Free In Manchuria by Michael Meyer Page A

the Yalu River; in 2004 , UNESCO added the ruins on both sides of the border to its list of World Heritage Sites, North Korea’s first. In the fifth century A.D. , a Koguryo ruler moved its capital to Pyongyang. In the eighth century a Chinese army toppled the kingdom, establishing a toehold in the Northeast.
    I had Ji’an’s ruins to myself. On a hike into a valley where once a palace stood, the only other person I saw was a farmer leading an ox. On my walk back out, the ox was tethered to the front bumper of a stuck taxi, towing it across a rocky stream. The cabbie said he was looking for me; he had heard a tourist was wandering around out here.
    He dropped me off at the largest tomb, fenced and requiring an expensive ticket to enter. “These pretty ones are fake, you know,” a woman selling roasted yams said. “The real ones are the mounds of rubble you see around here. These have been rebuilt.”
    I found no proof of this, and the woman was wearing a T-shirt that read, in English, GOD SAVE THE TEENAGERS OF AMERICA . But comparisons to old photos suggested that the photogenic ruins had been touched up. That was in line with everything I would see across the Northeast, where its history, unlike in the rest of China, felt present. Not the nation’s Five Thousand Years of History, but the parts made in recent lifetimes. Even its ancient ruins looked new.
     
    The first time I visited the city of Harbin, 160 miles northeast of Wasteland, was to update a guidebook on a job that no one else would take. It was 1998 , and its tourist bureau handed out a promotional magazine meant to lure visitors. The cover story was headlined “Police, Police Vehicles, Police Dogs . . . Are So Close to Us.” (I loved the tension-building ellipse.) Later, pressed between pages like a treasured leaf, I found a napkin upon which I had scrawled the word depressing eleven times.
    Now Club Med operated a ski resort outside town, Starbucks anchored downtown’s cobblestone pedestrian thoroughfare, and Disney sponsored Harbin’s frenetic Ice Lantern Festival. Millions of visitors descended on the city to view two-foot-thick frozen Songhua River ice blocks fashioned into thousands of lighted designs that ranged from life-size pandas to a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower.
    Frances joined me there for a long weekend. Her inner attorney marveled at what a carnival looked like in a pre-litigious society. Kids hopped across a course of three-foot-tall ice pedestals and swooped down four-story ice slides, while the adults—fueled by cheap bottles of Ice River beer—clenched knotted ropes to rappel sheer ice walls and, in go-karts, dodged the horse-drawn sleighs that jingled across the Songhua. One night we watched a large, smiling man teeter on the lip of a luge chute as his friends, who called him Fatty, urged him to go first. You got the feeling that Fatty always had to go first. He leaned forward, and was gone. His howling fur-coated mass receded into the dark.
    “This place is a death trap,” Frances said. But the only casualties were to our teeth, inflicted by candied hawthorn berries that somehow got even harder in the cold.
    “This is really a zero-return snack.” The petrified fruit stuck to my molars as their bamboo skewer jabbed the inside of my cheek, drawing blood.
    “One day lawyers will put a stop to all of this fun,” Frances said with a smile. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
    We were in Harbin to see the remains of an all-but-forgotten dynasty that was the precursor to the Manchus’ rule of China. The ruins were said to be twenty miles outside town in a place whose name sounded like a sneeze: Acheng.
    Although the route took us along the expressway, the bus, like many in the Northeast, played a video showing Er Ren Zhuan , the regional opera. A shirtless actor in yellow silk pants asked his female counterpart—plump and shimmering in a pink silk pantsuit—her surname.
    “I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” she replied