by Huan Hsu
I harangued my mother for more details: How much porcelain and silver was buried? Were there really imperial pieces in the collection? Had anyone ever tried to dig it up? What happened to it? But to my surprise and consternation, neither my mother nor her two brothers, who had all been born on mainland China, emigrated to Taiwan as children, and emigrated again to the United States for graduate school, knew or cared much about this part of their history.
My best source of information, my mother said, would be my ninety-six-year-old grandmother, who had returned to China after my grandfather died to live with my uncle Richard. The youngest and most evangelical Christian of my mother’s siblings, Richard had started out as an engineer at Texas Instruments and risen to a management position setting up manufacturing facilities in Europe. At age fifty, after spending two decades with Texas Instruments, having built his dream house in a north Dallas suburb where one of his neighbors was the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, he took an early retirement and established a semiconductor foundry in Taiwan called Worldwide Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, or WSMC. Richard served as the president of WSMC until 1999, when he sold the company to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, or TSMC, the behemoth global leader whose market cap was nearly 30 percent of Taiwan’s gross domestic product, for $515 million. In its report on the deal, The Wall Street Journal dubbed Richard the “Taiwanese Tycoon.”
On that same day he claimed to have received a vision from God to start a similar company on mainland China as a way of both developing its high-tech industry and spreading the gospel there. With a $1 billion investment from the Chinese government, and plenty more from top venture capital firms, Richard installed himself as president and CEO and named his new enterprise Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC. He broke ground on his venture in Shanghai while I was finishing up college and heading off to work at my first job, in a high-tech public relations agency in San Francisco, and he asked me to work for him every chance he got. My mother posited that he wanted me as his assistant, where I would learn the company and eventually take over for him. The stock options alone should have been enticing enough, but I demurred each time, not interested in the work, the industry, or China. My other uncle, Lewis, bought up as many pre-IPO shares as he could, and the general sentiment was that the stock could double, even triple, its initial price. Lewis would sometimes phone my mother just to berate her for not forcing me to join the company. “There’s a million dollars right there in front of him,” he’d howl, “and he can’t be bothered to bend over and pick it up!”
Ten years later Richard’s company boasted twelve thousand employees and manufacturing facilities in Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, and Chengdu, along with another fab—short for “fabrication facility”—under construction in Shenzhen; offices in Tokyo, Milan, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; and a $1.8 billion initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange (my aunt Scarlett helped ring the opening bell), larger than Google, which went public the same year. In the same spirit as the Methodists who had educated my grandmother nearly a century earlier, Richard built schools, health centers, and churches across China, all with the tacit approval of the Communist regime that my grandparents, scientists who researched weapons-grade ores for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, had fought against.
Because I could barely speak Chinese, and my grandmother, despite having graduated from a missionary boarding school and college, had never demonstrated much ability with English, I conscripted my mother to ask my grandmother questions about the porcelain and report back the answers, an imperfect arrangement that led to many outbursts over why my mother had not asked the obvious follow-up question or clarified a detail. One day, after hearing one complaint too many, my mother heaved a sigh. “We’re tired of trying to guess what you want to know,” she told me. “Especially Grandma. She says you should just go to Shanghai and ask her these things yourself.”
So I did. In 2007, equipped with only a few threads of a family legend and an irresistible compulsion to know more about it, I moved to China to find out what happened to my great-great-grandfather’s buried treasure. In order to obtain a long-term visa, I contacted Richard for a job. I could sense his vindication over the phone, and I doubted he took me seriously when I insisted that I was going to China for the porcelain first and foremost. He must have figured that it would only be a matter of time before I came to my senses.
My plan was simple. I would work at Uncle Richard’s company, take evening language classes to learn enough Chinese to speak with my grandmother about the porcelain, and use my weekends and holidays to look for it. Richard was notorious for paying low wages by American standards, but the cost of living in Shanghai was such that my monthly compensation—which included health insurance, three weeks of annual paid vacation, a biannual airfare allowance for trips home, reimbursement of moving costs, and heavily subsidized housing—could still fund the necessary travel, as long as I didn’t try to live like the foreigners on expat packages. What the actual search would entail beyond talking to my grandmother remained nebulous, but I told my friends and family that I’d probably be back in the United States after a year.
I ARRIVED IN SHANGHAI late one evening in August, connecting through Tokyo. As I walked through Narita to change planes, the Japanese had spoken Japanese to me. When I touched down at night at Pudong International, the Chinese spoke Chinese to me. I told everyone in English that I couldn’t understand them, and they all looked at me like I was crazy.
Stepping out of the airplane, even well past sunset, felt like entering a greenhouse, the concentration of wet, stifling summer heat that would later coalesce into the rainy season. My cousin Andrew met me at the terminal with a driver. Andrew was almost two years older than me, born in Montreal. He had spent his early years in Singapore and Hong Kong while his father, Lewis, my mother’s older brother, worked for a Thai multinational before the family settled in Texas, where, not knowing any better, Andrew showed up for his first day of elementary school in the Dallas suburbs wearing his Hong Kong schoolboy uniform: blazer, tie, Bermudas, knee socks, and loafers. He graduated from Baylor University with a philosophy degree and was an early pilgrim to Shanghai, joining our uncle’s company in 2000, when it consisted of a circle of temporary trailers on a stretch of farmland east of the Huangpu River.
