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1936, Winter - Arrivals
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10 January: Finally arrived in Golmud. I’m staying at what is billed as one of the better hotels in town. Externally, the architecture is done in a Western style, presumably to attract the few tourists that come through here. The name translates as `Good Restings`, but the building is fairly ramshackle once you go inside. It feels like it is just barely a step up from a place you might read about in an American Western story. There’s even a chamber pot in the room in case you don’t feel like going down the hall to the communal flush. Not quite the Savoy, but good enough for what I feel like spending.
[size=-2]My hotel in Golmud. Bad plumbing, but decent electric and they handle telegrams[/size]
15 January: The big news over the wire today is that the Germans have sent military troops into the Rhineland. My understanding of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles is that this should have caused an immediate war with France and Britain, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case. Maybe the memories of the Great War are still strong enough that the major nations won’t just jump into another one quite so easily. I’m sure this episode will be a big boost to German national pride, as I expect any country would be humiliated to have to be told where you can and can’t have your troops. Besides which the French have been promoting their Maginot Line to the point that I don’t expect they care much what is on the other side.
2 February: I’ve started to become a patron of a public house within easy walking distance of the hotel. It’s run by a German fellow named Konrad Schmidt and is called The Americaine. Konrad explained that he tried to give it a pretentious name to catch the eye of locals who might be interested in Western culture. Of course, `pretentious` isn’t the precise word he used. Konrad’s English is pretty bad, and I’m starting to wonder if it would be easier for me to just start learning German to make it easier to speak with him. He doesn’t even try to pronounce `Americaine` correctly in French and just uses the German `Amerikaner` whenever he refers to it. Speaking of French, getting him to pronounce my name was fairly hopeless, so I agreed he could call me `Terry` if he wanted. I’m not overly thrilled with it but I like it slightly better than substituting `Jack` for `Jacques`. `Jack` just feels a little too... American, I guess.
Anyway, Konrad’s all right. It turns out he was also here back during the Great War with the Peking Legation, as part of the German forces, naturally. We don’t recall having seen each other back then, but it’s certainly a possibility we passed by on the street. Unlike me, when he mustered out of the German Army after the War he stayed in Peking and went into the public house business right off. There were plenty of German businesses still dealing in China throughout the 20s, most of them selling weapons to the various factions that popped up after the death of Yuan Shikai. However, the political situation got bad enough that it became too risky to try and do much business in Peking and a lot of the Germans pulled out. Konrad joined the general exodus but went to the (relatively) safer area here in western China rather than return to his native Bavaria. I asked him why he decided to remain here rather than go home, since he doesn’t exhibit much of an interest in the Chinese culture or language. He basically told me that in the latter days of the Weimar Republic and the worldwide Depression he didn’t think he’d be making much more money back home than he does here. I’m not entirely sure that’s the whole story, even though it seems reasonable. There’s a small picture of an attractive lady he keeps behind the bar and I haven’t been able to suss out who she might be since he won’t talk about her. The photo looks like it was taken in the `teens... but who knows.
[size=-2]Konrad Schmidt, owner of The Americaine[/size]
These days, Konrad’s main prides are his moustache and his booze. The main product is Tsingtao beer, and don’t bother too much about asking for anything else if you don’t like it. The brewery for this beer was founded by German settlers way back in 1903, so they could make sure the Peking Legation had all the comforts of home. It stayed under German ownership until the Japanese bought it out in 1916. Luckily for Konrad the Japanese are still willing to keep the taps open to all comers. Tsingtao itself is on the coast up in the Shandong peninsula. Right now Chiang’s government is in control of this region so Konrad hasn’t had too many issues with supply, but he happened to mention to me that things did get a little bad during the worst of the fighting earlier. For a couple of months during the Northern Expedition he wasn’t able to get any beer at all and had to close up shop. I asked him what he might do if the same situation happens again, and he just looked thoughtful and wasn’t able to give me an answer.
Something else Konrad does is show movies on a whitewashed wall of the public house whenever he can get a new film in. This brings in a lot of the locals who are curious to get some outside news, along with a lot of the expat community out here looking for the same thing. The first time I stopped by for a movie, Konrad made a point of introducing me to a lot of the Americans who also patronize his business. He was so proud of himself for making all these introductions I started to wonder if he thought maybe I’d never seen an American before, since he knew I came originally from Canada. There are quite a few of these men I am starting to know quite well.
Patrick `Paddy` O`Doul and Giovanni `Joe` Crosetti are in their early 20s and work in the local coal mine. Both sets of their parents emigrated to the United States right after the War and Paddy and Joe started working in the Pennsylvanian coalfields when they grew up. Although the mine out here isn’t large, the local government persuaded their company back out in the States to take a contract to help develop it. So Paddy & Joe went from swinging picks to supervising miners. Not too bad an advancement.
