In Manchuria (11 page)

The historian did not own his book, so the next morning he walked us to the middle school. “They have a copy there,” Liu Liangjun said. “It’s only sixty-five pages, but it tells the old tales.” He looked like most historians I had met in China, dressed in a polo shirt tucked into highly buckled slacks and with a graying shock of hair that suggested electrocution.

We arrived at the school to find its principal out back, hoeing a row of onions. In fluent English he asked if I knew what used to stand on the school’s site. “A Buddhist temple?” I guessed correctly. In rural areas, temples had often been converted to schools and police stations. “It was pulled down during the Cultural Revolution,” the teacher said, pointing at a worn cornerstone. “That’s all that remains.”

The principal, Mr. Li, and I followed the historian down a dirt road that we had to step off to allow a tractor to pass. The historian’s book had gone missing from school, and so he would instead show us the story. We stopped at a mud embankment divided by the road. The historian pointed to a stubby, leafless willow trunk. No plaque marked the spot. “The Willow Palisade,” he said.

This gate sat on the eastern flank of the barrier, which once streteched
700
miles from near Wasteland south to the Yalu River border with North Korea. It marked the imperial hunting grounds—equal in size to the state of Maine—in which Han Chinese were forbidden to settle. In the third verse of his poem about the palisade, the Manchu emperor Qianlong wrote:

Like the fence that is seventy
li
long,

The Hunting Reserve exceeds several times its confines.

In our erection of borders and regulation of people, ancient ways are preserved,

As it is enough simply to tie a rope to indicate prohibition.

But the frontier is as much a process as a place. After the Manchu conquered Beijing, their army and its families moved to the capital in such numbers that at first the court enticed Han Chinese to repopulate the area. A
1653
decree offered seed, draft animals, and deferred taxes to farmers willing to reclaim northern land. The act was rescinded only fifteen years later, however, and by
1681
the Willow Palisade was built, sometimes incorporating walls erected in previous dynasties meant to repel the “barbarians.”

Yet over the next two hundred years there were as many edicts forbidding as encouraging Han Chinese settlers (and banished convicts). Restrictions were lifted during times of southern famine, or to populate areas such as Wasteland where Russia showed territorial ambitions. Jilin city—Kirin, or Girin Ula, in Manchu—became a strategic center after the emperor opened a naval port there in
1676
. A Jesuit priest who accompanied the emperor to inspect Jilin’s shipworks wrote: “In this city they make their boats in a particular manner. The inhabitants always keep a great number in readiness to repulse the Muscovites, who often frequent these rivers and endeavour to take away the pearl fishery from the Kiringers.”

In the end, it wasn’t the Muscovites but Chinese settlers who arrived in droves. As the Qing dynasty faltered, racking up debt, local administrators needed to raise their own revenue. Their only available asset was land. In the
1870
s the imperial hunting reserves and pastureland were opened to homesteaders and the palisade became superfluous.

The school principal interrupted the historian. “This area is ripe for tourism!” he said, pointing to the near distance. “You see the dip in the hills where the Willow Palisade came down? There’s a lake up there where we can add tents and picnic areas and then rebuild the Willow Palisade. It’s so easy: Just plant trees. I’m telling you, it’s so easy. Think about it. It’s willow trees! It won’t cost much, it’s just trees. But the local leaders won’t listen to me.”

Our group walked back to the school and stepped across the street to the village’s only restaurant. Stacked at its entrance was a neat row of drying corncobs topped by a row of severed German shepherd paws. So much for the Manchu founding father’s order forbidding his people to eat dog.

At the table, the historian sat quietly, the headmaster was talking (“
Trees! Easy! Cheap! Trees!
”), and Mr. Li held the menu. “I’m a vegetarian,” I lied. A policeman in uniform joined us, said that he was Manchu, and knew the location of Qingyuan’s most valuable artifact. “It’s in my basement.”

Grasping the type of large iron key ring I thought only existed in Westerns, the officer led me down the police station stairs. “It’s in here,” he said, pointing at a door. “In the boiler room.” The lock clicked and the cop tugged at the metal door. On the dirt floor I saw a rusting bell as tall as my knee, inscribed in Manchu and Chinese script. “Welcome to our museum,” the officer joked. “It’s all that remains here of our Qing dynasty.”

The historian suggested I look for the Willow Palisade on its western flank, where it formerly divided Manchu and Mongolian pastures. It was
120
miles from Qingyuan, and there was less development out there, the historian said—fewer roads, little construction. But more wind: surely, I thought, less of the structure would remain. Even in his eighteenth-century palisade poem, the emperor Qianlong described its diminishment:

I spurred my horse along the Palisade;

It was so low I could have jumped over it.

The deer go back and forth and can sometimes be caught outside;

Building it is the same as not having built it.

When I later made the trip west, I assumed that the bus would deposit me in an ancient village where another Manchu shop owner and another historian—distant cousins of Qingyuan’s, perhaps—would step forward and show me the way. Instead, the bus discharged me in a town named New Citizen at a gleaming station as large as a regional airport. While everyone inside the terminal was friendly and engaging in the Northeastern way, offering syrupy pinecones to eat (for the seeds), asking why I didn’t have kids, yelling into cell phones, and making inquiries, no one had heard of the Willow Palisade.

I asked a teller at the Agricultural Bank and a clerk at the Great Northeast Medicine Store. Unlike in other parts of China, they didn’t say that I had to be mistaken, that I was pronouncing it wrong, that I didn’t understand anything because I was a foreigner. Instead: blank stares, self-effacing laughter, offered cups of green tea.

