In Manchuria (5 page)

“I have to apply for a passport in my hometown,” she said. “If I’m going to America for the first time with you, then you have to come to the Northeast for the first time with me. I want you to meet my parents.”

They waited on the platform as our overnight train pulled into Liaoyuan, a small (by Chinese standards) Northeastern city of one million people. They were my first impression of Manchuria, and I liked them immediately. Frances greeted them with a “
Ma! Ba!
” and laughter. No hugs or kisses, not in public. Her father, a tall and rugged former medic in the People’s Liberation Army, pumped my hand and, unlike many Chinese on meeting a stranger, looked directly into my eyes. Her mother was a short, round bundle of welcome. She handed me a large sack of hazelnuts. “You’re hungry! These are from our city!” She couldn’t stop smiling.

“Yes, I’m very hungry,” I lied, popping a few in my mouth. “They’re delicious!”

“Oh! You like them? I’ll buy you another bag! Wait here!”

Frances grabbed her arm as she bolted, saying the bag of nuts would last me a month. The four of us walked away from the station. The parents made small talk with their daughter. I wasn’t the center of attention, and it felt wonderful. They didn’t compliment my Chinese; they didn’t ask if I could use chopsticks or how much money I made. They called me not Heroic Eastern Plumblossom but my preferred Chinese name, the transliteration of Meyer—
mai’er
—a feudal-era term that meant “a son sold in the marketplace.” Her father thought it fit; here I was, thousands of miles from home, being picked up by my new family. “Sold Son! Call me Ba,” he said, smacking my shoulder. Dad.

As in many Chinese families, Dad did the cooking, and he enjoyed going to the market each day, which he described as a real-life opera, awash in color and sound. I followed at his side, watching him sniff melons, poke at slabs of pork, and bargain fiercely. “In this town, people argue over pennies,” he said. Despite its location on the rolling hills of a river bend, Liaoyuan looked bleak. The skyline showed a cooling tower and smokestacks surrounded by concrete walk-up apartment buildings with peeling-paint façades. Along the pitted streets, workers laid off from busted state-owned factories squatted, selling watermelon seeds and peanuts.

A century prior, during China’s final dynasty, Liaoyuan (“Origin of the Liao River”) had been part of the imperial hunting grounds named the Flourishing Capital Paddock, an area enclosed and offset by a fence called the Willow Palisade. Those romantic names were long forgotten. Beginning in
1931
, during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Liaoyuan was the region’s second-largest coal producer. Its only tourist “attraction” came from that era: a mass grave of forced laborers dubbed the Ten-Thousand-Person Pit that showed visitors rows of exhumed skeletons stretched on the soil around an open gash of earth. The coal seams had been stripped and the mines closed. Near the exhibit’s exit, a propaganda billboard promised:
LIAOYUAN TOMORROW WILL BE EVEN BETTER
. It wasn’t wholly empty talk: the town was transitioning to light manufacturing—and on its way to becoming one of China’s leading sock producers and a maker of the MacBook computer’s aluminum frame—but in
1998
, it looked exhausted. No wonder Frances had graduated high school early and moved to Beijing to study English, then accepted a job at the international school.

Over dinner she recounted her day in various offices, filling out and photocopying passport forms. Around the table with us were her mother, grandmother, two cousins, and a just-arrived uncle and aunt. “He’s really my uncle,” Frances whispered. “She’s not really my aunt but my middle school English teacher who wants to meet you.” The culture shock I felt wasn’t because of China: my parents had six marriages between them (no longer to each other), and a large family meal like this felt more exotic than the fried silkworms set on the table as an appetizer.

Dad worked the kitchen alone. The apartment didn’t have running water or an oven, only an electric rice cooker and a single gas burner. With a cigarette clenched in his teeth and an apron around his waist, he produced braised stuffed eggplant, sweet-and-sour pork, battered lotus root, pockmarked tofu, flash-fried green beans, corn with pine nuts, and fish dumpling soup.

