中朝边境 纽约客00/08/07

2008-02-15 12:29:13 来自: KK

Letter from China
VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
North Korea through a Chinese looking glass.
PETER HESSLER
August 07, 2000
The New Yorker

On my third day in Dandong, I woke up at two in the morning with a thief in my hotel room. It was a midrange Chinese hotel, ten dollars a night, and Dandong was a midrange Chinese city the sort of place you wouldn't pay much attention to if it weren't across the Yalu River from North Korea. But having North Korea five hundred metres away changed everything. Dandong promoted itself as "China's Biggest Border City," and the riverfront was lined with telescopes that could be rented by tourists, most of whom were Chinese hoping to catch their first glimpse of a foreign nation. The telescopes had signs that advertised: "Leave the Country for Just One Yuan!" For nine more, you could catch a ride on a speedboat and get a closer look at the North Koreans, who, during the heat of the day swam in the shallows off their riverbank. On days deemed auspicious for getting married, it was a Dandong tradition for Chinese newlyweds to rent a boat, put life preservers over their wedding clothes, and buzz the North Korean shore.

There was a lot to think about in Dandong, and that was probably why I had forgotten to close my window that night. Because my room was on the second floor, I'd thought I was safe from intruders, but I hadn't noticed the foot-wide ledge that ran just below the window. Nor had I bothered to put my money belt and passport under my pillow; instead, I'd left them on a dresser, along with my camera, my wallet, my reporter's notebook, and a pair of shorts. The thief was scooping everything up when I awoke. For an instant, neither of us moved.

I sat up in bed and shouted, and he turned and ran for the door. I chased him down the hallway, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. We rounded a corner, skidding on the tile floor. I caught him at the end of the hallway, by a stairwell.

I hit him as hard as I could. His hands were full of my belongings, and every time I punched him he dropped something. I slugged him and my camera popped out; I hit him again and there was my money belt; another punch and my shorts flew up in the air. After he had dropped everything, he ran down the hall, trying to find a door that would open, while I continued to shout and throw punches. At last, he found an unlocked door that led to an empty room and an open window. He jumped. I ran to the window and leaned out. The thief had been lucky—there was an overhang just below the sill. I heard his footsteps as he rounded the corner of the building. He was still running hard.

During the struggle, I had wrenched the middle finger of my left hand, so the hotel's night manager accompanied me to the Dandong hospital. It took us a while to wake up the doctor who was on dun; He yawned, popped the finger back in place, and took an X-ray of it. The finger looked crooked, so the doctor yanked it out of its socket again, and then put it back in place. This time, the X-ray machine failed to work, and the doctor said that I'd have to return later in the morning, when a technician would be on duty I went to the police station, where I reported the crime, answered some questions, and filled out some forms. Finally, at 5 A.M., I went back to bed. I didn't sleep well.

A couple of hours later, the hotel owner showed up to escort me back to the hospital. He was a handsome man, who gelled his hair so that it swept, blue-black, across his forehead. He wore a new white button-down shirt and well-pressed slacks. He apologized profusely about the robbery and introduced himself

"My name is Li Peng," he said.

"The same name as the former Premier?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. He smiled in a tired ways and I could see that I wasn't the first person to have made this observation. Li Peng strongly advocated the use of force against Beijing students and workers in the protests of 1989, and he is the least popular leader in China. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, a Hong Kong newspaper reported that angry citizens were harassing twenty Beijing residents who happened to be named Li Peng. At least one of them had applied formally for a change of name.

"Do you like Li Peng?" I asked the hotel owner.

"No," he said, using English for emphasis. It was clear that he wanted to talk about something else. He asked me about the robbery.

I had already told the police everything I could recall about the thief: he had black hair, and he was somewhere between the ages of twenty and for~ He was smaller than me. I told the police that I wouldn't recognize him if I saw him again.

This vagueness had bothered them: how could you break your finger on another human being and remember nothing about him? It bothered me as well. I could remember details of the chase with incredible vividness—mostly, I remembered the overwhelming anger I'd felt, a rage that now scared me. The man himself was a blur in my mind. I could see that it also perplexed Li Peng, who wrinkled his brow.

"Was it a child?" he asked.

"No," I said. "It wasn't a child."

"But how did you catch him so easily?" "I don't know.

"Do you have thieves in America?" I told Li Peng that there were thieves in America, but that they carried guns and you didn't run after them.

"Most thieves here in China have knives," he said, "What kind of thief doesn't carry a knife? That's why I think he was a child."

"He wasn't a child. I know that for certain."

"But why didn't he fight back? Why did you catch him so easily?" He sounded almost disappointed.

