A Visit to Changchun

 

 

I  longed to see the historic sites and relics of China’s  past, and for me, the main focus of the visit to Changchun was  the Imperial Palace, former residence of China’s Last Emperor. Katharine and Ed came with me on an overnight train from Tonghua. I have more to say later about overnight train journeys in China.

You could say that China’s ‘Last Emperor’, the subject of Bertolucci's film of that name, paid a heavy price for his status. Born to privilege and protected from the problems of survival which were a daily challenge for most of his subjects, Puyi was heavily influenced and controlled by his elders throughout his life. His grandmother, for instance, became a legend of ruthless cruelty in China and was rumoured to have poisoned Puyi’s uncle, the reigning Emperor. When was born on February 7, 1906, the Qing Dynasty was already in trouble. An old Chinese saying statesthat it takes three generations for a family to decline, and for the Chinese dynasties the decline into corruption was a steep and spectacular one. Completely helpless and encouraged to be so, Puyi was separated from his mother at an early age, hardly ever saw his father and was brought up surrounded by eunuchs who pandered to his whims. He was manipulated variously   by family elders, a treacherous general, Japanese and Russian invaders and finally by the Communists who took over in 1949. Every decision was made for him, including choice of wives and ‘consorts’.

Within the complex of grey buildings that housed the royal villa, the palace itself was a revelation, being nothing at all like the Forbidden City in Beijing, but a grand-scale 1930’s villa such as might please an old-fashioned curmudgeon from the pages of Evelyn Waugh or John Mortimer. Luxuriously furnished with polished wood furniture, chandeliers and rugs, everything seemed designed for comfort and use rather than to impress.

The residence at Changchun expressed an elegance and convenience that lofty public rooms with gilded furniture and portrait-hung walls never could. Unlike the vast, chilly spaces of the old Imperial palaces with their thrones and screens and costly ornaments, here things were arranged on a more domestic scale, laid out for a man who had much leisure and few official duties.  We looked through doorways and glimpsed waxen figurines representing the debauched Empress on a silk-covered daybed, the Emperor at his desk or in meetings with Japanese officials, flanked by a well-stocked drinks cabinet, and further on a billiard room and a music room with a wind-up gramophone.

Katharine admired the neatness and order of a small suite of Japanese-style rooms, with tatami mats and sliding screens, and wondered aloud how much it would cost to convert a London flat to this cool and uncluttered look. We took  photos in a long conservatory facing the garden, sitting on the parapets of fountains  at either end of the room. Outside we walked around a  tiled swimming pool with and steps leading down,  so recently drained it seemed that one could almost hear the laughter of a poolside cocktail party in a humid  Beijing August afternoon, or the faint echo of racquets striking balls in the a tennis court.

Puyi could never really ‘boomerang’ - his moves were always for political reasons, and he couldn’t return. He never enjoyed any kind of independence, and the sense of a destiny unfulfilled must have stayed with him to the end of his life. Ironically enough his sister lived out her days unrecognised, selling matches on the streets of Tonghua.

 



A Well-travelled Daoist

 

The temple in the Jade Emperor's Park in Tonghua, with the character for 'dao' on the door. 

 Cultural relics were scarce in Tonghua ; to visit the ancient sites I'd dreamed of in the course of my
studies, I was forced to take overnight trains to the cities of the Manchurian hinterland.

By happy chance, I came across an exception  in  a local park, which was called 'The Jade Emperor's Garden',  located on sloping ground overlooking the river. 

This was where local girl and our self-appointed guide,  Helen, did her morning exercises when she wasn't at university in Changchun. Her aim was to show us a small zoo, which we were quick to leave for reasons I'll relate in a future extract.

Helen, however, was alarmed when we spotted smoke rising from a Daoist temple, half hidden by trees on the upper slopes of the park. We were able to enter and walk around in exchange for a small donation to one of the monks. The temple building, home to several old men,  housed giant images of frightful gods, with blue faces and long fangs, brandishing huge weapons. Various altars and highly decorated urns were on display in the grounds. Helen was anxious for us to leave, disturbed by our interest in these 'superstitious' remnants of China's pre-revolution past.

