In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  I asked a teller at the Agricultural Bank and a clerk at the Great Northeast Medicine Store. Unlike in other parts of China, they didn’t say that I had to be mistaken, that I was pronouncing it wrong, that I didn’t understand anything because I was a foreigner. Instead: blank stares, self-effacing laughter, offered cups of green tea.

  The sky was high and piercingly blue, saturating everything and highlighting a fat white moon. That feeling of open space and empty landscapes returned, and I was reminded of how much I loved traveling in the Northeast. A bus pulled up and the driver asked if I was the guy looking for the Willow Palisade. I climbed into the front seat for the full view out the windshield. It showed cornfields.

  I had been up since five, and rocking along the two-lane road lulled me to sleep. The driver woke me an hour later, in a town named Zhangwu, and said, “This is the old border with Mongol lands.” I didn’t see the palisade, only another bus station, also large, also new. Perhaps sensing my dejection in the waiting hall, an old man wearing faded camouflage pants sidled near. I knew he was the one.

  “Where is the Willow Palisade?” the man said, repeating my question. “It’s thirty kilometers back the way you came. You passed it. Get off at the blue highway sign.”

  An hour later the same driver stopped at the sign that stretched over the road, saying “This is the only blue one, brother.” The bus pulled away. The sun was high now, and sweat ran down the back of my neck. All was silent save for the patch of sunflowers rustling in the breeze. Their blossomed heads bowed toward a strip of white sand that ran fine and hot through my fingers. It felt like a dry riverbed. The blue sign posted by the local government read: IF YOU ENCOUNTER TROUBLES WHEN DOING BUSINESS IN ZHANGWU, CALL 6949006.

  I thought of dialing the number and asking for help. First I followed the sand along an embankment past the sunflowers until hearing the staccato bursts of a tractor, which appeared from behind a bend of cornstalks. A farmer named Mr. Feng stopped the Taishan T-25 and asked what I was up to.

  “The Willow Palisade?” he repeated. “You’re standing on it.”

  I exhaled in relief.

  “This was the moat, or part of the river, and that embankment of earth there was the barrier.” Mr. Feng climbed down from his seat and led me through the corn into a clearing. “This was the barrier. But now you see that it’s all broad beans, and this,” he said, sinking a hand into the moist loam and ripping out a tangle of roots, “is just peanuts.”

  On the back of his tractor, holding on to Mr. Feng’s shoulders, I bumped along the palisade’s remains. He brought me back to the main road and pointed to a gully on the other side. “Didn’t you see the marker there?”

  I saw only a pile of trash, but Mr. Feng was off our ride and walking down to the soggy ground. He stopped at a toppled white granite plaque.

  “This is the second one the government put here. The first one? It went missing.” He laughed and added, “You understand, it was stolen. It’s good stone.”

  The new stele was not properly set and lay facedown. Brushing back weeds revealed an inscription that said this was part of the western Willow Palisade. The road, it said, ran through the former gate that separated Mongol from Manchu lands.

  Seeing us, another tractor stopped, and then a car, and now there were five of us standing in ankle-deep water, staring at the stone. A better marker would have included the final stanza of the emperor Qianlong’s palisade poem:

  Insofar as the idea exists and the framework is there, there is no need to elaborate;

  The methods of predecessors are preserved by descendants.

  When there are secure fortifications, it is peaceful for ten thousand years:

  How can this be dependent on these insignificant willows?

  After Mr. Feng and the other men departed, I spent an hour in the hot sun on the side of the road, caked in dirt, waiting for a bus, and happy to pass time filling an empty water bottle with the soft sand as a souvenir, thankful no one was here to hawk it. After passing me, a truck laden with watermelons shuddered to a halt and the driver hopped out of his cab and walked back along the shoulder. He said I looked like an American and asked about Obama and the economy, and how short our history was compared to theirs, and, say, what did watermelons sell for in the States? It was a conversation I could have had anywhere in China, but we were completely alone, surrounded by sunflowers, peanuts, and dragonflies, listening to different frequencies. “This is the Willow Palisade,” I said with pride, and the driver replied, “The what?”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Waking of Insects

  At last I found a house, or should I say, a house found me. After a research trip, I had returned to Jilin city after six o’clock, too late to catch the last bus to Wasteland. That night my hotel room was freezing. Via Skype, Frances pointed at my bed and said, “Toss dried rice stalks beneath it and light them on fire.”

