 We have a very exciting talk. I'm very very excited about this because It's about the China that Written by a Western observer that isn't quite the China we see for one thing. It's a it's a China that isn't urban It's a China that isn't crowded. It's a China that isn't polluted. In fact, are you really writing about China Mike? I'm not sure people here, you know, because that's the perception we get increasingly now so I'm very happy to introduce Michael because Michael's talking about the other China, which is where 60% of people live and just a little bit of information about Michael Michael started off in the Peace Corps in 1995 20 years ago In the joke in China is that one year is always like seven years dog years because there's so much transformation So that would put you firmly into the ancient category time Michael wrote one of my favorite books about Beijing called the last days of last days of old Beijing Yeah, and it's all about the transformation of the city and all the the dying bits of old Beijing which the old Hutong culture and So in his new book in Manchuria, he talks about a very different kind of of China Where he spends time in a old village that is his wife's ancestral village and spends a lot of time there Understanding how the transformation is coming forth in China. So I will leave you to him. Thank you It's afternoon I just want to do my part for the Beijing Winter Olympic bid for 2022 here by showing this was my my daily hockey game on the Forbidden City Moat in Beijing and I like this picture a lot actually because it it sets up something which I'm going to talk about Which is a lot of policy in China happens at the grassroots level and then slowly but surely the government or some administrative branch of it Will come around and codify it into law our hockey game started organically back in 1999 The next year somebody got and got lumber and put up boards. These were stopped by flags We weren't legally supposed to be here because this is a cultural heritage artifact here We're at the Forbidden City But the next year that didn't stop somebody from selling advertising space here And these boards became painted and then the next year people started selling drinks on the shore, right? So it became sort of sanctioned officially by the park in 2004 when they started charging admission to it Which is sort of the way things go in China now It's been shut down because how dare you skate on cultural heritage, right? So we don't have that anymore Today I'm going to talk about my new book in Manchuria a village called Wasteland and the transformation of rural China But first a little background. So we're rooted here of where we're going Here's Beijing. I'm going to talk about the northeast of China here this region Chinese say that their country resembles the outline of a chicken that would make the northeast its head It also makes Taiwan the egg which is a problematic metaphor that people say no no no we're just brooding over it We're protecting Taiwan here. So the region I'm going to talk about here is north of the Great Wall It's the area the size of Germany and France combined geographically It's also equal in population to Germany and France It's about a hundred and ten million people and I would argue that historically It's also sort of like the Germany and France of Of this part of Asia or the crossroads that a lot of different empires have clashed over Including Russia including the Korean Peninsula here and migrants that came north into it Japan and of course China proper Now it's 20 years ago this summer that I went to China by accident I was sent out here in Sichuan province in a town called Neijang. I was a Spanish speaker I applied to the Peace Corps. I had volunteered with United Farm Workers I thought for sure Peace Corps would send me to Latin America Peace Corps called and said you're going to Vladivostok and I said they don't speak Spanish there And they said okay. Well, how about Mongolia and I said again, that's not quite right and they said okay Turkmanistan which is over here and I said no and they said Kiribati Which was down here in the Pacific this went on and on and it wasn't until China was actually the eighth country. They offered me and they said it's not Club Med It's the Peace Corps take it or leave it and although I didn't speak any Chinese and couldn't use chopsticks I got on a plane and lived here in Sichuan for two years Which was a great place pre-internet especially to learn Chinese because I had to and then in 97 I moved up here to Beijing. I'm gonna talk really quickly I'm just gonna show you about four slides of what got me up to the Northeast. I lived in Beijing for close to a decade As the city started remaking itself to host the Beijing Olympics in 2008 I started noticing of course that areas I love neighborhoods I love places that I would used to go to dumpling restaurants where I would love to eat We're all being torn down and it got me thinking again about if you look at what Jane Jacobs did say with New York in the 1950s and 60s or Herbert Gans did with his work in Boston in the 1950s Where was the book about Beijing? Where was the book that explained Why old Beijing was being torn down? Frankly, was it a good thing or a bad thing and more importantly? Is it really a new thing? Beijing has cycled through changes over the last 600 years And so I moved to this courtyard apartment here or this courtyard home. Here's my bike My roof that needs weeding. I found this on the internet and it wasn't your typical courtyard home It was typical in the sense that post 1955 Beijing it was quite typical and that this former mansion or manner right more more accurately have been subdivided for several Families to move into after Beijing became the capital again This is just on the edge of Tiananmen Square that southwest corner of Tiananmen Square That's your law. It's the name of the neighborhood There are four courtyards here had been subdivided into and in 2005 I moved back to the very coldest Dampest room in the in the courtyard back here where I lived for three years researching my book the last days of old Beijing This room has three people this room has one person This room has an elderly lady this room where I'm standing has three people So we're all living back in here my landlord or my neighbors called me on dadiju big landlord Because I had two rooms and they all had one there's a cold water tap here You see where our laundry is hanging and there's a propane stove here that we would cook on this being 21st century Beijing I had no toilet, but I had really good broadband internet because they ran the wire over my roof and down Into my house the worst part of this and this was all preparation for living in the countryside was of course the outhouse which was down the lane a good four-minute walk and Starting in 2005 and the run-up to the Olympics Advertising started permeating every corner of Beijing to the point when I would walk into the toilet and squat down I would see this guy who was telling you all the symptoms you should be checking yourself for I also like you know in the round to the Olympics say that a rectification of names campaign Where direct Chinese to English translations such as this had to be updated so this became the proctology hospital But it's a reminder of one thing I really love about working in China and doing research in China and writing about China It's how direct and Frank the languages and how direct and Frank the people can be as well I need to find this guy's agent and see why he got this gig and if he knows about it This is the last picture I'm going to show you a Beijing and this was sort of a springboard for why I moved to The Northeast and started this next round of research I said I think it's time to write a book when the book you want to read doesn't exist I had not seen a book Demons are documenting those changes in Beijing And then my students got me thinking about the next book actually so I was quite lucky that in this neighborhood I taught the same kids grade four grade five grade six I followed them as they progressed and I got to know their families quite well These kids right here are grade four and you see they're wearing the school uniform the young pioneer Kurchoff and the yellow safety hat that all Beijing kids have to wear to other Traffic to their presence even though in our neighborhood. There's no cars right in this who's home. These kids are grade four These girls are my sixth grade students who I've known for three years grade four grade five grade six They're not wearing the school uniform or the red pioneer Kurchoff Because they don't get to go to middle school in Beijing their parents are officially YDRN They're from outside. They migrated into Beijing to work Per Beijing law and Chinese law Kids who are children of migrants can attend elementary school up until the middle school entrance exam Then they have to go back to their home village and attend middle school there and it got me thinking again Like I said, I'd live for ten years in Beijing. I'm right on the edge of Tiananmen Square I've done all the research for this book. Well, what now if I if I'm writing about urban China That's one thing but what's going on in rural China and really where are these girls going back to right? What are they going to find when they go home? So Dr. Lara this neighborhood is one square mile Vatican City is one square mile Vatican City has 700 people in it. Dr. Lara's one square mile has 57,000 people in it So the research for this book, you know took me hundreds of interviews And looking at history through the lens of the last 600 years of this neighborhood But now in order to follow sort of the story of what was going on in rural China I swapped this environment for this one And I think this is quite beautiful actually, you know in the Northeast they don't call their dirt just dirt They call it Pei Tu Di they call it the the black earth It's as rich and saturated as spent coffee grounds if you can picture that So I moved straight northeast from Beijing went over the Great Wall Up here into Zhilin Province, which is the heart of what historically is called Manchuria a word a quick word about the word Manchuria, you know in China today everybody calls it Dongbei they call it the Northeast