Authors: Michael Meyer
President Truman missed the next day's meeting with the Joint Chiefs (his memoir noted only that he was “unable” to attend), where they concluded that MacArthur wanted an all-out war with China. They favored a political solution to Korea, such as the one proposed by Great Britain, that UN forces retreat and the countries stay divided at the Thirty-eighth Parallel. General Bradley later wrote that they should have stood up to MacArthur then. “We read, we sat, we deliberated and, unfortunately, we reached drastically wrong conclusions and decisions. We let ourselves be misled by MacArthur's wildly erroneous estimates of the situation and his eloquent rhetoric, as well as by too much wishful thinking of our own.”
MacArthur had refused to salute Truman at their last face-to-face meeting, on Wake Island the previous October, but the president had not disciplined him, writing: “You pick your man, you've got to back him up.” Nor did he confront the general after he wrote the House Republican leader to criticize Truman's management of the war, having ignored his suggestion of opening a second front in China using Nationalist troops from Taiwan. Now MacArthur would not call off attacks on the Yalu bridge even after Chinese forces had realized the Americans could not cross into their territory. They had even stopped camouflaging their antiaircraft guns.
American pilots flew headlong at them, soaring low along the spine of the bridge, then banking up hard to avoid entering Chinese airspace.
Still the attempts continued, into the gales of flak and ninety-five-mile-per-hour crosswinds. After six hundred sorties, the “Korean half” of the Yalu bridge finally fell on November
14
,
1950
.
Five days later, the river froze.
Chinese forces, including Uncle Fu, marched over the ice to join the war. For MacArthur, “the wine of victory had turned to vinegar.” The conflict would last for another twenty months, but MacArthur wouldn't be there at the end: Truman sacked him for insubordination in April
1951
. A cease-fire would divide the Korean Peninsula at the Thirty-eighth Parallel. The war solidified Chairman Mao's control of the Party and China. It also claimed his eldest son, killed at age twenty-eight in the November air raids by a napalm bomb dropped from a South African plane.
Under a withering sun on the day I visited, a group of South Korean tourists toting umbrellas crowded the end of the Yalu River Broken Bridge, getting to within five hundred yards of that forbidden shore. I stood apart, imagining propeller planes diving at seventy degrees with their landing gear down, dodging dogfighting jets. Antiaircraft guns flashing along both riverbanks. Water spraying. Thunderous explosions. Against a twisted steel support, tourists posed beside the bridge's plaque that explained only:
During the war, the United States bombed it from November
8
to November
14
,
1950
.
CHAPTER
16
In August, Wasteland ripened green. The rice nearly reached my hips, and its broadening stalks cloaked the paddy’s water. Walking down Red Flag Road felt like cutting through a plush carpet that needed to be combed for frogs. Their pulsing croaks reverberated from the fields.
It was the solar term named the Beginning of Autumn, and, San Jiu said, the most stressful time for a rice farmer. Harvest was only thirty days away, and he walked through his plants checking for diamond-shaped yellow lesions made by a fungus called rice blast. Historically, it was the grain’s deadliest pathogen, and one that could destroy an entire crop. “It’s always a threat,” San Jiu said, “but it usually appears about three-quarters of the way through the growing season.”
He checked each plant, whose fuzzy seedpods crumbled like damp chalk when cracked. “One more month,” he said. He pulled weeds from the irrigation ditch, explaining that soon he would drain some water to strengthen the rice’s roots. “Now the days are hot and the nights are chilly. When the days cool down, too, we can harvest.”
I noticed that he never added the Chinese equivalent of “Knock on wood.”
“Superstitions are useless,” he said. “You have to do the work.”
But every day fresh fruit appeared before his home’s statue of Shennong, the bald, long-bearded icon representing the founder of Chinese agriculture. “That’s not a superstition,” San Jiu said, seriously. “That’s a tradition.”
Mr. Guan had no icons in our house, or much of anything. No ticking clocks, no alarms, no television or radio. It was the quietest place I had ever lived: my cell phone ring often startled me, which, when I yelped, Mr. Guan thought was hilarious. I changed its setting to silent.
