In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  “I know,” I said. “I hate being in these situations in China, when I only know one person in the room and they all know I am the American Guest.”

  “It’s not the same,” she argued, and she was right. In China, being the American Guest was an unearned prestige: you were temporary royalty, a grinning minor duke from a faraway land. But many of the wedding guests were Peace Corps volunteers from China. Another spoke fluent Mandarin from his studies of ancient literature at Yale.

  “He’ll know more about Journey to the West than I will and ask questions, then wonder why I’m not an expert in it,” she fretted. “That was just my favorite childhood televison show, not something to analyze. The Peace Corps people will see me like their college students, not an adult. I want to go back to Beijing.”

  “Is this because of lunch?”

  A customer in a downtown Milwaukee diner had asked if she was from China. She nodded with a smile. An opening like this usually meant the person had visited the country.

  This man said: “I hope one day soon you’ll be free.”

  Her face flashed What?

  “Have you ever been to China?” Frances fixed her eyes on his.

  “No, but I’ve read about it.”

  “Things aren’t that simple. I’ve read about America, too.”

  I heard a gurgle in her voice, a more urgent tone. It was the same emotion-faster-than-words sound that had overtaken me in China when I grew weary of defending my identity.

  After lunch came the wedding rehearsal. Frances saw everyone hugging, so when newcomers introduced themselves, she opened her arms to their surprised faces. Someone teased her. It stung. Back in the room, she failed to hold back tears when describing how strange it felt to be different for the first time. “So this,” she said, “is why people stay home.”

  We drove west, camping in the Badlands, at Mount Rushmore, and in the Black Hills, then we moved across Montana, over the Beartooth Pass into Yellowstone. This was the America for her: open space, national parks, and no one looking at us twice. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, we read a plaque commemorating the 1885 massacre of twenty-eight migrant Chinese laborers killed after refusing to join their white coworkers on strike. A mob burned the Chinese workers’ huts, blocked all escape routes, and fired into the panicked crowd. The survivors fled Rock Springs on foot, west along the railroad. Train conductors brought them to safety at Green River.

  In a gas station Yellow Pages, I looked up “Restaurants, Chinese.” Rock Springs, population 19,000, had one. Green River, population 12,000 had two. Frances chose Green River.

  The waiter at China King Buffet was surprised to see her. “I’m from the Northeast,” she said by way of introduction. He was from the south. Chinese people often begin a conversation with strangers this way; their Chineseness a given, the connection found by one’s geographic region, or shared dialect. The waiter lobbed a laowai at me. Even six thousand miles away from Beijing, in my own country, I was the foreigner still. “You’re the laowai now,” I laughed. The waiter laughed, too, but his laugh said I was wrong.

  After our meal, I cracked open fortune cookies, pulling out the slips to read aloud: “What’s vice today may be virtue tomorrow.”

  “Morality is for weaklings,” Frances corrected. “Do whatever it takes to get ahead.”

  “It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today.”

  “Eat your eggs now as they may never hatch.”

  “Everything will now come your way.”

  “The key to happiness is to expect little from life.”

  “You should be able to undertake anything.”

  “If you never try, you will never fail.”

  “Your love life will be happy and harmonious.”

  Frances laughed, and said: “Keep one eye closed and things only look half bad.”

  In Santa Cruz, California, we spent the trip’s final days at the beach with my grandmother, who reminded Frances of her own. For the two of them, it was love at first sight. They cooked and gardened, and my grandmother showed Frances her work from her days as a draftsman, including the design of her home. As a teenager, she had had a chance to study piano in Paris, but her father, a French immigrant with his own bakery, forbade her to go, saying, “No girl of mine is running around Paris. You’ll stay and keep the books.”

  “He sounds Chinese,” Frances said.

  In San Francisco we boarded a bus for Golden Gate Park. Unlike in China, Americans didn’t sing on buses. They sat guarded, or catatonic. A sign over the driver warned: INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION. But soon these signs would appear on Chinese buses, too.

  On Ocean Beach we watched container ships fade toward the horizon. This was the end of our road, the end of America. China, and another year of teaching—and questions about our future together—waited on the other side.

  I asked: “I wonder where we’ll be a year from now?”

  “Maybe here.”

  My heart flared; she’d said it. “I hope so.”

  “Or maybe there.” She narrowed her eyes at the wind, watching the Pacific. “But hopefully together.”

  Books about China can indulge an emperor’s irredentist impulse to redraw a map—This is China—but our story, like Manchuria’s itself, is one of blurring borders, of comings and goings, like the waves that advanced and retreated before us on Ocean Beach. I learned to read Chinese at Tsinghua University; Frances graduated from Berkeley’s law school. I wrote a book about Beijing; she worked as an attorney in Manhattan. We have long been happily married, if occasionally apart for work.

  In our early years together, through graduate school and entry-level jobs and no savings, we jokingly described any unsettled, purgatorial situation as being mired “in Manchuria.” It was a state that existed only in the mind, a station between what had been and what came next. I feel like I’m in Manchuria. Now, after moving to Wasteland, where Frances had been raised, I was actually there. But she was not about to ditch her career—let alone a good job at a firm in Hong Kong—to follow me around the Northeast, instead joining me in the village and on side trips when she could.

