In Manchuria (35 page)

Like the Japanese emperor and his family, Puyi was not charged with any crime. In
1950
the Soviet Union handed him back to China. He was shipped to a prison near Qingyuan, the Manchu county along the Willow Palisade whose name meant “Origin of the Qing,” the dynasty that had ended when he abdicated the dragon throne.

At the former prison, now a patriotic education base, school groups pause before the former cell of the “living god” who became prisoner number
987
. In photos, Puyi darns socks and drinks tea from an enameled mug captioned, “Working Is Glorious.” The guide narrates, “In the end, he became a useful friend of China and the Chinese people at large.”

Useful, again.

In
1959
, on the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic founding, Puyi was pardoned and released. He returned to his hometown of Beijing for the first time in thirty-five years. Dressed in a baggy blue serge Mao suit, he served as a “special guide,” leading a one-off tour of his former palace, the Forbidden City. His memoir, published by the state press, did not record his impressions of the visit other than to note that the palace walls had been repainted and the “old and desolate atmosphere” had gone.

The Party assigned him to work in the hothouses at Beijing's Botanical Garden. Always slight and sad-eyed, Puyi looked as delicate as the orchids that had once adorned the Manchukuo imperial seal. His memoir concluded with the first words he learned to write in Chinese, from a Confucian primer:

 

People at birth

Are naturally good

Their natures are similar

Their habits diverge

When foolishly taught

 

In
1967
, as the Cultural Revolution consumed China, Red Guards found Puyi, enfeebled by kidney cancer, and shouted, “We will take you back to the Northeast and smash you, you dog's head!” The cancer took him before they could: he died, aged sixty-one, leaving no heirs or treasure. In its obituary, the
New York Times
called him “a historical leftover.” Since he was no longer an emperor, his cremated remains were interred not at the Qing tombs alongside his royal ancestors but at Beijing's Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the final resting place for Communist heroes.

But in new, market-driven China, Puyi became useful yet again. In
1995
a private cemetery in the capital's outskirts paid his widow an undisclosed fee to move his ashes to one of their plots, aimed at the wealthy elite. The graveyard, named Hualong (Chinese Dragon), neighbors the Western Qing tombs—favoring the interred, its advertisements promise, with imperial
feng shui
. Puyi's presence proves it. Buried under a headstone bearing only his name—written not in Manchu but in Chinese—he remains a symbol for all eternity.

 

After Japan surrendered in August
1945
, the Soviets rolled south through Manchuria, not halting until they reached Korea's Thirty-eighth parallel. The peninsula was divided into north and south, into the Democratic People's Republic and the Republic. The next war was about to begin.

But first the Chinese civil war played out. In
1936
the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, had forced Chiang Kai-shek at gunpoint to form a united front with Mao Zedong. For this, Zhang would never return to Manchuria, spending the next fifty-four years under house arrest on the mainland and Taiwan, and dying at age one hundred in Hawaii. With Japan defeated in
1945
, Chinese Nationalist and Communist forces divided and fought each other for four years.

One of the deciding blows for the Nationalists happened in Changchun, site of the erstwhile Manchukuoan capital seventy miles west of Wasteland. Before Japan's invasion, Changchun had
100
,
000
inhabitants; at the fall of Manchukuo, nearly
900
,
000
people lived there.

The Communist People's Liberation Army, commanded by Lin Biao, encircled Nationalist forces, and the city itself. Lin—later credited as the creator of the “Little Red Book” of Chairman Mao's sayings—called for Changchun to be turned into a “city of death.” His soldiers ringed its perimeter with barbed wire barricades. For five months, from June to October
1948
, no civilians were allowed to leave and no supplies were allowed in. Survivors told of eating rotten grain, then corncobs, then tree bark. Others tore open pillows for their corn husk stuffing. Belts were boiled; dead bodies were consumed. Soldiers seized the aid packages dropped by American planes. At least
160
,
000
civilians perished, equaling the number killed by the first atomic bomb.

“The casualties were about the same,” a People's Liberation Army colonel later recorded. “Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.” The colonel's book describing the siege,
White Snow, Red Blood
, was published in
1989
but was soon banned for “insulting the Communist Party.”

No patriotic education base commemorated, let alone mentioned, the Siege of Changchun. A Hong Kong–based researcher recalled that every elderly army officer she interviewed for a book about China's civil war broke down when recalling the siege. “It's an unspeakable national trauma that has not once been opened up,” she said.

“Some refugees threw down their babies and ran away, others hung themselves with ropes right in front of the sentries,” the colonel wrote in his book. He cited a cable from a People's Liberation Army officer on the scene, lamenting that soldiers had shown reluctance to follow his orders. “Not allowing the starving city residents to leave and sending other starving citizens back into the city has become difficult to explain to the troops.”

You can meet the siege's survivors among the elderly who congregate in Changchun's Victory Park. Originally built by the Japanese, it is now punctuated by a statue of Chairman Mao. There, a former soldier said the Party's official line was that “Changchun was liberated without firing a single shot.” He knew how: with
170
,
000
other Communist troops, he drove back civilians who tried to escape the city. He wished the siege's full story would be made public. Chinese schoolchildren, he said, “only know the propaganda. Maybe if they know how horrible war is, they can try to avoid it in the future.”

