Dr. Meyer will speak on her book, Life and Death in the Garden: Sex, Drugs, Cops, and Robbers in Wartime China, on Thursday, February 19th at 2pm at the Veteran's Center in Millett Hall. Refreshments will be served.
Dr. Meyer’s new work offers a harrowing tale of the lives of slum dwellers in war-torn China during the late 1930s and 40s. Her exploration of life at the edge offers a fresh look at the Second World War in Asia, and a striking ground-eye view of the desperate struggle between the Chinese, Japanese and Russians forces in northern-most China.
At the center of the slums of Harbin was the Garden of Grand Vision, where many had gone to find opportunity, or to escape the turmoil of China in civil war. Instead they found despair. Relief came in the form of heroin addiction. These people lived at the very bottom of Chinese society. Yet the Garden supported a vibrant informal economy. Rag pickers and thieves recycled everything from rat pelts to cigarette butts. Prostitutes entertained clients in the building’s halls and its back allies. Alongside the working girls, villains ran gambling operations.
Rumors that Chinese spies hid among the residents concerned the Japanese authorities. For this population lived in 1940s Manchukuo, the first Japanese conquest in what became the Second World War. Manchukuo was meant to be a showcase for Japanese modernity. The slum offered living proof of a different reality. Both concerns made the authorities send three police officers into the slums.
In the middle of war, three Japanese police officers travel into the underworld in Manchukuo, occupied China, to investigate crime and vice in the Harbin slums while their military leaders drag their nation deeper into the Pacific War. At the end of the war our three policemen face their own versions of hell. The Soviet army captured two of the investigators who spent five years in the gulag. The third was arrested three times by various Chinese armies before finally being released. Before returning home he was marched through the streets in front of jeering crowds, saw friends captured and executed, and once had to dig his own grave.
