In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  Summer headlines in Jilin city newspapers included:

  “Expressway Tollbooth Revealed as Corrupt”

  “67-Year-Old Woman Leaps from Thirteenth Floor”

  “Nine-Year-Old Boy Runs Away from Home After Mother Loses Cat”

  “Investigative Report of Pornography Viewing Rooms”

  “Drunk Driver Kills Two”

  “Smart Little Dog Can Use a Cell Phone”

  “Corpse Found Beaten, Lying in Pool of Blood”

  “Drunks Toss Buddy from Second Story Window”

  “Farmer’s Prize Pig Mysteriously Murdered”

  China always looked different after reading the paper. On the bus back to Wasteland, I suddenly wondered what each passenger was capable of. Corruption? Pornography? Pig murder?

  Online, I read Western headlines such as:

  “China Sees Food Needs Rising”

  “China Snaps Up Farmland in Argentina”

  “Brazil Uneasy over China’s Interest in Land”

  The nation was on a “global commodity hunt,” the Wall Street Journal reported. China was the biggest purchaser of Argentine soybeans, mainly used as livestock feed, a demand that rose with meat consumption. In Brazil, Chinese companies signed a $7 billion agreement to produce six million tons of soybeans each year, part of a series of deals that made China its largest trading partner. Its food and energy purchases had “helped fuel an economic boom . . . that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability . . .” wrote the New York Times.

  The shift to overseas food sources came as China’s surging demand clashed with its arable land being diminished by urbanization. In the past thirty years, farmland equivalent in area to the size of New York State had been developed.

  Science and technology wrung increasing yields from the existing land: an average hectare now produced 6.3 tons of rice, four times more than in 1949. “Chasing ever-higher output levels may mean overfertilization and unsafe agriculture,” a top agricultural official warned. “Of course, we have to raise output in this area but our techniques and resources can’t keep up.”

  China classifies corn, wheat, and rice as key grains, and keeps the planet’s largest stockpiles of these foods, totaling 40 percent of annual consumption. Once the world’s largest exporter of soy, China is now the largest importer. The Brazil deal alone would meet 10 percent of its annual demand. At the start of the twenty-first century, China imported a few tons of corn each year. In 2012 alone, it bought two million tons. Chinese demand, coupled with drought and increasing consumption by the U.S. ethanol industry, pushed the grain’s price to an all-time high.

  Among the largest beneficiaries of Chinese consumption was the American farmer. Food accounted for $1 of every $5 China spent on American products between 2010 and 2012, led by soy, whose sales totaled $15 billion annually. Exports of all goods doubled from 2005 to 2010, but food—including dairy, pork, and fruit juice—more than tripled. Pecan sales rose twentyfold. An elated grower in Georgia told the Wall Street Journal that, thanks to the Chinese belief that the nuts were good for the brain, “we’re in a situation of finite supply and seemingly infinite demand.” The price of a pound of pecans doubled in a single year.

  China kept outsourcing: in 2013 it signed a fifty-year agreement with Ukraine to lease three million hectares of farmland, more than doubling the two million hectares it had previously held overseas. The produce and pigs raised in Ukraine would be sold to two Chinese state-owned grain conglomerates. One was known as Bingtuan, a quasi-military organization founded in the 1950s to strengthen the Chinese border with the Soviet Union. Now it brandished a checkbook, writing on the memo line: Food.

  “We can send them a trainload of pigtails,” Auntie Yi said.

  “Is that a Chinese saying?”

  She looked up from weeding her poppies. “What?”

  “‘We can send them a trainload of pigtails,’” I repeated. “What does it mean?”

  Auntie Yi laughed, her long gray curls bouncing under her bucket hat. “It means a trainload of pigtails. That’s what it means. Aiya wo’de maya.” She shot me a playful look. Her snaggletooth peeked out from her upper lip. “You just told me that China is buying food from the former Soviet Union.”

  In August 1945, the Red Army looted Jilin city’s cement factory, she said. It was located at the site of Diamond Cement, the plant that now rained gooey pellets on passerby. “It had a bunch of advanced machinery that the Japanese had built, and we finally got rid of them and could use it; but the Red Army stayed after war’s end and took whatever it wanted. Stalin said he was keeping the factory safe in the USSR so the Americans couldn’t take it. He ransomed it back; Premier Zhou Enlai paid him in apples and soybeans. ‘We have no pork,’ he said, ‘but we can send them a trainload of pigtails.’”