  Thirteen years had passed since her first visit to my American home; in a sort of connubial quid pro quo I would explore where she came from. Shadowing the journey was the fear that our individual ambitions could be marking an irreversible route away from what we long wanted but also long delayed: parenthood. I was thirty-nine; she was thirty-four, and the sound of a ticking clock scored our daily long-distance conversations on Skype.

  To the young man and woman sitting on the wind-blown edge of San Francisco in 1998, all of this would have sounded absurd. What’s Skype? But when asked why I moved to Manchuria, my thoughts shift from China’s edge to America’s, and the woman who kindled my attraction to the Northeast. The starting point is there, at that moment of two people falling in love: looking to the horizon, leaning against one another, and holding on tight.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lineages

  Aside from passing the bar exam, I have never been as happy as when I lived here,” Frances said atop San Jiu’s kang. “We had nothing, but didn’t know it, so didn’t care. We were a family.”

  She had made the trip north to help me find a house to rent in Wasteland. We peeled off our winter wear as San Jiu stoked the bed’s brazier with dried rice stalks from the past autumn’s harvest. Across the village, bushy piles of the straw rose above the single-story homes they heated.

  As Frances talked, I pictured a little girl in a hand-sewn white cotton dress running through the yard as chickens scatter. “Hello, chickens!” she yells, laughing. “Hello, pigs!” She doesn’t know any place beyond Wasteland, outside this yard, away from this house.

  Looking back, Frances felt she was here by accident. Not San Jiu’s house, where she had lived as a child—when it had an earthen floor, mud walls, and thatched straw roof—but here here, as in alive. In 1962 her mother woke in this home. She had
tested into the region’s best teachers college, but on registration day was locked inside a room by her own mother, who claimed that teaching was too difficult a job for a woman to undertake. This, after a decade of Communist Party sloganeering to abolish traditional, conservative thought. Frances’s mother sat alone on the kang, seething. She was not one to wail; like most women of her generation, who had made the transition between old and new China, she emanated forbearance. Soon she found work outside Wasteland, clerking at a post office.

  Frances’s father came from far away, from the southwest province of Sichuan, and a small, steamy Yangtze River port named Yibin. He enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army at age sixteen. It trained him as a “barefoot doctor,” the legion of medics who delivered basic care and inoculations in the Chinese countryside, and shipped him to Manchuria. The great northern wasteland, he thought, concealing his disappointment. But then he was surprised at the land’s beauty: prairies between foothills, forests leading to mountains. But he never got acclimated to the cold. Never. For the rest of his life, he considered it a mortal enemy. The Japanese, the Soviets? They were expelled. The cold returned every year. The army would not transfer him south, closer to home.

  The mother’s post office coworker knew someone who met a single soldier who was, she swore, the handsomest man she had ever seen. She arranged a blind date. At first sight, the mother thought to herself: He is the handsomest man I have ever seen. He had lean chiseled features, thick black hair, and a perpetual smirk that looked kind and bemused, not mean and challenging. But then, maybe men looked like this elsewhere. She had never been.

  Their date consisted of walking in slow loops around the post office, chatting. They discovered that they had lost their dads when they were at the same age: eleven. They considered it a sign.

  The father’s transfer came through, but he was sent to an even more barren place: the steppes of Inner Mongolia. The two began exchanging letters. He got leave once a year. He asked if he could use his leave to come see her. In reply, she wrote, “I would not object.”

  The longer that couples were together, the shorter the telling of how they met. Here my mother-in-law always concludes: “And then we got married.”

  Their letters, the words they wrote while falling in love, were gone. Not seized by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution; this is not that China story. The father was not an intellectual or “class enemy” but a soldier born to poor farmers who supported the Communists and who were largely exempt from that chaotic decade. No, the letters—written with steel nibs dipped in pots of India ink and scratched on tissue-thin sheets of onionskin and posted with stamps showing the trains and tractors of new industrial China—were just . . . gone. This frustrated only their children, who were told the past was something you reaped, not sowed.

  The children’s names mapped the early years of their marriage, however. The firstborn son was named for Shanxi province, where the father was stationed when he was born. The firstborn daughter, for a port in the northern coastal province of Shandong. The second-born son, for a town on the plains of Inner Mongolia. All of them arrived nine months after the father’s annual leave. He was not there for their births, but then, as he said, roosters didn’t watch chickens lay eggs.

  Then he was offered a post in Changchun, Jilin’s provincial capital, at a time when the divide between rural and urban living was even starker than it is today. A city hukou—the household registration file—meant better access to housing, education, transportation, and even food. The family knew it should leave the countryside when it could. Changchun was a key metropolis, a strategic Northeastern railway junction, the seat of China’s automotive and movie industry, and home to several universities, including the one the mother had been barred from attending.

