In Manchuria (51 page)

Chapter 9: Tunnels in Time, Sidings to Space

The father of Chinese archaeology
Unnoted was that the sobriquet previously had been bestowed on his contemporary at Harvard, Li Ji, until he fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Communist victory. Chinese museum plaques didn’t have room for parenthetical asides.

The original of Liang’s journal sat seven thousand miles away
I am grateful for the assistance of Janet Steins, associate librarian for collections at Tozzer Library at Harvard, in helping me access the document. She answered my prayers to Saint Librarian.

Although I had not heard of Liang Siyong, I had written about the Beijing motorcycle accident that left his architect brother with a lifelong limp. The older brother was driving the bike that got sideswiped by an official car outside their courtyard home on Nanchang Jie; Liang Siyong, riding in the sidecar, was comparatively unscathed. The brothers appeared to remain close: in this journal, Liang Siyong notes that he accompanied “Cheng and Phyllis [his wife, the architect Lin Huiyin]” to the Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang’s ball in Mukden.

Shopping for supplies in Harbin
Liang, p. 6.

Of the warlord, Liang wrote
Ibid., pp. 23–24.

A gang on horseback chased Liang
Ibid., p.30.

And it was cold
Ibid., p. 109.

“I found a great and significant parallel”
Ibid., p.116.

Out in remote Manchuria
Ibid., p 13.

The next day he uncovered
Ibid., p. 9.

After a day “wading through more than
6000
paces”
Ibid., pp. 9 and 14.

Whatever may be said of this
Ibid., p. 14.

Half of the world’s
6
,
800
languages
Lague and Yu. Both cite Professor Zhao Anping, director of the Manchu Language and Culture Research Center at Heilongjiang University in Harbin.

The only other preserve of Manchu speakers is in China’s far west, on its border with Kazakhstan, where thirty thousand descendants of soldiers sent to guard the then Russian border speak the mutually intelligible Xibe language. For more, see Johnson. The story’s link includes a Manchu phrase book with audio: http://online.wsj.com//files/12/32/80/f123280/public/resources/documents/MANCHU-LANGUAGE.html

But an estimated
20
percent of the ten million archived
Et Tu, Manchu? One Hundred Years on, Only a Few Native Speakers Remain.”
Economist
, October 8, 2011. The writer quoted Wu Yuanfeng, a government archivist, who said that “only about 30 scholars in China are truly expert in the language.”

Shaded by trees and set back from a busy downtown street
Harbin is unique among Chinese metropolises for the explanatory plaques on its colonial-era architecture. The Sister Cities Museum’s building has a nearby twin: the former American consulate at 289 Dongdazhi Street, now home to a Harbin Bank branch. The showcasing of its past is a recent, tourist-attracting phenomenon. For more, see Carter.

In these post–Evil Empire days
One of SCI’s current directives is the “Iraq and American Reconciliation Project,” which pairs Denver with Baghdad, Dallas with Kirkuk, Philadelphia with Mosul, and other Iraqi cities with Fresno, Tucson, and Gainesville.

The port was already bringing culture back home
But even long-term relationships can sour. In 2012, Nanjing suspended its thirty-four-year-old relationship with Nagoya after that city’s mayor expressed doubts that Japanese soldiers massacred civilians in Nanjing in 1937. In fact, they killed between 250,000 and 300,000 people. A Nanjing government spokesman said the mayor’s remarks distorted historical facts and “seriously hurt the feelings of the Nanjing people.” A spokesperson with Nagoya’s city hall said that Kawamura’s words “represent just his own opinions.” The city government also said it would abide by the stance adopted by the Japanese government, which is that “Japan’s slaughter and plunder against civilians in Nanjing is undeniable.”

The campus was part of a pump-priming project
Barboza 1.

The government monitored faith in anything but the Communist Party
In fact, China’s interest in the heavens wasn’t new. Matt Forney at
Time
magazine found a fourth-century text named
Collected Legacies
that described a “moon boat” floating above China every twelve years, while a famous ancient astronomer once saw a “hovering pearl of light” over a Chinese lake.

Chapter 11: The Ballad of Auntie Yi

He used the word
dao
The character for planted rice—
dao
—dates to the Zhou dynasty, formed in 1046 B.C, which, not coincidentally, was the same dynasty that pioneered hydraulic engineering and irrigation. The short-grain type of rice that San Jiu planted had been grown since those Neolithic times. (
Geng
, the Chinese term for the variety known as
japonica
, dates to the first century A.D. See Bray 2.)

Ancient Chinese records called the practice
During the Song dynasty, agriculture was for the first time explained in handbooks—such as Chen Fu’s
On Farming
, published in 1149—and circulated throughout the country. The book walked a reader through financing, plowing, topography, crop selection, the preparation of seedbeds, fertilizer, and weeding, citing the advice of the
Book of Songs
, circa 1000 B.C.: “Root out the weeds. Where the weeds decay, there the grains will grow luxuriantly . . . In this manner you will live up to the system exemplified by the ancients.” It concludes with a section on concentration, noting: “If something is thought out carefully, it will succeed; if not, it will fail; this is a universal truth. It is very rare that a person works and yet gains nothing. On the other hand, there is never any harm in trying too hard.” It’s sound advice for a writer, too.

An eighth-century poet wrote a verse
The poem is “Water Fills the Paddy Fields of Circuit Official Chang Wangpu” by Du Fu. Cited in Needham, p. 510.

