In Manchuria (25 page)

This was a stroke of genius: Mr. Meng had introduced Chinese class-consciousness to interstellar relations. The story transported Mr. Meng and his wife and children from the last house on a logging commune lane to a college campus in the provincial capital. When he retold the tale over our lunch in Harbin, only one detail had changed: now he said he had copulated for an hour, not forty minutes. “I asked the aliens if I would see my child,” he added. “They said yes. But they would not tell me where.”

I made a joke about sister planets, but Meng didn’t laugh. “Once, humans believed that the earth was flat,” he said. “Even a decade ago, people would not believe that a cell phone could work. Humans, if we have never seen something with our own eyes, naturally doubt that it exists, or that life could be that way. I was the first to be brave enough to say: ‘I saw that.’

“But you know,” Mr. Meng said, nodding collegially, “when you live up here, you see strange phenomena all the time.”

CHAPTER
10

Summer Solstice

In summer, Wasteland came alive. Cottony white clouds reflected off the water-filled paddies, which resonated with the sounds of jumping fish, quacking ducks, and croaking frogs. On Red Flag Road I stepped around furry caterpillars and dodged dragonflies. Tractors put-putted past the deep green rice that ran to the foothills. Two months after planting, the stalks, called tillers, reached past my knee. Harvest was two months away. Then the northern wind would come, and the sun would set before four. Summer was a time to savor.

After my travels, the land felt tranquil. At first glance, there was nothing to see, and it was a relief. Compared to Harbin, it was easier to define Wasteland by what was absent than what was here. No museums, no local newspaper, no graveyards, no plaques, no library, no former mansions or battlefields. I understood the pride villagers displayed when speaking of recent developments that allowed a family to sow a plot, sell what they reaped, and live a life outside war, famine, bandits, and shifting politics. When I turned off Red Flag Road and walked into San Jiu’s house, the first thing he said was “You’re back. You’ve been gone. Nothing’s new.”

To me, with a backpack of filled notebooks, that was news in and of itself. But to San Jiu, it just meant everything was fine: no one was sick, the rice was growing, and the weather was regular. He walked me along the berm of earth that separated his ripening paddies—frogs bouncing wildly off our shins—to check for weeds. The formal names of the choking sedges sounded like portmanteaus from
Finnegan’s Wake
: Dayflower. Fringerush. Ducksalad.

San Jiu searched for a three-bladed signalgrass that had to be pulled by hand. But the herbicide was working. “The rice is growing just right,” he said. “Where’s your wife?”

“In Hong Kong.”

“That’s good. She has a job,” San Jiu said. Then he stared at me with a bemused look on his tanned face, crossed with new lines. A tear welled in his left eye; a cataract was forming. From across a field, he still looked like a stout bull of a man with a white crew cut. But up close all of his now sixty-seven years were upon him. I wondered if contracting his crop to Eastern Fortune and moving to a modern apartment wasn’t such a bad idea.

“You wander around up here while she works down there,” he said. “How do you afford it?”

My expenses were low: trains, dumplings, house rent, and the occasional inn on the road amounted to a few hundred dollars a month. But the figure seemed exorbitant to San Jiu. The price of chives seemed exorbitant to San Jiu.

“Everything is more expensive now,” he said. “The three-wheel pedicab from this house to Wasteland’s clinic used to cost five yuan, and now it’s seven. That’s a
40
percent increase in just one year. The cost of seed is up. Pork is outrageous.” A year ago one pound of pig cost
12
yuan ($
1
.
97
). Today it was
19
yuan ($
3
.
12
).

Now we were off the topic of my livelihood—or lack thereof—and onto the Island of Prices, where so many villagers liked to drop the conversational anchor and spend some time. San Jiu listed the rise in everything from soap to milk (up
9
percent from last year) and chives. They were to Northeastern cooking what oregano was to Italian, and he couldn’t bargain down their price at the market. “I planted them myself this year. And tomatoes, and potatoes, and onions. I also bought a chicken, because eggs are more expensive now, too.”

It was a national trend. On a recent train ride, passengers around me munched sweet popcorn and read books titled
Currency Wars
,
The Collapse of the Eurosystem
, and
The Upside of Irrationality
. Despite the raft of anti-inflationary measures introduced by the government, the lead article in that morning’s paper announced that the price of gasoline was at a record high of $
4
.
91
a gallon. Another article said that a popular Chinese online forum voted
?
—
zhang
, increase—the “character of the year.” It outpolled the runner-up, “resentment,” nearly six to one.

As the train glided silently past cornfields, I had asked my seatmates, people of varied ages and professions, about
zhang
. They swapped stories of soaring apartment prices, not to mention the
zhang
of cooking oil, the
zhang
of toilet paper, the
zhang
of airplane tickets, the
zhang
of school fees. Voices rose as the passengers blamed “speculators and hoarders” and declared that
zhang
made them “angry to death”—it was always personal in China—and suddenly everything was in the grips of
zhang
, including my formerly tranquil train ride.

So it was not surprising that the annual
Blue Book of China’s Society
, compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, reported that prices topped the list of the public’s concerns. China’s consumer price index, a gauge of inflation, rose a record
5
.
5
percent in the month of March
2011
. That was driven by food prices, which, on average, rose
11
.
7
percent, with vegetable prices doubling in some places.

Master Kong, the nation’s best-selling brand of instant noodles, increased its price
10
percent to cover, it said, a rise in ingredient prices—leading the French hypermarket chain Carrefour to pull the product from its
169
stores in China. Say it with Parisian élan:
zhang
! And real estate prices continued to surge: a two-thousand-square-foot apartment in the Hong Kong border city of Shenzhen could cost the equivalent of a four-bedroom in prime New York.

