A Brief Introduction

I wrote this years ago as part of a narrative about my trip to Liaoning Province in 2007. I’ve not been able to write a satisfactory account of the middle part of the trip (and remain unsatisfied with what I wrote about its beginning), but have felt motivated to finish writing about the final leg of the journey, which took us to Dandong and China’s border with North Korea.

I mention this because some of the characters below (Know It All, Mr Binoculars, the idiot tour guide) would have been – and, perhaps, will be – described and fleshed out in this episode’s prequels. For this reason they aren’t developed below, though such development probably isn’t necessary.

Also, keep in mind that these events took place in 2007. Prices have doubtlessly risen, and Dandong has doubtlessly developed.

Enjoy.

How DPRK Gulags Became Dandong’s Saviour

The view of North Korea from Dandong.

Dandong (丹东) is a sleepy town that is able to draw a disproportionate number tourists because the North Korean city Sinuiju (신의주) is directly across the Yalu River. At Dandong the river is maybe 100 m wide, so from the riverwalk you can take as long a look at North Korea as you wish. Hawkers meet gawkers to rent binoculars and telescopes with which to give the North a good visual scrubbing. From the docks you can pay to go on a seven minute tour boat ride that takes you within mere yards of the North Korean shore; all the better to rubberneck at you, my dear.

Tourists and journalists find Dandong/Sinuiju appealing because the visual contrast is so striking. Dandong’s riverbank is towers and hotels and neon and KTV’s. Sinuiju’s bank is mud, dirty trees and worn buildings. I assumed the Chinese would look at the DPRK and think something like  ”there, but for the grace of God…”, but none of the Chinese I asked reported thinking anything of the sort.

Sinuiju is the principal gateway for Sino-Korean trade, is home to a nasty prison camp, and is one of the North Korean regions chosen to experiment with running a market economy. The view of it from Google Maps is depressing.

The Boat to North Korea

Our boat pulls away from the dock and goes one kilometer upriver to the “Broken Bridge” (which US planes bombed during the Korean War to sever a Sino-Korean rail line) before veering to starboard to run parallel to the DPRK’s shoreline.
We’re now in North Korean waters.

The Broken Bridge – the fruits of a USAF bombing run during the Korean War.

At this point everyone on our boat runs to the port side of the vessel to be as close to North Korea as possible. The shift in weight is such that we begin to keel to port, and I worry that we will capsize. The headline – “300 Dead In Chinese Tour Boat Disaster” might make the bottom of page A18, and since Americans will drown the late night comics will take notice and make Chinese Fire Drill jokes. What an ignominious death.

The first thing you see in North Korea is an empty ferris wheel. Foreigners who write about Dandog like to bring up this ferris wheel so they have the opportunity to describe North Korea as eerie and/or foreboding.
I don’t know why. The ferris wheel looks similar in make and model to the ferris wheel in the park by my apartment in Changchun. The baskets are wooden and narrow with a steep roof and look like those A-frame houses you see around ski resorts. They’re painted red, blue, or green and the paint is peeling in places. They’re all empty and sway a little in the breeze. They’re only creepy insofar as anything manmade and in disuse represents a failure to appreciate a miraculous act of human ingenuity.

A large group of people (North Koreans, presumably) are listening to a lecture under the trees on the Korean riverfront. I don’t imagine they will go on the ferris wheel after the talk. Most of the people on our boat take pictures of the group.
We motor a little farther down the river and run parallel to a row of watercraft: two fishing boats, a day cruiser, a North Korean naval vessel, and a final wood fishing boat docked in front of cranes and factory buildings.

Real live North Koreans in bright uniforms are standing on the cruiser and the naval ship. On the cruiser is a group of men in their 50’s and wearing officers’ uniforms that are blue and nicely laundered though slightly big in the shoulders and arms. They are smoking, leaning on the cruiser’s rails, and chatting while looking at the tour groups.

The North Koreans on the cruiser.

There are two or three young guys on the navy cutter, dressed in humiliating striped sailor suits with Donald Duck caps. They’re built somewhere between scrawny and emaciated, puffed up at attention to project an air of malice.

The real show stopper are the women on the cutter. They’re dressed in nautical white uniforms with thick horizontal blue stripes at the bodice and puffy sleeves, and each wears a large white hat that’s shaped like a painter’s palette. They style their hair sort of large in front and then pulled back into a thick ponytail supported by hairnet. It’s exactly the hairstyle that you see on all the women on North Korean stamps. The bright red lipstick, rouge and eyeliner are clearly visible, even at a distance.
The overall effect initially seems sort of 50’s retro and charming and just maybe weird enough to fit nicely into what we’ve been taught to think about North Korea. Then you realize that from the eyebrows down they look like every other person in the world who studied Tourism & Recreation Management at university. Cold eyes hang over that fixed smile that guides learn to use as a defensive, offensive, or neutral tool for submission.
I doubt they ever get to lean or chat or smoke when they’re on deck, and they probably wouldn’t want to. These ladies are professionals. The young guys are rigid at attention next to them, but it seems highly unlikely that the women might ever need outside help defending themselves.

