In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  A worker who didn’t recognize me on Red Flag Road asked the usual questions—American, I answered. 1.86 meters, Year of the Rat—then said he was from Mud Town. He came to prune the Manchurian ash trees lining the road. After a winter of pummeling gales, the branches bowed in one direction. He worked alone, with a handsaw and wooden ladder. Eastern Fortune Rice hired him to make the road look nice, he said. Three days later he had completed all two miles of the trees, on both sides of the road, which was now marked with a sign pointing the direction to the company’s office—NEW AGRICULTURE/NEW COUNTRYSIDE/NEW FARMERS—and its Shennong (Divine Farmer) Hot Spring, named for the mythological emperor who bestowed agriculture to the Chinese.

  Auntie Yi, standing off the road amidst the tall stems of her unopened poppies, said with a snort: “A private company is taking care of our Socialist road and named its resort after a god.”

  But I liked the hot spring’s name, which sounded better than Red Star, or Laborer’s Number Seven Leisure District, or other clunky Communist-era monikers. In the 1960s, Wasteland had been renamed the Ninth Platform Commune.

  “You watch,” Auntie Yi said. “Before long, Eastern Fortune Rice will control everything here. They’ll probably even rename the town.”

  “To what?”

  “Who knows?”

  Shennong, the legendary Divine Farmer, is also said to be the founder of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and is renowned for testing the effects of herbs by ingesting them and watching their effects inside his transparent body. For an antidote, he drank another of his discoveries, this one accidental: tea. Legend said that burning twigs of a tea bush sent scorched leaves floating upward, landing in his cauldron of boiling water.

  I liked that story, too, and how, even if it was via the name on a new hot spring resort off a road named Red Flag, rural China still spun folk tradition. In the cities, most of that had long been razed and forgotten. None of my Beijing students had known about the fox spirit said to live in the old wall towers, or the legend of Beijing’s layout itself, resembling the body of a deity who slew a dragon that lived in the area. In a way, even the countryside’s recent eras were sliding into that realm. Painted on the redbrick houses around Auntie Yi’s, you could make out the fading characters from 1980 announcing the village as a “Red Defender.” To the west we could see the rusting gate of the Rejuvenate China Farm, an abandoned collective from the 1970s. One brick wall of its former storehouse remained, punctured by a window missing several panes of glass, framing a horizon of paddies.

  On her kang, from under a stack of cross-stitching magazines, Auntie Yi pulled out the oversize calendar Eastern Fortune Rice gave to each village home during the Lunar New Year holiday. “It’s an advertisement, really,” she said. “The company wants farmers to sign over their land and houses and move to the new apartments.”

  The calendar’s pages included the ancient poem “Sympathy for Peasants,” a reminder to appreciate the labor that goes into a bowl of rice, still invoked by parents ordering children to finish their meals:

  A peasant weeding at noon,

  His sweat drips to the field soon.

  Anyone with rice on a tray,

  Owes it to his toiling day.

  Yet the accompanying photos were of Eastern Fortune’s threshers and polishing machines. Another picture showed seated farmers being lectured. “The company likes to give advice,” Auntie Yi explained. Each month on the calendar was headlined with a suggestion, written as a rhyming couplet, such as: Reflect on the past months / and sign contracts at once.

  Even in rhyme, that sounded pushy. Auntie Yi said she would never move.

  The security guard at the entrance to Divine Farmer Hot Spring smiled as I approached. “No one walks here,” he said. “Where’s your car?”

  The driveway ran straight for a quarter mile, past the billboard showing then Chinese president Hu Jintao touching a can of Big Wasteland rice on his visit, then past fallow paddies and a greenhouse until I reached the Manchu Villa Area. Here visitors could dress up in silk robes and coronets and pose in a replica of a traditional Manchu three-sided courtyard home. It was exactly the sort of site I had expected, and I saw why my Manchu roommate and our neighbors never came here.

