In Manchuria
Authors: Michael Meyer
For Benjamin, our
??
Contents
9 Tunnels in Time, Sidings to Space
15 The Half-Bombed Bridge to Worker’s Village
Wasteland
Could it be that all the elegance of heaven and earth
is stored north of the Wall?
From “Guarding the Pass,” a nineteenth-century
zidishu
, a folktale performed in Manchu and Chinese.
Every piece of duckweed floats down to the sea;
People will always meet each other somewhere.
From the classic Chinese novel
Journey to the West.
CHAPTER 1
In winter the land is frozen and still. A cloudless sky shines off snow-covered rice paddies, reflecting light so bright, you have to shield your eyes. I lean into a stinging wind and trudge north up Red Flag Road, to a village named Wasteland.
The view is flat, lifeless, and silver fresh. The two-lane cement road slices through the paddies like the courses plowed across frozen lakes in my native Minnesota, but there are no icehouses to shelter in here. Ten minutes ago, I set off from the coal-fueled warmth of Number
22
Middle School, where I volunteer as an English teacher. Already my beard is beaded with ice.
Tufts of dry husks sprout through the snow, resembling ripening brooms. To my left, the sun sinks over the far horizon. It is
3
:
22
p.m. at December’s end—or, as Chinese farmers know it,
dongzhi
(Winter Solstice), one of twenty-four fortnight-long periods describing the seasons based on the sun’s longitude. The previous solar term was Major Snow, which fell on schedule, blanketing Wasteland in white. Next up, in early January, is Slight Cold, which, given today’s high temperature of minus
8
degrees Fahrenheit, makes me fear what “slight” will feel like. At school, a red nylon propaganda banner lashed to the accordion entrance gate urges us to
PREVENT HAND, FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE
and, less helpfully, announces that
WINTER BRINGS THE BIGGEST CHANGE IN TEMPERATURE
.
Red Flag Road’s single traffic sign displays a speed limit of forty kilometers an hour. On school days I never see anyone break it; bicycles and three-wheeled motorcycles saunter and sputter to the crossroads’ Agricultural Bank, seed store, noodle shops, and train station. Painted bright pink and crowned with a peaked tin roof whose cobalt-blue matches Wasteland’s usual sky, the station has been rendered all but obsolete: the new high-speed trains that cover the seventy miles between the cities of Jilin and Changchun do not stop here. For passengers in the sealed compartment, Wasteland whooshes by in a silent four-second blur, looking like any other village in northeast China.
Closer inspection reveals a dotted line of trash aside Red Flag Road: empty boxes of expensive Panda brand cigarettes and bottles of Moutai brand liquor; broadsheets of stock tips, real estate flyers, and fortune-telling booklets advising the most auspicious days to buy property; and self-published circulars, sold in big cities, with titles such as
Intriguing Stories
and
Strange Affairs
. In addition to the latest gossip about the private lives of top officials, the pamphlets answer questions such as
Will our capital be moved from Beijing?
(No.)
Did the
1989
student protest movement fail?
(Yes.)
How many people were killed during the Cultural Revolution?
(Lots.)
Today the only sound on Red Flag Road comes from another banner, strung between two Manchurian ash seedlings, whipping in the wind. The cloth twists and unfurls, then twists again. Between gusts spin the Chinese characters for
plant
, then
seeds
, then
record
and
yield
. I pass the banner every day and, unlike the farmers, study its message. In the Chinese countryside—free of newsstands and street signs—propaganda is my primer, even when written by Comrade Obvious. This red ribbon teaches me the characters that form:
PLANT QUALITY SEEDS TO PRODUCE A RECORD YIELD
.
For decades, the three-story middle school was Wasteland’s tallest structure. From my English classroom window I can see all the village’s homes, whose clusters make an archipelago across the fields. Now I walk toward a billboard whose message I can read a mile away:
BUILD THE NORTHEAST
’S TOP VILLAGE
. It was erected by Eastern Fortune Rice, a private agribusiness company based in Wasteland. I never thought about this propaganda—just another exercise in blatancy—until Eastern Fortune began making it come true.
Gossip says that, like the railroad, Red Flag Road will be upgraded, too. Locals wonder if it’s their way of life that will be made obsolete. There’s even talk of changing the village’s name.
No one can say for certain why the place is called Wasteland. It may have been a ploy by homesteaders to discourage other migrants from moving to this fertile floodplain, stretching from the western banks of the Songhua (Pine Flower) River to forested foothills. Neighboring hamlets, also comprising a few dozen single-story homes abutting table-flat rice paddies, include Lonely Outpost, Zhang’s Smelly Ditch, the Dunes, and Mud Town.
In the movie
Caddyshack
, Rodney Dangerfield boasts that he and his partner, Wang, just bought some land at the Great Wall: “On the
good
side!” Wasteland is in the other direction. Beyond the wall begins China’s northeast, or
Dongbei
(rhymes with
wrong way
). Chinese say a map of their country resembles a chicken, which makes the Northeast its head, squeezing between Mongolian grasslands and the Ever-White Mountains before bumping up against Siberia.
Perhaps no other region has exerted more influence on China across the last four hundred years. Historically, the West referred to the Northeast as Manchuria, homeland of the Manchu, tribes that for centuries alternated between independence from and vassalage to the Chinese emperor before uniting to storm through the Great Wall in
1644
and seize the Beijing throne. The Manchu’s Qing dynasty ruled China for nearly three hundred years, doubling its territory—adding Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia—to form the borders of today’s multiethnic nation. But the regime’s center could not hold. On her deathbed in
1908
, the empress dowager Cixi chose a two-year-old boy named Puyi for the throne. The toddler bawled during his coronation. “Don’t cry,” his father consoled. “It will be over soon.” Four years later, the increasingly dissolute Qing crumbled, and Puyi became China’s last emperor, forced to abdicate in
1912
after the revolution led by Sun Yat-sen that created the Chinese republic.