In Manchuria Read Online Free

Lawsuits . It contains three hundred answers to questions that include Can the village committee profit from individual farmer’s land? (No.); Does the village committee have to make its books open to the public? (Yes.); Is it true that hitting one’s wife and child is the home’s concern, not the village’s? (No.); and Do farmers have the right to petition the national government? (Yes.). I am half expecting to read Does winter bring the biggest change in temperature? when San Jiu returns and says, “That book wasn’t so useful. I knew all of that.”
    He switches on the television, showing the national broadcast of the 7 : 00 news. We sit with shoulders touching on the kang . One of the lead reports details the government’s measures to rein in inflation. As it does every week at our shared meal, the mention of money leads San Jiu to ask me the price of gasoline in the United States. “What about pork? A bottle of corn oil?” For the next half hour we recount the cost of garlic, the cost of chives, the amount for tuition, the cost of rent. Everything is up, he says.
    “Including the price of rice,” I say. “That’s good for you.”
    “Seed is up, fuel is up, water is up, electricity is up. It’s funny that the only thing that’s gone down is taxes.”
    In 2006 , for the first time in its history, China abolished all taxes on farmers.
    The landline telephone rings. San Jiu lifts the receiver. His side of the conversation sounds like this:
    [Ring] Uh!
    Uh?
    Uhhh.
    Uh. [Click]
    There is no Chinese character for Uh , but in the Northeast it stands for many. It can mean Hello ; Good-bye ; I hear you ; I agree ; More, please ; and This is a difficult question to answer simply. San Jiu turns his attention back to the evening news. He tells me that someone is coming to join us. I don’t recognize the noun describing the man’s place on the family tree, and San Jiu explains it slowly, in the same tone I use when diagramming a complex sentence on the blackboard for my middle school students.
    “He is the son. Of the stepbrother. Understand? Of your mother-in-law. Of your wife’s mother. Is it clear?”
    “Uh.”
    And therein lies the truest answer to the question of what really led me to Manchuria, and to—of all the Northeast’s villages—Wasteland. Not, initially, because of an intrinsic attraction to its history and ways. That gripped me over time. The root attraction was much simpler: a girl.

CHAPTER 2
    Quid Pro Quo
    Thirteen years earlier she stood in San Francisco International for the first time, thinking: So this is what it feels like to be a foreigner.
    Frances moved through the airport cautiously, unsure where to turn. In China you just followed the crowd. But here she had to go through immigration, retrieve her bag, make a phone call, and find her connecting flight—alone. Everything was so quiet and orderly, she couldn’t even hear her own footsteps. Carpeting in an airport? She watched a row of fountains sending water into the air. How wasteful. Beijing could use that stuff, she thought.
    The people around her were patient and pleasant. The customs agent brought over his friendly dog to sniff her. There was a red channel and a green one. She didn’t know where to go; she was twenty-one, and had never been outside of China. A white man in the arrow-straight line pointed and advised her to answer “No” to any questions.
    She presented her passport to the officer. Its photo—taken when she was an English student at university in Beijing—showed a waif with shaved hair and sallow cheeks. The clerk looked at the long-haired, buxom woman before him. He insinuated that the passport wasn’t hers at all but belonged to a man. Internally she panicked before realizing that the officer was demonstrating humor. “Ha?” she responded uncertainly. He smiled, and she tried again. “Ha ha ha!”
    “Welcome to the United States.”
    Inside the terminal, a man in his seventies, well dressed and