She opened the menu and frowned again. “Seven bucks for garlic-fried broccoli? That’s five times what it costs in China. It’s just a vegetable. People pay these prices?” At meal’s end, the waitress presented the check with a mound of plastic-wrapped fortune cookies. Frances had never seen one, as they had been invented by a Japanese man for American diners. The shell tasted like sugared cardboard, but much better than the mysterious orange syrup that coated our sweet-and-sour dish. Yet, to her ear, the messages within sounded overoptimistic and American. We played a game. I read the fortune, and she edited it to sound authentically Chinese.
I read: “You are one of the people who ‘goes places in life.’”
“Chinese would never say that,” she said. “In China, it would be: ‘You’re not so bad. Better than some, worse than others.’”
“Your present plans are going to succeed.”
“No plan is the best plan.”
“The current year will bring you much happiness.”
“This is as good as it gets.”
“You will step on the soil of many countries.”
“The best thing to do is to stay home and serve your parents.”
“You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself.”
“You’re a woman. Be chaste and stop dreaming.”
We had met in Beijing a year earlier, in 1997, teaching together at an international school located in the capital’s far northern suburbs, surrounded by apple orchards and flanked by the Western Hills. I taught English to the teenagers; Frances taught the kindergarteners Chinese. Meeting her for the first time was confusing. In my two previous years as a Peace Corps volunteer in China’s rural southwest, I had been ordered, in training and regular meetings, not to do three things, in order of severity:
(1) engage in politics
(2) ride motorcycles
(3) date a host country national (as locals were called)
I had arrived in 1995 as part of China’s second-ever batch of volunteers. As a fluent Spanish speaker, I had hoped to be sent to Latin America, but the Peace Corps offered Vladivostok, then Turkmenistan, then Malawi, then Kiribati, then Sri Lanka. The choices kept getting further from a ¡Sí! After I refused Mongolia, the recruiter snapped, “This isn’t Club Med, it’s the Peace Corps.” His final take-it-or-leave-us offer: China. At the time I couldn’t even use chopsticks, let alone speak a word of Chinese.
Six weeks later, in a Sichuan Normal University classroom, a Peace Corps trainer warned us newcomers that a volunteer in the first group had married his college-age Chinese student. The story was related rapidly, as if it had happened during one farcical afternoon. I pictured Cary Grant as the nonplussed volunteer, doing a “spit take” and barking, “MARRIED? What, in that office? I thought she was helping me buy a TRAIN ticket!”
But Peace Corps swore it was all true. The university expelled the student, and Peace Corps the volunteer. There was more: gossip about Chinese police dragging unmarried native/foreign couples from hotel beds and tales of wily women trolling for green cards. Those came from my training-period roommate, a gruff Coast Guard veteran with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, a bulbous red nose, and a tattoo above his navel that instructed ADD OIL HERE.
We were Peace and Corps, together in one room. I was twenty-three, a freshly licensed English teacher eager to bridge cultures and study Chinese. He was in his fifties, toting a Korean War survival manual in which he underlined key passages such as “Keep a sense of humor. Americans are the most unpredictable people in the world—and methodical types like the Chinese Communists become unstrung when they cannot anticipate what we do next.”
The man—I called him the Captain—watched for signs of any male volunteer “going native.” My playing basketball with a female Chinese student was, for the Captain, exposure that would lead to “yellow fever.” When the Captain was expelled from the Peace Corps later that year, I thought it was because he had begun a class by chalking KARL MARX on one side of the board and ADAM SMITH on the other. “This one works,” he had announced, pointing at Smith. “And this one”—moving to Marx—“is full of shit.” But no, the Captain had fallen in love with a host country national. Americans are the most unpredictable people in the world.
So when I moved to Beijing in 1997 after finishing my Peace Corps assignment, dating had been ingrained as Something You Just Didn’t Do. But it was an untested maxim, like my mom’s warning—handed down by her own mother—to never run the vacuum cleaner over its own power cord or use the blow-dryer with wet feet. You probably wouldn’t get shocked, but why risk it? My students in remote Sichuan, like the isolated campus itself, had become family, and I hoped Beijing would bring the same sibling-like relationships.
