the ghosts of Harbin

Harbin: 23rd August 2013

Where: North-East China, an 8 hour train ride from Beijing.

Population: 10 million

Famed For: The January Ice Festival



As I’m writing, someone has set off a box of firecrackers in the street opposite my hotel.

My friend, A, says they’re celebrating the birthday of someone important. A politician, or a god maybe. She’s not sure. They have too many. Here, there are gods and ghosts in everything. The kitchen, the sky, the grass… the past.

Yesterday, we passed people burning paper money in the streets to send to their ancestors.

In the city centre, the century old byzantine church, St. Sophia, sits crumbling inside from decay. Chandeliers hang, unlit, from the domed ceiling. The wall murals are mostly gone and in some places the plaster is missing, baring the brickwork. It is beautiful and bleak and without religion. Instead it contains a photographic exhibition of China before ‘the liberation’. It’s a museum to the god of the state, to China and its people.

And Harbin, like its famous church, is shabby and yet somehow lovely.

In the morning daylight, the outskirts are rather worn looking. Blocks of flats stand half built against the skyline. Piles of brick and sand and tubing are heaped and left on the pavement. Telephone wires are impossibly knotted round an overcrowded pole and dangle down across the street. A few watermelons from a street vendor have dropped into the road and lie, exposing their glistening pink insides on the tarmac. The smell of roasting meat mixes with car fumes. A man with a mouthful of phlegm looks for a place to spit. In the background half a dozen taxis sound their horns. A scraggly looking kitten wanders into a hotel lobby and is hurriedly shooed out. Someone hangs their washing out to dry on a tree in the street.

The city centre, meanwhile, is spotlessly clean. The pedestrianized century old street with its cobbled road and tree lined pavements sports an odd assortment of Russian goods shops and western retailers. Costa sits comfortably next to a Babushka store. In H&M there is a sale. The vodka shop next door is conspicuously full. A street vendor selling squid tentacles and other unnamed meats has parked outside McDonalds. At the end of the street, a colonnade rings a statue to the flood defence system protecting Harbin from the grey river that flows through it.

It starts to gently rain.

Night-time is when Harbin looks its best, when the worn edges are hidden by the softness of the dark, and the sky glitters with the light of skyscrapers and KTV bars, street lamps and advertising billboards. It is still balmy in the evenings and we sit out on the pavements, drinking the local pijiu and pointing at pictures of things we think look recognisable on the menu. Balanced on plastic chairs we tuck into noodles, pork with potatoes, tofu and prawns in a spicy sauce and something so deep fried the meat is unidentifiable. White lotus root, carrots and bean sprouts are heaped onto enamel plates and platters of skewered meats are arranged around our table and in the evening light everything is electric and wonderful.

At the end of the meal, as we count out yuan, the waitress, giggling, hands over her iphone to another server so she can pose for a picture with us. A group of Chinese men on the next table say something in rapid Mandarin and suddenly they are all up, cameras out, posing for individual photographs with each of us.  

We are a strange novelty, us laowai, or less politely gweilos, which means white ghosts. Strangers stop to take our pictures, thrusting their bemused children into our arms. We pause to watch a fashion show on the high street and the photographers turn to snap us instead. At the Tiger Park we are more of an attraction for the visitors than the beautiful white Siberian cats we have come to see. People do it sneakily, pretending to take photos of buildings behind us. Or they do it brazenly and herd us together like sheep, before proudly posing in front of us.

We absently wonder what they do with the photographs as we hail a taxi home.

We’ve just had a long day of lesson planning and most of us didn’t get more than six hours sleep the night before, or the night before that, too busy talking to think of bed. Our exhaustion may explain why we are able to fall asleep despite the fact we are doing 120km/h down the main road, weaving in and out of the traffic, narrowly avoiding pedestrians and other drivers. None of us are wearing seatbelts because they are tied in a double knot against the windows. The lock is buried under the fake Chanel covered seats.

We wake briefly when our taxi makes a u-turn across six lanes of traffic to the soundtrack of car horns. Twenty minutes later and we pull up at the hotel, carefully counting out yuan in the neon light of Harbin at midnight.We stumble out of the taxi and into the hotel, silently crossing the floor to the lift. 

The hotel receptionist is asleep, her head pillowed on her arms as seven ghosts go by.

Outside, the firecrackers burn on.