From Beijing's Hutongs to a Village in the Northeast, This American Is Curious About the Voices and Lives No One Records

Michael Meyer thinks Third Aunt, a character in In Manchuria, said the wisest thing he has ever heard: “How can you ever know when a place has developed just enough?”

“I want to give some context to everything we see on Chinese soil today,” Michael Meyer told QDaily. Meyer is an American writer, born in 1972, and his subject is a China in the middle of rapid change.

It has been 22 years since he first came here. In 1995, at 23, he arrived as a US Peace Corps volunteer, taught English in Neijiang, a small city in Sichuan, and studied Chinese at Sichuan University in the same class as Peter Hessler, the American writer who would go on to publish River Town and Country Driving. Around then Meyer also acquired a Chinese name: Mei Yingdong.

Two years later, speaking fluent Chuanpu — Sichuan-accented Mandarin — Mei Yingdong finished his Peace Corps service and moved to Beijing. He studied Chinese at Tsinghua University, taught at an international school, wrote about China for The New York Times, Time, the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, and fell in love with and married a Chinese woman named Dan (English name Frances). He stayed in Beijing for ten years.

In June 2008, Meyer published his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing. It is about the transformation of Chinese cities, and it follows the demolition of Beijing's hutongs and the people who lived in them. Unlike a reporter who interviews fast and writes faster, Meyer's method is to move in, watch, talk, and only then write.

On August 8, 2005, he moved into a hutong on Yangmeizhu Xiejie, in the Dashilar area in the southwest corner of Beijing, to gather material. Many of his neighbors were migrant workers who had come to the city for jobs. Meyer used the same public toilets and bathhouses they did, read the Beijing Evening News, and watched for the demolition notices that kept appearing on the walls. By the time the 2008 Olympics opened, most of the hutong was gone. Meyer's life there ended, and the book was finished.

“I want readers to know that every city has a history of tearing down the old and putting up the new — Beijing is no different. In fact, with the hutongs coming down in such numbers, we may have witnessed Beijing's last round of it. I also want to tell readers what preserving cultural heritage actually means. Are we preserving imperial Beijing? The Beijing of the 1920s? Or the Beijing of the 1950s?” Meyer said in an interview with The New York Times.

While he lived in the hutong, Meyer also taught as a volunteer at the local elementary school. Because of the rules governing what the authorities call “children accompanying migrant workers into the city,” those students had to go back to their home villages to sit the middle school entrance exam once they reached sixth grade. “I was curious about the place they were about to go back to. I had been looking for a book about the changes happening in rural China, but there was no such book. If the book you want to read doesn't exist, you might as well write it,” Meyer said.

So in 2010 he moved to Dahuangdi Village, in Gudianzi Town, Changyi District, Jilin Province, and started a new book. The village is also his wife's hometown. As with The Last Days of Old Beijing, he settled in — volunteering at the village elementary school, talking with residents, sleeping on a heated kang, digging through the library — and stayed for two years.

Meyer comes from Minnesota, in the American Midwest. As he sees it, “people in the Northeast are warm, hardworking and honest.” Rural life there reminded him of home.

Early this year, In Manchuria, his record of how rural China is changing, finally came out in a simplified-Chinese edition; the traditional-Chinese edition is titled 《在满洲》. We took the chance to talk with Meyer about the China he has come to know, about nonfiction writing, and about what he plans to do next.

“In the story of modern China, the protagonists are the capital and the coastal cities. Look at those glittering cities! Those new towns! The cities that host the Olympics! The congested, stratified, overcrowded cities! I have written plenty about the transformation of Chinese cities, and what I care about now is life in another world. I knew that in the Northeast I could look into China's past. What I hadn't expected was that in Wasteland I would catch a glimpse of the country's future,” Meyer writes in In Manchuria.

In the new book he argues that over the past four hundred years the Northeast has “perhaps been the most influential region in China.” The land has passed through the hands of Manchu, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese peoples and states. Its “rise and fall” is “a microcosm of the ups and downs of modern China.” In the Northeast you can find railways named after the tsar, Russian Orthodox churches, Japanese red pines lining the avenues, government office buildings from the colonial years, the “puppet palace” of the last emperor Puyi, the places where Japan held Allied prisoners of war during World War II, and bridges American pilots bombed during the Korean War.

That tangled history has meant that most people who told the region's story started from a position they had already chosen. “The national feeling and enmity between China and Japan in particular have pushed most researchers to speak from their own particular positions, to analyze historical data with subjective attitudes already formed, and to interpret it in their own favor,” wrote Lin Zhihong, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Modern History of Taiwan's Academia Sinica, in his essay “The Production and Reconstruction of Colonial Knowledge: Antiquities Surveys During the ‘Manchukuo’ Period.”

