In Manchuria (2 page)

By then, the nation’s gains were the Manchu’s loss: more Manchu lived south of the Great Wall than in their former homeland, and culturally they had all but assimilated with the Han Chinese they once ruled. Today, most Manchu look indistinguishable from other Northeasterners. Though their court was bilingual—Mandarin remained China’s lingua franca; a Manchu emperor even named Tiananmen, Chinese for “the Gate of Heavenly Peace”—most Manchu no longer spoke their mother tongue. The language, which sounds nothing like Mandarin and is written in a Mongolian-based script, began a fade toward extinction.

Eroding, too, was the Manchu’s hold on the Northeast, which their emperors had attempted to maintain as a cultural reserve. Countermanding centuries of edicts restricting migration to Manchuria, Han Chinese homesteaders flooded the region. Between
1927
and
1929
alone, an estimated one million settlers arrived each year, surpassing the number of Europeans who landed annually in the United States at the peak of its immigration wave.

Most new arrivals didn’t call the land Manchuria, or the Northeast, or “east of the barrier” (the Great Wall), or even the “three eastern provinces,” as redistricting had it rendered on maps. They called their new home what it looked like: the Great Northern Wasteland.

“Although it is uncertain where God created paradise,” wrote a French priest crossing Manchuria during this era, “we can be sure He chose some other place than this.”

But I found it beautiful and unique, a land worthy of its evocative names.

The wind whips across the scalloped snow, slashing through my four layers of clothes. I imagine the gale born to neglectful parents named Gobi Frost and Siberian Tundra. My neighbors call their seething offspring the Torturer, constantly driving needles into our bones no matter how much we pad them.

And yet, the sky stretches from horizon to horizon, a fresh prairie sky without pause. In Chinese cities you do not stop to appreciate the sky; you can rarely see it through the smog. Other parts of rural China feel stooped and low ceilinged, with clouds sagging from age. But at China’s Northeastern frontier, the sky’s incandescent blue is as much of the landscape as the dark earth below. Farmers here seldom call the dirt mere “soil.” Unlike elsewhere in China, where fields have been turned and tilled for thousands of years, in the Northeast they farm comparatively virgin “black earth” using “sweet water.” When thawed, a handful of loam feels as rich and saturated as spent coffee grounds.

Wasteland is a typical rural Chinese community, even if its fields are not. Instead of working terraced hillsides year-round, farmers harvest a single annual crop of rice from paddies that run to the distant foothills, surrounding us on three sides.

Beijing is a twelve-hour train ride southwest, a trip equal in distance to the six-hundred mile journey between central Maine and Washington, D.C. Wasteland is closer—by half—to Vladivostok and Pyongyang, if logistical and cultural worlds away. On my classroom blackboard, the “map” I often chalk to explain our village’s location is labeled:

The middle white space, China’s Northeast, is equal in population and area to Germany and France combined. The analogy also evokes its recent past: while late-nineteenth-century Western travelers who journeyed to Manchuria compared this frontier to Alaska’s, the next generation wrote that they had arrived in a “cradle of conflict” that was Asia’s Alsace-Lorraine.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Manchuria was the prize in battles between China, Japan, and Russia. Brokering the end of one war earned President Theodore Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize but gave Japan control of much of Manchuria’s railroad—China’s longest and most lucrative—linking its mineral-rich heartland to Pacific Ocean ports. Russia had failed to yoke Manchuria to eastern Siberia; Japan tried shaping it into the toehold for its imperial dream of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

Due to its similarity to
Manchukuo
, the name of the puppet state Japan founded here in
1931
, the term
Manchuria
fell from use after Japan’s surrender, ending the Second World War. But
Manchuria
long predates the Japanese invasion, appearing on nineteenth-century Chinese maps and in European atlases—often replacing
Tartary
. Even the Communist Party’s regional office once used it, in publications with names such as the
Manchurian Worker
.

Western press reports revived the term during the Korean War, but
Manchuria
faded from use after Soviet advisers withdrew from the region in
1955
and it was—at last—wholly controlled by the central government in Beijing.

But as its status as geopolitical hot spot dimmed, the Northeast still retained its Otherness. China is a patchwork of places as diverse as America’s, each with its own local language, cuisine, and character. Append
Dongbei
(
Northeast
) before any of these nouns, and it will, to a Chinese person, evoke a ringing lilt of elongated vowels, sour cabbage served with potatoes and boiled pork dumplings, and tough, yet self-effacing, people known for eccentricity. A recent national pop hit, “All Northeasterners Are Living Lei Fengs,” poked fun at the natives’ overcompensating virtuousness, familiar to anyone who has experienced the placating temperament known as “Minnesota Nice.”

I’m attracted to all of this, especially the eccentrics, who remind me of my childhood neighbors. And unlike in China’s other borderlands, where the native mother tongue is Tibetan, Uighur, or Cantonese, the Northeast today uses standard Mandarin Chinese—which I speak and read fluently—and a closely related dialect. But it was the region’s history that drew me here most.

Chinese civilization, as my middle school students have been taught to recite with stentorian solemnity, “has five thousand years of history.” In their textbooks, the Northeast claims only a sliver of that time line, making its past feel comparatively intimate. The bulk of its recorded antiquity began in the early seventeenth century, around the time—on the other side of the world—that Shakespeare wrote his plays and the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Anyone who has spent time in contemporary China knows the feeling of traditions slipping away, of old landscapes remade. In Beijing you could return to a neighborhood where you ate noodles the week before and find it flattened to a field of rubble. A decade ago, at a Buddhist nunnery that would be submerged by the Three Gorges Dam, I met an elderly novitiate who said she wanted to live there forever. She asked if I could put her into a story so she always would.

