In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  Our tour group trudged upstairs, past a yarmulke meant to evince that Harbin’s Jewish community was once the largest in the Far East. We stared at a rusting flatiron, proof that “Harbin flourished as a modern, open, and inclusive city.” No connection was made to the synagogues, to Saint Sophia’s, to the restored cobblestone street, or the district of former Russian tenement homes crumbling nearby. No mention was made of the czar and emperor and warlords and armies that had battled for Harbin, once home and refuge to people from fifty-three countries, speaking forty-five languages.

  Instead we saw displays from Chiang Mai (tapestries), Cagayan de Oro (an ostrich egg), Sunderland (a photo of George Washington, whose parents emigrated from there). Griffith had also sent an egg—an emu’s—along with kangaroo skins and bottles, now empty, of Yellow Tail wine. Asahikawa’s beer bottles were drained, too, as was the vodka from Sverdlovsk Oblast. The children stared at a boomerang behind glass. The hall was silent, and dimly lit. We were looking at dry bottles, locked-up weapons, and there in the corner, at Rovaniemi, a pile of unopened letters to Santa Claus.

  “The most favored person residing in Rovaniemi is Santa Claus,” the guide recited. “Every year there are hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting his office at the Santa Claus Village on the Arctic Circle.” Those who couldn’t make it, such as a child named Max Lee of 139 Boundary Street, Kowloon, sent letters instead. Here was his now, on display in Harbin.

  The guide led us downstairs for a summing-up—Harbin, international city, friendship, development, modern, friendship—and the children stared at me and smiled, and I thought: This beats being called laowai. The museum was closing, the kids filed past Minneapolis, whose items did not disprove critics who sniped that the sister city movement was a gloss on doing business, on increasing trade. But I dropped the sense of wizened expat irony and did as the tour guide asked, enthusing in Minnesota-accented Mandarin how Mill City life on the Mixixibi (Mississippi) river was illustrated by the displayed box of Pillsbury Funfetti brownie mix.

  I grew up eagerly anticipating the latest issue of National Geographic for the maps, which wallpapered my bedroom. When you’re from a place like Minneapolis, surrounded by a continent on all, nearly equidistant sides, you naturally wonder what holds you in—one reason Midwesterners make up a disproportionate number of Peace Corps volunteers. It’s a ticket Out There.

  And here’s what it looked like this gorgeous morning in our sister city of Harbin: at Saint Sophia’s square, I sat on a green wooden bench next to a planter of yellow marigolds being bothered by black butterflies. A little girl fed pigeons, a boy blew bubbles, women walked past holding parasols, a couple wore matching Angry Birds T-shirts, and bus honks and dialect filled the air: ayamaya and en’e. Dumpling house employees stood in rows for their post-lunch group exercises and pep talk. Dragonflies buzzed the marigolds, a woman leaned against the former cathedral to be photographed, and a man strutted past with his hand purse tucked in his arm like a riding crop. Another followed him, holding a brown, string-sealed FILES envelope with both hands. The smell of hot dogs and popcorn wafted from a cart. When you travel, everything can look new, and the mundane becomes interesting. The city is on display, and travelers—in China especially—are also an exhibit. A grandfather cradling an infant hurried toward the marigolds, spread the slit of the boy’s pants, and held him as the baby watered the flowers. I watched them; they watched me. Our expressions were exactly the same. We’re twins.

  I had last seen the lumberjack Meng Zhaoguo at the Red Flag Logging Commune, eighty miles north of Wasteland, set among the remains of a forest of oak, birch, and Manchurian ash that once covered an area twice the size of Wyoming. Back then, he had directed me to find him in the last house on the village lane. Now he told me to come to a Harbin university and walk to the last building on campus. “If you can’t find me, just ask anyone,” he said. Everyone knew the man who had been abducted by aliens.

