How to make friends in China
When I took the job, I expected the usual gibes. ‘What culture?’ the Europeans would say. ‘Ah, the cultural spy!’ would whisper the Chinese. ‘The Les Patterson of the Orient,’ the Australians would throw in. I suppose I lived up to expectations. At any rate, most of my neckties are stained.
For New Year 1988 I went to Harbin, once the ‘Paris of the East’, in China’s frozen far north. With a few remaining onion-domed churches, it is reminiscent of Middle Europe. Or Dickens. After dark, on foggy, cobbled streets, vendors sell roast chestnuts and blackened frozen persimmons. Harbin used to be famous for bread before the cold war and the Sino–Soviet split brought on a double isolation. It still produces export-quality vodka and passable caviar. But the echoes of Paris have faded. Harbin is now Ice City. In winter, with temperatures below twenty degrees Celsius, the city fills with fantastic ice-sculptures, an art form that, however ephemeral, is taken seriously by the locals. But the ice festival was not my reason for visiting.
The Anti-Bourgeois Liberalisation Campaign of 1987 had made it difficult for unofficial art to be exhibited in Peking, but in the China of the economic reforms the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum was willing to take the risk. The only active part of the museum was a display about human reproduction and the one-child policy. Foetuses in ascending sizes lined up in jars alongside anatomical cross-sections of genitalia. Siamese twins and specimens of elephantiasis provided a freak show that people would pay to see. Otherwise the museum’s enviable collections of porcelain and bronzes, fossils and stuffed animals, were deteriorating quietly in unvisited halls. As an entrepreneurial gesture, the museum had decided to experiment with hiring out space to any self-styled artist with the cash and the nod. From an earlier period of rustication an artist friend in Peking had mates in the local Artists’ Association who had talked the bankrupt museum into holding an unprecedented, officially sanctioned display of bold contemporary oil paintings. The warps in China’s reform process made such unlikely things possible.
The visit of an Australian cultural counsellor was a rare event in Harbin, so meetings were arranged with the local artists, who hang off official structures like barnacles off a pier, maintaining their factions and their pseudo-independence. But first I wanted to sightsee. Before my breakfast meeting, we set off from the colossal Soviet-built Friendship Palace along the frozen Songhua River. As we trudged along, the safe markers disappeared under the falling snow, and suddenly the ice broke. My two companions, an Australian woman and a Chinese man who couldn’t swim, yelped as they sank into the freezing water. Both were dressed in great-coats, walking boots, caps and gloves. The cold was so intense it virtually catapulted them out. I grabbed at them, hauling them on to slabs of ice cracking beneath us as we pulled backwards, the river flowing fast under the frozen surface. Then we ran, ice still splitting, towards the bank. My companions’ clothes were hard as boards by the time we reached the hut where a local committee was in session around the pot-bellied stove. We burst in. The Australian woman ripped off her clothes by the stove, down to her thermal underwear, while the committee members took notes.
We were late for our meeting. Drink is an important habit of solidarity in northern China. Our host, Liu Zhi, a benign painter of Van Gogh-inspired landscapes, was a veteran. He was a man who had lived his life within iron limits, but who inwardly had gone to extremes. To accompany the breakfast dumplings, he provided champagne glasses of ferociously strong spirits for the self-congratulatory toasts. In thanks for our deliverance from the Songhua River, we began downing the stems, proclaiming friendship and co-operation between the artists of Harbin and Australia.
My head seemed to float from my body. I could hear people around me putting questions that I did not respond to. I could hear them asking, ‘Is he all right?’ I sat there with my eyes open, but as if unconscious. In the two-room flat, tables had been set up, laden with food, around which twenty artists were crammed. Somehow I stumbled to the door and down three flights of stairs to the street and the snow. A search party came after me to fetch back the foreigner, the diplomat in flight. Back in the flat I was laid in a tiny room filled by a double bed and a television set that was showing Donald Duck quacking in Chinese. I lay on the quilt, the room turning, and heard them say, ‘He’s thrown up.’
The next day I went back to apologise. The tables and chairs had been folded up out of sight, the cement floor washed down. The artist’s wife was wringing out sheets in a tub. The down quilt was strung on a line across the room where it would take forever to dry. Liu Zhi shook my hand and offered me a drink. I turned green at the thought. He told me I was one of them.
Acheng means Old City. It is south-west of, and even colder than, Harbin, reached by the kind of long, straight road, lined with bare poplars, through mile after snow-covered mile of country that you associate with Tolstoy. The Acheng Print Creation Workshop, my reason for coming, was in a barracks clad with padded tarpaulin. A brunch of dog ribs, sparrow skewers and stewed frogs awaited us. The founder of the workshop was Shen Shaomin, a solid, long-haired woodblock artist whose fame had reached Peking. The Great Northern Wilderness was home to a native tradition of printmaking that had been harnessed to the Communists’ requirement for art to serve the revolution. Local woodblock printing assimilated styles of socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism. Nearby were the miraculous oilfields of Daqing, which workers had dug with their bare hands. Woodblock printmaking also had roots in the lively folk customs of the district. After the Cultural Revolution, younger artists, including many people demobilised or otherwise stranded in the Great Northern Wilderness, became restless for a more contemporary direction. In setting up the Acheng Print Creation Workshop, Shen Shaomin and friends had drawn the threads together, creating an informal support group for young artists. Workers who by day designed prints for the local cotton mills would by night turn their skills to self-expression.
Asked to sing, we sang that old standby, ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’ as, more warily this time, I toasted artistic co-operation. The visit subsequently opened the way for Australian woodblock printmakers Ruth Burgess and David Marsden to attend the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Great Northern Wilderness Printmaking Movement, and a continuing series of exchanges between Australia and artists linked to the Acheng Print Creation Workshop. The Art Gallery of New South Wales has acquired two of Shen Shaomin’s best works from that time: Red Wind, depicting the red gales of socialism, the desert or the prairie fire sweeping through a field of sunflowers, and Autumn Sunflower, the flower withering as it releases seed into a sickly green environment.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been troop reductions along the banks of the Amur River that marks the northern border. It is an open border now, crossed in both directions by streams of people looking for business opportunities. The risk-taking Chinese have the better of the situation at the moment. Russian is being studied once more in Harbin’s schools, blond Russian women are employed in Harbin’s night spots. Not far away, since the death of Kim Il-sung, the scar dividing North and South Korea moves towards healing – perhaps. Harbin is on the map again, if not the Paris of the East, then a plausible entrepot town.
I keep in touch with the Harbin gang. When I left China a few years later, they told me that I had only shown my true self to them twice in the time they had known me. The first was when I didn’t save my Australian friend from the frozen water at the expense of the Chinese who couldn’t swim. The second was when they drank me under the table. Maybe that’s why they continue to deal with me.
1990