Where Souls Rest

203 Highland sleeps in the belly of a criminal.  There are empty, dirty secrets behind the bushes and trees.  As I walk up towards the top of the hill, the mists curl around my waist in what seems to be an increasingly wet journey through Liaoning Province.  I feel slightly claustrophobic in the clouds and cannot tell if I am floating through the vapor, or if it is floating through me.  I find myself turning into the ghosts that I don’t even believe in.  The hill is not so tall, 203 meters above sea level, and so named “203 Highland.”  It is an empty stomach.  The mists are acidic fluid.  I am a sinner.  The souls of the dead have been digested.  Something horrible has happened here, or something horrible is about to happen.  I can’t tell.  The mists thicken, the clouds can’t hold the moisture.  Rain.

Pit-pat-pit-pat-pit-pat…I continue up the hill, stepping over running rivulets, and pass a short, squat cannon on one side.  It is of Japanese craftsmanship, and it’s shape reminds me of the Colombian artist, Botero^W who made his figures disproportionately round and fat.  Fleshy.  On the other side of the path there is a Russian made cannon, long and slender with purpose like a ballet dancer.  Markers for spots where officers fell in agony dot the way up the hill, which has turned into a tomb.  The closer I get to the top of the hill, the more the weather deteriorates.  I continue through the mist, and then I see IT.  There is a respite of precipitation and up ahead of me I clearly see a large bullet standing erect at the top of the highland, a looming deathstar monolith.

After the Russo-Japanese War came to its bloody conclusion and Imperial Japan was on the rise, the “ringleader of Japanese militarism Maresuke Nogi^W renamed this hill ‘Er Ling Hill’ as per its pronunciation of 203, and built Er Ling Hill Tower in height of 10.3 meters made by cannonball shell and wasted weapon remained in the period of the war shaped like bullet of Japanese bow gun for the criminal purpose to sacrifice the soul of a deceased Japanese soldiers and deceive Japanese people” (203 Hill introduction sign).  During the Russo-Japanese War approximately 20,000 soldiers died in the battle of 203 Highland  in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the war.  The estimates hover around 7,000 Russian soldiers, and more than 10,000 Japanese soldiers.

I walk up to the eery, ghost-green bullet.  On IT are written the characters for “Er Ling Shan,” which sound like the Chinese characters for “203,” but if written another way, they mean “Where Souls Rest.”  The deathbullet supposedly houses the souls of the Japanese who fell during the battle.  I walk up to the rusty monument and approach it slowly.  Death surrounds me everywhere.  Looking up at the copper green bullet in the swirling mist, I feel a slight shiver.  Touch it.  Touch it.  The voice echoes in my head.

I reach out and touch the base of the monument.  Cold.  Lifeless.  No pity.

There are sounds of Japanese tourists approaching.  A small group of middle-aged Japanese men and women walk up towards the bullet.  I watch them gaze up through past their umbrellas and middle-aged eyes.  I make my way towards them and attempt to speak a bit of Japanese that I pull out of the file cabinet in my brain from seven years before.

“Afternoon,” I say.

“Afternoon….you can speak Japanese?”  The man has a thin face.  He wear’s a kind of baseball hat, the brand of which I fail to remember.  Next to him is an older genteleman with grey hair and horn-rimmed glasses.

“A little.  Are you having a good trip?”  I ask.  It’s hard for me to remember any Japanese on this hill for some reason.

“Good….Been to Japan before?” the thin-faced man asks me.

“Yes, I used to live in Niigata^W for one year.  The girls there are pretty,” I smile, remembering my ex-girlfriend Mayumi.  The smile is also pride for the fact that I can remember how to say this.

“Ah, yes.  Niigata beauties.  Famous for that.  Why do you come here?”

“History,” I say.  I’m falling in the pit of wordlessness again.  He says something I cannot understand.  I need to end this conversation.

“Anyway….uh…have a good trip,” I say.  I give my best attempt at a bow.  He bows back automatically.

Walking down the hillside I decide to purchase a couple of t-shirts from the souvenir stand.  One of them simply states “203 Highland.”  Behind the characters there are 3 communist stars.  The other shirt is a poem about the horrific battle written by a Japanese officer.  I don’t understand most of the characters, but can guess at its starkness based on the fact that each line is separated by an image of barbed wire.  The salesgirl at the T-shirt stand on 203 hill speaks to me in Japanese.

“What size are you sir?” she asks.

I feel the gears in my head click and stall.  At first I don’t know what to say.  It’s strange to have a Chinese speaking Japanese to me, and I’m caught between the gears.

“I’m not Japanese, you know,” I answer in Chinese.  “But we can speak Japanese if you want to,” I switch to Japanese.

The gear problem switches from myself to the salesgirl, and she takes a moment to process what I’ve just said.

“Oh…um…maybe a large for you, then.”  She is back in her salesgirl mode.

I purchase the t-shirts and walk down the hill, past the cannons and the spirits that don’t exist.  The bullet disappears again in the mist.  In the afternoon I visit various other war sites including a prison originally built by the Tsarist invaders.  It was later expande and equipped with a torture room and secret chamber for hanging prisoners during the Japanese period of occupation.

My last site to visit is another war memorial called “White Jade Mountain.”  Much like the 203 highland, the top of the hill for the Jade tower ends in a monument that was built with forced labor as a home for the Japanese war dead.  After the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, “Heihachiro Togo, Commander of the Japanese joint fleet and Nogi Maruske^W, Commander of the Japanese third army corps chose (this spot) as the site to build the “Loyalty Tower,”….Chinese craftsmen and migrant workders, actually ranging from 2000 to 3000 people at that time, were press-ganged into doing reserve labor” (Baiyun Tower sign introduction).  The tower itself reminds me of a slightly less sinster verson of the deathbullet at the top of 203 Highland.  One similarity is the shape of the structure.  From far away, it also resembles a bullet.

Bullets.  Loyalty.  The two of them just don’t seem right together.  I can’t imagine a bullet symbolizing anything else but its function:  to kill.  Death.  Looking up to the tower, I’m haunted by the green bullet of 203 Highland and see an image of my own cousin, Chiara, whose life was stolen by a bullet years before.  She wasn’t taken in a battle or a war, not even a fight, really.  She was taken by a careless youth who aimed with intent to kill an opposing gang member.  He missed his mark.  The bullet entered my cousin’s head.  She was in a car, probably frightened by what was happening outside. That emotion, fear, may have been the last thing she ever felt.  I don’t know.  How can I know?   She was 22 years old and we were told she felt no pain.  How does anyone know that?  Who knows what the dead feel when no one has the power to communicate with them?  If those who have passed knew that the only things standing to remember them were large bullets on the tops of misty hills accompanied by cannons and other instruments of death, how would they feel?  My cousin has a rock outside of a courthouse with her name engraved on it in Boston, the city where she died.  Her rock is surrounded by other engraved rocks of those who have died bullet-induced deaths, including the Kennedy brothers.  She has a grave.  There are trees, pieces of artwork, and a college scholarship, all dedicated in her name.  For all this dedication and loyalty to her memory, she is gone.  I feel lost walking past another slender Russian ballet-cannon towards the bottom of the slope.  I miss my cousin.  I think about her and life’s brevity every week.  There’s nothing I can do to stop time, and I don’t believe in ghosts.  Still, they surround me, and I let them inside.  Lushun brings out the past for anyone who’s wiling to walk into the mist.

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