 

 

'As we made out way back across the lower courtyard, where potatoes and cabbages were laid out on sacks covering the ground, we noticed a tall, skeletal figure, standing in a shady doorway towards the back of the yard. He beckoned to us by raising his hand, palm facing inwards, and curling the fingers slowly towards himself.  His black Russian-style tunic was gathered at the waist by a cord which reached half way down his thighs, clad in close-fitting trousers in the same material, and knee-high grey gaiters His watery eyes, gaunt face and wispy beard, gave him an other-worldly air, but he was not unfriendly. His strange high-pitched voice fell almost to a whisper as he invited us in Chinese to follow him. Helen would not move, but Katharine and I  crossed the cobbles towards his stone-floored cell.

The room was windowless, but in the light from the doorway it was bare, except for a low tiled stove with  a built-in wok near the door, and towards the back, a bed and a desk. A small battered bookshelf flanking the desk held a few volumes. The old man  told us he was just back from a lecture tour of America and, opening a desk drawer, proudly showed us a passport with a visa. I noticed he was born in 1934, which made him much younger than I’d thought at first.  His passport photo resembled portraits  I’d seen on ancestral altars in Chinese homes, like caricatures which  seemed to have been painted when the subjects were at their last gasp.

Katherine, whose Mandarin was better than mine, began to ask him about his trip to America, and he said he had given talks on Daoism to various groups he’d been invited to address It was hard to imagine this strange old man, with his deliberate mannerisms, and quavering voice, striding along New York sidewalks or riding the streetcars in San Francisco. I wonder how much of the peaceful atmosphere of this hillside temple he had carried with him across the Atlantic. It also struck me as ironic that at a time when American youths were covertly seeking converts to Christianity among the Chinese, this ancient Daoist had, so to speak, jumped over the wall in the opposite direction.

Helen smiled again when, finally, we left the old man to his prayers and reminiscences. She led us into the playground part of the park, where we could throw wire hoops over pottery figurines, bars of soap and cigarette packets placed on the ground, or shoot pellets at balloons pinned to a board. We were happy enough to be amused, although we soon attracted groups wishing to be entertained by ‘waiguoren’ taking  part in Chinese pastimes.'

A Job in China

 The extract below is from the  Intoduction to  Hotpot and Dumplings . It describes the location of the company where I worked in 2003-4.  

'A major Chinese ELT publishing House, is undertaking a significant expansion of its output and is now seeking English native-speaker editors to assist in the production of newspapers and magazines for learners and teachers of English in China. Two year contracts from April 2003, based in Tonghua City, Jilin Province, China. Airfares and accommodation provided, competitive hard currency salaries commensurate with experience.' (Advert in The Guardian, January 2003)
 

 ‘Yes, you should go there. You can always go to the tourist places on holidays,’ said my teacher. I'd been learning Mandarin for nearly ten years, and progress seemed abysmally slow.
Difficult to locate on a map, Tonghua  was dismissed by ‘ Lonely Planet’ as a ‘dull’ jumping-off point for a trip to Tian Hu, the ‘Heavenly Lake’, a  water-filled  crater at the highest point of the Changbaishan or ‘Ever white mountains’. The mountain was accessible by train and minibus from Tonghua for about two months in the summer – snow made the roads impassable at other times. Tourists were cautioned about walking near the summit,   because both China and Korea claimed it as theirs and suspicious Korean border patrols had been known to arrest straying tourists. My meeting with Korean border guards is a story for a later chapter. Meantime, my research turned up some interesting historical background.

Had things turned out differently, this barely-mentioned mountain city might have been, for a while at least,  the capital of China. When the occupying Japanese were forced to retreat from Changchun, in the area which they names  Manchukuo, Tonghua seemed a suitable place to resettle the puppet Emperor. This was not to happen, although the Emperor's sister, after fleeing from the palace, lived incognito for a while, selling matches in from a Tonghua street stall.

