please get in touch with me at National Review.
Especially if you are like Derb.
Banquet
fatigue has set in. Everyone's being so nice that I hate to say
this, but Chinese hospitality is really over the top. Arriving on
Saturday, we had a huge meal that evening at fourth Uncle's place
(where Taiye lives). Sunday, Father-in-Law threw an even bigger
bash for us at a restaurant: three full tables in a private room,
28 of the 34 extant family members present, with karaoke afterwards.
(I sang Edelweiss, Jingle Bells, and a Chinese folk
song left over from my chorister days. This extravaganza, by the
way — "nuts to soup", as Rosie says, at the poshest restaurant
in town — was the family's official jie-feng, the banquet
traditionally given to family members who have been long away from
home. It cost 580 yuan, i.e. about $2.50 per head.) Monday, the
husband of the second of those three daughters hosted us at another
restaurant. Tuesday, First Aunt, at an even more sumptuous place
with a Manchu theme. Tonight, the husband of the first daughter,
at yet another restaurant... It's all very flattering, and I am
a big fan of Chinese food, but there are starting to be moments
when I feel I would kill for a plain cheese sandwich and a slice
of apple pie. There is, I note, a McDonalds in the town. Perhaps
if I could just slip out...
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