Authors: Michael Meyer
Now, before four on a Saturday morning, a convoy of dump trucks shook our little farmhouse.
I pulled the piece of plastic baling string that turned on the room’s exposed bulb, but no light came on. The electric kettle, too, would not start. I got off the
kang
, slipped into flip-flops, and tried the kitchen light. Nothing. As Wasteland turned toward the sun, a bit of light crept into our yard. I stepped outside to see our sunflowers turn their heads in the slipstream of each passing truck.
I ducked under the grape trellis and edged past the shed, buzzing with flies that hovered over a mesh tray of drying fish. My head snagged a net, then a spiderweb, and in my murky grogginess I couldn’t tell which one I was trying to shake off. Leeches dangled from a string of hooks. If I woke with amnesia in this setting, I’d wonder what horrible thing I had done to end up here. I stepped over the foot-high plank that covered the outhouse entrance to keep the rats out, and squatted.
Don’t think about rats in the hole,
I told myself every morning. But then all I thought about was their red eyes shining glassily below.
I stuffed a handful of Nescafé packets in my hoodie’s front pocket and set out for San Jiu’s. He could burn rice stalks to boil water. Turning south on Red Flag, I saw the dump trucks in a queue that stretched to his house. A Komatsu digger sat parked at Wasteland’s intersection. For one mile, past every dump truck cab, I recited the list that began
American,
1
.
86
meters, Year of the Rat
.
“They’re widening Red Flag Road,” San Jiu explained, handing me a chopstick to stir the coffee granules. “It’s Eastern Fortune Rice’s project; they’re paying for it. They want better access to the hot spring, I guess. Or there’s a high official on his way and they want to impress him and say, ‘Look at the road we made.’”
“Does the road need to be widened?”
San Jiu laughed. “The road is fine. It was resurfaced two years ago. I remember when it was dirt, and before that, when it was a footpath. They’ll have to tear down that new archway, too. It just went up two months ago.”
Sure enough, the arch at the start of Red Flag Road that announced
THE ROOTS OF NORTHEAST PROSPERITY
came down that morning. The pieces filled a dump truck, which joined the line of mud-filled vehicles exiting Wasteland.
A digger cut a ten-foot-wide gash the length of the road. Previously, it was a drainage ditch. But for a fifty-yard stretch, it had also bloomed with the bright pink poppies planted by Auntie Yi. I found her standing outside her house in her bucket hat, yelling at the machine’s operator.
“Eastern Fortune just does whatever it wants,” she said. “They didn’t even post notices about this project, so I didn’t have time to transplant my flowers. I planted those myself, from seeds I bought and raised. Everyone in these villages knows my flowers!”
It was true: their stripe of color on the otherwise barren road served as a local landmark.
We watched the digger cut into the wet, dark soil. “It smells good,” I said.
“It smells like dirt,” Auntie Yi corrected.
She pointed to the cranes and apartment buildings on the horizon. “Eastern Fortune expects everyone will move out of their courtyard homes and into those. Once you agree, they’ll tear your house down and plant rice where it used to stand. I’m never moving there.”
Auntie Yi was a Party member and former village cadre; what annoyed her about the development—from the hot spring to the apartments to the road widening—was that a private company was funding it, not the government. “It’s all Eastern Fortune,” she said. “It’s a pilot program, so the state gives some construction subsidies, but the company is in charge. It’s their design. To make this into ‘The Northeast’s Top Village.’ You’ve seen the sign. The government expects companies like Eastern Fortune to lead the ‘backward’ peasants toward change. That’s our nation’s direction now.”
All politics were personal. Auntie Yi yelled again at the hapless digger operator, who avoided her gaze, instead focusing on depositing a dripping scoopful of mud into a dump truck. Late that afternoon, as the sun cast long shadows that stretched the workers’ silhouettes to fifteen feet on Red Flag Road, the trucks returned bearing loads of crushed stone. The rocks clattered onto the excavated area, burying the remains of Auntie Yi’s flowers. She cried.
“She really loves those flowers,” San Jiu said as we sat down for dinner. “It’s her hobby. Everyone has their reason for wanting to stay in their home. For her, it’s those flowers. But she can plant them again. They’ll finish the road in a week.”
I nearly choked on my tofu. “A week?”
“I heard they’re bringing in a large team of migrant workers. Must be an inspection by an official coming up.” He said it in the same tone that he forecast the weather.
Partly sunny with a party secretary expected
.
Cloudy with a chance of cadres.
Despite San Jiu’s pragmatic—or fatalistic—view of events, it always stung to see the elderly react to changes in China that were beyond their control, enacted by people who hadn’t asked for their input. Auntie Yi was deeply patriotic—
We won’t bully you,
the People’s Liberation Army soldiers camped in her yard had promised her as a little girl—and sang the revolutionary song “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China” with gusto. So couldn’t someone have alerted her to save her flowers?
San Jiu said she hadn’t lost a crop, or her home. It was just a bunch of flowers. He glowered at me for a moment, not playfully, as usual.
“What are you looking at? I’ll show you the colors,” I said.
He snorted, forcing a laugh. “You have to remember. We only grow four months out of the year here. That’s our livelihood for all twelve months. I’m paying attention to making a living instead of some flowers. Auntie Yi gets a pension. And you—you just pay rent to your friend, the teacher, and travel around the Northeast.”
San Jiu had mentioned, previously, that I should not be paying rent to anyone, since I volunteered at the school.
“I would have paid you if there was space for me to live here.”
“Family doesn’t charge rent!”
We sat in silence. This was where my Chinese ceased to be fluent. I feared saying something that would make the situation worse. Was he mad that I didn’t live with him? Was he worried about money? Did he support the road project, and had he argued with Auntie Yi?
“I don’t pay that much rent,” I tried.
