Volume 49, Number 9 · May 23, 2002
There Were Worse Places
By Jonathan Mirsky
Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora of Communities of Shanghai
by Marcia Reynders Ristaino
Stanford University Press, 369 pp., $60.00
In the mid-1980s I made occasional trips to Harbin in Manchuria to report on the Orthodox White Russians who lived there, the remnant of a community that had fled from the new Soviet Union after the revolution. There were once so many of them that parts of Harbin resembled a Russian city. But the upheavals of the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution, emigration, and death had reduced the community to a few dozen by the time I arrived. They attended a restored church with an onion dome where the priest, a handsome young Chinese with a basso profundo voice, was feared by his congregation, who told me they suspected him of being a police spy.
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