Dear city, proud and graceful

            Harbin is partly known for its old buildings, which is strange because they aren't that old.  Most of the famous ones were built between 1900 and 1930, making them about the same age as the Minnesota house I grew up in.  They are also partly famous for being good-looking.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that Harbin's buildings aren't beautiful, but I'd say that they're not so beautiful as to justify a visit to the city.

            I've developed these convictions through the past nine months.  They did not prepare me for a conversation I had with a taxi driver a few months ago.  He started with the same cookie-cutter questions, where are you from, working or studying in Harbin, etc.  I then asked him if he was a local, and after he answered that he was, I asked him whether he liked his hometown.

            "Yes, I like it," he said.  I nodded in agreement.  He paused, added, casually, "Harbin is so beautiful."

            I stopped nodding and swiveled my head to look at him.  Images of some of Harbin's older building's flashed before my eyes, buildings whose walls advertise the KFC's and Zaras that live inside, that have often been painted over in garish yellows and greens, and that cycle upon cycle of hard winters and hot summers have discolored.

            "Oh...  some parts of Harbin are beautiful, I think," I stuttered.   "And it's certainly a very interesting city, historically."

            "Mhm, so beautiful," he said, half to himself it seemed, eyes on the road.

            My thoughts swirled in dismay.  Here was a local born-and-bred, plain-spokenly proclaiming the beauty of his hometown, and, I could tell from his demeanor, with no motives for doing so other than the fact that he truly believed it.  He was saying this about a city that I had decided was, while a truly fascinating place to live in, one of the least attractive I had ever seen.

            Part of Harbin's ugliness just comes from being a big, developing city that has had little attention paid to it by the Central government.  Entire parts of the city are swathed in construction activity, paper and plastic waste litter the streets, and city slums are not uncommon.  But a big part of my problem with Harbin is just the way its older buildings are maintained-- and the part that irks me most is that these buildings are often seen as adding to the city's beauty.

            The usual strategy for renewing these buildings seems to be to slap on a fresh, thick coat of paint, usually in a bright yellow with white highlights, completely at odds with the architectural style.  There's also a tendency to use many of these older buildings as homes for fast-food chains and name-brand stores with the aim of capitalizing on tourist foot-traffic.  Other old buildings are used as homes for government offices, closed to the public.

Originally the home of the head of the Harbin Railway Department, now a KFC.

           It's hard to know why exactly I hate that Harbin yellow so much.  Sometimes I tell myself that it's because it's obviously not the color used when these buildings were first built (locals have confirmed this).  Or I say to myself that it's the boring uniformity, that they use the same colors over and over.  But I think it must simply have to do with my intense suspicion that buildings with any degree of European features should definitely not be painted that color.

            To that taxi driver, I suppose it's just the opposite-- those old buildings better be painted yellow, otherwise they're just not going to look right.  Maybe seeing a fresh coat of yellow paint being applied to an eclectic mix of renaissance, neoclassical, and baroque styles makes his heart sigh.

            Disclaimer: Americans fell into a similar trap with our neoclassical architecture.  The classic Washington DC tour mandates a stop at the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, which borrow from Ancient Greek and Roman styles.  Their uniform white marble appearance gives them a solemnity and gravitas, conjuring images of the Acropolis or Rome's Pantheon.  The problem is, the relevant experts now know that those Greek and Roman Buildings didn't originally look like that; they were probably painted in what we would now judge to be a kitschy riot of color.  Only after centuries of ruin were they reduced to their current, recognizable state.

The Parthnenon, as it once looked.

            To my chagrin, I identified something that bothered me about Harbin, only to realize that it's just a different form of some practice that American's perfected long ago.

***

            I only started to feel affection, and then a deeper love for Harbin, when I started to learn more about its history.

            As a major city, it isn't very old.  It took off in the late 1800s after the Russians built it around the Trans-Siberian railroad, which connected European St Petersburg with the port of Vladivostok in the Far East.  Many of these famous buildings were constructed by Russians after Harbin became a major trade and transportation hub in the early 1900s; French, Japanese and Italian consulates, stores, synagogues and churches, mansions for lumber magnates and their families popped up around the city at speeds comparable to a Wild West boomtown.   Harbin had an advantageous location for trade, positioned on both the banks of the Sungari River (or, in Chinese, the Songhua) and the railroad.

