HOP AND’ E IN A CHINESE ‘ WASTELAND'
US writer discusses the transformation of rural Northeast China
Seemingly at odds with news that China’s villages were emptying, when author Michael Meyer first arrived in Northeast China he had a difficult time finding an empty house to rent. He ended up sharing a house with a Manchu rice farmer in Dahuangdi, or “Wasteland,” a village in Jilin Province.
Meyer spent two years from 2010 in Dahuangdi, his wife’s hometown. He documented his experiences in the village in his 2015 book In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. The Shanghai Translation Publishing House published the Chinese edition in China in January.
In interviews with Chinese media, Meyer, currently a professor teaching writing at Pittsburgh University, explained that his initial plan was to write a book about the folk customs in the village, but his time living there allowed him to see “a miniature of the transformation of Chinese villages.”
In his book, he outlines many innovations he saw taking place in the village, such as leaflets bearing stock tips and real estate advertising to tabloids featuring gossip about the private lives of local officials.
Meyer first came to China as a volunteer teacher in 1995. He taught in a local primary school in a rural area in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province during which time he became interested in Chinese culture. Two years later, he moved to Beijing, where he found a teaching job and studied Chinese at Tsinghua University. It was also during his time in the capital that he met his future wife, Feng Dan.
In 2008, he published his first non- fiction novel, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, in which he described the dying traditions of old Beijing life. The Chinese version debuted in 2013, making him a wellknown name among Chinese readers.
In an e- mail interview on Monday, Meyer shared with the Global Times his inspirations for his books and his views on China’s rural areas.
Q: Did your opinion about China change after living in Northeast China for two years?
A: That’s a good question, and one I think about a lot when reading stories from the region, which are all about the “Rust Belt” of crumbling Stateowned manufacturing bases. But the cities are – and have long been – a comparatively small slice of Dongbei’s [ Northeast China] character, and economy. I know I am biased, having lived in rural China for many years, but I think the countryside should not be painted with the luohou [ backward] brush that Chinese and Western writers often use to describe it. Of course, this has long been an issue, dating back to the writings of Pearl Buck.
To answer your question: Dongbei turned out to be even more interesting than I expected; the village named “Wasteland” is not one at all.
Q: In your previous book, The Last Day of Old Beijing, you focus on the transformation of urban areas, while this current book focuses on rural areas. How did you become interested in China’s transformation from the past to modern times? A: You know it’s time to write a book when the book you want to read does not exist. After volunteering in a Beijing hutong elementary school, I watched about half of my Grade 6 students have to return to their home villages to sit for the middle school entrance exam, since by law children of migrant workers must leave city elementary schools and return to where their household is registered. After researching the changes to Beijing and urban China, I started wondering, “What are those kids going back to?” So I moved to the countryside to find out. As for my interest in China’s changes, I feel like I’m really writing for a reader 100 years from now, since my understanding of China is shaped by writers born 100 years previously, such as Lao She and Lu Xun and Liang Sicheng and the foreign reporters and missionaries who described daily life and society as China transitioned into 20th century modernity. One thing I didn’t enjoy while working as a journalist was the assumption that what we see today is somehow a fait accompli, and not the result of past events.
Q: During your two years there, did you notice any cultural traditions that were changing or disappearing? A: When I was researching The Last Days of Old Beijing, I interviewed the Tianjin- based writer Feng Jicai, who
talked about his project to document folk tradition. He said he could tell, when approaching a village, the degree to which folk culture had been eroded based on how many television satellite dishes were on the houses. He railed against the “monoculture” that television brings. I have seen the process first- hand in my Minnesota hometown, too. In Wasteland, people really loved their satellite dishes! But I would still hear dongbeihua [ the Northeast China dialect], and still hear about superstitions, and still see a traditional wedding and funeral and eat traditional dishes and sleep on a kang [ a bed with a stove underneath that provides warmth] with corn cobs drying on the mantle outside. But what I didn’t find was a catalog of these practices, a handbook or memoir of what it means, in essence, to be a Jilin native, or a dongbeiren [ Northeasterner] as a whole. I did, toward the end of my research, find a thick textbook that explained the origin of the Northeast’s place names, which was a wonderful resource: It filled in my mental map of the area, and made it clear how the local economy had once been tied to the Manchu court, producing saddles for the cavalry and manning the Willow Palisade checkpoints.
Q: Do you think Wasteland village represents the changes taking place throughout China? A:
I think the central government would love for it to be a representative of the possibilities of change in rural China. It has become a sort of modern- day Dazhai [ in Shanxi], a place to learn from. But there’s a lot of reasons the modernization and land- reform has worked there: It’s a flat landscape suited for mechanization; it grows
a single crop, sold at a high p price because it’s organic; i its villagers are willing to leasel their plots to the locally g grown company which pays themt a fair price. So I think Wasteland can be representative, but it’s not a model that can be easily exported to all parts of rural China. It’s also quite young, in terms of a model – it will be interestingi to see how things play outo now that many families’ former homes have been torn down and they have moved into apartments.
Important names in the story
Pearl Buck ( 1892- 1973): Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu. US writer widely known for her best- selling novel The Good Earth which focused on the lives of farmers in China. The book won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first US woman to win this prize.
Lao She ( 1899- 1966): Pen name of Shu Qingchun, one of the most significant figures of 20th century Chinese literature, best known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and play Teahouse.
Lu Xun ( 1881- 1936): Pen name of Zhou Shuren, a leading figure of modern Chinese literature who advocate writing in vernacular Chinese, best known for stories The True Story of Ah Q and A Madman’s Diary.
Liang Sicheng ( 1901- 1972): Famous Chinese architect and scholar widely known as the father of modern Chinese architecture. He is famous for advocating heritage sites such as Beijing’s old city wall.
Feng Jicai ( 1942- ): Tianjin- based writer who has focused on the protection of traditional villages for many years.
Willow Palisade: System of ditches and embankments planted with willow trees built during the Qing Dynasty ( 1644- 1911) to restrict movement into Manchu lands.