  “So there weren’t any pigtails?”

  “China was broke!”

  Auntie Yi veered into a story about her younger brother, who had gone to school in Jilin city. The old town’s gates were still standing then, she said, but none of its wall or wooden architecture remained. “A few months ago you asked me about the Japanese occupation, and I’ve been meaning to tell you what I remember,” she said, leading me inside her house, where Uncle Fu poured bowls of hot soymilk.

  “You asked me what it used to be like here,” Auntie Yi said from the edge of the kang. “I remember [the puppet state named] Manchukuo well. I was a little girl when the little Japanese devils occupied this place. Why did they come here? I hear now people say they came here for the mines, and to build a dam, but we Chinese built the dam and worked in the mines. If you didn’t work, they would beat you and toss you in the pit of dead bodies.”

  “Did you ever see Japanese people?”

  “They lived in one part of Jilin city. I remember seeing Japanese women wearing kimonos and carrying their babies on their back. They wore wood shoes, and the sidewalks were wood then. The shoes went ta ta ta ta ta. They powdered their faces and ate so well; they looked beautiful in all that silk. We Chinese wore old cotton clothes we wove and dyed ourselves. The crotch of my pants kept ripping, and the blankets at home were rough cloth and full of fleas.

  “I was in elementary school then, and every morning we had to sing the Manchukuo national anthem. It was about the colors of the Manchukuo flag and went . . .”

  She sang a stately tune with Japanese lyrics:

  “Our national flag flutters, flutters, flutters.

  Red, blue, white, black, yellow.

  I love my flag, the flag that flutters, flutters, flutters.

  “The teacher would smack your palm three times with a wooden pointer if you didn’t sing correctly,” she explained. “I hated having a swollen hand. So I still remember some Japanese.” She counted to ten in the language without pause.

  The flag’s five colors represented the five ethnicities living in Manchukuo, which comprised the entire Northeast, from the Great Wall to Siberia. The mustard-yellow field mimicked the Manchu’s Qing dynasty flag, but instead of a spindly blue dragon, it featured a square in its upper-left corner that showed a red stripe (representing Japanese) over a blue stripe (Han Chinese), white (Mongolians), and black (Koreans).

  “We were taught we were ‘Manchukuoans,’ not Chinese,” Auntie Yi said. “The Chinese language was called the Manchukuo language. You couldn’t say China; nothing could be Chinese. They taught only Japanese at school. Every morning we stood up and saluted the teacher and said ‘Hai!’ It was like what they show on TV: everything was always ‘Hai!’ and a salute. At lunchtime, we said ‘Thank you’ in Japanese over and over. ‘Arigato arigato arigato.’ At the end of the school day, we saluted and said good-bye, and then, on the walk home, I spoke Chinese again. That only lasted for a year. In 1945, Manchukuo fell.”

  Before rebel forces made it to Jilin, their Chinese foe arrived first.

  “The Nationalist army was really fierce. It was the Seventy-seventh and then the E
ighty-eighth Brigade. They would come to our homes and demand labor. They often beat my grandfather for refusing to work. He didn’t support them at all. When they came into our house, we had to kneel before them. They were bastards. They cut down our trees for fuel and beat my brother, cracking his head. There were ten soldiers on him. Oh, the Japanese came to our house, too, but on patrols. They just looked inside, but it was still scary, because they had helmets on, and rifles with bayonets. But the worst of all came after that.”

  Auntie Yi lowered her voice theatrically and murmured: kata kata kata. “That was the sound of the Russians marching on the road beside their carts. I would sit in a tree and yell, ‘Hairy ones!’ and the women would hide. They would shut their doors and get sticks ready. Sometimes a car would pull up with two or three Russian soldiers in it, to inspect our homes. They would open the wardrobe and take whatever they could find, even my mother’s watch and her gold ring. One guy pulled a gun on our dog for barking at him, but my uncle got the soldier drunk, plucked a goose for him, and he left.”