            Russians continued to settle in the city, thanks to the favorable economy, but the population really boomed after the Bolshevik's 1917 revolution, when over 100,000 White Russians fled the newly formed Soviet Union to Harbin.  The city attracted immigrants from other European countries, as well as Japanese.  A sizeable Jewish community also settled in Harbin at this time, many of them fleeing persecution in Europe and the Soviet Union.  In the 1920's and 30's, the number of foreign consulates in Harbin reached 16, including an American one (the need for agricultural machinery in Heilongjiang at the time was high, and it was largely American firms that met the demand).

            Lilian Grosvenor Coville, then the wife of the Harbin's American Consul General, gave a sketch of life in the Manchurian city in a National Geographic article in 1933.  She described the main street of Harbin, Central Street, which was then known as Kitaiskaya Street, and which is now the main tourist attraction of Harbin, thus:

"Looking down Kitaiskaya, the main street of Harbin, from one of the many Balconies of the "Moderne" Hotel, Harbin appears a rather shabby continental town.  The buildings are strongly built of stone or concrete, with tall double windows and doors ready for the below-zero weather, when the ground is frozen solid four feet deep for months, and Siberian winds blow.  The signs above the stores are in Russian and the letters look as if they were turned backward, until one has spent an evening learning the fairly simple Russian alphabet."

            According to accounts I've read, while there was little racial or ethnic tension in Harbin, the city was highly segregated.  The Chinese residents lived on one side of the train tracks, and the Russians on the other.  Buildings on the Russian side were generally built large and blocky, while the buildings the Chinese lived in were smaller and often had details in the Baroque architecture style, something they supposedly picked up from their new Russian neighbors.  Despite their historical and architectural interest, these buildings are in severe disrepair today; on the verge of collapse, they are not a major tourist attraction.

***

            Harbin at this time was a cultural force as well as an economic one, especially when compared to the creatively repressed cities of the Soviet Union.  Opera and theater companies, poets and novelists, Russian language periodicals and libraries all thrived.  Even such acts as traditional Ukrainian musical comedy and a company performing only in the Tatar language had their day in Harbin.

            One poet writing in Harbin in the late 1920's and 30's was Valery Pereleshin, originally from Irkutsk, Siberia.  He left Harbin sometime around 1940, escaping the fate of some other Russian Harbin intellectuals of that time, the Gulags.  He wrote of Harbin:

Dear city, proud and graceful,

There will come a day

When it won’t be remembered

That you were built by a Russian hand.

Though such a destiny be bitter,

We will not lower our eyes:

Remember, aged historian,

Remember us.

            I'm not sure if Pereleshin was wrong or right.  You can't visit Harbin without having its foreign heritage put on show. Central Street's European style buildings are painted brightly, just in case you weren't sure which ones they were.  Half of them are filled with "Russian product" souvenir shops peddling made-in-China matryoshka dolls.  The occasional Russian style restaurant is sprinkled here and there in the old neighborhood.

            Despite this, it doesn't really seem to be the case that many people engage all that deeply with this history when they come to Harbin.  In some way this doesn't surprise me. The late 1920's, when the foreign population was probably at its peak in Harbin, weren't really so long ago.  But there's something about this history that feels so distant, like it could only have happened on another planet.  I think this is mainly due to the lack of diversity in Harbin today; it's just tough to imagine a Harbin where half the inhabitants are white.  This fact, and the multiple upheavals of the last 100 years of China's history make Old Harbin feel not just old, but ancient.

            In some selfish way, I can't say I mind that I seem to be somewhat alone in my interest in Harbin's history.  Walking around older parts of Harbin, perhaps passing the Italian consulate around 5:00pm when the golden hour makes that yellow hue slightly more bearable, and imagining for a moment the Consul General stepping out the door and climbing into his coach, it feels like I am accessing some deeper layer to Harbin, a layer that often just lies there unnoticed as China's hyper-speed modernity zooms along.  Now, after getting to know Lilian Coville and Valery Pereleshin I have to admit to myself from time to time, Harbin is beautiful.

In front of the former Czech Consulate, now abandoned and unused.

Bowling Together

            "She's going to Barcelona soon, what suggestions do you guys have?"  Jesús asked the group.