The other tourists on our Chinese boat start taking pictures of the Koreans on the Korean boats.

There’s nothing weird or robotic or menacing about what we’re seeing. The Koreans are here because we come over on these damn rickety boats to look at them.

Our boat loops to starboard again and we’re back at the dock.

A Challenge

On the dock, at the fake Chinese/Korean border. The DPRK's territory doesn't start for another 50m or so.

The incompetent tour guide comes over to the four of us and says he’s been on a speedboat ride that was awesome. The pilot of the speedboat will take us on the same ride for just ¥250, each. It’s such a preposterous price that we decide to see how cheaply we can find the same ride on our own.

We work our way down the dock until Cindy, who is more or less a pit bull when she bargains, is persuaded to strike out ahead of us to see if she can strike a deal before our white faces inflate prices. We catch up with her a few minutes later and pay ¥15 each for a seat on a speedboat.

Our pilot takes us further upriver, where there are empty docks and overgrown bushes and more views of the ferris wheel, which still doesn’t look creepy.

We tear back downriver to the Korean ships and the pilot kills the engine so we can drift and enjoy the view. We look at the soldiers on the first boat and they look at us. I don’t know what else to do so I wave and smile. They smile and wave, then go back to smoking and talking. The women ignore us when we go past. Four people in a speedboat don’t merit the professional treatment–too small an audience.

We pass by a fishing boat’s open cabin doors and there’s a skinny shirtless man squatting over a washbowl and scrubbing his face. You can count his ribs, even from ten meters away, and I surprise myself by taking a picture that I know won’t turn out.

It’s been a morning of voyeurism that hasn’t sat well with me, and I wonder why I’ve started seeing North Korean people as Kodak moments.

Our engine turns over and we go back to China.

Back in China

On the walk back to the tour bus we browse vendors’ card tables of North Korean kitsch. Most of the women behind the tables speak heavily accented Mandarin to us and chat with each other in Korean. Cindy, fresh off her haggling victory on our speed boat trip, wants to barter over trinkets, but the women are much more interested in asking Am I From Canada and What Do I Do and Is My Whole Body As Hairy As My Arms? I press the flesh but keep us moving so we can find someplace to eat lunch before the bus leaves. My very real urgency is taken as a bargaining ploy and Cindy ends up with great deals on gifts for the folks at home. We get takeout from a Korean barbecue on the square and browse in a shop to buy North Korean stamps.

The idiot tour guide comes into the shop to cluck us back onto the bus, and for the only time on the trip we’re the last ones on. Mr. Binoculars is standing next to the bus door, staring through his binoculars into the lobby of the hotel we’re parked in front of.

Know It All, who’s just starting to smoke a cigarette and who until three minutes ago had been shopping for stamps with us, says, “I’ve been standing out here for twenty minutes looking for you!”
“Bullshit!” Michael’s had enough of the guy. “You were just in the same damn store as us, shopping!”
“Well, I was looking for you then, too.”
“Bullshit!”

Goodbye, Dandong

On the bus we open our lunch bags and fill the bus with the smell of garlic and kimchi and onions and beef broth. I feel bad and self-conscious about it until the family across the aisle opens one of their bags and gives their kids bottles of bubbles, light-up noisemakers, and little plastic pistols that go RAta-TAta-TAT-TAT-TAT when you pull the trigger.

I decide I don’t care if the smell of our food bothers them.

The bus gets lost leaving Dandong and we stop at a junkyard to ask directions. Cindy hops off the bus to get rid of our garbage, leaving the plastic bag of styrofoam dishes in an otherwise empty gutter. By the time the bus has turned around, kids have come out from the piles of garbage and have opened our garbage and are eating what they can.

Epilogue

North Korea’s experiment with free markets was checked in late 2009, when the DPRK government revalued its currency and set a limit of W100,000 that could be exchanged into the new currency. To date, at least two thousand North Koreans have starved to death as a result.

Dandong continues to be American journalists’ go-to place for shallow insight into North Korea. Give it a google and see what you come up with; North Korean soldiers throwing stones is a popular motif. Peter Hessler wrote about Dandong in Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China, which I highly recommend as a more balanced look at the city.

Related posts:

1. Exploring Liaoning (辽宁) Province, Part 1: Where we went, and why
2. Weekend Visit to Nami Island (남이섬), Korea
3. Exploring Liaoning (辽宁) Province, Part 2: The Bus

I started today with some festive Christmas linguistics reading:

"Academic Reading" is a course title, not an idiotic statement of the obvious.