This area has had many names over its past 400 years especially of recorded history and of recorded maps But the word Manchuria long predates the Japanese puppet state that was here from 1931 to 45 That was Manchukuo sometimes people confuse up. You're saying Manchuria isn't that Equivalent to saying the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. It's not and in fact the word Manchuria stayed in use even after the Japanese puppet state fell Even Zhou Enlai and Liu Xiaoqi used it in personal correspondence when they were talking about this region It didn't really become the Northeast until the Soviets left in 55 when they withdrew from Dalian and people started calling it Dongbei Dongbei Dongbei so to a Chinese person now they just know it as the Northeast, right? But frankly in the Northeast isn't a very good title for a book and I'm talking about historically In this region too, and so that's why I'm using the word Manchuria So I went 600 miles northeast of Beijing that's equivalent from getting on a train here at Union Station And going up to Central Maine in the same direction also again This area shares a long border the entire border with North Korea. Here's Vladivostok. I'm getting closer to my Peace Corps Or original offer here. I'm actually closer Geographically and culturally in many ways to Vladivostok and Pyongyang than I am to Beijing Okay, so the village I moved to is just north of Jilin here on the Songhua River, and it's called Huangdi or wasteland Just like in Beijing, I thought I might as well make myself useful while I'm here So I started teaching at the elementary school see these kids out here in February with their basketball They pounded this the court down to like a Wimbledon quality sheen here This was the school my wife went to that's how I ended up in wasteland of all the villages My wife since left went to Beijing for university went to Berkeley for law school and works Internationally, but as a little girl She went to this school right here and her mom went to this school as well And so in your nice introduction may you mention this is my wife's ancestral village The ancestral part of it goes back two generations, and that's actually really common for the Northeast It's another thing I liked about moving up here in Sichuan where I was a Peace Corps volunteer You could go into a village and see an ancestral tablet that went back 17 18 19 generations The Northeast is just if you're Han Chinese You migrated here much much much later perhaps in the late 19th century more likely like my wife's family You came up here in the 1920s 1930s from Shandong from Hebei fleeing famine or fleeing unemployment and looking for opportunities and so the entire region sort of has this pioneer American West aspect to it that I quite liked and frankly as a writer. It's easier for me I've been doing Beijing has in China. You always hear China has 5,000 years of history Although they say it China has 5,000 years of history The Northeast really recorded history goes back about 400 years Which is that you know equal to when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock or Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet So for me as a writer, I like this too. It was a bit more digestible When I first moved here, I thought I was going to be writing stories like that of Mr Mung Mr. Mung is a lumberjack who lives not far from Wasteland and he has claimed His claim to fame in China is being the first Chinese to see an alien an extraterrestrial Now northeasterners are a bit like Minnesotans are characterized or perhaps people from Maine are New Englanders in the States The rest of China's season was a bit eccentric or a bit touched in the head So it wasn't any you know, it wasn't a surprise to anybody I think that the first Chinese to say he saw an alien came from the Northeast Mr. Mung is somebody whose story I followed for a while actually. I thought it was interesting He he saw a flash of light on the mountain here one night went out to investigate Saw some wreckage didn't know what it was that night He was sleeping in bed when he found himself levitating passed through the wall was up in a spaceship And I okay and he said and then one of the aliens made love to me And I said okay, and I said did you tell your wife and he said oh no no, but I told the media which cracked me up So he kind of went viral before there was such a thing in China to the point where like Japanese tourists started bringing him televisions and other electronics a Malaysian man brought a Macau I Saw Mr. Mung as this great example of sort of this northeast pioneer You know spirit of self-invention because over time he did his story got he became so well known that He started getting job offers off this busted logging commune And he ended up getting a job running the boiler at a Harbin the provincial Capital at a university there which meant he got his little boy off the farm and into a middle school I saw him as this great example of self-invention My wife saw him as a great example of the northeastern art of bullshitting But I will say that his story kept getting better and better to the point now though when you see him He's embarrassed to talk about he puts his head down when students recognized him He says oh no no that was somebody else it wasn't me So I think it's great, but he extended the story to to include the fact that he actually impregnated the alien and That in 60 years on a distant planet. She will give birth to a peasant So he actually introduced interstellar you know class consciousness to these relations as well One thing I thought was so funny too about this is I asked him to draw the alien for me And he drew a series of co-incentric rings that got wider in the middle with little stubby hands and Tape her down did two legs and I realized that the only billboard between town and his commune was for Michelin tires And it was the Michelin man. That awesome. Yeah Okay, so I thought that was the book I was going to do I thought I was going to sort of replicate pearl bucks field research She did with her husband John loasing buck when they were going before she wrote the good earth when they would go out to farms and sort of collect Lore nursery rhymes recipes that sort of thing And I thought I was going to do a sort of encyclopedia of Northeast history and what kids were going through Living in the school there. I was going to focus on one piece of land Dr. Larr my Beijing neighborhood is one square mile. I thought in wasteland this village I would also focus on one square mile of land. Here it is in winter Here it is at thaw, which is about right now. You see that hey 2d that really dark soil Here it is come spring or early summer. I should say when the rice is in interestingly, you know This village they plant a very high quality Grade of rice and a lot of them grow it organically actually they were among the first villages to do this in this region Although the Northeast only grows about one-eighth of China's total rice Production they grow over half of the short grain sticky variety that we eat in sushi So it's like if you go across the map to Hokkaido the northern island of Japan They they grow the same crop and so farmers in this village are a bit unique too And that they can make a living growing only one crop a year planning in April harvesting in September So I do want to put a caveat in here that there's this is not a typical Chinese farm But then again there is no such thing as a typical Chinese farm a cotton grower is much different than a pork producer It's much different than a rice grower and there's geographic and land issues as well. So here's the crop coming in in summer Here's the crop when it's in full ear late August and then here we are at harvest So I love the foothills out here. It was a gorgeous place to live I mean as may said in an introduction look at the sky and these low-hanging clouds It really reminded me a lot of Northern California sort of Sonoma County without the valley if you can picture that the Soha River is here and these foothills hug us on three sides in this area. It's this fertile flood plain I took a long time as it does anything in China right that isn't recorded to figure out why the place was named Wasteland I did figure out that it was founded in 1722 or at least the Emperor had passed through then congee, but This village out here is named lonely outpost this village is named mud town This village is named the dunes and this village is named John Smelly ditch And so Wasteland sort of fit into this pattern right and what people started the theory is from locals anyway because again None of this is recorded officially that local administrative government would burn their records for cooking fuel You know in the 70s and 80s. Nothing's recorded anymore The theory as to why Wasteland is named this and these villages have these horrible names is because the land was so good They wanted other settlers to pass by and not settle down there Or they wanted bandits or soldiers to pass through as many soldiers did Japanese have been through here Russians have been through here the Guomingdong has been through here warlords have been through here Communists have been through here and so forth whether that's true or that's apocryphal. I can't confirm I Run at a farmhouse. So these are my onions here and my corn the outhouse is here closer walk no advertising Thankfully, this is my grape trellis growing here. It's a very simple farmhouse You know, I shared it. I have this half right here This half is owned by a manchu gentleman a fisherman named mr. Guan who's a character in the book and When you step inside the house You step up on a Kong a Kong is that that prototypical northeastern bed Made a brick and you feed it outside here. You can see the burn marks Outside the house's event into which you stuff dried rice chaff in the winter time these houses have rice chaff piled up beside them taller than the homes themselves And it's really hot, you know in the winter It's usually minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit here in winter time, but I'd be sitting in my shorts in a t-shirt And you start to smell like baked bread after a while. It's a nice. It's a kind of a nice sensation that you're baking atop Your oven here. I also