"I don't know," I said.

The police had followed the same line of questioning, and it was beginning to annoy me. The implication was clear: only a thief of unusual ineptitude would be caught and beaten by a foreigner at two in the morning, and so there must have been something seriously wrong with him. The police offered various excuses. He must have been a drunk Or a cripple. Or an idiot who was desperately poor. Dandong, the police emphasized, was a modern, orderly city; with a growing tourist industry It wasn't the sort of place where a foreigner woke up in the middle of the night with a common thief in his room.

Nobody suggested what I suspected— that the man was a North Korean refugee. The police had assured me that there were few refugees along this part of the border, because Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the river, was relatively well-off. People in Sinuiju ate twice a day, according to Dandong residents who had relatives there. But I knew that farther east, where a famine had been particularly severe, an estimated seventy thousand North Koreans were fleeing to China every year. It seemed likely that at least a hundred of them had made their way to Dandong. This possibility distressed me. If the locals wanted the thief to have been disabled, I wanted him to be perfectly normal and fit. It disturbed me to think that I'd viciously punched a man who was starving.

Both Li Peng and I were silent for a while, and then he thought of another possibility

"Probably he was a heroin addict.

That would explain why he was so weak."

"Are there a lot of heroin addicts around here?" I asked.

"Oh, no," Li Peng said quickly. "I don't think there are any in Dandong."

Apart from the North Korean swimrners, the main tourist attraction in town was the Yalu River Broken Bridge, which had once connected Dandong and Sinuiju. ln November, 1950, during the first year of the Korean War, American bombers destroyed most of the bridge when General MacArthur's troops made their push toward China's border. In Chinese, the war is known as "the war of resistance against America and in support of Korea." It is estimated that a million Chinese died in the fighting. Today, the Chinese half of the Yalu River bridge is stili standing. Tourists can walk to the end of it, look at the bombed-out wreckage, and pay one yuan to stare through a telescope at the North Koreans. One morning after the aborted theft, I paid a yuan and looked through the telescope. As usual, the North Koreans were swimming. The worker at the telescope asked me what country I was from. I told him.

"If America and China had a war today, who do you think would win?" he asked.

"I don't think America and China will have a war today."

"But if they did," he said, "who do you think would win?"

"I really don't know," I said. It seemed like a good time to ask him how business was going. He said it was fine, and he added that he had a photography stand where tourists could dress up and have their picture taken with the wreckage of the bridge in the background. They could wear either traditional Korean costume or a frill Chinese military uniform, with a helmet and a plastic rifle.

Another vender on the bridge ran a café where tourists could buy "Titanic" ice-cream bars, with pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the wrappers. The café manager explained that although the bridge was state-owned, private entrepreneurs were allowed to rent space for their telescopes and soft-drink stands. It was an example of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." The ice-cream man paid five hundred wan a month for his café. On summer nights, he slept on the bridge, where the river breeze was cool.

The bridge was at one end of the Dandong Border Cooperative Economic Zone, which the locals referred to as the Open District. They were very proud of the Open District, because it showed how far Dandong had come during the past ten years, after China's capitalist-style reforms finally started to take hold in this part of the country People told me that a decade ago the Open District had been nothing but peasant shacks and makeshift docks. Now there were restaurants, coffee shops, ice-cream parlors, and karaoke halls. At the western end of the Open District, a luxury apartment complex, with Western-style villas, was under construction. It was called the European Flower Garden. The eastern end of the Open District featured the bombed-out bridge and the Gateway to the Country Hunting Park Between the bridge and the luxury apartments there was a twenty-four-hour venereal-disease clinic and the Finland Bathing and Pleasure Center, a massage parlor whose marquee featured a photograph of a topless foreign woman taking a shower.

The Gateway to the Country Hunting Park was one of the recreational options available to Dandong's tourists, a place where they could hunt "wild" quail, pigeons, pheasants, and rabbits. The birds were tethered to the ground, and, for one yuan, tourists could shoot at them with either a .22-calibre rifle or a bow and arrow. For three yuan, they could take a potshot at a rabbit that was also tied to the ground. They were allowed to eat anything they killed. I never saw anybody shoot at the rabbit. It was too expensive.

One day, I watched two tourists from Guangdong hunt the quail. The young couple were in their early twenties, nicely dressed, and the man was very drunk. He missed so badly that the quail didn't even strain at their tethers. They just sat there in the sunshine. They were the most bored-looking quail I've ever seen.

"I'm too drunk," the man from Guangdong said to his girlfriend. "I want you to shoot instead."

"I don't want to shoot the gun," she said. "It's too loud."