[size=-2]The shantytown housing Golmud’s mine workers[/size]
Frank Cho is of Korean descent but his family was living in San Francisco since the California Gold Rush days of the 1840s. His story seems a bit convoluted. If I understand it right, his parents sent him to Korea in 1920 to find himself a wife. Instead of finding a well-to-do Korean lady and going home, however, he skipped out on his family duty (the details of which aren’t clear to me), and went to Ulaanbaatar and married a Mongolian bride. These days he tells me he works in the provincial customs office dealing with the traffic back to Mongolia. Sounds like pretty easy work, since I know there isn’t much trade going on that way these days with all the high incidences of banditry that keep getting reported on the wireless. In fact, hardly a day goes by where you don’t hear news about this or that atrocity being done by such bandits or Mongolian border guards themselves. If you held credence with everything the wireless announced, you’d think that Mongolia was about to declare war at any moment and come swooping down with their Hordes just like Genghis Khan was reborn. I’ve asked Frank if all this talk upsets his wife, but he says she doesn’t pay it any attention.
Peter Frank is the only other Anglo-Saxon patron who is a regular at the moment. Konrad loves to joke about `Frahnk und Frahnk` when the two are together. He’s about my age and makes his money doing exporting from China to various other companies around the world. He tells me his biggest customer is Morton Salt, who buys up a lot of the salt that Golmud produces for export. His business keeps him traveling a lot, so we don’t see him much, but one side of this is he’s often the source of the films that Konrad shows. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen Peter pay for a drink at The Americaine, so I suspect Konrad thinks `movie night` is one of his biggest customer draws.
[size=-2]1931 Advertisement for Morton’s Salt (image courtesy Morton Salt Company)[/size]
Peter is the only guy here interested in Pinochle, so we try to play whenever he is in town. I’ve tried to get some of the others interested in bridge, so we can get a real gentleman’s game going, but they’ve proved hopeless so far. Still, I’ll keep at it.
23 February: I took a walk around the edge of town today looking for some possible landscape shots and saw some earthworks going up. It looks like the Mas are getting ready to defend the place, but from what? Surely they don’t listen to their own propaganda about Mongolia. It’s also a bit odd, since I remember seeing a fair amount of soldiers on the road as I came out here, and they were heading west, not east. The main mandate that Chiang gave the Mas was to hold the line against the Communists based around Yan`an, but there is nobody there at the border anymore. Presumably that means Mao could slip out any time he wanted- but to go where? The road is now open for him to retreat to Mongolia if he wished. This would get him closer to his base of support, which is Stalin, but it’s a bad area if he wants to spread Communism throughout China. The military situation out here is getting quite confusing.
When I came back to the hotel I found a bunch of correspondence had caught up to me at the telegraph office, so I’ll be busy tonight following up with that. I certainly should write to Henry yet again to get him to change his mind about including more photos in
Time magazine. People can’t pay to come to places like China, but I’m sure they’d be happy to pay to see it in a magazine if the pictures are done right.
6 March: An end was announced yesterday to the second Italo-Abyssinian war. The Italians won, as you might expect, and the Ethiopians agreed to take their directions from Rome... if `agree` is really the right word to use. Crosetti is bursting at the seams with pride and I haven’t had the heart to say anything to the contrary to him. It’s not like this is a really huge feat of Italian arms that will have the other major powers of Europe jumping if Mussolini snaps his fingers. Personally, I think the whole episode is a bit of an embarrassment, since with no disrespect to the Ethiopian Emperor, you might have expected a European power to defeat them far more quickly than they did. Still, Mussolini will have his day and Crosetti eats it up whenever he can catch a snippet of a speech on the wireless. He seems to switch between feeling Italian or American as the mood takes him.
18 March: A new Chaplin film came in today,
Modern Times. I must have seen this scamp character of his a hundred times, and each still feels as funny as the first. I’m sure mom has watched this one a dozen times by now, he’s aces for her. I’m wondering now when was the last time we watched a film of his together... was it
Gold Rush? Either way it’s good to get a real taste of home once in a while- and since I don’t expect anyone here to be doing Shakespeare or Gilbert & Sullivan any time soon, Chaplin is as good a taste as any.
[video=youtube;CReDRHDYhk8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CReDRHDYhk8[/video]
It turns out that he’s a pretty popular character over here, which makes sense since physical comedy transcends language and often culture. The Americaine was pretty packed, which helps Konrad maintain his bottom line, I’m sure. He ended up showing it more than once that first night, since some of the locals were more than willing to stay up late to watch it again. All the laughter just reminds me how close we all are down inside, no matter where we may be from.
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