  I entered the humid greenhouse. A middle-aged man emerged from the rows of lush green trellises. He was worried about fungus, he said, by way of introduction. Powdery mildew in particular: it was attacking his organic cucumbers. During the rice-growing season he lost sleep thinking about insects and birds, especially swallows, and what they were wreaking on the insecticide-free fields. This time of year was supposed to be less stressful. But then powdery mildew showed up.

  The football field–size greenhouse was a recently added attraction to the hot spring, since visitors from the city liked picking their own organic fruit and vegetables. “Kids don’t know how to do it,” the gardener said with a frown. “They’ll look at a tomato vine and yank on the entire thing instead of gently twisting off each tomato. They kick the melons like they’re soccer balls.”

  I looked at the trellises. “Is this soil from Wasteland?”

  He nodded. “Our black earth is the best.” But he worried for how long, since recent tests of Wasteland’s soil showed levels of heavy metals that were approaching the allowable limit for a crop to be certified organic. “The soil is safe, but I worry a lot,” he said. “Farmers are like that. We always worry.”

  “You said farmer, not gardener.”

  He laughed. “At this hot spring I’m called the Head Gardener. Tourists don’t want to eat food raised by any old farmer.”

  We walked around the outdoor springs, steaming in the cold April air. A wide, shallow communal pool the size of a putting green led to smaller, individual soaking areas. Wicker chaise longues were set out before a thatched-roof bar and a bamboo-walled teahouse. It looked like an upscale resort imported from southern, coastal China.

  “It’s modeled after a Japanese design,” the gardener said.

  Children’s shrieks and splashes echoed from the covered Olympic-size swimming pool. We stepped along its slippery edge—the gardener first checking that our shoe soles were clean—then entered the resort’s cavernous reception area. Robed parents in shower sandals tried herding kids wearing rubber flotation rings. They broke free and ran, full speed, into the furniture and potted plants: bumper kids. The posted prices showed that a day in the water cost 120 yuan ($20), while a night in the cheapest hotel room cost 288 yuan ($47). The most expensive went for double that price.

  “That room includes a mah-jongg table,” the gardener noted.

  “The entrance ticket to use the pool costs nearly as much as renting a thresher to cut a paddy of rice,” I said.

  “But to someone who lives in the city, it’s cheap.”

  “How is this good for Wasteland’s residents?”

  “As Eastern Fortune profits, the village profits,” he replied. “It’s true that locals don’t come here, but we don’t eat all the food we grow, either. We sell it to people in town, in the region, and across our nation. We’re not a dead-end street anymore.”

  Wasn’t it better, the gardener added, to build a place where a city kid could come and exercise and eat organic produce instead of going to a shopping mall with fast food?

  “Sure, if local kids can use it, too.”

  “Do you want to get in the water?” the gardener asked. “Wasteland teachers only have to pay half price.”

  I said I was afraid of leaving a dirt ring around the pool. The gardener nodded and went back to worrying over powdery mildew. As I left, he jogged after me, calling, “Organic tomatoes!” I carried the heavy sack up Red Flag Road toward home. The view showed yellow cranes adding the fifth and final floor to the new apartments.

  May turned, bringing the solar term named the Beginning of Summer. Meltwater filled the irrigation ditches, and the tall birches that lined them budded green. For Wasteland, a more fitting solar term name was the Awakening
of Frogs. Their pulsing croaks filled the area, loud enough for me to wonder if frogsong was a word in Chinese.

  San Jiu said no. He didn’t even hear the frogs, just as a city dweller stopped hearing traffic. “I dare not say I turn my back on the natural world, because I’m a farmer, obviously,” he said. “But farmers worry about nature, about things we can’t control. You don’t want floods, or drought, or insects, or anything. You want a quiet summer without any trouble. You want nature to mind its own business.”

