Authors: Michael Meyer
In Manchuria (3 page)
I know his given name, but have always called him San Jiu. He is a sixty-six-year-old ruddy-cheeked man who never seems to age but rather hardens, like the Manchuria ash lining Red Flag Road. He still opens beer bottles with his teeth, shoulders fifty-pound sacks of seed, and weeds his paddy by hand, stooping low in the muck. He smokes Changbaishan, a brand named for the perpetually snow-covered peaks on this province’s border with North Korea. The name translates as Ever-White Mountains, but when we share one together, I just see a lump of tar.
“It’s your Christmas, right?”
“In two days,” I reply.
“My wife is gone tonight,” he says, resolute. “So we can drink.”
San Jiu fills two rice bowls with Snow brand beer (often the only cups in a farmer’s home are for tea). After he finishes his bowl, he splashes in a bit of the hard stuff from a plastic gallon jug and sips loudly. None is offered: San Jiu remembers the last time he served me sorghum liquor.
That was seven years ago, when I had visited Wasteland for the first time. I was alone, on a
National Geographic
assignment about historical Manchuria. After rolling two hours east from the provincial capital of Changchun on a bus that smelled of feet, the driver pulled to the edge of the two-lane road, stared out the windshield into the darkness, and said, gravely: “Are you sure you want to get off here?”
After he pulled away, I stood alone in the subzero air, regretting the decision. There were no taxis, no dumpling restaurants or shops to wait inside—no streetlights, even. A calf-high granite slab said, in Chinese characters, that I had arrived in Wasteland.
With chattering teeth, I walked up Red Flag Road under a black dome thick with stars. The Big Dipper bent low over snow-covered paddies. Complete silence. Plumes of breath. The smell of burning rice stalks wafting from chimneys. San Jiu stood on the road with a flashlight, waiting. He led me to his house and into a room full of people raising glasses over a table full of steaming food.
“What if I moved here?” I had asked, after too many shots of
120
-proof liquor.
“You live in Beijing!” he said. “Everyone wants to be there. No one moves here.”
But I could,
I thought, keeping the notion to myself.
After dinner, San Jiu stretched me on the
kang
next to him. We slept side by side, as rigid as mummies. Through the night, I dreamed of moving to Manchuria.
But I had stayed in Beijing, living in the capital’s oldest neighborhood with several Chinese families in a courtyard home that lacked heat, hot water, and a toilet. Beijing was tearing down its traditional lanes—
hutong
—at the heart of its Old City, and before it vanished I wanted to experience a life that tourists, foreign students, and journalists (I had been, in order, all three) only viewed in passing. For two years I taught English in the local elementary school and to retired seniors, giving me a purpose and place in the community. Life in the lanes was not postcard pretty—poverty never is—as I wrote in
The Last Days of Old Beijing
, a book detailing the neighborhood’s layered history and daily routines. Much of what I saw on my
hutong
had Manchu origins, including the bamboo whistles fastened to the feet of the pet pigeons that dopplered mournfully overhead every afternoon; the names of lanes with
banner
in them, for a military division; the silk cheongsam (
qipao
, “banner robe”) dresses being hand-sewn at the tailor’s; and the Peking opera clanging at all hours on my elderly neighbor’s television.
Throughout those years, I held Wasteland in reserve. The dominant narrative of modern China is told from its capital and coastal cities. Those shiny cities! Those new cities! Those Olympics-hosting cities! Those car-choked, class-divided, and overcrowded cities! Most foreign correspondents live in cities, and Chinese writers have long focused on urbanity and urban intellectuals—one reason some contemporary Chinese scholars feel that Pearl Buck’s
1931
novel
The Good Earth
should be taught as Chinese literature.
I had written about change in urban China, and now I wondered how the other half lived. The sheer numbers of people moving off farms to urban centers had me picturing fields going to seed, as if farmers had tossed down their scythes to hop a passing bus and never return. I imagined empty houses illuminated by left-on televisions, and cows mooing plaintively with full udders.
In
1993
, the U.S. Census stopped counting American farmers: the demographic had become “statistically insignificant,” as less than
2
percent of the population lives on a farm. But in China nearly half the country—some
700
million people—still lives in rural areas such as Wasteland. That number was plummeting: since
2000
, a quarter of China’s villages had died out, victims of migration or the redrawing of municipal borders to encompass surrounding hamlets, meeting national urbanization targets. Though it sat twenty miles and an hour’s bus ride away, Wasteland was recently folded into the Jilin city limits, retaining its name and—on paper, at least—offering residents the chance to become urbanites.
I knew that in the Northeast I could explore China’s past. I didn’t expect that in Wasteland I would glimpse the nation’s future.
By
2011
, China had spent more years dismantling a Marxist society than building one. Wasteland faces a new, unknown economic phase: becoming a company town.
Its largest business, Eastern Fortune Rice, began in
2000
, when two village partners planted the same short-grain sticky rice as their neighbors. The variety is commonly used in sushi, though Chinese eat it as a side dish. But unlike their hidebound neighbors, Eastern Fortune’s founders experimented. They tested different seed varieties and for the first time in Wasteland grew an organic crop.
By the third harvest, government ministries began serving the rice—branded Big Wasteland—at official banquets. In
2007
, China’s then president, Hu Jintao, visited the village and Eastern Fortune’s headquarters. A massive photo of him inspecting production hangs at the entrance to the company’s new hot spring resort, which on weekends attracts a steady stream of city day-trippers who trail the jetstream of trash down Red Flag Road. The hot spring’s
120
yuan
($
20
) entrance fee equals what local farmers earn in a fortnight.