I had applied to teach at the international school after reading its Help Wanted posting in the Peace Corps newsletter. Since I had no Internet access or even a cell phone, it was the only lead I had on a post-Corps life. It took an entire morning to peck out an error-free résumé on a manual typewriter. After crossing the river in a skiff with a farmer and his ox, I spent the afternoon at the post office affixing stamps brushed with fish glue and slowly writing the Beijing school’s Chinese name with a leaky fountain pen. I pushed the envelope into the mailbox slot next to LOCAL, enticingly labeled OTHER PORTS.
The starting salary was $15,000 a year, an enormous increase from the $1,200 I had earned annually in the Peace Corps, and even the fact that I would have to teach grades six through eleven each day did not dampen my excitement to be able to remain in China and continue learning Chinese. On the first day of school I saw Frances, tanned from a summer hiking alone, when she arrived late to a staff meeting with a lilting apology and self-effacing laugh.
Her given name was Peony, and she hated it as much as I hated the Chinese name a teacher had assigned to me: Heroic Eastern Plumblossom. “That sounds like a girl’s name,” she said, a common response that always made me feel sorry for that girl, wherever she may be. “I prefer my English name, Frances,” she said. “Or my nickname, Guazi.” Sunflower Seed. That fit her long, slender face.
We began hanging out after school, cautiously, walking our students home, biking to Wudaokao to rifle through boxes of VCDs and remaindered cassette tapes, and playing basketball at the Language and Culture Institute’s outdoor court. The first time, she out-hustled me with such spirit that it broke my heart to tell her she had to dribble. We started eating together—cautiously, again: first a McDonald’s milkshake, then Korean pancakes, and finally sitting outside on one of Beijing’s perfect clear autumn nights around a steaming brazier, using chopsticks to dunk lamb slices, tofu, and mustard greens in boiling water and washing the cooked food down with big bottles of Yanjing beer that chilled in an ice pail beside the table. This was 1997 B.C. (Before Cars), when Beijing life still thrived in the hutong and under tree-canopied sidewalks in comparably fresh air. For the first time in more than two years in China I didn’t feel, no matter what our waitress had just called me, like a laowai, a foreigner. I didn’t feel like the Other. Perhaps it was because I didn’t see Frances that way. I saw many things, not least of all her beauty. Everyone saw that; heads turned to follow her curves as she passed. To me, she was quick, smart and funny—and unlike anyone I had met before, in or out of China. At her insistence, we split the dinner check. Then we said good night.
When I got home, my apartment felt unusually empty.
Frances told her roommate she had made a new friend.
Neither of us could sleep.
I was twenty-five, she was twenty. Eventually, I wanted to return to the States for graduate school. She had no interest in leaving China. We knew how it would end. But then it didn’t: we spent winter nights skating at Tsinghua University’s pond and spring weekends hiking the Great Wall. Peace Corps friends sent an invitation to their summer wedding in Wisconsin, and I asked Frances to go.
“I have to apply for a passport in my hometown,” she said. “If I’m going to America for the f
irst time with you, then you have to come to the Northeast for the first time with me. I want you to meet my parents.”
They waited on the platform as our overnight train pulled into Liaoyuan, a small (by Chinese standards) Northeastern city of one million people. They were my first impression of Manchuria, and I liked them immediately. Frances greeted them with a “Ma! Ba!” and laughter. No hugs or kisses, not in public. Her father, a tall and rugged former medic in the People’s Liberation Army, pumped my hand and, unlike many Chinese on meeting a stranger, looked directly into my eyes. Her mother was a short, round bundle of welcome. She handed me a large sack of hazelnuts. “You’re hungry! These are from our city!” She couldn’t stop smiling.
“Yes, I’m very hungry,” I lied, popping a few in my mouth. “They’re delicious!”
“Oh! You like them? I’ll buy you another bag! Wait here!”
