The company planted seedlings to replace the mature Manchurian ashes cut down to widen Red Flag Road. While the easement between the new roadbed and her home had narrowed, Auntie Yi was pleased to see room enough for new poppies. “I’ll plant the seeds in September,” she said, “and they’ll germinate in spring. Poppies are strong, you know. They self-seed, so only a few packets should fill in this stretch of road. I’ll plant pink and orange ones.” She pointed to the spot before her home’s yellow wall where the flowers would bloom. Outside of Keats (“Through the dancing poppies stole / A breeze, most softly lulling to my soul”) I doubted anyone held poppies in such high esteem as Auntie Yi. “They’re beautiful. They’re elegant, not like a sunflower.” She made a face. “Sunflowers have a production purpose. Poppies are just flowers.”
“They make opium.”
“Incorrect! That’s illegal now. Lin Zexu threw all the opium into the harbor.” We had, as often happened in conversation, stepped back two centuries, to the faraway southern wharf where the defiant act had occurred. Time travel was real when I boarded Auntie Yi’s train of thought. After touring the first Opium War, we returned to Wasteland. “Poppies make you smile when you look at them. There aren’t many plants like that.” She said this while staring at lush acres of rice running unobstructed to the forested foothills in the far distance. That, she disagreed, was not scenery. “It’s food.”
Turning right out my driveway, I walked fifteen minutes east past paddies and Eastern Fortune’s new rice polishing shop, a metal-walled warehouse that faced a billboard showing rows of apartment buildings and the legend: WITH ONE HEART, EVERYONE BUILDS THE NEW VILLAGE. Cranes and dozens of migrant workers helped, too. I passed their temporary dormitories and turned right down a narrow lane that I remembered as a dirt path that ended in paddies. Rows of blue tin sheeting—the kind that concealed construction sites—ran along the lane, blotting out the abandoned mud-walled farmhouses. Unlike urban architecture, nothing in the countryside was ennobled by its age. Tools rust, weeds climb, roads sink, roofs collapse; nature always wins.
On the single-lane bridge fording a foul-smelling stream choked with trash, another billboard announced: REVERE GENTRY RIVER TRANSFORMATION PROJECT. The accompanying schematic showed planted willows along the widened water’s promenade. I looked around the sign: fetid canal. Back at the sign: clean river. Around the sign: feces. Back at the sign: lotuses. Time travel, again.
The shells of the apartments were already built. Fresh steel-grey paint coated the four-story walk-ups, even though the driveway was still unimproved mud and the apartments had yet to be wired for electricity. The buildings looked nice, comparable to new construction in Jilin city, or even Beijing. A posted notice said that in this first phase of development, Eastern Fortune spent $2 million to build six hundred units into which it expected villagers to move.
But the apartments felt cramped compared to a typical farmhouse. Narrow windows faced not foothills and fields but other apartments. Rural homes usually had a wall of south-facing windows. The apartments, however, were dim, with low ceilings. Load-bearing walls divided the space into smaller rooms, unlike a farmhouse’s great room, where life took place atop the kang. There would be no kang here, but central heat.
And stairs, too. Even the ground-floor apartments were accessed by a small flight of steps, which could be an impediment to the elderly, especially during winter. Plus they could no longer “absorb the earth’s energy” by living with their feet on the ground.
An “oldsters’ leisure hall” was being built, along with a covered parking lot and exercise yard. The development backed against the company’s first stab at housing construction, the rows of single-story homes that replicated traditional design and included gardens and areas to dry and store rice seeds. When the village chief had offered to rent me his house, I blanched, seeing the structure as a soulless cement bunker. But compared to the new apartments, it looked practical and inviting.
Mr. Guan listened to my field report and said, “I like the new development. I’m looking forward to moving there.” He had signed the agreement. “Why do you think this house is so run-down?” he asked. “I’m not going to put any money into fixing it up when they’ll tear it down to plant rice.”
“When?”
“When they tell me to.” He saw my face fall and added, “Don’t worry. If we have to leave before your lease runs out, you can live with me in the new apartment.”