like when I came home at night I would step up onto this stage, which was a nice place to do my notes because the entire house was this this Kong Now when I first moved there, there was only one road in the village. This is 2010 summer of 2010 Hongqilu again people dispute is this red flag because it's post liberation Communist Party red or is it Hongqi as in a banner a manchu banner Which was the name of the the military administrative districts that the manchu would use to govern their region No one can say for sure But what I do know for sure is that my first summer there I started getting this weird deja vu feeling that I was living the Beijing book again Because the first summer these trucks came in dumped these stones here Imported laborers from elsewhere in the province came in broke the stone by hand and started widening the road to double its current width That incensed auntie yee a main character in the book. She has been in this village her entire life She went to elementary school under the Japanese in Manchukuo. She can still sing the Manchukuo National Anthem in Japanese and count to ten in Japanese But she's a lifelong party member and she's a lifelong village cadre village administrator who is in the government And what incensed her about this change in the village is that the government did not pay for this road project The government did not pay to butter her house yellow either so it looked nice for passerby The government did not pay for this wasteland's first lawn here the strip of sod that tore up her poppies And the government did not pay for these street lights with this advertisement for the person or the entity that did pay for this project Which is a local agribusiness called eastern fortune rice, which I'll talk about in a second Auntie yee asked me a question That no one had ever asked me and hundreds of interviews in five years of writing a book about Beijing No one had ever asked me this question How do you know when a place has developed just enough? In other words, when do you stop that march toward improvement improvement improvement? Wasteland farmers are among the richest in the Northeast Which means they're among the richest in all of China your average Chinese farmer makes about $1,500 a year wasteland farmers make over 50% of more than that they make about 22 to $2,300 a year Most of them have their own homes, which may look a bit ranch shackle But on the inside they're quite nice and they're toasty you saw in that picture. There's a brand new elementary school They don't consider themselves a whole lot backward at all and many people there didn't feel like they needed a company to come in and Improve what they had already spent 50 years doing which is opening the patties originally opened by Korean migrants And then settling this region so for auntie. This was a big issue How do you know when a place has developed just enough and part of this book is trying to answer that question? Especially when it comes to what China is now calling the new countryside Come winter this was my backyard previously. I showed you a picture of the house here and there's corn This is my Manchu roommates drying corn out here traditional Manchu staple in winter time They're putting up these cranes are going up and by spring time these appeared and so this was like phase two of what was going on in the village This is a trend that started in about 2005 and is accelerating now to the national level the Northeast has often been a place of experimentation a policy experimentation and this village happens to be one in which his policy was being Piloted and now you're seeing it rolled out and promulgated nationwide and it was that a local company Could start sub leasing villagers farmland and then urge them to Explain this more of this in a second and they would urge the farmers to leave their single court your single-story courtyard homes Plow those courtyard homes under plant more rice there the farmers then would move to these high-rise apartments Which they would own and then they would officially become urbanites Right so in the company and the government's mind It's a win-win you're taking people out of what they deem as dilapidated housing You're doing a better use of land and you're moving people into efficient modern housing with central heat and so forth But as often happens, you know, and again, I understand the reasons for this I should say China's facing three very daunting things when it comes to farming right now One is the the workforce population is aging rapidly The average age of a farmer in wasteland was about 67 years old. There's no 4h clubs at school I never saw any of my students in the field. I wasn't even allowed in the field My wife is 38 years old. She grew up in this field. She has never been in a rice field So that has been going on for generations now a family saying no, no, no, you're going to school You know, you're not gonna work. This happens elsewhere in China, too But it's very market in this area So one of the shrinking workforce population of people to work on the farm to there's higher and higher demands for the land That does exist an area the size of New York State has been plowed under and made into urban centers And so China is trying to get more off of less land. It's trying to do a lot of land reclamation Projects. It's also trying to get higher yields off the land that it has One reason you tear down a farmer's house and plant rice there and move them vertically And the third thing is soil pollution and pollution in general is quite acute in China right now There's an area the size of the state of Maryland that was finally declassified last year That's too polluted to farm at all. And so that land is coming offline The government says look if everybody in this room right now all has an acre Plot of rice if we all come to the granary here dump that rice in a food safety official can't check How much fertilizer do you use? What's the soil like in your corner of the village? We think look it's much easier if you have a sort of come out We've had an agribusiness coming in and managing this collectively at a large scale It's easier for food safety, and it's certainly more efficient Now you can imagine what China's model for this is in every single briefing of the Ministry of Agriculture Maybe every is hyperbole in most briefings by the Ministry of Agriculture They cite the United States and they say look as of 1992 the American census stopped counting farmers Farmers are statistically insignificant in America now and they have been for for 20 years Also, you know in America now 90% of our farms produce about three quarters of our food So America has scaled up and China's urging American agribusinesses to come in and do this as well There's a Minnesota-based conglomerate named Cargill huge agribusiness that has a poultry operation in Anhui Where Pearl Buck set the good earth that processes 65 million chickens a year and already they're saying this is peanuts in the scale of China But the government likes this because you can put barbed wire around the area you can employ locals to work in the plant You can control the medicine the birds are given you control the food the feed they're given and so forth So wastelands a bit unique. It's a local grown agribusiness that's making these changes Another character in the book is Sanjo. This is Friends of my wife's uncle actually and he's 67 years old. He's representative of a typical wasteland farmer This is his house here, which he's improved over the years and he says look I don't like this idea because I've lived through 50 years of economic Experimentation in this area. I've lived through the Great Leap Forward. I live through the culture evolution I've lived through mandatory state procurement of grain and now starting in 2006, you know China abolished all agricultural taxes on farmers I'm finally free. I don't have to give any of my output to the state. I'm free of taxes I'm free to sell my crop on my own and he'll point out that, you know, rice has doubled in price in the last six years Now costs of production are up, too But he farms one and a half acres about the size of an American football field and on that mere plot Just picture an American football field. He makes a living, you know He makes about $2,500 a year which puts him among one of the wealthier of China's farmers if you're looking on average So the way this works so the program is such that Chinese farmers right now don't own their farmland, of course They don't own their field because all land belongs to the state But they now have the freedom to sublease their land and so what's officially happening is farmers like Sanjo are being Their doors being knocked on and a representative from an agribusiness will come and say look we want to contract your land You don't have to work it. Here's a contract We have the rights for three years to use your assigned plot. We'll farm it. You don't touch it We'll give you a guaranteed price, right? And so it's sort of hedging your betting if you sign that contract you're a saying I don't want to work on the Farm anymore. I want to pursue other employment in the city Let's say or have a shop in town But you're also betting on that fixed price the company is giving you is going to be a good deal three years out So you're betting that the price of rice won't keep rising and rising and rising which it had and Sanjo in the book I follow him through this period is very happy that for him short term. He came out ahead He made about 30% more money By not signing the contract and farming himself then he would have had to be subleased it to the company But he feels a lot of pressure and those pressures began at the very top of the Chinese Political chain here. This is then president Hu Jintao visiting Wasteland in 2007 He came to Eastern Fortune rice usually when a Chinese official goes to a farm They put on wellingtons, you know They put on the Zhongshan suit and they go out in the fields and they're they're you know seen as one of the People their photograph with the farmers Hu Jintao didn't bother with that, right? He went to the agribusiness itself Here's the manager who again is a local boy people don't have animosity toward him in the village necessarily not personally anyway But he's wearing