IN MANCHURIA
A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China
Michael Meyer
Bloomsbury; 365 pages; $28
In Chinese, the region that was once the cradle of the mighty Qing dynasty is today rather prosaically known as Dongbei, the Northeast. Home to 110 million people, it has smoggy cities and bitingly cold weather. It can seem drab or worse to a visitor. But Michael Meyer has a more refined sense of history and poetry, and with his new book he seizes the opportunity to dig beneath the region's gritty surfaces.
Mr Meyer's motivation for writing his book is simple. "Since 2000, a quarter of China's villages had died out, victims of migration or the redrawing of municipal borders", as the country urbanises, he notes early on, adding: "Before it vanished I wanted to experience a life that tourists, foreign students, and journalists (I had been, in order, all three) only viewed in passing."
In Manchuria shifts back and forth among various genres. It is part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage and part memoir, but it is also a love offering to Mr Meyer's wife, Frances, who grew up in the unfortunately named Wasteland, the village that Mr Meyer chooses as his base near the start of this decade, and to the unborn son she is carrying by the time In Manchuria ends.
To tell his story, Mr Meyer alternates between chapters that examine a broad historical canvas and those focused on his daily life in Wasteland. There he sleeps on a kang, a combination bed and stove heated by burning rice husks; uses a rudimentary outhouse and a public bathhouse; and tries to adjust to a place defined "by what was absent", with "no local newspaper, no graveyards, no plaques, no library, no former mansions or battlefields".
In Manchuria is the second book by Mr Meyer, whose work has also appeared in magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. His first was The Last Days of Old Beijing, a well-received portrait of daily life in an ancient section of the city that is about to be razed in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics.
As a political and cultural centre of 21 million people, Beijing offers an almost endless supply of fascinating characters and historical details. Wasteland, elevated to village status only in 1956 and populated by a handful of families, is a more difficult subject, and Mr Meyer responds to that challenge with mixed results.
Applying a method that worked well in Last Days, he has found colourful locals to anchor his narrative, and capably captures the flavour of colloquial Chinese. Two residents seem especially noteworthy: the voluble Auntie Yi, a retired Communist Party cadre and a bit of a well-meaning snoop, and her taciturn brother San Jiu, who is rendered as the quintessential Chinese peasant, canny and deeply attuned to the interrelated cycles of nature, weather and the cultivation of rice.
But when Mr Meyer turns to the transformation of the Chinese countryside in recent decades, he is able to use his experience in Wasteland to illuminate much larger trends. A commune in its early years, the village is, by the time he moves there, on its way to becoming a company town, yoked to a privately held enterprise called Eastern Fortune Rice. Founded in the late 1990s by a former chauffeur of the village chief, Eastern Fortune grows so rapidly that when Mr Meyer arrived in Wasteland, it is urging - perhaps "pushing" is the better word - peasants to give up their land and homes and move into the modern apartment buildings going up near its processing plant. By the end of the book, Eastern Fortune's managers are even talking about renaming the village after the company.
This clearly has the support of China's Communist Party leaders. "You have to understand, this will be a nationwide trend," the company's general manager tells Mr Meyer in between visits from top officials. "It can't be stopped. [Chinese president] Xi Jinping has made developing the countryside his administration's priority."
Mr Meyer also has a knack for noticing amusingly incongruous details, and he employs that talent to full effect to convey the contradictions of contemporary China. He sips "a cup of Marxism brand instant coffee ('God's Favored Coffee!' the package promised in English)"; notes that Harbin is a city with "a Walmart bordering Stalin Park"; and, at winter's peak, observes peasant girls who "belted out Lady Gaga songs" as they watched a basketball game in a frozen schoolyard, "tethered together with shared MP3 earbuds".
After a year in Wasteland, Mr Meyer was ready to move on, and he now divides his time between Singapore and Pittsburgh, where he teaches non-fiction writing. But his interlude in Manchuria clearly taught him many lessons, perhaps the most fundamental being this: "The countryside was romantic only to people who didn't have to live there."
