siberia

true story. my sydney grandfather has a brother. i only found out about this today. my father mentioned him in passing and i was a bit affronted that i hadn't known about him earlier (probably a byproduct of my indoctrination that knowledge is power). anyway he graduated from college during the earlier stages of the communist era. as it was back then, he was assigned to a workplace. his assignment turned out to be a medium-sized city in heilongjiang, the northernmost province of manchuria and china, situated across the amur river from siberia. having no say in the matter, he went there and worked for twenty years or so. during these twenty years he made it a point not to marry local girls, because they are ethnically and culturally distinct from han chinese (read: dark, short, ugly, manchu) and that just wasn't his steez. every year he had about a month's vacation off, during which he'd come back and chill in shanghai. one year he met a girl and they fell in love. they kept in touch and soon they were married. but she didn't want to go to heilongjiang, because "for ten or eleven months of the year it's so cold you have to wear one of those big russian hats" (source: my father). so for the next twenty years or so he worked in the north while she stayed in shanghai, raising their two children. during his vacations he'd come home to shanghai and chill.

damn.