With The Last Days of Old Beijing, Michael Meyer looked at the modernization of China’s ancient city, and with In Manchuria he furthers his fascinating piece on This American Life, charting the much-mythologized region bordered by Mongolia, North Korea and Siberia, now called the Northeast. For three years, Meyer lived in the remote Northeast in the rice-farming community of Wasteland. A quiet village of two dozen homes, one road, and communally farmed rice paddies, where the temperature can reach 20 below and the sun sets before 4 o’clock. There Meyer witnessed Wasteland’s sweeping changes with the arrival of Eastern Fortune Rice, a privately held and governmentally-backed company which began buying up paddies and hiring their farmers as laborers. Wasteland’s saga mirrors the tremendous shift most of rural China is undergoing; Eastern Fortune 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, one that Meyer documents for the first time.
Michael Meyer first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. As the author of the acclaimed The Last Days of Old Beijing, he received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also won a Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers. Meyer’s stories have appeared in the New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and on "This American Life." He teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh and spends the offseason in Singapore.