  I stood at the gate of the Harbin University of Commerce, feeling like I had arrived in another ghost town. The campus was part of a pump-priming project to build a new Harbin city center as large in area as New York City. The scheme had stalled: people simply did not want to move across the Songhua River, and some halted building sites had been reclaimed by rows of corn and soybeans. The university’s main classroom building stood empty but for a group of students shouting phrases from a popular textbook series named Crazy English, which was an excellent lesson in yelling, if not communication. As I walked past transplanted pines propped up in planters, the voices chorused: “It’s better than nothing! You can’t please everyone! Time will tell!”

  But at the back end of campus, in full grin, stood Meng Zhaoguo. “I am very happy to work here,” he said. “It’s quiet. I’m in charge of the boiler and watch the steam pipes.” It was a better job than felling trees, he said. Logging had been curtailed at his former post; only 10 percent of the trees remained, protected as part of the Dragon Mountain National Forest Park. The workers at Red Flag Logging Commune had either left or stayed to farm soybeans.

  Mr. Meng wore a clean white tunic, slacks, and loafers, with short black hair pushed neatly to the side. He looked thinner, healthier, and just as earnest as before. But he was tired of retelling what became known as the Meng Zhaoguo Incident. Talking with him is how I imagined it would be to interview a former adult film star embarrassed about his past. “When students say they recognize me from television,” he said, “I tell them that was someone else who looks like me.”

  But his notoriety had landed this job. “A friend told me about it, and when I came for the interview, the boss had seen me on the news. The college provides an apartment with heating, my wife and daughter are working on campus as well, and my son attends a good Harbin middle school. He’s studying English. Life is better for him here than in the forest.”

  Mr. Meng was the best example of Manchurian self-invention I had ever met. Chinese characterize Northeasterners as bighearted, industrious, and sometimes a bit touched in the head. So it was not a shock when the nation’s first person claiming to sleep with an extraterrestrial came from up here.

  When I previously visited him at the Red Flag Logging Commune, Mr. Meng was living in a two-room timber-frame house he had built with his own hands. Bare yellow light bulbs dropped from the ceiling, there was no phone—or cell reception—and the wall over the kang’s barley-stuffed pillows was filled with a fading map of the world. “I put that up a long time ago,” he explained, “when I dreamed of seeing more places.”

  A big-screen Sony television filled one end of the room. “Out here, it only picks up two channels,” he said. “So it’s a waste of money, but I didn’t buy it. A businessman brought it, after he heard about my story.” Another visitor, from Malaysia, had brought him a cow. “I sold that,” Mr. Meng told me. “Cows cost money to take care of. What am I going to do with a cow out here?”

  We had stepped outside, boots crunching snow, and faced the Dragon Mountains, veiled in purple mist as the day’s light faded. Meng said that on a night much like this in 1994, he saw a metallic glint shimmer off those peaks. “I thought a helicopter had crashed, so I set out to scavenge for scrap.” He made it to the lip of a valley, spying the wreckage in the distance, when “Foom! Something hit me square in the forehead and knocked me out.”

  He awoke at home, with no memory of how he got there. A few nights later he woke to find himself floating above the kang. As his wife slumbered beneath him, a three-meter-tall, six-fingered alien woman with thighs coated in braided hair straddled his waist. Mr. Meng and the alien had copulated for forty minutes. “She then disappeared through the wall and I floated back down to bed. She left me with this.” He undid his trousers to reveal a two-inch-long jagged mark that he insisted bore only a coincidental resemblance to a scar resulting from a saw accident.

  The next morning Meng told his wife what happened. She did not feel betrayed, he said. He had been helpless, after all, abducted in his own bed by
an alien.

  I asked him to draw the creature, and he took my pen and tore off a sheet from a roll of rough, unbleached paper (“This could be made from a tree I cut”). To my surprise, I recognized the alien. She looked like the carved round-eyed figurines excavated by a young Liang Siyong at the Neolithic sites near here. Actually, she looked more familiar than that. As he made tiny x’s on the alien’s inner thighs, I realized Mr. Meng was sketching a hairy cousin of the Michelin Man.