Even the dead were affected by
zhang
. At the privately run Eternal Garden Cemetery in Shenzhen, a saleswoman explained to Frances that
50
,
000
yuan
($
7
,
547
) would secure her father’s ashes in a one-square-meter hillside plot for twenty years, with an option to renew for fifty after that, provided the cemetery had not been evicted by a building site.

“If you want the grave to face the pond and valley, which has the best
feng shui
,” the saleswoman said, “it will cost
70
,
000
yuan
($
10
,
566
). Those are selling quickly; I suggest you buy today. The price will not go down.” Frances quickly chose the tomb with a view.

I dared not tell San Jiu the actual cost. Instead, I described to him how Frances knelt beside the grave, updated her father’s ashes on family news, placed him in the earth, knocked her head three times on the soil, cried, and said good-bye.

“That sounds proper,” San Jiu said approvingly. “Filial piety is a tradition.” It was the closest to praise that San Jiu would ever offer, and I softened inside, remembering the feel of the fresh earth on my hands and forehead beside the grave. Then San Jiu said, “So how much did the plot cost?”

I was alone in Wasteland now, with Frances buried in work in Hong Kong. We had been separated for stretches in the past, and bridged the distance with daily text messages and Skype calls. So long as we stayed busy, it didn’t feel like we were apart. Thirteen years together had planted her voice, her presence, in my head, anyway; sometimes Wastelanders turned questioningly after the foreigner blurted something aloud to a woman who wasn’t there. I considered wearing a Bluetooth headset as a prop to mask my one-sided conversations.

Frances thought that alien-loving Mr. Meng had seen a meteorite crash that night, not a spaceship. (The rest of his story, she said, was a master performance of the Art of Northeastern Bullshitting.) A meteorite had burst into pieces over Wasteland in
1976
. San Jiu and Auntie Yi and Uncle Fu remembered hearing the sonic boom and seeing a ball of fire in the March afternoon sky: they thought an airplane had exploded. The debris missed their homes, slamming instead into the paddies in a spray of mud and smoke. The ground quaked—
1
.
7
on the Richter scale, according to the Jilin city museum built to display a microwave-oven-size chunk of the meteorite. It was not a patriotic education base: it spiced up the narrative for schoolkids by describing the rock as a “visitor from outer space.” Reading that caption, I thought fondly of Mr. Meng.

The bus from the museum back to Wasteland passed Number
22
Middle School, vacant in late June. Results for the high school entrance exam hung from red banners on its exterior walls, announcing which students tested into the top Jilin schools and who had been relegated to the Physical Education Academy. The serious girl who called herself Phil earned a place at the city’s best high school. She aspired to go to university and become an English teacher despite being able to outrun her classmates headed for “P.E. School.” They would be groomed for a nonacademic career. Sitting beside me on the bus, Ms. Guan laughed at my translation of Woody Allen’s joke: Those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, teach gym. “Although,” she added, “P.E. teachers don’t have to grade homework. So maybe they’re the smartest teachers after all.”

Around the school, paddies of deep-green rice shone in the morning sun. The landscape had not changed in my absence, but the school’s garbage pile rose with empty plastic bottles of Coke, Pepsi, and orange Fanta. Two small billboards papered on the side of the grocery store featured Kobe Bryant and a team of gowned surgeons concentrating on a prone man. Kobe pitched the Web portal sina.com, while the operation demonstrated
KOREAN STYLE CIRCUMCISION
. It could be performed in Wasteland’s expanded clinic, presently shrouded in scaffolding.

But the biggest change lay ahead.

As the roar of training jets cut through the silent morning, the bus idled at the start of Red Flag Road, waiting for a passenger to offload boxes of flooring tiles. An auntie unknown to me asked the singsong question “
Shei jia’di’ah
”—To whose family do I belong?—and smiled broadly, saying that she remembered Frances as a little girl. I said I was here alone, and she clucked her tongue, exhaling an
aiya wo’de maya
to register her concern. “You two don’t have a child yet? When are you going to be a father? You’re not a young man anymore. She needs to get pregnant. You can’t do it from up here when she’s down in Hong Kong.”

It was true: Skype didn’t feature that button.

The bus howled in laughter, teasing me for being childless, marooned, alone. The jokes paused only when someone said, seriously, “Mixed-blood children look beautiful. Your child will be so good-looking.”

“And smart!” another auntie chimed.

“But tell your wife to eat—”

“Apples,” I finished.

The bus nodded in agreement, then went back to needling me, whooping over my self-inflicted solitude.

The driver pulled under the new archway stretching over Red Flag Road. It was Wasteland’s tallest structure, reaching even higher than the billboard that pledged to
BUILD THE NORTHEAST'S TOP VILLAGE
. Green sod ringed the archway’s foundations, and its legs rose in marble-clad blocks bridged by five gleaming metal tubes. It looked like something, if not from outer space, then at least not from Wasteland.

White decal characters running down one of the arch’s legs said:
THE ROOTS OF NORTHEAST PROSPERITY
. The other side announced:
EASTERN FORTUNE RICE
.

“The arch doesn’t even show the village name,” I said.

“The company is acquiring more and more land,” Ms. Guan replied.

The driver searched for, then noisily found, first gear, and the bus stuttered under the arch, toward the ripening paddies. The driver said, “Some people joke that we all live in Eastern Fortune Rice now.” But no one on the bus laughed at this.