Michael Meyer. (2015). In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Michael Meyer. 2015. In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Michael Meyer, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Michael Meyer. In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

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In Manchuria

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Meyer, Michael
   • bioText: Michael Meyer first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. The winner of a Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing, Meyer has also won a Whiting Writers' Award for nonfiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His stories have appeared in the New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. He is the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing, which became a bestseller in China, and he divides his time between Pittsburgh and Singapore.
   • name: Michael Meyer

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2015-02-17T00:00:00-05:00

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In Manchuria

fullDescription

In the tradition of In Patagonia and Great Plains, Michael Meyer's In Manchuria is a scintillating combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's legendary northeast territory. For three years, Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, hometown to his wife's family. Their personal saga mirrors the tremendous change most of rural China is undergoing, in the form of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments into which farmers can move in exchange for their land rights. Once a commune, Wasteland is now a company town, a phenomenon happening across China that Meyer documents for the first time; indeed, not since Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth has anyone brought rural China to life as Meyer has here.

Amplifying the story of family and Wasteland, Meyer takes us on a journey across Manchuria's past, a history that explains much about contemporary China—from the fall of the last emperor to Japanese occupation and Communist victory. Through vivid local characters, Meyer illuminates the remnants of the imperial Willow Palisade, Russian and Japanese colonial cities and railways, and the POW camp into which a young American sergeant parachuted to free survivors of the Bataan Death March. In Manchuria is a rich and original chronicle of contemporary China and its people.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times
   • content: Michael Meyer has a more refined sense of history and poetry, and with his new book In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, he seizes the opportunity to dig beneath the region's gritty surfaces . . . In Manchuria is the second book by Mr. Meyer, whose work has also appeared in magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. His first was The Last Days of Old Beijing a well-received portrait of daily life in an ancient section of the city that is about to be razed in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics . . . Mr. Meyer also has a knack for noticing amusingly incongruous details, and he employs that talent to full effect to convey the contradictions of contemporary China.
2. • premium: False
   • source: New York Review of Books
   • content: Meyer writes from the appealing perspective of an American outsider who can tell a Chinese story from the inside, as it were, by plunging into the private lives of people he came to know intimately . . . As an historian, and especially as a guide to Chinese museums, memorials, and monuments, Meyer is superb . . . [He] is not only a connoisseur of patriotic monuments, but also a wonderful explorer of the relics of a past that is rubbed out, overlooked, or largely forgotten.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
   • content: In Manchuria is a bet that the desolate plains of northeast China will be more interesting to him and his readers than they are to most Chinese, and even to most residents of Manchuria. And Meyer wins that bet, offering readers a richly detailed, highly readable, and utterly enjoyable history of Manchuria (and Wasteland).
4. • premium: False
   • source: Wall Street Journal
   • content: A fine book to lose yourself in on a winter's night . . . Meyer is a fine descriptive writer . . . he sketches his small cast of characters with simple grace . . . [His] memoir is most rewarding if read as a story about searching, about living, about exploring, in which the act of discovery is incidental.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
   • content: Michael Meyer combines an informative history of China's northeast region with a charming and at times sentimental account of the lives of the inhabitants of a rice-farming community that is about to become a company town.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Shelf Awareness
   • content: Michael Meyer's In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China is a beautifully written blend of memoir, travel account, history and social commentary. . . . an engaging account of rural China poised on the brink of change.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: This wonderfully written book is an intriguing blend of immersion journalism, history and a cross-cultural romance. Michael Meyer threw himself into China's fast-disappearing village culture that foreigners virtually never get to see. He has brought it to life with zest, humor and insatiable curiosity, in one of the most unusual and satisfying works on China I've read. Fittingly for a book centered on a farm, In Manchuria is a feast.
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Telegraph
   • content: With In Manchuria, Michael Meyer has resurrected what was once a great literary tradition of books about the life and land of rural China. Over the past twenty years, writers have focused on the boom of urban China—overlooking the fact that today most Chinese still have ties to the countryside. Meyer's heartfelt book helps us remember. He tracks the lives of farmers in the vast northeast, and their uncertain transition to corporate agriculture, in a book as rich and deep as the earth of this storied region.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Best of Non-Fiction"
   • content: Michael Meyer's exhilarating account of life on a Chinese rice farm, In Manchuria, takes a completely fresh look at contemporary China. A brilliant (and witty) reporter and writer, Meyer notices everything and deftly threads history, politics, people, and the rich textures of daily life in the country's remote Northeast into a drama of change and loss, as Eastern Fortune Rice, a large government-sponsored business, turns a quiet village of farmers into a 'modern' company town.
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 1, 2014
      The Chinese countryside struggles to preserve its soul while edging toward modern capitalism in this vivid snapshot of China’s far northeastern region of Manchuria. Journalist Meyer (The Last Days of Old Beijing) spent three years living in his in-laws’ village of Wasteland—which, despite the name, turns out to be a lively place. With delightful character sketches and casual but sharp-eyed reporting, his portrait of Wasteland captures the close-knit warmth of rural life—everyone knows everything about Meyer’s business, especially the village “aunties” who are forever kibitzing his parenting plans—as well as the hilarious ways that Chinese and American cultures mistranslate each other. Along the way he tours Manchuria’s historical sites and stilted museum exhibitions, while recounting its tumultuous past as a battleground fought over by Japan, Russia, and Chinese Nationalists and Communists. In Wasteland, he observes a quieter upheaval as the town is gradually taken over by an agribusiness that wants to move farmers off the land and into apartment complexes, a development that promises advantages—steadier incomes, indoor plumbing instead of frigid outhouses—while threatening to unravel the social fabric. Meyer’s entertaining mix of memoir, travelogue, and sociology yields a rich, insightful view of China in transition. Photos. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from December 1, 2014
      A satisfying, elegant personal journey in China's fabled Northeast.A Peace Corps volunteer in China in 1995, Meyer spent subsequent years teaching English in a rapidly changing Beijing, where he wrote his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed (2008). Against the usual logic (the Chinese were leaving the land to flock to the cities), the author settled in the remote Northeast, in a town called Wasteland, Manchuria, the hometown of his Chinese wife, Frances. There, working as a middle school teacher while living among Frances' eccentric relatives, Meyer realized that he was interested in exploring China's past. A rice-growing center, Wasteland (founded in 1956) was closer to Vladivostok and Pyongyang than the Great Wall. It was once the heart of the Manchu, who stormed through the country on horseback and seized Beijing in 1644, ruled for 300 years, and added the territory of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Eventually, the Manchu mingled with the infiltrating Han Chinese; as a result, today Manchu make up less than 10 percent of the region's 110 million residents. In addition to providing a variety of tender tales of the local folk (e.g., "The Ballad of Auntie Yi"), Meyer inserts profound and troubling observations, such as the official desecration of cultural artifacts in the name of development and the fact that many of the residents first came with families fleeing the famine of the Cultural Revolution era. Throughout, Meyer moves gingerly through Manchurian history-the gradual weakening of the Qing court as China opened to the West; the building of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, bringing geopolitical hostilities; and the conquest of the region by imperial Japan and creation of Manchukuo in 1931-yet the author ends in a hopeful fashion: a pregnancy. A work of enormous heart as well as research.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2015
      

