“That sounds proper,” San Jiu said approvingly. “Filial piety is a tradition.” It was the closest to praise that San Jiu would ever offer, and I softened inside, remembering the feel of the fresh earth on my hands and forehead beside the grave. Then San Jiu said, “So how much did the plot cost?”
I was alone in Wasteland now, with Frances buried in work in Hong Kong. We had been separated for stretches in the past, and bridged the distance with daily text messages and Skype calls. So long as we stayed busy, it didn’t feel like we were apart. Thirteen years together had planted her voice, her presence, in my head, anyway; sometimes Wastelanders turned questioningly after the foreigner blurted something aloud to a woman who wasn’t there. I considered wearing a Bluetooth headset as a prop to mask my one-sided conversations.
Frances thought that alien-loving Mr. Meng had seen a meteorite crash that night, not a spaceship. (The rest of his story, she said, was a master performance of the Art of Northeastern Bullshitting.) A meteorite had burst into pieces over Wasteland in 1976. San Jiu and Auntie Yi and Uncle Fu remembered hearing the sonic boom and seeing a ball of fire in the March afternoon sky: they thought an airplane had exploded. The debris missed their homes, slamming instead into the paddies in a spray of mud and smoke. The ground quaked—1.7 on the Richter scale, according to the Jilin city museum built to display a microwave-oven-size chunk of the meteorite. It was not a patriotic education base: it spiced up the narrative for schoolkids by describing the rock as a “visitor from outer space.” Reading that caption, I thought fondly of Mr. Meng.
The bus from the museum back to Wasteland passed Number 22 Middle School, vacant in late June. Results for the high school entrance exam hung from red banners on its exterior walls, announcing which students tested into the top Jilin schools and who had been relegated to the Physical Education Academy. The serious girl who called herself Phil earned a place at the city’s best high school. She aspired to go to university and become an English teacher despite being able to outrun her classmates headed for “P.E. School.” They would be groomed for a nonacademic career. Sitting beside me on the bus, Ms. Guan laughed at my translation of Woody Allen’s joke: Those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, teach gym. “Although,” she added, “P.E. teachers don’t have to grade homework. So maybe they’re the smartest teachers after all.”
Around the school, paddies of deep-green rice shone in the morning sun. The landscape had not changed in my absence, but the school’s garbage pile rose with empty plastic bottles of Coke, Pepsi, and orange Fanta. Two small billboards papered on the side of the grocery store featured Kobe Bryant and a team of gowned surgeons concentrating on a prone man. Kobe pitched the Web portal sina.com, while the operation demonstrated KOREAN STYLE CIRCUMCISION. It could be performed in Wasteland’s expanded clinic, presently shrouded in scaffolding.
But the biggest change lay ahead.
As the roar of training jets cut through the silent morning, the bus idled at the start of Red Flag Road, waiting for a passenger to offload boxes of flooring tiles. An auntie unknown to me asked the singsong question “Shei jia’di’ah”—To whose family do I belong?—and smiled broadly, saying that she remembered Frances as a little girl. I said I was here alone, and she clucked her tongue, exhaling an aiya wo’de maya to register her concern. “You two don’t have a child yet? When are you going to be a father? You’re not a young man anymore. She needs to get pregnant. You can’t do it from up here when she’s down in Hong Kong.”
It was true: Skype didn’t feature that button.
The bus howled in laughter, teasing me for being childless, marooned, alone. The jokes paused only when someone said, seriously, “Mixed-blood children look beautiful. Your child will be so good-looking.”
“And smart!” another auntie chimed.
“But tell your wife to eat—”
“Apples,” I finished.
The bus nodded in agreement, then went back to needling me, whooping over my self-inflicted solitude.
The driver pulled under the new archway stretching over Red Flag Road. It was Wasteland’s tallest structure, reaching even higher than the billboard that pledged to BUILD THE NORTHEAST'S TOP VILLAGE. Green sod ringed the archway’s foundations, and its legs rose in marble-clad blocks bridged by five gleaming metal tubes. It looked like something, if not from outer space, then at least not from Wasteland.
White decal characters running down one of the arch’s legs said: THE ROOTS OF NORTHEAST PROSPERITY. The other side announced: EASTERN FORTUNE RICE.
“The arch doesn’t even show the village name,” I said.
“The company is acquiring more and more land,” Ms. Guan replied.
The driver searched for, then noisily found, first gear, and the bus stuttered under the arch, toward the ripening paddies. The driver said, “Some people joke that we all live in Eastern Fortune Rice now.” But no one on the bus laughed at this.
CHAPTER 11
The Ballad of Auntie Yi
“July is when the rice sunbathes,” San Jiu said at his paddy. He used the word dao (?), which meant planted rice, not mi (?), the processed product we eat. With his finger he drew the characters in the dirt separating the fields. “Now you do it,” he said, and watched patiently until I wrote both correctly. Then he swept the soil away with his rubber boot, plunking the words into water.
