Jason Barbacovi's Me and Chairman Mao

Fowl Play

In many ways, big cities are big cities, regardless of what county, country, or continent said big city happens to be located in. They all have certain characteristics in common, buses and banks and bad traffic, not to mention downtowns, business districts, shopping areas, and so on. There are more similarities of course, things like highways and freeways, malls and movie theaters, not to mention they all probably have at least one Starbucks and they all definitely have multiple McDonald's, because why should only people in the US become disgustingly obese when we can make the rest of the world fat as well?

At any rate, my point is that, in all likelihood, New York and Paris have more in common than New York and pretty much any one-stoplight town in the US, although particularly those in the South, the part of the Midwest commonly referred to as "the Heartland," and anyplace where you can see the Appalachian Mountains from your house. You know, places where a list entitled "Things to Do for Fun" might include items such as cow-tipping, sheep-screwing, or cousin-groping. To be fair, those annoying, one-stoplight artist's communities that dot the American Southwest like a Medieval pox should be included as well, since while they likely abstain from cow-tipping, they probably practice the other two, although because those people are artistes they believe it's somehow less fucked up. Which it's totally not—no matter how hot your cousin might be.

Of course, for Americans this city-sameness is truer for large European cities than it is for other parts of the world. Which makes sense, since America was founded by Europeans and modeled after Europe. Or at least parts of it, although, sadly, not always the best parts. I mean, people in Sweden get like six weeks of vacation while we in the US are stuck with only two, which we probably won't take anyway because who has time for vacation? I know: fucking Puritans. To a lesser extent, however, these similarities also hold true for big Asian megalopolises like Tokyo and Hong Kong, Bangkok and Beijing: while these cities have the recognizable forms and structures of other large population centers, they are still different enough cosmetically—sometimes radically so—to make sure you never forget that you're in a country far, far away.

Naturally, things begin to break down as you start to consider increasingly smaller towns—particularly in Asia—until eventually you reach a point where there is nothing in common at all, when instead of comparing a five-hundred person town in Arkansas and a similarly sized village in Thailand, you might as well be comparing apples to oranges, which we all know are completely different despite the fact that both are sweet, pulpy, seed-filled fruit that grow on trees.

Of course, in a country with as many people as China, things become unrecognizable just a bit faster. Like in Harbin, for example, a quaint little provincial capital of two million or so up in the northeast corner of China. (As far as I know, China is the only country where a city of two million can accurately be described as quaint.) And when I say it's northern, I mean northern: it's on roughly the same latitude as Ulaan Bataar, better known—well, hardly known, actually—as the capitol of Mongolia. And I think we all know three things about Mongolia: it's full of Mongols; said Mongols have an affinity for yurts; and it's really fucking cold. Ergo, Harbin—while not overrun by Mongols, yurts, or any combination of the two—is really fucking cold as well.

Does the cold make it quaint? No, but it does make it a bit more isolated than your average city of two million, since most people tend to shy away from living in places where, according to our cab driver, negative fifteen degrees Fahrenheit is considered a warm night for mid-January. And sure, there's some ways in which it's still a recognizable big city—besides the omnipresent KFCs, it even has a Wal-Mart (now ruining China's labor market, too!)—but in other ways it was very different from other similarly sized 'burbs that I have been to. Well, in one way at least, as you shall see.

So why go to Harbin at all? For the Snow and Ice Festival, which is why my friends and I made the trip. Or maybe it was for the Ice and Snow Festival—I never really got the title straight. Either way, it's a yearly happening that involves a lot of sculpted snow and ice and generally begins in early January, sometime after the Heilongjiang has frozen through so completely that gigantic blocks of frozen water can be cut directly out of the river itself and used to create the ice festival. The snow, conveniently enough, is polite enough to accumulate in large quantities on its own, although the locals do have to pack it into cubes in preparation for sculpting.