            Jesús is from Spain, a young-looking 35-year-old of average height with closely cropped black hair, an ever-present five-o'clock shadow, and a quick, broad smile.  He's been living in Harbin for around four years now, training engineers and helping manage local operations for the plane manufacturer Airbus.  He has an ability, almost a compulsion it seems, to meet and befriend other foreigners in Harbin.

            He was asking a small group for ideas of what our Russian friend should do in the Spanish city.  Luckily, one of the other girls there happened to be from Barcelona and started talking about museums, restaurants, tourist sites etc.

            We were seated at a table in Tree Pizza, an American restaurant run by a guy from New York.  The music was a mix of American rock and Russian pop.  Fake license plates and kitsch pictures of New York City adorned the walls.  The group consisted of a few Spaniards, a French woman, a Russian woman, and myself.  This is part of what makes living in China interesting; you get to mix with a diverse group of people that make up the community of foreigners here.

            "How about beaches around Barcelona?" our Russian friend asked.

            Jesús interjected, "But you have nice beaches in Russia, no?  Around Sochi, in the Black Sea."

            Our Russian friend explained that some parts of Russia had nice beaches, but that it's a big country and she didn't live near any of them.

            From here the conversation slid down several levels in quality, where people feel comfortable talking about the world in the vaguest and broadest of terms.  "What about the beaches in Vladivostok," someone said, "aren't they supposed to be nice?", to which someone replied, "of course not, aren't they polluted like in China?"  Someone else objected that there are in fact some beautiful beaches in China, like in the southern island of Hainan, which drew some grave nods of agreement from the rest of us.   "But of course", said the French friend, "everyone knew that the best beaches in the world were in the Caribbean, on islands like St Lucia and Jamaica."  "But did she know", said Jesús, "that the locals on those islands couldn't even afford to enjoy their own beaches because the tourists could pay much higher prices to use them?  And anyway, beaches on the islands of Southeast Asia were just as good as their Caribbean counterparts, and much cheaper."

            Suddenly Jesús looked at me and asked "What about beaches in the US?"

            I thought for a moment and said, "Well the beaches I have most experience with are in the Northeast, they're mostly rocky, and the weather isn't great for beaching there most of the year anyway."  The group was silent and the hopeful glow in Jesús' eyes faded to dismay, his lips puffed up into a small pout.  "But yeah, Miami, Hawaii, California, they're supposed to be nice," I said.  "Not that I've been to any of those places."  It was enough to appease.

            I've found that this kind of chatter is common in groups of foreigners here that come from different places.  People feel a desire to talk about the world, different customs and cultures, I think from a genuine desire to learn something and take advantage of all the perspectives available.

            But so often these talks turn into "knowledge matches," and bold statements on places never visited become commonplace.  One person's own anecdotal evidence replaces thoughtful questioning of other members of the group.  Instead of an inclination to learn something surprising or interesting, people may pushback against statements that challenge their worldview.

            I've found it's often easier to just give in to these kinds of attitudes.  When asked about America, rather than try to paint a nuanced picture of my home country, which I love and try to represent fully, I'm usually better off repeating a few sound-bytes.  "New York is my favorite city, it's a lot of fun.  Chicago is nice and so underrated.  LA is just one big sprawling traffic jam, but I've heard they have good Korean food (I've never been)."  Of course this isn't always how these kinds of discussions go, but it happens more often than I'd expected.

            I think what most bothers me are just the blanket statements and the bald-faced stereotypes.  Of course there are some beyond-the-pale stereotypes that people have been trained to avoid (Russians drink too much, American's are all obese, Chinese are all good at math).  But there are some fairly common ones that people will still assert with confidence, kind of high-brow stereotypes.  People may say about the United States, for example, that the portions are huge, the vast majority of households own guns, and all Americans are huge patriots, or at least really like the US.  Meanwhile, I'm hesitant to make practically any wide-ranging claim about my own country.

            Of course, I don't want to stereotype foreigners living in Harbin; this isn't always the attitude people take.  The other night I was talking to a Ukrainian friend who teaches English in Harbin.  Like many English teachers here, she is pretending to her students and their parents that she is from an English speaking country, in her case Canada.  I asked her what she says when her students ask her about Canada, what she misses, what she learned about in grade school, what her favorite parts of the country are.  She says she's taken the time to read about Canada, and that sometimes she makes answers up on the fly.  After pausing thoughtfully for a minute, she smiled and added humbly, "but you know, I might not even be able to answer some of those questions if they were asking me about Ukraine." 

