Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [141]
But I liked the cold. There’s something about freezing together that brings the warmth out of people. Extreme heat tends to make people irritable. But in the cold, particularly when you have a heavy coat and a fur hat, mirth ensues. Brrr, it’s cold, you say. I know, says your friend. Let’s get some hot chocolate. Happy times.
But in Harbin it wouldn’t be hot chocolate. It would be tea, hot tea, served in the Russian style. This is because it feels like Russia in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, the northernmost province in China. It is surrounded by Russia. To the north, there is Russia. To the east, there is Russia. If you don’t like Russia, you can go to the west and find yourself in Mongolia. But still, Harbin seemed like a Russian city. Sure, the city is surrounded by the grim factories common to every city in China nowadays, and the downtown is rife with glitzy new high-rises, and the Songhua River is hideously polluted because of an explosion upstream at a benzene plant, but nevertheless in the Daoliqu District in Harbin, it feels like Russia. There is, for instance, Stalin Park. Yes, it’s true. A pretty riverside park full of inline skaters and waltzers is named after Joseph Stalin. Nobody names anything after Joseph Stalin anymore. Except in Harbin, apparently. And to complete this little tableau of yesteryear, there are also bread lines. I’d found a bakery selling bread, which was odd because the Chinese don’t eat bread, except apparently in Harbin. Odder still was the long line of customers waiting outside to purchase this bread. Normally, the Chinese are pretty good at matching supply with demand. But here there were bread lines.
And there were onion domes. Russians had moved into Harbin early in the nineteenth century when men such as Rasputin, Lenin, and Tsar Nicholas II began their fateful dance, making life just far too interesting for many Russians, and some found their way to Harbin, deep in Manchuria, where they built Orthodox churches and charming cafés that remain to this day, serving blintzes and borscht and sausages and demitasses of vodka. But I had not come to Harbin to eat blintzes and borscht washed down with a clarifying shot of vodka, though I did do that and it was good. Nor had I come to Harbin to meander among cobblestone lanes while humming the theme from Dr. Zhivago, nor had I come here because I thought I might like this city of 4 million, which I did. I actually liked it very much and hoped one day to return for the Ice Lantern Festival, when ice sculptures are shaped into fantastic, whimsical creations such as the Forbidden City itself.
No, I had come to Harbin to explore China’s peculiar relationship with the animal kingdom beyond the endangered-species markets of Guangzhou. Take the Yangtze Sturgeon, for instance. When I was in Chengdu, I’d seen an engrossing program about the Yangtze Sturgeon on CCTV’s nature show. Yangtze Sturgeons are, unsurprisingly, not particularly happy at present. It’s a migratory fish that lives in the Yangtze but returns to the ocean to do other fish-type business. It goes back and forth, freshwater to saltwater, doing fishy things, following a cycle that has lasted millennia. But now with the Three Gorges Dam the sturgeons could no longer go back and forth from river to ocean. So this is a problem. But the Chinese, naturally, have a solution: They’re going to train the Yangtze Sturgeon to remain content in the river, to give up its wandering ways, and to forgo its need to do business in the ocean. To that end, they’d captured a couple of Yangtze Sturgeons and put them in a tank where they would be trained to dispense with millions of years of evolutionary adaptations and learn how to live happily in this all-freshwater-all-the-time environment. Training consisted of, as far as I could tell, placing many divers in the tanks to pet these large Yangtze Sturgeons, to pull at their