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By Root 1328 0

of the Kangxi emperor, maybe around 1700, a farmer named Zhang Hualong left his home on the crowded North China Plain for the Manchurian prairie, where virgin land was so plentiful that anyone could make a fresh start. In those days, every village in north China seemed to have someone who had migrated; then as now, it was often the younger and more enterprising people who went out. Zhang Hualong had two sons, who traveled farther north to settle in a village called Liutai, in the Manchurian province of Jilin. The site they chose was known as Pauper’s Valley because of its poor climate and swampy land. Fourteen generations of Zhangs have lived there. I am of the eleventh.

As with Chinese migrants of the 1980s, the journey of my earliest known ancestor was not legal. In 1644, the Manchus, an ethnic group living on China’s northeastern frontier, conquered China and established the Qing Dynasty. Soon after, the Qing rulers declared Manchuria off-limits to the Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group of the rest of the country. Their aim was to monopolize the region’s natural resources and to preserve their homeland: As long as the frontier remained intact, they believed, their people would retain their vitality and forestall the corruption and decadence by which dynasties inevitably fell. To seal off Manchuria, the emperors ordered the construction of a two-hundred-mile mud wall planted with willow trees. It stretched from the Great Wall northeast through most of present-day Liaoning and Jilin provinces, with fortified checkpoints along its length.

The border was called the Willow Palisade, and it was even more porous than the Great Wall. It was completed in 1681, and perhaps twenty years later my ancestor breached it to settle in Liutai, which means “sixth post”—one of the fortified towers along the border that was built expressly to keep out people like him. The Chinese who entered illegally to farm were called liumin, wanderers. Over the next two centuries, my pioneer ancestors farmed—planting sorghum and soybeans, and living in log cabins surrounded by primeval forest.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Manchuria’s population began to swell as farmers from north China fled drought and famine. This migration, of twenty-five million people over the next half century, would be the largest in the country’s history until the present wave. The region’s economy boomed, new railroads linked the interior to coastal and foreign markets, and foreigners spouted prophecies as breathless as those heard today. In 1910, the British consul-general posted in Tianjin wrote:

There is little doubt that Manchuria is to become, in the not far distant future, a competitor of America in supplying agricultural products for the markets of Europe. The flour mills of Harbin . . . are placing their products upon the local markets at prices with which it is impossible for American mills to compete . . . What the United States may lose through diminished sales of farm products must more than be made up through increased trade in manufactured goods.

My family rose to prominence in this economic boom. My greatgrandfather, Zhang Ya’nan, bought an oil press and a flour mill and used the money from these ventures to become the biggest landowner in Liutai. Around 1890, Zhang Ya’nan oversaw construction of a family compound with five central rooms and eight wings. The ancestral tablets and portraits occupied the central rooms, while the living ate, worked, and slept along the sides. That was how a Chinese family lived—the dead intruding on the living, and filial devotion built into the very architecture of the houses. The compound was named Xinfayuan, which means “New Origin.” It was surrounded by high walls, with Mauser pistols mounted at each corner and an armed militia to protect against bandits. The measure of a family’s prosperity was in the food they ate, and at Xinfayuan even the hired hands dined on steamed buns filled with sweet bean paste. Portions were so generous that they inspired a song whose lines my father would recall a century