In Manchuria (14 page)

History started then.

“The wind is huge today,” Auntie Yi said. “It comes all the way from Mongolia. Once it passes, the weather will get better. What did your wife say about the weather in Hong Kong? Sunny and hot? Isn’t it amazing that one country can have so many climates? Down south you have green trees and flowers blooming, and here it’s all snow and my poppies are frozen.”

Her husband turned from the television and watched her with obvious affection.

“You know,” she continued unbidden, “when I was a little girl, I lived in a village closer to Jilin named Sand Creek. There were rolling hills everywhere, so we made sleds out of branches and scrap and we would be happy to see snow, because we could sled all day. I didn’t have winter shoes—I wore cloth shoes just like these—and my clothes were all patched up, and I would come home with my face all red, but only when it was time to eat. Do you know what we ate back then?”

Countryside reminiscences often swung around to food.

“Corn and flour fried with soybeans, and a little pickled radish, and sometimes potatoes. In summer it was cucumber, peppers and eggplant, and cabbage, of course. That’s what we could grow. We never had meat except at New Year’s, and it was a slice of pork. We never received a red envelope of money as a gift. Where could commoners get money? This was in the
1940
s, before Liberation. My grandchildren are living in a different time.”

I asked Auntie Yi which of her relatives migrated to the Northeast and when. “I’m here because my ancestors were hungry!” she said with a laugh. “They were in Shandong province, and it was a famine. What year? There was always a famine down there; the year doesn’t even matter. Famine Year. How’s that?”

Uncle Fu laughed and shot me a look that asked,
Isn’t she something?

“Two brothers left the village carrying only their knapsacks and walked for a year until they crossed the Great Wall and entered the Northeast. They got into a fight; no one can say why. No one can even say the village they came from. They split up, and one kept walking north, ending up in Jilin city. I don’t know what happened to the other brother. The one in Jilin hauled corn and sorghum on his back, transporting it. He saved enough to buy a horse and cart, and he could transport more. He bought land around here and rented out huts to other laborers.”

This was her grandfather, who grew corn. “We were fortunate. We always had corn flour, and under our roof’s thatch and tree branches we stuffed corncobs for insulation. But it was still cold; every spring around this time, we’d coat the walls with new layers of mud. In winter the walls would bubble from frost, and mice infested the ceiling.”

Auntie Yi’s raised her hands, wiggling her fingers like ten busy creatures.

Her grandfather opened a grain store in a town near here, but across the Songhua River. “He told me that this land where our house is now used to be underwater. He said they used to weave reed baskets and pole over here in a little skiff to trap carp in the shallows. The water was clear and you could see right to the sandy bottom. In winter they would break the ice and reach down to pluck frogs and sleeping bullheads. Like this!”

Her hand darted at my knee. Uncle Fu flinched in surprise, too. We both laughed.

“You sound really tired of telling these stories,” I teased Auntie Yi. But my sarcasm eluded her.

“No!” she said, suddenly serious. “I never tell these stories. Who would I tell them to?”

Everyone out here, Uncle Fu added, already knew everything.

CHAPTER
6

Grain Rain

No one could say when winter would finally end, or what Eastern Fortune rice had planned for Wasteland. A cold drizzle continued through the end of April. San Jiu said this year’s planting would be later than any in his lifetime; usually the rice seedlings went into the ground before May. But ice still filled the paddies’ furrows. Then the rain stopped overnight, and the landscape turned from silver white to black mud. Only the distant foothills showed a hint of green.

A worker who didn’t recognize me on Red Flag Road asked the usual questions
—American
,
I answered.
1
.
86
meters
,
Year of the Rat
—then said he was from Mud Town. He came to prune the Manchurian ash trees lining the road. After a winter of pummeling gales, the branches bowed in one direction. He worked alone, with a handsaw and wooden ladder. Eastern Fortune Rice hired him to make the road look nice, he said. Three days later he had completed all two miles of the trees, on both sides of the road, which was now marked with a sign pointing the direction to the company’s office—
NEW AGRICULTURE/NEW COUNTRYSIDE/NEW FARMERS
—and its Shennong (Divine Farmer) Hot Spring, named for the mythological emperor who bestowed agriculture to the Chinese.

Auntie Yi, standing off the road amidst the tall stems of her unopened poppies, said with a snort: “A private company is taking care of our Socialist road and named its resort after a god.”

But I liked the hot spring’s name, which sounded better than Red Star, or Laborer’s Number Seven Leisure District, or other clunky Communist-era monikers. In the
1960
s, Wasteland had been renamed the Ninth Platform Commune.

“You watch,” Auntie Yi said. “Before long, Eastern Fortune Rice will control everything here. They’ll probably even rename the town.”

“To what?”

“Who knows?”

Shennong, the legendary Divine Farmer, is also said to be the founder of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and is renowned for testing the effects of herbs by ingesting them and watching their effects inside his transparent body. For an antidote, he drank another of his discoveries, this one accidental: tea. Legend said that burning twigs of a tea bush sent scorched leaves floating upward, landing in his cauldron of boiling water.

I liked that story, too, and how, even if it was via the name on a new hot spring resort off a road named Red Flag, rural China still spun folk tradition. In the cities, most of that had long been razed and forgotten. None of my Beijing students had known about the fox spirit said to live in the old wall towers, or the legend of Beijing’s layout itself, resembling the body of a deity who slew a dragon that lived in the area. In a way, even the countryside’s recent eras were sliding into that realm. Painted on the redbrick houses around Auntie Yi’s, you could make out the fading characters from
1980
announcing the village as a “Red Defender.” To the west we could see the rusting gate of the Rejuvenate China Farm, an abandoned collective from the
1970
s. One brick wall of its former storehouse remained, punctured by a window missing several panes of glass, framing a horizon of paddies.

