Hamas TV

Gaza Photo Op

North Korea, nearly

LEISURE & ARTS
The Mobile Guide: Sin City on the Yalu Stars Venus in Furs
By Craig S. Smith

23 May 1996
The Wall Street Journal

Dandong, China -- Bobbing midstream in a crippled Russian speedboat 40 yards from hungry North Korea, I cursed the woman in the white fur miniskirt for her racy nightclub act the night before. The train I was supposed to catch was already huffing into the station beneath a towering statue of Chairman Mao, and I knew as the speedboat pilot pulled open the engine cover -- stenciled with Cyrillic letters and spattered from the inside with thick, black oil -- that the train would leave without me.

Fifteen years ago, when I first visited northeastern China, it was a deadly boring wasteland, the only spectacle an occasional steam engine blowing billows of bright white steam. An evening's entertainment consisted of picking pebbles out of the rice at dinner. The lights were out by 8 p.m.

These days, the cities are filled with cabarets and clean, well-lit restaurants, though many of them serve dog. High-speed trips on the Yalu River to within a holler of North Korea make even the border town of Dandong an entertaining destination.

But as the wind cut through me, pushing us gently toward the machine-gun-toting soldiers patrolling the North Korean shore, my enthusiasm waned. Our pilot removed the boat's floor, crowding me and my companion toward the prow. Behind us the steel fretwork of a bridge ended ominously halfway across the river where it was severed by American bombs more than 40 years ago.

My adventure had begun securely enough, bouncing in a car as it crossed the mountains on the winding road from Shenyang. By evening, my hosts -- provincial-government employees -- were ready to show me Dandong. "The Korean girls, the Korean girls," they repeated mysteriously as we drove down a dark lane. A green neon sign and a line of shiny cars, BMWs and Cadillacs among them, announced our destination. Inside, a woman behind a counter distributed keys.

The place turned out to be a sauna, operated by South Koreans. Wet sauna, dry sauna, icy bath, scalding bath, all in a vast marbled chamber crowded with chatting, mostly naked men. Later, we lounged on easy chairs in a dimly lit room while a bloody Hong Kong kung fu movie played on a large video screen. The only women were those serving tea, something my morose hosts attributed to President Jiang Zemin's recent anticorruption drive. I was relieved.

It was midnight, and I was ready to retire. But, my hosts insisted, the night was still young. Dandong, a city of 2.5 million people, has half a dozen nightclubs and they were all going strong. I agreed, hesitantly, to take a look.

Then I saw the woman in the white fur miniskirt, more a fringe than a skirt really, and I knew I would have to stay and see the show. She wore a gauzy top, with only a little glitter sprinkled on for cover, and did a wonderful dance. Her head slid to one side while her eyes slid to the other, her fur-cuffed hands pressed together in front of her, Thai style. She winked above her dimpled smile and the crowd, as they say, went wild.

This wasn't mere tacky titillation, nor an amateurish routine. This certainly wasn't the drab northeast I had known so long ago. This was Tian Da, Dandong's hottest club, packed with the city's most affluent young people, as hip as anybody in Hong Kong or even New York. Introducing the next act was a man wearing a black baseball cap, a metallic plate across its crown emblazoned with the letters DKNY.

Onto the floor strode a tall, thin woman with an arched back and a square face. Dressed in skintight red shorts and a sequined tube top, her only prop was an oversized white-lacquered mock cigarette with a red light at the end. She turned in the spotlight, posed and pouted. Her back, as unnaturally long as an Ingres odalisque, awed the crowd. And then she was gone.

The spotlight went out, the dance lights went up and the man in the DKNY hat grabbed his mike and shouted: "Cha-cha!" A woman sitting next to me grabbed my hand. Cha-cha? I vaguely remembered watching my parents practice the cha-cha in the living room when I was five years old. But before I could count one, two, cha-cha-cha, I was stumbling on the dance floor trying to keep up with a crowd that had clearly done this before. Later, although I had trampled her toes, my dancing partner offered to show me the river after lunch the next day.

That is how I happened to be in a Russian speedboat, hired for a $1.50 spin on the river. The boats are popular with curious South Koreans who idle along the shore for short, shouted conversations with their hollow-cheeked North Korean cousins.

At first, the ride seemed worth it: From midstream, the two banks present a graphic display of China's growing economic might and North Korea's slow Stalinist implosion. The Chinese side is lined with tall, gleaming new buildings, while the North Korean shore has only drab, red-brick structures built decades ago. But then there was a pop from the engine, smoke on the water and the smell of burning oil.

If I hadn't seen the woman in the white fur miniskirt, I reflected, I wouldn't have danced the cha-cha and wouldn't have ended up in a broken boat far from my train. I gathered the collar of my green cotton greatcoat closer around me and heard a locomotive's whistle in the wind. Finally, the pilot smiled, the engine caught and we were on our way back to China.

---

Mr. Smith is a reporter in the Journal's China bureau.

China, circa 2000

I took this picture from a hotel room in Beijing. It reminds me of my early days in China, before the development when the hutongs were still relatively intact. I spent a lot of time in courtyard houses like this in the early 1980s.

They were not insulated at all and were heated with little iron stoves that burned coal powder bricks and poured thick, yellowish smoke out of stovepipes all over the city. That smoke always made me think of the T.S. Eliot line about "yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes."

More from the same window.

Anna and I stayed in a little hotel years ago in a courtyard much like the one painted red and green here. I remember it had a very cheap plastic telephone with a cartoon character on it and a crude toiletry kit from one of the old state-owned enterprises. I saved the kit as an artifact of those disappearing days. I don't know if we still have it.

My photographer, Ritsu, took this picture soon after I switched newspapers. I always liked it, even though I wasn't there when she took it. It was a scene with which I was very familiar.