Summer brought up to sixteen hours of light each day. “Aside from the bugs, the biggest danger is that the rice will grow too fast and not ripen evenly,” San Jiu explained. “If it’s growing too fast, you remove the water from the paddy and let the rice stand dry for a few days.” Traditionally, draining the fields for a short period mid-growth was said to toughen the roots. Ancient Chinese records called the practice “shelving the rice” or “baking the fields,” since farmers waited until the soil dried enough to crack.
San Jiu pointed at the calf-deep water. “That’s the most important thing, you know. The water quality. It’s more important than the seed or the soil, even. River water is the best, everyone knows that.”
“Not me.”
“Silt!” San Jiu exclaimed. “River water has silt and clay.” Later I learned that it held fertilizing minerals. In the classical Chinese handbook On Farming, published in 1149, the writer advised that rice “likes fresh, moving water and fears cold and stagnant water.”
An eighth-century poet wrote a verse that San Jiu and his fields fit right into, thirteen hundred years later:
North of the Yangtze River
Ten thousand acres lie flat as a table.
By the sixth month the green rice is plentiful,
In a thousand fields the jade waters mingle.
San Jiu surveyed his crop.
“At this time,” he said, “when it’s warm in the daytime and cool at night, the conditions are just right. We haven’t even had any humidity.”
It was perfect weather; highs in the seventies and lows in the fifties, the kind of days made for shorts and a hoodie, though no one beside me wore them. Even the children always had pants on. They spent their summer vacation mostly indoors, watching television, playing video games, or doing homework. The village ran extracurricular English classes each weekday afternoon, where I helped out. During recess, the kids challenged me, one by one, to fifty-meter dashes. Their little legs windmilled across the dirt exercise yard, raising clouds of Roadrunner dust.
One place I never saw children was in the fields, or the seed stores, or at Eastern Fortune’s rice polisher and warehouses. This, San Jiu said, was a concern. Parents wanted their child to go to school, and learn white-collar professions. Some also aspired to studying at the agricultural institute, located halfway between here and Jilin city, but what use was learning farm management or seed biology if you didn’t have practical experience with animals or soil? China had no equivalent of the 4-H Club. Farming was not a skilled trade in which one apprenticed, then gained professional expertise. It was, San Jiu said, something people were once born in
to, but seldom would be again.
On television, my students liked to watch sports and the Chinese version of the singing competition The Voice. My unscientific sample showed that Wasteland’s adults favored the soap operas about gentry during the Manchu dynasty or about heroism during the Japanese occupation. Outside of the news, I never saw a farm on screen. There was no equivalent to Little House on the Prairie; the school’s bookshelves held no corresponding version of John Steinbeck’s stories set on California farms. China’s national novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, detailed an aristocratic household. Their tenant farmers appeared only to pay rent and present annual offerings. “Country people are such unsophisticated creatures,” a character sniffed. “They’re just like a piece of yellow cedar made into a mallet for beating the sonorous stones with. The exterior looks well enough; but it’s all bitter inside.”
One of the first works of American literature appeared around the same time. Written by the French-born J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and published in 1782, Letters from an American Farmer was extolled by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Coleridge as exemplifying what would come to be called the American Dream. It reads like a sweatier Walden: “The father, thus ploughing with his child, and to feed his family, is inferior only to the emperor of China ploughing as an example to his kingdom.”
In Wasteland I reread Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, wondering if it would interest my students. I also wanted a better reply to Westerners who said my current research was “like The Good Earth,” aside from pointing out that Buck’s book was a novel. Set in central China. Ninety years ago.
It begins with a young farmer named Wang Lung waking on his wedding day. He tears the paper from his shack’s window to thrust an arm outside to check the weather, relieved to feel “a wind mild and murmurous and full of rain.” Then comes marriage, children, famine, concubines, floods, war, and locusts before greed conquers all. The book concludes with his dying words to his urbane sons: “Out of the land we came and into it we must go . . . [I]f you sell the land it is the end.” The sons promise they will never sell, “But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled.”
It was a tragic ending, but if Wang Lung had lived to see the Communist revolution, he likely would have been branded a bourgeois landlord, and executed. At the very least, his hard-earned acreage would have been seized and redistributed to people like Frances’s family, in places like Wasteland.
Forty years after her death, Pearl Buck remained stranded between two worlds. In China she was admired but not read; in America she was read but not admired. William Faulkner once dismissed her as “Mrs. Chinahand Buck.” Her most recent Chinese translator, however, told me, “She was a revolutionary. She was the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals.” Her childhood home, in the Yangtze River port Zhenjiang, which smelled like its famous vinegar, was recently turned into a museum about her life there before she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though, one thing was notably absent from the gift shop: Buck’s books.
She wrote eighty of them, but her life story is the most compelling to me. Born Pearl Sydenstricker, she was raised by missionary parents who hired tutors to teach her calligraphy and the classical texts of Confucius and other philosophers in Chinese. “I became mentally bifocal,” she wrote in a memoir. “When I was in the Chinese world, I spoke Chinese and behaved as Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.”
She loved the works of Charles Dickens, whose influence was seen in her descriptions of cultural minutiae. Her father had translated the Bible into vernacular Chinese, and her own syntax often echoed its authoritative run-ons: “The children tugged at Wang Lung then, and Wang Lung led them all back to the hut they had made, and there they laid themselves down and they slept until the next morning, for it was the first time since summer they had been filled with food, and sleep overcame them with fullness.”