Anyway, both events are pretty amazing. The snow festival features acres and acres, although I guess in Harbin it would be hectares and hectares, of impossibly intricate snow sculptures. Some were so big I wasn't sure how they could possibly stay together, like the thirty-foot tall dragon—being ridden, bizarrely, by a number of fat, smiling snow babies—that greeted visitors walking into the festival, or the gigantic sculpture of Apollo in his chariot surrounded by bare-breasted maidens, the size of which made the dragon look like a doorstop. Although the maidens did at least made more sense to me than the obese dragon babies, since, if you must be surrounded by maidens, I firmly believe that bare-breasted ones are the only way to go. Some of you, I'm sure, will agree. The ice festival was just as incredible. Rather than featuring ice sculptures, it turned out to be a massive city created out of frozen water and lit entirely with neon, an ice-age Vegas. It had ice buildings of all shapes and sizes, including the Vatican; the Louvre, complete with outer pyramids; and a massive clock tower that lorded over the entire grounds like an Apollo rocket on its launch pad.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? It is, and you ever find yourself wandering around northeast China in the dead of winter, I highly recommend you take the time to visit Harbin. And, after taking the time to visit the Snow and Ice--Ice and Snow?--Festival, I even more highly recommend you take the time to visit an attraction we didn't learn about until we found ourselves with a morning to kill and, over breakfast, asked our waitress what else there was to do in Harbin: the Manchurian Tiger Park. And yes, by tiger park I mean a large fenced-in area filled with tigers, as well as a handful of lions and a few other really big cats, the existence of which I will now conveniently ignore to concentrate on the tigers. It was the Manchurian Tiger Park after all, not The Manchurian Mixed Great-Cats Park.

The park itself, while being a bit old-fashioned by Western standards as far as zoos go—think cement and chain-link—was fairly normal for attractions of that type: you buy a ticket; you get on a bus; you drive through various fenced and double-gated compounds to watch the tigers lying around doing nothing or, if you're very lucky, deigning to stand up, stretch, yawn, and possibly even amble alongside you for a moment while you frantically try to take a decent picture through the bus's smudged and scratched Plexiglas windows; you oooh and aaah at the fact that there are so many white tigers until you realize that you've just stumbled into one of Siegfried and Roy's wet dreams and you have to try very hard not to throw up; you pull up at the end of the tour thirty minutes later and are hustled off the bus wondering if it was really worth ten bucks to stare at a bunch of half-asleep tigers.

The thing is though, in Harbin the tour didn't necessarily end there. Oh no. After getting out of the bus, we were led up onto a metal, grated walkway that was maybe fifteen feet off the ground. Since the path itself went straight over the tiger cages we had just driven through, it was also partially enclosed, with the same steel mesh that formed the floor used to fashion high, curving sidewalls that created an almost-complete cylinder over our heads. (Side note: half-asleep tigers look surprisingly menacing when you are walking above them on a see-through grating.) Once on the pathway, there were signs pointing the way to the exit cum gift shop—as if those two things could exist separately anywhere paid admission is required—for those who were interested in leaving. However, for discriminating tourists who wanted to get a little more for their money, the walkway was just one part of a grid that covered the entire park, and you were free to wander pretty much wherever you desired on said grid. Or at least there wasn't anything or anyone preventing you from doing so, which in my mind is pretty much the same thing.

Being discriminating tourists, we chose to wander. As a result, we saw all manner of interesting things: a liger, which is the actual name for a cross between a lion and a tiger; a group of tiger cubs playing in a way that would either kill or at least maim lesser animals; a miserable puma or jaguar or possibly panther—I'd tell you the difference between them, but I have no idea what it might be—buried in a pile of dirty hay and looking less than thrilled at being transplanted from whatever tropical jungle it used to call home and into the subzero Harbin winter; and a weather-beaten man who was probably ten years younger than he looked standing at the intersection of two walkways. At his feet was a wire cage that was big enough to comfortably hold one or two chickens, but which was currently holding seven or possibly eight, the exact number being somewhat difficult to determine from the tangled mass of crests and beaks, feathers and feet.

At first, I couldn't figure out what they—man and chickens—were doing hanging out on an otherwise empty walkway in the middle of a tiger park. As I thought about it, however, I remembered a sign that had been posted just below the admission prices at the ticket window. It was a seemingly random list of animals, followed by a price in Chinese currency. For example, first on the list was Chicken: 40 RMB, which was about five US dollars. Next came a pheasant, followed by several more creatures of increasing size, and ending with two fairly large animals: Goat: 700 RMB and Cow: 1,500 RMB. In my American naiveté, I'd figured these were animals that people could purchase to take home with them, since even on the way to the Beijing airport you will sometimes see twenty or thirty sheep grazing along the side of the road, and once you get out into the country chickens are scratching their way around pretty much every yard. Needless to say, I was mistaken. Gravely mistaken: the animals weren't to buy and take away; the animals were for the people to buy and give to the tigers.