  I saw Wasteland’s landscape as natural. San Jiu knew it was manufactured. “This was all underwater until the 1950s,” he said, waving at the paddies. “Everything you see was shaped or made by a human. The black earth was here, but only after the marshes and shallows were drained. It was tilled by hand, and tilled again, and fertilized, and so on. Look, the road—cement; the electric poles—timber; those houses—brick; the irrigation channels—cement; the pump house—iron and brick.”

  What I viewed as bucolic, he saw as industrial. I searched for the Chinese vocabulary to explain how, in the West, people started using the word grower instead of farmer, as it indicated a smaller-scale operation. But in Chinese, a farmer was nongmin (“agricultural person”) and nongmin only. It was often translated in English as “peasant,” which to my ear sounded like person tilling mud in a feudal, preindustrial world. In Chinese, nongmin did not sound as archaic. Regardless, the terms didn’t matter to San Jiu. “We’re nongmin. But we’re really manufacturers. We produce grain.”

  We walked a mile south of his house, to the intersection with the road that led to Jilin city. At the single-story cement building that was Wasteland’s “rice station,” a chalkboard announced a Perpetual Harvest brand thresher for sale and also a slice of land for rent for 10,000 yuan ($1,631) per year.

  “I should rent that,” I said.

  “You can’t,” San Jiu replied. “No one outside this village can rent it. Even Auntie Yi and Uncle Fu, they’re classified as urbanites, so they can’t rent it, either. Farmers only.”

  “You could rent it for me.”

  “Uh,” he said. It meant No way. The last time he leased someone else’s land, San Jiu found himself in Beijing, petitioning the central government to resolve a dispute.

  China’s constitution stipulates that land in cities is owned by the state, although urban residents can buy and sell homes, which usually come with a renewable seventy-year leasehold. In contrast, rural land—including housesites—is owned by “collectives,” or local governments. Leaseholds on farming plots are renewable and run for thirty years. Until recently, farmers could not transfer the rights to use their assigned field, which averaged one to two acres per family.

  The area fluctuated with a household’s size. The local government assigned additional acreage when a child was born or a person got married, or subtracted it after a person died or got divorced. San Jiu’s family paddies totaled 1.5 acres, a bit larger than an American football field.

  New rules allowed leaseholders to rent their assigned plots of farmland so long as the land did not sit fallow or was converted to industrial use. In Wasteland some families leased their entire plots to sharecroppers, leaving them free to open a restaurant or commute to jobs in Jilin city. Other families leased strips of their allotment.

  San Jiu had leased a strip of paddy from a fellow villager in need of cash. The local government approved the deal, but after the land produced more rice than expected, it tried to reassign the plot before the next planting. “I had a signed contract between me and the collective,” San Jiu said. “They just didn’t expect the land to be that good. They thought it should go back into the pool of village land, to be redistributed. To a government official’s relative, I suspected.”

  In 2010, 65 percent of China’s “mass incidents,” as protests were called, concerned rural land. Often the conflicts were between farmers and developers or the local government in league with them. San Jiu consulted his law books and sought advice from a legal expert on a call-in radio show. The expert, a professor, suggested he view his dispute as contractual, not personal. This, San Jiu said with a self-aware laugh, only angered him more.

  “Of course it was personal,” he told me, clenching his fists. “Everything in a village is personal.”

  Still, he had filed a complaint in a Jilin city court, asking that the village government be made to honor the terms of their contract. When the court dismissed it without ruling, San Jiu boarded a train to Beijing.

  Petitioning the central government was rarely successful; some supplicants spent years clutching ever-growing sheaves of photocopied documents, waiting to be heard, while others were hauled back by police who followed them from home. San Jiu, however, got lucky.

  “I was there only a couple days,” he said. “I followed the law handbooks I had collected. The important clause, which I memorized, was: ‘Collectively owned land must be registered at the county government, which will issue a land-use contract and land-rights certificate.’ I had those. An official read them and wrote a letter for me to bring back here.”

  The document, called a gonghan, told a lower court that the petitioner’s grievance had been heard in Beijing and suggested the matter be handled “courteously and according to law.” It was, in effect, an upbraiding for wasting the central government’s time.