San Jiu said: “Don’t waste your money. You need to have a kid soon. Kids cost money.”
“My Chinese name is Sold Son,” I said, laughing. “I know all about it.”
“No you don’t,” San Jiu said seriously.
A rumble rippled across the paddies. At first I thought it was more trucks. “Thunder,” said San Jiu, meaning,
Go home
. A fifteen-minute walk lay ahead. I thanked him for dinner—he nodded without words—dodged the barking Pekingese tied up in the yard, and cut through the paddies behind his house, angling toward mine.
I called this path Frog Alley, as their croaking filled the air and they leapt into my shins, landing at times on my shoelaces. Clouds of gnats filled my mouth the way plankton got sucked in by a whale. The thunder boomed nearer. The work crews had arrived on Red Flag Road, and I could hear them in the darkness, talking and spreading the crushed rock even as the storm approached. I made it home just as the skies opened. The power was still out, so I climbed onto the
kang
and read South Manchuria Railway reports by the light of my computer screen, until the battery died and it was time for bed.
The chiming tune of “Happy Birthday to You” woke me at dawn. I looked out the window to see the recorded song clanging from roof-mounted speakers on a water truck, spraying away the mess the dump trucks had trailed down our street.
My morning run took me along rain-washed roads, through hamlets named Mud Town and Black Mountain. Its name ended not in
cun
(village) but
wopeng
, a term from imperial times that meant “an inn by the wayside,” or a “hunting party base camp.” Further on, near the Songhua River, was a
wopeng
named Lower Frog. There, as I gulped a one-yuan bottle of mineral water, the woman who sold it to me asked, “Does your hometown have a river?”
“The Mississippi.”
She brightened. “That’s a famous river.”
I nodded. Then she blurted the area, in square kilometers, of the United States and China. “Your country is just a bit larger,” she said.
“Why do you know that?”
“I read a lot.”
I bought an apple. She began listing the varieties grown in Jilin province, then the ones commonly found in New Zealand, Chile, and Washington State. To me, all apples tasted like a variety I called Hectoring Auntie: each bite reminded me of Wasteland women chiding me to impregnate Frances and for her to fill up on apples.
I began backing toward the shop exit. But not before one final question.
“Do Americans see the same sun as we do?”
“What? Of course; there’s only one sun.”
“The same sun, huh?” she said, sounding unconvinced.
I ran until the road turned to dirt, narrowed to tractor tracks, and became the river. By the time I returned to Wasteland, the work crew had arrived, dressed in slacks, sweater vests, and plimsolls. They had been bused in after improving a road in Jilin city. In a single morning they built a new curb, made of mortared stones.
The curb reached from paddy level to the roadbed. Crushed stone and dirt filled the gap, running three miles along Red Flag Road. This all happened within a workweek. The men were at it from sunup until past sundown, working entirely with their hands: no power tools, only trowels, spades and levels. They slept and ate in temporary tin-walled dormitories erected near Eastern Fortune’s headquarters. Many would stay on to finish the apartments rising there.
When the work crew reached Auntie Yi’s house, she brought out bottles of mineral water, asking if anyone was hungry. They called her
da niang
, a term of respect for an elderly woman, and modestly refused her offers. In her bucket hat and patched hand-knit sweater, she browbeat them to accept by out-humbling them. “I’m just a simple person . . .” her harangue began.
She remained my consigliere: When I handed her a pound of fresh pork, she said, “San Jiu’s upset you don’t bring him meat like before. He’s too proud to tell you that he prefers that to milk, because pork costs a lot more.” (I brought the pork; San Jiu again treated me like a son.)
Auntie Yi’s grudge lay elsewhere.
“Eastern Fortune Rice expects farmers to give up their courtyard homes and move into new apartments? Then we’ll have to pay for heating, for water. We’ll have to buy vegetables instead of grow them. We’ll even have to pay for rice! It’s too ridiculous,” she said.
Locals owned their homes, so they would be compensated for the building itself, but not for the land their house sat upon. That belonged to the village collective. “In theory, it’s not a bad idea, moving into a modern apartment,” Auntie Yi said. “But what if you want to keep things just as they are? What if you prefer the status quo? This is a company telling us what to do—and the police and government will back them up, instead of the way it used to be.”
I asked: “Should the government still make decisions when it comes to people’s livelihood? Hasn’t that been done to death?”
Auntie Yi countered: “Let’s say you like your house and plot of land, for gardening. Let’s say you want to keep things just as they are. But how did they get that way? Because of government policies meant to make everyone equal, or at least treat everyone fairly. What would you say is fair about this?” She waved her arm at the new road, at the spot her poppies used to bloom.
“People can choose whether to farm or do something else. They don’t have to be farmers. That’s fair, right?”
“You don’t know how to plant anything, so it’s easy for you to say,” she replied. “It’s true that some people no longer want to farm. But many people do, like San Jiu. When we farmed collectively, everyone depended on someone else, since we all worked together. Now, at last, people can work independently. But here comes Eastern Fortune, buying up and controlling our village.”
Auntie Yi didn’t farm, but she was taking the long view of things. She also sounded more philosophical about developments.
“I’m unhappy about these changes now,” she said, “but people are always unhappy when things are new. They say they’re unhappy, but really they’re unsure. No one explains why the change is happening, and no one can imagine what it means for their family’s future. I remember the introduction of ‘mutual aid teams’ in
1952
, then ‘agricultural production cooperatives’ in
1954
, then ‘advanced cooperatives’ in
1956
. These were all stages of collectivizing the land and turning control over to peasants instead of landlords. Were people unhappy then? Of course!
Aiya wode maya!
They quarreled, they complained. And then what happened? Communes. Then the Great Leap Forward, and the famine. At every turn, people were unhappy. But unhappy people can change things.”