In Manchuria (44 page)

I asked him how, over the decades, the Lüshun Museum had managed to escape damage, or looting, or eviction, or even remodeling? Had an army never bivouacked there? Had no stray bombs ever fallen? Had the Cultural Revolution's Red Guards somehow forgotten that there, in sleepy Lüshun, was a treasure chest filled with examples of the “Four Olds”—customs, culture, habits, and ideas—they sought to destroy? Had Premier Zhou Enlai placed a phone call ordering Red Guards to leave the Lüshun Museum alone? After hearing that apocryphal anecdote repeated at heritage sites across China, I had always wanted to ask a museum curator if it was true.

Director Liu smiled. “That's a popular story, but it's not what happened in Lüshun. We crated up all the priceless artifacts and put them in storage. We emptied most of the display cases. Then my staff and I painted revolutionary slogans on the building's façade, strung up some red banners, and locked the front doors. I came to work every day during that time, going in through a side entrance, waiting for the Red Guards to come. When they finally did, they wanted to smash the statues outside, but the staff had already put barricades around them. Then they wanted to come inside. I told them they were too late, the place had been gutted. I handed over some comparatively worthless artifacts, which they made a show of smashing, then left.”

Director Liu didn't sound boastful or even proud; he spoke in the tone of a foot soldier who had survived being drafted to war.

“I spent my entire career, my entire life, protecting that museum and everything inside,” he said. “In the final analysis, I love my country, and the meaning of that is that I am an historian. I love China's history, all of it, good and bad, glorious and low. The Lüshun Museum—its grounds, its building, its contents—represents so much of the Northeast's unique history, and Chinese history.”

It was the first time I had heard an official speak of history in an endearing and not bombastic tone. “What are museums for?” Director Liu asked. “Are they advertisements? No. They are living stories of what our ancestors created.”

Now tasked with transforming the Modern Museum into a lowercase modern museum exhibiting art and artifacts, Director Liu said that the one thing he wished he could have brought from Lüshun was not its collection but the tall standing cabinets that displayed it. In their glass a viewer leaning close to see a relic often was startled to notice someone staring back: the faint reflection of his or her own face.

CHAPTER
18

Frost's Descent

The dew on the rice straw piled against our home froze at October's end. Around the outhouse, the flies buzzed languidly. For the first time all year, I could swat them. “The flies have fighter genes from the days of resisting the Japanese,” Frances said via Skype, “but no one can defeat the cold.”

Mr. Guan admitted that he preferred spending his days at his new workplace instead of at home. Eastern Fortune's warehouse was centrally heated, whereas our bedroom windows bled frigid air. He suggested buying a new roll of duct tape to patch my
kang
. “This will be the last winter spent in this house,” he said, sounding relieved.

My morning walk to school had me pulling a sweatshirt's hood tight against my ears. I imagined Wasteland's version of the mistral gathering force in Siberia. “Prepare to weep and be grievously distressed when the wind blows from the north,” a traveler to Jilin wrote in
1903
, “for you are about to suffer an agony of nose and eyes and finger-tips not easily surpassed.” Now it puffed in short, chilling bursts, building endurance for its winter-long marathon across Manchuria.

Past drying cornfields not yet cut for silage, I finally ran the ten miles to the foothills. Up close they looked smaller than they did from home. The road ended in a smoldering garbage pile. After a summer of training, that was the finish line. From out here I couldn't see Wasteland at all. On the run home, a strong breeze stripped a copse of poplars, showering me in a confetti of yellow leaves.

The only reminders of summer's colors were the cabbages drying on fences. Stacks of dried rice stalks rose next to the homes they would heat through winter. The fields showed mud. Frogs burrowed into the fallow paddies to hibernate until spring.

Auntie Yi stood on Red Flag Road, staring in disgust at the latest poppy prevention. Over the sod stripe, a work crew had erected a thin wall, five feet tall and painted harvest yellow. In red characters, it said:
BUILD A NEW SOCIALIST COUNTRYSIDE.

The workers had told her the wall was to protect her home from car accidents. Speed bumps would have been more effective. Vehicles tore down the improved road so fast that you could see the drag on their bodies. For the first time Wasteland had large-scale roadkill. Unfortunate voles and frogs never saw what hit them.

“This wall will also conceal destruction of our homes from passing cars, too, if we have to move to those apartments,” Auntie Yi guessed. She studied the wall, and I thought she was reading its painted slogan like a fortune. Instead, she grimaced and said she would plant her poppies along the wall's base. She eased down on both knees and started digging.

 

Often a cold rain would send me sprinting toward shelter, which was hard to find on the open landscape. After a cloudburst halted a run, I waited under the overpass that bridged the train tracks. The sleek white express running from Jilin city to Changchun whooshed by, moving too fast for passengers to read Wasteland's station sign. Most passengers had lowered their window shades anyway.

The platform sat empty. The station's salmon-pink walls looked pretty in the rain. It was Wasteland's brightest and cleanest building, though weeds began swallowing its disused storage sheds, and the entranceway had turned to mud. A rusting sign said
PUBLIC TELEPHONE
. Farmers—and their children—had cell phones now. Under the new overpass, I read spray-painted phone numbers for well diggers, more stickers proclaiming that Falun Gong was good, and a poster showing the blisters caused by hand, foot and mouth disease. Why did I always look?

The rain turned to rice-size hail.

I ran to the clinic, pushing through double doors with decals that said
OPEN 24 HOURS
and
WISHING YOU GOOD HEALTH
. The nurse said that San Jiu had just left, and I found him across the street at a table, watching Chiang Kai-shek wring his hands over his failure to dislodge the Japanese from Manchuria. He would be forced to unite with the Communists.

