IN MANCHURIA
A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China
Michael Meyer
Bloomsbury
365 pages (hardcover); Rs 399
Michael Meyer, a former Peace Corps volunteer, left Beijing, and moved to a village called Wasteland in the Chinese northeast - locally known as dongbei (northeast) and chronicled as Manchuria - one of the bleakest and most barren regions of the country.
He produced his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, from his former location. From Wasteland comes his second, In Manchuria - in many ways a sequel. The approaches in both are similar - studying a small geographical area to understand larger transformative forces. The tone, too, follows the anecdotal recounting of characters and experiences.
The tale is a mix of travelogue, memoir, history and reportage. Mr Meyer has not travelled to Wasteland to write about its history, or the politics of an old farming village metamorphosing into a company town. His wife Frances grew up in the village and this book is a tribute to the rustic culture and values and how they are getting transformed.
Home to over 100 million people, China's dongbei is peculiarly placed. Geographically, it is peppered with smog-riddled cities and rocky terrains. In the immediate neighbourhood of the Gobi Desert, it has a bitingly cold bleak weather. On the political map, it is tucked away between Mongolia, Russia and North Korea.
The book shifts back and forth through space and time, taking into account all these varied dimensions. Mr Meyer eases the reader into layers of Manchurian history - the Qing dynasty, the Russian proximity, the Japanese conquest, Maoist heydays, and the boom in heavy industry.
Squat in the middle of this loaded historical and political background we find a village with a peculiar name. A village with a handful of families which came into being only in the 1950s after its marshes were drained for rice cultivation, Wasteland is a place with "no museums, no local newspaper, no graveyards, no plaques, no library, no former mansions or battlefields", and, like the rest of Manchuria, and the maybe whole of China, Mr Meyer implies, defies history. Its population can hardly trace back the origin of its name.
It is the hunt for a missing history that drives the book. Mr Meyer has to repeatedly refer to the wider world of Manchuria in order to find a historical location for Wasteland. He browses through museum after museum, travels to the border, where the Trans-Siberian Railroad first cut through Manchuria in 1901 carrying settlers from Russia, examines architectural vestiges of the Japanese state of "Manchukuo" in the 1930s, to sites of former World War II prisoner-of-war camps and even a bombed bridge from the Korean War - only to be told by one of the many "dotty" north-easterners by the road-side, that "If you're looking for history, you've come too late."
So Mr Meyer has to keep returning to personal histories - his own as well those of the colourful village residents - especially Auntie Yi, a retired Communist Party worker, and San Jiu, who knows the very nerve of the village and its goings-on, besides the occasional way-farers whose one-liners provide the greatest insight into the rural Chinese mind.
In Manchuria is not only about "the transformation of rural China" as its subtitle says. It is also about a man living away from his country. It is not only a travelogue; yet travel does become a major trope in understanding and measuring the change - whether of people like Frances who do not want to live in Wasteland and move to larger cities or western nations for high-paying jobs, or the inward travels of foreign NGO-workers, Peace Corps volunteers who are welcomed, revered, respected yet remain outsiders.
The author's propensity to work in individual anecdotes - some as bizarre as a UFO sighting - may seem diversionary but these which help us understand the transformation best.
We are introduced to Eastern Fortune, a privately owned rice company and the book's main antagonist. The company was founded in late 1990s, by the village chief's former chauffeur, and by the time Mr Meyer arrives in Wasteland, has grown so much in influence that it pushes the local rice growers to vacate their lands and move into apartments it will provide. By the end of the book, Wasteland, in all likelihood, will even be renamed for this dominating corporate benefactor.
Mr Meyer suggests it is not the firm's operation that is at fault. Rather, it's the presumption to decide the future of all the villagers. The presumption is fuelled by a "nationwide trend", as Eastern Fortune's general manager puts it, endorsed by the top leaders themselves, including the Chinese president Xi Jinping. This is quite relatable to the recent economic history of the Asian giant, whose economic reforms and liberalisation-globalisation-privatisation, unlike our own, centred upon the rural. This determined push of erasing the past to erect a distinctly urban future is again a theme carried forward from Mr Meyer's first work.
As San Jiu sums it up, this new trend is nothing new. "Someone up here is always telling us down here what to do." Mr Meyer adds, "In feudal times, it was landlords. Then came cadres. Now there were managers." The subtext he implies is: like the Qing, the Russians, the Japanese and the Maoists, Eastern Fortune, too, is waiting to be lost.
In Manchuria becomes a study in transience, solitude and also of a family. Read it for an inroad into one of the many grey regions of history.
