A lot can be said about the city of Shenyang 沈阳, but for me I will always remember the cold first.
It was bone chilling.
Imagine the sensation of sticking your hand in a bucket of ice or maybe even running outside on a snowy day in nothing but your underwear. That shock, that electric jolt shocking your nerves in an instant, a short circuit for your senses, that is nothing compared to bone chilling.
True bone chilling however, seeps into the skin, penetrating your protective warmth layer after layer, until just a small gust of wind can feel like knives precisely peeling at your bones like a master sushi chef.
Bone chilling cold is so cold that it permeates the senses, it has sound, it has a taste. Your throat scratches with each breath, and even the pungent smells of Chinese sauerkraut （酸菜） fermenting in street-side tubs outside restaurants and residences falls flat to your feet in the face of the cold.
This kind of cold is lonely, it is hollow, and it drives the people who must endure it to drink.
I think that is where the Northeastern Chinese love of drinking comes from. The ‘Dong Bei Ren 东北人’ as they are called in Chinese defy common North American stereotypes of Chinese people.
They are tall.
The men are macho, and live for the brotherhood born in a brawl.
They are the sons of warring steppe tribes and imperial Manchus, the sons of the proletariat heroes of China’s socialist aspirations, and the sons of hardscrabble peasant farmers tilling frozen soil year after year.
Above all, they drink.
Picture a Russian in your minds eye, with their never-ending glasses of vodka punctuating life’s important moments, and you’ve just about got the closest equivalent in the Chinese context.
True men of the Northeast of China don’t ask you if you would like to drink when you stop by their house for a visit, they challenge you to see how much you can drink.
Do not misunderstand, drinking in the Northeast of the country is not in its own right about the alcohol though. These are not alcoholics wallowing their demons away at the end of a bottle. Drinking is the social activity, and it is reflective of the deeper camaraderie Northeasterners feel for each other. It is a part of their own definition of ‘tough’, a shared belief about what it means to be a man and how to handle yourself.
Part of this robust, rugged spirit probably came from history. This part of China was never truly entirely ‘Han’ to begin with. The city itself was called Mukden, and was formed by the Manchurians, the ethnicity which stood at the top of Qing dynasty imposed ethnic hierarchy.
Alongside these former horseback mounted warriors, the city was populated by the Mongols and other tribes of the grass steppe. Koreans had always had a ethnic contingency resident in the city. The historically Korean Western Pagoda ‘Xi Ta 西塔’ district serves as a middle point between the mythical homeland of all Koreans ‘Paektu Mountain’ or ‘Chang Bai Shan 长白山’ in Chinese mountain to the immediate northwest, and the barrier of the great wall of China far to the Southeast. Throw in Muslim traders arriving in caravans and the occasional Russian settlement in surrounding areas and you have a very complex, combustible mix of people.
Snow piles high during the winters in Shenyang. It collects on the streets and shovels come out to push it aside and up against the doors of restaurants and houses. The snow quickly turns from white to slushy grey as airborne pollution concentrated from the coal burning factories throughout the region is absorbed into the city-scape.
Rather than battle this daily struggle with shoveling alone, many buildings have a set of steps leading up to the main door, which then lead down to a basement level. This also helps keep in the warmth, and gives a delightful feeling of entering into a nice warm cave every time you are coming or going.
In these little basement caverns is where daily life is lived during the long, cold winters. Grey streets devoid of any life are quickly forgotten when you enter into a small family restaurants or bars at one of these ground floor level buildings.
It was in one of these little hole in the wall restaurants that my good friend Yuko and I decided we would spend our afternoon on one particularly cold winter day.
We left campus around 3 or 4pm, just before the day started to turn dark. A local classmate had recommended this family restaurant for its dumplings, which meant we had to try, no further questions required.
You have not tasted dumplings （饺子） until you eat them prepared by a northeastern Chinese grandmother at home. Every family has their own recipe, and for someone to recommend a restaurant which they feel even approaches what they long for at home takes away any questions. I was also looking forward to a local sauerkraut soup dish called ‘suan cai dun fen tiao 酸菜炖粉条’.
Dumplings, sauerkraut soup...there is even a dish called ‘Tu Dou Ni 土豆泥’ or ‘Potatoe Mud’
which tastes exactly like an inverted shepard's pie. With the culinary parallels to Northern Europe adding up at this rate, it would almost be a shame if there wasn’t a pervasive drinking culture to fall back on.
To appreciate our experience fully, you also have to understand what Yuko and I looked like most everyday Shenyang people.