  “The Jilin city court heard my appeal right away. The contract was upheld. I can still farm that land.”

  “So you won.”

  He shrugged, looking wary of the harvest to come.

  San Jiu had refused to contract his crop to Eastern Fortune Rice, and so far it had been a smart bet. His last harvest sold for the equivalent of forty cents a pound, double the previous year’s price. Even after expenses, he still earned 50 percent more than what a contract with Eastern Fortune would have paid.

  Like Auntie Yi, he also refused to move to the new apartments. The company representative hadn’t threatened him or even called him stubborn. The man understood that San Jiu wanted to stay in his home. But when San Jiu cooked dinner every night, the view from his kitchen window showed the cranes and sprouting high-rises silhouetted in the setting sun. “The taller those buildings get,” he said, “the closer they seem.”

  The rice station was a state-owned shop that sold pesticides and seeds. There are more than 140,000 varieties of rice; the station sold two dozen of them, selected for their suitability for these paddies. San Jiu, like all farmers here, hedged his bets and selected five varieties, whose names ranged from boastful (Super Production Number 1) to technical (Agricultural Institute Number 7) to inventive (Jilin Japonica Number 66) and poetic (a Japanese variety that translated as “Small Part of an Autumn Field”).

  The rice station showed packets of each, hanging from walls adorned with dried rice husks, banner advertisements for herbicides—OUTSTANDING PADDY: SPRAYING ONCE IS ENOUGH!—and posters for seeds named Harvest Leader Number 8 (and 9, and 13, and 14), which promised higher yields. Pictures showed ripe rice hanging heavy off the stalk.

  The seed varieties all looked the same to me, but San Jiu described the properties of each like a car salesman touting a new model’s features. “This kind takes 145 days to ripen, and this one takes a few less, but the real difference is that this one averages 90 grains of rice per panicle, but some of these other ones can have a third more than that, so you’re getting more rice, obviously, but that’s if they all ripen and don’t get sick. You’ll spend all summer worrying about fungus,” he said, shaking his head.

  The rice station smelled like musty fertilizer, and the walls were painted the same colors as my classroom. But it looked lively after the brutal winter; its opening signaled planting season. A posted chart explained how to prepare a rice paddy according to the solar cycle. Now, during the period named Grain Rain, was the time to plant beds of seedlings.

  “I didn’t know you transported seedlings to the paddies,” I said. “I thought you just walked through the field broadcasting dry rice like t
his . . .” I demonstrated the Johnny Appleseed toss, flicking my hand left and right.

  San Jiu laughed loudly, as did the clerk standing behind the counter.

  “You can’t plant like that! You’ll starve!”

  Actually, rice seeds can be sown this less efficient way. But I learned this later. At that moment I heard the many Chinese synonyms for moron. San Jiu called me a dolt, a fool, a hollow head, and more. It was the happiest I had seen him in weeks.

  I interrupted to add: “It must be exhausting transplanting the seedlings, bending over all day.”

  He snorted. “We use a machine! A mechanized rice transplanter! You load trays of seed beds onto it and it plants them in the paddy.” San Jiu’s tone made it sound like robots had long followed his every command. But when I asked him when the machine first came to the village, he said, “Last year.”

  Now it was my turn to teach. In California, this type of short-grain rice was planted by a low-flying propeller plane pelting the paddies with dry seed that bounced like hail off the mud. Standing on the ground meant being stung by a post-wedding seed shower: rice in your hair, rice under your collar, rice in your shoes.

  The clerk said, “I wonder who isn’t working anymore, that they need to use planes.”

  “Even though the machine plants our field,” San Jiu stressed, “we still prepare the seedlings, and weed the paddies. We still labor.”

  “Young people don’t want to work the fields, though,” the clerk said.

  It was true. On our walk back to his house along Red Flag Road, everyone pacing the muddy fields, or tending seedbeds in their front yards, looked San Jiu’s age. He was about to turn sixty-seven.