In Manchuria (7 page)

Socialism is good!

Socialism is good!

Downplay American imperialism!

Downplay American imperialism!

Socialism is good!

As a child in Wasteland, she fell from a cottonwood tree and broke her arm. The nearest doctor was in Jilin city, twenty miles away. Her grandmother bundled her on a mule cart, which clopped through the night. The arm healed crookedly, though unnoticeably. Yet the accident had been marked in Frances’s permanent record. City teachers took frowning note, but the asymmetry spared her from joining the school’s rhythmic gymnastics squad or dance troupe. She never had to twirl a red ribbon to a screeching soundtrack or wave handkerchiefs for the Rice Planting Dance. She didn’t even watch the performances. She knew that nobody planted rice like that. First of all, no one smiled like those dancers. Standing bent at the waist in cold, calf-deep water was hard work.

In middle school, teachers began calling her intelligent, even though she fell asleep during the class named Building Socialism. She excelled in Chinese and English. Her early-
1990
s textbook required memorizing such useful dialogue as:

A:
Where is the Red Lobster restaurant located?

B:
May I suggest our specialty: lamb chops garnished

with spring peas and mashed potatoes?

A:
Lobster with mayonnaise sounds inviting.

B:
Permit me to pour you a glass of champagne. It’s on

the house.

In Chinese class, she read classic novels in which the female characters radiated beauty. They were described as looking like swallows in the branches of willow trees, with bones of jade under skin as pure as ice. They were so lovely that fish would sink and wild geese would fall out of the sky at the sight of them. But Frances had grown up on the farm. Her skin was tanned like a peasant’s, not light like a city person’s. She was tall. Her hair was as light-colored and brittle as the straw she shared with pigs as a child. She couldn’t understand why, to be considered beautiful, a Chinese woman had to look like a foreigner. She smiled and laughed like a man, refusing to cover her mouth with her hand. She wouldn’t stand like a girl, either, with arms passively at her sides. In photographs she cocked them on her hips, sharp elbows akimbo, shaping herself into a kite, waiting to fly high and far away.

“As a girl, I hated mirrors,” Frances remembered. “Mirrors were all over the place in the city. At home, in the department store, at the entrance of every school.” She had longed for the countryside, where her only reflection was in her grandmother’s smiling eyes.

Even now, Frances remained the baby of the village. To help me find a house to rent, she had arrived on a January morning on a public minibus whose windows had frosted over from passengers’ breaths, veiling the interior like tulle. Though Frances was padded in down and swaddled in a scarf and hat, an elderly passenger did a double take at her face before yelling her name in joy. On Wasteland’s lanes, even after a twenty-year absence, the scene was repeated. There was no hugging, only a familiar conversation, like she had just returned from running an errand in town.

Sixty-six-year-old San Jiu half skipped out his front door, calling her name.

A hot meal waited in a room filled with relatives eager to fuss. Frances lounged on the
kang
cracking sunflower seeds with them, talking about her grandmother’s passing, slurping jasmine tea, and filling the room with gasps of Northeastern dialect such as
Aiya wo’de maya
(
Oh, my mother!
) and
En’e
(
All right
). The aunties warned her that she should become pregnant soon. “Mixed-blood” (
hun xue’r
) children are beautiful, they said. But be sure to eat lots of apples, a woman warned, otherwise the baby’s skin would be “too yellow.”

Frances rolled her eyes and shot me a grin. Her BlackBerry whirred with updates of a $
300
million leveraged buyout she was working on, but she kept the device in her pocket. Lawyers had little clout in China, so no one asked her about her job. Instead her family surrounded Frances on the
kang
, demanding a child. As San Jiu and I watched the evening news in another room, I heard more laughter, more
Aiya wo’de maya
s.

We were used to complete strangers asking us about our relationship; over thirteen years, we knew these questions well enough to see them forming above a person’s head, like comic strip thought bubbles. In Chinese, they read:
Married a foreigner, huh? What country? That’s a good passport to have. But you couldn’t find a Chinese man? Well, your children will be beautiful. Mixed-blood children are always beautiful. And smart. Beautiful and smart. But hopefully the children will look more like you.

This silent conversation was preferable to the one Western men volunteered to me.
You know what’s it’s like,
it began. But I didn’t. And I didn’t want to know—not about enduring public tantrums or wearing matching couples’ T-shirts or buying in-laws new appliances or how the
1990
Gérard Depardieu film
Green Card
explained everything.
Not our story, pal. Go eat some apples.

With family, however, came different, well-meaning, but also loaded questions. About Frances becoming a “city girl.” About how her American education had changed her thoughts. About where we would raise our child—the one we should be creating right this instant instead of idly chatting. And why didn’t we move back here? The village could raise the child! What did she mean, she had to return to Hong Kong and her career? What about becoming a mother, as they had? Everything was out of context, because there was no context.

After sundown and the last good nights, Frances, looking dazed, told me, “It’s amazing how coming home transforms you into a child again. I hate it. But it’s also sweet.” Nowadays Chinese were so focused on the future, on what lay ahead, she said. “It’s nice to be able to return and see where you came from while it’s still there.”

The next morning we leaned into the wind and walked to see Wasteland’s only vacant house. Although February brought the solar term named the Beginning of Spring, which coincided with the lunar New Year, the season felt far away.

Still, I said, the landscape looked beautiful.

“When you live in the countryside, you don’t actually see it,” Frances said. “You see your little slice of it: your house, your paddy, your village. None of it makes you think, ‘This is beautiful.’”