a tie here, right not the Zhongshan suit and Hu Jintao is inspecting this and Eastern Fortune's big coup was they got their rice served at official state banquets. So now it's a well-known brand in China To the point now where our tallest billboard in town says dad's out on baby it's on Right make many make the the first village of the Northeast So now if you search the the name the village name on Chinese search engines It's sort of becoming a prototypical model of how agriculture could follow in the rest of China But there are big differences here first thing you notice these are flat fields that are very easy to do mechanized farming in and To scale up and to try to get more off the land and do it more efficiently The other thing as I mentioned to you is these lands are not stretching back 17 to 20 generations Sanjo the farmer I just showed you his family's been farming this since they got to the village in 1953 so people don't have the strong ties to the land and are a little bit more willing to sign it over to a company Let's say and the third is that the Northeast in general has been this hotbed of experimentalism over the past 400 years especially and I want to talk about this rather quickly actually because I want to sit down with May and talk but Briefly, I mean I'll talk about this for 10 minutes One thing I loved about working in the Northeast is how different it is from the rest of China And it's a point I want to make in terms of this Experimental agriculture that's going on there because for the past hundred years especially about 150 actually Successive regimes have tried to bend the Northeast to their will to their narrative and they've all failed Miserably and we can begin with the Manchu that the natives from this area who by the 19th century after they'd established the Qing dynasty and You know in large China to his present-day state with Xinjiang with Tibet some would say Taiwan Inner Mongolia the Northeast that by that point in the late 19th century more Manchu had left the Northeast and lived in Beijing Then they actually lived in their home region to the point now where all There's 6,800 languages on the planet and they say about half will go extinct by the end of this century But none were once as prominent as Manchu and I actually went up to this village North of Chichihar if you know this region where the last three native speakers of Manchu live We're down to three remaining native speakers. This was their failed attempt at luring tourists to this area They could not lure tourists because it's very politically sensitive to express minority culture in China Even if you're somebody like the Manchu who's largely been Honna sized or cynicized over the past hundred years. I did find this village though. This is Manchu script here This is at the school. It says passing on Manchu culture begins with me There is a teacher age 39 who was taught by his grandmother some of the language some of the language And so he's leading classes in teaching Manchu He can't do it during school hours though because ironically in China if you're studying a foreign language in school It has to be English. It can't be Manchu even if you're ethnic Manchu So the kids are doing it after school a little flicker left of that era Also, you know, there was attempts throughout the 1800s 1700s and 1800s the Manchu made to keep Han Chinese from migrating into this region They built a thousand mile wall called the willow palisade It's really more of a barrier than it was a wall This was the moat here the sandy area and these sunflowers were the edge of a berm that used to go up And these trees were once lashed together with rope and it was a borderland that would protect the area from Han Chinese Mongolians and Koreans from settling in here Wasteland is within the border of this. No one in my village knows about the willow palisade Not my Manchu roommate not the kids at school. My wife had never been heard of it. You're not taught that in school You're taught the great wall, right? You're not taught anything. That's minority culture officially, especially for the national exam There are some markers for the willow palisade, but here you see some Manchu farmers jumping on one of them Locals keep stealing the stone because it's really good quality stone So they break it up and use it for their homes or for their driveways instead Moving forward the Russians tried to occupy this region starting at about 1900 They built a railway going across, you know from Moscow to Vladivostok the Trans-Siberian that cut through it was officially the Trans-Manchurian it cut through the northeast corner of the northeast One big change that's happened in the northeast the last 20 years is that when I first visited Harbin This is Saint Sophia's Orthodox Cathedral a remnant of that Jeff Russian occupation You know in the 1990s you couldn't see this church from the street There were apartment blocks built all the way around it when you did get through the apartment blocks and came in This was all boarded up anti imperialist slogans on it and it was being used as a warehouse for a department store Right, but so many state-owned enterprises started going bust in the 1990s That the northeast devolved from the Beijing Central Economy and had to raise its own revenues And one way it did it was to restore a lot of this old colonial architecture and rebrand them patriotic education bases So unlike Tianjin or Shanghai or or Beijing or Guangzhou when you're in the northeast you can actually see these these Artifacts that are still existing around That you know in the heart of cities It's sort of like a picture of a board game called Empire and these playing pieces have been left behind You still see these old Russian railroad stations out in the middle of nowhere I noticed that the brighter the station the more desolate the surrounding was as it was urging you to get off The train, please please And you see that going forward to this is on the border with Siberia we see that old Russian Wooden water tower next to a brighter pink Soviet style box After the Russians came the Japanese who defeated the Russians in 1905 in the Russo-Japanese War in the book I talked about Jack London was the Hearst correspondent and was sent off on after the success of Call of the Wild To try to follow the battles and those remnants are all over the Northeast to Japan really true This is a Japanese built museum in Lushun in Port Arthur The Japanese tried to show they were a civilizing influence and they would be different than the Russians and in the book I interviewed the curator of this museum whose job it was to protect it during the Cultural Revolution And he said Joe and I did not make a phone call He's now doesn't know of any real situation in China where Joe and I actually did make a phone call to protect something Instead he boarded it up painted slogans on it put all the expensive stuff downstairs the valuable stuff Kept some rather worthless artifacts in his office and when the Red Guards would come to want to smash things He would he'd faint you'd act Oh, if you must you can take this and they would make a show of smashing it and go on their way This guy did such a good job that his job now in Dalian is to scrub that city museum It was the Boshi lie museum the disgraced former mayor of Dalian And so this long time party guy his job now is to take Dalian's museum out of the throes of worship Boshi lie You also see these old Japanese and Russian built hotels on the train lines when you're traveling the northeast you don't take buses There's trains that go to every nook and cranny of the area unlike other places in China This is a hotel in 1912 a Japanese built hotel note the road is being built here 1912 same hotel 2012 the road is still being built which I like But you know this has not been preserved and a lot of the things you see in the northeast Unlike other places of China. They haven't been posted with historical markers reminding you of what happened here This was the hotel to which the Japanese hid Puyi the last emperor of China who had abdicated in 1912 Had fled finally the 19 he tried he wanted to go to the British legation had hoped to go to Oxford The British wouldn't let him in the Japanese in Beijing took him into their compound They installed him in Tianjin for a while and finally in the 1930s brought him to that hotel and Kept him hidden there for several months because they said you can be emperor of our new puppet state called Or they didn't call it a puppet state our new independent state called Manchukuo, and this was Puyi's palace In China everything with Puyi now is puppet. He's the puppet emperor This is the puppet emperor's palace that he lived in starting in 1932 when he was made chief executive of this puppet state And when you go inside you see a puppet Puyi. There he is gleefully conferring with the Japanese general a Word about Manchukuo, you know this I shouldn't make light of something that was so brutal But I should say that people in the northeast have a very different relationship with the Japanese history than the rest of China It is true that Japan invaded in 1931 It is true that now the anniversary that's marked in the northeast is no longer the start of the Korean War But instead on September 18th at 9 18 in the morning all traffic stops Classroom stop an air raid siren blows and that's the time and the date at least the date in 1931 when the Japanese formally occupied or invaded the northeast here You see this this propaganda poster of unity the manchukuo flag on the left Japanese flag in the middle the Vishi Republic of China flag on the right And there's these reminders around town. This is a state executive building for Manchukuo Japan called this architectural style rising Asia and they still remain these buildings are still in use and You still see these Shinto shrines around town in Changchun. I asked the city official Why has this not been torn down and he said because people like to roller skate here that that was quite sweet I don't think it's true, but I like the pragmatism there And you do still see things like this unit 731 This is where Japan's answer to Joseph Mengele did his experiments on live prisoners of war over 3,000 people perished in this camp up in Harbin now when you visit it There's