Frances grabbed her arm as she bolted, saying the bag of nuts would last me a month. The four of us walked away from the station. The parents made small talk with their daughter. I wasn’t the center of attention, and it felt wonderful. They didn’t compliment my Chinese; they didn’t ask if I could use chopsticks or how much money I made. They called me not Heroic Eastern Plumblossom but my preferred Chinese name, the transliteration of Meyer—mai’er—a feudal-era term that meant “a son sold in the marketplace.” Her father thought it fit; here I was, thousands of miles from home, being picked up by my new family. “Sold Son! Call me Ba,” he said, smacking my shoulder. Dad.
As in many Chinese families, Dad did the cooking, and he enjoyed going to the market each day, which he described as a real-life opera, awash in color and sound. I followed at his side, watching him sniff melons, poke at slabs of pork, and bargain fiercely. “In this town, people argue over pennies,” he said. Despite its location on the rolling hills of a river bend, Liaoyuan looked bleak. The skyline showed a cooling tower and smokestacks surrounded by concrete walk-up apartment buildings with peeling-paint façades. Along the pitted streets, workers laid off from busted state-owned factories squatted, selling watermelon seeds and peanuts.
A century prior, during China’s final dynasty, Liaoyuan (“Origin of the Liao River”) had been part of the imperial hunting grounds named the Flourishing Capital Paddock, an area enclosed and offset by a fence called the Willow Palisade. Those romantic names were long forgotten. Beginning in 1931, during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Liaoyuan was the region’s second-largest coal producer. Its only tourist “attraction” came from that era: a mass grave of forced laborers dubbed the Ten-Thousand-Person Pit that showed visitors rows of exhumed skeletons stretched on the soil around an open gash of earth. The coal seams had been stripped and the mines closed. Near the exhibit’s exit, a propaganda billboard promised: LIAOYUAN TOMORROW WILL BE EVEN BETTER. It wasn’t wholly empty talk: the town was transitioning to light manufacturing—and on its way to becoming one of China’s leading sock producers and a maker of the MacBook computer’s aluminum frame—but in 1998, it looked exhausted. No wonder Frances had graduated high school early and moved to Beijing to study English, then accepted a job at the international school.
Over dinner she recounted her day in various offices, filling out and photocopying passport forms. Around the table with us were her mother, grandmother, two cousins, and a just-arrived uncle and aunt. “He’s really my uncle,” Frances whispered. “She’s not really my aunt but my middle school English teacher who wants to meet you.” The culture shock I felt wasn’t because of China: my parents had six marriages between them (no longer to each other), and a large family meal like this felt more exotic than the fried silkworms set on the table as an appetizer.
Dad worked the kitchen alone. The apartment didn’t have running water or an oven, only an electric rice cooker and a single gas burner. With a cigarette clenched in his teeth and an apron around his waist, he produced braised stuffed eggplant, sweet-and-sour pork, battered lotus root, pockmarked tofu, flash-fried green beans, corn with pine nuts, and fish dumpling soup.
The English teacher raised a toast, eking out a “How do you do? Welcome you!” before knocking back 140-proof sorghum liquor. Two little-girl cousins climbed on my back, and Uncle commented on my surprising ability to use chopsticks. Dad toasted to me, then to his daughter, then to our relationship, and then . . . well, somewhere between my rendition of Fats Waller’s “Everybody Loves My Baby” and Dad’s performance from the People’s Liberation Army songbook, Frances flashed a smile that said I was home.
Dusk faded to night. Auntie English spilled wine in her lap. One of the kid cousins fell asleep at the table. Frances’s grandmother began talking about the village north of there, where she raised “Little Peony” as a girl. The village name stuck in my mind: Wasteland. What was it like to live in a place called Wasteland? “It’s a very good environment,” her grandmother said. For two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, I had heard Chinese sweepingly define the countryside as luohou—backward. “It’s a better place to live than a city,” her grandmother continued. “We grow rice—the best rice in China. One crop a year, when the black earth thaws after the long cold winter.”
Rice tasted like rice to me, but not to her grandmother. She smacked her lips and ran her liver-spotted hands down sallow cheeks. “I can always smell and taste it. The rice from our farm is the best. I keep a sack of it here in town, even. It’s the only rice I like to eat.”
