Authors: Michael Meyer
He laughed and admitted that he did. Everyone in a village knew everything.
San Jiu opted not to sign the three-year contract with Eastern Fortune. That was for families who no longer wanted to farm, he said. The price of rice kept rising, and it would be foolish to agree to a fixed payment, given the year-on-year increase. San Jiu was betting on
zhang
.
He was also sixty-seven and a stroke survivor. His sons ran a village restaurant, and I never saw them in the fields. I wondered for how long he could continue to work his land. For the elderly, Eastern Fortune’s offer—along with the “oldsters’ leisure hall” and clinic being built in the new apartment complex—could be a lifeline.
In a phrase that was becoming as clichéd as
It’s for our friendship,
Party propaganda and Eastern Fortune billboards promised to “unleash the enormous potential of the countryside.” The words put the focus not on the farmers but on the land, suggesting that it did all the work. But China had already seen the enormous potential of the countryside unleashed in its coastal factories, where migrant workers fueled two decades of soaring economic growth. Some Chinese academics and researchers were floating proposals to unleash that potential in villages by granting farmers full land ownership rights.
“The Communist Party will never let that happen,” San Jiu said without malice. “That’s what the revolution was for: land reform. This is a Socialist economy now.”
“Socialist with Chinese characteristics,” I said, quoting the official term. It covered all the market’s vagaries, from state-owned to privately held to publicly traded companies. If this was the start of the mechanized farming era, then the next landmark reform could be an evolutionary transfer of land ownership from the “collective” to individual families.
“Not in my lifetime,” San Jiu said. “My grandson’s, perhaps. Or yours.”
Sitting on their
kang
, Auntie Yi and Uncle Fu watched a women’s volleyball match between China and Cuba on television. “Cuba’s winning,” Uncle Fu said, sounding disappointed.
“But only in volleyball,” I assured him.
Auntie Yi had blown off Boss Liu’s plans as bluster. “He talks and talks,” she said, “but the collective owns the land and no decisions can be made without consulting every resident.”
I said that he had sounded awfully confident.
“We’ll see,” Auntie Yi said. As a retired cadre, she still had a line to local politics, and did not seem overly concerned that a superhighway or ski slope would soon be visible from her living room windows. Now they showed the peaceful view of a flat expanse of snow-covered paddies and an empty Red Flag Road. In springtime, if Auntie Yi’s secretly sown seeds survived the winter, the section passing her house would blossom with guerrilla poppies.
“I heard another rumor,” she said. “They discovered oil under the Changchun airport. It’s a big enough reserve that they may move the airport here, back to this old airfield.” Transferring a newly built international airport forty miles seemed entirely rational in present-day China. It could probably be accomplished in a week. Still, I thought the rumor sounded far-fetched. But Auntie Yi’s intel had yet to be wrong.
“Of course, we don’t want to leave our house,” she said. “Those apartments are no way to live. Besides, our family has roots here. All these families do. Your mother-in-law grew up in this village, and so did your wife. Maybe one day your child will, too.”
This was an opening for news.
“My wife is pregnant.”
Auntie Yi’s face spread so wide into a grin, her bucket hat lifted from her head. Uncle Fu chuckled and said congratulations. San Jiu had made the same low, approving laugh earlier. Then he had scolded me for waiting so long to become a father.
Frances had delivered the news early one summer morning. My cell phone flashed her number and I answered, concerned that something was wrong in Hong Kong. Instead, two home pregnancy tests confirmed that things could not have been more right. My first reaction was to burst into laughter and jump up and down, which startled the villagers standing on the road around me. By nightfall my mouth hurt from smiling. Hers had ached the same.
Perhaps we had Wasteland to thank. It had inured me to urban Chinese bureaucracy, making me forget to renew my visa, which meant missing a train back north from a trip to see Frances. During those unplanned, extra three days together, we had argued about settling down; about finally deciding—at ages thirty-four and thirty-nine—whether to try for a baby; about, in essence, if it was time to stop living “in Manchuria.” We grappled to a draw, which had settled the argument definitively.
