My morning walk to school had me pulling a sweatshirt’s hood tight against my ears. I imagined Wasteland’s version of the mistral gathering force in Siberia. “Prepare to weep and be grievously distressed when the wind blows from the north,” a traveler to Jilin wrote in 1903, “for you are about to suffer an agony of nose and eyes and finger-tips not easily surpassed.” Now it puffed in short, chilling bursts, building endurance for its winter-long marathon across Manchuria.
Past drying cornfields not yet cut for silage, I finally ran the ten miles to the foothills. Up close they looked smaller than they did from home. The road ended in a smoldering garbage pile. After a summer of training, that was the finish line. From out here I couldn’t see Wasteland at all. On the run home, a strong breeze stripped a copse of poplars, showering me in a confetti of yellow leaves.
The only reminders of summer’s colors were the cabbages drying on fences. Stacks of dried rice stalks rose next to the homes they would heat through winter. The fields showed mud. Frogs burrowed into the fallow paddies to hibernate until spring.
Auntie Yi stood on Red Flag Road, staring in disgust at the latest poppy prevention. Over the sod stripe, a work crew had erected a thin wall, five feet tall and painted harvest yellow. In red characters, it said: BUILD A NEW SOCIALIST COUNTRYSIDE.
The workers had told her the wall was to protect her home from car accidents. Speed bumps would have been more effective. Vehicles tore down the improved road so fast that you could see the drag on their bodies. For the first time Wasteland had large-scale roadkill. Unfortunate voles and frogs never saw what hit them.
“This wall will also conceal destruction of our homes from passing cars, too, if we have to move to those apartments,” Auntie Yi guessed. She studied the wall, and I thought she was reading its painted slogan like a fortune. Instead, she grimaced and said she would plant her poppies along the wall’s base. She eased down on both knees and started digging.
Often a cold rain would send me sprinting toward shelter, which was hard to find on the open landscape. After a cloudburst halted a run, I waited under the overpass that bridged the train tracks. The sleek white express running from Jilin city to Changchun whooshed by, moving too fast for passengers to read Wasteland’s station sign. Most passengers had lowered their window shades anyway.
The platform sat empty. The station’s salmon-pink walls looked pretty in the rain. It was Wasteland’s brightest and cleanest building, though weeds began swallowing its disused storage sheds, and the entranceway had turned to mud. A rusting sign said PUBLIC TELEPHONE. Farmers—and their children—had cell phones now. Under the new overpass, I read spray-painted phone numbers for well diggers, more stickers proclaiming that Falun Gong was good, and a poster showing the blisters caused by hand, foot and mouth disease. Why did I always look?
The rain turned to rice-size hail.
I ran to the clinic, pushing through double doors with decals that said OPEN 24 HOURS and WISHING YOU GOOD HEALTH. The nurse said that San Jiu had just left, and I found him across the street at a table, watching Chiang Kai-shek wring his hands over his failure to dislodge the Japanese from Manchuria. He would be forced to unite with the Communists.
“I know how this soap opera ends.”
San Jiu said “Uh” for hello.
As the television blared, we shared a plate of chun bing, the Northeast’s burrito, pinching chopstickfuls of sliced scallions, pickled carrots, and fried spicy pork onto thin, oily wrappers. We didn’t order rice. A cooker full of the staple sat plugged in on a sideboard, and we could fill our bowls as we wished. There had been no celebration at harvest’s end, no gathering to eat the crop’s first bowl. When I asked why not, San Jiu said, “It’s just rice.”
He stood with some difficulty and shuffled across the restaurant to grab a horse blanket folded on a chair, which he then wrapped around my shoulders with another “Uh,” adding, “Don’t get sick.”
Sitting with him in the empty restaurant, saying nothing, clicking chopsticks and crunching into the scallions as the television blared military commands and gunfire, I reminded myself to savor the moment. San Jiu had been my constant, the unchanging variable of my life here. Now that time was slipping away.
