In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  “As a girl, I hated mirrors,” Frances remembered. “Mirrors were all over the place in the city. At home, in the department store, at the entrance of every school.” She had longed for the countryside, where her only reflection was in her grandmother’s smiling eyes.

  Even now, Frances remained the baby of the village. To help me find a house to rent, she had arrived on a January morning on a public minibus whose windows had frosted over from passengers’ breaths, veiling the interior like tulle. Though Frances was padded in down and swaddled in a scarf and hat, an elderly passenger did a double take at her face before yelling her name in joy. On Wasteland’s lanes, even after a twenty-year absence, the scene was repeated. There was no hugging, only a familiar conversation, like she had just returned from running an errand in town.

  Sixty-six-year-old San Jiu half skipped out his front door, calling her name.

  A hot meal waited in a room filled with relatives eager to fuss. Frances lounged on the kang cracking sunflower seeds with them, talking about her grandmother’s passing, slurping jasmine tea, and filling the room with gasps of Northeastern dialect such as Aiya wo’de maya (Oh, my mother!) and En’e (All right). The aunties warned her that she should become pregnant soon. “Mixed-blood” (hun xue’r) children are beautiful, they said. But be sure to eat lots of apples, a woman warned, otherwise the baby’s skin would be “too yellow.”

  Frances rolled her eyes and shot me a grin. Her BlackBerry whirred with updates of a $300 million leveraged buyout she was working on, but she kept the device in her pocket. Lawyers had little clout in China, so no one asked her about her job. Instead her family surrounded Frances on the kang, demanding a child. As San Jiu and I watched the evening news in another room, I heard more laughter, more Aiya wo’de mayas.

  We were used to complete strangers asking us about our relationship; over thirteen years, we knew these questions well enough to see them forming above a person’s head, like comic strip thought bubbles. In Chinese, they read: Married a foreigner, huh? What country? That’s a good passport to have. But you couldn’t find a Chinese man? Well, your children will be beautiful. Mixed-blood children are always beautiful. And smart. Beautiful and smart. But hopefully the children will look more like you.

  This silent conversation was preferable to the one Western men volunteered to me. You know what’s it’s like, it began. But I didn’t. And I didn’t want to know—not about enduring public tantrums or wearing matching couples’ T-shirts or buying in-laws new appliances or how the 1990 Gérard Depardieu film Green Card explained everything. Not our story, pal. Go eat some apples.

  With family, however, came different, well-meaning, but also loaded questions. About Frances becoming a “city girl.” About how her American education had changed her thoughts. About where we would raise our child—the one we should be creating right this instant instead of idly chatting. And why didn’t we move back here? The village could raise the child! What did she mean, she had to return to Hong Kong and her career? What about becoming a mother, as they had? Everything was out of context, because there was no context.

  After sundown and the last good nights, Frances, looking dazed, told me, “It’s amazing how coming home transforms you into a child again. I hate it. But it’s also sweet.” Nowadays Chinese were so focused on the future, on what lay ahead, she said. “It’s nice to be able to return and see where you came from while it’s still there.”

  The next morning we leaned into the wind and walked to see Wasteland’s only vacant house. Although February brought the solar term named the Beginning of Spring, which coincided with the lunar New Year, the season felt far away.

  Still, I said, the landscape looked beautiful.

  “When you live in the countryside, you don’t actually see it,” Frances said. “You see your little slice of it: your house, your paddy, your village. None of it makes you think, ‘This is beautiful.’”

  She studied Eastern Fortune Rice’s billboard and the sign pointing to the hot spring resort. “People travel here to soak in the water?” she asked San Jiu, who replied, Uh. “When I was a kid,” Frances continued, “we hated going near water: the paddies were filled with fish, frogs and leeches.” The countryside was romantic only to people who didn’t have to live there.

  The view from the top floor of Wasteland’s Agricultural Bank showed shops lining a five-hundred-yard ice-covered stretch of Red Flag Road: seed stores, dumpling and hot pot restaurants, a bathhouse, a clinic, a medicine store, a funerary shop, the police station and village government office, and some brave vendors standing in olive-green great coats before boxes of candied hawthorn berries, persimmons, and arm-length saury fish—now frozen solid—pulled that morning from the Songhua River. Near the train tracks was a small fertilizer factory, a government-run grain storehouse, a rusting sign advertising Bitter Melon Beer, and a painting, on a redbrick home, of a beaming farmer under a straw hat for something named Happy Soil.

  To me, this all looked charming, a respite from crowded, polluted, honking Chinese city life. Everything one needed was right here; the Agricultural Bank ATM even accepted our American debit card and spit out Chinese yuan.