"Here," he said. "You shoot it. I'm too drunk. I can't shoot straight."

"I don't want to."

"Go ahead. It's easy"

The man showed her how she could rest the gun on the fence so that it would to be simpler to aim. Usually customers weren't allowed to do that, but the park it keepers were willing to make an exception because the couple had traveled all the way from Guangdong. I was sitting nearby, listening to the conversation and trying to remember which Hemingway story it recalled. In the best at stories there were always guns, animals, women, and drunk people bickering. The only difference was that in Hemingway stories the animals were never tied to the ground.

Finally the man persuaded his girlfriend to pick up the .22 and the keeper helped her prop the gun up on the fence. She shot three bullets, and every time she squealed and covered her ears. She missed badly The quail appeared to have fallen asleep. It was late afternoon. Later, after it got dark, the Open District was a riot of lights, neon and fluorescence blazing from the restaurants and karaoke bars and the Finland Bathing and Pleasure Center. Meanwhile, across the Yalu, there was complete darkness on the North Korean shore. There was no electricity over there, The North Koreans didn't go swimming at night.

I got to know a couple of the local boat pilots, and several times a day they'd drive me along the banks of North Korea. We'd cruise by run-down tourist boats that were empty except for the portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on the walls, and we'd pass factories that looked abandoned. On the sandy stretches, hundreds of North Koreans were swimming. The children smiled and waved when we went by Farther upstream, where the river narrowed, it wasn't unusual for adventurous young Chinese to swim across the Yalu, touch the far side, and swim back again. There weren't any' North Koreans swimming to China. On the Sinuiju bank, armed soldiers stood stiffly' at their posts, watching over the swimmers. They were like lifeguards with guns.

One day we cruised past a barge where soldiers were unloading bags of grain marked "USA," which had been donated through the United Nations World Food Program. I asked the pilot to draw closer. When we got to within thirty feet of the barge, one of the soldiers glared at me and made an obscene Korean gesture: a fist with his thumb poking out between the fingers. We sped off.

"All that food will go to the soldiers and the cadres," the pilot said. "None of the common people will get it."

He spoke matter-of-factly'——the way everybody in Dandong did when I asked about their neighbors. They were quick to say that the North Koreans were poor and that they- had bad leadership, but then they'd shrug and say; "Meiyou yisi"— "It's not interesting." Thev weren't concerned by the North Koreans' poverty or by- their isolation; everybody who had lived in China through the sixties and seventies had seen enough of that.

Ordinary Chinese tourists buzzed the Korean shore simply because it was the closest they'd ever get to a foreign country; wealthy tourists, however, could enter North Korea on organized tours. Passports weren't required; the regulations were lax because the Chinese government was pretty sure that no one would want to stay on the other side of the river.

Even' morning, tour groups of upper-class Chinese met in front of my hotel before leaving for North Korea, and one dayI watched a guide give a briefing. The guide explained that the tourists should be careful to show respect when they visited memorials to the North Korean leaders, and he said that they should avoid taking photographs of people laboring, because the North Koreans might accuse them of focusing on poverty. The North Koreans are proud people, and the Chinese need to be conscious of this, he said. Also, when visiting the thirty-eighth parallel, it was important that the Chinese not shout "Hello!" at any American soldiers on the other side.

"You'll notice that it's not as developed as China," the guide said. "You shouldn't tell the North Koreans that they need to reform and open up, or that they should study the example of our China. And remember that many- of their tour guides speak very good Chinese, so be careful what you say"

One day I met a Chinese veteran of the Korean War. He had been in the Navy and hadn't seen much action during the war, but in 1964 he'd been wounded in a battle off the coast of Taiwan. He was sixty-four years old and had been a member of the Communist Party for four decades. He walked with a limp. The enemy- who wounded him had been Taiwanese, but his weapon was American-made. The veteran pointed this out very carefully As far as he was concerned, everything had gone downhill after Mao died. "Nowadays too many things aren't certain," he said. "Some of the retired people don't get their pensions. And some people are too rich while others are too poor." He disagreed with the views of the younger generation, including those of his twenty-six-year-old son, who had turned down a perfectly good government job to join a private firm. The firm paid more, but there wasn't as much stability. Was this, he asked, how Americans lived? And had his son learned to think this way from the foreign teachers at his college?

I asked the veteran about the situation across the border, and he said that North Korea had a leadership problem.

