In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

But unlike government ministries, private companies had to show their hand. Legal filings and license registrations were accessible to the public. On my kang, as Mr. Guan snored loudly in the neighboring room, I read Eastern Fortune’s credit report, part of a due diligence dossier on the company.

  The destruction of Auntie Yi’s poppies aside, the company’s hands looked clean: no pending lawsuits, no environmental fines, no muckraking reports of malfeasance. The details matched what the agronomist Dr. Liu had told me in her company office: Eastern Fortune was cofounded in 2000 by Wasteland’s current party secretary, a man named Liu Yandong. It started as a small rice-processing workshop with limited facilities. The company’s moniker was a blend of characters from the founders’ names. Mr. Liu had bought out his partner. There were no shareholders, and his younger brother was the company’s general manager. The only news items, from city, provincial and national newspapers, were positive. Mr. Liu was often quoted as saying, “Technically, we are a rice processor, not a rice grower. We provide seed free of charge to farmers, who plant the fields. Those who choose not to farm will have their land tended by laborers and receive an annual payment of 15,500 yuan [$2,530]. Our motto is: ‘A stable company, plus farmers, plus technology equals green rice.’”

  In 2003, some 2,000 farmers in Wasteland and surrounding villages had contracted their crop to Eastern Fortune. Eight years later the number reached 5,120.

  “In the past, farmland here was divided into numerous pieces and contracted to individual households,” Mr. Liu told a Jilin city newspaper. “At the beginning of 2011, the village representatives decided to consolidate the farms while preserving farmers’ rights to it.”

  Mr. Liu did not mention that he—and his brother—were among the village representatives, only that “the decision was based on voluntary and legal principals and farmers will get compensated.”

  Auntie Yi disagreed. “Will anyone replace my poppies?” she asked, watching the road-widening work. “Do you expect me to trust a promise to pay me fairly for my house, let alone to better manage my village? I’m a retired cadre. I know all the policies, all the announcements. But I don’t know if we have to move into those high-rise apartments. I told you to go to the office and say you want to buy the company. Did you do it yet? Walk in and get a meeting with the boss. He probably sits in the hot spring all day. Go look for him there.”

  The sun rose at 4:15 on a Sunday morning, and I was wide-awake to see it. All through the night, cement trucks shook my windows. The electricity had been shut off again. Workers raked wet cement onto the widened road, illuminated by spotlights powered by gasoline generators.

  At six, a vendor’s pedicab puttered past, calling out types of noodles and also “Seaweed strips for sale!” By seven a crew of men wielding brooms made of willow branches tied to a stalk of dried bamboo swept our driveway. Mr. Guan was still fishing, and I reflexively ducked away from the windows, feeling suddenly foreign amidst the strangers.

  I went on a long run, reaching the Songhua River but not finding Mr. Guan. When I looped back through a hamlet named Zhang’s Family Outpost, the man who sold me a bottle of water said that his Internet had stopped working and his cell phone reception was spotty. “We’re expecting official guests,” he said with a smile. Muggy with a chance of motorcade.

  I turned at the northernmost end of Red Flag Road and ran toward home. Cars never slowed for me on this stretch; they swerved and sped away. But now a Land Cruiser, painted in green camouflage, slammed its brakes and reversed back in my direction. My stomach sank. I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Frances. The diversion, I thought, would somehow render me invisible, or at least look too busy to chat.

  Before Frances answered, the driver’s tinted window lowered in a whir. A bull of a man—crew cut, aviator sunglasses, thick gold chain around a meaty neck—yelled in Chinese, “Stop filming!”

  “I’m talking to my wife,” I replied.

  His mouth twitched slightly.

  “Does that phone have a camera?”

  “Nope. I’m cheap. Look.” I showed him the old, basic model.

  He sneered, the window whirred up, and the Land Cruiser sped away.

  At Wasteland’s intersection, uniformed policemen halted traffic, preventing anyone from crossing the road. I couldn’t go home. Instead I sat in the sundries shop with the rest of the village. “Once the motorcade passes, we can leave.”

  “Who’s visiting?”

  “Wen Jiabao.” China’s premier.

