As soon as my kids got out of school for the Spring Festival (mid-February), I stuffed them in the car and headed up to Harbin to see the Ice Festival. We passed a village on Route 202 called 拉林 (lālín), and it crossed my mind that with a little phonetic change, maybe it used to be Lolo, the village mentioned in the opening sentence of The Book of the Nisan Shaman. On the way back I stopped there to get some snacks and found that it was a Manchu village and there was Manchu writing on signs everywhere. Continue reading Where is Lolo?