On her
kang
, from under a stack of cross-stitching magazines, Auntie Yi pulled out the oversize calendar Eastern Fortune Rice gave to each village home during the Lunar New Year holiday. “It’s an advertisement, really,” she said. “The company wants farmers to sign over their land and houses and move to the new apartments.”

The calendar’s pages included the ancient poem “Sympathy for Peasants,” a reminder to appreciate the labor that goes into a bowl of rice, still invoked by parents ordering children to finish their meals:

A peasant weeding at noon,

His sweat drips to the field soon.

Anyone with rice on a tray,

Owes it to his toiling day.

Yet the accompanying photos were of Eastern Fortune’s threshers and polishing machines. Another picture showed seated farmers being lectured. “The company likes to give advice,” Auntie Yi explained. Each month on the calendar was headlined with a suggestion, written as a rhyming couplet, such as:
Reflect on the past months / and sign contracts at once
.

Even in rhyme, that sounded pushy. Auntie Yi said she would never move.

The security guard at the entrance to Divine Farmer Hot Spring smiled as I approached. “No one walks here,” he said. “Where’s your car?”

The driveway ran straight for a quarter mile, past the billboard showing then Chinese president Hu Jintao touching a can of Big Wasteland rice on his visit, then past fallow paddies and a greenhouse until I reached the Manchu Villa Area. Here visitors could dress up in silk robes and coronets and pose in a replica of a traditional Manchu three-sided courtyard home. It was exactly the sort of site I had expected, and I saw why my Manchu roommate and our neighbors never came here.

I entered the humid greenhouse. A middle-aged man emerged from the rows of lush green trellises. He was worried about fungus, he said, by way of introduction. Powdery mildew in particular: it was attacking his organic cucumbers. During the rice-growing season he lost sleep thinking about insects and birds, especially swallows, and what they were wreaking on the insecticide-free fields. This time of year was supposed to be less stressful. But then powdery mildew showed up.

The football field–size greenhouse was a recently added attraction to the hot spring, since visitors from the city liked picking their own organic fruit and vegetables. “Kids don’t know how to do it,” the gardener said with a frown. “They’ll look at a tomato vine and yank on the entire thing instead of gently twisting off each tomato. They kick the melons like they’re soccer balls.”

I looked at the trellises. “Is this soil from Wasteland?”

He nodded. “Our black earth is the best.” But he worried for how long, since recent tests of Wasteland’s soil showed levels of heavy metals that were approaching the allowable limit for a crop to be certified organic. “The soil is safe, but I worry a lot,” he said. “Farmers are like that. We always worry.”

“You said
farmer
, not
gardener
.”

He laughed. “At this hot spring I’m called the Head Gardener. Tourists don’t want to eat food raised by any old farmer.”

We walked around the outdoor springs, steaming in the cold April air. A wide, shallow communal pool the size of a putting green led to smaller, individual soaking areas. Wicker chaise longues were set out before a thatched-roof bar and a bamboo-walled teahouse. It looked like an upscale resort imported from southern, coastal China.

“It’s modeled after a Japanese design,” the gardener said.

Children’s shrieks and splashes echoed from the covered Olympic-size swimming pool. We stepped along its slippery edge—the gardener first checking that our shoe soles were clean—then entered the resort’s cavernous reception area. Robed parents in shower sandals tried herding kids wearing rubber flotation rings. They broke free and ran, full speed, into the furniture and potted plants: bumper kids. The posted prices showed that a day in the water cost
120
yuan
($
20
), while a night in the cheapest hotel room cost
288
yuan
($
47
). The most expensive went for double that price.

“That room includes a mah-jongg table,” the gardener noted.

“The entrance ticket to use the pool costs nearly as much as renting a thresher to cut a paddy of rice,” I said.

“But to someone who lives in the city, it’s cheap.”

“How is this good for Wasteland’s residents?”

“As Eastern Fortune profits, the village profits,” he replied. “It’s true that locals don’t come here, but we don’t eat all the food we grow, either. We sell it to people in town, in the region, and across our nation. We’re not a dead-end street anymore.”

Wasn’t it better, the gardener added, to build a place where a city kid could come and exercise and eat organic produce instead of going to a shopping mall with fast food?

“Sure, if local kids can use it, too.”

“Do you want to get in the water?” the gardener asked. “Wasteland teachers only have to pay half price.”

I said I was afraid of leaving a dirt ring around the pool. The gardener nodded and went back to worrying over powdery mildew. As I left, he jogged after me, calling, “Organic tomatoes!” I carried the heavy sack up Red Flag Road toward home. The view showed yellow cranes adding the fifth and final floor to the new apartments.

May turned, bringing the solar term named the Beginning of Summer. Meltwater filled the irrigation ditches, and the tall birches that lined them budded green. For Wasteland, a more fitting solar term name was the Awakening of Frogs. Their pulsing croaks filled the area, loud enough for me to wonder if
frogsong
was a word in Chinese.

San Jiu said no. He didn’t even hear the frogs, just as a city dweller stopped hearing traffic. “I dare not say I turn my back on the natural world, because I’m a farmer, obviously,” he said. “But farmers worry about nature, about things we can’t control. You don’t want floods, or drought, or insects, or anything. You want a quiet summer without any trouble. You want nature to mind its own business.”

I saw Wasteland’s landscape as natural. San Jiu knew it was manufactured. “This was all underwater until the
1950
s,” he said, waving at the paddies. “Everything you see was shaped or made by a human. The black earth was here, but only after the marshes and shallows were drained. It was tilled by hand, and tilled again, and fertilized, and so on. Look, the road—cement; the electric poles—timber; those houses—brick; the irrigation channels—cement; the pump house—iron and brick.”