On her
kang
, Auntie Yi whooped and clapped her hands. She didn’t ask if Frances was eating apples, only when she was due, and if it was a boy or girl.
I didn’t answer the second question, not wanting to hear that we were lucky, because boys continued the family name. We had already decided that his Chinese surname would not be Frances’s—from her father—but that of her mother, who was the last surviving descendant on that branch of the family tree. Our son would carry it on, honoring the woman whose scheduled abortion had been canceled by an earthquake, and who could not bear to give her newborn daughter away. Instead she had sent her to be raised in Wasteland, where I answered the phone and heard “Little Extra” say she was pregnant.
Another cycle, complete. The story’s twists only made sense in the end. Being here was the meaning.
“The baby is due after Spring Festival.”
“It will be born in the Year of the Dragon!” Auntie Yi exclaimed. “That’s good. That’s going to be a good year.”
“Everyone says that about every year,” I said with a laugh. “No one ever says, ‘Oh no, your baby will be born in the Year of the Rabbit? Surely it will be a dullard and amount to no good.’”
Auntie Yi hopped off the
kang
and reentered the room carrying the oversize Eastern Fortune Rice calendar, looking for auspicious birth dates.
“We just received this,” she said. “It’s really good quality.”
She flipped the thick pages to find the date of the Lunar New Year. “The Dragon starts then,” she said. Above each month, the calendar listed the solar terms, the fortnights that described the growing seasons. Winter Solstice began the following week. I had moved to Wasteland during that spell.
Below the calendar’s pictures of ripe fields, smiling farmers, and industrious harvesters, the agronomist Dr. Liu had added folk sayings, a touch that reminded me of Pearl Buck brightening her husband’s dull field reports with colorful adages. December’s sounded less traditional and more like an optimistic fortune cookie: “Major Snow is finally here. End-of-year calculations will fill your wallet with money.”
On her first trip to America, only one slip of paper had stumped Frances in our fortune cookie translation game, requiring no editing to sound authentically Chinese: “The course of life is unpredictable; no one can write his autobiography in advance.”
That could have been Manchuria’s motto. Now I could put away the Northeast’s train timetables, maps, and history books, and write my own.
As I said good-bye to Auntie Yi and Uncle Fu, my cell phone whirred with an incoming message. In their yard, I shielded the screen from the sunlight and read: “I hope you are enjoying the
Dongbei
morning. Felt the baby kick in the lower abdomen, like little thumbs gently poking my skin. Awesome. Come home.”
In winter the land was frozen and still. A cloudless sky shone off snow-covered rice paddies, reflecting light so bright you had to shield your eyes. A stinging wind pushed me faster south down Red Flag Road, away from a village named Wasteland.
My thanks go first to the residents of Wasteland who welcomed me into their homes, classrooms, offices, and fields. I’m particularly indebted to the Guans, Auntie Yi, Uncle Fu, and San Jiu.
For the research it allowed, I’m grateful for financial support from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
At the latter, librarians Sumie Ota and Rebecca Federman went above and beyond in hunting down materials, while Marie d’Origny and Jean Strouse gave support and good cheer.
???!
I’m also thankful for Mari Nakahara’s help at the Library of Congress in locating South Manchuria Railway gazetteers, and to David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, for assistance with Operation Cardinal and Japanese war crimes in Manchuria.
Being a freelance writer in China brings challenges beyond not having a business card, staff, and expense account. I’m grateful to editors who showed interest in stories from a place none had been to and few had even heard of: Don Belt and Oliver Payne at
National Geographic
, Tom Miller at
China Economic Quarterly
, Richard Story at
Departures
, Chris Hill at
DestinAsian
, Jennifer Schuessler at the
New York Times Book Review
, Susan Jakes at the Asia Society’s
ChinaFile
, and Miki Meek, Julie Snyder, and Ira Glass at
This American Life
.