a middle school here, so you're looking at bone saws and stuff But you're hearing these laughter of middle school kids next door, which is quite incongruous, but also nice But I want to talk briefly about why the Northeast has a different historical relationship with Japan and the rest of China This millions to Manchuria campaign. This is a Japanese campaign. This poster says to Manchuria You see the Japanese flag here starting in the late 1930s Japanese farm communities were failing on a grand scale Japan had an idea that they could take second-born third-born kids Put them on a boat put them up in the northeast of China They could go to villages that they would rename after their Japanese home village They would replicate a society an agrarian society there these farmers were told they were getting 25 virgin acres That they would open by themselves It wasn't the case they showed up They were given a single bolt action rifle many of them and they were put in border areas that the Soviet Army was likely to invade When it finally turned its attention towards Japan or in areas where there was a lot of Chinese guerrilla activity to get them out of there 300,000 people came over mostly women and children remained in 1945 The men had been called up for the draft the Japanese army had turned tail and fled south as the Soviet Army started invading and This is a site. This is in Fang Zheng. This is in the Songhua River two hours downstream from Harbin Where thousands of Japanese mothers and their children waited on these docks for what they were told were going to be Japanese rescue ships coming to get them a Secret Japanese communique revealed that a general instead said their only alternative is suicide and in fact That's what happened the women put their children on the shore and stepped into the current here now Local farmers adopted many of these kids and raised them Fang Zheng is a very interesting city to go to it's actually a county because the street signs are in Chinese and Japanese You don't see the English language schools for after-school programs You see Japanese language schools the county official record says about one-fifth of all county residents have been to Japan a Lot of Japanese come over in August to sweep the graves of their mothers and the things that have been found To the point where in the 1960s Joe and Lai himself even opened a cemetery or dedicated a cemetery in the Town for Japanese farmers who had perished and the Chinese mothers that raised them and the orphans that remained and Joe and Lai said This shows that the Japanese were also victims of the war Japanese civilians also suffered from Japanese imperialism and a local historian This man agrees a Chinese man, and he's been trying to get this posted as a patriotic education base as well And he says like everybody else were in China calls our county traders But we had a very different experience with the war than the rest of the country did Now at that cemetery in 2011 a new monument went up honoring The names of 500 Japanese farmers who's at whose bones had been found recently Chinese nationalists from the south got on a train came up spray painted it smashed it a bulldozer took it under the next day Now the cemetery is closed again one thing I was interested about this book too as you're looking at this these cycles of agriculture that are going on this Experimentation but you also have this other cycle of history in the northeast that's still turning and is still unresolved To the point where there's still American POWs survivors of the baton death march who were held in this area This is their prisoner of war camp in the book I talked to a guy who parachuted in with only a Mauser And he was going to try to liberate these POWs amidst 30,000 Japanese soldiers who didn't know the war was over And he's led a charge to try to change the narrative of how this museum is going to be portrayed In the city right now so again these contested histories that continue on and on and on it goes forward to the Korean War When the US bombed the Yalu Bridge here and MacArthur was sacked for this operation Which I talked about in the book now when you go to it You just see you know here's the dotted line going to North Korea with the ferris wheel a plaque Just says the Americans bombed it November 8th and November 14th 1950 It doesn't tell you all the backstory Including in the book there's a man from my village who at 16 years old Waited on the Chinese side when the Americans were done bombing the bridge the river froze five days later And he and 130,000 other Chinese troops marched across and joined the Korean War and turned the tide against MacArthur and the Americans So a lot of what I'm doing this book is sort of like I said detailing this agricultural change But also link these historical changes You know the cult of Mao I've four more slides. I'll show you was quite strong in this area But it's diminished so much in recent years This is the last big statue of Chairman Mao that it remains is in Shenyang These are laid-off factory workers actually praying to him and bowing to him and leaving him flowers And when you sit here during the daytime you see family after family not irregularly coming up and offering prayers to Saint Mao looking for work three more slides now back in the village though Any prop communist propaganda, you know is fading on these old granaries because people have moved on to the capitalist stage of their lives These old slogans like agriculture studies. Dajai, which was a commune that was popularized in the 1970s are also fading away To the point now, you know, this is what our village looks like now Our entrance is an advertisement for the agribusiness for Dongfu rice instead and Right as I was ready to leave the head of the company called me in for an interview They were very open with me and very welcoming and he said oh, I have good news I said what he said we're changing the name of the village and I said I like wasteland. That's a beautiful name It's older than the American, you know, the United States of America itself. He said no no I have a much better idea. We're gonna change it to Eastern fortune after our company So the village is literally transformed from not only economically a company town, but it's transforming to geographically and physically a company town as well. This is the last slide. I'll show you this was Mr.. Guan my roommate he decided to Least his fields to the company But for one last time his family got together and harvested their fields by hand and did it the old-fashioned way Where they spread their grains out on the road to dry And this was all end on this is sort of, you know going off into the sunset It was really something to watch that all of those generations of farming Just there goes off into the road and they signed a contract and they were all done and they're quite happy I should add so I'll stop there. Thank you So What occurred to me was You've written about the last days of old Beijing and you're writing about the last days of wasteland basically And now you're living in Singapore and you're gonna write about Singapore. I'm wondering whether the Singaporeans should be concerned But what is this urge about Capturing something that's dying or moving away. What what spurs you on to do that? I don't know if they're actually dying as they are just Cycling right when you take the long view here that but the last days of old Beijing is sort of a joke as a title It wasn't my idea frankly But when you it makes sense because in that book I talk about there's always been a last days of an old Beijing that every dynasty or every regime that's occupied Beijing remade the city in their image, right and with the farming techniques that are going on here You know an audience member at a previous talk was really helpful He said but you know you're just describing what they did in the 60s with communal farming But now it's a company managing it instead and a character in the book actually said like when we first came here It was landlords that were running our farm or controlling our farm that it was village cadres You know administrators and now it's a manager that's changing like that So I'm interested in capturing those moments where think the needle is just about to tick over I think the reason for that is I love reading books that are a hundred years or 200 years old that do that as well I still like reading dickens. I still like reading, you know, I teach Moby Dick to my students for that same reason You see these industries dying so transformation is what gets you going You know one of the problems I think you you've mentioned before in previous interviews, too Is that the problem of writing a book about China and because of China's geopolitical significance nice? Everybody expects you to sort of explain China I mean some of the the in Manchuria for example It's not a very easy China book in that sense because it goes against all these sterile types And I've also heard it compared to pro-less bucks to good earth and in Patagonia Patagonia. Yeah, nobody is asking Chat went to sort of explain Argentina or yeah, or or or something like that, but somehow do you find you have to fight against this? Waiter expectation. It's exhausting actually and you know, I'm the writer Ian Frazier who wrote Great Plains Which is another model for this book. He said to me, you know your challenge is what your problem here is I said what he said you're ruining the fantasy I said what do you mean? He said Americans have our face of the deluge of China information now every day Newspaper radio television by very good correspondence Those are all portraying a China of a certain a certain kind of China and a certain topic of China when you write about happy farmers and you know The vicissitudes of history and this this bending narrative that Japanese maybe aren't so evil or considered so evil in this area You're going against that fantasy in a way, right? And so but that's what's fun as a writer I suppose right. I mean you're facing this right now with the book you're doing, right? Yeah, I'm ready with a one-child policy and and one hand you But you know I think the issue that writers want to do is they want to have a book that has a shelf life that goes beyond You know a newspaper, right? So