  Frances said: “It’s charming to us now, but when you live here, it’s a step down from the city. You always look to get out, to leave, and to lift your family from here, too.”

  I expected the village to be emptying, but Wasteland was comparatively prosperous. “If people aren’t growing rice, or if they signed their crop over to Eastern Fortune, they keep their rent-free houses and commute to work in Jilin city,” San Jiu said. “Or they have agreed to move to the company’s new apartments, so their home will soon be razed.”

  Legally, Frances and I were not permitted to buy a home, since only those classified as rural residents could do so. This protected the countryside from real estate speculation, but it also kept farmers tied to their village, since they could not sell their houses and move elsewhere. But renting out a home, and even one’s farmland, had recently been allowed.

  One morning, as I walked alone, a Toyota Land Cruiser slowed beside me on Red Flag Road. The driver, whom I had never seen before, said, “Hey, teacher, I hear you’re looking for a house.”

  He was the “village chief,” an administrative post similar to mayor. Wasteland’s leader was not a wizened farmer in a blue serge Mao suit but a thin man in his twenties who wore khakis and a puffy North Face jacket. He drove down a newly laid dirt road that cut across the paddies to a cluster of one-story cement houses. From a distance they looked like bunkers.

  “You can rent one of these,” he said, opening a garage door. “Eastern Fortune Rice built it as a model home. Farmers who gave up their old house could move here. But few people agreed. Now the company’s building apartments instead.”

  “Will these newer houses be torn down?”

  “Maybe,” he said. It meant Of course.

  His voice echoed in the concrete shell. It was more of a brutalist sculpture than a dwelling. Instead of brick, the kang was unpainted cement. The floor, wall, and ceiling were gray and unfinished, too.

  “It needs flooring and all the other decor,” the village chief said. “It needs furniture and probably some new window panes. And the toilet needs fixing, but it’s indoor and flushes, and if you install a water heater you can shower. The kitchen needs propane tanks, and a range, and these lights don’t work, so you have to fix those. Uh,” he said, pulling a door loose from its frame. “That needs repairing, too.”

  Other than that, the house was perfect.

  I found myself in the situation I handled worst in China: needing to recuse myself from a suggestion without making the other person lose face. When that person was an authority figure, the stakes grew higher. I didn’t want to make trouble for my family, or myself. You had to choose words carefully in the countryside, where resentments steeped like tealeaves. I panicked, and told the village chief the truth.

  “I want to rent a common home, like most farmers live in
. And this place needs a lot of work; I don’t want to spend money repairing someone else’s house, especially one that might be razed.”

  “That’s reasonable,” the village chief replied.

  Then I did something even stupider. I asked whose house it was.

  San Jiu called me a moron. “You should have known that he would take you to a house he owned,” he said. “He’s a good businessman. He also has ties to Eastern Fortune Rice. He married the sister of one of its founders. She teaches English at the elementary school.” I made a mental note to visit her classroom and lead a lesson, a step toward squaring things with the chief.

  San Jiu had heard of one other vacancy in the village, a home behind the police station. Without knocking, he pulled back the tall sheet-tin gate and stepped into a courtyard illuminated by hundreds of candles. They surrounded dozens of gold-painted statues of the Buddha.

  “The owner’s husband left her, so she became a Buddhist nun,” San Jiu explained. “She’s going to a convent for a while. She said you’re welcome to stay here, but you have to keep the candles lit. The rent is low because of that.” If I would be the village altar boy, the nun would charge the equivalent of $20 a month. An apartment half the size in Jilin city rented for ten times that amount.

  “But you want to travel . . .” Frances cautioned.

  “Who will know if the candles blow out?”

  “Everyone will know,” San Jiu said. In the village, everyone knew everything. Gossip, the original social network, was wireless, and nearly as instantaneous.

  In the 1947 book From the Soil, a famous Chinese sociologist remembered growing up on a farm and being assigned to write a diary at school. He labored to log one entry, describing waking up, walking to class, playing at recess, walking home, doing homework, eating, and going to bed. For each successive entry he wrote, “The same as above.” Even as a child he felt that countryside life made a diary, and even memory, superfluous. “The fall of the Qin dynasty, the rise of the Han dynasty—what difference does it make? People in rural society do not fear forgetfulness. People in cities need to keep address books and photo identification, but in the countryside all is known.”

  Historically, the inability to freely move in search of work, in addition to a village’s geographic isolation, fostered a dependence on cooperation, of intimate relations with neighbors. The natural extension of this was a distrust of outsiders. Most foreigners who had visited China experienced this when a stranger shouted Laowai! at them. It could feel like getting soaked by a water balloon.

  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 1980s 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 MP3 earbuds. Th
ey 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.”