In Manchuria (27 page)

And they loved the farm. In a speech to American pilots shipping out during the Second World War, Pearl said what
The Good Earth
’s plot had obscured, and made many readers think the title was meant to be ironic. “What if you land in the Chinese countryside?” Buck asked. “Well, then, you are lucky, for the Chinese countryside is beautiful.”

Summer headlines in Jilin city newspapers included:

“Expressway Tollbooth Revealed as Corrupt”

“
67
-Year-Old Woman Leaps from Thirteenth Floor”

“Nine-Year-Old Boy Runs Away from Home After Mother Loses Cat”

“Investigative Report of Pornography Viewing Rooms”

“Drunk Driver Kills Two”

“Smart Little Dog Can Use a Cell Phone”

“Corpse Found Beaten, Lying in Pool of Blood”

“Drunks Toss Buddy from Second Story Window”

“Farmer’s Prize Pig Mysteriously Murdered”

China always looked different after reading the paper. On the bus back to Wasteland, I suddenly wondered what each passenger was capable of. Corruption? Pornography? Pig murder?

Online, I read Western headlines such as:

“China Sees Food Needs Rising”

“China Snaps Up Farmland in Argentina”

“Brazil Uneasy over China’s Interest in Land”

The nation was on a “global commodity hunt,” the
Wall Street Journal
reported. China was the biggest purchaser of Argentine soybeans, mainly used as livestock feed, a demand that rose with meat consumption. In Brazil, Chinese companies signed a $
7
billion agreement to produce six million tons of soybeans each year, part of a series of deals that made China its largest trading partner.
Its food and energy purchases had “helped fuel an economic boom . . . that has lifted more than
20
million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability . . .” wrote the
New York Times
.

The shift to overseas food sources came as China’s surging demand clashed with its arable land being diminished by urbanization. In the past thirty years, farmland equivalent in area to the size of New York State had been developed.

Science and technology wrung increasing yields from the existing land: an average hectare now produced
6
.
3
tons of rice, four times more than in
1949
. “Chasing ever-higher output levels may mean overfertilization and unsafe agriculture,” a top agricultural official warned. “Of course, we have to raise output in this area but our techniques and resources can’t keep up.”

China classifies corn, wheat, and rice as key grains, and keeps the planet’s largest stockpiles of these foods, totaling
40
percent of annual consumption. Once the world’s largest exporter of soy, China is now the largest importer. The Brazil deal alone would meet
10
percent of its annual demand. At the start of the twenty-first century, China imported a few tons of corn each year. In
2012
alone, it bought two million tons. Chinese demand, coupled with drought and increasing consumption by the U.S. ethanol industry, pushed the grain’s price to an all-time high.

Among the largest beneficiaries of Chinese consumption was the American farmer. Food accounted for $
1
of every $
5
China spent on American products between
2010
and
2012
, led by soy, whose sales totaled $
15
billion annually. Exports of all goods doubled from
2005
to
2010
, but food—including dairy, pork, and fruit juice—more than tripled. Pecan sales rose twentyfold. An elated grower in Georgia told the
Wall Street Journal
that, thanks to the Chinese belief that the nuts were good for the brain, “we’re in a situation of finite supply and seemingly infinite demand.” The price of a pound of pecans doubled in a single year.

China kept outsourcing: in
2013
it signed a fifty-year agreement with Ukraine to lease three million hectares of farmland, more than doubling the two million hectares it had previously held overseas. The produce and pigs raised in Ukraine would be sold to two Chinese state-owned grain conglomerates. One was known as Bingtuan, a quasi-military organization founded in the
1950
s to strengthen the Chinese border with the Soviet Union. Now it brandished a checkbook, writing on the memo line:
Food
.

“We can send them a trainload of pigtails,” Auntie Yi said.

“Is that a Chinese saying?”

She looked up from weeding her poppies. “What?”

“‘We can send them a trainload of pigtails,’” I repeated. “What does it mean?”

Auntie Yi laughed, her long gray curls bouncing under her bucket hat. “It means a trainload of pigtails. That’s what it means.
Aiya wo’de maya
.” She shot me a playful look. Her snaggletooth peeked out from her upper lip. “You just told me that China is buying food from the former Soviet Union.”

In August
1945
, the Red Army looted Jilin city’s cement factory, she said. It was located at the site of Diamond Cement, the plant that now rained gooey pellets on passerby. “It had a bunch of advanced machinery that the Japanese had built, and we finally got rid of them and could use it; but the Red Army stayed after war’s end and took whatever it wanted. Stalin said he was keeping the factory safe in the USSR so the Americans couldn’t take it. He ransomed it back; Premier Zhou Enlai paid him in apples and soybeans. ‘We have no pork,’ he said, ‘but we can send them a trainload of pigtails.’”

“So there weren’t any pigtails?”

“China was broke!”

Auntie Yi veered into a story about her younger brother, who had gone to school in Jilin city. The old town’s gates were still standing then, she said, but none of its wall or wooden architecture remained. “A few months ago you asked me about the Japanese occupation, and I’ve been meaning to tell you what I remember,” she said, leading me inside her house, where Uncle Fu poured bowls of hot soymilk.

“You asked me what it used to be like here,” Auntie Yi said from the edge of the
kang
. “I remember [the puppet state named] Manchukuo well. I was a little girl when the little Japanese devils occupied this place. Why did they come here? I hear now people say they came here for the mines, and to build a dam, but we Chinese built the dam and worked in the mines. If you didn’t work, they would beat you and toss you in the pit of dead bodies.”