you don't want a book that's full of statistics and numbers because those change over time you want to get a sort of Greater truce that will encapsulate a certain period in time You can't keep up, you know in Beijing they put out a new map of the city now every it was six months I think they're not like three months because the roads change so quickly and so forth and so do people's lives I mean, that's the hard thing with you know Capote faced it within cold blood where he couldn't finish the book until the criminals were actually executed, right? I'm not comparing myself to Capote here, but I had a hard time with the Beijing book, too I'm like where does this end because the changes are so ongoing you keep chronicling You know and the same thing with this book where it was like well Where's my cutoff point where I say aha the change has occurred now we can stop But at the same time you're also writing and what gets me interested in this book is also because what's unusual about it Is this sort of a timeless quality about it? There are things that don't change Yeah, or they change very very slowly and that is very different from the China the rest of China I structured this around that that the seasons which are eternal, right? The farm is always going to be there It's been there for a hundred years Somebody else might be planting it or picking it, but the farm will probably still be there in a hundred years So that's the eternal and then there's that ephemeral wheel of all these regimes all these people who have walked across this land and Changed. Yeah, do you I mean, okay So talking moving on to a so-called hot button topic current about China the urbanization issue Which is what you've talked about to that this China's on this big move to get all the people a lot of the people Into cities and it's for the first time ever now. It's more urban than So where does it all go? Where do all the heart happy farmers go? Well one solution recently I thought was really ingenious is wasteland this village recently became part of Geelyne City and So I thought well, that's interesting. There's no airport. There's no rail link There's no new road or anything, but what a lot of cities are doing now is simply saying we have to meet these urbanization Targets we don't want migrants coming into the city anymore and adding to our social Roles right for social welfare benefits and so forth. We'll just redraw our municipal boundaries And so one way they're making those targets, you know, they're still farmers, but they're considered urbanites now legally Which I think is really interesting. So there's that aspect of it And then there's the other aspect of people's people are choosing to become urbanites, and I think that's one thing that Surprised me. I thought after this wave of migration of the coast in the late 1990s early 2000s People would have said well, no, no, we should stay home now Life is actually better here or it's better to be in a third-tier city than in Beijing or Shanghai That really isn't happening yet. Now having said that I couldn't find a house to live in in wasteland I thought everybody everything I'd read, you know, you could walk in and just walk into a house There'd be a cow that needs milking right in front everybody went to the cities But wasteland is comparatively prosperous And so some people are coming back there after college because if you're classified as a farmer If you can't find a job in the city, you still hold title to some land back in your village And you have your house in the village as well. So that's your job security. That's job security Isn't it interesting? And so some people come back to wasteland, but then make a they have a car So I feel like Porsche SUVs because it's China, right? And some of them make that 25 mile commute into Jilin City every day Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah One of the things I found very interesting about China is there's no romance of the countryside there not at all Everybody's like, oh my gosh, that's the place you get sent to, you know, during a, you know, miles time or something It's it's not at all romantic. It's full of Outhouses and smelly shit and we don't ever want to go down. We want to come back But do you find a reversal of that now? I mean What we're hearing right now is complaints about pollution overcrowding in cities Um, is there a change, you know, especially since you're describing such a happy blue sky place That's a good question. And I do see I once I try to explain, you know, in China, I hate the word peasant I'm glad we're using the word farmers. I think we need to put the word peasant to rest But Chinese farmers consider themselves manufacturers more than they do farmers, right? People would say to me everything You're seeing is a manufactured landscape here This was once, you know water this deep that was from the Songhua River on a flood plain People created these patties and so forth everything is manufactured. I said, oh, it's really pretty in this You're looking at a food factory essentially we're factory workers We just produce food and I say well, you know in the States people like to call themselves growers now And that was just a foreign concept to a Chinese farmer like no, no, no, you don't understand We are factory workers out here. We do this right? There's no Romanticization of the farming profession and like you said in the countryside about being in the country side There's no romance having said that though It's amazing to watch my wife Transform leaving Singapore, Hong Kong or we came from Manhattan from New York City when we moved to this area together And the idea was she'd quit her job in New York City come with me to this village where her family was And we'd explore this place together and I would collect all this lore and she would just take a year off Well, she lasted a week, you know, she's like you've got to be kidding me. I cannot stay here. I'm not using an outhouse I'm not sleeping on that bed that's heated by rice I want my career back and she went on but part of that too was she felt like she was a little girl again And she felt she was getting the pan the head and sort of being slotted back into the family But one thing she taught me that was really interesting I see this more and more from people when they talk about the countryside is that the countryside is still alive to them It is a living repository of their memories So every place my wife and I courted and dated in Beijing is gone We have no legacy to show our son where we had our first meal our first movie together where we went for a walk Completely torn down But if she goes back to her village, she could show me the exact spot her grandmother would sit her down in the mud or on the dirt Right while her grandmother seated the patty and for her like she would start crying like Unexpectedly like I can't I have a connection back to the past with this place that I could never have in a city Yeah, but you do see that more and more people with the pollution things to the point where Eastern fortune rice is cashed in on this and they built a hot spring resort in the village That's modeled on a Japanese resort ironically with the Japanese resort where City kids come and they can pick organic strawberries pick organic watermelons, right and their parents are very happy because they're like Oh, see they're getting some fresh air on stuff. So there's that weird We're not gonna go fix things with our hands Exactly, yeah, this is a really interesting Impressive to the point where the gardener the gardener at the hot spring resort the kids won't pick the watermelons They sort of kick at them like soccer balls So the parents will say hey gardener come here. Can you pick the watermelon for the kid? Pay you five quay for that, right? um, I Think I'm glad you brought up your wife because one of the things that in Manchuria is is a love story Isn't it in a sense? It's it's hard to do and about China, but yeah Did Was this in a sense something of wanting to capture where you came from for your son But you finish off the book talking about news of your son right cycle Yeah, yeah I wrote one version of the book and then my wife got pregnant and I threw away that version and started over Because it's really different when you're writing not only for a general audience But I wanted to leave something that would tell my kid Here's what mom and dad were up to before you came here But more importantly, here's where you come from because our son's growing up in Singapore now. It's not the state It's not China. We wanted to have some connection back to this place. He might not discover that till he's 15 Yeah, we'll see my wife won't let him near China and who knows by that point He might have condominiums and spas and all sorts of things in wasteland Yeah, the manager of Eastern fortune rice is a big Starbucks drinker He's a huge Starbucks fan and gilin is too small of a city to have Starbucks And he stated that his mission is to get a Starbucks in wasteland Yeah, he wants to open up the resort. I don't put it past him at all I'm gonna open up the floor to some questions now because I always think that's really interesting Arnold yeah, hi Arnold is My name is Arnold Zeitle and I'm teaching in China as well That's great After I read the book I Felt that What was missing was any much reference to the Communist Party and its effect on people on the people you write about and I wondered if this was a choice you made or Whether it was Reflecting the way people felt about the party because in my experience people were rather not talk about it Yeah, you know, it's really different than Beijing because I was living on the edge of Tiananmen Square People would say why don't we speak up about the Hutang being destroyed? We were all here in 1939 people ran from the square into our neighborhood in the village Honestly, it never came up. It never came up in the index for the book There are several entries for the Communist Party because of the history of the region and stuff There's actually more than that But in the village itself Everybody knew the village committee and it was auntie was one of them But it was all personal it was all like your Chun Zhang was was, you know, Wang Chun Zhang He wasn't the Communist Party. He was just