Manzhouli's Lake : Lake Hulun
In one restaurant, I was invited to eat with a couple chummy lads and share their meal of shish-kebabs, beer, and sheep tails. One of the men told me he owned a place down the street and lived upstairs, but I couldn't catch what type of place it was. When we were finished, we walked down the street and he showed me the sign. "Do you know that character?" he asked. I didn't, so he pushed me past some dark curtains and into the building. All the wives promised to Muslims in paradise couldn't have compared to what I saw: skirts, boots, tight pants, skin, and curves generously distributed amongst gorgeous women in their twenties. A living piece of raw meat, I felt that I had stepped into a den of vampires. The owner laughed after I quickly withdrew. I aknowledged his most effective lesson on defining that particular character.
The Lake
He gave me the number of his nephew, who was a cab driver, and we planned on an outing the next day. I wanted to see the big lake south of town. I had read that it is so big, it has tides. That I had to see. So he picked me up at the hotel, and we drove through the dirt streets and past some coal mines and over the steppe until we had arrived at the lake. It was a ghosttown during the late Spring. We saw the restaurants and campgrounds that I was told were full when tourists from Beijing and Shanghai came for the summer, but now stood empty in the gusting wind. No one saw us, and but for these pictures, I could easily imagine that the whole trip had been a dream. Never had I seen such foreign expanse, amplified by the juxtaposition to the intense congestion I had experienced in other Chinese cities. It seemed that I never had seen a sky so blue or felt a wind so clean. Ge and I used the automatic timer on my camera for a series of photos.
I asked for his address when he took me back to the train station. He struggled with writing down the characters. Within a few days I was back in the United States, wandering the beaches of Half Moon Bay at 5 in the morning amidst the throes of jet lag. Across the great ocean I mailed Ge copies of these pictures, but I have no way of knowing if they ever arrived. For me they recall some of the most poignaint and vivid memories of my time in China, so I close my narrative with them. I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed living it.
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