In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  Mr. Guan didn’t drink liquor or play cards. He fished, sold his catch on rounds to regular customers, then brought the rest home. He was asleep each night by eight. We moved in silent comfort around one another.

  Our front door had no lock, though Mr. Guan installed a small padlock on the door to my room. Aside from my laptop and a hot-water kettle, I had nothing worth taking, unless a thief wanted stacks of Japanese-language South Manchuria Railway reports from 1938 with titles such as “An Example of Japanese Free Settlers Primarily Operating Irrigated Paddy Fields Along the Mukden–Kirin Railway.”

  My first day in the house, a burning smell roused me from a nap. I opened my eyes to see the room enveloped in smoke pouring through the cracks of the kang. No one had used it for months, and no one had tested it, either. As I coughed and rubbed my eyes, Mr. Guan came into focus on the other side of the window, standing outside in the fresh air over the bed’s fire vent. “Mei wenti!” he advised, attempting to damper the smoldering rice stalks. The sleeves of his oversize coat flapped uselessly. “No problem!” he yelled. “Just don’t breathe! No problem!”

  In early March, the solar term with the foreboding name the Waking of Insects indicated hibernation’s end. Still the snow remained, and the only thing stirring in Wasteland’s air were Fierce Dragon fighter planes. Air force pilots in training flew over the village after taking off from what had been Jilin city’s airport, until a new one opened in 2005, closer to Changchun, the provincial capital.

  Aside from its functioning single runway and a hangar, the old airport’s squat cement terminal building and air traffic control tower sat empty, surrounded by a rusting fence that kept out only tumbleweeds. Dried stalks of volunteer corn smothered the empty redbrick storage sheds, whose painted slogan, in fading yellow, urged Chairman Mao to live forever. In China, seeing those words was like noticing a fallout shelter sign rusting on an American post office. It was a relic of a distant era, even if only a few decades had passed.

  My memories of rural students seemed just as outdated. As a Peace Corps volunteer in southwestern China fifteen years earlier, I had taught college students who still worked the land beside their parents. They were eager to move away but unsure how the wider world worked. It was an ideal introduction to China, since they were as confused as I was about how to sign up for a pager, let alone find a job, rent an apartment, and live independently. Tales of villagers who migrated to work on the coast filtered back to the campus, but making that leap meant turning down the security of a government-assigned teaching job. Most of my students were their parents’ only child and felt enormous pressure to provide for them as they aged. Once, when I visited a student after graduation, she remembered my explanation of mascots, which Chinese schools didn’t have. The middle school where she worked should be called the Mules, she said, because the kids—and teachers—were driven hard like one.

  Wasteland’s students were more mobile, more prosperous, and more connected. None of them had used a scythe; aside from household chores, they were expected to work on their studies, not in the fields. The team name that would best describe the cell phone–toting Number 22 Middle Schoolers was not the Huskers but the Texters. And their parents expected them to move away, beginning with testing into a Jilin city high school, then advancing to university elsewhere in China, or finding work on their own. Who looked to the state to provide a job anymore? That was another fading memory of a faraway time.

  My former Peace Corps site was no longer surrounded by rapeseed fields and bamboo-shaded hillsides. In 1997 a student had described the walk out the back school gate to her parents’ farmhouse:

  “Dusk, on a Country Road”

  Sun is setting

  Earth veiled

  With soft light

  Water brightening

  Cooking-smoke rising

  And, shepherdess coming

  With her song

  What a wonderful thing!

  Now that spot held billboards for high-rise apartments named Seattle Gold Mountain, California Blue Harbor, and a development whose signs receded around the river bend: VIP VIP VIP VIP.

  If that happened in comparatively moribund rural Sichuan, what would well-off Wasteland look like in fifteen years?

  Yet, when it came to teaching in the countryside, some things hadn’t changed. The classroom still held thirty students sitting in rows. The back line of desks showed not alert faces but nests of black hair rising rhythmically in sleep. The English textbook’s vocabulary list still read like a game of free association: Unfortunately. Go down. Politely. Overslept.