  Another time, she remembered, a Russian man raped a neighbor. “People said that after he finished, he tied her legs to the back of a horse and dragged her until she died.”

  Seeking refuge, her parents moved her out to Wasteland. But the danger stayed near. “In 1948, the Nationalists and Communists fought each other in a big battle by the river here. I used to duck beside the kang when we heard shots. I was so frightened. A bullet came right through the paper covering our windows! We couldn’t have any light at night, so the lanterns were out, and we just tried to sleep. I couldn’t sleep: my heart beat like crazy all night. We slept on the floor, under the window level. I was seven then.”

  Then the Communist Eighth Route Army arrived in Wasteland. Unlike the Japanese, the Russians, and the Chinese Nationalist troops, they didn’t enter villagers’ homes. “The soldiers sat quietly in the yard, and camped outside. They carried their own water and cooked their own food and never bothered us. Our windows had paper glued over the panes, not glass, and sometimes they would poke a hole—pa pa pa—and say, ‘Don’t be scared of us. We’re here to help common folks like you. We won’t bully you.’”

  Auntie Yi broke into song after mimicking the sound of triumphant trumpets:

  “Arise! All those who don’t want to be slaves!

  Let our flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall!

  As the Chinese people have arrived at their most perilous time. Every person must expel his very last roar.

  Arise! Arise! Arise!”

  The song, “March of the Volunteers,” was composed for a 1935 patriotic film about exiles from the occupied Northeast who enlisted in the army to expel the Japanese from Manchuria. It became China’s national anthem except during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, when its lyricist was imprisoned.

  Auntie Yi said that then, in the late 1960s, “The East Is Red” became the national song. “It played on the loudspeakers every sunrise and sunset. The whole countryside all over China could hear it.” She sang:

  “The east is red, the sun rises.

  From China arises Mao Zedong.

  He strives for the people’s happiness,

  Hurrah [hu’er haiyo] he is the people’s great savior!”

  The inclusion of hu’er haiyo always intrigued me, because they are not words but sounds reminiscent of the aiya wo’de maya that Northeasterners exclaim in dialect to express disgust. “The East Is Red” was said to have been penned by a patriotic farmer, who set the words to a traditional rural folk song that began:

  Sesame oil, cabbage hearts,

  If you want to eat string beans, break off end parts,

  After three days apart, I miss you so,

  Hu’er haiyo.

  Auntie Yi knew the words to that, and many other songs. Her generation had to sing, she said with a sly grin. Uncle Fu rose and shuffled across the narrow space between the kang and the windows to turn on the television. Snooker again. He switched it off. The home’s south-facing windows stretched from his waist to the ceiling, and potted plants lined the sill. “I’ll add some water to these,” he said. “You two keep talking.”

  “Only one more song,” Auntie Yi promised, although I was enjoying her performance. Her legs dangled off the edge of the kang, not reaching the floor. Under her bucket hat and locks of gray hair, her tanned, unlined face flexed comical or serious as the lyrics dictated, the white snaggletooth rising and falling like a baton.

  The last song was “On the Songhua River,” a regional anthem as ubiquitous here as “Home on the Range” had been in the American West. It was sung from the perspective of an exile who fled south on the day in 1931 that Japan invaded Manchuria. Auntie Yi sang:

  “My home is on the Songhua River,

  There are timber forests and coal mines,

  Mountains covered in sorghum and soy.

  My home is on the Songhua River,

  My compatriots are there, and aged parents, still.

  September 18, September 18.

  At that miserable moment, I left my homeland,

  Leaving the infinite natural resources behind.

  Wandering and wandering,

  Drifting on the Great Wall’s other side.

  What year, what month, can I return to my home?

  What year, what month, can I reclaim its treasures?

  Father and mother, will we ever be together again?

  “Everyone knows that song,” Auntie Yi said.

  “When did you learn it? When you were a little girl?”

  “I’m not sure,” Auntie Yi said. “It has always been around.”