            Of course, those kinds of sweeping conversations are a small side of expat life in Harbin.  So much of the community is positive.  It's close-knit, and because of the general lack of large-scale crossover between foreigners and locals in social life, for better or for worse, it's an isolated community.  Sometimes it can feel like living in a small town of a few thousand people, inside a city of 5 million.

            Many foreigners hang out at the same bars, cafes and restaurants.  They work together as teachers in the same local schools or study together at university. They drink together, have trivia nights, go to spas and on bike rides, go on day trips outside the city.  They go bowling together.

            It's hard to understate the importance of the smartphone app WeChat for social life in Harbin, among foreigners but also local Chinese.  WeChat is a messaging app, but also so much more; it has functionalities similar to those of Facebook, Shazam, Venmo, Grubhub and Uber, all rolled into its platform (some of these are managed by third parties).

            But what's more important than its usefulness is the culture surrounding WeChat.  To add a person on WeChat means almost nothing, but it can lead to almost anything. Contrast that with the US; if you meet someone in a bar and chat for a couple hours, there is some small chance of an exchange of numbers or Facebook pages at the end.  In China, if you chat with a new acquaintance for about ten minutes (often less), it would be almost strange if you didn't add their WeChat.  This has happened to me dozens, if not hundreds of times.  It's then shockingly normal to, at a later date, reconnect at a later date with that ten-minute acquaintance you met one night in a tipsy haze.  It's also fine to reject such an offer, as no one has invested anything in the relationship.

            In a word, the niggling little neuroticisms and anxious second-guessing that partly make up American social life just aren't a thing here.  It seems like this is just what social life looks like in China, but I think being a foreigner helps quite a bit as well.  As foreigners, there's a common understanding that we are trying to crack the codes that come with trying to live a full life in China.  Many of us need all the help we can get.

            In most Chinese cities there is a WeChat expat group chat, usually with hundreds of members, where people can share information on local news, good restaurants and bars they've found, or ask questions about visas, transportation, or anything else relevant.  In Harbin, there are also group chats for Trivia Nights, Poker Nights, and Foodies.

            Nightlife for foreigners largely revolves around Bar Street.  Though it's near HIT, it seems that many foreign students from other universities and adults working in the city see it as the place to be on weekend evenings.  There's a bar for everyone.  Ace is a no-frills place that is popular with both foreigners and Chinese, and is the default go-to for many.  Mix is a bar popular mostly with the sizeable Russian community here.  Bubble Pub has three fridges full of imported craft beers, as well as fifteen rotating taps (very rare in China).

            Night's on Bar Street remind me of a passage from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, where he describes life as a foreigner in Paris.  With the little earnings he made as a dishwasher, he could go out on Saturday nights and "take part in the social life of the quarter."  He would drink and sing the night away with a mix of other foreigners and locals, and towards the beginning of the night's festivities he says "Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain that the world was a good place and we a notable set of people."

            There have definitely been times in Harbin when I've felt like I was part of a notable set of people in a wonderful world (it's not clear to me that this is part of life as a foreigner in China, or just something that everyone feels in their twenties after a few drinks).  On any given night it's possible to meet characters with huge variation in backgrounds.  Some are fresh off the boat, others have lived here for 15 years.  Some get by teaching English in elementary schools, others have started their own businesses here, and still others help multinational corporations run their China operations.  The best part isn't simply that they're there and you can talk to them, but that they want to talk to you as well.  Just last night, I met two men from Uzbekistan who are in Harbin for a couple of weeks.  They've been studying Chinese non-stop for 6 years, and now work as translators when officials from their city, Samarkand, make trips to China.

            By the end of those Saturday nights, Orwell writes, he and his comrades "perceived that they were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk."  This 2:00am comedown happens as well, on the short walk home from Bar Street.  In these moments, lit by fluorescent streetlights, it's uncomfortably easy to remember that Harbin is an underdeveloped, polluted city compared to its urban cousins on China's Southeast coast. Walking home, used napkins and empty bottles litter the street, and stragglers linger around street corners as the bars shut down.  Huge mechanical beasts of burden lurk in the urban backdrop, left from the previous day's construction.  The view from Bar Street in the wee hours isn't pretty, and it's hard to feel like the world is very splendid at all.