The streets looked like Boston’s streets. Never mind that the main thoroughfare in Dalian was called Stalin Road (Sidalin Lu). It looked like Atlantic Avenue.
At the turn of the century the Russians had schemed to make Dalny (as they called it; it means “far away” in Russian) a great port for the tsar’s ships. It was valuable for fighting the Japanese, because unlike Vladivostok it would not freeze in the winter. After the Russo-Japanese war, when the Japanese flew kites in Dairen (as they called it) — each kite saying THE RUSSIANS HAVE SURRENDERED! — this port city was handed to the Japanese. They simply completed the Russian plan for turning what had been a fishing village into a great port. It prospered until the Second World War, and when the Japanese were defeated the Russians were given the city under the Yalta terms. The Russians remained until well after the Chinese Liberation, when the Chinese renamed it Dalian (“Great Link”). I liked it for its salt air and seagulls.
“What desires do you entertain in Dalian?” Cherry Blossom said.
I told her that I had come here to get warm after the freeze in Dongbei, the northeast. And I needed a ticket on the ship that traveled from Dalian across the Bohai Gulf to Yantai. Could she get that for me?
“Keep your fingers crossed,” she said.
She vanished after that. I found an old hotel — Japanese pre-war baronial — but I was turned away. I was accepted at the dreary new Chinese hotel, a sort of Ramada Inn with a stagnant fish pond in the lobby. I spent the day looking for an antique shop, and the only one I found was disappointing. A man tried to sell me a trophy awarded to the winner of a schoolboys’ javelin competition in 1933 at a Japanese high school. “Genuine silver,” he whispered. “Qing Dynasty.”
The next day I saw Cherry Blossom. She had no news about my ticket.
“You will just have to keep your hopes up!”
We agreed to meet later, and when we did she was smiling.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“No!” She was smiling. And with this bad news I noticed that she had a plump and slightly pimply face. She was wearing an arsenic-green wool scarf to match the wool cap she herself had knitted in the dormitory (she had four roommates) at the Working Women’s Unit.
“I have failed completely!”
Then why was she smiling? God, I hated her silly hat.
“But,” she said, wiggling her fingers, “wait!”
She had a sharp way of speaking that made every sentence an exclamation. She reached into her plastic handbag.
“Here is the ticket! It has been a total success!”
Now she wagged her head at me and made her tight curls vibrate like springs.
I said, “Were you trying to fool me, Cherry Blossom?”
“Yes!”
I wanted to hit her.
“Is that a Chinese practical joke?”
“Oh yes,” she said, with a giggle.
But then aren’t all practical jokes exercises in sadism?
I went to the Free Market — open since 1979. Every sort of fish, shellfish, and seaweed was on display — a pound of big plump prawns was roughly $4, but that was the most expensive item. They also sold squid, abalone, oysters, conch, sea slugs, and great stacks of clams and flatfish. The fishermen did not look Chinese; they had a flatheaded Mongolian appearance and might have been Manchus, of whom there are five or six million in this peninsula and in the north. The market gave me an appetite and that night I had abalone stir-fried in garlic sauce: delicious.
Cherry Blossom said that foreign cruise ships stopped in Dalian in the summer. The tourists stayed for half a day.
“What can you see in Dalian in half a day?”
She said they all got on a bus and visited the shell-carving factory, the glassware factory, and a model children’s school (the kids sang songs from The Sound of Music), and then it was back to the ship and on to Yantai or Qingdao.
“I’d like to see Stalin Square,” I said.
We went there. In the center of it was a statue to the Russian army, which had occupied the city after the war.
“There are no Stalin Squares in the Soviet Union, Cherry Blossom. Did you know that?”
She said no, she was surprised to hear it. She asked why.
“Because some people think he made a few mistakes,” I said, though I did not mention the pogroms, the secret police, the purges, or the mustached brute’s ability to plan large-scale famines in order to punish dissenting regions.
“Is there a Mao Zedong Square in Dalian, Cherry Blossom?”
“No,” she said, “because he made a few mistakes. But don’t cry over spilled milk!”*
I told her that I had read somewhere that the evil genius Lin Biao had lived in Dalian. She said no, this was not so. She had lived her whole life in Dalian and no one had ever mentioned Lin’s connection.
But the driver was older. He said yes, Lin Biao had lived there in Dalian. Lin Biao, a great military tactician, was now maligned because he had done so much to build up Mao — it was Lin who devised the Little Red Book and chose all the quotations; and in the end (so it was said) he had plotted to assassinate Mao, when Mao was weak and at his heffalump stage; and Lin in trying to flee the country (“seeking protection from his Moscow masters … as a defector to the Soviet revisionists in betrayal of the party and the country”) had crashed in dear old Undur Khan, in the People’s Republic of Mongolia. Foul play was never mentioned. It was regarded as natural justice that this heliophobe should meet an untimely death.
It was his heliophobia that made me want to see his house. This weedy little man had a horror of the sun. I thought his house might not have any windows, or perhaps special shutters; or maybe he lived in a bomb shelter in the basement.
Cherry Blossom was saying in Chinese to the driver, “I did not know that Lin Biao lived in Dalian,” and then to me in English, “It’s too dark to find his house. Let’s go to the beach instead.”
We headed for the south part of Dalian, to a place called Fu’s Village Beach. Because of the cliffs and the winding road, the driver went very slowly.
Cherry Blossom said, “This car is as slow as cold molasses in January.”
“You certainly know a lot of colorful expressions, Cherry.”
“Yes. I am queer as a fish.” And she giggled behind her hand.
“You should be as happy as a clam,” I said.
“I like that one so much! I feel like a million dollars when I hear that.”
These colloquial high jinks could have been tiresome, but it was such a novelty for a Chinese person to be playful I enjoyed it. And I liked her for not taking herself too seriously. She knew she was mildly excruciating.
Meanwhile we were descending to Fu’s Village — great rocky cliffs and an empty beach of yellow sand with the January wind off the sea beating the waves against it. Offshore there were five blob-like islands floating blackly on the gulf. A couple was canoodling on the beach — the Chinese do it standing up, out of the wind, usually behind a rock or a building, and they hug each other very tightly. It is all smooching. These two ran away when they saw me. A drunken fisherman staggered across the beach toward his big wooden rowboat that was straight off an ancient scrolclass="underline" a sharply rockered bottom, very clumsy, the shape of a wooden shoe, probably very seaworthy.
I asked Cherry Blossom whether she took her tourists here. She said there wasn’t time.
“Some of the people have funny faces,” she said.
“What is the funniest face you have ever seen, Cherry?”
She shrieked, “Yours!” and clapped her hands over her eyes and laughed.
“Another of your saucy jokes, Cherry Blossom!”
She became rather grave and said, “But truly the Tibetans have the funniest faces. They are so funny I get frightened.”