China Diary, Part IV
Discoveries abound.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
July 13, 2001 12:00 p.m.

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...