In Manchuria (16 page)

It was a modern Chinese business fable: an impoverished village driver, a chance meeting with an agronomist, a farm created from scratch in twenty-two days. I would have been skeptical, until Dr. Liu said she bargained down the price of the business license. That was entirely in the Northeast’s character.

“I attended a provincial agricultural meeting in July
2000
,” she said, “and began my second career, in public relations. For the next year I was an advertisement for the company, telling officials at meetings in Dalian city, in Xi’an, in Beijing, about our farm. Our first harvest brought no recognition. The next one attracted financing from the State Council. Mr. Liu was able to open the polishing mill that had triggered his dream. I’ll show you the new one.”

We walked past the posted results of a company Ping-Pong tournament and across the road, where, in temperature-controlled silos, the company stored
280
tons of processed rice.

“This all used to be marshland, navigable only by boat,” she said, matching what Auntie Yi had told me. “The land was almost perfectly flat already. The marshes were drained, and workers dredged an irrigation canal from the Songhua River. The first rice was planted in
1965
.”

“My aunt said it was
1955
,” I corrected. “She lived here then.”

Dr. Liu asked who my aunt was. Her eyes narrowed. I felt the end of the tour drawing near. But no, she knew Auntie Yi for her poppies. She pressed a mental Delete key and repeated when rice was first planted with the corrected date.

“Farmers only produced a fraction of what they do now,” she said, regaining her footing as we balanced on a strip of raised dirt separating paddies. The Northeast grew
12
percent of China’s total rice crop, but nearly half of its output of the short, sticky variety. “It’s strong and cold tolerant,” Dr. Liu said, “and a good plant to raise organically.”

Eastern Fortune used animal feces as fertilizer: organic fertilizer was often made from sheep poop, Dr. Liu noted. The company no longer used river water but extracted it from forty feet below the soil. “It’s clean; we monitor it all the time,” she said.

As China developed, food safety and pollution rapidly became national concerns. In
2010
the results of a countrywide soil survey were classified as a state secret, but by
2013
a high-ranking official announced that eight million acres—an area the size of Maryland—was so polluted that “farming it should not be allowed.” In early
2014
the government released the results of an eight-year survey that found that one-fifth of farmland, mostly in central and southern China, was contaminated.

“Really, our company’s biggest concern isn’t pollution,” Dr. Liu said as we walked to the paddies. I thought of the Head Gardener worrying over recent soil samples, and the string of feed, fertilizer, and ethanol plants on the road from Jilin city to Wasteland. I imagined villagers’—and my—insides pulsing radioactive green.

“Everything is fine,” Dr. Liu said. “Don’t worry. I’m not worried.”

A moment passed. That wasn’t true, she admitted. She worried about weeds and bugs. “We’ve experimented with all sorts of preventions. We put laying ducks in the paddies at planting, in those little wooden houses you see out there. When the ducklings are a month old, they can start swimming around and eating insects. We’ve tried putting crabs in the water, too: they’re always hungry.”

I said I liked the ducks. In the silent if croaking countryside, seeing them swim past in a paddy made me smile. Ducks always look content.

Dr. Liu clucked her tongue. “Those ducks taught me a hard lesson! One year I gave them special food—really high-quality organic feed. Well, what do you think happened? They stopped eating the paddy’s weeds. They got lazy and just waited for me to bring that gourmet stuff. It was ridiculous. I fed them so well, they wouldn’t work. When it rained, they would even stay in their little houses, waiting for me to arrive with dinner.” The ducks won that round. Starting the following year, Dr. Liu cut their rations. Now they again fattened themselves on insects.

As in a fable, the ducks taught Dr. Liu a lesson, one she passed down to villagers who contracted their crop to Eastern Fortune.

“Every year after harvest, we call all of our farmers in for a meeting,” she said, “even the ones who lease their land to us and no longer work it themselves. We remind them how to choose quality seeds, and what temperature the seedbed soil should be, and how to choose the good sprouts and get rid of the rest. The farmers know this process. We Chinese have been doing it for thousands of years. But every year, no matter what new technology arrives or what machine replaces hands, we reteach the old ways in case they don’t remember.”