Meyer, by contrast, seems to write this history from a view of the past that reaches past nation and ethnicity, and looks instead at the relationship between land and people. “For the past 200 years it has been a land of dreams and experiments, but nearly every human plan for it has failed. In the end only the land itself has stayed this rich and this alive, outlasting all of it,” Meyer said.

A New York Times review said that In Manchuria “moves between genres — part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage, part memoir.” That is also Meyer's particular way of writing and of “constructing meaning.”

To get there, he read his way through the materials on the South Manchuria Railway, which Japan ran in its colony, held at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress; flew to Colorado and San Francisco to interview American veterans in their nineties who had served in the Northeast during World War II; flew to Tokyo to interview soldiers who had been sent home from the Northeast; and consulted scholars at an American rural development institute. The 18 pages of references at the back of the book suggest how much work went into it.

All of it was in service of answering a question the Chinese writer Lin Yutang asked in 1936: “Who can be China's translator?” Lin's My Country and My People and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, the American writer who won both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize, were among the first books about China that Meyer read, and they have stayed with him.

Unlike those earlier chroniclers, Meyer is writing about a China that is changing fast. The press therefore likes to line him up against other writers of contemporary China, such as Peter Hessler and Evan Osnos. Meyer himself doesn't seem to care much about the comparison; he simply records what he sees and thinks. And unlike writers whose angle is heavily political, he is drawn to the lives of the people at the bottom of Chinese society. That matches the writer he loves most, the American John Steinbeck, another Nobel laureate.

From The Last Days of Old Beijing to In Manchuria: when we asked Meyer what he makes of how fast China is building, in its cities and in its countryside, he pointed to a line from Third Aunt in In Manchuria, the wisest thing he says he has ever heard: “How can you ever know when a place has developed just enough?”

In In Manchuria, at least, Meyer gives us a concrete case: Dahuangdi turned into a company town. In 2000 Dongfu Rice Industry, now the village's largest company, was founded. Unlike the “old-fashioned” ordinary farmers, Dongfu's founder grew Dahuangdi's first organic crop. Government departments then began serving Dongfu rice at official banquets. In 2007, Hu Jintao, the president at the time, came to inspect the village and the company. That made Dongfu a “model.”

Dongfu went on to contract nearly all 13 square kilometers of land in Wasteland, with only a few families, Third Uncle's among them, still unpersuaded. The company also “offers farmers apartments in exchange for their existing living space.” Once it has the land, though, it will “bulldoze the old houses and turn the ground into farmland.” And “very few people have agreed to move.”

Meyer is 45 now, and teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Hong Kong. He has not stopped writing about China. This fall he will publish his third book on the country, Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up, a memoir of how he found his way into this land, covering Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Gansu and Beijing. He is also thinking about a book on China's coastline, a book on Taiwan, and a book on Benjamin Franklin.

“I think of books as a conversation that has gone on for a thousand years. I only want to write one when I have something to add to it. I'm curious about the voices and lives that official history and the mainstream media never record,” Meyer told QDaily.

What We Talked About With Michael Meyer

Q = QDaily

M = Michael Meyer

Q: In an earlier interview you said you moved to the countryside because you wanted to read a book about how rural China is changing, and that the research became In Manchuria. But why did rural change interest you in the first place? When did it start, and how?

M: While I was researching my previous book, I was teaching at a hutong elementary school in Beijing. The sixth graders had to go back to their villages to sit the middle school entrance exam, and I was curious about the place they were about to return to. I had been looking for a book about the changes happening in rural China, but there was no such book. If the book you want to read doesn't exist, you might as well write it. So in 2010 I moved to Dahuangdi Village. No plan, no phone call ahead — I simply dropped out of the sky. I just wanted to wander around the village and let things happen.

Q: When you talked with people there, what part did your identity — your appearance included — play? Did they treat you differently than they would treat other Chinese people? Or are people in the Northeast simply very sure of themselves?

M: People in the Northeast are warm, hardworking and honest. They treated me as a teacher, not as a foreigner. They were well-mannered, nothing like the bad stereotypes people hold about farmers. American farmers are the same. They're some of the smartest professionals I have ever interviewed. They have to understand their land and their craft, or they don't eat.

Q: I remember you also said in an earlier interview that the Northeast actually resembles your home state of Minnesota. Did that make you see the region differently?

M: Yes, the rural life and the people here remind me of home. I think “culture shock” could only happen to me if I had to put on a tie and work in an office!

Q: What does writing a book like this mean to you? You once called it a loving gift to your wife, Frances. Chinese writers rarely dedicate a book to someone, but in the West it's common.