  “Incorrect!” a man playing mah-jongg said. “It’s a general.”

  “Someone said it was the minister of agriculture.”

  “Hu Jintao came in 2006.”

  “It was 2007,” I corrected, and added a brag: once I attended an official lunch for President Hu at the U.S. State Department. The villagers were not impressed.

  “He came here.”

  “He ate our rice.”

  The names of other titles, of other officials, rang in the air. In the end no one could agree who was in the backseat of the black Audi that toured Wasteland. The car turned left, edging the concrete drying on the new half of Red Flag Road, and sped away.

  At the start of 2013, China’s most important policy announcement, called the Number 1 Document, said the central government would “encourage [individual] land contracts to flow to large-scale landholders to develop scale management.”

  The nation’s patchwork of small, single-family plots were to merge into large, company-managed ones. The minister of agriculture said that “gradually transferring land into the hands of efficient farmers and developing moderately sized operations is the direction of the future.”

  High officials had seen farming’s future. It looked like Wasteland.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Half-Bombed Bridge to Worker’s Village

  The modernization of agriculture followed a transformation of urban life. In the Northeast, the latter began in the 1990s with the shuttering of failing state-owned enterprises. Shenyang, 250 miles southwest of Wasteland, had once been China’s leading example of the “iron rice bowl,” or jobs that provided housing, health care, and education. One thousand factories operated here, manufacturing everything from bedsprings to airplanes. Employees lived in the nation’s model housing project, named Worker’s Village. Its three-story walk-up apartments fronted willow-lined roads with names such as Praise Industry, Celebrate Industry, Serve Industry, and Protect and Defend Industry.

  I remembered its demise at the turn of the twenty-first century, when the wrecking ball thudded into the apartments, unemployed factory hands trolled for work holding signboards listing their job skills, and the social hall called the Worker’s Cultural Palace was the domain of laid-off women. One had pinched my butt and said, “Privet!”

  “I’m not Russian.”

  “You don’t have to lie,” she replied, in Chinese. “You can be frank with me. Let’s dance.”

  She opened the padded door to the ballroom, releasing a burst of alto sax playing on the stereo. The windowless room was completely black; only the smell of her hair spray told me the woman was there. “It’s ten yuan for three dances,” she said. “You can put your hands anywhere you’d like.”

  Instead we sat in the hallway with six of her colleagues on a bank of orange plastic chairs usually seen in bus stations. Her factory had closed, and by day she cleaned hotel rooms. “I have a six-year-old son, and my husband is laid-off, too, so we need the money. I dance every night. The community government manages the dance. They earn five yuan for every patron who enters. That’s the ticket price. We keep all the money we earn. It’s better than nothing. Every bit helps.”

  “I’ve been doing this for six months, but it doesn’t suit me,” a woman said.

  Another asked, “Where else can I earn money now? We lost our jobs and there’s nowhere to turn.”

  “Why do farmers want to migrate to cities?” another woman said. “They have it easy compared to us. I wish I had land
that could earn money forever.”

  Despite our surroundings, the women were cheerful and open, talking about how good life used to be, laughing, and taunting one another in dialect—“Shuo sa?” They were all mothers to young kids, and explained the shattering of their iron rice bowls to me in language that even a child could understand: the “bad men” took their jobs and one day they would punished for “telling lies.”

  My would-be dance partner led me upstairs, where the Worker’s Cultural Palace computer-training classroom sat dark. Next door, three women in curlers rooted through cases of makeup in a cosmetology class. The lone person sitting at a desk in the English language school asked, in Chinese, what I wanted. I replied in English, but the man dismissed me with a wave. “I don’t understand,” he grunted. At my back he shouted mockingly: “ABCDEFG!”

  The dancers did not deny that sometimes they did more than twirl. “We give our numbers to men if they ask, but most men just come to dance, and to be held. They’re going through tough times, too.” Back in the darkened dancehall, faces were indistinguishable, and the room had become something felt rather than seen: a mass of laid-off people grasping each other tightly, moving in circles to a wordless song.

  Eight years later I revisited the area on a late-August weekday to find that most of the factories had been razed, replaced by luxury apartments. The old street names remained, however, so now people lived on Protect and Defend Industry Road in high-rises named About America and Napa Grove.

