Excerpt from In Manchuria by Michael Meyer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Next to the kang is a round table laden with steaming plates of twice-cooked pork, fl ash-fried mushrooms, garlic-sautéed wild greens, and rice grown in the paddy just outside these wall-size windows, weatherproofed with plastic wrap. The dishes have been cooked in a large wok sunk into a cement stove, fired by burning rice stalks. "Mai'er," the family's patriarch says with a nod.

"San Jiu," I say, nodding back. The lack of formality—of You must be cold; have you eaten? you're not wearing enough layers; eat; take a smoke; drink some tea; you must be cold, it's winter now and cold outside, you have to wear more; eat; have some beer; you look cold; eat, eat, eat—means that I'm home.

"I cooked," he says. "It's the two of us tonight. Everyone else had to go to"—and here he says the term for Fourth Cousin, Second Nephew, or some other title which I can never keep straight without a diagram. Every branch of a Chinese family tree has its own name indicating not only which side you come from but in what order. In English we say aunt, but in China she was, for example, the wife of my father's oldest brother. One's cousin could be your mother's younger sister's second-born son. San Jiu (pronounced San Joe) means "Third Uncle on Mother's Side."

I know his given name, but have always called him San Jiu. He is a sixty-six-year-old ruddy-cheeked man who never seems to age but rather hardens, like the Manchuria ash lining Red Flag Road. He still opens beer bottles with his teeth, shoulders fifty-pound sacks of seed, and weeds his paddy by hand, stooping low in the muck. He smokes Changbaishan, a brand named for the perpetually snow-covered peaks on this province's border with North Korea. The name translates as Ever-White Mountains, but when we share one together, I just see a lump of tar.

"It's your Christmas, right?"

"In two days," I reply.

"My wife is gone tonight," he says, resolute. "So we can drink." San Jiu fi lls two rice bowls with Snow brand beer (often the only cups in a farmer's home are for tea). After he finishes his bowl, he splashes in a bit of the hard stuff from a plastic gallon jug and sips loudly. None is offered: San Jiu remembers the last time he served me sorghum liquor. That was seven years ago, when I had visited Wasteland for the first time. I was alone, on a National Geographic assignment about historical Manchuria. After rolling two hours east from the provincial capital of Changchun on a bus that smelled of feet, the driver pulled to the edge of the two-lane road, stared out the windshield into the darkness, and said, gravely: "Are you sure you want to get off here?"

After he pulled away, I stood alone in the subzero air, regretting the decision. There were no taxis, no dumpling restaurants or shops to wait inside—no streetlights, even. A calf-high granite slab said, in Chinese characters, that I had arrived in Wasteland.

With chattering teeth, I walked up Red Flag Road under a black dome thick with stars. The Big Dipper bent low over snow-covered paddies. Complete silence. Plumes of breath. The smell of burning rice stalks wafting from chimneys. San Jiu stood on the road with a fl ashlight, waiting. He led me to his house and into a room full of people raising glasses over a table full of steaming food.

"What if I moved here?" I had asked, after too many shots of 120-proof liquor.

"You live in Beijing!" he said. "Everyone wants to be there. No one moves here."

But I could, I thought, keeping the notion to myself.

After dinner, San Jiu stretched me on the kang next to him. We slept side by side, as rigid as mummies. Through the night, I dreamed of moving to Manchuria.

Excerpted from In Manchuria by Michael Meyer. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Meyer. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.