In Manchuria (46 page)

The designation would bring government financing for new roads. “We want an expressway to link us to Jilin city, so we'll only be twenty minutes away, not an hour,” Boss Liu said. “I want a road eight lanes wide, nothing less. And the old airport? That can be a logistics base where cargo airlines can fly in fresh seafood. We can fly out fresh flowers. I've signed a deal for the flower's greenhouse location. No one grows fresh flowers up here; they're all imported from the south. We'll be leaders in this sector.”

I said nothing.

“I heard that you're from a village in America.”

“A small town, yes. In Minnesota. Near the Mississippi River. It's cold, like here.”

“What does your town look like now? Like Wasteland?”

I had to admit that it resembled much of what Boss Liu was dreaming. Freeway noise filled my childhood home, where my sister now lived, and the surrounding farmland sprouted only malls and McMansions. The town was a tony suburb of white-collar workers commuting to Minneapolis, with an expanded high school that resembled a college campus. The lakes remained, but the remaining farms mostly grew fresh flowers in greenhouses.

Boss Liu beamed an I-told-you-so grin.

“We could be sister cities,” I suggested. “For our friendship.”

Boss Liu loved the idea.

“I don't want to get rich myself,” he said abruptly. “I want all the people from where I grew up to share the fortune. That's what I want to do next. That is to let my farmers have the same life as I do. Someone's writing a television screenplay about me. It will surely get made. Everyone will watch it, because people love success stories.”

“You said ‘my' farmers.”

He ignored me, continuing: “After we complete the macro-level stuff, we'll build two hundred hot-spring villas for farmers to use. That way everyone can enjoy the hot spring.”

“Separate from this hot spring.”

“Correct. Farmers don't feel comfortable coming here. And we're going to build a big canteen for the village, so in two or three years' time we can all celebrate the Lunar New Year together, like we did in the past.”

“In the commune.”

“Only now we'll have a spring gala. I'll invite the best singers and dancers to come here.”

My head swam with the contradictions. Farmers would become urbanites, but still celebrate the new year together as a village while keeping to their side of the hot spring. A cargo airport and freeway. A made-for-TV movie. It could be called
My Farmers and Me
. “Let's schedule a meeting,” Boss Liu suggested. “I really want to talk to you about what farming in America is like, and its most important characteristics.”

Subsidies and corporations came to mind. Instead I said what my lawyer wife had impressed on me: that the right of due process was more important than even the Farm Bill.

“In America, farmers own their land. Here, our collective owns the land,” Boss Liu said, speaking collectively.

Forget moving into the new apartments, I thought. Auntie Yi, fretting over her poppies, had no idea of the changes to come.

“What if residents don't like your plans?”

“I'll explain that I'm helping them. I'm making their lives better, and their child's life better. You have to understand, this will be a nationwide trend. It can't be stopped. [Chinese president] Xi Jinping has made developing the countryside his administration's priority. Mechanized farming is one method. So is agricultural tourism. We're doing both. I'm going on a study trip to Australia and New Zealand to see how they're managing it. I understand that their model is similar.”

I realized that, during our talk, Boss Liu had yet to say the word
rice
. He had grown up in Wasteland's poorest family but had excelled at Number
22
Middle School—where Ms. Guan was among his teachers—and tested into a top high school, then Tsinghua University, China's most esteemed engineering college. Where he majored in Chinese.

Rice, he said, was the agronomist Dr. Liu's field of expertise. She handled the paddies and he focused on growing the business. She smiled and nodded. She had barely said a word since Boss Liu sat down.

“The one thing we are not allowed to lose is the area's ‘farming characteristic,'” he continued. “That's what the provincial officials granting approval stress. We can develop the land, but we can't cause a net loss in arable land. So whatever we build on, we have to replace with crops. Replacing houses with high-rise apartments, for example. One day everyone will want to move into them.”

That was Boss Liu's way of answering whether Auntie Yi and San Jiu would have to move:
Eventually.

Boss Liu said that the head of the nation's Politburo had heard of Eastern Fortune's success and sent a team to investigate. Afterward he wrote a letter of praise, saying that if the company's work “continues to go well”—and by that, Boss Liu figured, he meant high yields, safe food, rising incomes, and no unrest—their business model could be promoted nationwide. He also informed Boss Liu that the nation's next annual agricultural forum would be held in Wasteland, at this hot spring.

“We need to build a bigger meeting hall,” Boss Liu told me.

Some brick village walls still held the faded painted
1960
s slogan
Learn agriculture from Dazhai,
the name of a model commune. I said that across China those could be refreshed to urge farmers to learn instead from Wasteland.

“Actually,” Boss Liu said, “I'm thinking of changing the village's name.”

“Wasteland is a great name,” I said. “Your new history stone out there on Red Flag Road says it dates back to the Qing dynasty in
1722
. That's older than the United States.”

“I have a better idea,” Boss Liu said. He paused dramatically and announced: “The village name will be changed to Eastern Fortune, after our company.”

CHAPTER
19

Major Snow

In the middle of December, I woke at winter’s dawn, which broke three hours later than summer’s sunrise. Wiping the steam from my bedroom windows revealed three inches of fresh snow atop the piled rice straw that fueled the
kang
. Mr. Guan had already left, carrying his auger—a salvaged piece of rebar—on his motorcycle like a lance to his Songhua River fishing spot. When I had asked how he navigated the bike on the ice sheet covering the road, he said: “Slowly.”