  There was a problem, however: the government preferred that farm families remained in the countryside, and so the mother’s household registration could not be transferred to Changchun. Again she was denied a move there. An army clerk suggested the family transfer to a second-tier city 140 miles southwest of Wasteland, named Liaoyuan. Neither mother nor father had been, but it was a city, so they went, moving into a walk-up apartment with steam radiators and indoor plumbing. Their parents had never lived in such modernity.

  The mother read news and announcements over a factory’s public address system, becoming a sort of teacher after all. The father worked in public health. In 1976 a nationwide campaign had begun urging urban residents—after years of being told to have multiple children—to limit their offspring to two, as China’s population had doubled to 900 million since 1949, when the Communists had taken power.

  Eight years after their last child arrived, the mother announced: I’m pregnant.

  But they couldn’t have another child—not with the new rule, not with his job. They scheduled an abortion for July 1976.

  That month, the Tangshan Earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, hit northern China, killing 250,000 people. Fearing aftershocks, people in cities across the region moved out of apartment blocks and camped in makeshift tents. When city life resumed, and the mother returned home, it was too late to terminate the pregnancy. Secretly, she was relieved.

  The mother would deliver the baby but agreed to give it up for adoption. She carefully screened applicants before settling on a young woman who was unable to conceive. But after the baby entered the world silent, swift, and beautiful, she could not bear to give her away. On her back in the hospital bed, she refused to let go. She named the girl Peony and declared that she would be hers forever. The father called the child Little Extra. They decided her maternal grandparents would raise her, out in Wasteland where their other kids had gone to school before moving to town.

  In a Chinese family, grandparents are more than an accoutrement to be visited and nodded over on major holidays. Of course they said yes, they would take Little Extra. Though they didn’t call her that. They called her Princess.

  Princess rode on her grandfather’s back to the paddy every summer morning. The villagers coddled and spoiled her and called her Princess, too. She was the only infant around Wasteland; the other farmers’ grandkids were already old enough to write Chinese characters. Like her grandmother, they knitted clothes for her, cooked her favorite dishes, and told her stories, sitting outside in the shade of a Manchurian ash tree, or atop the kang. There were a few picture books inside the house—telling the names of fruit and vegetables and animals—but she didn’t need books to teach her those; she saw them every day. There was no television—no one could afford one—or a mirror. Everybody told Princess she was special and beautiful, and she believed it. Her grandfather often set her in the hay next to the pigs. She climbed on and talked to them, and they responded. They told her she was a Princess. She told them they were pigs. It was a compliment.

  In spring, her grandmother taught her folk songs while planting rice. Princess followed her voice through the upbeat tunes. Grandmother sang gently: “Little sparrow, your clothes are so colorful! Why do you come here every spring?”

  “Because your spring is beautiful!” answered Little Sparrow, in perfect harmony with the world.

  “I didn’t want to leave,” Frances said at San Jiu’s house. “But I didn’t have a choice. Because our family had been transferred to Liaoyuan, I had to enroll in school there. Now you can drive there in two hours, but back then it was a full day’s journey by bus and train from Wasteland.”

  They sang songs in cities, too. The first one she learned at school was “Socialism Is Good.” Everyone nodded their heads when they shouted it. The bouncing beat was impossible to resist.

  Socialism is good!

  Socialism is good!

  Downplay American imperialism!

  Downplay American imperialism!

  Socialism is good!

  As a child in Wasteland, she fell from a cottonwood tree and broke her arm. The nearest doctor was in Jilin city, twenty miles away. Her grandmother bundled her on a mule cart, which
clopped through the night. The arm healed crookedly, though unnoticeably. Yet the accident had been marked in Frances’s permanent record. City teachers took frowning note, but the asymmetry spared her from joining the school’s rhythmic gymnastics squad or dance troupe. She never had to twirl a red ribbon to a screeching soundtrack or wave handkerchiefs for the Rice Planting Dance. She didn’t even watch the performances. She knew that nobody planted rice like that. First of all, no one smiled like those dancers. Standing bent at the waist in cold, calf-deep water was hard work.

  In middle school, teachers began calling her intelligent, even though she fell asleep during the class named Building Socialism. She excelled in Chinese and English. Her early-1990s textbook required memorizing such useful dialogue as:

  A: Where is the Red Lobster restaurant located?

  B: May I suggest our specialty: lamb chops garnished

  with spring peas and mashed potatoes?

  A: Lobster with mayonnaise sounds inviting.

  B: Permit me to pour you a glass of champagne. It’s on

  the house.

  In Chinese class, she read classic novels in which the female characters radiated beauty. They were described as looking like swallows in the branches of willow trees, with bones of jade under skin as pure as ice. They were so lovely that fish would sink and wild geese would fall out of the sky at the sight of them. But Frances had grown up on the farm. Her skin was tanned like a peasant’s, not light like a city person’s. She was tall. Her hair was as light-colored and brittle as the straw she shared with pigs as a child. She couldn’t understand why, to be considered beautiful, a Chinese woman had to look like a foreigner. She smiled and laughed like a man, refusing to cover her mouth with her hand. She wouldn’t stand like a girl, either, with arms passively at her sides. In photographs she cocked them on her hips, sharp elbows akimbo, shaping herself into a kite, waiting to fly high and far away.