  My phone rang at six the next morning. The screen showed not Frances’s number but that of Ms. Guan, the Number 22 Middle School teacher. I answered with a concerned “Uh,” fearing something had happened.

  Instead I heard: “You can live with my brother.”

  “When?” I said groggily.

  “Now.”

  “I’m in Jilin.”

  “Meet me at the bus stop in thirty minutes.”

  As we waited for the Number 10 minibus, I saw that Ms. Guan had changed since our last meeting a week before. Blond streaks ran through her long black hair, her glasses now had purple-tinted lenses, and she unzipped her down jacket to reveal the top of a red rose tattooed above her left breast. It was a costume change for a new act in her life: “After the students take their high school entrance exam in spring,” she said, “Number 22 is transferring me to a better school. It’s right over there.”

  She gestured to the Diamond Cement Factory, whose smokestacks rained gooey pellets that speckled our black coats. Jilin’s amphitheater of pine-clad hills was fronted by factories like this, manufacturing poison against the prettiest backdrop of any Northeast city. Some of Jilin’s districts still looked like a live-action version of the old propaganda magazine China Reconstructs: chemical tanker trucks threaded their way between cooling towers and under steaming pipelines that snaked over the narrow lanes.

  “My new school’s location is much better than Wasteland,” Ms. Guan said, but I couldn’t see how.

  Jilin is a second-tier metropolis, with four million people—and sleepy by Chinese standards. A century ago it had flourished as a shipyard and trading post. An English traveler passing through in 1903 found “shops and main streets bright with the beloved northern colour, vermillion red, [selling] beautiful carved wood, all manner of stamped leather, furs, bearskins, tiger and leopard skins from the Eastern forests, and curious colored silks.” The old walled city was made of wood; a Japanese poet, arriving in the winter of 1918, described it as “breathtakingly beautiful, fully warranting its reputation as the ‘Kyoto of Manchuria.’” Fire destroyed most of wooden Jilin in 1930. Industrialization took care of the rest.

  Our bus stopped every fifty yards to fill the remaining seats, then the padded engine cover at the driver’s right hand, then the aisle. Bundled as we were in layers, every added body felt like additional protection from a crash. The interior became a human airbag.

  Immobile in the crush, I was happy to be rolling, to feel the thrum and hear the grinding gears as people gossiped about apartment prices and school fees. Everything cost more. Had I seen the prices at the new apartment high-rises named Moca, Loire Town, and the Fifth Avenue? So gui (pronounced gway). Expensive. Forget what the zodiac said about the rabbit: this was really the Year of the Gui.

  I looked out the window at the winding Songhua. The river did not freeze here even during the fortnight called Severe Cold, and when its water vapor rose into the frigid air, the droplets crystallized on the branches of willows and pines. This rime ice (called shugua, pronounced shoe-gwa) transformed the riverbanks into a photo backdro
p of national renown.

  In the late nineteenth century, an English explorer described the phenomenon: “We saw one morning one of the most perfectly lovely sights I have ever seen. I have never seen a similar sight, either before or since. It was a frozen mist. As the sun rose we found the whole air glittering with brilliant particles sparkling in the rays of the sun—and the mist had encrusted everything, all the trunks of the trees and all the delicate tracery of their outlines, with a coating like hoar frost. The earth, the trees, and everything in the scene was glistening white, and the whole air was sparkling in the sunlight. It lasted but a short time, for as the sun rose the mist melted away, but while it could be seen we seemed to be in a very fairyland.”

  A century later the description held.

  The bus passed a building site for an apartment complex named Warm City. In English, its billboard said: IF WHITE AMERICA TOLD THE TRUTH ONE DAY ITS WORLD WOULD FALL APART. That’s the title of a song by the Welsh rock group the Manic Street Preachers. How did it end up here? And why would anyone buy an apartment near the shiny, steaming spires of Jilin Ethanol? Its billboard promised CLEAN ENERGY FOR A BETTER ENVIRONMENT. Which ad told the lie?

