In Manchuria (8 page)

But Chinese could feel it, too. On the street, Frances noticed that strangers didn’t exhibit a curiosity about our presence in Wasteland but rather a question mark:
Do we know those two?
Hence the usual greeting:
Whose family are you?
and the visible relief in the questioners’ faces when they heard a surname they knew. That’s where we fit into the puzzle. We were strangers no more.

I wanted to know where Wasteland’s name came from and when the village began. The newsstand sold magazines whose covers showed Kobe Bryant and Japanese manga, but nothing on local history. This was not unusual: even Jilin city’s many bookstores and its new library stocked only ideological retellings of Feudal Jilin, of Occupied Jilin, of Liberated Jilin. I broadened my search for a contemporary account of the Northeast, but that, too, yielded no results.

Beyond politics, there were other reasons such narratives were uncommon. Generations of writers born in the single-child-policy years needed to find a paying job to support their parents, rather than gamble on immersing themselves in a place, researching a book that may not even get published. Indeed, the best “memoir” I have read of a Chinese farm is a thick academic text that explains economic policy changes in the author’s central China hometown. In the book, he notes that since the
1980
s most Chinese villages recycled or used their archives for cooking fuel over the years, as they were seen as trivial and unworthy of preserving. (The author is now a Chinese history professor at the University of Texas.)

At Wasteland’s small government office at Red Flag Road’s main intersection, the friendly clerk lifted her eyeglasses to stare at a ledger. She informed me that this area had a population of
1
,
459
. “There are
717
females and
742
men.” By grade level, she broke down the
450
children attending the three schools: two elementary, and one middle. When I asked to see the town’s gazetteer, which even Beijing’s smallest neighborhoods have, detailing local history and color, the woman said that there wasn’t one. “Look at the big stone outside,” she suggested. “That has the information.”

Squatting low aside Red Flag Road, I read, on the back of the slab carved with Wasteland’s name:
In 1956, it became a village.

“I love this American teacher very much. He is the tallest man which I have already seen. I think his beard is too sex. And his hair is really cool. But I love his Chinese name best. Heroic Eastern Plumblossom doesn’t sound like a girl’s name at all. If I saw this name first, I’ll believe that will be a really cool man. I must say ‘thank you’ to you, Ms. Guan. Thanks for you give us a chance to speak with person who comes from America. Yours, Xue Chang.”

I read the letter via Skype to Frances, who had returned to work in Hong Kong. She laughed and said, “In the States, this could be submitted as evidence at your trial.”

But I was innocent. Word went out that a native English speaker and teacher had landed, and it didn’t take long for my cell phone to buzz with a text from a teacher named Ms. Guan, inviting me to begin regular lessons at Wasteland’s Number
22
Middle School. In Beijing, I had volunteered at an elementary school, finding it a natural entry into neighborhood life. In a small town, your work is your identity, the role you play on the community stage. To me it made perfect sense, but San Jiu thought only morons worked for free. This echoed the response I used to get as a Peace Corps volunteer when Chinese wondered what sort of a nation sent its young people abroad to work with strangers instead of staying home and providing for their own families.

I arrived at the school’s electric accordion gate—a safety measure implemented nationwide after a spate of knife attacks on students elsewhere in China—and was let inside once Ms. Guan, a forty-two-year-old Wasteland native, vouched for me with the security guard, who sat inside the toasty gatehouse. “I know whose family you belong to,” he said. “I heard you were wandering around.”

Ms. Guan led me to a classroom packed with thirteen-year-olds and teachers. On the podium, the textbook was open to the day’s lesson, “Making an Introduction
”
:

Lucy:
Hi, who are you?

Robot:
Hi, I’m a robot. Glad to meet you.

Lucy:
Glad to meet you, too. Let’s be friends.

Robot:
All right.

Lucy:
 I can sing. Can you?

Robot:
Yes, I can. It’s easy. I can see you. And I can work, too.

Lucy:
That’s fine.

Reciting where the Red Lobster restaurant was located seemed more useful. My robot voice elicited no laughs, instead confusing the class.
Is this what native English sounded like?
Wishing I had a different text, or at least a better robot voice, I put the kids in groups to answer discussion questions about what the lesson ominously described as “the coming control of cyberculture.” Could the teens imagine a day when robots would be their singing, working friends? They could. “Well,” I asked, going off book, “what if the robots turned evil? What would you do then?”

This led to a discussion of Optimus Prime’s character in the movie
Transformers
, followed by pleas to end the lesson early so the male students could take me on in basketball. The court—dwarfed by the largest schoolyard I had ever seen—was covered in snow, stomped to an even, Wimbledon-quality sheen. There was one ball, and fourteen kids, and soon the game more resembled a rugby scrum. The kids quickly tossed off their hats and gloves, unzipped their coats, and ran around until steam rose from their sweat-soaked heads. A group of girls in bright pink down coats that reached their calves stood to the side, tethered together with shared MP
3
earbuds. They belted out Lady Gaga songs.

Frances’s mother had attended Number
22
Middle School, as did Frances’s sister and both brothers. The narrow single-story building where they studied was now the cafeteria and Ping-Pong room, bordered by a ten-foot-high mound of coal whose fuel made the classrooms hot enough for teachers to open the windows. White curtains swayed slowly along the classroom wall, reflecting bright sunlight.

Since Wasteland had been folded into Jilin city’s administrative boundary, the school received faculty assigned from downtown, who commuted by bus an hour each way; they could not find a vacant house to rent, either. The school also received funds to expand. The old middle school building faced a newly built three-story elementary school. Their interiors matched the color scheme I had seen across China: seasick green to waist height, and tofu white to the ceiling.