  Wasteland’s teens wondered, as my college students had fifteen years before, if it was true that American teachers were not allowed to assign homework. They constantly asked what time it was in the U.S., and—since China only had one time zone—what time it was in various cities. New York! Eleven p.m. San Francisco! Eight p.m. Washington, D.C.! Eleven p.m. Wait, that’s the same as New York! The boys questioned me on NBA rosters; the girls fretted over choosing an English name.

  I didn’t require students to select one; it was easier for me to memorize a single list of names, in Chinese. But some students wanted an English-speaking identity. One day, before lunch, Hu Nan, a shy girl with bangs combed over her eyebrows, told me she had decided to call herself Phil.

  “How about Nan, or Nancy?” I suggested.

  “I like Phil.”

  “But Nan sounds like your Chinese name. It’s unique and special.”

  “I am not special. I am just Phil.”

  “If it’s short for Phyllis, I like it.”

  “Just Phil,” she said.

  After lunch, two of the boys who had slept through my lesson challenged me to one-hundred-meter dashes over the packed snow. Phil stood at the finish line, outshouting her peers yelling “Jia you!” Pronounced zha yo, it literally means “Add fuel,” or “Come on!”

  That was what teaching in tranquil, pastoral Wasteland sounded like: air force jets thundering over a pack of pubescents screaming at me to hustle. More boys stepped to the starting line. After ten minutes of this, Phil surprised me with an offer to switch places and it was my turn to shout. Looking serious, she outran each of her male challengers, high-fiving me with the hint of a smile on the way back to class.

  At March’s end, the insects awoke, and our part of the world spun into the solar term named the Vernal Equinox. Finally the snow began to melt. Next came early April’s Qingming—Pure Brightness—the fortnight named for China’s tomb-sweeping festival. After banning it post-Liberation as a relic of the old society, the central government made Qingming a national holiday in 2008. Now it is a tradition anew.

  Wasteland’s tombs had been destroyed, so my students instead read descriptions of the festival in their Beijing-issued textbook. In English class, we translated the poem “Qingming,” written twelve hundred years ago:

  A drizzling rain falls on Mourning Day,

  The mourner’s heart is breaking on his way.

  Enquiring where a tavern is,

  A herder points to Apricot Blossom village, far away.

  When I told Frances that the kids translated the famous poem by Du Mu, she asked, “Who?”

  “The Tang dynasty poet. Du Mu.”

  “You mean Du Fu?”

  “No, Du Mu, the poet.”

  “Du Fu was the famous Tang dynasty poet.”

  “Du Mu! He wrote the poem about Qingming!”

  “Oh! Du MU. You said it wrong.”

  Frances relished my missteps just as I did her (comparatively rare) ones in English. I still teased her about the time she pronounced Yosemite in two syllables: Yose-mite. Or the time she said she liked the band named the Dixie Chickens.

  My utterance of Du Mú (a rising tone) meant nothing to her, not when the writer’s name is pronounced Du Mù (a falling tone). To me, this inability to use context to guess at my intended meaning was as ridiculous as a traveler stopping on Interstate 70 to ask if this was the way to “Dansas
City” and hearing the confounded listener reply, “Dansas City? Never heard of it.”

  “That’s a beautiful poem,” Frances said over the phone as I walked north on Red Flag Road, raindrops running off my glasses. “It rhymes in Chinese, you know. Try to make it sound that way in English.”

  In the original, the lines ended with characters pronounced fen/hun/you/cun. “It’s assonance, dummy,” she said, mystifying me further. I changed the subject to her father and how she had honored him on Qingming.

  He had passed away the previous autumn in Shenzhen, the southern coastal city that borders Hong Kong. Frances’s oldest brother had moved there on his own in 1989, after turning down an assigned accounting job. Instead, he started at the bottom rung of one of China’s first brokerages. He rose to a seat on its board of directors and bought their parents a house. Frances’s father had loved being able to leave the Northeast’s cold and return to his southern China roots. He died, surrounded by family, after complications from an intestinal obstruction.