Yes, you read that right. The chickens were there to feed to the tigers, as were apparently a host of other animals that were too large to be displayed on the walkway in wire cages. We asked the guy with the chickens if this was true. He told us that not only it was true, but, if we so desired, we could buy a chicken right then and there and have it fed to the tigers as we watched. This, I thought, was an interesting proposition. On the one hand, I am generally against having any sort of creature killed for my or anyone else's amusement and I feel good about the fact that no animals are apparently harmed in the making of any movie ever; on the other hand, how many chances would I get to watch a tiger hunt its prey? And for only five dollars! I mean, in the States that sort of thing would cost at least forty or fifty bucks, if not more. And people still wonder why we have a trade imbalance with China—things are just so much cheaper here. Either way, we figured it was something we could truly only experience in China, and how could we pass up a deal like that?

As it turns out, we couldn't, and after giving him forty Renminbi, we found ourselves the proud if only very temporary owners of one Chinese chicken, which he picked out for us. For the record, I should say that he did offer to let us select our own chicken, but we deferred to what we presumed to be his superior chicken choosing knowledge. At this point, things took a turn for the unexpected, which they often seem to do in China. I had assumed he would simply toss the chicken over the fence, and the chicken would then proceed to dash pointlessly around the compound for ten or twenty seconds before being pounced on by whichever tiger happened to see it first.

That, however, was not the case. No, instead of simply launching the chicken to its admittedly grisly but hopefully not gristly fate, he clutched the chicken by the base of its wings, pressed it up against the fence, and swept it back and forth across the grating. As he did, the sound of the chicken's feet hitting the grating made a metallic clacking sound. While this sound meant nothing to me, it definitely meant something to the tigers, for whom it seemed to be the rough equivalent of a mom telling the roomful of children at her kid's seventh birthday party that it was time for cake, because the tigers came running, leaping over rocks, tree limbs, and each other until five of them were padding in circles below us like, well, a pack of hungry tigers. I was actually going to say sharks, but that would just be silly. Plus, sharks don't stare ravenously up at you with unblinking, saucer-big eyes as they wait to turn you or whatever you have to offer into a balanced part of a healthy diet. At least, I don't think sharks do that; I'm happy to say that I have no hands-on experience in such matters, not to mention no feet-on, thigh-on, or torso-on experience either.

The chicken seller stood there with an uncomfortably eager smile on his face—one that made me think he'd be happy to sell us as tiger food, if only he could figure out a way to do it—and dangled the squawking fowl up in the air until the tigers were in a frenzy, batting one another out of the way with their paws to get as close to us as possible. One even jumped up against the sidewall to try to snatch the chicken away before any of their brethren could get to it. Thankfully, the fence was very, very solid, although I backed up a few steps anyway, putting the chicken seller between me and the tigers. I mean, I like to think I'm nice and all, but after seeing the size of the claws on the jumping tiger as they raked over the metal barrier I'd decided that, when it comes to the possibility of being eaten by tigers, it's an "every man for himself" type of situation. Discretion is the better part of valor and all that. In any case, it didn't matter, because after a second tiger had launched himself at us, the chicken seller asked if it was now okay for him to send the chicken flying over the fence.

We said yes.

What happened next was a blur. Not because it was disturbing or disgusting, but because the tigers simply moved that quickly. Obviously I knew, or at least suspected, that tigers were quick—they are cats, after all—but I never would have thought something that weighed close to a quarter-ton could move so fast. As soon as the chicken cleared the fence, it was over. One tiger, the smart one apparently, had been crouched and ready to pounce while the other tigers milled around the snowy ground below us, and before those tigers could react to the sudden appearance of a mid-afternoon snack, the clever tiger was already airborne. It snatched the chicken out of mid-air in one fierce bite and, after taking a second to make sure it had a good grip, ran off with the screeching and obviously very much alive bird clenched between its jaws. All in all, the whole thing lasted for only four or five seconds, and possibly less.