A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China
Michael Meyer
Bloomsbury; 365 pages; $28
In Chinese, the region that was once the cradle of the mighty Qing dynasty is today rather prosaically known as Dongbei, the Northeast. Home to 110 million people, it has smoggy cities and bitingly cold weather. It can seem drab or worse to a visitor. But Michael Meyer has a more refined sense of history and poetry, and with his new book he seizes the opportunity to dig beneath the region's gritty surfaces.
Mr Meyer's motivation for writing his book is simple. "Since 2000, a quarter of China's villages had died out, victims of migration or the redrawing of municipal borders", as the country urbanises, he notes early on, adding: "Before it vanished I wanted to experience a life that tourists, foreign students, and journalists (I had been, in order, all three) only viewed in passing."
In Manchuria shifts back and forth among various genres. It is part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage and part memoir, but it is also a love offering to Mr Meyer's wife, Frances, who grew up in the unfortunately named Wasteland, the village that Mr Meyer chooses as his base near the start of this decade, and to the unborn son she is carrying by the time In Manchuria ends.
To tell his story, Mr Meyer alternates between chapters that examine a broad historical canvas and those focused on his daily life in Wasteland. There he sleeps on a kang, a combination bed and stove heated by burning rice husks; uses a rudimentary outhouse and a public bathhouse; and tries to adjust to a place defined "by what was absent", with "no local newspaper, no graveyards, no plaques, no library, no former mansions or battlefields".
In Manchuria is the second book by Mr Meyer, whose work has also appeared in magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. His first was The Last Days of Old Beijing, a well-received portrait of daily life in an ancient section of the city that is about to be razed in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics.
As a political and cultural centre of 21 million people, Beijing offers an almost endless supply of fascinating characters and historical details. Wasteland, elevated to village status only in 1956 and populated by a handful of families, is a more difficult subject, and Mr Meyer responds to that challenge with mixed results.
Applying a method that worked well in Last Days, he has found colourful locals to anchor his narrative, and capably captures the flavour of colloquial Chinese. Two residents seem especially noteworthy: the voluble Auntie Yi, a retired Communist Party cadre and a bit of a well-meaning snoop, and her taciturn brother San Jiu, who is rendered as the quintessential Chinese peasant, canny and deeply attuned to the interrelated cycles of nature, weather and the cultivation of rice.
But when Mr Meyer turns to the transformation of the Chinese countryside in recent decades, he is able to use his experience in Wasteland to illuminate much larger trends. A commune in its early years, the village is, by the time he moves there, on its way to becoming a company town, yoked to a privately held enterprise called Eastern Fortune Rice. Founded in the late 1990s by a former chauffeur of the village chief, Eastern Fortune grows so rapidly that when Mr Meyer arrived in Wasteland, it is urging - perhaps "pushing" is the better word - peasants to give up their land and homes and move into the modern apartment buildings going up near its processing plant. By the end of the book, Eastern Fortune's managers are even talking about renaming the village after the company.
This clearly has the support of China's Communist Party leaders. "You have to understand, this will be a nationwide trend," the company's general manager tells Mr Meyer in between visits from top officials. "It can't be stopped. [Chinese president] Xi Jinping has made developing the countryside his administration's priority."
Mr Meyer also has a knack for noticing amusingly incongruous details, and he employs that talent to full effect to convey the contradictions of contemporary China. He sips "a cup of Marxism brand instant coffee ('God's Favored Coffee!' the package promised in English)"; notes that Harbin is a city with "a Walmart bordering Stalin Park"; and, at winter's peak, observes peasant girls who "belted out Lady Gaga songs" as they watched a basketball game in a frozen schoolyard, "tethered together with shared MP3 earbuds".
After a year in Wasteland, Mr Meyer was ready to move on, and he now divides his time between Singapore and Pittsburgh, where he teaches non-fiction writing. But his interlude in Manchuria clearly taught him many lessons, perhaps the most fundamental being this: "The countryside was romantic only to people who didn't have to live there."
© The New York Times News Service 2015