In the winter of 1989 I visited Harbin, hoping to get a glimpse of what Manchuria has once been. After a few lazy days of looking at the Ice Lantern Festival and an Orthodox church, I visited a retirement home where a few aging foreigners were living. The information of such an institution might have come from the Lonely Planet guidebook or some other mundane source. Now, 16 years later, I can remember only a few of them, mostly the ones I talked to. There was an old Russian lady and also a man. The lady told me that the man had once murdered his wife with an axe. The Russian man himself was quite coherent. He came to Harbin during the Civil War and could not go back to Russia. He still had a brother somewhere in Siberia with whom he kept occasional contact. He even was going to go there at one point but, after a short visit, came back to Harbin. Beside them, there was also a lively American lady who was happy to chat with me. It came to me as a surprise that her mother was living in the same retirement home. I caught a glimpse of her walking around in the hallway, she did not want to talk. She must have been over ninety. I am sure that by now both of them are gone. The daughter, aged seventy, told me that she was born in Shanghai and had never been outside of China. She spoke fluent Shanghainese, Mandarin, and English. Her father had been a military man who left China during one of those wartime turmoils, whereas his wife and daughter could not get out of Shanghai in time.

I asked her if she ever tried going "back" to America. She replied that to her there was really nowhere to go there. She had no relatives there and it was a strange land. Once the American consul came to visit her and tried persuading her to move to the US but the project failed half way. Now she had no such aspirations and was destined to die in China. She said she was comfortable there, as I looked around the place in despair; they had food and heating. Occasionally water ran out or there was a power outage but it was still better than moving off to a strange land, even if it is supposedly your homeland. by Imre Galambos, 2005

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