My runs had lengthened to ten, then twelve, then fourteen-mile loops. Compared to the surrounding hamlets, Wasteland looked kempt and cared-for. The official’s visit had left the mementos of houses painted harvest yellow, the clean cement of widened Red Flag Road, and solar-powered streetlights. They were the area’s first, and while people said they were good, villagers didn’t go out much after sundown anyway, because that was time for dinner, television, and bed. Auntie Yi eyed the blue-and-red bunting adorning each lamppost. It advertised Big Wasteland Rice and Shennong Hot Spring.
“Eastern Fortune paid for this road, so now it’s their billboard,” she said. “What we need is a speed limit sign.” It was true: the improved road looked like a runway. Cars tore down it as if attempting to get airborne. It was unsafe for bikers and pedestrians, and I diverted my running route north, onto dirt roads.
Someone had already tagged a few of the poles with graffiti praising Falun Gong, the tai chi–practicing sect that the government had banned in
1999
as an “evil cult.” In Wasteland, however, spray-painted stenciled characters proclaimed it “good.” It was the only graffiti I ever saw in the village, and soon it popped up on other lampposts and the metal staircase that ascended the new bridge over the high-speed train tracks.
Also posted: a notice announcing Eastern Fortune was hiring men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five to work in the polishing shop, loading sacks of grain and running the machines. Mr. Guan got the job; his shift began at eight. He was pleased, because he could still fish before clocking in. Just like that, he said, he had a second income. Eastern Fortune was good.
The company planted seedlings to replace the mature Manchurian ashes cut down to widen Red Flag Road. While the easement between the new roadbed and her home had narrowed, Auntie Yi was pleased to see room enough for new poppies. “I’ll plant the seeds in September,” she said, “and they’ll germinate in spring. Poppies are strong, you know. They self-seed, so only a few packets should fill in this stretch of road. I’ll plant pink and orange ones.” She pointed to the spot before her home’s yellow wall where the flowers would bloom. Outside of Keats (“Through the dancing poppies stole / A breeze, most softly lulling to my soul”) I doubted anyone held poppies in such high esteem as Auntie Yi. “They’re beautiful. They’re elegant, not like a sunflower.” She made a face. “Sunflowers have a production purpose. Poppies are just flowers.”
“They make opium.”
“Incorrect! That’s illegal now. Lin Zexu threw all the opium into the harbor.” We had, as often happened in conversation, stepped back two centuries, to the faraway southern wharf where the defiant act had occurred. Time travel was real when I boarded Auntie Yi’s train of thought. After touring the first Opium War, we returned to Wasteland. “Poppies make you smile when you look at them. There aren’t many plants like that.” She said this while staring at lush acres of rice running unobstructed to the forested foothills in the far distance. That, she disagreed, was not scenery. “It’s food.”
Turning right out my driveway, I walked fifteen minutes east past paddies and Eastern Fortune’s new rice polishing shop, a metal-walled warehouse that faced a billboard showing rows of apartment buildings and the legend:
WITH ONE HEART, EVERYONE BUILDS THE NEW VILLAGE
. Cranes and dozens of migrant workers helped, too. I passed their temporary dormitories and turned right down a narrow lane that I remembered as a dirt path that ended in paddies. Rows of blue tin sheeting—the kind that concealed construction sites—ran along the lane, blotting out the abandoned mud-walled farmhouses. Unlike urban architecture, nothing in the countryside was ennobled by its age. Tools rust, weeds climb, roads sink, roofs collapse; nature always wins.
On the single-lane bridge fording a foul-smelling stream choked with trash, another billboard announced:
REVERE GENTRY RIVER TRANSFORMATION PROJECT
. The accompanying schematic showed planted willows along the widened water’s promenade. I looked around the sign: fetid canal. Back at the sign: clean river. Around the sign: feces. Back at the sign: lotuses. Time travel, again.