I asked about the harvest, and he rattled off the yield and prices as quickly as if he were repeating a phone number. The land produced more than he had expected, and wholesale prices were up, though so was the wholesaler’s markup, which San Jiu predicted could be 50 percent when it hit the shelves for consumers. “Zhang,” I replied.
“You don’t have to say it,” San Jiu said. “Increase, increase, increase. Everything costs more. China has too many people.”
After harvest, the village was reduced by two. In another rainstorm I sheltered under a tin portico over a home’s front door. A boy I recognized from the elementary school ran out under an umbrella, yelling, “Teacher don’t stand there, don’t stand there, Teacher!” Between gasps he said the home’s exterior had been painted red because a woman’s body was being stored inside, until her funeral. I flinched, realizing the front windows were painted over, too, save for a cross-shaped opening. “Let’s go,” the boy urged, “before her ghost attaches itself to you.”
“What about you?” I said. “Why wouldn’t the ghost cling to you?”
“I’m a kid!” the boy yelled.
“So what? Do ghosts hate homework? They don’t want to go through school again?”
The boy pulled at my arm and said, “Stop joking. We have to move, before it’s too late.” He handed me the umbrella, and we huddled beneath it on the walk to his house.
The following week, I woke to the sound of a nazi (pronouncd nah-zuh), the long horn that produced a sound reminiscent of a grown-up kazoo. The instrument was played at weddings and funerals, accompanied by a gong and drum to scare away evil spirits. The music boomed from a home down a dirt lane that I had never visited. Mr. Guan said the deceased woman had been eight-six, with a loving family who would sit vigil with her body, lying in situ for at least one night, and perhaps more. He was going to the wake. “If you come, make sure you don’t say ‘Nin hao’ in greeting,” he advised. The words, used for “Hello,” literally meant “You are well.” Instead, I was to say, “Nin buhao,” or “You are not well.”
I walked with him to the house, but stopped in its yard. I had never met the departed and didn’t recognize her family’s name. Suddenly I imagined San Jiu lying in state, and a stranger stepping over the threshold, introducing himself to the bereaved. That the stranger was a foreigner, prone to disrespectful, face-losing faux pas, made the scenario even more upsetting.
Mr. Guan said I was talking logically, but this was an emotional event. “Come show your face,” he said. “Don’t take notes; you don’t have to write about it. If you’re uncomfortable, I’ll tell the family you have to be somewhere. I know the ways.” I could just be, and not record. Mr. Guan led me inside the family’s house, and closed the door.
In the final week of October, when the fortnight of Frost’s Descent approached the Beginning of Winter, the police called, telling me to appear at the station. My stomach sank; in Beijing such a call had resulted in a lengthy plea to remain in my courtyard home, which the police had insisted wasn’t safe. It was, but they had allowed me to live there only after I taught them a list of swearwords in English, so they would know when a foreigner was cursing them. That horse trade wouldn’t be much use for a cop in Wasteland.
I had never even seen a policeman out here until the official’s summer visit, when an officer had halted Wasteland traffic for the motorcade. The village’s two-story brick police station was painted white with blue trim just as in Beijing, though its parking lot was filled with drying corncobs and a pair of wrestling puppies.
The clerk directed me past windows whose plaques said:
BIRTH REGISTRATION
MARRIAGE REGISTRATION
CORRECTION OF ERRORS
“Wait at the last one,” she instructed.
The officer, his uniform clean and pressed, called me “Teacher Plumblossom” and apologized for asking me in. He looked as old every other cop I had seen across China, a perpetual forty. They never seemed to age. The man said that the village chief had reported me as living with Mr. Guan. Was it payback for not renting his house? I would never know, but according to a national regulation, foreigners had to register when lodging at hotel or in a home. “In urban areas you have to do it within twenty-four hours or you get fined,” the officer said. “But in the countryside you have seventy-two hours. How long have you been living in Wasteland?”
“Seventy-one hours,” I replied with conviction.
“Uh.” The officer smiled.
I exhaled.
