Riding the Iron Rooster

In this land of red wind-chafed cheeks and runny noses, Harbin seemed an unlikely city. It looked Russian (onion-domed churches, villas with turrets and gables, office blocks with pompous colonnades), and it had that strange fossilized appearance that cities have in very cold countries—a sort of dead and petrified shabbiness. Its Russian ornateness was overlaid with soot and frozen slush. Here and there was a Japanese roof or a Chinese ministry or statue—mostly monstrosities, which added to the weirdness of the place, because in addition to their odd proportions, they were also hung with long, gnarled icicles. I liked the city best in the early morning, when it glittered with frost—little prismatic pinpoints on its ugly face.

It was not much more than a hundred years old. It was a fishing village on the Songhua River that had been turned by the Russian tsar into a railway junction when he extracted permission from the decadent Qing Dynasty in the 1890s to make a shortcut through Manchuria to Vladivostok. The city went on rising and the various railway lines kept running after the Russo-Japanese War (1904), and the Russian Revolution. The greedy Japanese presence was powerful—they had planned to take over Asia, beginning here—but their puppet state of Manchukuo lasted only from 1931 until 1945, when the Russians reasserted themselves after the Second World War. Harbin's boast had always been that it was only nine days, by train, from Paris; so it got the fashions and the music and the latest papers long before Shanghai. The striptease and the Charleston and Dixieland jazz were introduced to China in Harbin in the 1920s because of the Trans-Siberian link with Paris.

Times had changed. Harbin's sister city was now Edmonton, Alberta. You guessed that somehow, when you looked at Harbin. There was something in its severity and its dark and funless nights that resembled a remote city in Canada.

And yet in Canada people joke and gloat about the cold. In Harbin and in Heilongjiang in general no one mentioned it except outsiders, who never stopped talking about it. I bought a thermometer so that I would not bore people by asking them the temperature, but the damn thing only registered to the freezing point—zero centigrade. The first time I put it outside the red liquid in the tube plunged into the bulb and shriveled into a tiny bead. So I had to ask. It was midmorning: minus twenty-nine centigrade in the sparkling sunshine. By nighttime it would be ten degrees colder than that—so cold in the more familiar figures of Fahrenheit that I didn't want to think about it.

I wore mittens and long underwear and thermal boots and a hat with earflaps and two sweaters under my leather jacket. One overcast day of paralyzing cold I wore more than that, put on all the clothes I had with me; I turned myself into a big padded and bulging fool, and yet I was still so cold I had to rush inside occasionally and jump up and down. The Chinese were well wrapped up, and some wore face masks, but on their feet many wore no more than corduroy rubber-soled slippers. Why didn't their feet fall off? They were enthusiasts for heavy knitted underwear that gave them elephantine legs, which contrasted oddly with their skinny frostbitten faces.

They didn't wash, for many reasons, the main one being that they did not have hot water or bathrooms. It hardly mattered: stinks are seldom obvious in icy northern lands. They did not take their clothes off, even indoors—neither their hats or coats, even when they ate. It was easy to see why. The heating was turned to an absolute minimum—the Maoist doctrine of saving fuel and regarding heating and lighting as luxuries except where they affected production of something like pig iron or cotton cloth. This constant wearing of coats and hats, inside and out, had given them some very bad habits. The worst was that they never seemed to close doors, and wherever you went there was a door ajar and wind like a knife coursing through it.

My hotel was so cold I always wore three or four layers of clothes. It was called the Swan—I thought of it as the Frozen Swan. It had a rock garden and ornamental pool in the lobby, but the lobby was so cold the fish had died and the plants were stiff and brown. Manchus and Hans sat in thick coats and fur hats on the lobby sofas, smoking and yelling. I was told there was a warmer hotel in Harbin, called the International, but it did not seem to matter to anyone in Heilongjiang whether a hotel was heated or not. The great boast of the hotels was their cuisine, and they vied with each other in offering grilled bear's paw, stewed moose nose with mushroom, Mongolian hot pot, white fungus soup and monkey-leg mushrooms and pheasant shashlik.