“I know how this soap opera ends.”

San Jiu said “
Uh”
for hello.

As the television blared, we shared a plate of
chun bing
, the Northeast's burrito, pinching chopstickfuls of sliced scallions, pickled carrots, and fried spicy pork onto thin, oily wrappers. We didn't order rice. A cooker full of the staple sat plugged in on a sideboard, and we could fill our bowls as we wished. There had been no celebration at harvest's end, no gathering to eat the crop's first bowl. When I asked why not, San Jiu said, “It's just rice.”

He stood with some difficulty and shuffled across the restaurant to grab a horse blanket folded on a chair, which he then wrapped around my shoulders with another “
Uh,
” adding, “Don't get sick.”

Sitting with him in the empty restaurant, saying nothing, clicking chopsticks and crunching into the scallions as the television blared military commands and gunfire, I reminded myself to savor the moment. San Jiu had been my constant, the unchanging variable of my life here. Now that time was slipping away.

I asked about the harvest, and he rattled off the yield and prices as quickly as if he were repeating a phone number. The land produced more than he had expected, and wholesale prices were up, though so was the wholesaler's markup, which San Jiu predicted could be
50
percent when it hit the shelves for consumers. “
Zhang,
” I replied.

“You don't have to say it,” San Jiu said. “Increase, increase, increase. Everything costs more. China has too many people.”

After harvest, the village was reduced by two. In another rainstorm I sheltered under a tin portico over a home's front door. A boy I recognized from the elementary school ran out under an umbrella, yelling, “Teacher don't stand there, don't stand there, Teacher!” Between gasps he said the home's exterior had been painted red because a woman's body was being stored inside, until her funeral. I flinched, realizing the front windows were painted over, too, save for a cross-shaped opening. “Let's go,” the boy urged, “before her ghost attaches itself to you.”

“What about you?” I said. “Why wouldn't the ghost cling to you?”

“I'm a kid!” the boy yelled.

“So what? Do ghosts hate homework? They don't want to go through school again?”

The boy pulled at my arm and said, “Stop joking. We have to move, before it's too late.” He handed me the umbrella, and we huddled beneath it on the walk to his house.

The following week, I woke to the sound of a
nazi
(pronouncd
nah-zuh
), the long horn that produced a sound reminiscent of a grown-up kazoo. The instrument was played at weddings and funerals, accompanied by a gong and drum to scare away evil spirits. The music boomed from a home down a dirt lane that I had never visited. Mr. Guan said the deceased woman had been eight-six, with a loving family who would sit vigil with her body, lying in situ for at least one night, and perhaps more. He was going to the wake. “If you come, make sure you don't say ‘
Nin hao
' in greeting,” he advised. The words, used for “Hello,” literally meant “You are well.” Instead, I was to say, “
Nin buhao
,” or “You are not well.”

I walked with him to the house, but stopped in its yard. I had never met the departed and didn't recognize her family's name. Suddenly I imagined San Jiu lying in state, and a stranger stepping over the threshold, introducing himself to the bereaved. That the stranger was a foreigner, prone to disrespectful, face-losing faux pas, made the scenario even more upsetting.

Mr. Guan said I was talking logically, but this was an emotional event. “Come show your face,” he said. “Don't take notes; you don't have to write about it. If you're uncomfortable, I'll tell the family you have to be somewhere. I know the ways.” I could just be, and not record. Mr. Guan led me inside the family's house, and closed the door.

 

In the final week of October, when the fortnight of Frost's Descent approached the Beginning of Winter, the police called, telling me to appear at the station. My stomach sank; in Beijing such a call had resulted in a lengthy plea to remain in my courtyard home, which the police had insisted wasn't safe. It was, but they had allowed me to live there only after I taught them a list of swearwords in English, so they would know when a foreigner was cursing them. That horse trade wouldn't be much use for a cop in Wasteland.

I had never even seen a policeman out here until the official's summer visit, when an officer had halted Wasteland traffic for the motorcade. The village's two-story brick police station was painted white with blue trim just as in Beijing, though its parking lot was filled with drying corncobs and a pair of wrestling puppies.        

The clerk directed me past windows whose plaques said:

BIRTH REGISTRATION

MARRIAGE REGISTRATION

CORRECTION OF ERRORS

“Wait at the last one,” she instructed.

The officer, his uniform clean and pressed, called me “Teacher Plumblossom” and apologized for asking me in. He looked as old every other cop I had seen across China, a perpetual forty. They never seemed to age. The man said that the village chief had reported me as living with Mr. Guan. Was it payback for not renting his house? I would never know, but according to a national regulation, foreigners had to register when lodging at hotel or in a home. “In urban areas you have to do it within twenty-four hours or you get fined,” the officer said. “But in the countryside you have seventy-two hours. How long have you been living in Wasteland?”

“Seventy-one hours,” I replied with conviction.

“
Uh
.” The officer smiled.

I exhaled.

He directed me to a desk where another officer sat at a computer. I expected her to fill out the postcard-size tissue-paper registration form by hand, but instead she opened a Web browser, logged in, and asked to see my passport. Entering its number produced my photograph on the screen.

“There you are,” she said.

Now a cop in any far-flung station had access to a database of every identity card. “Here's your visa,” she said, clicking a tab. “It shows that your last entry came last month, when you crossed the border from Hong Kong into Shenzhen.”

“I was visiting my wife.”

Living in the countryside—free of surveillance cameras, checkpoints, security screening—made me forget China's bureaucracy and its rules. Out here, I had never given paperwork or asking for permission a second thought. Just as, on a trip to see Frances in Hong Kong earlier that summer, I had neglected to check when my Chinese visa expired. The previous day, it turned out. I had to miss my train back north and apply for a new one.