  A group of well-dressed couples stopped waltzing when I stepped into the former Worker’s Cultural Palace. A uniformed security guard asked me to leave: “This is a private club now. It’s for people with money.”

  At a nearby Starbucks, the stereo softly played Chet Baker, and sitting amongst the imported American earth tones made me wonder how any of this indicated I was in Northeast China. The answer came at the door, when I reflexively filled my hoodie’s pocket with thick napkins for use in the public toilet that still stood down the lane.

  The Worker’s Cultural Palace had become a private dance hall, and the former bank owned by the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, had become the Shenyang Finance Museum, telling the “Story of Money.” One room contained a bank note from every country—“Eritreans use nakfas,” the guide intoned—while in a gilded chapel couples knelt on a pillow, kowtowing to Cai Shen, the god of wealth. In the final exhibit room, Chinese tourists posed for photos beside a replica of Wall Street’s bull statue, and a smiling wax likeness of Bill Gates. “He is the living god of wealth,” the docent told me.

  Across town, in the Japanese-designed plaza facing the former South Manchuria Railway hotel, China’s best-known statue of Chairman Mao faces neon ads for Coca-Cola and Hankook tires. The towering likeness was built at the height of the Cultural Revolution and shows Mao riding a flotilla of lantern-jawed proletariat brandishing wrenches and rifles while stomping Buddhist and imperial statuary. Stickers dotted its marble plinth, advertising employment agencies and retirement homes. LOOKING FOR WORK? WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU WHEN YOU AGE? A middle-aged couple, dressed simply in color-faded clothes, entered the plaza. They bowed to the statue, clasped their hands in silent prayer, bowed again, and left a bouquet of cut flowers at Mao’s feet. They had once lived at Worker’s Village, they said, and had come to ask for help finding jobs. Saint Mao stood silent.

  Only seven of the original 157 buildings remain at Worker’s Village. The apartments still look inviting, especially compared to the anodyne units rising around them. Cement archways lead to wide staircases stacked with cabbages, boxes of pink geraniums hang outside large windows, and plots of tomatoes and green beans blossom in courtyards between the buildings, where blankets sun on lines strung between poplars.

  One building has been transformed into a community-run exhibit. It is not a patriotic education base but an example of how museums can bring history to life instead of burying it under dates and death tolls. The displays show the past glory of Worker’s Village through four apartments, re-created to reflect daily routines in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Here is the bedroom of Mr. Ren, who moved to Shenyang in 1952 to work at the 3301 Factory. See his rotary phone, propane stove, enamel washbasins, spittoon, antimacassars, and sewing machine, evincing the advanced level of Socialist housing the village provided. Rare for China at the time, his apartment even had electric lights.

  Today, however, the power was out, and I toured the two floors alone in darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight. The museum was open four hours a day, staffed by a single volunteer, who charged no admission. The old woman said her neighbors collected the displayed items: old chopping blocks, coat racks, and the Manchu game ga la ha that used pig knee bones as dice. The pictures on old calendars in each room showed the evolution of home entertainment: a black-and-white television (1969), a boom box (1978), a videodisc player (1988).

  The granary displayed ration coupons; the school held a blackboard whose chalked characters announced Lesson One: “Long Live Chairman Mao!” The walls of other rooms showed painted propaganda from across the decades, from Mao’s exhortation “Dig tunnels deep, store vast amounts of grain, and avoid hegemony” to Deng Xiaoping’s “In the future, do not forget what was learned in the past.” Seen through the weak glow of a cell phone screen, the slogans looked like cave art from long, long ago.

  Just as antiquated as the iron rice bowl was the notion of being assigned to live somewhere, as Auntie Yi’s husband had been.

  “I was never a farmer,” Uncle Fu said as we sat on his kang in Wasteland. “I was sent here after the Resist America and Aid Korea War. This certainly wasn’t my choice of places to live. I’m a southerner. But in the army you go where they tell you.”

  Uncle Fu was born in 1934 and enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army at age sixteen. As a former soldier, he was the only villager who didn’t think running was a waste of time; when he saw me pass on Red Flag Road, he would chug with his arms in place, making his oversize camouflage jacket sleeves flap, urging me on.