I was always immediately assumed to be Russian. Most Americans visiting the city at this time couldn’t speak a word of any Chinese dialect. However, quite a few Russian businessmen and traders would visit, and they could speak Mandarin very well, albeit with a heavy accent which delightfully had the same stereotypical Russian accents to an American ear as you have heard from countless TV dramas.
Yuko is Japanese from Osaka, no more than 5-feet tall, with that classic Japanese bowl cut hairstyle. She spoke Chinese with a thick accent of her own, but overall did not present an imposing figure outright. With the cities large population of both indigenous and visiting Koreans, most people we met just assumed Yuko was from South Korea without asking too many questions.
So there we were, a not-quite Russian and a somewhat believable South Korean, both obviously about University age, walking into a family run dumpling shop catering the the hardscrabble working class of China’s answer to industrial Detroit.
Needless to say the entire restaurant fell silent when we walked in. You could hear the sounds of noodle slurping abruptly slide in the recessed corners.
Dead silence.
We stared around at the tightly packed tables, no more than 15 patrons or so huddled together communally, their thick winter coats wedging them in against one another. Every eye was on us, you could hear a pin drop.
Thankfully someone coughed, and the spell was broken.
‘How many are you?’ The waitress/daughter-in-law slurred at us with that unmistakable Northeastern Mandarin drawl. They roll their ‘R’s’ in this part of the country, think of how you would pretend to be a pirate for Halloween as a child and say ‘Arrr Matey’....sometimes it takes every ounce of strength you can muster no to burst out laughing.
‘Uhhh...just us two’ I responded. ‘Do you have seats?’
‘Come with me’, she relied in a gruff, no nonsense tone. We followed that long shoulder shrug through a path snaking itself to a small table and two small bunches somewhere in the back.
By now the patrons around us had started eating again, lighting cigarettes and paying us no more attention than just as if the moment you had sat down at your own local hangout, an elephant suddenly walked in leading a hippo as a date, and then nonchalantly sat down beside you without a word to study the menu.
‘What would you like to drink?’ The all important question.
‘What do you recommend?’
‘You’re a foreigner, all foreigners like beer, so I’ll bring you that. You shouldn’t try our other liquor, its too strong for non-locals.’
Yuko looked at me, a challenge had been issued by this waitress. She was from a martial arts family background in Osaka, and could probably drink this lady under the table despite her small stature. We knew what we had to do.
‘We’ll have the local liquor then.’
The waitress shambled off and came back in less than a minute with a large kettle of steaming water. She plunked it down between us in the center of the table, and walked away. We were dumbfounded, having no idea what to do next.
A group of factory workers sitting across from us chuckled, looking our way. We waved hello to them, and exchanged cigarettes so as not to be rude to them in their own place.
The waitress came back with a large bottle of Baijiu from Liaoyang （辽阳千山古享香酒）, a city nearby Shenyang famous for this local over-proofed variety of China’s national spirit. She opened the bottle, and stuck it in the hot water. The water level rose up to the neck of the bottle, peaking menacingly over.
Next, she brought out two white tea cups and a white tea pot with a little plastic spill regulator on the spout, standard issue for Chinese restaurants the world over. The pot was completely empty.
‘Can we have some tea also?’
‘Why?’ She said. ‘Don’t you want to drink? You know now that I’ve opened the bottle I can’t take it back, you still have to pay.’
Now thoroughly confused, we didn’t know how to respond. Likely seeing the looks on our faces, she then grabbed the bottle without a word, and poured the heated Baijiu into the teapot. She returned the bottle to its sauna, and poured each teacup full of Baijiu to the brim.
‘That will keep the Baijiu warm （加热酒）.’
Yuko looked at me, I looked back at her. We both stared down at our cups, the smell of warm Baijiu already causing our eyes to water. Everyone around us was watching again, curious as to what we were going to do.
One older gentleman looked at us and took some form of pity, explaining ‘this is how we drink it up here. It’s cold outside, and this will warm you right up.
Yuko looked down, her clear filled ceramic cup stared back at her, daring. This was not hot sake, this wasn’t even something familiar like a whiskey or vodka. I could tell by the look on her face that this was a challenge, but we’d wanted an experience.
‘Are you ready?’ She asked me in broken English.
I nodded.
With a ‘ganbei 干杯’ and a toast we tried the drink.
The first note that hits your throat is sickeningly sweet, but is quickly overwhelmed by a burn of pure alcohol. Your sinuses open, the room changes focus a bit. For some reason I was noticing the smoke stains patch worked across parts of the ceiling and walls, grey-ish black scattered against cheap, cracking drywall and faded poster girls offering ‘Snow’ beer.