      Journalist and travel writer Meyer (The Last Days of Old Beijing) turns his eye toward northeastern China, searching for traces of lost history and observing the breakneck pace of rural development in his wife's home village of Wasteland. Located in what was historically called Manchuria, Wasteland is caught up in China's shift away from family farming to a model dominated by large corporations. The author deftly illustrates how the upheaval felt in the village mirrors the historical instability in the region, where rival ethnic, political, and military entities have vied for control for centuries. These accounts are interwoven with reflections on the author's personal connection to the country and his decision to start a family. Meyer's style is familiar; mixing memoir, history, and journalism in an approach reminiscent of Peter Hessler's River Town. Like Hessler, Meyer highlights the frequent contradictions of life in China without resorting to stereotypes or mockery. VERDICT Meyer largely succeeds in his attempt to make the complex history and future of northeastern China accessible to a Western audience. This work will appeal to those interested in travel narratives, Chinese culture and history, and the changing global landscape.--Rebecca Brody, Westfield State Univ., MA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

66

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In the tradition of In Patagonia and Great Plains, Michael Meyer's In Manchuria is a scintillating combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's legendary northeast territory. For three years, Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, hometown to his wife's family. Their personal saga mirrors the tremendous change most of rural China is undergoing, in the form of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments into which farmers can move in exchange for their land rights. Once a commune, Wasteland is now a company town, a phenomenon happening across China that Meyer documents for the first time; indeed, not since Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth has anyone brought rural China to life as Meyer has here.

Amplifying the story of family and Wasteland, Meyer takes us on a journey across...

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   • description: History / Asia / China
3. • code: TRV003020
   • description: Travel / Asia / East / China