Riding the Iron Rooster

I arrived on Christmas Eve—the Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve, at the end of the first week in January. I went to one of the churches, where a shivering mustached man—possibly Russian; he was certainly not Chinese—was draping pine boughs upon the holy pictures and the statues. The interior of the church was sorry looking and very cold. The next day there was a Christmas service, twenty people chanted, sang and lit candles. They were all Russians, and most of them were old women. They had the furtive look of Early Christians, but it was obvious that no one persecuted them. They went about the Christmas service in a morose way and wouldn't talk to me afterward—just crunched away in the icy snow.

Even in January most events take place in the open air. The market is outdoors in the thirty-below temperatures. People shopped, bought frozen food (melons, meat, bread) and licked ice cream. That was the most popular snack in Harbin—vanilla ice cream. And the second most popular was small cherry-sized "haws" (hawthorns) which they coated with red goo and jammed on twigs. The market traders were cheery souls with rags wound around their faces and wearing mittens and fur hats. It went without saying that they spent the whole day outside, and when they saw me they cackled and called out, "Hey, old-hair!"

It was the Harbin expression for light-haired foreigners (lao mao zi), because old people are associated with light-colored hair. In this regard they have a special phrase for Russians, "second-class light-hairs" (er mao zi), which is intended as a term of disrespect.

A few days after I arrived the Harbin Winter Festival opened. It was a gimmick to attract tourists to this refrigerator, but it was a good gimmick. Most of it was an exhibition of ice sculpture. The Chinese expression bing deng is more accurate: it means "ice lanterns," and these ice sculptures usually had electric lights frozen inside them.

The whole city of Harbin was involved in it. A sculptor would stack blocks of ice around a lamppost and then chip away and shave the ice until it resembled a pagoda or a rocket ship or a human being. There was an ice sculpture on every street corner—lions, elephants, airplanes, acrobats, bridges; some of them were thirty or forty feet high. But the most ambitious ones were in The People's Park—there were eighty acres of them. Not only a Great Wall of China in ice, but a smaller version of the Taj Mahal, a two-story Chinese pavilion, an enormous car, a platoon of soldiers, an Eiffel Tower, and about forty more displays, all cut out of ice blocks in which fluorescent tubes had been frozen. Because of the lights these ice sculptures had to be seen at night, when it was nearly forty below. But no one minded. They shuffled around, they slipped and fell, they ate ice cream and goggled at these wonderful examples of deep-frozen kitsch.

'The Russians introduced these ice sculptures," a Japanese man told me. 'This is not an ancient Chinese art. But the Chinese liked them and developed the knack of making them. And it was their idea to put lights inside them."

Mr. Morioka in his tam-o'shanter and miracle fibers had taken a sentimental journey back to Harbin. He said you had to come to Harbin in the winter to see it as it really is. The pity was that so few foreigners dared to visit in the winter months.

I said it might have something to do with the stupefying cold.

"Oh, yes!" he said. "I was here in the thirties. I was a student. This was a wonderful place—full of Russian nobility who had no money. Some of them brought jewels and sold them here to keep themselves going. A few lived in style, in those villas that you see in town. But most of the Russians were poverty-striken émigrés. It was a Japanese city."

We were strolling through the ice sculptures; through an ice tunnel, down the main street of an ice village, past a pair of ice lions.

Mr. Morioka said, "As you pined for Paris, we pined for Harbin."

"We pined for sex and romance in Paris," I said.

"What do you think we had in Harbin? We had strippers, nightclubs, Paris fashions, the latest styles—books, songs, everything. This was like Europe to us. That's why our boys used to yearn for the bright lights of Harbin."

That seemed a very unusual way of describing this Chinese refrigerator, but of course he was talking about Manchukuo, Land of the Manchus, owned and operated by the Sons of Nippon.

"The strippers were Russian. That was the attraction. Some of them had been very grand, but they were down on their luck. So they danced and they performed in the cabaret—"

And as he spoke I could see a roomful of libidinous Japanese with their mouths open, transfixed by a wobbling pair of Russian knockers.