His family had also agreed to contract their rice plot to Eastern Fortune, choosing to receive an annual rent payment. Mr. Guan had gone full Eastern Fortune: it would farm his land, swap his house for a new apartment, and pay him to work in the shop. He showed me his uniform, a red canvas jacket with the company’s name stitched on the left breast. The item would soon become as ubiquitous around Wasteland as the blue Mao suit had been. Only San Jiu’s generation wore that now.
“Pretty soon you’ll be spending weekends soaking at the hot spring,” I teased Mr. Guan.
“Wo cao!” he cursed. “I’ve never been to that place. That’s for people with money.”
“That’s what everyone says at first. Then it’s one soak, and you’re on the path to ruin.”
He said the greater danger to his morality was the nightly mah-jongg game at the corner shop. Fishing meant going to bed early and missing the action, but he would hear the amounts won and lost the next day. “It’s easy to get addicted,” he said. “You don’t just want to win the game—you want to beat a particular person who pisses you off.”
The reasons could include: money, family, love, work, and conflicts therein. Or heard/said things about the above. There were no secrets. “My sister hates coming out here now,” he said. “It’s obvious. People talk about her. She’s unmarried, she moved to the city, she has a foreigner living in her old bedroom.” He watched me laugh and added, “Don’t tell anyone how much rent you pay to us, OK? We just tell them we’re doing you a favor, because your family lives here, and they had no room for you, and you teach at the school for free. No one needs to know about the money. It will make them gossip more.”
It was more convenient for him, he said, if villagers thought I wasn’t a tenant but having an affair with his sister.
“People say that?”
“No,” he reflexively replied. “Maybe.” He quickly changed the subject to fish.
That weekend, dump trucks again woke me before dawn, rumbling through Wasteland. Our power went off. “They’re fixing Red Flag Road,” Mr. Guan explained.
“They just finished fixing it.”
“Maybe they’re making it even wider.”
I caught the first bus to Jilin city, queued for a ticket, and boarded the high-speed train to the airport to catch a flight to Frances. The adrenaline of made connections, of continued momentum, of beating the obstacle course of Chinese logistics—Push to the front of the line! Lug as little as possible! Don’t look in that bucket!—carried me from the ticket counter through the metal detector, up the escalator, down the gangway, onto the plane. As we ascended, I looked for Wasteland out the window. But from far away the villages all looked the same.
The following week, Auntie Yi fumed on Red Flag Road.
“That’s what Eastern Fortune Rice did while you were in Hong Kong! I was going to plant poppies in that space!” She pointed with disgust at a stripe of green sod. A strand of gray hair spilled from her bucket hat and down her tanned cheek. “Now I’ll have to wait until the grass dies. Or just dig it up and put the flowers in anyway. They’ll know I did it. But this is village land, not their land. Look at that!”
We stared wordlessly at Wasteland’s first lawn.
Typically for a Chinese conversation, Auntie Yi slipped the bad news in only after asking about my trip to see Frances. “Is she pregnant yet? No? Well, San Jiu had a stroke.”
It had been minor, she said, and now he was resting at home. “Don’t disturb him,” she advised. “He’s in a terrible mood. He’s rarely sick, let
alone experienced something this serious. Tomorrow morning he’ll go to the clinic for medicine. Go sit with him there.”
I ran the mile to his house at 6:00 a.m. only to find that San Jiu had biked to the clinic. I ran there. Young nurses in starched white uniforms asked me the usual questions—American, Year of the Rat, 1.86 meters—as I roamed the hall, looking in doors for San Jiu.
He lay in a room with four platform beds, each occupied by a man on his back, tethered to an IV line. A ceiling fan pushed the limpid air, and flies buzzed against the screened windows facing the village street. The horns of rumbling dump trucks bleated as they passed, sending plumes of dust into the room. When the saline bag emptied, the patient yelled, at the top of his voice, “Huan yao!” (“Change medicine!”)
San Jiu’s eyes lit up as I said hello and patted his arm; there was no hugging in Chinese families, even after a stroke.