But the Northeast’s history still seems near. Its artifacts spill across the region like playing pieces left on a board game named Empire. You can travel on railways built in the name of the czar; pace not through ancient Buddhist temples but into onion-domed Russian Orthodox cathedrals; walk down boulevards lined with Japanese pines and colonial ministries constructed in an architectural style dubbed Rising Asia; tour Puyi’s “Puppet Emperor’s Palace”; visit sites where the Japanese held Allied prisoners, including Bataan Death March survivors; and stand on the bridge­—reaching halfway across the Yalu River, separating China and North Korea—that American pilots dive-bombed during the Korean War. I saw these sites—and the stories missing from their official plaques—as markers that charted the rise and fall of the Manchu, and the nadir and ascent of modern China. Uniquely for a Chinese region, foreigners played a prominent role on its stage.

Other than Harbin city’s famous Ice Lantern Festival, a monthlong winter carnival around life-size replicas of famous buildings made from blocks of frozen Songhua River water, the Northeast remained to most Chinese “the land beyond the pale,” as the expanse north of the Great Wall was historically known. Winter is the barrier today; skiers and masochists aside, who sets off for a subzero holiday? Summers are mild and bright, but even then I often feel like I have this upper-right-hand corner of the nation to myself: no scrums at train ticket windows, no need for hotel reservations, no dodging tour groups. On the twenty-five thousand miles that I’ve traveled on side trips from Wasteland, I’ve often sat alone in a train car, unlike in the south, where the compartments could be so crowded, I have spent rides standing in the toilet or lying on newspapers spread beneath the bench seats.

At Manchuria’s de facto border, the First Pass Under Heaven—where the Great Wall tapers into the Bohai Sea—a rebuilt section of the wall extends five hundred yards west before ending abruptly at a cinder block barrier. It obstructs any view; the visitor is stuck facing a gray curtain of cement. But set in its middle is a normal-size door, the kind that separates rooms in an apartment. Push hard and it opens to reveal the unimproved Great Wall, crumbling and crowned by tall grasses and mature elms, scaling the mountains wild. Traveling in the Northeast feels like stepping through that door.

On a farm, weather is the fourth dimension. The icy wind burns my cheeks on Red Flag Road. Ahead, in the distance, moving closer and sputtering like a shot-up biplane, I see a three-wheel tractor. Oversize sunglasses and a white cotton surgical mask obscure the driver’s face, which is further shrouded by a fur-lined People’s Liberation Army hat. Its earflaps bounce rhythmically over the black ice. The driver honks, a limpid squawk that sounds like the tractor’s battery is conserving energy. The driver lays into it harder. One rule of the Chinese countryside is that the more peaceful the surroundings, the more noise people make.

The driver stops, and the tractor idles roughly, as if stamping its feet in the cold. I have no idea who is under the hat, those glasses. Through the face mask comes the dialect-inflected demand: “
Ga ha’me’ne ni!
”

What am I doing? “I’m walking.”

The driver asks, in the singsong Northeastern way: “
Shei jia’di’ah?
”

“To whose family do you belong?” is a standard greeting here—even to a foreigner—unlike elsewhere in China, where strangers ask if you’ve eaten, or what country you’re from.

“The Guans,” I reply, naming my Manchu landlords.

“Correct!” the man laughs. “Get on!” He kicks the tractor into gear. It leaps like it’s been defibrillated.

I tuck my head behind his shoulder as the driver put-puts a mile north, turning off Red Flag into a huddle of two dozen single-story brick homes. He stops at the last one, with sodium lights shimmering through the windows and a stream of smoke flowing from its chimney. My house is another mile north, but tonight is the weekly meal with my closest friend in Wasteland.

I thank the unknown driver, who won’t accept payment, though I know that one day he will identify himself and the favor I can return. I push open the never-locked front door, stomping the snow off my jeans in the vestibule, then opening a door to the home’s main room and climbing on the
kang
, a brick platform bed two feet high that runs the length, and nearly the width, of the room. Heated by burning dried rice stalks, the
kang
’s linoleum covering is hot to the touch but feels comfortable when covered with cotton bedrolls. The house smells pleasantly of toasted grain, like we’re lounging atop baking bread, and I am always happy to step over its threshold.

Next to the
kang
is a round table laden with steaming plates of twice-cooked pork, flash-fried mushrooms, garlic-sautéed wild greens, and rice grown in the paddy just outside these wall-size windows, weatherproofed with plastic wrap. The dishes have been cooked in a large wok sunk into a cement stove, fired by burning rice stalks.

“
Mai’er
,” the family’s patriarch says with a nod.

“San Jiu,” I say, nodding back. The lack of formality—of
You must be cold; have you eaten? you’re not wearing enough layers; eat; take a smoke; drink some tea; you must be cold, it’s winter now and cold outside, you have to wear more; eat; have some beer; you look cold; eat, eat, eat
—means that I’m home.

“I cooked,” he says. “It’s the two of us tonight. Everyone else had to go to”—and here he says the term for Fourth Cousin, Second Nephew, or some other title which I can never keep straight without a diagram. Every branch of a Chinese family tree has its own name indicating not only which side you come from but in what order. In English we say
aunt
, but in China she was, for example,
the wife of my father’s oldest brother
. One’s cousin could be
your mother’s younger sister’s second-born son
.
San
Jiu
(pronounced
San Joe
) means “Third Uncle on Mother’s Side.”