  His smiling, puffy white face waved from atop an auto repair shop at the base of Red Flag Logging Commune. I thought of that, and the empty crates of Five Star beer stacked just outside Mr. Meng’s front door, and the remote loneliness of a Northeast winter. But he told the story calmly, not in an anxious or pleading tone, cajoling the listener to believe. I kept my deductions internal, and Mr. Meng suggested we go outside with his kids and light off the fireworks I had brought for them. That night I slept fitfully on his kang.

  The government monitored faith in anything but the Communist Party, but an expression of belief in extraterrestrials was permitted, as it fell under the purview of astronomy, and the “scientific socialism” the Party supported. A UFOlogy journal had a circulation of 200,000, and the China UFO Research Center boasted 50,000 members and held annual conferences before splintering—as organized groups of believers tended to do—into rival factions. Once Mr. Meng’s story started making the rounds via text messages and the Internet, the media came calling, leading to his appearance in national newspapers and on television. He was even the subject of a debated Wikipedia page, which listed different versions of his story, including being taken to the aliens’ home planet of Jupiter, and “ongoing harassment” from the extraterrestrials.

  “Journalists look for discrepancies in my story,” he told me at the logging commune. “I get tired of telling it. In the end, I’m just a peasant.”

  But the next morning he had continued the tale: a month after the alien had visited him in bed, he again awoke to find his body passing through the world map over the kang. He levitated through the stratosphere and into a spaceship, where a circle of aliens cloaked him in a robe of flesh.

  “A robe of what?”

  “Of flesh,” he repeated. “They said in Chinese, but with a heavy accent so it was hard for me to understand at first, that they were refugees. Like me, they wanted to escape their former lives, so they left their dying home.”

  That echoed the tales of many migrants to Manchuria.

  Mr. Meng asked to see his alien paramour, the one with braided hair on her inner thighs.

  “‘Impossible,’ they replied. But then they said something that made me hopeful. ‘In sixty years, on a distant planet, the son of a Chinese peasant will be born.’”

  This was a stroke of genius: Mr. Meng had introduced Chinese class-consciousness to interstellar relations. The story transported Mr. Meng and his wife and children from the last house on a logging commune lane to a college campus in the provincial capital. When he retold the tale over our lunch in Harbin, only one detail had changed: now he said he had copulated for an hour, not forty minutes. “I asked the aliens if I would see my child,” he added. “They said yes. But they would not tell me where.”

  I made a joke about sister planets, but Meng didn’t laugh. “Once, humans believed that the earth was flat,” he said. “Even a decade ago, people would not believe that a cell phone could work. Humans, if we have never seen something with our own eyes, naturally doubt that it exists, or that life could be that way. I was the first to be brave enough to say: ‘I saw that.’

  “But you know,” Mr. Meng said, nodding collegially, “when you live up here, you see strange phenomena all the time.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Summer Solstice

  In summer, Wasteland came alive. Cottony white clouds reflected off the water-filled paddies, which resonated with the sounds of jumping fish, quacking ducks, and croaking frogs. On Red Flag Road I stepped around furry caterpillars and dodged dragonflies. Tractors put-putted past the deep green rice that ran to the foothills. Two months after planting, the stalks, called tillers, reached past my knee. Harvest was two months away. Then the northern wind would come, and the sun would set before four. Summer was a time to savor.

  After my travels, the land felt tranquil. At first glance, there was nothing to see, and it was a relief. Compared to Harbin, it was easier to define Wasteland by what was absent than what was here. No museums, no local newspaper, no graveyards, no plaques, no library, no former mansions or battlefields. I understood the pride villagers displayed when speaking of recent developments that allowed a family to sow a plot, sell what they reaped, and live a life outside war, famine, bandits, and shifting politics. When I turned off Red Flag Road and walked into San Jiu’s house, the first thing he said was “You’re back. You’ve been gone. Nothing’s new.”

  To me, with a backpack of filled notebooks, that was news in and of itself. But to San Jiu, it just meant everything was fine: no one was sick, the rice was growing, and the weather was regular. He walked me along the berm of earth that separated his ripening paddies—frogs bouncing wildly off our shins—to check for weeds. The formal names of the choking sedges sounded like portmanteaus from Finnegan’s Wake: Dayflower. Fringerush. Ducksalad.