It wasn't  just the scenery that made Manchukuo attractive to foreigners.  The minerals, forestry and medicinal flora and fauna of the region made occupation attractive to the Japanese, Russians, Koreans, and Mongolians, including Genghis Khan. China’s last dynasty, the Qing, was founded by invaders from the west known as the Manchus who founded a capital at Shenyang before moving on to take Beijing. The legacy of these occupations, as much as its isolation from the rest of China, determines its distinctive culture.

Of course, I didn't all this when I answered the job advert . A lecturer  in a South London College. I’d been a part-time student of Chinese ever since I’d returned in 1993 from a spell of teaching English in Singapore, where I'd fallen in love with Chinese culture. I’d managed to get to China to teach on a summer school course for teenagers in the south in 2001 and a week’s holiday in Shanghai in 2002. I was near the end of my career, and to spend a year working as an editor for a Chinese publisher would make an excellent finale.

It was certainly going to be a change from South London. My husband, happily retired, was at first reluctant but resigned. When I told him about the long cold winter with temperatures consistently at -20C it dispelled al doubts.  ‘No, you go, Sheila, and I'll look after the flat. I could always come for a visit if it gets too much for you’.

I could cope with the challenge of living in the mountains for a year, I thought, and I could manage in  Chinese speaking environment..  There would be very few westerners around, apart from two or three fellow foreign editors also employed by the company. Would I be too lonely? There was only one way to find out.

A Hundred Ways with Dofu

In keeping with the Chinese 'danwei' or work unit system the Chinese employees at the publishing company were housed by the company. While we half dozen  foreign editors had apartments in the company building, the Chinese editors were bussed in from a dormitory building in Tonghua. Three meals were provided in the canteen with tea trolley fare morning and afternoon. The extract below is about the canteen food.

I thought I had seen dofu in all its forms until one day I was pleased to see a tray of my favourite breakfast food, scrambled eggs, being stirred around by the chef. Mr. Liu was a stocky middle- aged man with slumped shoulders and an air of melancholy; the result, no doubt, of years of struggling with limited raw materials. As I waited in the queue, clutching my metal tray divided into sections, he pointed a ladle at the ‘egg’ mix and said, ’Dofu!’ So that was yet another kind – disguised as scrambled eggs! No wonder it didn’t taste like egg, which I had put down to overcooking and the flavour-hiding spring onions or shredded green peppers which were mixed in. However, I helped myself to this and some chipped potatoes, not fried but cooked until soft in oil and soy sauce gravy.
As I ate in front of the big TV screen at one end of the canteen, mopping up gravy with a steamed bun,  I watched Chinese employees file in, and called, ‘Ni Hao!’ to the ones I recognised as my office colleagues.
 This was a good ruse on the company’s part, I thought. A bus brought the employees from the dormitory building in the city, but it arrived a good hour before 8am, the official time for starting work. Breakfast, including queuing beside the food trestles, took no more than twenty minutes. As with the rest of the company impositions, they took it without complaint.
At lunch there was always soup, but it appeared to be just warm water into which some vegetable stalks and herbs had been thrown and left to stand for a while. It made me think of Ivan Denisovitch’s daily fare in Solzhenityn’s gulag story, but at least it wasn’t the only course. The accompaniments to the main dishes, which were stewed versions of local vegetables with scraps of meat or fish,  were trays of dark and salty pickled vegetables, and I didn’t have time to acquire a taste for these, although I tried from time to time, as they seemed to be popular.
Dessert consisted of fruit with the bruises cut off, usually apples. I hardly ever saw a fat employee -  in fact most were very thin. On the other hand, they were healthy, and almost never off sick.
One thing I didn’t like was the widespread habit of eating raw garlic. This was placed on a ledge near the long tables, together with a bowl of chilli paste. Whilst chewing garlic cloves is no doubt highly beneficial to the health, it made for uncomfortable episodes at my desk in the afternoons, as one or another of the Chinese editors came to consult me about some grammar point, leaning close to explain and point a finger.

