Riding the Iron Rooster

"—and you know, Russian women are very beautiful until they are about thirty or so," Mr. Morioka said. "These were fine women. Very lovely. I tell you, some of these women were aristocrats. I remember one cabaret singer telling me how she had gone to great parties and fancy balls in country houses in Russia."

This was an interesting story from the Old World, even though it did stink of exploitation. He said that in a Harbin nightclub there would be eighty percent Japanese and twenty percent rich Chinese. "Almost no Russians," he said. "They couldn't afford it. In Shanghai in the thirties it was fifty-fifty, Japanese and Chinese."

I wanted to talk to him a bit more, but my feet were so cold I was seriously worried about frostbite. I apologized and said I had to get out of this park and into a warmer place.

"There isn't much more to tell," he said. "It all ended in August 1945. when the Japanese front collapsed. The Russian soldiers, who had all been criminals and prisoners, were unmerciful. They took this city and began raping and murdering. That's another story!"

There were more ice carvings and ice monuments at Stalin Park on the riverbank—walls, fences, lions, turrets, and especially slides and sluices down which people rocketed in sleds onto the Songhua River. There were iceboats with sails and runners, and horse-drawn sleighs. Not many takers—no one had money. But there were plenty of people bruising their ankles on the ice-block helter-skelter, a spiral slide around a tower.

That made me think that of all the foreign companies that might soon start up in China the unlikeliest was an insurance company. I thought, Who would insure these people? I saw a man skidding at the ice sculptures. He slipped and cracked his head and was dragged into the snow, where he remained inert. It was a country of bare wires and potholes. Tourists have been known to disappear down elevator shafts and the claims by tourists against the China International Travel Service for injuries, missed cities and sickness are astronomical. The average Chinese factory is a death trap, and yet the Chinese blithely escort visitors through them and past machines that snatch at your hair and poke you in the eye, past gaping holes in the floor, and pools of toxic substances and crackling furnaces. Hard hats are not common, and few welders I saw wore masks.

My hotel was very cold but very hospitable. It was so friendly it actually aroused my suspicions—like the man who is such a glad-hander you suspect he is picking your pocket. I was on the eleventh floor. Welcome to Our Floor! the signs said. That was very unusual. Good health! more said. And many said, Prosperity and Long Life!

I asked the floor attendant what was up. He just grinned and said, "Welcome to our floor!"

"Why are you welcoming me to your floor?"

"I want you to be happy."

"No one has ever welcomed me to their floor in China," I said.

"It is a very good floor."

His insistence in his squawking voice only made me anxious, and so I looked deeper into this and discovered that the previous year there had been a terrible fire in the hotel in which two people died. The eleventh floor had been burned out. The man who had started it was an American businessman. He was said to have been smoking in bed. He was detained by the Chinese and—so I was told—confined to a hotel for quite a while because his company refused to pay the $70,000 damages that the Chinese demanded. And yet no security precautions were taken after the fire. No fire stairs, no smoke detectors, no fireproof furnishings. All the Chinese had done was print hundreds of cardboard signs to be placed in every hotel room. The sign said Do Not Smoke in Bed.

One day in Harbin I met a Canadian who surprised me by saying that he was delighted to be here. His name was Scotty. He was of course from Edmonton, Alberta, the sister city.

"But I'm the only Edmontonian here," he said.

He was a stout and good-humored man and this was his first time in China. He could hardly believe the notoriety it had given him. He had been to a banquet with the governor and he had met many high Party officials in the province. He was the superintendent of a steel forge, on a two-year assignment, and was perhaps on the verge of believing in his importance to the future of Chinese industry. "It's hard to describe," he said. "But I'm a kind of unofficial celebrity."