  San Jiu searched for a three-bladed signalgrass that had to be pulled by hand. But the herbicide was working. “The rice is growing just right,” he said. “Where’s your wife?”

  “In Hong Kong.”

  “That’s good. She has a job,” San Jiu said. Then he stared at me with a bemused look on his tanned face, crossed with new lines. A tear welled in his left eye; a cataract was forming. From across a field, he still looked like a stout bull of a man with a white crew cut. But up close all of his now sixty-seven years were upon him. I wondered if contracting his crop to Eastern Fortune and moving to a modern apartment wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “You wander around up here while she works down there,” he said. “How do you afford it?”

  My expenses were low: trains, dumplings, house rent, and the occasional inn on the road amounted to a few hundred dollars a month. But the figure seemed exorbitant to San Jiu. The price of chives seemed exorbitant to San Jiu.

  “Everything is more expensive now,” he said. “The three-wheel pedicab from this house to Wasteland’s clinic used to cost five yuan, and now it’s seven. That’s a 40 percent increase in just one year. The cost of seed is up. Pork is outrageous.” A year ago one pound of pig cost 12 yuan ($1.97). Today it was 19 yuan ($3.12).

  Now we were off the topic of my livelihood—or lack thereof—and onto the Island of Prices, where so many villagers liked to drop the conversational anchor and spend some time. San Jiu listed the rise in everything from soap to milk (up 9 percent from last year) and chives. They were to Northeastern cooking what oregano was to Italian, and he couldn’t bargain down their price at the market. “I planted them myself this year. And tomatoes, and potatoes, and onions. I also bought a chicken, because eggs are more expensive now, too.”

  It was a national trend. On a recent train ride, passengers around me munched sweet popcorn and read books titled Currency Wars, The Collapse of the Eurosystem, and The Upside of Irrationality. Despite the raft of anti-inflationary measures introduced by the government, the lead article in that morning’s paper announced that the price of gasoline was at a record high of $4.91 a gallon. Another article said that a popular Chinese online forum voted ?—zhang, increase—the “character of the year.” It outpolled the runner-up, “resentment,” nearly six to one.

  As the train glided silently past cornfields, I had asked my seatmates, people of varied ages and professions, about zhang. They swapped stories of soaring apartment prices, not to mention the zhang of cooking oil, the zhang of toilet paper, the zhang of airplane tickets, the zhang of school fees. Voices rose as the passengers blamed “speculators and hoarders” and declared that zhang made them “angry to death”—it was always personal in Chin
a—and suddenly everything was in the grips of zhang, including my formerly tranquil train ride.

  So it was not surprising that the annual Blue Book of China’s Society, compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, reported that prices topped the list of the public’s concerns. China’s consumer price index, a gauge of inflation, rose a record 5.5 percent in the month of March 2011. That was driven by food prices, which, on average, rose 11.7 percent, with vegetable prices doubling in some places.

  Master Kong, the nation’s best-selling brand of instant noodles, increased its price 10 percent to cover, it said, a rise in ingredient prices—leading the French hypermarket chain Carrefour to pull the product from its 169 stores in China. Say it with Parisian élan: zhang! And real estate prices continued to surge: a two-thousand-square-foot apartment in the Hong Kong border city of Shenzhen could cost the equivalent of a four-bedroom in prime New York.

  Even the dead were affected by zhang. At the privately run Eternal Garden Cemetery in Shenzhen, a saleswoman explained to Frances that 50,000 yuan ($7,547) would secure her father’s ashes in a one-square-meter hillside plot for twenty years, with an option to renew for fifty after that, provided the cemetery had not been evicted by a building site.

  “If you want the grave to face the pond and valley, which has the best feng shui,” the saleswoman said, “it will cost 70,000 yuan ($10,566). Those are selling quickly; I suggest you buy today. The price will not go down.” Frances quickly chose the tomb with a view.

  I dared not tell San Jiu the actual cost. Instead, I described to him how Frances knelt beside the grave, updated her father’s ashes on family news, placed him in the earth, knocked her head three times on the soil, cried, and said good-bye.