The sky was high and piercingly blue, saturating everything and highlighting a fat white moon. That feeling of open space and empty landscapes returned, and I was reminded of how much I loved traveling in the Northeast. A bus pulled up and the driver asked if I was the guy looking for the Willow Palisade. I climbed into the front seat for the full view out the windshield. It showed cornfields.

I had been up since five, and rocking along the two-lane road lulled me to sleep. The driver woke me an hour later, in a town named Zhangwu, and said, “This is the old border with Mongol lands.” I didn’t see the palisade, only another bus station, also large, also new. Perhaps sensing my dejection in the waiting hall, an old man wearing faded camouflage pants sidled near. I knew he was the one.

“Where is the Willow Palisade?” the man said, repeating my question. “It’s thirty kilometers back the way you came. You passed it. Get off at the blue highway sign.”

An hour later the same driver stopped at the sign that stretched over the road, saying “This is the only blue one, brother.” The bus pulled away. The sun was high now, and sweat ran down the back of my neck. All was silent save for the patch of sunflowers rustling in the breeze. Their blossomed heads bowed toward a strip of white sand that ran fine and hot through my fingers. It felt like a dry riverbed. The blue sign posted by the local government read:
IF YOU ENCOUNTER TROUBLES WHEN DOING BUSINESS IN ZHANGWU, CALL
6949006
.

I thought of dialing the number and asking for help. First I followed the sand along an embankment past the sunflowers until hearing the staccato bursts of a tractor, which appeared from behind a bend of cornstalks. A farmer named Mr. Feng stopped the Taishan T-
25
and asked what I was up to.

“The Willow Palisade?” he repeated. “You’re standing on it.”

I exhaled in relief.

“This was the moat, or part of the river, and that embankment of earth there was the barrier.” Mr. Feng climbed down from his seat and led me through the corn into a clearing. “This was the barrier. But now you see that it’s all broad beans, and this,” he said, sinking a hand into the moist loam and ripping out a tangle of roots, “is just peanuts.”

On the back of his tractor, holding on to Mr. Feng’s shoulders, I bumped along the palisade’s remains. He brought me back to the main road and pointed to a gully on the other side. “Didn’t you see the marker there?”

I saw only a pile of trash, but Mr. Feng was off our ride and walking down to the soggy ground. He stopped at a toppled white granite plaque.

“This is the second one the government put here. The first one? It went missing.” He laughed and added, “You understand, it was stolen. It’s good stone.”

The new stele was not properly set and lay facedown. Brushing back weeds revealed an inscription that said this was part of the western Willow Palisade. The road, it said, ran through the former gate that separated Mongol from Manchu lands.

Seeing us, another tractor stopped, and then a car, and now there were five of us standing in ankle-deep water, staring at the stone. A better marker would have included the final stanza of the emperor Qianlong’s palisade poem:

Insofar as the idea exists and the framework is there, there is no need to elaborate;

The methods of predecessors are preserved by descendants.

When there are secure fortifications, it is peaceful for ten thousand years:

How can this be dependent on these insignificant willows?

After Mr. Feng and the other men departed, I spent an hour in the hot sun on the side of the road, caked in dirt, waiting for a bus, and happy to pass time filling an empty water bottle with the soft sand as a souvenir, thankful no one was here to hawk it. After passing me, a truck laden with watermelons shuddered to a halt and the driver hopped out of his cab and walked back along the shoulder. He said I looked like an American and asked about Obama and the economy, and how short our history was compared to theirs, and, say, what did watermelons sell for in the States? It was a conversation I could have had anywhere in China, but we were completely alone, surrounded by sunflowers, peanuts, and dragonflies, listening to different frequencies. “This is the Willow Palisade,” I said with pride, and the driver replied, “The what?”

CHAPTER
5

The Waking of Insects

At last I found a house, or should I say, a house found me. After a research trip, I had returned to Jilin city after six o’clock, too late to catch the last bus to Wasteland. That night my hotel room was freezing. Via Skype, Frances pointed at my bed and said, “Toss dried rice stalks beneath it and light them on fire.”

My phone rang at six the next morning. The screen showed not Frances’s number but that of Ms. Guan, the Number
22
Middle School teacher. I answered with a concerned “
Uh,
” fearing something had happened.

Instead I heard: “You can live with my brother.”

“When?” I said groggily.

“Now.”

“I’m in Jilin.”

“Meet me at the bus stop in thirty minutes.”

As we waited for the Number
10
minibus, I saw that Ms. Guan had changed since our last meeting a week before. Blond streaks ran through her long black hair, her glasses now had purple-tinted lenses, and she unzipped her down jacket to reveal the top of a red rose tattooed above her left breast. It was a costume change for a new act in her life: “After the students take their high school entrance exam in spring,” she said, “Number
22
is transferring me to a better school. It’s right over there.”

She gestured to the Diamond Cement Factory, whose smokestacks rained gooey pellets that speckled our black 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 Jilin’s districts still looked like a live-action version of the old propaganda magazine
China Reconstructs
: chemical tanker trucks threaded their way between cooling towers and under steaming pipelines that snaked over the narrow lanes.

“My new school’s location is much better than Wasteland,” Ms. Guan said, but I couldn’t see how.

Jilin is a second-tier metropolis, with four million people—and sleepy by Chinese standards. A century ago it had flourished as a shipyard and trading post. An English traveler passing through in
1903
found “shops and main streets bright with the beloved northern colour, vermillion red, [selling] beautiful carved wood, all manner of stamped leather, furs, bearskins, tiger and leopard skins from the Eastern forests, and 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 took care of the rest.