 

The war still suppurates into daily life. China estimates that, since
1945
, at least two thousand people have been killed by unearthed Japanese chemical weapons. Two million pieces of ordnance were left behind in the Northeast alone, bleeding their contents into the soil and water table, or worse. In Jilin province in
2004
, boys aged twelve and eight were burned and sickened after coming into contact with a rusting toxic shell they found in a stream. The Japanese government acknowledged it was one of their weapons but refused to pay damages. Under its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention, Japan agreed to send teams to excavate and dispose of the munitions at a facility it would build outside of Dunhua city, where the boys had been injured.

Dunhua was two hundred miles east of Wasteland, and I wanted to check the project's progress. Previously, Japan had pledged to dig up its ordnance by
2007
. A Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman said the cleanup was “extremely important for improving trust.” But in
2008
the agency in charge was discovered to have misused $
1
million of public funds.

For four hours my bus curved past green foothills over an empty expressway that gently dipped and rose, passing a villa development named the Island of Egrets. I misread it as “Regrets” while under the spell of the Liam Neeson action film blaring on the bus's video player. His vengeful oeuvre was replacing the regional comedic opera
Er Ren Zhuan
on Northeastern buses. I never thought I would miss the opera's clatter, until spending seated hours captive to recorded gunfire and gravel-voiced threats.

Dunhua's street grid still showed traces of a Japanese planner's pencil: in front of the train station, axial roads radiated diagonally off a roundabout, leading to the town center. With a population of
500
,
000
, Dunhua counted as a small Chinese city but felt more like a county seat. Its only fast-food outlets were knockoffs, including CFC, California Fried Chicken.

A local man named Dong Gang offered to take me to the weapons cleanup site where the boys had been injured, twenty miles north of town. Dong Gang was wound tight. He clutched an iPhone hard enough to whiten his knuckles, mirrored sunglasses indented the temples of his shaved head, and his jeans and black T-shirt looked painted on. He told me to call him “brother” and began most sentences with, “Here's my analysis.” As he sped down the country road, over the Peony River and past rolling tobacco fields, he turned and looked at me while talking.

“Eyes straight ahead, brother.”

“Don't worry. Here's my analysis. The Japs reject any claims for compensation because they think the peace pact signed with us in
1972
settled the matter.”

“Watch the road, brother.”

“Here's where the Japanese airfield used to be. When I was a kid, we would ride bikes on the runway. Now it's rows of corn. Here's my analysis . . .”

Thirty minutes later we entered a narrow valley, passing signs announcing the activities forbidden in the forest preserve: chopping, burning, barbecuing. The single-lane road looked like a bike trail winding toward the stream where the boys had discovered the toxic shell. The house where they had lived, however, was now deserted.

“Here's my analysis: they moved into town like everyone else.”

We continued ahead, stopping to lift a red-and-white-striped pole that served as a gate. A sign warned that we had entered a chemical weapons cleanup site and were not supposed to be here. Yet the road was empty, and the only sound was a faint hum that grew louder as we approached the valley's last house. Through shoulder-high cornstalks we saw a lean-to perched on a slope. A squadron of bees escorted our approach, revealing an apiary. The Qins were the sole remaining family who lived here year-round, and they greeted us with a bowl of boiled water stirred with fresh honey.

The cleanup had paused again, Mr. Qin said, though he couldn't say why. He pointed to the backhoes and bulldozers parked in a clearing. “The trucks are still there, but not the Japanese.” As bees buzzed my ears and tickled my arms, Mr. Qin said that the villagers who used to live here in Hualianpao—Bursting Lotus—had met with Japanese officials and accepted their offer of new housing, though the officials had been careful to call its cost a “transformation fee” and not “compensation,” which could set a precedent for future war-related claims.

The money had been given to the Dunhua government to contract the building of new apartments in town. When they were completed, Mr. Qin said, the villagers complained of their shoddy quality and accused local officials of pocketing a portion of the funds. Still, they had been forced to move, and their homes razed. “My family never signed the agreement,” Mr. Qin said. “I can't grow corn in the city, and I can't have bees. In all these years, I haven't hit any weapons when planting. Hopefully, they're buried elsewhere.”

As the tightly wound Dong Gang presented his analysis of Japan, of war, of chemical weapons, of burned children and forced relocation and allegations of embezzlement, I felt the sun on my face and inhaled the scent of ripening corn. Of all things, I thought of Yeats's wish for a small cabin and a life alone in the bee-loud glade, “where peace comes dropping slow.”

That poem's ending never sounded peaceful to me: bee stings hurt like hell. I was doing my best to ignore the cloud buzzing around us, sipping the honey water as the bees brushed my ears and tickled my neck.

“They're not going to hurt you,” Mr. Qin said, interrupting Dong Gang's analysis. “They have their world and we have ours, but we have to exist together.”

CHAPTER
14

Great Heat

Back in Wasteland, a rumble shook me awake. I brushed a fly off my eyelid and reached for my cell phone.
3
:
35
a.m. The rumble came again, shaking the house. I rolled off the barley-filled pillow and crawled over the
kang
’s cool linoleum to look out the window. Empty dump trucks sped toward Red Flag Road.

The previous morning, I had sat in the empty house, feeling cut off from the world, thinking:
If I woke with amnesia, could I guess where I was and how I got here? Would I find it backward or beautiful?
My housemate Mr. Guan had puttered up on his motorcycle then, announcing, “Five pounds of eels, four pounds of fish. Not bad.” My cell phone whirred with an incoming text message—a different kind of phishing—that said, “One-month MBA/MPA dual-certificate program with a Beijing address on the diploma. Don’t worry about the cost! Call Teacher Zhang at
18210557248
!” In China, even in the countryside, isolation was short-lived.