“I’d like to visit the village.”
Frances flashed me a look that said: Slow down.
Her grandmother said that the village used to call her Princess.
“I’m not a princess,” Frances protested.
Her grandmother swatted her head. “I say you are.”
At dawn I woke heavy-headed on the apartment’s wooden sofa. At Liaoyuan’s train station, Frances’s mother presented a pair of red wool socks she’d stayed up after dinner to knit. “I measured your foot when you were sleeping,” she revealed with a sneaky grin. Dad shook my hand with a firm grip, not the usual Chinese kind, where the person cupped my palm as if it were bleeding.
“Keep calm at the American embassy when you apply for your visa,” Frances’s mom lectured her. “Don’t lose your bad Northeastern temper.” The dozen assembled relatives nodded on the platform as the conductor called for us to board the olive-green carriage. Then her mother addressed us. “Learn from each other. Help each other. You’re happy together!”
Frances wept as the train pulled out. She missed them already. Her mother’s head bobbed outside the window, reminding us, “You’re happy together! Happy together!” The word trailed away as the train gathered speed.
For an entire summer in America, Frances subsisted on “first ones.”
It was a land of decisions. At a restaurant: Eating in or taking out? Booth or table? Black or room for cream? She told the waitress she wanted a chicken burger. Roasted or barbecued? The first one. Whole wheat, sourdough, or French roll? Yes. Those are breads, which one would you like for the bun? The first one. And what would you like on it? Less choices.
After sorting out the toppings came the matter of sauce, then the option of fries, chips, or potato salad. Each carried with them several sub-choices that concerned salt content, oil variety, and entry into the Homestyle-versus-Regular debating arena. The undercard for this bout featured Pickle versus Coleslaw.
The waitress just kept coming at her. “And what would you like to drink? We have—”
“The first one.”
At this point I opened the newspaper to the two pages filled with movie ads. “Let’s go see a movie. You choose.”
“The first one,” she said.
In the car, stations crowded the radio dial: you couldn’t move the tuner a bit without picking up another signal. It was just as bad as the television. Didn’t Americans ever have a moment of peace and quiet? And why did everything take place indoors? Where were all the old people? She hadn’t seen any grandfathers pushing infants in strollers or squattin
g on the curb, playing chess. No one ballroom danced on sidewalks at night or seemed to knit.
At the Mall of America, walking around the Camp Snoopy amusement park, she said: “Kids here are so lucky. When I was a kid, my toy was a pair of plastic shoes. Do they know how fortunate they are?” We studied the closest specimens, sentenced to adolescence. The boys moped past in oversize pants, too loose to cover their underwear. Metal punctured the sullen girls’ noses, cheeks, and lips. They looked like they’d been condemned to Labor Camp Snoopy.
“Maybe kids in America aren’t so lucky,” she conceded. “There are a lot of things here to want. When I was a kid I never wanted money, because after I had a bike, there wasn’t much else to buy. Movies and ice cream cost pennies.”
Before the first pitch at the St. Paul Saints game, the crowd stood for the national anthem. I removed my hat. People around us sang along.
“It’s very militaristic,” she whispered.
The crowd drank Summit beer and munched hot dogs. Nuns gave backrubs for charity. T-shirts boomed from a cannon into the stands. A train rolled past the outfield fence. Fireworks went off after the game. It was a perfect Minnesota summer night. Frances had no idea what had transpired on the field, but even the mosquito bites dotting her exposed skin couldn’t spoil her good time.
The wedding had been built up so much, months of me talking about it, expressing excitement for Frances to meet my friends, that when she arrived at the hotel, anxiety overtook her and she didn’t want to leave the room. It wasn’t the bitter brewery air or the way people gave us directions to avoid parts of Milwaukee dubbed “rough,” “tough,” and “scary”; neighborhoods in Beijing were never called that. Rather, it was the wedding itself, in particular the assembled guests. They were all strangers to her. How should she act? Would they think of her as “Chinese” and expect a certain Chinese-ness?
In Manchuria Page 3