你们去哪儿? Where Are You Going?
The grasslands begin almost as soon as the airport ends. Our Didi driver’s eyes widen when he sees my friend and me approaching his car, the realization setting in that he’d spoken to a foreigner on the phone when he called to confirm the pickup location. His first question “你们来自哪儿? Nǐmen láizì nǎ’er? “Where are you from?” is quickly followed by a second: “你们去哪儿? Nǐmen qù nǎ’er?” Where are you going?” His use of 哪儿 nǎ’er (where) typical of northern-accented Mandarin as opposed to the softer 哪里 nǎlǐ (where) to which I have become more accustomed from its use in southern China is the first of many signs that we are far from home.
I explain that we’ve just landed from Beijing and are on the way to our hotel in Manzhouli 满洲里 (literally: “inside Manchuria”), a northeastern port city known as the “window of East Asia” that sits at the intersection of the Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian borders. The city initially developed in the early 20th century when it became a junction with the Trans-Siberian Railway as well as one of the first land border cities opened by the People’s Republic of China. The city even used to welcome Russian tourists visa-free as a center for Sino-Russian-Mongolian trade as late as 2008. Our driver, Mr. Ning (宁师傅), who happens to be from Manzhouli, explains that with the borders closed due to COVID-19, there have only been a few foreign visitors in the past year and a half as opposed to the steady stream that used to visit for business or weekend getaways. He hands us his business card as we exit his Didi, offering to drive us to nearby attractions since public transportation in the region is limited.
For our first night in the city, Manzhouli certainly did not disappoint. After we’d finished checking into our hotel, we were welcomed by buildings lit up in their entirety, the clouds above reflecting the buildings’ orange neon fluorescence that glowed in the distance while trilingual signs in Mandarin, Mongolian, and Russian guided our walk through the streets below. Little did we know at the time, though, that Mr. Ning would soon become our friend and traveling companion for this first half of our journey. I gave him a call at the semi-abandoned wedding palace to which we’d walked the next morning and asked if he could drive us to Lake Hulun 呼伦湖, China’s fifth largest freshwater lake located just 36 km (22 miles) south of Manzhouli. Mr. Ning was shocked that we were not interested in stopping off on the way for archery or horseback riding, roadside attractions that largely catered to the Chinese tourists who had also chosen to escape the heat and humidity of the south. His repeated exclamations, “But all tourists visiting Hulunbuir go horseback riding through the grasslands!” were met with our polite declines and explanations that we, unlike other tourists, preferred immersing ourselves in the more authentic, transcultural past of the northeast.
While we had hoped to visit Guomen Scenic Area 满洲里口岸国门景区 after returning from Lake Hulun, we were refused entry at the ticket counter because we were foreign passport holders. This was a harsh reminder that borders and “border areas” (“边境区域”) can be unforgiving, especially as this “rule” was not stated anywhere on their website or travel apps. We proceeded instead to the nearby Russian Matryoshka Doll Square 满洲里口岸套娃景区, home to the world’s largest matryoshka doll in the world standing 30 meters (98 feet) tall, who also happens to double as a hotel. An odd claim to fame, perhaps, but nonetheless entertaining as we spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening wandering through this park of oversized Russian dolls with the occasional roller coaster or haunted house providing us with a welcome break from the many dolls’ watchful eyes.
The Russian Doll Park embodied what I found so intriguing about Manzhouli: a city whose mix of cultures, ethnicities, and languages promises its visitors a semi-escape from mainland China without ever crossing the borders that demarcate the country from Mongolia and Russia. Fascinated by this celebration of culture and life on the border, we traveled north in an eight-hour’s drive to Enhe Russian Ethnic Township 恩和俄罗斯族民族乡, the only township in China designated for China’s Russian minority (in Chinese) and our base for the next two nights.
While making our trek north to Enhe, we made a quick stop that morning to board a speed boat out to the Chinese-Russian border, nothing more than a flimsy, colorful banner separating the two countries at a seemingly arbitrary point in the marshy wetlands. “Who needs a land border when we can take a boat out to Russia instead?” my friend and I gleefully asked each other, thrilled that we’d somehow found a legal loophole around the unforgiving “rule” of the scenic area in Manzhouli just the day before.
An unexpected visit to the Chinese-Russian border was accompanied by a less-exciting surprise later that afternoon once we arrived in Enhe. The front desk staff explained that because Enhe is situated in a “border area,” they were not able to register us online with the local police station as hotels in China are required to do. We’d have to go and register ourselves. It was the second time in two days that we’d heard “border areas” as an excuse for differing from what is usually standard practice in the rest of mainland China, but faced with no other choice, we quickly backtracked to the police station we’d passed on the way into town to our guesthouse and answered a dizzying, unforgiving round of questions: “Where are you from?” “Where do you live?” “What do you do for work?” “Why are you visiting Enhe?” “What do you plan on doing for the two nights you’re here?”