Recalling the snapshot of a lecture shown on the calendar the company had given to Auntie Yi, I said that some farmers must tune out the lesson.

“Of course!” Dr. Liu said with a smile. “So I ordered calendars with the instructions written above the corresponding months. They’re big and red and shiny and look really great. We hand them out at Lunar New Year as gifts. My hope is that their children study it, so at least they’ll have read of our planting traditions, even if they’ll never do it themselves.”

CHAPTER
7

The Pilgrims' Progress

Auntie Yi, wearing her bucket hat, knelt to weed the earth around her poppies along Red Flag Road. She asked what I saw at the hot spring and whether I had learned anything about Eastern Fortune's plans. We squatted and talked. It was a weekday, and the road was empty save for us, pawing at the black earth.

She wondered aloud if there was such a thing as too much development. “How do you know when a place has developed just enough?”

When I had lived in Beijing, I interviewed scores of residents, officials, and urban planners over four years. No one had ever asked this question. And no one—from architects to developers to the government—had ever asked my neighbors what they thought about plans to renovate—or, more commonly, raze—their courtyard homes and community. Many of them would have preferred a new apartment far away from the crowded, dilapidated lanes. Others would have suggested upgrading a house's heat and hygiene, then leaving the people alone to live in a neighborhood that had thrived for six hundred years. As the capital—once a densely textured masterpiece of traditional urban design—transformed into a car-centered sprawl linked by beltways and malls, I often politely pointed out that this was the sort of planning the United States had begun to reverse. Beijing didn't have to make the same mistakes that America had made. With indignant pride, one official replied: “We have every right to make the same mistakes that America made.” Widen roads, flatten the courtyards, add subways, build higher: Beijing could never be developed enough.

Its cities' new skylines notwithstanding, China still classified one-tenth of its population as living below the poverty line, earning the equivalent of $
1
.
25
each day. The majority of these
128
million people lived in rural areas.

As villages went, Wasteland was comparatively well-off, with its fertile cropland and train station and businesses and paved streets. As the circumference of my morning run expanded, however, I discovered that, outside the village, Red Flag Road narrowed and crumbled, eventually turning to packed dirt. I ran through hamlets lined not with shops and schools but piles of smoldering trash. Wood-framed houses that needed repainting were fenced by rows of wired-together tree branches. Hanging on them were hand-painted signs announcing
GOSLINGS FOR SALE
 and
WELL DIGGING
the way poor American towns displayed ones emblazoned with
RABBITS
and
HAIRCUTS
. People stood with their hands thrust into the pockets of tattered winter jackets. They eyed me without saying a word as I weaved around standing puddles, feeling like a trespasser caught peeping.

One morning, waking with my roommate Mr. Guan as he set out, I ran to the Songhua River. His fishing spot looked, I imagined, just as it had for centuries. Unlike in Jilin city, here the riverbanks had not been landscaped and smoothed with cement. The fields bordered flat marshland, which ran unimpeded to the channel. Mr. Guan, standing in the current as he threw his nets, seemed an apparition from the past. He said that sometimes the hot spring's day-trippers saw him selling fish in Wasteland and snapped his picture. But he wasn't a character in a rustic rural fantasy; he was Mr. Guan, making his living.

I followed the Songhua's wide bends north for three miles, never encountering a bridge, ferry, or person—not even somebody selling bottled water, which you encounter even on mountainsides in China. A magpie tagged beside me, flitting along electric wires strung between wooden poles that still held their bark.

The fields changed to fresh-planted corn. Pioneer brand seed packets littered the ground. At first I lamented the reach of global agribusiness into local furrows, but in a way these seeds closed a loop. Pioneer, now owned by DuPont, had been founded in Iowa by Franklin Roosevelt's future vice president Henry Wallace. He created the first hybrid corn seed by combining an American strain with one from China.

I turned and ran south through a hamlet named Big Red Soldier. It consisted of soggy redbrick houses that looked like they needed to be disassembled, dried in the sun, and put back together.

“Everything around here used to look like that,” Auntie Yi said, back at her poppies.