"When Kim Il Sung was alive, he was like Chairman Mao—everybody worshipped him. But Kim Il Sung's son isn't as great as his father. He's too young and he hasn't been hardened by war. If you look at Kim Il Sung's life, he experienced war as a small boy That's why he became a great man." My hotel room picked up North Korean television, which was one reason that I continued to stay there even after the attempted robbery. The other reason was that Li Peng gave me free food and drinks at the beer garden out in front. I had become a local celebrity — the Foreigner Who Broke His Finger Fighting the Thief.

When it rained, I sat in my hotel room eating cookies and watching North Korean television. North Korean television had everything that fascinated me about Chinese television, but more of it. There were more military variety' shows, more patriotic bands, more heroic leaders. The songs were more cloying. The smiles were bigger. The uniforms were more uniform. There were more programs of singing and dancing children wearing heavy makeup.

I got to the point where I could watch North Korean television for nearly an uninterrupted hour. There was the news, which consisted of showing the front page of a newspaper while a commentator read it. There was the great leader, Kim Jong Il, wearing dark glasses and pointing at maps. An Army choir, some violinists and some singers—all driping with medals. Kim Jong Il visiting a factory. Children in makeup bouncing across a stage. Kim jong Il in the T'aebaek Mountains. Pyongyang at night. Miners working happily Children singing. Kim jong Il.

At night, I dreamed of being robbed. I'd wake up, my heart racing, and I'd lie there trying to recall what the thief had looked like. But mostly I remembered what he had felt like. I remembered his body recoiling from one of the blows, and I remembered hitting him again. I found myself thinking about my anger and his fear—the two emotions shifted uneasily in my mind. What had made me keep punching him, even after he'd dropped my valuables? And why had he not fought back?

On my last afternoon in Dandong, the river was full of Chinese wedding boats. At any given moment, there were half a dozen on the water, the couples posing in the prows as they glided past the North Korean shore. The wealthy couples hired big two-tier cruisers; the others rented little motor launches. All of them followed the same route—a scoot out to the ruined bridge; a pause for photographs; a slow cruise along the banks of North Korea. The Chinese brides wore bright dresses of all colors—white and pink and orange and purple—and they stood in the prows of the boats like flowering figureheads. It was a hot afternoon and the North Koreans were swimming again.

I went out with a pilot named Ni Shichao, and we zipped in and out of the flotilla of wedding boats. Ni Shichao explained that it was a very auspicious day on the lunar calendar—the sixth day of the sixth month—which was why there were so many weddings. But on the whole, he said, there were fewer weddings than usual this year.

"People think that years ending in nine are bad luck," he explained. "I don't believe itmyself, but many people do. In '89 there was the disturbance"—a euphemism for what happened around Tiananmen Square—"and in '79 there was the trial of the Gang of Four. Sixty-nine was the Cultural Revolution. Fifty-nine was when your America bombed the bridge."

He paused and thought for a moment. "No, that was in 1950," he said, shaking his head. "Anyway something bad happened in '59."

That had been the climax of the Great Leap Forward, when Mao's mad push for greater industrial production resulted in a famine that killed an estimated thirty million people. But Chinese history books brushed over this disaster. As with many Chinese, Ni Shichao had a shaky grasp of recent history; he had also made a mistake about the Gang of Four trial, which took place in 1980 and 1981.

"What about 1949?" I asked.

"That was when the new China was founded," he said. He paused again. We were in the shadow of the ruined bridge; the slow-moving Yalu flowed blue beneath us. "That year wasn't the same as the others," he went on. "That was a good year, of course."

A week after leaving Dandong, I went east to Tumen, a Chinese city on North Korea's northern border, Tumen was poor; it had none of Dandong's energy and development, but it still drew hordes of refugees from North Korea. The Tumen River was narrow here, and this stretch of the North Korean countryside was reported to have suffered some of the worst effects of the famine that had been devastating the country since 1995. Almost nobody went swimming in the murky Tumen River. The border wac heavily guarded on both sides. The Chinese promenade had a few souvenir stands and telescopes, but there weren't many tourists. You couldn't see much across the river.

I walked along the promenade and passed a child sitting in the shade. I approached him from the back, thinking that was a local boy about seven years old, but then I saw his face, and I stopped. I had never seen so many different ages in a single person. He had the body of a young child, but from his face I could see that he was older, probably fourteen or fifteen. The corners were wrinkled, the skin shrivelled like an old man's, and there was a gray dullness in his gaze that startled me.

I stared at the boy and realized that he was a North Korean who had come here to beg. In that moment, everything I'd glimpsed about this closed-off country—the swimmers and the soldiers and the television programs—slipped away The boy gazed back Finally I fumbled for my wallet and pulled out some money He accepted it without changing his expression. Neither of us said anything. I felt his eyes on my back as I walked away.