Mayor Wang in that regard Yeah And one reason for that may be that a lot of the people that moved to this area were soldiers They were working at the Air Force Base that isn't too far from here. That's mid-moth ball Now they use it for practice flights So they had a very different cultural revolution because there were so many soldiers there red guards didn't really come out and raise rabble and they had a very different 70s and 80s for that reason too and so that might be another reason there isn't a lot of like Opposition or anger yet at things that have been going on because it's been a steady trajectory upward there Yeah, nominally so yeah, not officially, but yeah, yeah, he has That's true. So the company is officially owned. It's privately held with different investors and I did a due diligence report I paid somebody hired a lawyer to go through all their files. Was there any suits against them? What's the local press about them and stuff who's on the ownership documents and so forth and what that turned up? Is it's privately held with backing and you couldn't tell who all the investors were it could well be that a g-lean Somebody in the g-lean government's a backer or no, yeah Maybe could tell say a little something about who you are first. Yeah, that would be great And Kendall and Sansa pressed I Noticed that several of the buildings including where you live were warm you described them as warm How did they get warm and how did they stay warm? I mean, what was the heating that bad? It was all that kind was burning dried rice chaff and then that heat emanating outward and then we'd seal everything inside with you Know with saran wrap essentially with those with 3m plastic things on the inside You know tape them all shut, but it was all fire. It was all fire heat Against minus 18 it gets so hot in there. You really would sit in shorts and a t-shirt Yeah, amazing People aren't romanticizing that they're like my roommate was so happy the irony is the house I lived in in Beijing I thought I was writing a book about it being torn down is still there And it's now part of a who's on this full of art galleries The farmhouse I lived in is gone and now rice is planted there instead Because my roommate was very happy to go out and get an apartment instead. Yeah My name is Steven Dutton. I'm a grad student in Asian Studies at Washington and so I've been to China a few times I've lived there for a while, but I've never traveled to the Manchuria area But I did take the trans-Siberian up into Siberian I read a lot about Siberian literature things like that In the Siberian experience and one of the sort of the great fears of Russian Siberia is that the Chinese will kind of Overwhelm what was or is Russian Siberia and have a really, you know a large Chinese presence there looking for opportunities that maybe where crowded China is Poisoning problems. There's so much space and nothing really happening in Russian Siberia So maybe that's a new opportunity for Chinese people Do you see any evidence of of this exodus of Chinese people? I mean it's a serious concern for from the Russian end from from what I saw sure and you know from the Chinese side They'd say oh, we're just taking back territory That was ours during the Qing dynasty because at one point the border went quite further north in the Amur River all the way up to the Pacific Coast there What you see right now on the border towns I give you up to Heihe Which is the northernmost town on a rail line there? There's a little free trade zone on the other side there with the with an island You know with the mall and stuff But what is happening along the that side of the Amur River the Russian side is Russian villages and municipalities are leasing out Huge tracks of land to Chinese farmers or more officially Chinese agribusinesses like bingtuan Which was a one time an army-owned? Farming group that's taking on I talk about this a little bit in the book to you these leases They're taking on over the border to grow produce for shipment back into China actually yeah So as far as the exodus of people going there I think it's hard enough to get people to go to Heihe or Suifen or some of these border Monjoli for that matter But yeah, the Chinese often will say like well, but that was ours during the Qing dynasty Yeah, there is this theory that you know this appears that China as it rises is going to get more militant and more muscular Who knows right suddenly in the Southeast Asian in the East Asian region They've been more disputes over the agutai and the islands and all I haven't seen anything about the Siberia but well, it's a big deal that with food policy because China has huge holdings now like in Brazil and Argentina The New York Times had some line that the Chinese investment in Brazilian soybeans has lifted X amount of people out of poverty Right because the market is so big there Ukraine Large leases of land then the flip side is happening too like right outside of wasteland like four villages over Singapore just broke ground on a 500 square mile super farm. They're calling the Jilin food zone Which is Singapore backed with Chinese? Help but the idea of this 500 miles. That's a size of Los Angeles by the way 500 square mile That's a funny thing is that they actually want to raise organic rice and pork for export to Singapore Because Singapore is its resource issues So it's like on the one hand China's outreaching outside of its borders, but on the other hand other countries that are reaching inside the China I'm sure there's a quid pro quo here behind the scenes of what China will get from Singapore in exchange for this But and we'll see if it ever comes to anything too just because you break ground doesn't mean it'll happen. Yeah Hi I guess I'll go first. My name is Alina and I've done a lot of work in international development not really in China But it's interesting what you're bringing up because there's a lot of parallels talking with Africa in terms of the elderly farming and issues between rural and urban But I was curious in what you were talking about first of all if you were an English teacher because you didn't explain what kind of teaching you were doing And then also what the attitudes were towards you as an American So I'm assuming that it was fairly rare for them to have Americans or is that wrong is there a special attitude because of the US and and what their sense is about that I Think overwhelmingly in the last 20 years of China being an American as an asset people are quite friendly towards you about that in This region it was interesting because people immediately wanted to have the Korean War for example and that drew people out The 16 year old soldier I talked about fought against the Americans I'll tell you about that in the book. He didn't really fight but he was there And then the history of Japan and everything else what was different in the village than being in Beijing and saying I'm an American It's in the village when people would see you in the middle of nowhere Like I must look this Dr. Spidell when I was a Peace Corps volunteer Dr. Spidell was waiting for me 20 years ago in Sichuan and you would align I don't know if you remember this You said when people see you walking down the street think of a kangaroo bouncing down your hometown street That's a similar reaction right of shock and so in Beijing someone would see me and say you know You should show my boy. Yeah, what were you from? But always in the Northeast somebody would say you sure she's idea Whose family do you belong to right and so they were slotting me inside my clan much more than I what they were Internationally, which that was interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I never got anything positive or negative actually For a while cuz I had cold water I had a big huge beard for like a hive of bees beard like yeah, and One time I shaved and I was at a hotel and I shaved and I came back and I saw a shopkeeper and she said oh Where you been I said, oh, you know I've been Working and running around she said oh, there's been a Libyan walking around here And I said a Libyan and she's yeah, this guy looks like you but it's a big black beard and Libby I haven't be the news that summer. You know so that was it. I was like all this time. They've been thinking I'm a Libyan Okay, we'll play that too. Yeah Hi Isaac long time no see Doing well you look great. Thank you Actually also wanted to ask about Americans, but oh she covered that so I'm wondering how long did it take for People to get used to the idea of you coming to their village and writing a book I mean was that a very weird thing for them or it seemed normal It was the exact same as in Beijing and it was the exact same as in Sichuan it when I was a Peace Corps volunteer It wasn't until I left and came back that people went on nevermind when I was there the first go-round It's what's he doing? What's he eating? Where's he been? What's going on? Who's his phone? Who's visiting him that sort of stuff when you leave people go back around their lives And then when you come back, there's a sort of surprise to like oh you live here. Oh you came back Okay, and then they forget it really it's amazing each of the scenarios I found the best thing to do Isn't to try to stay on for three months to get to know everybody introduce yourself stay for a while pull out and Come back and Francis my wife was in Hong Kong working And so I was making this really awful commute quite often, you know once a month at least And I always felt when I got back that first week was always the best reporting I could do because people were completely at ease like oh you're back. Whatever and they would ignore me. Yeah Yeah My name is Marshal Lee. I just wonder whether you come across any Christians and people like that because as I recall the Catholic Church used to have pretty strong presence in the Northeast Thank you. Very good question. There's a French Catholic cathedral that remains in Geelyne City There's a in the book. I write about a Virgin Mary grotto in Geelyne City that exists from a French priest There aren't Buddhist carvings in the Northeast or many Buddhist temples for that matter There's a lot of churches the Scottish Presbyterian Irish Presbyterian Go back to something Arnold said earlier I did make a