  I smiled at her turn of phrase. In the countryside, everything had always existed; everything was already known. September 18, September 18. At that miserable moment I left my homeland. Colonizers whose shoes went ta ta ta ta ta. An occupying army marching kata kata kata. Soldiers slaughtered on a civil war battlefield by men who carefully poked holes in paper windows—pa pa pa—to say we won’t bully you. Arise! Arise! Arise! The east is red. Hu’er haiyo. In 1956, it became a village.

  CHAPTER 12

  Puppets of Manchukuo

  I preferred Auntie Yi’s telling of history to what is displayed in the Northeast’s museums. They show the dates and death tolls of when China, Russia, and Japan collided in Manchuria. But the unnoted personal dramas from that time interested me most.

  The story of Puyi, the last emperor, mirrored his Manchurian homeland: bandied between empires, allied with whoever held the gun. His reign began in Beijing in 1908 and ended in 1945 in Changchun, the provincial capital seventy miles west of Wasteland. There, in photographs hanging in the Puppet Emperor’s Palace Museum, Puyi looked like a doll: first as a toddler regent in an oversize silk gown; then as a young man in a tunic weighted with medals bestowed for docile compliance rather than valor; and finally as a gardener with a Chairman Mao pin affixed to his serge work shirt. In the exhibit, not a single photo, across his life span, showed him smiling.

  The two-story museum looked more like a workers’ sanatorium than a palace. It would not have qualified as a storage shed at the Forbidden City, Puyi’s former residence. There were no vermillion walls, no awe-inspiring gates, no elaborate gardens, no throne room. The swimming pool held only rotting leaves, the rockery masked a tiny bomb shelter, and the puppet palace’s displays included captions such as “Puyi sometimes played the piano in here in order to let off his depression and discontent as a puppet emperor.” And: “To kill time after getting up, Puyi would sit on the toilet reading the daily newspaper.” A copy of the Manchurian Daily News sat, folded, before his lesser throne. The museum was, of course, a patriotic education base.

  Outside, in the warm summer sun, a low thunder grew louder. I turned a corner to see five chestnut horses rounding a bend. This being contemporary China, patriotic education included running a sideline business. At the Puppet Emperor’s Palace Museum Horse Riding and Stables Club, visitors could saddle up and loop the dirt tra
ck where Puyi once made circles. The horses trotted past, powdering my face in Manchurian dust.

  Puyi’s life hinged on a fateful miscalculation, unnoted in the museum, that had reined him to Japan. In a memoir, his childhood English tutor wrote that Puyi was “a very ‘human’ boy, with vivacity, intelligence, and a keen sense of humor.” He found him “mentally active and anxious to learn,” taking interest in world news and geography, and reading multiple newspapers each day. “Moreover, he has excellent manners and is entirely free from arrogance. This is rather remarkable in view of the extremely artificial nature of his surroundings and the pompous make-believe of the palace-routine.” His tutor felt Puyi’s post-Beijing destiny was to attend, and perhaps live out his days at, Oxford.

  In 1924, when a warlord expelled Puyi from the section of the Forbidden City granted to him after abdication, the tutor drove him to the Legation Quarter. He chose not to deliver him to the British embassy, as its staff had indicated it would not interfere in China’s internal politics. Instead, the tutor brought him across Canal Street to the Japanese legation, an action he later regretted as an “enormous mistake.”

  For three months, Puyi squatted at the Japanese embassy with his retinue—­wives, dozens of attendants, concubines, eunuchs, maids and scullions—who continued to prepare breakfasts featuring twenty-five dishes. (In his memoir, Puyi wrote of the stay: “I was actually relieved to be able to live like a normal citizen, free from the palace.”) In 1925, Japan put him on the train to Tianjin, eventually installing him at a mansion named the Garden of Serenity.

  “Although he was now thoroughly Westernized—wearing European clothes, eating European food and dancing to European music—Puyi still thought of himself as emperor,” his tutor wrote, “and the expatriate community in Tianjin delighted in playing along with this delusion for the [six] years he languished in exile there.” Photos showed Puyi as a dandy wearing a diamond tiepin and ring, carrying a walking stick. “My body,” he recalled, “would emit the combined odors of Max Factor, eau de cologne and camphor and I would be accompanied by two or three Alsatian dogs and a strangely dressed wife and consort.” From around the world arrived letters containing “proposals from unknown females who desired to enter the imperial harem.”