The English teacher raised a toast, eking out a “How do you do? Welcome you!” before knocking back
140
-proof sorghum liquor. Two little-girl cousins climbed on my back, and Uncle commented on my surprising ability to use chopsticks. Dad toasted to me, then to his daughter, then to our relationship, and then . . . well, somewhere between my rendition of Fats Waller’s “Everybody Loves My Baby” and Dad’s performance from the People’s Liberation Army songbook, Frances flashed a smile that said I was home.

Dusk faded to night. Auntie English spilled wine in her lap. One of the kid cousins fell asleep at the table. Frances’s grandmother began talking about the village north of there, where she raised “Little Peony” as a girl. The village name stuck in my mind: Wasteland. What was it like to live in a place called Wasteland? “It’s a very good environment,” her grandmother said. For two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, I had heard Chinese sweepingly define the countryside as
luohou
—backward. “It’s a better place to live than a city,” her grandmother continued. “We grow rice—the best rice in China. One crop a year, when the black earth thaws after the long cold winter.”

Rice tasted like rice to me, but not to her grandmother. She smacked her lips and ran her liver-spotted hands down sallow cheeks. “I can always smell and taste it. The rice from our farm is the best. I keep a sack of it here in town, even. It’s the only rice I like to eat.”

“I’d like to visit the village.”

Frances flashed me a look that said:
Slow down
.

Her grandmother said that the village used to call her Princess.

“I’m not a princess,” Frances protested.

Her grandmother swatted her head. “I say you are.”

At dawn I woke heavy-headed on the apartment’s wooden sofa. At Liaoyuan’s train station, Frances’s mother presented a pair of red wool socks she’d stayed up after dinner to knit. “I measured your foot when you were sleeping,” she revealed with a sneaky grin. Dad shook my hand with a firm grip, not the usual Chinese kind, where the person cupped my palm as if it were bleeding.

“Keep calm at the American embassy when you apply for your visa,” Frances’s mom lectured her. “Don’t lose your bad Northeastern temper.” The dozen assembled relatives nodded on the platform as the conductor called for us to board the olive-green carriage. Then her mother addressed us. “Learn from each other. Help each other. You’re happy together!”

Frances wept as the train pulled out. She missed them already. Her mother’s head bobbed outside the window, reminding us, “You’re happy together! Happy together!” The word trailed away as the train gathered speed.

For an entire summer in America, Frances subsisted on “first ones.”

It was a land of decisions. At a restaurant: Eating in or taking out? Booth or table? Black or room for cream? She told the waitress she wanted a chicken burger. Roasted or barbecued?
The first one.
Whole wheat, sourdough, or French roll?
Yes.
Those are breads, which one would you like for the bun?
The first one.
And what would you like on it?
Less choices.

After sorting out the toppings came the matter of sauce, then the option of fries, chips, or potato salad. Each carried with them several sub-choices that concerned salt content, oil variety, and entry into the Homestyle-versus-Regular debating arena. The undercard for this bout featured Pickle versus Coleslaw.

The waitress just kept coming at her. “And what would you like to drink? We have—”        

“The first one.”

At this point I opened the newspaper to the two pages filled with movie ads. “Let’s go see a movie. You choose.”

“The first one,” she said.

In the car, stations crowded the radio dial: you couldn’t move the tuner a bit without picking up another signal. It was just as bad as the television. Didn’t Americans ever have a moment of peace and quiet? And why did everything take place indoors? Where were all the old people? She hadn’t seen any grandfathers pushing infants in strollers or squatting on the curb, playing chess. No one ballroom danced on sidewalks at night or seemed to knit.

At the Mall of America, walking around the Camp Snoopy amusement park, she said: “Kids here are so lucky. When I was a kid, my toy was a pair of plastic shoes. Do they know how fortunate they are?” We studied the closest specimens, sentenced to adolescence. The boys moped past in oversize pants, too loose to cover their underwear. Metal punctured the sullen girls’ noses, cheeks, and lips. They looked like they’d been condemned to Labor Camp Snoopy.