  His ashes, placed in a carved marble casket the size of a large shoe box, sat on a shelf in a columbarium, awaiting entombment. On Qingming, Frances went there to take her father “out for some air.” She lifted the casket from the shelf, carried it out into the warm sunshine to a designated area for burning paper money and incense, and raised the gold cloth covering its lid. Emblazoned there was her favorite picture of him—black-and-white, wearing a black sport coat and white dress shirt, with one corner of his mouth turned up in a half grin. She let out an “airport cry,” as if she had just seen him at Arrivals after a long journey.

  Frances, her brother, and their mother talked to her father as they had during a holiday meal. “I made your favorite, braised pig knuckle,” her mom said, placing the dish by the casket. “Have a smoke, Baba,” Frances said, lighting a cigarette and placing it on the ground. Her brother poured a shot glass of sorghum wine, raised a toast, then set the filled cup next to the smoldering cigarette. The dead, Frances noted, got to live it up once each year.

  Her mother burned paper gold coins and a stack of paper money that was legal tender in the afterworld. She uncovered more cooked dishes, urging him to eat. She narrated the family news since he had departed, telling him not to worry, that everyone was fine. I had even moved to Wasteland, she said. “Everyone there misses you,” Frances added. “They ask about you all of the time. But you’ll stay here now, where it’s warm.”

  For two hours the family sat beside him in the sun.

  “It does seem strange, not having any tombs around here,” Auntie Yi said on her kang. “The dead just vanish.”

  She wore a black padded silk jacket, black cloth shoes, and a worn black bucket hat. Curls of gray hair spilled from its sides. As she spoke, a single snaggletooth jutted over her lower lip. She looked like a hip librarian, and was as vivacious as her brother San Jiu was taciturn. She often papered over my social faux pas, telling me only after she felt my unknowing offense would no longer sting (which it still did): “Go pay a visit to Auntie Zhu,” she would advise, “and maybe bring her some pork. Ask her to cook it for you. You walked by her house a few weeks ago and didn’t stop to see if she was home, to say hello.”

  If I had any clout, Auntie Yi would be my consigliere. As I did not, she was simply my favorite aunt. She lived in the first house off Red Flag Road, a half mile from the middle school. It was the most solidly built home in the area, made from reinforced concrete instead of brick. “I was never a farmer,” she said. Her father, a Communist cadre, had been assigned to Wasteland in the 1950s to oversee construction of the state-owned granary that now rusted, abandoned, near the train station. Before reaching the mandatory retirement age of fifty-five for female civil servants (men could stay until they turned sixty), Auntie Yi worked as an administrator in the village government. Her work now revolved around the rows of bright pink and white poppies she tended along Red Flag Road. “I used my own money to buy the seeds,” she often reminded me. “Long before Eastern Fortune Rice started spending money on the village, I planted those poppies so the road would look nice.”

  I usually stopped to see her on my walk home from school. In a way, I had to: little passed Auntie Yi’s house without her seeing it from the windows that faced the road.

  I enjoyed sitting with her husband, who, like me, had married into the family. He said to call him Uncle Fu, though the correct honorific was “Husband of Third Female Cousin.” He had a kind face, with large, inquisitive eyes and a close-lipped smile. He kept his white hair shorn close to a liver-spotted scalp, and his blue serge coat and pants hung loosely on a lean frame.

  He liked sports, so we usually sat on the kang and watched whatever played on TV. On late afternoons it was often women’s volleyball, a replay of Premier League soccer, or snooker. Uncle Fu didn’t like that, but I did, because he chatted during the long silences between shots. Yet, every time he began to tell me the story of how he ended up in Wasteland, Auntie Yi—taller, heavier and a bundle of industry—entered the room and interrupted. She was a conversational snowball rolling downhill and gaining momentum.