Baijiu comes in different strengths across the country, but this rustic variety was strong, 57% alcohol. With nearly every table around us also warming their drinks, the liquor enhanced steam mixing with raw smell of humanity packed tightly together with fermenting cabbage and cheap tobacco caused your eyes to water.
We both put the cups down, by the grace of God our food had arrived and we eagerly tore into it, a welcome respite from the heady atmosphere.
That same table kept focusing on us, never taking their eyes off our table for too long. A few empty Baijiu bottles were strewn about their chairs and on the table, the men shouting and laughing loudly with one another.
One by one they would get up and come over to us without saying a word, and offer us a cheers. In Chinese drinking culture, especially in the Northeast, it would be impossible to refuse their intended hospitality. So we were forced to dry teacup after teacup of the over-proofed spirit, trying as best we could to pace ourselves without offending anyone on their home turf.
These men were difficult to understand. They had thick, peasant accents born from life on the farm and in the factories.
Obviously having trouble communicating, the same waitress came back to us and tried to clear up a few questions that were being shouted our direction.
‘They are asking you where you are from?’ She explained for a third time.
Yuko replied: ‘We are students here at Liaoning University 辽宁大学.’
This obviously didn’t satisfy them, and they pressed on.
‘No,’ the waitress tried again, ‘they mean what country are you from. Your friend doesn’t look Russian, and your accent is isn’t local. They want to know if you are Japanese.’
The question seemed to freeze the room again, only this time the ambient sound of happy patrons didn’t stop altogether, but slowed to a menacing simmer.
Yuko and I exchanged worried glances, this was the type of situation we’d hoped to avoid.
The University staff had warned all international students to be careful at this time sharing their backgrounds outside the University, especially for Americans and Japanese. Only recently, Prime Minister Abe in Japan had made a point of visiting the Yasakune war ‘heroes’ shrine in Tokyo in an effort to appease the more right wing elements of his electoral base. The results echoed throughout Asia, but in no place more strongly than the Northeast of China, particularly Shenyang.
This history of Japanese conflict and atrocity in this region of China is long, stemming from Japanese conflict with Korea and bleeding into the heart of the region. Before World War II Shenyang, or Mukden, had been annexed by the Japanese military and reformed into a vassal state to the Japanese Emperor known as Manchuko. Thousands upon thousands of non-Japanese natives to the region were tortured, killed or conscripted at gunpoint to serve the needs of the army.
While US lead forces in the Pacific had broken the back of Japanese military power by retaking the pacific and ultimately dropping the Atomic bomb, Stalin’s communist forces had collaborated with communist resistance cells in this Siberia adjacent region to free the downtrodden population and kick out the Japanese forces. Soldiers from the Shenyang garrison were China’s first line of support for North Korean forces during the Korean War, and the heartland of communist industry was centered in the region ever since.
With that history, the population still had a lingering hatred for all things Japanese, much more deeply ingrained than anywhere else in China. Coinciding with Abe’s visit to the shrine, this hatred was sparked and more than a few incidents of Japanese citizens and Koreans mistaken for Japanese had been attacked in the month preceding our adventure this day. Someone, a South Korean business person, had actually been killed by an angry mob just a few days before in a case of mistaken identity.
Yuko stared at me, obviously worried about our next move.
I replied the only way I knew how: ‘Oh, I’m Canadian doing research at the university for a year. This is my friend, she’s Canadian-Korean studying Chinese.’
The waitress had a quizzical look on her face, but without waiting a beat the table across from us all raised their glasses and cheered us with a hearty ‘welcome to Shenyang!’. Someone started talking about their cousin who had emigrated to Vancouver and all the good seafood they had there.
Yuko quickly offered to buy another bottle for our new ‘friends’, and any remaining tension evaporated from the room.
We continued drinking and laughing with everyone well into the night, they didn’t often get a chance to talk with foreigners directly. At sometime the owner of the restaurant broke out a clunky old home karaoke system to match the off-color balanced Chinese model TV in the corner above the doorway, and the singing began.
When we finished up and said our goodbyes, we headed for the door. The waitress walked us out of the restaurant up the stairs to the frigid street, now completely dark with a sickly grey snow flurry just starting to come to being.
She asked: ‘Are you really Canadian? You’re friend looks Japanese, I have a Japanese friend at the University and she speaks just like your friend does.’
We looked at each other, the three of us standing there on a dead street.
I shrugged, ‘No, I’m American. You’re right…..was everything ok in there a little while ago?’
She laughed ‘I knew it haha, that was very funny, thank you for telling me. It is fine, we are a family run place, and they are regulars. We love people visiting from all over the world. Come back again soon!’
With that she went back inside, and propping each other up, Yuko and I stumbled our way into the evening, back towards the University gates.
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