Now came the worst part of the day. I pulled on long underwear, jeans, thick wool socks, a hoodie, a jacket, and a hat and stepped outside into the minus-
18
-degree-Fahrenheit air. Our outhouse’s pit had not been emptied before the frost, and a brown iceberg protruded from its hole. It had grown noticeably over the weekend, when the Guan family convened for a niece’s wedding, and male relatives bunked with us on our
kang
.

A rural wedding, especially in the depths of winter, was an extended banquet that moved from house to house. Pork-and-sour-cabbage dumplings topped with garlic and black vinegar made the breakfast, served with steaming bowls of the starchy water in which they were boiled. Fruit and peanuts and sunflower seeds were constantly offered. The plate of salty fried silk worms reminded me of Frances’s dad and the first time I had come to Manchuria, to meet her parents. Once again I accepted the dish, and once again the room erupted in laughter at the face I made, biting into the worms’ pasty mush.

In a caravan of rented cars, the group went to Jilin city to take pictures beneath the silvery, rime-coated trees lining the riverbanks. Vendors sold roasted sweet potatoes and steaming satchels of chestnuts along with bright red candied hawthorn berries, which looked like skewered Christmas ornaments. Strings of white lights decorated the French Catholic cathedral’s gray brick façade, while across the street in the park an animatronic Santa Claus shook his hips while playing a saxophone next to his sleigh and reindeer. The sting of every indrawn breath and the clouds made from exhaling reminded me of Minnesota. As did the site of people windmilling their arms to avoid falling on the sidewalk’s black ice. Only now the scene was scored by women howling “
Aiya maya
” and men cursing “
Wo cao
” on their way down.

I left the party early and rode the bus back to Wasteland. Passengers slipped on the slop of melting snow mixed with coal dust that puddled in the aisle. Our breath fogged and then iced the windows, and I scraped a porthole to see the bus sliding precariously close to the river. The driver peered through a cracked windshield at the white road, and I wondered whether I had used up my allotment of safe rides. When the driver, with one hand on the wheel, answered his cell phone, sending the bus sharply to the right, the bus plunge that I feared would one day be my demise seemed imminent. The passengers, meanwhile, chatted calmly and stared at their own phones.

Viewed from afar, Wasteland’s houses looked pretty under the pure snow. But once back inside ours, I spent an hour sealing cracks in the plastic sheeting that covered our windows and inspecting the
kang
for fractures. I started looking forward to teaching, if only for the classroom’s warmth.

On the way to the elementary school, I made a running start and slid past the chickens free-ranging on the road. “Be careful!” a fourth-grader shouted, sounding as serious and grown-up as her mother. She wasn’t game for a snowball fight, either: the cold was something to endure, not play in. My lesson that day described a snowman, which none of the children had ever made. The classroom was toasty, but still the children sat in layers of pants and hand-knit sweaters, as plush and immobile as sacks of grain.

As the sun sank before four o’clock, I walked down Red Flag Road to San Jiu’s, passing the hot-spring entrance, wondering if one day it would have a Starbucks: Boss Liu had said he liked lattes. Red Flag Road was silent but for the wind. It lashed through the bare poplars, whipping the paddy snow into drifts.

San Jiu poured me a cup of instant coffee; since the stroke, our drinking days were over. He had not shown any emotion at hearing Boss Liu’s village vision, only commenting, “That’s a lot of plans.”

But he also said that Eastern Fortune was good for the area. Merging farmland, improving food safety, and adding infrastructure were positive changes. “As far as I’m concerned, this is the best era I’ve experienced as a farmer,” San Jiu said. “But a new era is beginning.”

Thirty years separated China’s landmark agricultural reforms, he noted. That brought a major change every two generations. If your grandmother was a sharecropper in
1925
, for example, you had your own plot of land in
1955
. If your grandfather worked a commune in
1965
, you held a thirty-year lease to grow and sell freely in
1995
. The problem, according to San Jiu, was that there wasn’t a large enough generation to implement the next step. “So by
2025
machines will take the place of many laborers. But that’s a natural evolution,” he said. “That’s progress.” Especially when it spanned a single lifetime. San Jiu started out as a teenager, opening Wasteland’s paddies by hand with a hoe.

What he didn’t like, however, was the continued assignation of farmers to underling or employee status. Or, as he put it: “Someone up here”—he raised his arm—“is always telling us down here what to do.” In feudal times, it was landlords. Then came cadres. Now there were managers.

“Village land is collectively owned, but in theory we farmers are the collective,” he said. “If you want to lease your land contract to Eastern Fortune and move to the city and work another job, good! You have that option now, and before you did not. Eastern Fortune provides that choice. If you can’t afford to improve your house or want to live differently, you can move into the new apartments. Good! Eastern Fortune provides that choice, too.”

But what if you wanted to continue working your land and keep living in your one-story home with a garden? That’s what worried San Jiu. “I’m just one person,” he said as we sat side by side on his
kang
, “but I think every family should be able to choose how they make a living.”

The Eastern Fortune model, he said, would be a win-win for an impoverished farming area, but Wasteland was comparatively prosperous. On the rice station’s notice board, only one family advertised land for rent next year, the equivalent of
1
.
6
acres for
10
,
000
yuan [$
1
,
640
]. Eastern Fortune’s rebuilt archway at the start of Red Flag Road was papered not with Seeking Work ads but ones offering farmers special rates on holiday tours to warm southern destinations.

“Could you find an empty house to rent?” San Jiu asked. “No. So you gave money to that teacher and moved into her house. How much did you pay them?”

“You know exactly how much I paid them, down to the last yuan,” I said.