He directed me to a desk where another officer sat at a computer. I expected her to fill out the postcard-size tissue-paper registration form by hand, but instead she opened a Web browser, logged in, and asked to see my passport. Entering its number produced my photograph on the screen.
“There you are,” she said.
Now a cop in any far-flung station had access to a database of every identity card. “Here’s your visa,” she said, clicking a tab. “It shows that your last entry came last month, when you crossed the border from Hong Kong into Shenzhen.”
“I was visiting my wife.”
Living in the countryside—free of surveillance cameras, checkpoints, security screening—made me forget China’s bureaucracy and its rules. Out here, I had never given paperwork or asking for permission a second thought. Just as, on a trip to see Frances in Hong Kong earlier that summer, I had neglected to check when my Chinese visa expired. The previous day, it turned out. I had to miss my train back north and apply for a new one.
In the police station, the officer stopped typing. “There’s a field to enter a house number, but we don’t have those out here,” she said. “I’ll say you live in Wasteland.” My address was just a place name, like Santa’s.
The officer made small talk, asking why I didn’t yet have a child. She wondered what I was really doing in Wasteland, alone. Her tone changed from warm to icy: Was I a missionary? “You must be a missionary. Do you understand that proselytizing is illegal? Understand? What religion are you? Can you prove you’re not affiliated with a church group?”
I pleaded innocent. “Enter my English name into Baidu.”
On the popular search engine’s Web page, the officer saw pictures of my dilapidated Beijing courtyard, and snapshots of me teaching English to retirees in the neighborhood. News items in Chinese described the book I had researched there.
“Oh, you’re just a writer,” the woman said, sounding relieved. It was the first time I had heard someone say that in China.
“Let’s talk to the boss,” Dr. Liu said, pulling out her cell phone. Eastern Fortune’s agronomist was leading me through the hot spring’s greenhouses, reeling off statistics from the harvest. After growing six acres of rice at its founding, the company had just harvested 1,200 acres. “The boss can tell you what we’re planning next.” She put her phone to her ear. A “Wei!” in greeting, followed by a series of “Uhs” in rising inflection settled the matter. “He’ll meet us in the garden.” She led me past banana trees, under grape trellises, to a thatched-roof pavilion and wicker chairs. Recorded birdsong filled the air. Dr. Liu stooped to pick a ruby strawberry.
Liu Yanfeng stepped through the plants and shook my hand. He was Eastern Fortune Rice’s general manager, the second-in-command after his older brother, the company’s cofounder. Boss Liu motioned to a carved wood table and said, through a self-effacing giggle, “Sit down, please,” in heavily accented English. “That’s about all I remember how to say,” he admitted, switching to Chinese.
Boss Liu looked the part: barrel-chested, with black crew-cut hair carpeting a round, ruddy face and a pug nose. “I’m a simple guy,” he said, pulling with thick arms at the T-shirt he wore belted into black slacks. “I wear these clothes every day, unless I have a business meeting.”
Two waitresses appeared bearing plates of peeled bananas, watermelon, and strawberries. “We grew these here,” Boss Liu said, lighting a cigarette. He smoked Red Pagoda Golds, which cost more than the Red Pagoda regulars, but not as much as a pack of Pandas. They were a brand popular with bosses—not ostentatious, but not proletarian, either. I declined his offer.
“That’s right, I see you running all the time.” His arms mimed a jog. “I like to run, too. I wanted to talk to you about organizing a race here. A marathon, maybe.”
“It’s a perfect place to run: flat, little traffic, places to get water. You would have a hotel and hot springs at the finish line.”
Boss Liu smiled. “Yes, let’s talk about that. I’m in charge of promotions. The other day, Zhang Yimou was here filming a commercial for us.” He named China’s most famous film director, the man who staged the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
“He is a good friend. It would have been nice if you had met him. Next time.”
I nodded, remembering that Northeasterners were known as champion exaggerators. Boss Liu mentioned a famous pop star. “He came here last year. I sang a song with him.”