The other tigers chased after the winning tiger for twenty feet or so before stopping all at once to sit and watch their cage-mate enjoy a paw-lickin' good meal, which sort of confused me. I mean, I figured they would at least fight over the chicken, like a rugby scrum where the ball just happened to be edible. I don't know if the smart tiger was also the most bad-ass tiger or if it was some unwritten rule of tiger dining etiquette or what, but from that point on none of the other tigers came close enough to even grab a stray chicken feather. Maybe because the first time one of the other tigers seemed like it might possibly be considering making the slightest move toward the feeding tiger, said tiger turned, bared all of its considerably large and sharp-looking teeth, and let loose a low, rumbling growl that made each and every one of the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stiffen like I was part porcupine. I'm guessing that's probably the answer.

But the really freaky thing was that, with apologies to all you friends of fowl out there, it was just a chicken. Remember, there were a wide variety of other animals that you could pay to have slaughtered by a pack of ravenous beasts as you watched. I mean, for just sixty US dollars you could do what the trolls couldn’t and turn any member of the Billy Goat Gruff clan into a nice, sensible meal. And if you were willing to dig deep and ante up roughly one-hundred and eighty bucks, you could send a cow to the same gruesome end for your personal viewing pleasure. That is, if you are the kind of sick, twisted bastard who enjoys pulling the legs off insects, torturing kittens, or listening to Celine Dion. And yes, those are all similar offenses, in my book. And this is literally my book, so there.

As it turns out, doing such a thing to a cow is even worse than it sounds, which is hard to believe but apparently possible. On the plane ride back to Beijing we sat next to someone whose friend had gone to Harbin earlier that year with his entire office to take in the wonders of the Snow and Ice Festival. Needless to say, they went to the tiger park as well. And, while at the park, their Chinese boss had apparently decided it would be a fun, team-building, and possibly morale-increasing activity for him to buy a cow so everyone he worked with could enjoy watching it be turned into its constituent parts. And you thought your office parties were bad.

It gets better, though. After paying, they found out that for almost two-hundred dollars you don't get a cow: you get a calf. A baby cow. A baby cow that was, very understandably less than pleased about being led to its death, bleating and lowing and scrambling to dig its hooves into the frozen ground as it was pushed into tiger pen. Not surprisingly, most people didn't watch, but for those who did—including the friend of the person we were talking to—the end came as quickly as it possibly could have for the poor beast, which is something at least. The workers who had put the cow in the pen, sacrificing it like they were ancient Greeks instead of contemporary Chinese, then somehow managed to scare off the tigers long enough to drag the carcass out of the enclosure, which couldn't have been pretty either, now that I think about it. And for the record, how one scares off a bunch of tigers that have the taste of blood is beyond both me and the scope of the airplane guy's story. I asked.

Why move the cow at all, though? I'm guessing it's because while a chicken qualifies as an appetizer, gorging on an entire cow would really screw up the feeding schedule, but I'm not sure. Either way, I'm glad we stuck with the chicken, which occupied the tiger for about five minutes before it loped off to do whatever it is that tigers do after snacking. If they're anything like me, they probably sit on the couch and watch Seinfeld reruns, but who knows. Not us, because as soon as the tiger got to its feet, we took one final look at the now feather-filled enclosure and made our way to the exit. A few minutes later we were in a cab and on our way back to Harbin proper, the tiger park gone but obviously not forgotten.

But what does this all mean, you ask? How does it relate to my theory that big cities are big cities, regardless of what continent you happen to be standing in? To be honest, I'm not completely sure. I'm an English major after all, not an anthropologist—sorry. I do know this however: the next time you're meandering through the twisted Medieval alleys of an ancient European capital or pushing through the crowded streets of a massive Asian supercity, sighing in despair every time you pass by a Starbucks or McDonalds, wondering if there is any place in the world that's different from what you know, anywhere left that feels exotic and unique, just pause for a second to think about the tigers of Harbin and remember that, no matter what you might think, you never know what's waiting for you, just around the corner.

Although, hopefully, it's not a tiger.