  Next came a Purina feed factory, then a Wahaha brand mineral water plant. At a village named Lower Frog, the bus, sagging on its axles, climbed over the new high-speed railroad tracks, and then the view showed open fields. We had crossed the line from industry to agriculture, from urban to rural. The bus passengers visibly relaxed as after take-off, when an airplane levels and the FASTEN SEATBELT sign chimes off with a ding!

  An old man sitting beside his grandson, said, “Tell Teacher Plumblossom all the English words you know.”

  “Banana!” the plump boy yelled. “Apple!”

  “If he can eat it, he knows how to say it,” the grandfather said proudly.

  “Hamburger!” the boy yelled. “Pizza! KFC!”

  The other passengers laughed. The grandfather recognized me, but some of the other riders did not. The grandfather explained to them: “He married a woman from here, but she left for work.” Passengers whom I had never met nodded empathetically. We were like many rural households, they said: one spouse became a migrant worker, leaving the other behind.

  An old saying holds that if you go three miles from home, you are in another land, but the distance was shorter for a foreigner. Outside Wasteland, people stared at me with friendly, cautious curiosity, the way you might if a kangaroo joined your commute.

  I read that the comedian Steve Martin used to hand autograph seekers a signed name card that confirmed the person had met Steve Martin and found him to be “warm, polite, intelligent and funny.” At times—like on this bus—I wished I had a similar card to present that would answer the usual questions strangers asked of me, in this order:

  I am an American.

  I have been in China a long time.

  I was born in the Year of the Rat. I am 1.86 meters tall.

  I do not have a salary. I am a writer and volunteer teacher.

  Chinese is not hard. It is easier to learn than English.

  Yes, I can use chopsticks. We eat Chinese food in

  America, too. But often it is expensive and orange.

  On rare occasions someone started me off with a curveball: a gruff construction worker, hard hat in hand, once asked if anyone had ever told me that my beard was beautiful; a gentleman in a business suit standing on a country lane wondered if morality was more important than wisdom.

  Saying that I was American always brought a smile; regardless of political ups and downs, that reaction had not changed since I first arrived in China in 1995. Though sometimes—when interrupted mid-slurp over noodles, or facing a drunkard—I tired of giving honest replies that would only lead to more questions. I am from Mars, I would say. What are chopsticks? I just started learning Chinese yesterday—what a breeze! Kids caught on faster than adults; sarcasm, via movies and the Internet, was a recent American import.

  Ms. Guan pulled a child onto her lap. She asked me to guess his age, and I—forgetting the Inverse Rule—guessed too low instead of too high.

  “He’s eight,” I said, honestly.

  “No! He’s twelve.”

  So many of the village kids looked smaller and younger than their years, in contrast to the adults, who accelerated to middle age.

  “How old am I?” Ms. Guan demanded.

  “Thirty,” I tried, safely, although I knew the truth.

  “I’m forty-two!” she laughed.

  “Forty-two and you’re still without a husband?” the woman standing in the aisle teased. I knew this talk stung Ms. Guan, but she gamely parried back. Later she told me she hated living in Wasteland, where there were no secrets, unlike in town, where she could blend in and be anonymous.

  The boy on her lap studied my face in silence.

  “Gan sa?” Ms. Guan said, dialect for “What’s up?”

  “Can I ask Teacher Plumblossom a question?” the boy said, seriously. “I want to know: Do you hate Osama bin Laden?”

  “Can you hate a dead person?”

  The boy blinked. “Do you hate Hitler?”

  “I hate eating cabbage.” I was talking to a twelve-year-old and trying to lighten the subject.

  The boy didn’t take the bait. For the remainder of our ride to Wasteland, we discussed not food but the nature of evil. It was 7:30 in the morning when the boy got off at the intersection of Red Flag Road.

  “I have one more question!” he yelled to the driver, who idled.

  “Teacher Plumblossom, do you miss your mom?”

  The full bus watched, expectant.

  “Yes, I miss my mom.”

  “Do you miss her so much that you cry?”

