Authors: Michael Meyer
In Manchuria (28 page)
Sesame oil, cabbage hearts,
If you want to eat string beans, break off end parts,
After three days apart, I miss you so,
Hu’er haiyo.
Auntie Yi knew the words to that, and many other songs. Her generation had to sing, she said with a sly grin. Uncle Fu rose and shuffled across the narrow space between the
kang
and the windows to turn on the television. Snooker again. He switched it off. The home’s south-facing windows stretched from his waist to the ceiling, and potted plants lined the sill. “I’ll add some water to these,” he said. “You two keep talking.”
“Only one more song,” Auntie Yi promised, although I was enjoying her performance. Her legs dangled off the edge of the
kang
, not reaching the floor. Under her bucket hat and locks of gray hair, her tanned, unlined face flexed comical or serious as the lyrics dictated, the white snaggletooth rising and falling like a baton.
The last song was “On the Songhua River,” a regional anthem as ubiquitous here as “Home on the Range” had been in the American West. It was sung from the perspective of an exile who fled south on the day in
1931
that Japan invaded Manchuria. Auntie Yi sang:
“My home is on the Songhua River,
There are timber forests and coal mines,
Mountains covered in sorghum and soy.
My home is on the Songhua River,
My compatriots are there, and aged parents, still.
September
18
, September
18
.
At that miserable moment, I left my homeland,
Leaving the infinite natural resources behind.
Wandering and wandering,
Drifting on the Great Wall’s other side.
What year, what month, can I return to my home?
What year, what month, can I reclaim its treasures?
Father and mother, will we ever be together again?
“Everyone knows that song,” Auntie Yi said.
“When did you learn it? When you were a little girl?”
“I’m not sure,” Auntie Yi said. “It has always been around.”
I smiled at her turn of phrase. In the countryside, everything had always existed; everything was already known. September
18
, September
18
. At that miserable moment I left my homeland. Colonizers whose shoes went
ta ta ta ta ta
. An occupying army marching
kata kata kata
. Soldiers slaughtered on a civil war battlefield by men who carefully poked holes in paper windows—
pa pa pa
—to say we won’t bully you. Arise! Arise! Arise! The east is red.
Hu’er haiyo
. In
1956
, it became a village.
CHAPTER
12
I preferred Auntie Yi’s telling of history to what is displayed in the Northeast’s museums. They show the dates and death tolls of when China, Russia, and Japan collided in Manchuria. But the unnoted personal dramas from that time interested me most.
The story of Puyi, the last emperor, mirrored his Manchurian homeland: bandied between empires, allied with whoever held the gun. His reign began in Beijing in
1908
and ended in
1945
in Changchun, the provincial capital seventy miles west of Wasteland. There, in photographs hanging in the Puppet Emperor’s Palace Museum, Puyi looked like a doll: first as a toddler regent in an oversize silk gown; then as a young man in a tunic weighted with medals bestowed for docile compliance rather than valor; and finally as a gardener with a Chairman Mao pin affixed to his serge work shirt. In the exhibit, not a single photo, across his life span, showed him smiling.
The two-story museum looked more like a workers’ sanatorium than a palace. It would not have qualified as a storage shed at the Forbidden City, Puyi’s former residence. There were no vermillion walls, no awe-inspiring gates, no elaborate gardens, no throne room. The swimming pool held only rotting leaves, the rockery masked a tiny bomb shelter, and the puppet palace’s displays included captions such as “Puyi sometimes played the piano in here in order to let off his depression and discontent as a puppet emperor.” And: “To kill time after getting up, Puyi would sit on the toilet reading the daily newspaper.” A copy of the
Manchurian Daily News
sat, folded, before his lesser throne. The museum was, of course, a patriotic education base.
Outside, in the warm summer sun, a low thunder grew louder. I turned a corner to see five chestnut horses rounding a bend. This being contemporary China, patriotic education included running a sideline business. At the Puppet Emperor’s Palace Museum Horse Riding and Stables Club, visitors could saddle up and loop the dirt track where Puyi once made circles. The horses trotted past, powdering my face in Manchurian dust.
Puyi’s life hinged on a fateful miscalculation, unnoted in the museum, that had reined him to Japan. In a memoir, his childhood English tutor wrote that Puyi was “a very ‘human’ boy, with vivacity, intelligence, and a keen sense of humor.” He found him “mentally active and anxious to learn,” taking interest in world news and geography, and reading multiple newspapers each day. “Moreover, he has excellent manners and is entirely free from arrogance. This is rather remarkable in view of the extremely artificial nature of his surroundings and the pompous make-believe of the palace-routine.” His tutor felt Puyi’s post-Beijing destiny was to attend, and perhaps live out his days at, Oxford.
In
1924
, when a warlord expelled Puyi from the section of the Forbidden City granted to him after abdication, the tutor drove him to the Legation Quarter. He chose not to deliver him to the British embassy, as its staff had indicated it would not interfere in China’s internal politics. Instead, the tutor brought him across Canal Street to the Japanese legation, an action he later regretted as an “enormous mistake.”
For three months, Puyi squatted at the Japanese embassy with his retinue—wives, dozens of attendants, concubines, eunuchs, maids and scullions—who continued to prepare breakfasts featuring twenty-five dishes. (In his memoir, Puyi wrote of the stay: “I was actually relieved to be able to live like a normal citizen, free from the palace.”) In
1925
, Japan put him on the train to Tianjin, eventually installing him at a mansion named the Garden of Serenity.