But that voice, too, sounded familiar to anyone who has spent time listening to Chinese people tell stories, which can come in fits and starts, and then roll, with words spilling fast when freed. Frances got to that point after a few beers, San Jiu when he was angry, Ms. Guan after the stress of a school day. When I would ask my former Beijing courtyard neighbor, an elderly widow, a direct question about a specific date, it could take a few days for her to respond, which she often did while doing something else, such as making dumplings: “The water is almost ready. You must be hungry. My father liked this kind of filling, pork and chives. He said I would have to marry an army officer almost twenty years older, a friend of someone he knew. That’s what I remember most about 1931.” The voice sounded detached, as if the speaker were telling a tale that happened long ago, to someone else, far away. It was different than an American voice. Frances noticed on arrival to the United States that Americans were their own protagonists, narrating their lives to anyone who would listen, or even when no one was. The Chinese invented many things, Frances said, but only Americans could have come up with blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
Like John Steinbeck, who wrote a series of newspaper stories on visits to relief camps that inspired him to begin The Grapes of Wrath, Buck witnessed firsthand the types of scenes she depicted in The Good Earth. As an adolescent, she had worked with her mother in soup kitchens during famine, and taught sewing at a school for the poor. At a church picnic she met a newly arrived agronomist named John Lossing Buck. He spoke halting Chinese; she was fluent. After their divorce eighteen years later, she wrote that all they had in common was “Sunday school teaching and Bible classes.” But they also shared a love for the Chinese farm.
Pearl moved to his agricultural experiment station in a central China hamlet of mud streets and mud houses, surrounded by mud walls. They explored the surrounding countryside—he on a bicycle; she, per custom, in a sedan chair borne by four laborers. He logged details of farm life: housing, fuel, prices, diet, recreation, funerals, and more. Until then—in a country where 80 percent of the people were farmers—no one had systematically gathered this material.
The result, a book titled Chinese Farm Economy, would make him the better-known writer, at least for a year. To a casual reader, the 1930 volume and its sequel are achingly dull, filled with statistical tables. Pearl typed her husband’s reports, and his prose could not have helped their marriage. Imagine the woman able to quote Dickens and the great Chinese epics clacking down topic sentences such as “Profitableness of a cropping system depends chiefly upon the yield and price of the crops, the seasonal distribution of labor and the proportion of the most profitable crops in the system.”
However, book-ending many chapters were local adages, rendered in Chinese characters, and translated into English, such as: “To learn to be a farmer one need not study. One needs only to do as his neighbor does,” and: “One should be cautious not to plant sorghum too close, but at least far enough apart for a cow to lie down.”
Some sounded like a fortune cookie that had been parsed into Chinese by Frances: “It is better to let your mother starve to death than to let your crop seed be eaten up.”
Pearl Buck had added the sayings. While her husband Lossing talked to the men in the fields, she stayed inside with the women, asking about their lives and lore. Her sister Grace told a biographer, “She entered very much into that project, and she did a great deal of editing.” Not long after Lossing’s book was finished, Pearl wrote The Good Earth in five months’ time.
In the 1930s eight different Chinese translations of the novel were “cheerfully pirated over and over again,” Buck wrote approvingly. But after the Communist revolution in 1949, her stories were seen as anachronisms from an era toppled by Mao. She had left China—and Lossing—in 1935, eventually marrying her publisher and moving to a farm in Bucks County, Penns
ylvania. During the Red Scare era, she wrote five novels set in the American West under the name John Sedges.
In 1972, the year of Nixon’s visit to China, Buck’s application for a Chinese visa was denied, the rejection letter explained, due to “the fact that for a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the people of new China and their leaders.” She died nine months later and was buried on the grounds of her Bucks County farm in a solitary grave carved with her Chinese name.
I saw many warnings in this tale for a foreigner writing about China, not least of all the possibility of being interred under the characters for Heroic Eastern Plumblossom. Another: a marriage failing because of one partner’s single-mindedness in research. “I was busy, busy, busy going back with all this land utilization data,” Lossing would admit after their divorce, which took him by surprise. And then there was the chance that one’s writing could result in being barred from the country.
But there were other lessons, too, in an age of intensive China watching. The Bucks learned the language. They left big cities. They saw things for themselves, not relying on officials’ explanations or intellectuals’ critiques. They focused on how life was lived by average people, not the headlines generated by extraordinary ones. “Americans,” Pearl Buck wrote in 1970, “have a genuine interest in the Chinese people,” but the news media underestimated “the general intelligence of their reading public and the range of its interest.” The Bucks focused on the slower story, observing changes to individuals and the land over time.
And they loved the farm. In a speech to American pilots shipping out during the Second World War, Pearl said what The Good Earth’s plot had obscured, and made many readers think the title was meant to be ironic. “What if you land in the Chinese countryside?” Buck asked. “Well, then, you are lucky, for the Chinese countryside is beautiful.”
In Manchuria Page 18