  “Yes,” I lied. The boy had boarded the bus alone and was exiting alone, and I guessed he needed assurance. “Sometimes I miss her so much that I cry.”

  “Ha ha!” the boy crowed. “What a big baby!” He bounded off the bus as the passengers laughed.

  It was a typical Wasteland house. A wrought-iron fence and gate separated its painted yellow brick from the nameless street that crossed Red Flag Road. Forty homes clustered in this corner of the village. All had peaked corrugated tin roofs and gardens for yards; ours was known for its large spring onions. Rows of corn grew in the back.

  The entrance’s exposed cement floor needed sweeping, while the kitchen conjured thoughts of anything but food. Its soot-coated walls held a rusting cleaver and wok, a single propane burner, a refrigerator, garlic bulbs, and a bottle each of black vinegar and soy sauce. Frost-tipped cabbages filled a waist-high clay pot capped with a marble slab that balanced atop them. Cabbage leaves drooped from the gap, looking like they had tired and given up while trying to escape.

  The house had two rooms, both nearly entirely filled with a kang, fueled by the stacks of rice stalks piled outside. The platform bed began just inside the door and required a high step to mount; coming home felt like climbing onstage.

  The house, like Wasteland itself, straddled the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries: there was no indoor plumbing, but I had broadband Internet, installed by a technician who drove out from Jilin city. “You must like to play online poker,” he guessed. Perhaps that explained why I was holed up out here.

  “I need Skype to call my wife.”

  “OK,” the technician replied, looking around the empty farmhouse.

  I had installed a virtual private network to breach the “Great Firewall” that blocked selected Web sites. In China, one came to recognize the stealthiest Internet on-ramps the way American parents could rattle off the highest performing school districts: 96.44.178.178 is much better than 216.240.128.82. It turned out I didn’t much need the VPN; I could access more forbidden Western media sites in the countryside than in a city. It was as if no one bothered to keep an eye on the single screen glowing atop a kang in a village named Wasteland.

  I shared the house with Ms. Guan’s brother. Mr. Guan was a wiry farmer my age whose temp
erament reminded me of neighbors in Minnesota: at once taciturn and bemused. He was a bachelor and every day wore baggy army pants and an oversize army jacket. He was thin, tanned, and perpetually squinting, as though the daylight hurt his eyes. He spoke softly, and my voice fell, too, when talking to him. We shared the mud-walled outhouse, and not much else. He had no interest in the Internet, spoke not a word of English, and never asked about my research, my wife, geopolitics, or whether I missed my mother.

  He asked his teenage niece, who often dropped by to surf music-sharing Web sites, to write our lease by hand on the back of an English vocabulary exercise sheet. On one side, a list of words—exhausted, embarrassing, kangaroos—on the other, a paragraph that stated I was entitled to 750 square feet and half the onion garden for 300 yuan ($49) each month. I took the space—well lit with a wall of windows on either side—but passed on the onions. The only thing I had ever successfully grown was a beard.

  The niece, age seventeen, wanted to be a kindergarten English teacher. She showed me her textbook, which explained that a tenet of American pedagogy was “a plan for ending the children’s relationships with their parents.” I explained that just because most kids left home after graduating high school, they still had a relationship with their parents, even from a distance. In the countryside, the niece said, “everyone is together with everyone forever.”

  Outside my back wall of windows, under snow, was the well where Ms. Guan’s father had committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Guan didn’t remember it; he was a baby then. “We drilled a new well,” he said conclusively.

  Mostly we talked about fish; he rose before dawn and rode his Flying Pegasus motorcycle to the Songhua River to cast nets. I heard the motorcycle return at daybreak and park near the storage shed, which burbled like a creek. One day I opened its tin door to see a hose, connected to a pump at the well, running into red plastic buckets filled with fingerlings, tadpoles, and writhing eels. Bait leeches dried on string dangling from the wooden rafters. Frances thought this sounded like a set for a Chinese production of The Silence of the Lambs. But to me it looked no different than the shed at a Minnesota cabin. Except for the eels. The sound of their contorted thrashing made me shut the door tightly. I dreaded opening it to fill a laundry bucket with water.