I thought of Auntie Yi’s order to proclaim my intention to buy Eastern Fortune Rice in order to learn its true worth. Boss Liu looked far too savvy for that ruse. He told me to ask him anything, calling me his gemen’r—his bro.
“Will everyone have to move out of their homes and into the new apartments?”
“The problem that the central government wants to solve now,” Boss Liu said, suddenly officious, “is how farmers can generate a second income. We’ve tried the production team model of agriculture. That didn’t work as well as the Household Contract Responsibility System, which we’ve used since 1984, actually 1983 here in Wasteland. We were piloting reforms even then. I was born in 1972 and remember that time.”
I said we were the same age.
“Brothers!” He smiled, sliding the plate of sweet watermelon closer. “Have more. There is no shortage.
“The current system worked much better. Families here could farm a piece of land and earn a living. When our house made 10,000 yuan [$1,641] in a year for the first time, we felt like we were prosperous. Not rich, but stable. Now that’s not enough—not when you have a child to put through school, or a car to buy, and other daily expenses. People want to generate a second income. Out here, we only farm less than half the year. And that’s a second problem: Who is going to plant the fields in the future? People our age don’t want to farm; they want to be in cities, making as much money as they can. No one wants their child to farm. This is an urgent problem.”
Boss Liu stubbed out his cigarette, replacing it in his mouth with a slice of watermelon. Between crunching bites, he slurped, “Our company—you know how it started, right? Now we have eleven enterprises under the original brand. It began as a village enterprise, and the village party secretary is on the board of directors.”
“Your brother, the company’s cofounder.”
Boss Liu nodded. “Our goal is to lead Wasteland to prosperity.”
“Will everyone have to move out of their homes into the new apartments?” I asked again. “Or will they have a choice to stay?”
Boss Liu lit another cigarette. “We formed a holistic mechanized collective,” he said. I looked to Dr. Liu for help.
“It means cutting out manual labor.”
“‘Liberating the laborers’ is how we say it,” Boss Liu corrected. “This is where Chinese agriculture is going, and we were among the first to experiment with it. It’s why the leaders come visit: to see and encourage this model. By farming collectively, we have a lower overhead cost. The central government subsidizes some of it: we buy the equipment and pay a family 13,000 yuan [$2,133] annually to lease one shang [1.6 acres] of their land. The government provides another 2,500 yuan [$410]. It’s a three-year contract at those rates, adjusted the next cycle if the price of rice changes. A fa
mily has guaranteed income and can generate secondary income through other work.”
Boss Liu saw my mouth forming the question again.
“The central government likes this model,” he continued, “because a collectively sown crop can be better managed for safety and grown more efficiently. Farmers shift off the land and the younger generation can find other work that contributes to national growth. Risk is shifted away from the farmers and village government and onto the shoulders of companies looking for a return on their investment.”
I opened my mouth.
“I’m going to answer your question,” he said. “Improving farmers’ living environment is also a goal. If they are not working the land, why do they have to live on it? They can move to a high-rise building with central plumbing and heat. Have you seen the new apartments we’re building? Those are for the farmers. The former farmers. It’s true that many people are not ready to accept a move into those buildings. Our job is to ease their worries and continue to develop the village so they will be willing to make the move, because they will see that their quality of life—their happiness index—will rise if they live there, such as having access to health care in the senior center. They can depend on receiving help. People will help them.”
“Many people enjoy having a garden to raise their own vegetables,” I said.
“In the future, they’ll want to buy better-quality ones,” he replied. “Is this good watermelon?” he asked, pointing at the plate. “Better than any other you’ve had in October?”
“Yes, but watermelon isn’t usually eaten in October—”
“Now it can be,” Boss Liu interrupted. “In the city, people go to Walmart and buy any fruit or vegetable year-round, imported from all over China and even the world. We can eat pineapple today, and apples, and mangoes. Shouldn’t farmers eat like we do? Instead of cabbage all winter, and only cabbage? I grew up eating cabbage, and those days are behind us just like my parents’ generation no longer has to live on sorghum and wowotou,” the rough cornmeal cakes.
In Manchuria Page 31