There was no equivalent to
Little House on the Prairie
There was, however, a text that echoed Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
: pirated copies of a banned muckraking report from the central Chinese province of Anhui titled
Nongmin Diaocha
—
Peasant Survey
—sold briskly on its publication in 2004, before taxes were abolished. The translated English version is titled
Will the Boat Sink the Water?
The province had been the setting of
The Good Earth
. See Chen Guidi.

Their tenant farmers appeared only to pay rent and present annual offerings
A rare positive portrayal of farmers in literature comes in a short scene where
Dream of the Red Chamber
’s main character, the teenaged Jia Baoyu, is told to amuse himself outside. He leads his pages to explore, coming upon a rack of tools:

He had never seen farm implements before and was thoroughly intrigued by the spades, picks, hoes and ploughs, although quite ignorant of their names and uses. When a page who knew informed him he nodded and remarked with a sigh: “Now I understand the words of the old poet: ‘Who knows that each grain of rice we eat / Is the fruit of intensive toil?’”

It reads like a sweatier
Walden
It was a fleeting chimera: Crèvecoeur had the 371 acres left to him by his father, and the land brought personal tragedy when his wife was killed and the farm destroyed by Indians while he was away. He ended up back in city life, appointed as the French consul for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, then became trapped in Paris during the French Revolution of 1789 and—as Pearl Buck would two centuries later in China—had his visa to return to the United States denied by ambassador James Monroe. He died in France, on his father’s land. The lone memorial to him in the U.S. that I know of is the small Vermont town of St. Johnsbury, whose name was suggested by Ethan Allen.

In China she was admired but not read
My professor at Berkeley, the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, urged me to read
The Good Earth
after I mentioned the awful movie version, featuring white actors playing the leads, including the German-born Luise Rainer as the matriarch O-Lan (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress). Kingston, however, fondly recalled being assigned Buck. “I was lucky,” she told me. “When I was a student in the California public schools, Buck was still required, so I read
The Good Earth
in 1955, when I was in ninth grade. That book was very important to me. Jade Snow Wang influenced me as a writer, but Buck showed that Chinese people were people. She wrote about them with compassion. That book humanized Chinese people. It is written with so much empathy that, for the first time, Americans had to see Chinese as equals.”

Her most recent Chinese translator, however, told me
Liu Haiping at Nanjing University. For a visit to her Chinese home and museum, see my
New York Times Book Review
piece, listed under “Meyer” in the Bibliography.

Professor Liu first read Buck in the United States, when he was a student at Harvard in the 1980s, though not in class. “When I would go to friends’ homes, it was usually a woman in her sixties who would ask me how I viewed Buck’s portrayal of China,” he told me. “I felt embarrassed because I had not read her. She was banned. The more I learned about her life, the more I wanted to do her justice.”

In 1986, Liu organized a literary conference in Nanjing that marked the beginning of Buck’s resuscitation in China.

In
China Past and Present
, Buck remembered of
The Good Earth
: “‘My only criticism of this book,’ a famous Chinese writer said, ‘is that it should have been written by a Chinese’” (p. 162).

“I became mentally bifocal”
Buck, Pearl, 2, pp. 10 and 52. Paraphrased nicely in the excellent biography by Spurling.

Her father had translated the Bible
Buck, Pearl, 1, p. 86.

Like John Steinbeck
He wrote these columns in 1936 for the
San Francisco News
, since collected in a book titled
The Harvest Gypsies
.

After their divorce eighteen years later
Ibid., p. 92. In the city of Nanjing, Lossing founded China’s first agricultural economics department, which grew into what was then the world’s largest, with a staff of one hundred. But his work fell out of favor after the Revolution; he had recommended mechanization and access to credit to alleviate farmers’ burdens, not Marxist land redistribution. Lossing continued to publish research about China from the United States, where he became a specialist at the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The better-known chronicler of Chinese agriculture became William Hinton, author of
Fanshen
, a six-hundred-page portrait of a village undergoing Communist land reform in 1948. It was not published until 1966, after Hinton sued for the return of his notes, seized by U.S. customs agents at the height of McCarthyism.

“To learn to be a farmer”
Buck, John Lossing, 2, pp. 240–41.

Her sister Grace told a biographer
Ibid., p. 166. In
Chinese Farm Economy
’s acknowledgments, Lossing cited ten other people—including “Miss G. C. Mertsky particularly for compiling the index; and of all others who have helped for briefer periods of time” before arriving at “For editing I am greatly indebted to my wife.” There was no mention of her name, her translations, or her work alongside him in the field.

In
1972
, the year of Nixon’s visit to China
Buck, Pearl, 4, p. 171. The actual letter appears on the page, dated May 17, 1972. The author, a functionary, wrote that he was “authorized to inform you that we can not accept your request for a visit to China.” It’s signed, “Sincerely yours . . .” Buck had wanted to visit her parents’ graves. She noted, on the last page of the last book she ever wrote, that “I was humbly happy that my parents were also mentioned [in the Nobel Prize citation] in the added phrase, ‘and for masterpieces of biography’” (Buck, Pearl, 3, p. 177).

Although Buck said that she had assiduously avoided visiting Taiwan or taking any sides in the Chinese civil war, she did, in 1970, allude to her politics, writing: “After I left China permanently in 1933, knowing that Communism would win because of its growing appeal to the peasantry, and knowing, too, not only that I could not live in a Communist-controlled country but also that Chinese Communists would not tolerate Americans who were not Communist, I then devoted my efforts to helping Chinese in the United States not to be deported to Communist China” (Buck, Pearl, 3, p. 294).

I was busy, busy, busy
Spurling.

But there were other lessons, too
I owe thanks to my friend Leslie T. Chang for this pithy notion. See Chang.