Named after the World War I general called "BlackJack," Pershing lay at the end of an asphalt strip branching from Highway 5. Its grid of a dozen tromped-gravel streets still constitutes the remains of the somewhat larger company-owned mining town that flourished during the earlier decades of this century when, presumably, demand made it more profitable to burrow under the land for soft coal than to farm. Legend says our family started there in the late teens or early '20s when my grandfather, Albert Marshall, gave up a shot at pitching in the majors to marry my grandmother, Fay Cauldenburg, and work in the mines. The reason given for his choice is the same my father gives for exchanging his theatrical ambitions for a steady spot on the assembly line: He didn't like the travel and the being away from home.

Growing up, I often believed my father regretted his decision, that he felt he had betrayed his dream by forsaking it before it might have proved beyond him. My grandfather--who died just before I was born--appears to me in a single photograph, clad in a baseball uniform, the shade from the bill of his cap shadowing his eyes. Through my mother's reverent taciturnity, he speaks only in calm, patient tones, and I imagine her--a middle child of eight--loving him from her place among the faces. I once believed that because he and I were left-handed and I was her first born, I was her favorite child. He died of heart disease no doubt encouraged by the same coal dust that sometimes befogged Changchun like gaslit London. Perhaps his forsaken major-league prospect is a soothing substitute for talent, or possibility. I can only verify that my mother -- who looks like her mother -- could throw a baseball, and she taught me how.

Pershing could be roamed like the streets I shared with my three best friends and Mrs. Whittenhall. There, my cousins and I whipped Nazi commandos in Dracula Woods and careened at the steering wheels of cars rusting among weeds. On trampolines sunken like swimming pools in a lot called "Recreation Center," I bounced and romped until the glands in my throat ached. Using a ditch, I learned one day how to get on my cousin Jim's 26 inch bike--and rode and rode and rode, proudly waving at my relatives as I pedaled past on another town circuit, weary but perplexed as to how to get off the thing without injury.

During one family reunion, I watched men somehow get into the casual play of secretly passing around a twisted, muddy, bald baby doll. On finding it in his front seat or on his dashboard, each man would avenge himself by putting it on another man's hood or in his tacklebox, or in his cooler -- where the latter would surely find it and pass it on, hoping to spy the next man when he discovered it.

That night, back home in Des Moines, my father found the doll as he unpacked the station wagon. He chuckled like a mother bewildered by a madeup game in which her children have included her. He took it into the house, and nothing more was said about it until one winter Sunday when he opened the sewing machine. He cleaned and straightened the doll's limbs and dressed it in a smock and bonnet fashioned from remnant satin. With rouge and mascara, he gave it back its eyes and the flush of infant health. He also transformed it in some other way I may never be able to articulate. Now, I see the doll as having suffered more than the men through whose hands it had passed, the doll as the unfortunate world into which we press our imaginings -- another case of making too much of things.

In a box outfitted with supple white paper, my father sent the doll back to one of my uncles in Pershing -- no return address, just a note pinned to its smock, "l've come back."

Pershing smelled of well water and blacktop. Its residents then, as now, went off to work at the VA in Knoxville, Rollscreen in Pella, or Maytag in Newton. Mustard jars and bread-wrappers and stacked plates cluttered its kitchen counters, and a sun-bleached plastic deer stood shyly in the yard. Pershing was my Aunt Myrna wet-nursing all of us kids--she had so much milk. It was vast husbands with deep bellybuttons recumbent in the shade, sipping Grain Belt beer and smoking Camels. Land of the double negative and the double entendre; of my cousin-in-law Walt plucking a string bass propped on a long, rubber-tipped screwdriver; of a fast-pitch softball team that in night games played rival towns: Attica, Bussey, Lovilia. Pershing was pride and formidable limitation, farm-pond fishing, and the dowdy gray stone my Uncle Tony broke open in his rock shed to reveal to me its glittering crystals.

Most of all, for almost two decades, Pershing also seemed a place of immortality. No one in our family there died, and few went away--until recent years.

I sometimes hear my fellow provincials wish aloud for more street life in their cities, for places where one could promenade, or linger safely, and regard the day or night abounding with strangers. The summer sunlight in Tampa--which can split dashboards and jab the brow like a searing spike--discourages outdoor cafes, though they are now coming into fashion in some quarters. The city has its joggers and dog-walkers and lunch-hour strollers, but like most North American towns--Des Moines included--the people who spend real time on its streets are mostly homeless, insane or for sale. Our only crowds near the size of street-market throngs in any provincial Chinese city gather for annual parades, sidewalk art festivals or musical beer bashes sponsored by local radio stations. Otherwise, we teem in enclosures.

Some years ago, in suburban New York state, I was dismayed to see parents shepherding their costumed children around shopping malls on Halloween, rather than around their neighborhoods, as was common when I was a child. For an ancient celebration acknowledging the darker spirits, these children dressed as cartoon versions of those monsters their parents took them to the mall to avoid. The treats dropped into their bags from the chain stores and anchor stores and food courts would contain no razor blades or poison, only positive community images, which is good for business.

Undoubtedly, this is one more sequestering from the immediate environment, one more exposure to the seamless display of the market. But then, what is the immediate environment? It was once common to refer to something that seemed wholly false as "plastic," as in, "This place is plastic." But isn't plastic just as much a real thing as any other thing? Isn't it "real" plastic? Only someone, I think, who is surrounded by too many goods rather than too few--someone not from Changchun--could see this as a crucial question.

Though the media in China never missed a chance to show disaster in the States, the Chinese I met who thought America a dangerous place pointed to the images the U.S. exports through popular film, which encourage visions of shoot-outs on every street corner, like gas stations and fast food. I also found a number of Europeans who wanted to believe in this violence, partly to stem their envy generated by the glamour of American publicity.

I am awakened occasionally by the newspaper's plop! on my porch at 3 a.m., a newspaper now delivered by an adult in a car. I sometimes lie in that dreamy darkness before receding into sleep and remember how 25 years ago, I walked my summer route, smoking Swisher Sweets, majestically nocturnal and somehow feeling in charge of the landscape.

Two old men, near the Stalin monument, play checkers on the curb until midnight, several other men squatting around them and smoking cigarettes, looking on.

Bar/bells and guitar strumming in a dim alley.

Lovers in a dark lane, one couple in each space between a row of lilac bushes.

Nearby, trunks of trees are whitewashed around their bases. "Socked trees," my father called them when I was a boy. "They are considered beautiful in China," he said, painting the elms in our back yard.