“Did you ever see Japanese people?”

“They lived in one part of Jilin city. I remember seeing Japanese women wearing kimonos and carrying their babies on their back. They wore wood shoes, and the sidewalks were wood then. The shoes went
ta ta ta ta ta
. They powdered their faces and ate so well; they looked beautiful in all that silk. We Chinese wore old cotton clothes we wove and dyed ourselves. The crotch of my pants kept ripping, and the blankets at home were rough cloth and full of fleas.

“I was in elementary school then, and every morning we had to sing the Manchukuo national anthem. It was about the colors of the Manchukuo flag and went . . .”

She sang a stately tune with Japanese lyrics:

“Our national flag flutters, flutters, flutters.

Red, blue, white, black, yellow.

I love my flag, the flag that flutters, flutters, flutters.

“The teacher would smack your palm three times with a wooden pointer if you didn’t sing correctly,” she explained. “I hated having a swollen hand. So I still remember some Japanese.” She counted to ten in the language without pause.

The flag’s five colors represented the five ethnicities living in Manchukuo, which comprised the entire Northeast, from the Great Wall to Siberia. The mustard-yellow field mimicked the Manchu’s Qing dynasty flag, but instead of a spindly blue dragon, it featured a square in its upper-left corner that showed a red stripe (representing Japanese) over a blue stripe (Han Chinese), white (Mongolians), and black (Koreans).

“We were taught we were ‘Manchukuoans,’ not Chinese,” Auntie Yi said. “The Chinese language was called the Manchukuo language. You couldn’t say China; nothing could be Chinese. They taught only Japanese at school. Every morning we stood up and saluted the teacher and said ‘
Hai!
’ It was like what they show on TV: everything was always ‘
Hai!
’ and a salute. At lunchtime, we said ‘Thank you’ in Japanese over and over. ‘
Arigato arigato arigato.
’ At the end of the school day, we saluted and said good-bye, and then, on the walk home, I spoke Chinese again. That only lasted for a year. In
1945
, Manchukuo fell.”

Before rebel forces made it to Jilin, their Chinese foe arrived first.

“The Nationalist army was really fierce. It was the Seventy-seventh and then the Eighty-eighth Brigade. They would come to our homes and demand labor. They often beat my grandfather for refusing to work. He didn’t support them at all. When they came into our house, we had to kneel before them. They were bastards. They cut down our trees for fuel and beat my brother, cracking his head. There were ten soldiers on him. Oh, the Japanese came to our house, too, but on patrols. They just looked inside, but it was still scary, because they had helmets on, and rifles with bayonets. But the worst of all came after that.”

Auntie Yi lowered her voice theatrically and murmured:
kata kata kata
. “That was the sound of the Russians marching on the road beside their carts. I would sit in a tree and yell, ‘Hairy ones!’ and the women would hide. They would shut their doors and get sticks ready. Sometimes a car would pull up with two or three Russian soldiers in it, to inspect our homes. They would open the wardrobe and take whatever they could find, even my mother’s watch and her gold ring. One guy pulled a gun on our dog for barking at him, but my uncle got the soldier drunk, plucked a goose for him, and he left.”

Another time, she remembered, a Russian man raped a neighbor. “People said that after he finished, he tied her legs to the back of a horse and dragged her until she died.”

Seeking refuge, her parents moved her out to Wasteland. But the danger stayed near. “In
1948
, the Nationalists and Communists fought each other in a big battle by the river here. I used to duck beside the
kang
when we heard shots. I was so frightened. A bullet came right through the paper covering our windows! We couldn’t have any light at night, so the lanterns were out, and we just tried to sleep. I couldn’t sleep: my heart beat like crazy all night. We slept on the floor, under the window level. I was seven then.”

Then the Communist Eighth Route Army arrived in Wasteland. Unlike the Japanese, the Russians, and the Chinese Nationalist troops, they didn’t enter villagers’ homes. “The soldiers sat quietly in the yard, and camped outside. They carried their own water and cooked their own food and never bothered us. Our windows had paper glued over the panes, not glass, and sometimes they would poke a hole—
pa pa pa
—and say, ‘Don’t be scared of us. We’re here to help common folks like you. We won’t bully you.’”

Auntie Yi broke into song after mimicking the sound of triumphant trumpets:

“Arise! All those who don’t want to be slaves!

Let our flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall!

As the Chinese people have arrived at their most perilous time. Every person must expel his very last roar.

Arise! Arise! Arise!”

The song, “March of the Volunteers,” was composed for a
1935
patriotic film about exiles from the occupied Northeast who enlisted in the army to expel the Japanese from Manchuria. It became China’s national anthem except during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, when its lyricist was imprisoned.

Auntie Yi said that then, in the late
1960
s, “The East Is Red” became the national song. “It played on the loudspeakers every sunrise and sunset. The whole countryside all over China could hear it.” She sang:

“The east is red, the sun rises.

From China arises Mao Zedong.

He strives for the people’s happiness,

Hurrah
[hu’er haiyo]
he is the people’s great savior!”

The inclusion of
hu’er haiyo
always intrigued me, because they are not words but sounds reminiscent of the
aiya wo’de maya
that Northeasterners exclaim in dialect to express disgust. “The East Is Red” was said to have been penned by a patriotic farmer, who set the words to a traditional rural folk song that began: