—— An Excerpt from ‘In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China’
At last, I found a house, or should I say, a house found me. I returned to Jilin city too late to catch the last bus to Wasteland. At six the next morning, my phone woke me. The screen showed not Frances’ number, but that of the Number 22 Middle School teacher, Miss Guan. I answered with a concerned uh, fearing something had happened.
Instead, I heard: “You can live with my brother.”
“When?” I said, groggily.
“Now. Meet me in thirty minutes.”
At the Number 10 minibus stop, which for three yuan [$.50] would take us the hour to Wasteland, I noticed that Miss Guan had changed since I last saw her, a week before. Blonde streaks ran through her long black hair, her glasses now had purple-tinted lenses, and she opened her down jacket to show me the top of a rose tattooed above her left breast. It was a costume change for a new life: “I’m moving to an apartment here in Jilin city,” she said. “After the students take their high school entrance exam in spring, Number 22 is transferring me to a better school. It’s right over there.”
She gestured to the Diamond-brand Cement Factory, whose smokestacks rained white, gooey pellets that spackled our coats. Jilin’s amphitheater of pine-clad hills was fronted by factories like this, manufacturing poison against the prettiest backdrop of any northeast city. Some of its districts looked like a live-action version of the old propaganda magazine China Reconstructs: chemical tanker trucks threaded their way between cooling towers and under pipelines bridging the narrow lanes.
“My new school is much better than Wasteland,” Miss Guan said, but I couldn’t see how.
Jilin was a second-tier metropolis, with four million people – small, by Chinese standards. A century ago, it had flourished as a trading post; an English traveler passing through in 1903 found “beautiful carved wood, all manner of stamped leather, furs, bearskins, tiger and leopard skins from the Eastern forests, [and] old curious colored silks.” The old, walled city was made of wood; a Japanese poet, arriving in the winter of 1918, described it as “breathtakingly beautiful, fully warranting its reputation as the ‘Kyoto of Manchuria.’” Fire destroyed most of wooden Jilin in 1930. Industrialization soon took care of the rest.
The bus stopped to fill the remaining seats, then the padded engine cover at the driver’s right hand, then the aisle. Despite the crush, I was happy to be rolling, to feel the thrum and hear the grinding gears as people gossiped about apartment prices and school fees. Everything cost more; had you seen the prices at the new apartments named Moca, Loire Town, and The Fifth Avenue? So gui. Expensive. Forget the Rabbit; this would be the Year of Gui.
My legs accordioned toward the window, whose view showed the winding Songhua River. The river does not freeze here, and its vapor droplets crystallizes on the branches of willows and pines. The rime, called shugua, transforms the banks of the Songhua into a photo backdrop of national renown.
The phenomenon was described by a 19th-century traveler, who marveled, “We saw one morning one of the most perfectly lovely sights I have ever seen. I have never seen a similar sight, either before or since. It was a frozenmist. As the sun rose we found the whole air glittering with brilliant particles sparkling in the rays of the sun – and the mist had encrusted everything, all the trunks of the trees and all the delicate tracery of their outlines, with a coating like hoar frost. The earth, the trees, and everything in the scene was glistening white, and the whole air was sparkling in the sunlight. It lasted but a short time, for as the sun rose the mist melted away, but while it could be seen we seemed to be in a very fairyland.”
A century later, the description held.
The bus passed a building site for an apartment complex named Warm City. In English, its billboard said: If White America Told the Truth for One Day Its World Would Fall Apart.
It was the title of a song by the Welsh rock group the Manic Street Preachers – how did it end up here? And why would anyone buy an apartment that fronted the shiny, steaming spires of Jilin Ethanol, even if its own billboard promised Clean Energy for a Better Environment? Which ad told the lie?
Next came a Purina feed factory, then a Wahaha-brand mineral water plant. At a village named Lower Frog, the bus, sagging on its axels, climbed over the new high-speed railroad tracks, and then the window showed open fields. We crossed the line from industry to agriculture, from urban to rural. The bus passengers visibly relaxed in a way I had only seen after take-off, when the plane leveled and the Fasten Seatbelt sign flashed off with a ding!
An old man sitting beside his grandson, said, “Tell Teacher Plumblossom all the English words you know.”
“Banana!” the plump boy yelled. “Apple!”
“If he can eat it, he knows how to say it,” the grandfather said proudly.
“Hamburger!” the boy shouted. “Pizza! KFC!”
The other passengers laughed. The grandfather recognized me, but some of the other riders did not. The grandfather explained: “He married a woman from here, but she left for work.” Passengers whom I had never met nodded empathetically. We were like many rural households, they said: one spouse became a migrant worker, leaving the other behind on the farm.
People stared at me with friendly, cautious curiosity, the way you might, if a kangaroo joined your commute. I read that the comedian Steve Martin used to hand autograph-seekers a signed name card that confirmed the person had met Steve Martin, and found him to be “warm, polite, intelligent and funny.” At times like this, I wished I had a similar card to present that would answer the usual questions strangers asked of me, in this order:
I am an American.
I have been in China a long time.
I was born in the Year of the Rat. I am 1.86 meters tall.
I do not have a salary. I am a writer and volunteer teacher.
Chinese is not hard. It is easier to learn than English.
Yes, I can use chopsticks. We eat Chinese food in America, too. But often
it’s expensive and orange.
On rare occasions someone started me off with a curveball: a gruff construction worker, hard helmet in hand, once asked if anyone had ever told me that my beard was beautiful; a gentleman in a business suit standing on a country lane wondered if morality was more important than wisdom.
Saying that I was American always brought a smile – despite political ups-and-downs, that reaction had not changed since I first arrived in China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1995. Though sometimes – when interrupted slurping noodles, or in the face of a drunkard – I tired of giving honest replies that would lead to more questions. I am from Mars, I would say. What are chopsticks? I just started learning Chinese yesterday – what a breeze! Kids catch on faster than adults; sarcasm, via movies and the internet, is a recent American import.
On the bus, the teacher Miss Guan pulled a kid onto her lap. She asked me to guess his age, then hers. “You’re twenty-five,” I said, safely.
“I’m forty!” she laughed.
“Forty and you’re still without a husband?” the woman standing in the aisle teased. I knew this talk stung Miss Guan, but she gamely parried back. Later, she said she hated living in Wasteland, where there were no secrets, and nowhere to hide.
The boy on her lap studied my face in silence.
“Gan sa?” Miss Guan said, northeastern dialect for “What’s up?”
“Can I ask Teacher Plumblossom a question?” the boy wondered, looking serious. “I want to know: do you hate Osama Bin Laden?”
“Can you hate a dead person?”
The boy blinked. “Do you hate Hitler?”
“I hate eating cabbage.” I was talking to a twelve-year-old, and trying to lighten the subject.
The boy didn’t take the bait. For the remainder of our ride to Wasteland, we discussed not food, but the nature of evil. It was seven-thirty in the morning when the boy got off at the intersection of Red Flag Road.
“I have one more question!” he yelled to the driver, who idled.
“Teacher Plumblossom, do you miss your mom?”
The full bus watched, expectant. “Yes, I miss my mom.”
“Do you miss her so much that you cry?”
“Yes,” I lied. The boy had boarded the bus alone and was exiting alone, and I guessed he needed assurance. “Sometimes I miss her so much that I cry.”
“Ha ha!” the boy crowed. “What a big baby!” He bounded off the bus as the passengers laughed.
This is an excerpt adapted from In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, by Michael Meyer, Bloomsbury Press, © 2015