In Shenyang, I benefited from Doug Kelly’s knowledge and love of the region, along with then consul general Sean Stein. Thanks, too, for conversations with David Douglas, Liu Haiping at Nanjing University, Anke Scherer, Eva Pils, Dan Abramson, Ping Kiang, Jeremy Zwinger, Ron Suleski, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Rana Mitter, David Spindler, and Tom Gold. Zhu Keliang at Landesa untangled the ball of yarn that is Chinese land rights, Michael Hunt helped with the mystery of Nelson Fairchild’s suicide, Mark Elliot taught me the etymology of
Manchuria
, and Stephen Wadley translated the
zidi shu
that appears in the epigraph. Peter Conn illuminated Pearl Buck’s fascinating life. The
New York Times
’ Jim Yardley lent a hand in locating survivors of the Shenyang POW camp, as did Andrew Jacobs with the siege of Changchun. Thanks to the
Asahi Shimbun
’s Ishida Koichiro for assistance in Dunhua, and Tomoaki Fujiwara for introductions to repatriated orphans in Tokyo. Finally, I’m grateful to Akira Nagamine (assisted by his daughter Janet) and Harold Leith (assisted by his wife, Helen) for sharing their war stories, too.
My mother-in-law, Cheng Zhaohua, and Gillian Riffe helped both in Manchuria and on the home front. I benefited, too, from the friendship and encouragement of Ron Gluckman, Mike Goettig, Ian Johnson, Mark Leong, and Luke Mines. Cheers, too, to (Dr.!) Travis Klingberg for egging me onward. Matt Forney’s Fathom China staff helped with due diligence on Eastern Fortune Rice, while Matt—on a visit to a Red Flag Logging Commune with his son Roy—crashed our Red Flag sedan into an oncoming Liberation truck. I stuck to trains after that; thanks, Matty.
For close reading of the manuscript and critical comments, I’m indebted to Nicholas Griffin, Adam Hochschild, and Peter Hessler. Adam, you’re the best teacher a student could ever hope for. Pete: Call Molo, because I owe you one.
Likewise, I’m indebted to my agent, Georges Borchardt, and publisher, George Gibson, for unflagging patience, edits, and support.
Frances and I met in
1997
, and I find it hard to believe that, as I write this, we’re approaching the seventeenth anniversary of our first date. Where did the time go? (Hey, where do these stairs go?
They go up.
) Words can’t express my gratitude for the friendship, support, laughter, and the family we share. I’m typing this with Benjamin, age two, on my lap, ukulele in hand, demanding to hear “The Wheels on the Bus” yet again. Benji,
??
(aren’t you glad we didn’t name you Wasteland,
??
?), one day you’ll tire of this song and demand your dad supply other diversions. These pages tell what your parents were up to before you arrived and made our lives even better. You, son, are the meaning.
?????
Sources are provided for direct quotations, identified by their beginning words, and for information that cannot be easily found in one—often several—of the most comprehensive books identified at the beginning of the bibliography. If no page number follows a citation, the source is a newspaper article.
Chapter 1: Winter Solstice
Perhaps no other region has exerted
Chang Kia-Ngau (p. 1). I’m not a fan of hedging, but Frances, despite her hometown ties to the Northeast, feels that the southern coastal province of Guangdong (home to Guangzhou/Canton and bordering Hong Kong) could also lay claim to this title. It’s a book waiting to be written.
Between
1927
and
1929
alone
eardon-Anderson, p. 98. He writes that the figure actually exceeded the waves to the United States, though in the peak year of 1907 one million people arrived at Ellis Island. The National Park Service notes that the average annual migration during the peak era was 783,000.
Although it is uncertain where God created paradise
The speaker is Abbé Evariste Regis Huc, who, in his travelogue, added: “Already two ages have passed away since the Manchus made themselves masters of the vast empire of China, and you would say that during these two centuries they have been unceasingly working out their own annihilation. Their manners, their language, their very country—all has become Chinese.” He died at age forty-seven; his
New York Times
obituary concluded: “He leaves behind him no priests more sincere, and few writers more honest or more entertaining than himself.”