The shells of the apartments were already built. Fresh steel-grey paint coated the four-story walk-ups, even though the driveway was still unimproved mud and the apartments had yet to be wired for electricity. The buildings looked nice, comparable to new construction in Jilin city, or even Beijing. A posted notice said that in this first phase of development, Eastern Fortune spent $
2
million to build six hundred units into which it expected villagers to move.
But the apartments felt cramped compared to a typical farmhouse. Narrow windows faced not foothills and fields but other apartments. Rural homes usually had a wall of south-facing windows. The apartments, however, were dim, with low ceilings. Load-bearing walls divided the space into smaller rooms, unlike a farmhouse’s great room, where life took place atop the
kang
. There would be no
kang
here, but central heat.
And stairs, too. Even the ground-floor apartments were accessed by a small flight of steps, which could be an impediment to the elderly, especially during winter. Plus they could no longer “absorb the earth’s energy” by living with their feet on the ground.
An “oldsters’ leisure hall” was being built, along with a covered parking lot and exercise yard. The development backed against the company’s first stab at housing construction, the rows of single-story homes that replicated traditional design and included gardens and areas to dry and store rice seeds. When the village chief had offered to rent me his house, I blanched, seeing the structure as a soulless cement bunker. But compared to the new apartments, it looked practical and inviting.
Mr. Guan listened to my field report and said, “I like the new development. I’m looking forward to moving there.” He had signed the agreement. “Why do you think this house is so run-down?” he asked. “I’m not going to put any money into fixing it up when they’ll tear it down to plant rice.”
“When?”
“When they tell me to.” He saw my face fall and added, “Don’t worry. If we have to leave before your lease runs out, you can live with me in the new apartment.”
His family had also agreed to contract their rice plot to Eastern Fortune, choosing to receive an annual rent payment. Mr. Guan had gone full Eastern Fortune: it would farm his land, swap his house for a new apartment, and pay him to work in the shop. He showed me his uniform, a red canvas jacket with the company’s name stitched on the left breast. The item would soon become as ubiquitous around Wasteland as the blue Mao suit had been. Only San Jiu’s generation wore that now.
“Pretty soon you’ll be spending weekends soaking at the hot spring,” I teased Mr. Guan.
“
Wo cao!
” he cursed. “I’ve never been to that place. That’s for people with money.”
“That’s what everyone says at first. Then it’s one soak, and you’re on the path to ruin.”
He said the greater danger to his morality was the nightly mah-jongg game at the corner shop. Fishing meant going to bed early and missing the action, but he would hear the amounts won and lost the next day. “It’s easy to get addicted,” he said. “You don’t just want to win the game—you want to beat a particular person who pisses you off.”
The reasons could include: money, family, love, work, and conflicts therein. Or heard/said things about the above. There were no secrets. “My sister hates coming out here now,” he said. “It’s obvious. People talk about her. She’s unmarried, she moved to the city, she has a foreigner living in her old bedroom.” He watched me laugh and added, “Don’t tell anyone how much rent you pay to us, OK? We just tell them we’re doing you a favor, because your family lives here, and they had no room for you, and you teach at the school for free. No one needs to know about the money. It will make them gossip more.”
It was more convenient for him, he said, if villagers thought I wasn’t a tenant but having an affair with his sister.
“People say that?”
“No,” he reflexively replied. “Maybe.” He quickly changed the subject to fish.
That weekend, dump trucks again woke me before dawn, rumbling through Wasteland. Our power went off. “They’re fixing Red Flag Road,” Mr. Guan explained.
“They just finished fixing it.”
“Maybe they’re making it even wider.”
I caught the first bus to Jilin city, queued for a ticket, and boarded the high-speed train to the airport to catch a flight to Frances. The adrenaline of made connections, of continued momentum, of beating the obstacle course of Chinese logistics—
Push to the front of the line! Lug as little as possible! Don’t look in that bucket!
—carried me from the ticket counter through the metal detector, up the escalator, down the gangway, onto the plane. As we ascended, I looked for Wasteland out the window. But from far away the villages all looked the same.