“Mei shi,” San Jiu said, when I asked what happened. “It was nothing.” While out in the paddy checking for rice blast, he had felt “strange.” Two fingers on his left hand went numb. “I hoped it was a cramp,” he said. But when the sensation remained, he walked a mile by himself to the clinic. The triage nurse recognized his symptoms and called a doctor. An ambulance took him to a Jilin city hospital for a CT scan and further tests. He showed no lingering effects, but was to come to the clinic three times a week to receive an infusion of rehydration formula mixed with medicine. San Jiu did not know what kind. “Mei shi,” he repeated. (“No big deal.”)
A man with a hand bandaged in white gauze slung around his neck asked where I had been. Another man, who had taken a liquor bottle to an eyebrow now sutured shut, shouted, “Huan yao!” A starched nurse entered and said, “Our clinic must look really poor to an American.” I replied, truthfully, that the clinic looked well-supplied, attentively staffed, and affordable, even for a farmer. But no one believed me.
I wondered how much San Jiu’s medical care cost and how I could let him know, in a roomful of people, that he should not worry about the bill.
Paying in China represented more than a financial transaction: merely picking up a restaurant check could lead to tableside scrums, climaxing with hand-slapping dashes to the register to toss down money first. Paying was a show of respect—and a deposit in the ledger of favors that balanced relationships. As a laowai, a foreigner, this account was all but closed to me. San Jiu had known the men in the room his entire life. He had lived through six decades of history with them. Through marriage we were family, but in situations like this I remained an outsider.
After I asked about the bill at the front desk, the clerk said the account had been settled. At lunch later that day, San Jiu’s cousin, who ran a local dumpling house, relayed the news that San Jiu had canceled our weekly dinner. “He told me to tell you it’s not convenient.”
“I told him he doesn’t have to cook. I’ll bring takeout from his favorite restaurant, the Korean barbecue.”
“It’s not convenient.”
Why? Was it about money, about face, about a joke I made, or something the clinic staff had said? I was baffled, and would have preferred San Jiu call me shagua—moron—as he often did, and say what I had done wrong.
I carefully mentioned the encounter to Auntie Yi. She clucked and said, “Everyone calls San Jiu qiuzi—slippery. That’s been his nickname for decades.”
I had never heard it before.
“You can never tell what’s going on with him,” she said. “Just show up for dinner and pretend nothing happened.”
I sat with him during his next appointments—flattering the nurses, humoring his wardmates—then did as Auntie Yi had instructed, arriving at his house for the meal carrying offerings of peaches, pork, walnuts, and chrysanthemum tea. Nothing was explained, but that night I ate dinner seated next to a hale and friendly San Jiu on his kang, munching flash-fried pork and garlic stems while kids ran in and out, the door slammed, and the Pekingese tried its best to be heard.
In mid-September the shadows lengthened on Red Flag Road, the foothills’ grass dried to a sandy brown, and the paddies turned yellow. At Wasteland’s elementary school, the children wore jackets at recess, and the blackboards cautioned against the coming frost of the solar term called White Dew. PREVENT HAND, FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE. Warnings that winter brought the biggest change in temperature could not be far behind.
For the first time since summer, I shaved, so kids wouldn’t want to paw and pull their furry teacher’s face. As I passed our intersection’s corner shop, its owner said hello and added, “There’s been a Libyan walking around here with a black beard.”
I was incredulous: another foreigner, let alone one from North Africa, had never been to Wasteland. “Auntie, that was me. I wasn’t cleaned up. Now I shaved.”
The woman narrowed her eyes at me and said, “Really, Teacher Plumblossom? That other guy was much better looking than you.”
My runs increased from fourteen- to sixteen- and then eighteen-mile loops, a route that took me further north along the Songhua to the foothills, which seemed to keep receding. The course now edged past drying cornstalks and sunflowers drooping from the weight of their seeds. Although it was autumn, it felt like a second spring: I ran under bright blue skies around pouncing grasshoppers and fiddling crickets, past blossoming thistles and golden dandelions. The fields showed the same colors: green stalks and yellow crowns. After the paddies had been drained, frogs sunned on the drying mud, fattened from their summer bug binge.