Andrew and I had always looked different, and mutual acquaintances often expressed surprise when they learned that we were related. One of the photo albums in my parents’ house in Utah held a picture of the two of us as adolescents, building a sand castle at a Great Salt Lake beach, me, bow-legged and so scrawny that my protruding hipbones held up my swim trunks like an iliac clothes hanger, next to knock-kneed, heavyset Andrew wearing nothing but an unflattering Speedo and a grimace to keep his enormous eyeglasses from sliding down his nose.
When we were very young, our age difference was sufficient for him to know a lot more than me, and I was the one who annoyed him with elementary questions. I eventually caught up, literally, as evidenced by the series of rules in the doorway of Richard’s laundry room in Dallas, where our uncle had marked the heights of his nephews over the years. As our stature grew equal, our relationship also got more competitive. Andrew and I would stand back to back and argue who was on his toes or stretching his neck to make himself taller. In family photographs, he would stick his chest out and stand on his toes right as the shutter clicked, and it wasn’t until I was back home that I found out he’d cheated. I had heard that he had taken up marathon running after moving to China and worked himself into terrific, almost unrecognizable shape. But he stopped training after contracting tuberculosis, and by the time we reunited in Shanghai, his body had sprung back to its original form.
The first thing Andrew said to me was “That long hair makes it seem like you’re hiding something, like a physical deformity.”
The second thing he said was “The sun has aged you. You look way older than your age.”
<
br /> We headed for the company living quarters in Zhangjiang, a district on the eastern outskirts of Shanghai, driving along a massive, well-lit, desolate freeway. Andrew had offered to let me stay in a spare room of his three-bedroom apartment in exchange for paying the utilities and the salary of the maid, or ayi—literally “auntie”—who came to clean three times a week. As we neared the living quarters, our route took us past the new church that our uncle had recently built, a cavernous glass-and-metal A-frame looming in the hazy glow of the streetlight, and I remarked that I had not seen it during my brief visit to the city three years earlier.
“We build things fast in Shanghai,” the driver said.
“They seem to build things fast in all of China,” I tried to say in Chinese, shaking my head.
I must have said something wrong, as the driver got defensive. “Yes, but we build things even faster in Shanghai,” she said. She also mentioned that the church had been closed for a while due to structural concerns, as if the two observations were completely unrelated.
THE SUN ROSE EARLY and hot over the living quarters, a seventy-acre complex abutting a technology park on the edge of Shanghai’s eastward urbanization as it churned through estuaries, villages, and farmland and left housing complexes, industrial parks, and manufacturing facilities in its wake. I didn’t start work for another week and wanted to buy a voice recorder for when I talked to my grandmother, so Andrew took the day off and we headed into the city for one of Shanghai’s massive electronics shopping malls.
The living quarters in Zhangjiang housed nearly six thousand employees and their families on a landscaped campus divided by one of the area’s many canals. Every day elderly men set up along it with bamboo fishing rods curving over the water. On one side rose about sixty high-rise apartment buildings along with a health clinic, guest housing for visitors, an administrative center (including a control room for monitoring the video feeds from the dozens of closed-circuit cameras trained on the walkways), and three dormitories for the machine assistants, or MAs, largely young, single women with basic educations from rural provinces who worked in the fab, moving items from one step of the manufacturing process to the next. On the other side of the canal, accessed by a small footbridge or a separate guarded entrance, was the executive housing, a gated community of about fifty villas with private yards and two rows of townhouses. Camphor trees shaded the walkways, and in the fall the pomelo trees near the playground sagged with fruit, tempting residents to climb up or fashion makeshift pickers to get at them.
Across the street from the residential campus was one of the company’s crown jewels, a bilingual K-through-12 private school headed by a former dean of Phillips Andover, and boasting all the facilities that a counterpart in America might have offered: a gymnasium with basketball and volleyball courts, a full-size running track, soccer fields that were repurposed into Little League baseball diamonds on the weekends, even an observatory. Flanking the school was a community center where employees and their families could work out, play Ping-Pong, take classes, or swim in the Olympic-size pool, and a commercial strip of stores, beauty salons, and a rotating array of eateries. Two small supermarkets sold fresh fruits and vegetables, scary-looking meats, and a handful of imported goods, like peanut butter and grossly overpriced Häagen-Dazs ice cream. People in the surrounding farming villages still burned their garbage, and when the wind shifted, the smoke blew right into the living quarters.
A multicolored line of taxis waited outside the main gate. Andrew explained that each taxi company painted its fleet a different color, and we caught a sky-blue Volkswagen sedan; Andrew had noticed that its drivers tended to be the best, denoted by the stars printed on their licenses, though I later learned that those, like many, many other things in China, could be bought. The taxi ferried us to the nearest subway station, on the other side of the technology park, its wide, empty boulevards named after famous scientists in Chinese history and the cross streets named for Western scientists. Some blocks were more than a quarter of a mile long to accommodate the massive manufacturing facilities headquartered there, our uncle’s being one of the largest. Street sweepers wearing sandals and reflective orange jumpsuits collected litter with handmade brooms and rickety carts at a languid pace. Many others dozed on the landscaped corners and medians, sprawled out as if dead.