Chomsky, Radford, Cook, Ouhalla and I spent the morning together, humbug-ing away.

After that I called my parents, who had just finished eating a Norwegian Christmas dinner.

My mother is a cook of such quality that I generally don’t eat holiday meals if they’re not cooked by her. Mom always cooks Norwegian food for Christmas, and there’s nothing that could replace it.

With all that being said, I’ve not been home in a while, and I thought it would be nice to have some Scandinavian food on Christmas. I told my mother that I planned to go to the Beijing IKEA for Swedish food. She approved, but pointed out that their meatballs are Swedish, and thus inferior in taste, quality, and character to the Norwegian meatballs I’m used to. At first opportunity I’ll find her an apron with a Norwegian flag on it so to anchor  her cookbook jingoism.

(A quick aside: When the Monty Python movie Life of Brian was released, it wound up being banned in Norway. The Swedes proceeded to advertise the film as “So Funny It Was Banned In Norway.”)

The Beijing IKEA. Just 45 minutes on foot from 太阳宫 if you get lost.

The Beijing IKEA is far away from everything, at least, that’s how it seems if you arrive at the 太阳宫 (Taiyanggong) subway station (Line 10). It takes about an hour by foot to arrive at IKEA from the subway station. Of course, it might take less time if you don’t get lost.

IKEA is sort of diagonal from the subway station, on the other side of Taiyanggong Park (太阳宫公园). In fact, you can almost see the IKEA from the subway. So, it made sense to try to cut through the park to try to get there. After all, parks have more than one gate, right?

Wrong.

The park was almost completely empty, and looked like one of the sets from Children of Men. Creepy derelict toys everywhere. Signs said that the lake opens for skating tomorrow. The frozen lake is covered by a good inch of dust and dirt; I mistook the flags demarcating the skating rink for ringing off a paved go-kart course.

It was getting dark and horribly cold, so I hightailed it out of the park.

The IKEA restaurant is on the third floor. And it’s pretty great.

Swedish Christmas Dinner a la Beijing

Seconds (extra plate of salmon not pictured).

The only disappointment was the lack of that good lingonberry drink that you can get at IKEA in the States.

I was shocked to see most of the other diners eating spaghetti or Chinese food. A plate of spaghetti was ¥15. The salmon plate was also ¥15. How does it make any sort of financial sense to buy spaghetti at the same price as salmon? Had the spaghetti cost ¥6, sure. But ¥15?¹

After stuffing myself there was a bit of walking through the store (prices are lower here on most items). Amazingly, the Beijing IKEA does have a little Swedish grocery store. There was no  bond-ost cheese or Swedish fish candy (!), but most of the other staples were available, including some Swedish vodka that I guess can’t be sold at IKEA stores in Washington State.

After some grocery shopping I caught bus 536 to 三元桥 (Line 10)…the station I should have come from in the first place.

Thank you, IKEA.

Happy Christmas and Happy New Year. Remember, religion isn’t necessary for morality: be good for goodness’ sake.

Related posts:

1. Surviving the Beijing Smog
2. Windows 2003–Beijing Olympics Edition

Polluted Beijing

Everything you’ve heard about Beijing’s horrible air is true. After I arrived, it took ten days before I saw blue sky.

Ten days.

On a typical day you can stare directly at the sun because there’s so much smog in the air.

When I lick my lips while outside (a favorite pastime in the cold, dry weather), they taste like saran wrap.

It seems like Beijing’s terrible air is caused by industrial pollution and car emissions more than anything else. As such, the pollution floats relatively high in the air and is non-abrasive. In contrast, the pollution in Pingyao came mostly from coal smoke and a huge copper smelter. That pollution seemed heavier, hung lower in the air, and was much more aggravating to the ENT tract.

The US Embassy in Beijing posts readings from their air quality monitors at twitter.com/BeijingAir. That link isn’t accessible from China due to censorship of twitter; however, the government’s firewall doesn’t block the site’s RSS feed.

Usually, the feed is depressing:

In all seriousness, this is some scary shit.

Every time I look at this I think, What’s it doing to my lungs?

Thanks to these, I didn't get sick in Beijing.

If I were to give one piece of advice to people coming to Beijing, it would be, Buy a sinus rinse kit before you come. The kit consists of a plastic bottle and hundreds of packs of salt and baking soda. Put the salt/soda in the bottle, fill with water, then hold the thing to your nose and squeeze. Yes, it’s embarrassing and gross to think about, but the damn things worked. I used it while in Beijing and didn’t get one sinus infection or any respiratory problems. The darn things work. Buy one before you go, or have some sent over. They’re worth it.

Related posts:

1. Swedish Christmas Dinner at the Beijing IKEA
2. Windows 2003–Beijing Olympics Edition

When Olbermann’s right, he’s right.

Related posts:

1. Chinese internet outage: no news would be great news