“Although he was now thoroughly Westernized—wearing European clothes, eating European food and dancing to European music—Puyi still thought of himself as emperor,” his tutor wrote, “and the expatriate community in Tianjin delighted in playing along with this delusion for the [six] years he languished in exile there.” Photos showed Puyi as a dandy wearing a diamond tiepin and ring, carrying a walking stick. “My body,” he recalled, “would emit the combined odors of Max Factor, eau de cologne and camphor and I would be accompanied by two or three Alsatian dogs and a strangely dressed wife and consort.” From around the world arrived letters containing “proposals from unknown females who desired to enter the imperial harem.”
Tianjin in
1928
was thick with factions, secret societies, and intrigue. Puyi heard whispers of restoration and assassination attempts. Rumors said a warlord would put him on a Manchurian throne and secede from the Chinese republic; others warned the Japanese wanted him, the most powerful Manchu, dead. When a Japanese-planted bomb killed the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin that year, Puyi feared he was the next target.
If he was unsure of his friends, he was certain of his enemy. In
1928
, Nationalist Chinese troops systematically plundered the Eastern Qing Tombs for three days, excavating the treasures buried with the Manchu emperor Qianlong—in power at the dynasty’s eighteenth-century peak—and Cixi, the empress dowager who had put Puyi on the throne. The soldiers were said to have hacked their remains to pieces and looted their crypts. Puyi heard that China’s first lady, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, used the pearls from Cixi’s crown to decorate the toes of her shoes. “My heart smoldered with a hatred I had never previously known,” he wrote, “and I made a vow before my weeping clansmen, with my face raised to heaven: ‘If I do not avenge this wrong I am not a member of the Aisin-Goro clan of the Great Qing Dynasty.’”
Were this a film, one can imagine a montage of a gritting Puyi lifting rice sacks, running beside a steam train, and stabbing pictures of Nationalist generals pinned to cabbages. But no. Puyi remained in the Japanese concession, attending dances that he never joined, preferring, he wrote, to watch from the side of the room.
Manchuria’s man of action was Zhang Xueliang, the “Young Marshal,” whose warlord father had been assassinated by a Japanese bomb. At the time, Zhang had lived a life as louche as Puyi’s. In a private letter, an Australian journalist wrote that Zhang and fellow officers had “nightly orgies with bunches of concubines, singing girls, mahjong and other things not directly connected with affairs of the state. The latter are relegated to the obscure background. Nero fiddling was not a circumstance to these beauties jazzing. They think more of their concubines than their country.” In the light of day, Zhang “tries to bang a golf ball about under bogey. Perhaps the latter redeems him a little. It has done some good for it has brought about the repair of the road to the course. For that we are grateful. He has also fixed up stone seats at the tees, and so we are thinking of making him Patron of the Club in order to get more out of him. He has a lot of ill-gotten gains.”
His father’s murder, however, spurred a transformation that echoed Prince Hal becoming Henry V. The young Zhang hired the Australian journalist as his chief adviser, who helped him kick his opium addiction. In April
1931
, he ceded administrative control of the Northeast to the Chinese republican government. It announced plans to terminate Japan’s lease of the South Manchuria Railway.
But it was more than just a train. The South Manchuria Railway was Japan’s largest corporation, whose yearly earnings represented nearly a quarter of all Japanese tax revenue. Called Mantetsu in Japanese, it was a state within a state, with administrative and police control of the tracks’ “attached lands,” leased—according to an agreement resulting from the American-brokered Treaty of Portsmouth—to the Japanese government until
2002
. Its roster of companies in Manchuria included coal mines, steel mills, hospitals, hotels, hot springs, public utilities, slaughterhouses, orchards, water supplies, flour mills, fire stations, sugar refineries, libraries, and schools—from kindergarten to universities. In
1931
the railway’s workers (and their dependents) made up one-third of the
230
,
000
Japanese living in Manchuria.
Under the slogan “Military Preparedness in Civilian Garb,” the railway also ran a research department staffed by two thousand employees that produced six thousand reports on Manchuria’s land, resources, and culture, recording statistics and stories on everything from jute sack shortages to the stateless Russian Jews trapped in Harbin. Researchers collected the minutiae of Manchurian life to better inform its future colonial administrators and settlers.
In the summer of
1931
, a Japanese officer in civilian clothes was killed in Manchuria by Chinese soldiers who correctly suspected he was a spy. In a dispute over irrigation rights in a village north of Changchun, Chinese farmers attacked Japanese-backed Korean settlers. No one was killed, but anti-Chinese riots broke out in Japanese-ruled Pyongyang, resulting in
146
Chinese deaths and hundreds of injuries. A boycott of Japanese products in Manchuria followed, increasing tensions.
China called its theater of the Second World War the War Against Japanese Aggression. It began on September
18
,
1931
, six years before Japan invaded greater China, eight years before Germany invaded Poland, and a decade before Pearl Harbor. Today the anniversary is marked in the Northeast with air raid sirens that howl at
9
:
18
a.m. on September
18
, the date Japanese soldiers detonated a bomb on train tracks outside present-day Shenyang. The small explosion harmed no one. It didn’t even disrupt rail traffic. But it was evidence, the Japanese army said, that their railroad zone was under attack. Soldiers overran a Chinese garrison near the tracks, then occupied the entire city.
Zhang Xueliang was in Beijing at the time, and most of his forces were also south of the Great Wall, skirmishing with Communist rebels. Zhang knew that opposing the Japanese was tactical suicide. “There was no way we could win,” he said later. “We could only have a shambolic go of it. Non-resistance was the only feasible policy.” Over the next five months, Japan took control of every major city along the railway, and all of Manchuria.
In November
1931
, one of the officers behind the September
18
bombing called on the last emperor, Puyi, in his Tianjin villa to offer the position of sovereign of a state named Manchukuo.