Once we’d completed our registrations and returned to our guesthouse, exploring the town by foot was the only item on the agenda for the evening. I’ve always felt most comfortable exploring a new city, village, or town on foot: it allows me to take pictures, chat with the locals or other tourists, and learn as much as I can about my surroundings. The best part? I can set my own pace.
Two walks from one end of town to the other exposed the differences that lay between Enhe’s two sides. Architectural stylings of traditional Russian wooden cottages adorned the town’s central tourist streets, many of them homestays, hostels, and bakeries that opened in the past 15–20 years with the growth of tourism in the area. Just behind these tourist streets on the outskirts of town, however, lie the metal houses and farmland that home many of the local population (about 2,000 as of 2017).
Fifty to eighty percent of these residents are from the Russian ethnic group, which has about 15,000–20,000 members in China, and many of them are second, third, fourth, or fifth generation Russian-Chinese, their facial features distinguishing them from the Han Chinese tourists. Walking through Enhe is the first time in China that I was greeted in Russia by local villagers who must have thought that I, a blond-haired, blue-eyed visitor, shared a common lineage with them, while several Chinese tourists stopped to ask if I was a member of the Russian ethnic minority.
It was while walking through the outskirts of town that an enthusiastic Han Chinese worker greeted me, asking in Russian if I could speak Russian. I replied in Mandarin saying I couldn’t, at which point the door behind him opened and out stepped a short, stout man, probably in his early-to-mid-50s, with pale skin closer in shade to my own than that of his friend’s. Most notable, though, were his striking grey eyes. “Can you guess which country he’s from?” the Han Chinese worker asked me with a grin on his face. “He’s Chinese,” I replied after a moment’s pause, suppressing the excitement within me as I realized that I’d stumbled into an opportunity to speak with a member of the local village in an authentic, organic setting. “Can you speak Russian?” I asked the Han Chinese worker, and before he could answer, the other man replied in his northern-accented Mandarin with a laugh, “He used to speak Russian, but he forgot a long time ago. We speak Mandarin when we’re together.”
The two men ushered me into the room where they’d been working and introduced me to a young woman — “our boss” (“我们的老板”) from Qiqihar, Heilongjiang Province 黑龙江省齐齐哈尔市 — who also owned a hotel in the village, but had just moved into this building earlier that same day to begin work on their new Russian-style restaurant. “缘分” (yuánfèn) I replied: “destiny.” What were the chances that we just happened to be in the right place at the right time to meet them on their first day of work at this new location?
I was conscious of what it feels like to be barraged by a deluge of question from curious locals who want to know where I’m from, particularly by the dozens of Chinese tourists we encountered during our trip, so I decided not to ask what it must be like for him to be Chinese by nationality, but with strikingly different physical features more similar to that of a foreigner. We continued our conversation in Mandarin — the sole language the four of us shared — and they patiently answered my questions about their work, life in the village, and plans for their restaurant. We spoke for about 10 minutes and when I explained that it was time for us to go and meet our driver for dinner, they thanked us for stopping by and I for their time. We left the grey-eyed man standing outside the restaurant, a grin on his face as he watched us walk away.
This conversation that took place outside of the carefully manufactured ethnic minority performances common at mainland Chinese tourist attractions was enough to keep me grinning the rest of the night and even into the next morning when Mr. Ning drove us up to Shiwei 室韦, another border town in the region of Ergun, Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia 内蒙古省呼伦贝尔市额尔古纳市. The famous Friendship Bridge connecting Shiwei with the Russian village of Olachi lying across the Argun River 额尔古纳河 was predictably closed to visitors, so we made our way instead to a different bridge from which we could see another Russian village beyond the river. Since being listed in 2005 by the mainland government as one of the “top ten most beautiful townships in China” (in Chinese), Shiwei has seen an influx of tourists, but on the day we visited, there seemed to be fewer tourists than there were in Enhe. From the windows of their Russian log cabins, the locals watched us curiously and we, them, their distinct facial features suggesting a mixed-race heritage similar to the residents of Enhe. If they, like the men we’d met at their new restaurant in Enhe, were wondering if we shared a common lineage, they did not ask.
The borders dividing China, Mongolia, and Russia were sheltering, restricting, and shifting, but physically traveling through “border areas” made me realize how they can also be arbitrary, unforgiving, and transcultural — all at the same time. Experiencing these junctures in culture, geography, history, language, and race, however, was a necessary reminder that for the nearly 300,000 people who live in Manzhouli, Enhe, and Shiwei, they might use a different word to describe these borders: home.