“Maybe kids in America aren’t so lucky,” she conceded. “There are a lot of things here to want. When I was a kid I never wanted money, because after I had a bike, there wasn’t much else to buy. Movies and ice cream cost pennies.”

Before the first pitch at the St. Paul Saints game, the crowd stood for the national anthem. I removed my hat. People around us sang along.

“It’s very militaristic,” she whispered.

The crowd drank Summit beer and munched hot dogs. Nuns gave backrubs for charity. T-shirts boomed from a cannon into the stands. A train rolled past the outfield fence. Fireworks went off after the game. It was a perfect Minnesota summer night. Frances had no idea what had transpired on the field, but even the mosquito bites dotting her exposed skin couldn’t spoil her good time.

The wedding had been built up so much, months of me talking about it, expressing excitement for Frances to meet my friends, that when she arrived at the hotel, anxiety overtook her and she didn’t want to leave the room. It wasn’t the bitter brewery air or the way people gave us directions to avoid parts of Milwaukee dubbed “rough,” “tough,”
and “scary”; neighborhoods in Beijing were never called that. Rather, it was the wedding itself, in particular the assembled guests. They were all strangers to her. How should she act? Would they think of her as “Chinese” and expect a certain Chinese-ness?

“I know,” I said. “I hate being in these situations in China, when I only know one person in the room and they all know I am the American Guest.”

“It’s not the same,” she argued, and she was right. In China, being the American Guest was an unearned prestige: you were temporary royalty, a grinning minor duke from a faraway land. But many of the wedding guests were Peace Corps volunteers from China. Another spoke fluent Mandarin from his studies of ancient literature at Yale.

“He’ll know more about
Journey to the West
than I will and ask questions, then wonder why I’m not an expert in it,” she fretted. “That was just my favorite childhood televison show, not something to analyze. The Peace Corps people will see me like their college students, not an adult. I want to go back to Beijing.”

“Is this because of lunch?”

A customer in a downtown Milwaukee diner had asked if she was from China. She nodded with a smile. An opening like this usually meant the person had visited the country.

This man said: “I hope one day soon you’ll be free.”

Her face flashed
What
?

“Have you ever been to China?” Frances fixed her eyes on his.

“No, but I’ve read about it.”

“Things aren’t that simple. I’ve read about America, too.”

I heard a gurgle in her voice, a more urgent tone. It was the same emotion-faster-than-words sound that had overtaken me in China when I grew weary of defending my identity.

After lunch came the wedding rehearsal. Frances saw everyone hugging, so when newcomers introduced themselves, she opened her arms to their surprised faces. Someone teased her. It stung. Back in the room, she failed to hold back tears when describing how strange it felt to be different for the first time. “So this,” she said, “is why people stay home.”

We drove west, camping in the Badlands, at Mount Rushmore, and in the Black Hills, then we moved across Montana, over the Beartooth Pass into Yellowstone. This was the America for her: open space, national parks, and no one looking at us twice. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, we read a plaque commemorating the
1885
massacre of twenty-eight migrant Chinese laborers killed after refusing to join their white coworkers on strike. A mob burned the Chinese workers’ huts, blocked all escape routes, and fired into the panicked crowd. The survivors fled Rock Springs on foot, west along the railroad. Train conductors brought them to safety at Green River.

In a gas station Yellow Pages, I looked up “Restaurants, Chinese.” Rock Springs, population
19
,
000
, had one. Green River, population
12
,
000
had two. Frances chose Green River.

The waiter at China King Buffet was surprised to see her. “I’m from the Northeast,” she said by way of introduction. He was from the south. Chinese people often begin a conversation with strangers this way; their Chineseness a given, the connection found by one’s geographic region, or shared dialect. The waiter lobbed a
laowai
at me. Even six thousand miles away from Beijing, in my own country, I was the foreigner still. “You’re the
laowai
now,” I laughed. The waiter laughed, too, but his laugh said I was wrong.