choice to admit something from this book actually on my coverage and it wasn't about the party But it was about the North Koreans who live in this area. There are villages all around Wasteland So she won quite near to my house Where North Koreans have come over illegally and have settled there because Korea one thing I don't have time for in this Talk, let's see how you read the book Korea plays an enormous role in this part of the country Including bringing rice and cultivating rice for the first time in the 1910s and 1920s So there are North Koreans there There's a Christian church in Wasteland Which I chose not to write about because they're the penitent. They said, please don't we don't we were church It looks like a church as a cross. They said we'd rather not be written about even though I'd go to service there So I chose to leave that out there aren't Buddhist temples or Taoist temples in this area, but it's a Christian church interesting and When I the only time I got in trouble with the police or sort of questioned by the police was after two years They called me in and said are you a missionary and I had approved to them I wasn't and the way I did that was I showed them on computers my Beijing book Me pictures of me teaching in Beijing right and everyone police officer actually said like oh You're only a writer and it was the only time I'd heard that in China like that's a relief, right? I'm not a missionary, but yeah, that that's a part that's a story. I didn't want to disclose, but it's there definitely good question I am a member for UNESCO task force for intangible cultural heritage and two years ago I was in Daliya for a conference for cultural and creative industries and we suggested that we asked first if there is subtle documentation of intangible cultural heritage in particular from that area So they were hesitant Talk about it. Maybe I misunderstood because I was surprised somehow and because they are somehow fan of UNESCO, but When I was asking about locals and this area with invasions Russian Japanese only you said 400 years of History is there a reason why or my question? I did not formulate well my question But then you documented high definition promote and Japanese came there the first high-tech it type of Subsourcing, you know, so everything was in place. They could play is there what is the explanation or maybe misunderstanding on my side? Well, it's interesting. I mean a lot of things in China if it's not, you know, Han Chinese culture It's not necessarily volunteered right away as oh, this is cultural heritage or intangible cultural heritage And there's a Argument or sort of I wouldn't say an argument but a conflict with that UNESCO site not far from Daliya The Kuguru tombs those ziggurat like tombs that are shared by North Korea and China right who owns that patrimony But because everything when you said intangible cultural heritage in the Northeast everything I flashed on with this Manchu heritage Or it was indigenous forms of opera There's a crosstalk comedic opera called our Ren Jun which is very popular in the Northeast that that would count as intangible cultural heritage But again, that's not something like paper cuts or peaking opera You know, I mean, it's not it's not it doesn't have the the beauty or the the pedigree of those other things I'm happy to send you a list if you'd like some suggestions Yeah In the back we have time for one more Thank you, I'm very sure if I'm an educator, but I've been to China into that and so I was interested in this I really wondered what happened to the three girls that you showed the picture of yeah, who went back to the countryside and You said you were going to follow up on them. Yeah, I'm sorry. Good question I should end the slide with them sometimes so The kids I taught in Beijing now I'm writing their you know Recommendation letters for university and stuff which was odd because some of them did not sit for the college entrance exam They went to paid colleges instead, right? The students who stayed in Beijing all got placed into a national level University they did quite well the students who left Beijing and went back to the countryside I'm sorry to say many of them if they're continuing their studies are going to paid schools Or they got into places like like yinzhou or is it Jinzhou north of Beidaihe that little town of they went to like second tier third tier regional universities As opposed to a Beijing Shanghai Guangzhou Chengdu Wuhan sort of thing. Yeah, so there's a huge difference there There's a big paper coming out by much of Stanford educational researchers talking about that Enormous chasm if you track kids who maybe go back and they're with mom or grandma and grandpa aunt uncle All their lives are happy and stuff and even if they score really high on the entrance exam Their quotas are so much different from those areas and they are from Beijing or Shanghai bigger cities They don't have places even if they score high enough They won't be given a place in a really quote-unquote good school I don't know if this is gonna matter so much in 20 years because Chinese tertiary education is going through such I think positive reforms, but it is a golf right now for those kids and the 18 year olds You know, they're devastated by this their friends are all going to school in Beijing or Shanghai And now they're going to places like yinzhou, you know, it's out of what is I don't even know the name of the town Yeah, well in Joe. Yeah, I used to think that before moving to China living their work He actually think wow the Chinese system is very meritocratic You just do sitting exams and how well you do goes to the next level But of course I discovered and I went there really wasn't the case at all Where you come from where your household registration is really does help in terms of getting you those crucial extra points And it makes a difference between you going to the equivalent of the Harvard of China or The Arkansas State, yeah, nothing against Arkansas State Yeah, yeah, so yeah, it's not meritocratic. It isn't as much as we think we are That's another book by the way Yeah, Singapore and the disappearing You mentioned that the title is a manchuria. You said the word manchuria has a sort of a romantic connotation something like to buck to and You know the sort of Samarkand those kind of places of you know, somewhere exotic and and and and and so What do you think it is about Manchuria that's sort of sexy and unknown and sort of beckoning? Yeah, there's so many, you know for a while there like from 1880 to 1935 maybe I'll tell Manchukua It was a prize for explorers to reach you know to go out in the train there to reach it by foot a lot of Americans made the journey in the book. I talked about some of these travelers who did it So it did once have this sort of cultural cache of getting there and in the old days I'm like Harbin was once the most international city in Asia at 45. What is it 53 nationalities speaking 43 languages or something? I should say that the Chinese version of this book will not use Manchuria in the title because Manchuria to a Chinese speaker doesn't mean anything today if you say Manjo even it doesn't have the same connotation as don't they does today because now when you talk about the Manchu where they're from when you talk about Japanese occupation when you talk about 18th century history the Chinese history books use don't they even on the past It's had different names like don't don't sunshine the three eastern provinces and so forth now It's all don't they don't they don't they northeast northeast northeast and so the title of the book in Chinese There's a very famous Chinese book called Journey to the West So the this book in Chinese is Journey to the Northeast a sort of play on that which the Chinese publisher is happy They're like oh Chinese readers will get that I Was kind of curious about this part you mentioned about that having a book on Chinese Are there any requests to sort of change and alter any content so far? I'm up against one and it's not what I thought it would be I thought it would be all the Manchukuo history. I thought it would be Japanese occupation I thought it would be the local historian trying to get Japanese, you know civilian deaths mark There was a horrible Quote-unquote battle called the siege of Changchun in 1948 where the communist army led by Lin Biao the man who wrote or put together a mouse little red book encircle the city of Changchun Which was once the provincial capital of Manchukuo? Trap the civilian population inside Trap the Guomingdong soldiers inside there and a communist general who wrote a book about it the book was banned Called red blood white snow Said Hiroshima took five seconds and killed a hundred and sixty thousand people estimated Changchun took five months and killed a hundred and sixty thousand people by starving them And so that is a passage in the book where I talked to survivors of that era and that's one thing right now They've been I'm holding firm on it. I can't take it out. It's a crucial Historical nugget of why the Northeast can't became what it did What do they want to take it out? Yeah, because you can't there's no official history of this and in Taiwan There is but you can't say that the official history is the Northeast fell without firing a single shot Well, it's true because they starve the soldiers out. So that's yeah, if I put this in there That's the only thing so far that they're the only thing in the whole book believe it or not But it's a big sticking point and maybe that's why they know that and now I'm in a horse track I don't want a horse train though. Yeah, that's a whole other topic Yeah It's a one last question from anyone You think no, I'll be around to if you guys want to talk afterwards. I'm happy to Please Did you feel anything or do you hear anything about Chinese dream And how does it relate to locally a specific of this part? Yeah, that's I hear about this allows in Beijing last week and I hear a lot about it there in the countryside now I hear about the new socialist countryside. That's what you hear out there all the time We're building the new socialist countryside new farmers new agriculture. Yeah, but Chinese dream is more on the national stage Yeah, thanks so much for coming everybody. Bye