  “You know what we used to say back then?” she asked. “When you got sick, you just had to keep going until you got better or you died. There was no clinic out here. I had an older sister already in school, and your mother-in-law had a younger sister. Both of them died of tuberculosis, or pneumonia—you didn’t know what it was back then, you just got sick, and then you died if you didn’t get better. There wasn’t an in-between, like now, where you can still live with a disease. We were talking about graves when you arrived. Today is Qingming. Where are their graves? Gone! Destroyed! Now they’re just fields. Now people are cremated and put near Jilin city. We used to have a Buddhist temple here, too, but it was pulled down in 1956, when this became an official production zone, and Wasteland became a village.”

  History started then.

  “The wind is huge today,” Auntie Yi said. “It comes all the way from Mongolia. Once it passes, the weather will get better. What did your wife say about the weather in Hong Kong? Sunny and hot? Isn’t it amazing that one country can have so many climates? Down south you have green trees and flowers blooming, and here it’s all snow and my poppies are frozen.”

  Her husband turned from the television and watched her with obvious affection.

  “You know,” she continued unbidden, “when I was a little girl, I lived in a village closer to Jilin named Sand Creek. There were rolling hills everywhere, so we made sleds out of branches and scrap and we would be happy to see snow, because we could sled all day. I didn’t have winter shoes—I wore cloth shoes just like these—and my clothes were all patched up, and I would come home with my face all red, but only when it was time to eat. Do you know what we ate back then?”

  Countryside reminiscences often swung around to food.

  “Corn and flour fried with soybeans, and a little pickled radish, and sometimes potatoes. In summer it was cucumber, peppers and eggplant, and cabbage, of course. That’s what we could grow. We never had meat except at New Year’s, and it was a slice of pork. We never received a red envelope of money as a gift. Where could commoners get money? This was in the 1940s, before Liberation. My grandchildren are living in a different time.”

  I asked Auntie Yi which of her relatives migrated to the Northeast and when. “I’m here because my ancestors were hungry!” she said with a laugh. “They were in Shandong province, and it was a famine. What year? There was always a famine down there; the year doesn’t even matter. Famine Year. How’s that?”

  Uncle Fu laughed and shot me a look that asked, Isn’t she something?

  “Two brothers left the village carrying only their knapsacks and walked for a year until they crossed the Great Wall and entered the Northeast. They got into a fight; no one can say why. No one can even say the village they came from. They split up, and one kept walking north, ending up in Jilin city. I don’t know what happened to the other brother. The one in Jilin hauled
corn and sorghum on his back, transporting it. He saved enough to buy a horse and cart, and he could transport more. He bought land around here and rented out huts to other laborers.”

  This was her grandfather, who grew corn. “We were fortunate. We always had corn flour, and under our roof’s thatch and tree branches we stuffed corncobs for insulation. But it was still cold; every spring around this time, we’d coat the walls with new layers of mud. In winter the walls would bubble from frost, and mice infested the ceiling.”

  Auntie Yi’s raised her hands, wiggling her fingers like ten busy creatures.

  Her grandfather opened a grain store in a town near here, but across the Songhua River. “He told me that this land where our house is now used to be underwater. He said they used to weave reed baskets and pole over here in a little skiff to trap carp in the shallows. The water was clear and you could see right to the sandy bottom. In winter they would break the ice and reach down to pluck frogs and sleeping bullheads. Like this!”

  Her hand darted at my knee. Uncle Fu flinched in surprise, too. We both laughed.

  “You sound really tired of telling these stories,” I teased Auntie Yi. But my sarcasm eluded her.

  “No!” she said, suddenly serious. “I never tell these stories. Who would I tell them to?”

  Everyone out here, Uncle Fu added, already knew everything.

  CHAPTER 6

  Grain Rain

  No one could say when winter would finally end, or what Eastern Fortune rice had planned for Wasteland. A cold drizzle continued through the end of April. San Jiu said this year’s planting would be later than any in his lifetime; usually the rice seedlings went into the ground before May. But ice still filled the paddies’ furrows. Then the rain stopped overnight, and the landscape turned from silver white to black mud. Only the distant foothills showed a hint of green.