dragonflies, listening to different frequencies. “This is the Willow Palisade,” I said with pride, and the driver replied, “The what?”
CHAPTER 5
The Waking of Insects
At last I found a house, or should I say, a house found me. After a research trip, I had returned to Jilin city after six o’clock, too late to catch the last bus to Wasteland. That night my hotel room was freezing. Via Skype, Frances pointed at my bed and said, “Toss dried rice stalks beneath it and light them on fire.”
My phone rang at six the next morning. The screen showed not Frances’s number but that of Ms. Guan, the Number 22 Middle School teacher. I answered with a concerned “ Uh, ” fearing something had happened.
Instead I heard: “You can live with my brother.”
“When?” I said groggily.
“Now.”
“I’m in Jilin.”
“Meet me at the bus stop in thirty minutes.”
As we waited for the Number 10 minibus, I saw that Ms. Guan had changed since our last meeting a week before. Blond streaks ran through her long black hair, her glasses now had purple-tinted lenses, and she unzipped her down jacket to reveal the top of a red rose tattooed above her left breast. It was a costume change for a new act in her life: “After the students take their high school entrance exam in spring,” she said, “Number 22 is transferring me to a better school. It’s right over there.”
She gestured to the Diamond Cement Factory, whose smokestacks rained gooey pellets that speckled our black coats. Jilin’s amphitheater of pine-clad hills was fronted by factories like this, manufacturing poison against the prettiest backdrop of any Northeast city. Some of Jilin’s districts still looked like a live-action version of the old propaganda magazine China Reconstructs : chemical tanker trucks threaded their way between cooling towers and under steaming pipelines that snaked over the narrow lanes.
“My new school’s location is much better than Wasteland,” Ms. Guan said, but I couldn’t see how.
Jilin is a second-tier metropolis, with four million people—and sleepy by Chinese standards. A century ago it had flourished as a shipyard and trading post. An English traveler passing through in 1903 found “shops and main streets bright with the beloved northern colour, vermillion red, [selling] beautiful carved wood, all manner of stamped leather, furs, bearskins, tiger and leopard skins from the Eastern forests, and curious colored silks.” The old walled city was made of wood; a Japanese poet, arriving in the winter of 1918 , described it as “breathtakingly beautiful, fully warranting its reputation as the ‘Kyoto of Manchuria.’” Fire destroyed most of wooden Jilin in 1930 . Industrialization took care of the rest.
Our bus stopped every fifty yards to fill the remaining seats, then the padded engine cover at the driver’s right hand, then the aisle. Bundled as we were in layers, every added body felt like additional protection from a crash. The interior became a human airbag.
Immobile in the crush, I was happy to be rolling, to feel the thrum and hear the grinding gears as people gossiped about apartment prices and school fees. Everything cost more. Had I seen the prices at the new apartment high-rises named Moca, Loire Town, and the Fifth Avenue? So gui (pronounced gway ). Expensive. Forget what the zodiac said about the rabbit: this was really the Year of the Gui.
I looked out the window at the winding Songhua. The river did not freeze here even during the fortnight called Severe Cold, and when its water vapor rose into the frigid air, the droplets crystallized on the branches of willows and pines. This rime ice (called shugua , pronounced shoe-gwa ) transformed the riverbanks into a photo backdrop of national renown.
In the late nineteenth century, an English explorer described the phenomenon: “We saw one morning one of the most perfectly lovely sights I have ever seen. I have never seen a similar sight, either before
CHAPTER 5
The Waking of Insects
At last I found a house, or should I say, a house found me. After a research trip, I had returned to Jilin city after six o’clock, too late to catch the last bus to Wasteland. That night my hotel room was freezing. Via Skype, Frances pointed at my bed and said, “Toss dried rice stalks beneath it and light them on fire.”
My phone rang at six the next morning. The screen showed not Frances’s number but that of Ms. Guan, the Number 22 Middle School teacher. I answered with a concerned “ Uh, ” fearing something had happened.
Instead I heard: “You can live with my brother.”
“When?” I said groggily.
“Now.”
“I’m in Jilin.”
“Meet me at the bus stop in thirty minutes.”
As we waited for the Number 10 minibus, I saw that Ms. Guan had changed since our last meeting a week before. Blond streaks ran through her long black hair, her glasses now had purple-tinted lenses, and she unzipped her down jacket to reveal the top of a red rose tattooed above her left breast. It was a costume change for a new act in her life: “After the students take their high school entrance exam in spring,” she said, “Number 22 is transferring me to a better school. It’s right over there.”
She gestured to the Diamond Cement Factory, whose smokestacks rained gooey pellets that speckled our black coats. Jilin’s amphitheater of pine-clad hills was fronted by factories like this, manufacturing poison against the prettiest backdrop of any Northeast city. Some of Jilin’s districts still looked like a live-action version of the old propaganda magazine China Reconstructs : chemical tanker trucks threaded their way between cooling towers and under steaming pipelines that snaked over the narrow lanes.
“My new school’s location is much better than Wasteland,” Ms. Guan said, but I couldn’t see how.
Jilin is a second-tier metropolis, with four million people—and sleepy by Chinese standards. A century ago it had flourished as a shipyard and trading post. An English traveler passing through in 1903 found “shops and main streets bright with the beloved northern colour, vermillion red, [selling] beautiful carved wood, all manner of stamped leather, furs, bearskins, tiger and leopard skins from the Eastern forests, and curious colored silks.” The old walled city was made of wood; a Japanese poet, arriving in the winter of 1918 , described it as “breathtakingly beautiful, fully warranting its reputation as the ‘Kyoto of Manchuria.’” Fire destroyed most of wooden Jilin in 1930 . Industrialization took care of the rest.
Our bus stopped every fifty yards to fill the remaining seats, then the padded engine cover at the driver’s right hand, then the aisle. Bundled as we were in layers, every added body felt like additional protection from a crash. The interior became a human airbag.
Immobile in the crush, I was happy to be rolling, to feel the thrum and hear the grinding gears as people gossiped about apartment prices and school fees. Everything cost more. Had I seen the prices at the new apartment high-rises named Moca, Loire Town, and the Fifth Avenue? So gui (pronounced gway ). Expensive. Forget what the zodiac said about the rabbit: this was really the Year of the Gui.
I looked out the window at the winding Songhua. The river did not freeze here even during the fortnight called Severe Cold, and when its water vapor rose into the frigid air, the droplets crystallized on the branches of willows and pines. This rime ice (called shugua , pronounced shoe-gwa ) transformed the riverbanks into a photo backdrop of national renown.
In the late nineteenth century, an English explorer described the phenomenon: “We saw one morning one of the most perfectly lovely sights I have ever seen. I have never seen a similar sight, either before
Similar Books