She studied Eastern Fortune Rice’s billboard and the sign pointing to the hot spring resort. “People travel here to soak in the water?” she asked San Jiu, who replied,
Uh.
“When I was a kid,” Frances continued, “we hated going near water: the paddies were filled with fish, frogs and leeches.” The countryside was romantic only to people who didn’t have to live there.

The view from the top floor of Wasteland’s Agricultural Bank showed shops lining a five-hundred-yard ice-covered stretch of Red Flag Road: seed stores, dumpling and hot pot restaurants, a bathhouse, a clinic, a medicine store, a funerary shop, the police station and village government office, and some brave vendors standing in olive-green great coats before boxes of candied hawthorn berries, persimmons, and arm-length saury fish—now frozen solid—pulled that morning from the Songhua River. Near the train tracks was a small fertilizer factory, a government-run grain storehouse, a rusting sign advertising Bitter Melon Beer, and a painting, on a redbrick home, of a beaming farmer under a straw hat for something named Happy Soil.

To me, this all looked charming, a respite from crowded, polluted, honking Chinese city life. Everything one needed was right here; the Agricultural Bank ATM even accepted our American debit card and spit out Chinese yuan.

Frances said: “It’s charming to us now, but when you live here, it’s a step down from the city. You always look to get out, to leave, and to lift your family from here, too.”

I expected the village to be emptying, but Wasteland was comparatively prosperous. “If people aren’t growing rice, or if they signed their crop over to Eastern Fortune, they keep their rent-free houses and commute to work in Jilin city,” San Jiu said. “Or they have agreed to move to the company’s new apartments, so their home will soon be razed.”

Legally, Frances and I were not permitted to buy a home, since only those classified as rural residents could do so. This protected the countryside from real estate speculation, but it also kept farmers tied to their village, since they could not sell their houses and move elsewhere. But renting out a home, and even one’s farmland, had recently been allowed.

One morning, as I walked alone, a Toyota Land Cruiser slowed beside me on Red Flag Road. The driver, whom I had never seen before, said, “Hey, teacher, I hear you’re looking for a house.”

He was the “village chief,” an administrative post similar to mayor. Wasteland’s leader was not a wizened farmer in a blue serge Mao suit but a thin man in his twenties who wore khakis and a puffy North Face jacket. He drove down a newly laid dirt road that cut across the paddies to a cluster of one-story cement houses. From a distance they looked like bunkers.

“You can rent one of these,” he said, opening a garage door. “Eastern Fortune Rice built it as a model home. Farmers who gave up their old house could move here. But few people agreed. Now the company’s building apartments instead.”

“Will these newer houses be torn down?”

“Maybe,” he said. It meant
Of course
.

His voice echoed in the concrete shell. It was more of a brutalist sculpture than a dwelling. Instead of brick, the
kang
was unpainted cement. The floor, wall, and ceiling were gray and unfinished, too.

“It needs flooring and all the other decor,” the village chief said. “It needs furniture and probably some new window panes. And the toilet needs fixing, but it’s indoor and flushes, and if you install a water heater you can shower. The kitchen needs propane tanks, and a range, and these lights don’t work, so you have to fix those.
Uh,
” he said, pulling a door loose from its frame. “That needs repairing, too.”

Other than that, the house was perfect.

I found myself in the situation I handled worst in China: needing to recuse myself from a suggestion without making the other person lose face. When that person was an authority figure, the stakes grew higher. I didn’t want to make trouble for my family, or myself. You had to choose words carefully in the countryside, where resentments steeped like tealeaves. I panicked, and told the village chief the truth.

“I want to rent a common home, like most farmers live in. And this place needs a lot of work; I don’t want to spend money repairing someone else’s house, especially one that might be razed.”

“That’s reasonable,” the village chief replied.

Then I did something even stupider. I asked whose house it was.

San Jiu called me a moron. “You should have known that he would take you to a house he owned,” he said. “He’s a good businessman. He also has ties to Eastern Fortune Rice. He married the sister of one of its founders. She teaches English at the elementary school.” I made a mental note to visit her classroom and lead a lesson, a step toward squaring things with the chief.

San Jiu had heard of one other vacancy in the village, a home behind the police station. Without knocking, he pulled back the tall sheet-tin gate and stepped into a courtyard illuminated by hundreds of candles. They surrounded dozens of gold-painted statues of the Buddha.

“The owner’s husband left her, so she became a Buddhist nun,” San Jiu explained. “She’s going to a convent for a while. She said you’re welcome to stay here, but you have to keep the candles lit. The rent is low because of that.” If I would be the village altar boy, the nun would charge the equivalent of $
20
a month. An apartment half the size in Jilin city rented for ten times that amount.

“But you want to travel . . .” Frances cautioned.

“Who will know if the candles blow out?”

“Everyone will know,” San Jiu said. In the village, everyone knew everything. Gossip, the original social network, was wireless, and nearly as instantaneous.

In the
1947
book
From the Soil
, a famous Chinese sociologist remembered growing up on a farm and being assigned to write a diary at school. He labored to log one entry, describing waking up, walking to class, playing at recess, walking home, doing homework, eating, and going to bed. For each successive entry he wrote, “The same as above.” Even as a child he felt that countryside life made a diary, and even memory, superfluous. “The fall of the Qin dynasty, the rise of the Han dynasty—what difference does it make? People in rural society do not fear forgetfulness. People in cities need to keep address books and photo identification, but in the countryside all is known.”

Historically, the inability to freely move in search of work, in addition to a village’s geographic isolation, fostered a dependence on cooperation, of intimate relations with neighbors. The natural extension of this was a distrust of outsiders. Most foreigners who had visited China experienced this when a stranger shouted
Laowai!
at them. It could feel like getting soaked by a water balloon.