 

On the eve of the solar term named Grain Fills, San Jiu raked his paddy's remaining chaff and stubble into piles for burning. The dampness wheezed out plumes of white smoke that smoldered overnight. My walk home after dinner was illuminated by constellations of embers pulsing in the dark.

The next morning a tractor driven by a hired laborer tilled San Jiu's paddy, churning the ash into fertilizer and lifting soil from fifteen inches beneath the dun-colored mud. By lunchtime his field looked like a pan of brownie mix. We softly sank to our ankles in the rich loam.

Organic farming cost too much and required more labor than San Jiu could handle. He paced in rows, spraying a herbicide named Japonica Result
612
. Its main ingredient was called pyrazosulfuron-ethyl,
and in Chinese the package warned it was not to be ingested by rabbits, guinea pigs, bobwhite quail, bluegill sunfish, or rats. “It's too dangerous for rats!” I exclaimed, but San Jiu said it was safe; everyone used it. In fact, it was a common weed-killer worldwide, sold under brand names such as Diehard and—I laughed at the logic of this one—Nondoctor.

The village pump opened, covering the paddies in an inch of standing water. The mechanized planter plugged the seedlings into the soil and the pump came on again, submerging them. San Jiu's crop was in for the season. He celebrated the same way he celebrated the end of every day: with a meal on his
kang
, sipping beer and watching the nightly national news.

In June, as the solar terms changed from Grain in Ear to Summer Solstice, the landscape turned into an expanse of verdant stalks. Red Flag Road cut a gray wake through a sea of green. After the white winter and rain-soaked spring, sunshine and oxygen returned; I swore I could feel the photosynthesis and taste the chlorophyll. (It could also have been the Nondoctor.)

The paddies sparkled, too: farmers tied compact discs to sticks to reflect sunlight and keep sparrows from landing for a snack. The water's stillness was occasionally broken by the plunk of a frog, a paddling duck, or a leaping fish. San Jiu said the creatures were the best pesticide: the frogs ate insects, the ducks ate worms, and the fish ate fungus.

For the first time since arriving, I understood Frances's attachment to Wasteland. Unlike in Chinese cities, the geography had remained largely unchanged. The view from her former home, now San Jiu's, looked the same. In Beijing most of our favorite places, including entire neighborhoods where we once taught and lived and dated, had been remade. We had little to revisit there; that past lived only in our memories, which were fading, making it feel like that time had irrevocably passed, if it even had happened at all.

The countryside did not provoke that type of nostalgia, Frances said. There were no good old days, only good old families enduring the conditions together. But still she beamed on her return for a weekend, running to show me where, as a little girl, she had sat and kneaded the wet black earth, watching her grandmother bend to plant rice seedlings. The old woman had gently sung the folk song that begins, “Little sparrow, your clothes are so colorful! Why do you come here every spring?”

Thirty years later, Frances pointed to the spot. She could see the past clearly through eyes welling from joy.

 

How much development was enough? Eastern Fortune's billboard advertised its goal to
BUILD THE NORTHEAST'
S
 TOP VILLAGE
, but Auntie Yi reminded me that my neighbors, including San Jiu, had themselves built it with their own hands. Fifty years ago, most of Wasteland had been dunes and marsh.

A century before that, explorers traversing the surrounding region described the land in journals that called to mind those of Daniel Boone hacking through Kentucky or Lewis and Clark crossing the American West, slathering their skin in bacon fat as a barrier against palm-sized mosquitoes. One of Manchuria's first extensive surveys was written by an Indian civil service officer who arrived in
1886
to collect specimens of flora and fauna. Mostly he found bugs. “I have not words to express to you the multitude of mosquitoes, gnats, wasps, and gadflies that attacked us at every step,” Henry E. M. James recorded. “Each of us, armed with a horse's tail fixed on an iron prong, endeavored to strike them, and this weak defence only served to render the enemy more vicious in his attacks. As for me, I was completely beaten, without strength either to advance or protect myself from the stinging of these insects; or if at times, I raised my hand to my face, I crushed ten or twelve with one blow.”