After about three miles the taxi dropped us off at the Zhangjiang Hi-Technology Park metro station, an elevated monstrosity of concrete and dirty white tiles strewn with garbage and vomit and crowded with vendors selling street food and pirated DVDs (“Porn, porn,” one of them whispered to me as I walked past) and taxi touts angling for fares. The train zipped us over villages where small farm plots sat beside enormous, ever-growing mounds of trash, then dived underground as we approached the Huangpu River. Each time the train pulled into a station, passengers massed on both sides of the doors and charged forward as soon as the doors opened, crashing into and off of each other until both groups somehow osmosed to the other side. Despite stationing attendants at the turnstiles wearing signs to be polite, stand in line, wait one’s turn, and generally “be a cute Shanghai person,” the Western idea of civility was all but absent in the subways. While riding public transportation, or in public spaces in general, the Chinese had the same sense of personal space as puppies, often literally piled on top of one another. On escalators they stood on whichever side pleased them. They stuffed elevator cars so tightly I wasn’t sure everyone had their feet on the ground, and would often ride opposite their desired direction of travel just to ensure they got a space. Occasionally, on the less crowded trains, young men with spiky, chocolate-colored hair holding stacks of business cards advertising travel agencies would stride the length of the train and fling the cards onto the passengers, hitting each person’s lap with the accuracy of a casino dealer. I found this kind of guerrilla marketing obnoxious, but the Chinese riders never objected, brushing off the card as they would a stray hair.
After thirty minutes we arrived at the East Nanjing Road station in the heart of the city. It was a bit of a stretch to call the place where I would be living and working Shanghai. Situated at the mouth of the Yangtze River and bisected by a tributary called the Huangpu River, Shanghai consists of two sections, Puxi, literally “west bank of the [Huangpu] river,” and Pudong, “east bank of the [Huangpu] river.” Historically, Puxi had been the city’s cultural, economic, and residential center, and home to the nineteenth-century colonial concessions that included the Bund, the mile-long stretch along the river where Western architects had erected dozens of impressive consulates, bank buildings, and trading houses, a concentration of international financial and commercial institutions that made the Bund the Wall Street of Asia. In the middle of the Bund, straddling the east–west thoroughfare of East Nanjing Road, real estate magnate Victor Sassoon built a pair of hotels in the early 1900s. From the subway station, the pyramidal art deco top of the north building, dubbed the Peace Hotel, which was closed for a three-year-long renovation, loomed like a hilltop citadel. At the Bund’s north end is the oldest park in Shanghai, built in the late nineteenth century for the city’s affluent and growing foreign population, where, according to legend, a sign proclaimed “No Chinese or Dogs Allowed.” (No such sign existed, but the park did prohibit locals and pets.) The Bund remains the most desirable real estate in town, and the colonial-era buildings have been recolonized by luxury brand boutiques, art galleries, and five-star restaurants.
Far from the old city, my uncle had established his company and its living quarters in Pudong’s Zhangjiang area. Until the 1990s Pudong was undeveloped and agricultural, and most people crossed the river by ferry; it might have taken the better part of a day to travel the fifteen miles from the living quarters to the Bund. But after two decades of frenzied, nonstop growth, I could access downtown Puxi from Zhangjiang by taxi in thirty minutes, crossing the Huangpu on a seven-lane, quarter-mile-long suspension bridge so monumental that the spiraling off-ramp made three full revol
utions before reaching street level, and all for about 70 RMB, or roughly ten dollars.
It was Pudong that built the landmark, skyscraping towers that had replaced the Bund as Shanghai’s—and China’s—iconic skyline: the futuristic Oriental Pearl Tower; the serrated, crystal-topped, eighty-eight-story Jin Mao, home to the five-star Grand Hyatt hotel and its peerless dinner buffet—until the Shangri-La came along and did it bigger, better, and more expensive; and the bladelike, 101-floor Shanghai World Financial Center nearing completion right next door to the Jin Mao, tower cranes (the national bird of China, as the joke went) perched on its peak and putting its final beams and panels into place.
Pudong is home to the city’s convention center, biggest shopping mall, largest park, tallest buildings, and lots and lots of dust. As in many American exurbs, Zhangjiang’s wide streets indicate that its preferred mode of travel depends on internal combustion engines, and its scale verges on the inhuman. Residents live in gated communities, and the rare sidewalk tends to disappear abruptly. Pudong contains the expat enclaves of Big Thumb Plaza and Jinqiao (Golden Bridge), home to international schools set on expansive, manicured playing fields, community centers offering Western psychologists to treat the population of trailing spouses suffering from adjustment disorders, and Western-style eateries luring families of polo-shirted parents and their cloistered children with weekday dining specials. On weekend nights tourists and locals alike gather on each bank of the Huangpu to gaze at the other side. Puxi is where nostalgic expats go to see how China used to look, but Pudong seems to better illustrate where China is going.