Mr. Guan’s teenage niece said I looked “unhealthy,” which in the countryside meant “thinner.” At night she began bringing over her family’s leftovers in an oversize stainless steel bowl—piles of rice and tofu and potatoes—that made me feel like a well-kept pet. After patching its cracks with duct tape, Mr. Guan fired up the kang. I stuffed rice stalks into its fire vent, curled against the bed’s warmth on my belly, and dozed like a contented dog.
Low on cash, I walked to the crossroads and pressed the buttons on the Agricultural Bank’s ATM. As a Peace Corps volunteer the previous decade, I had had to fill out multiple tissue-paper slips, then queue at a bank counter and all but beg the teller to release funds from my account. A few times the bank told me to come back later, as it had run out of cash. Now the transaction took one minute: Wasteland’s machine dispensed yuan, still making me feel like I had found a magic portal into money, eight thousand miles from its source.
A man named Mr. Wang managed Wasteland’s bank. He was short and plump and always smiling, though Auntie Yi said his grin concealed marital troubles. I asked how she knew, and she replied, “Everyone knows everything.”
Mr. Wang said that the bank recently tried a pilot program to lend money to farmers to improve their equipment or to start a side business. “The problem is that they have no collateral,” he told me. “They can’t put up their assigned plot of land. We decided they could use their home, but that isn’t worth much. The loans were restricted to such small amounts. Really, if a farmer wants to buy a bunch of chickens and build a coop, he’s not going to come to me and fill out an hour’s worth of paperwork to borrow 300 yuan. He can borrow that from family and friends. What this village needs is more threshing machines. They cost 20,000 yuan [$3,200]. That’s double the cost of an average house here.”
For the past week, Uncle Fu had urged me to buy a fleet of harvesters. “You can rent them daily,” he said. “Your business would be excellent. Now people wait their turn for the machines to come. There’s a list.”
“But outside of this season, the machines would need to be stored, and maintained.”
He considered this. “On second thought,” he said, “Eastern Fortune will soon be responsible for harvesting everything.”
The company rebuilt the arch at the start of Red Flag Road. A new billboard announced that Wasteland was an “eco-agriculture industrialization demonstration region.” San Jiu couldn’t say what that meant, nor could Mr. Guan or any other farmer I asked; none of them had ev
en bothered to read the sign. Then I remembered Dr. Liu, Eastern Fortune’s agronomist, explaining that the company had first labeled its fields a “technological experimental site” because the government had favored those adjectives in 2000. Now the terms had changed, and the company’s scope had expanded.
Eastern Fortune’s workers, clad in matching red jackets, surveyed the ripened fields with reaping knives, selecting seed grain for the next year. The rice reached above their waists, and the men moving amidst it looked like swimmers in a yellow sea.
The push was on to harvest before Mid-Autumn Festival, a September family-gathering meal that brought the year’s highest demand for the freshest rice. Farmers reaped and threshed across Wasteland. San Jiu finally gave in to his family’s concerns for his health and hired a two-man crew. Their harvester mowed his paddies in a single afternoon.
The drawback to harvesting by machine was that, once the grain was bagged, it needed to be dried and sold lest it turned rancid. Grains cut by hand, however, left the rice kernels attached to their stalks, which could be kept longer and sold when prices rose. But cutting by hand was back-numbing work, done with a forearm-long scythe. The tool was light and sharp, and the strain came not from pulling the blade through the stalks—yanking as much as slicing—but from bending low to cut just above the roots.
Both processes sent plumes of chaff into the air, clouding the horizon, powdering our clothes, and caking our eyes and lips. But in contrast to the machine-harvested fields, the hand-cut stalks were tied into sheaves and piled in shaggy mounds the shape and color of kneeling lions. Wasteland’s prides filled the fields, facing the setting sun.
After threshing the kernels, the rice was spread to dry on cement driveways and lanes—but not on Red Flag Road, or the hot spring’s parking lot, filled as they were with tourists’ cars. In our driveway, for the last time, Mr. Guan smoothed the rice harvested from his family’s plot. Next year the grain would go to Eastern Fortune and be fed into a dryer, then milled and polished by Japanese machines. But now Mr. Guan stepped carefully around his grain’s golden patch. He turned it over with a rake, moving as meditatively as a monk in a Zen sand garden.
In Manchuria Page 29