Eating Out in Tonghua

Me at a  hotpot restaurant in Tonghua, with  English colleague Katharine and a local family. The girl on my left, Helen, was our self-appointed guide to her native town.

The thirteenth century invasion of northeast China by Gengis Khan was reflected in the local dongbei cuisine. Most of the restaurants in Tonghua were of the 'Mongolian hotpot' type. Food items are  cooked in a central metal basin, with heated supplied by gas cylinder  under the table.

Meals were cheap, washed down with bottles of excellent, equally inexpensive, Tonghua beer.

The extract below describes a more formal occasion - a department dinner to welcome me to the publishing company and to farewell  employees about to embark on study courses in  the UK.

'‘This is a superior restaurant, so the meat is genuine lamb; in some cheap places they spray on lamb flavouring,’ Jack confided. Red meat was so unusual in Tonghua that I wondered what could possibly be used as a lamb substitute. Apart from platters of thinly sliced meat, other dishes contained  yellow blocks of defrosted dofu that resembled bath sponges and flat green tiles which Jack told me were seaweed squares. 

It seemed unthinkable they could be food, until I had softened one of the squares for a minute or two in the boiling broth. This made them tender, although quite tasteless, like biting into a bland, thick-leaved cabbage. A bowl of small green peppers, and a pile of flat green leaves  of   lettuce, cabbage and spinach made up the other dishes, as well as a bowl of large white beans mixed with ice cubes, and  packets of instant noodles by 'special  request' of  Jack and Katie.
I recalled why American editor Joseph disliked hotpot feasts -you could get up from the table as hungry as when you sat down, he said.  

The ‘bai jiu’  or white spirit with its distinctive gasoline aroma, played a crucial role in the ritual toasting. The diners took turns around the table. At the end of the toast came the cry ‘Gan bei’, literally ‘dry glass’, or ‘Bottoms Up’. Some employees, including  Jack, declared at the start they didn’t drink, and that seemed to be quite acceptable because of his youth. To my relief, women were exempt. One variation I heard called out by Gwen was ‘Ban bei’ or ‘half glass’, which  gave licence to drink only a portion of the spirit.

 Everyone was supplied with a set of tiny saucers which contained viscous liquids, and  individual metal canisters of boiling broth  The liquids were brown soy, yellow ginger and garlic , red pepper and a bright green one that looked like pureed peas.  These were mixed according to individual taste in a slightly larger saucer. 

The correct procedure was to take up uncooked food in  chopsticks as it passed on the  revolve  and immerse the morsel into the broth. Cooking took no more than a couple of minutes, after which the dripping shred of meat or vegetable was lifted from the broth  and dipped into the sauce before being carried to the mouth. The sauce served to cool the tasty mouthful but  judgement as to cooking time and size of food pieces had to be exercised.  It was enough of a challenge  to catch food with chopsticks as it passed by on the revolve, and then try  to get it to the  broth without dropping it on the table, given the added risk of knocking over  a container of boiling liquid. Some food items were easier than others. If part of a dofu brick dropped suddenly into the sauce it made quite a spatter.
That was why most restaurants provided apron-like bibs to cover the diners’ clothes.'

A Cold Nose in Shenyang

Statue of Mao Ze Dong in Shenyang.

My first real break from my job in China fell in the first week in October- 'Golden Week', as it was called. Shenyang, capital of ancient Manchuria, promised cultural delights that were in short supply in the mountain city that was my temporary home. Shenyang might be one of the most polluted cities in China, and take an overnight train journey to reach,  but in terms of Chinese culture it was a veritable Shangri-la. My English colleague Katharine had been invited to a wedding in Dalian, so I decided to go alone. I was eager to see some of the Emperors' palaces and tombs I'd only dreamt about in London classrooms.

 

Approach to the North Tomb in Shenyang

My American colleague Joseph advised against it . There were dangers, he said,  for a foreign woman who travelled alone;  what they were he didn't specify. But the fears of an elderly Franciscan monk weren't about to stop me.  There was even a Holiday Inn, I reassured him. In fact, the people I met during my stay, with an exception described in another chapter, showed the same courtesy I'd experienced in Tonghua and  on previous visits to China.