  “When I was sent here in . . . 1957?—yes, it was 1957—I lived in a little wooden shack at the airfield. The Japanese had used it, but the runway was in bad shape, so we rebuilt it, and that fuel depot you can see out the kitchen window—it’s still functioning. We had the granary and the fuel, which may have made farmers feel secure after the war, but as a soldier I knew it just made this place a target. Over here, this was all wasteland. Some grass-and-mud huts, like where your mother-in-law grew up, and your wife lived. There was no electricity, no water tap.”

  As Worker’s Village’s opened in Shenyang in the 1950s, villages such as Wasteland still looked as though they belonged to the feudal nineteenth century. One old house like the one Frances was raised in still remained, since converted to a storage shed. Its mud-and-straw walls were missing bite-size chunks, suggesting that a donkey had been nibbling away over the years. Black smoke scarred the dirt floor and interior walls, and the corrugated tin roof bled streaks of rust. Unlike in China’s remade metropolises, I had never met anyone nostalgic for old buildings in the countryside. Not when they had looked like this.

  “There were no paddies when I arrived here,” Uncle Fu continued. “This area was all sorghum. I ate a lot of sorghum in the army; it tasted awful. Mealy and bland. It doesn’t have fragrance, like rice.”

  He had arrived as Wasteland’s paddies were being built. “There was no Red Flag Road then; it was all rice out here, and you walked along the dikes dividing the plots. Sometimes you slipped, and you went into the paddies. That upset me: we were living in a field, not a proper village. I hated winter, too. I’ve never gotten used to it, actually. The first year I had frostbite on my hands and nose. We were always hungry. There were wild chickens and hares here. I used to hunt the chickens: they were everywhere. You chased after them three times. By the third time they were too tired. I was young and in good shape, so I was the one sent to do it. When the chicken surrendered, it ducked its
head into the snow. That was its end.”

  He paused and leaned close to check my powdered soymilk level. “I’ll get you some more hot water,” he said, rising slowly and shuffling to the thermos set by the window. It was an old-fashioned enamel kind whose large cork emitted a satisfying tunk when pulled and the steam escaped.

  Uncle Fu talked slowly and softly—Auntie Yi was out on errands and couldn’t interrupt him—and told me about his first encounters with Americans.

  “My family is from below the Yangtze River, a village named Liangshan. It’s southwest of Nanjing. It’s very small. But the Japanese still went there in 1943 . . . or 1944. It must have been 1943. They torched the whole village when I was a boy. You know, up here the Japanese behaved better. I dare not say they were good, but they needed workers for Manchukuo. In the south, their policy was called the ‘three gones’: Burn until the Chinese were gone, murder until the Chinese were gone, loot until the Chinese were gone. I was in elementary school at the time.”

  He took a sip of steaming soymilk.

  “I saw my first American then. After the war was over, in 1945, some Americans came to help rebuild our village. They drove up on a tractor.” His large brown eyes grew wide at the memory. “I had forgotten about that until now. The Communists liberated our village in May 1949. I volunteered for the army in October the following year, after the Resist America and Aid Korea war started. Every boy at my school enlisted—ninety-six of us from our village. We were between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.”

  Uncle Fu was then sixteen and away home for the first time, sent to Beijing to train in air force logistics.

  “Near the end of 1950, we made it to the border, to the city of Dandong on the Yalu River. They gave us guns and whatever uniform was available. Mine was too big.”

  It still was, but Uncle Fu’s gaunt frame made all of his clothes seem big.

  In North Korea, he remembered camping in caves by day and marching through the night. “Once over the border, I could see American planes filling the sky. Frankly, I had no idea where I was; in war, you do as you’re told and just think about surviving. We had Koreans in our unit; they had fought against the Japanese in the Northeast, then volunteered with the Communists in the Chinese civil war. We didn’t know that Russia wanted China to fight the Americans for them: Stalin was afraid of America! It wasn’t until after the war that I learned that of the ninety-six boys who enlisted from my village, only six of us survived. I was lucky, that’s all.”