M: My son was born while I was writing this book, so it is really written for him. One of the unexpected gifts a writer gets is that his children come to know him through his work. I hope my son will come to understand his mother's family history and culture, because it is likely to change a great deal over the next twenty years, and he can go and see it for himself once he has grown up.

Q: The New York Times said the book moves between genres — part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage, part memoir. How did you handle so many forms, sources, histories and threads? Why write it that way?

M: I want to give some context to everything we see on Chinese soil today, because the past foreshadows and shapes the present. So I put journalism, autobiography and historical material together. I write this way partly because that is how I experience things. Right now, for instance, I'm researching a book in Boston. I'll put a conversation with an Uber driver, eighteenth-century source material, and an afternoon interview with a Harvard professor into the same book. That's how I construct meaning.

Q: Writing about the history of the Northeast, you describe the influence of Russia, Japan, Korea and China on the region. But your view of that history seems to reach past nation and ethnicity and look at the relationship between land and people. Why do you see it that way? And what do you make of the arguments between countries over the Northeast?

M: You're right. There are many ways to answer that, but what draws me most to the Northeast is its otherness. For the past 200 years it has been a land of dreams and experiments, but nearly every human plan for it has failed. In the end only the land itself has stayed this rich and this alive, outlasting all of it.

Q: In In Manchuria, facing the wave of tearing down the old and building the new, Third Aunt says a line that has become a classic: “How can you ever know when a place has developed just enough?” You had also written The Last Days of Old Beijing — so what do you make of how fast China builds, in its cities and its villages?

M: On that score this book is really reflecting something else, isn't it? That certainly wasn't my intention, but perhaps that outcome can't be avoided in Chinese nonfiction writing today. I think Third Aunt's line is the wisest thing anyone has ever said to me, in China or anywhere else in the world.

Q: In an earlier interview you said that for the past 20 years you have been trying to answer the question Lin Yutang asked in 1936: “Who can be China's translator?” You also said you are trying to understand this land from a more balanced perspective. Can you explain what that means? Who, in your view, “can be China's translator”?

M: Lin Yutang's question is the second wisest thing I have ever heard. In his book he sets out the strengths and weaknesses of foreigners and of Chinese people translating — interpreting — China. When I write, I try to stick to the facts as much as I can. What local people say and think matters far more than what I assume, but when I bring in history that the people in my books don't know themselves, I inevitably amplify my own point of view as a reader too.

Q: In Manchuria (published in Taiwan as 《在满洲》) has been out for a while now. Has any of the response been interesting?

M: Last fall I did a book event in Taipei and talked with readers. Many of them had parents or grandparents who had fought in the Northeast, some of whom died there. Meeting them and hearing their stories was moving, and fascinating.

Q: What other places are you curious about? What do you hope to learn?

M: I also want to write a book about China's coastline. I have just traveled the whole coast, and I'm writing about fishing villages and coastal Chinese culture. I'd like to write a book about Taiwan too — I learn something new every time I go. My next book, Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up, comes out in October. It is set in Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Gansu and Beijing, where I met my wife. It's a memoir of how I found my way into China.

Q: In an earlier interview you said your favorite writer is John Steinbeck. Why? What effect has he had on you?

M: John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he never took himself too seriously. He called himself a “corny” writer. He was always the best writer of place. Take the first chapter of East of Eden — that is a master's work in describing a place. He wrote it at his desk in New York, three thousand miles away, with no photographs and no reference material. And over his career Steinbeck wrote journalism, fiction and nonfiction.

Q: What subject have you most wanted to dig into lately, or thought about most?

M: Besides the third book of the “China trilogy,” which comes out this fall — the first two are The Last Days of Old Beijing and In Manchuria — I'm also writing a book about Benjamin Franklin. As it happens, Franklin himself was fascinated by China. He once printed a saying of Confucius on the front page of his newspaper, and he was always trying to learn from Chinese inventions and technology.

Q: Generally speaking, what stirs your curiosity? Do you have a fixed method for looking into something? How do you judge whether something is worth it?

M: I think of books as a conversation that has gone on for a thousand years. I only want to write one when I have something to add to it. I'm curious about the voices and lives that official history and the mainstream media never record.

Q: If you were to give advice to a young person growing up fast, what would you say?

M: Don't wait for permission. Write, travel, investigate the subjects that interest you. People with power — editors, for instance — always say “no”; saying “no” is their job. So don't ask for permission! Set out, go through the experience, and convince them to say “yes” afterwards.

Q: Why is your Chinese name Mei Yingdong? Does it mean anything in particular? Where did it come from? I remember your first Chinese teacher gave it to you?

M: How I hate that name. My first Chinese teacher in Sichuan said my name, Meyer, sounded like mai'er, which in Sichuanese means “selling your son at the market.” But I would still rather people called me Mai'er than Mei Yingdong!

Cover image and in-text images provided by the author.