However, an encounter,  at the end of a very enjoyable visit, reminded me of Joseph's well-intended warnings.

I left Shenyang by an overnight train which departed at 9.30pm. The grim-faced, uniformed woman in charge of the ‘Luxury Waiting Room’ sold me a ticket for the standard 10 Yuan fee- about 60p at the time.  I entered a vast hall, built in the 1930s and not refurbished since, judging by the décor. It resembled a salon in an underwater Titanic, with huge chandeliers, damask wallpaper and battered sofas trailing brocaded skirts. Low, dark wood tables were ranged about , mostly empty. All this, illuminated by the customary Chinese twenty watt bulbs, created an atmosphere of faded grandeur. However, I was there only to pass through to reach the platform. In Chinese stations one always walked up stairs or escalators to the waiting rooms and then down again to the platforms. It was as if they had to find a use for the upper station storeys and employment for the multiple personnel who would check one’s ticket.

 

Before I boarded I had a brief and unpleasant exchange with the three men, fellow passengers going to Tonghua, who had been deputed by the waiting room attendant to escort me to the platform.  It was only when I tried to board the train I discovered that the assistant at the Holiday Inn had booked me  a hard sleeper berth but had not told me, as is the Chinese way with bad news.

 The guard at the door of the soft-sleeper carriage wouldn’t allow me to get on.  The three young men were laughing at my attempts to board while waving my ticket at the guard. I told them I could tell they were Shenyang people. ‘Wei shenme?’ How did I know? Well, for one thing, Tonghua people were more…and I stopped to think of the right Chinese word.  ‘Keqi!’ (Polite!) one of them suggested, and I nodded. They laughed even louder.

A Chinese Hospital

 

 ECP (English Coaching Paper (sic)), where I worked from Aug 2003 to June 2004

A lunch time football game  on the frozen river  in January

I'm working  on the third draft  of 'Hotpot and Dumplings', my book about living in the remote dongbei  area of China. That it's the third draft makes me feel better, because it's almost ten years since I started.

I've used  some chapters since as a basis for short stories or articles, but now I'm all set to finish the  book. I'll be posting extracts on a weekly basis  as I go through the chapters, which Word has arranged in alphabetical order.  The first,  'A Chinese Hospital'  is set in January 2004. My husband Roy had finally overcome his fear of the Dongbei Winter and joined me in Tonghua.

I was so looking forward to our first game of Ping-Pong in the dedicated room on the company premises, where my apartment was located. But he fell and broke his wrist in the very first game.

Luckily, I'd spotted a local building labelled 'People's Liberation Army Hospital Number 208'. But despite the English lettering on the outside wall, no one inside spoke a word of English. So it was quite a challenge.

The extract below is not about the treatment, but about how easy it is to get confused when you try to communicate in Chinese.

The X-ray was to be done in the main building, to which we were escorted by a young woman who happened to be passing through the entrance hall. By now I was feeling more confident and we fell to chatting. She insisted on holding onto Roy’s  arm as we walked along the slippery  path between the two buildings and told me her name was Meilin.  She lived locally and was visiting her sister, who worked at the hospital. She herself was a student. I asked her which subject, or ‘xue’

'Hu xue’

I looked at her with new respect. 'Hu', is Chinese for tigers, so she must be a Natural History student. Certainly there were said to be Siberian tigers still roaming in the Northeast forest regions, a source of  ingredients for Chinese medicine.  So it was quite likely that tigers were her speciality.
It wasn’t until I consulted the dictionary later that I realised my mistake. It was yet another example of Chinese tones making all the difference to the meaning. ‘Hu’ can mean tiger, but it is also means ‘nurse’, depending on the tone. Meilin was not studying tigers,  but how to be nurse!
No wonder she was puzzled, when I told her how much I admired her bravery in tackling such an unusual and possibly dangerous subject.