Initially my neighbors were happy when the company announced it would buy their rice crop at above market prices and hire them to work the polishing and packaging machines it imported from Japan. As the company profited, so did the village. In the previous seven years, the number of farmers contracting their fields to Eastern Fortune doubled. The company provided rice seed and guaranteed payment of
15
,
500
yuan ($
2
,
500
) for a family’s harvest.
That figure was twice as much as the average Chinese farmer earned annually. Eastern Fortune had contracted nearly all of Wasteland’s five square miles of paddies, though a few families, including San Jiu’s, still held out.
A skyline is sprouting. At the end of Red Flag Road stand cranes and the shells of five-story walk-up buildings. Eastern Fortune is offering apartments in exchange for farmers’ homes, which will be razed and the land converted to paddies. Few have agreed to move: giving up their homes means losing a garden and chicken coop, which allows for self-sufficiency and a secondary income. It also takes many families’ homes off the land itself, contrary to the traditional belief that health emanates from “being in contact with the earth’s energy.” And the elderly are worried about climbing stairs to a third-, fourth-, or even fifth-story apartment. Lastly, moving off the land means betting that the price of rice will not skyrocket by the end of the agreement. The amount promised by Eastern Fortune was, in effect, a futures contract: what seems fair today might not seem that way next year. Grain prices, like real estate, continue to soar.
The apartment project’s multicolored, laser-printed billboard shows a purling stream, renamed the Revere Gentry River, an incongruously feudal term for a collectively owned farming community. Its rendition is crowned with lotuses and bordered by willow trees and apartments with indoor plumbing and central heat. The people in this future scene sit on benches and stroll under trellises with children and lovers wearing blouses and skirts and T-shirts and jeans. They look and act nothing like Wastelanders. At least, not yet.
The
kang
’s heat has me peeling layers of clothing, and San Jiu’s cheeks are pink from the lukewarm Snow beer, bottles of which he pulls from a plastic crate beneath the round table. I dread a run outside to the toilet.
When San Jiu goes first, I notice a book atop the bureau, titled
Farmer Lawsuits
. It contains three hundred answers to questions that include
Can the village committee profit from individual farmer’s land?
(No.);
Does the village committee have to make its books open to the public?
(Yes.);
Is it true that hitting one’s wife and child is the home’s concern, not the village’s?
(No.); and
Do farmers have the right to petition the national government?
(Yes.). I am half expecting to read
Does winter bring the biggest change in temperature?
when San Jiu returns and says, “That book wasn’t so useful. I knew all of that.”
He switches on the television, showing the national broadcast of the
7
:
00
news. We sit with shoulders touching on the
kang
. One of the lead reports details the government’s measures to rein in inflation. As it does every week at our shared meal, the mention of money leads San Jiu to ask me the price of gasoline in the United States. “What about pork? A bottle of corn oil?” For the next half hour we recount the cost of garlic, the cost of chives, the amount for tuition, the cost of rent. Everything is up, he says.
“Including the price of rice,” I say. “That’s good for you.”
“Seed is up, fuel is up, water is up, electricity is up. It’s funny that the only thing that’s gone down is taxes.”
In
2006
, for the first time in its history, China abolished all taxes on farmers.
The landline telephone rings. San Jiu lifts the receiver. His side of the conversation sounds like this:
[Ring] Uh!
Uh?
Uhhh.
Uh. [Click]
There is no Chinese character for
Uh
, but in the Northeast it stands for many. It can mean
Hello
;
Good-bye
;
I hear you
;
I agree
;
More, please
; and
This is a difficult question to answer simply.
San Jiu turns his attention back to the evening news. He tells me that someone is coming to join us. I don’t recognize the noun describing the man’s place on the family tree, and San Jiu explains it slowly, in the same tone I use when diagramming a complex sentence on the blackboard for my middle school students.
“He is the son. Of the stepbrother. Understand? Of your mother-in-law. Of your wife’s mother. Is it clear?”
“Uh.”
And therein lies the truest answer to the question of what really led me to Manchuria, and to—of all the Northeast’s villages—Wasteland. Not, initially, because of an intrinsic attraction to its history and ways. That gripped me over time. The root attraction was much simpler: a girl.
CHAPTER
2
Thirteen years earlier she stood in San Francisco International for the first time, thinking:
So this is what it feels like to be a foreigner.
Frances moved through the airport cautiously, unsure where to turn. In China you just followed the crowd. But here she had to go through immigration, retrieve her bag, make a phone call, and find her connecting flight—alone. Everything was so quiet and orderly, she couldn’t even hear her own footsteps. Carpeting in an airport? She watched a row of fountains sending water into the air. How wasteful.
Beijing could use that stuff,
she thought.
The people around her were patient and pleasant. The customs agent brought over his friendly dog to sniff her. There was a red channel and a green one. She didn’t know where to go; she was twenty-one, and had never been outside of China. A white man in the arrow-straight line pointed and advised her to answer “No” to any questions.
She presented her passport to the officer. Its photo—taken when she was an English student at university in Beijing—showed a waif with shaved hair and sallow cheeks. The clerk looked at the long-haired, buxom woman before him. He insinuated that the passport wasn’t hers at all but belonged to a man. Internally she panicked before realizing that the officer was demonstrating humor. “Ha?” she responded uncertainly. He smiled, and she tried again. “Ha ha ha!”