A notice board asked: “What is modern pedagogy?” Ten framed posters down the hall’s both sides showed lessons from
The Analects
of Confucius, which led to a doorway marked
PARTY OFFICE
. Where once it banned the Master’s teachings as heterodoxy, now the government invoked them as a moral guide.

But unlike every other school in China I had visited over the previous fifteen years, no political slogans had been painted or hung on the walls.
NO STUDY DILIGENTLY AND IMPROVE EVERY DAY
, or
SEEK TRUTH FROM FACTS
, or
DEVELOPMENT IS THE CORRECT PRINCIPLE
, or
BUILD SOCIALISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
, or
STUDY THE
“THREE REPRESENTS
,”
or
IMPLEMENT AN OVERALL WELL-OFF SOCIETY
, or its sequel,
BUILD A HARMONIOUS SOCIETY
. Perhaps modern pedagogy is not hectoring children with dogma.

Instead, the walls of Number
22
Middle School had Confucius professing: “The way of the superior man is threefold, but I am not equal to it. Virtuous, he is free from anxieties; wise, he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from fear.”

After recess, in a classroom whose front blackboard was filled with the chalked content of “The Many Winter-Borne Illnesses,” Ms. Guan got online and typed in a popular file-sharing site, clicking on
Night at the Museum
. Within seconds Ben Stiller’s head filled the pull-down screen, then shots of Central Park West and the American Museum of Natural History. I could hear the C train screeching into the Eighty-first Street station, eight thousand miles away. As the better students scribbled down useful slang from Ben Stiller’s subtitled dialogue—“Hang on one sec,” “Yeah, I guess so”—I transcribed the Chinese characters for winter-borne illnesses, such as chilblains and hand, foot and mouth disease.

I sneezed, and Ms. Guan suggested eating raw garlic and drinking Coke boiled with a chunk of fresh ginger. The last time I had visited a Chinese doctor—for food poisoning—he had prescribed, on a pad, with characters written in physician scribble: “Watermelon and Pepsi.” It had worked, or at least not done any harm. After school I followed Ms. Guan to the grocer for garlic and ginger.

We hit it off immediately. She talked unbidden, and nonstop. After my first day at Number
22
Middle School, I learned that though to me she looked Han Chinese, she was ethnically Manchu: her surname was a common one that meant “an official.” She grew up in Wasteland, then left to study English at university in the northeast’s coastal city of Dalian. She thought she had made it out of the countryside for good, but in Dalian a truck hit her as she walked across a street. The accident broke bones and her spirit; during a yearlong hospital stay, her longtime boyfriend left her, and she forgot most of her English. She was discharged to begin what she called “my life of independence.”

Returning to Wasteland had felt like failure, but her mother had fallen ill, and she had no choice. That was nearly two decades ago. “I know everyone here,” Ms. Guan said. It sounded like more of a lament than a boast. “My students have made it to the top universities, and some have even gone on to be teachers.”

“This means you are good at your job,” I said.

“No. This means I am old.”

She was squat, with long black hair tinted orange at the ends, oversize pink glasses, and a kind face that could, in that teacherly way, flash into anger, which she directed at the garlic seller. “
De le ba!
” she snapped when the woman quoted the price. That was Northeast slang for “Bitch, please!”

Ms. Guan enjoyed speaking English. She talked in bursts, with the lilting cadence of a Dylan song. I finally realized Ms. Guan was speaking English as she did Mandarin Chinese, voicing its four tones: rising, falling, swooping and static. It was melodic and unique, and I hesitated to correct her.

Ms. Guan said: “But you are a very good chance to improve my spoken English.”

“I need a house. Do you know of any for rent?”

“I will help you. I know everyone.”

“But do you know of a house for rent?”

In a torrent of Chinese, she replied: “My father killed himself at our house. He was a teacher and threw himself down our well during the Cultural Revolution. That’s why I came back here, to take care of my mother. She was alone. But she is also dead.” Without even pausing long enough for me to ask a question, or say I was sorry, Ms. Guan gestured at a vendor’s box and said, in English, “The price of fish isn’t bad.” She suggested I bring some to San Jiu: not only did she know him, she knew that he liked to eat this fish. “Here’s a good one. This one, too.”

Then she parried over the purchase in a rapid-fire blend of indignant dialect and teacher-perfect standard Chinese:

“
Ga ha ya?
”
(Northeastern: “What’s up?”)

“
Duo shao qian
?” (Mandarin: “How much does it cost?”)

“
Che sha ya!
” (Northeastern: “You’re joking!”)

“
De le ba!
”

The vendor’s eyes flashed like a hockey player’s before a fight. The women verbally circled one another. In the end, the vendor cut her price in half. Ms. Guan told me to pick my prize.

At the intersection of Red Flag Road, she boarded the bus to her home in Jilin city, saying good-bye before adding, “I know a house you can rent.”

I stood in the fading light holding an orange plastic shopping bag filled with Coke, ginger, garlic, and six fish, as silver and stiff as broadswords. A day at school taught me
2
,
500
-year-old Confucian sayings, how to dribble a basketball on snow, the words to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” an underage student’s opinion that my beard was too sex, the English-language learning merits of
Night at the Museum
, how to write chilblains—and cure a cold—in Chinese, and a little, then a lot, about a woman named Ms. Guan.

No one at school could tell me what I had hoped to learn when I set out to teach that day: Wasteland’s history. I walked alone into the wind, past the stone that said:
In 1956, it became a village.