‘In Manchuria’ doesn’t live up to its promises

“In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China” (Bloomsbury Press), by Michael Meyer

The title of this book was so promising. An American writer who speaks Chinese settled in a rural village in a region that’s often overlooked by the parade of books about modern China.
Here was someone exploring the back end of that country’s dazzling climb into the world’s second-largest economy, choosing to live where the eight-lane highways dwindle into single-lane concrete roads.
No writer seems to get romantic about China’s northeast, or Dongbei, whose impression can be sketched in just two words: cold and coal. But the region is tucked among Mongolia, Russia and North Korea, and surely with neighbors like those, there are good stories to be found.
“In Manchuria” doesn’t tell them.
Author Michael Meyer did a fine job in his first book, “The Last Days of Old Beijing,” using the small geographic focus of a single neighborhood to tell a larger story of transformation.
“I had written about change in urban China, and now I wondered how the other half lived,” Meyer writes in the opening chapter of his new book.
But once he moves into a small home in the farming village called Wasteland, he refuses to stay there.
What should be a thoughtful portrait of a changing China through the lens of that village is instead a wandering travelogue through time and space.
Far from China’s showcase cities are thousands of villages like Wasteland where the ancient concerns about having enough to eat are now joined by worries about income inequality, pollution and the flight of young people to the cities. Private companies replace the old government bosses. Strange foreigners come to town.
How are people’s lives changing out there? What do you observe if you have the luxury of sitting still? It’s these questions that “In Manchuria” should have explored.
Instead, we’re left wondering about the narrative direction of the book, not that of China itself. Cara Anna, AP