For passengers in the sealed compartment, Trains that cover the seventy miles between the cities of Jilin andĬhangchun do not stop here. Usual sky, the station has been rendered all but obsolete: the new highspeed Painted bright pink andĬrowned with a peaked tin roof whose cobalt-blue matches Wasteland’s Three-wheeled motorcycles saunter and sputter to the crossroads’ Agriculturalīank, seed store, noodle shops, and train station. On school days I never see anyone break it bicycles and Red Flag Road’s single traffic sign displays a speed limit of forty kilometersĪn hour. At school, a red nylon propagandaīanner lashed to the accordion entrance gate urges us to PREVENT HAND, FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE and, less helpfully, announces that WINTER BRINGS THE BIGGEST CHANGE IN TEMPERATURE. Which, given today’s high temperature of minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit, makes Next up, in early January, is Slight Cold, The previous solar term was Major Snow, which fell on schedule,īlanketing Wasteland in white. Twenty-four fortnight-long periods describing the seasons based on the sun’s at December’sĮnd-or, as Chinese farmers know it, dongzhi (Winter Solstice), one of To my left, the sun sinks over the far horizon. Tufts of dry husks sprout through the snow, resembling ripening brooms. School, where I volunteer as an English teacher. Minutes ago, I set off from the coal-fueled warmth of Number 22 Middle My native Minnesota, but there are no icehouses to shelter in here. Slices through the paddies like the courses plowed across frozen lakes in The view is flat, lifeless, and silver fresh. I lean into a stinging wind and trudge north up Red Flag Road, Snow-covered rice paddies, reflecting light so bright, you have to shield Some villagers welcome the new apartments and crop prices the company offers, while others don’t. In his book, Meyer finds that a privately owned rice company, called Eastern Fortune, buys the farmers off their land and moves them into company-built apartments, in order to use the land to grow rice. “So they gave them these very undesirable names, but in fact, they look nothing like what they are named.” “Although the villages were all founded in the early 18 th century, the closest I could come to why they have these names is this sort of Greenland, Iceland name reversal – where the people who originally settled these areas didn’t want other migrants to come there, they didn’t want bandits to stop there,” says Meyer. So, Meyer spent some time investigating why the villages have these names. There is Dunes, Mud Town and Lonely Outpost. Villages surrounding Wasteland have similar names. “And then there’s this younger generation that says ‘no there’s nothing for us here, we want to leave.'” “In the village, there is that divide right down the middle where there’s an older generation, say people over age 40 like myself, who want to stay and want to keep their roots there,” says Meyer. He explains early on that Wasteland was his wife’s childhood home, however, she had no interest in returning to the village. Meyer spent three years living in Wasteland, while his wife pursued a legal career in Hong Kong. Despite its name, looks nothing like a wasteland, according to Michael Meyer, author of “In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China.” There is a small village called Wasteland in the Northeast China region.
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