The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  AS SHANGHAI ENTERED the rainy season, a typhoon always seemed to be spinning somewhere off the coast. Most of the time it just cleared the smoggy skies, but occasionally a wet tendril would inundate the city. One morning a heavy shower flooded the streets and drenched me as soon as I stepped into it. With the sidewalks and gutters under many inches of water, I walked along the crest in the middle of the driveway encircling the living quarters. As I neared the exit, a white Toyota sedan came up behind me. I knew the driver expected me to move. If it hadn’t been raining so hard, I probably would have, but he was dry and I was the one in the rain; I figured he could accommodate me for once. The driver honked. I kept walking. The driver lay on the horn, a long, unbroken proxy for his annoyance, which under the circumstances only irritated me more.

  A local would have just given way, because in China the ones being honked at, not the drivers, controlled whether the honking continued. As soon as the pedestrian yielded, the driver would have gone by, and because Chinese seemed to lack object permanence for these types of exchanges, both would have ceased to exist in each other’s minds. A non-Chinese foreigner also probably would have moved, bemused, perplexed, and possibly upset with the driver but not wishing to appear as the arrogant foreigner. And then there was me, the American-born Chinese. I decided that I wasn’t going to move. I couldn’t disavow our common heritage, but being Chinese didn’t mean I had to be Chinese, too.

  This was more than a traffic dispute or a cultural misunderstanding. The driver was the Chinese Red Army, a column of armored vehicles rolling over the principles of right of way and common courtesy, and I was the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, armed with nothing but an umbrella, staring down the machine for the millions of oppressed pedestrians and bicyclists forced to run for their lives to avoid vehicles blowing through stop signs and red lights, making left turns from right lanes, crossing medians, and diving into bicycle paths. The honking got louder, longer, and angrier. I put my head down and kept walking. Go ahead and run me over, I thought, because I wasn’t budging. I had rights.

  I walked all the way to the gate with the car crawling behind me, its horn sounding a continuous, grating wail. When I finally peeled off, the driver pulled up to me, rolled down his window, and screamed, “Ni you shenme yisi?” Basically, “What the hell is your problem?” I had neither the energy nor the vocabulary to retort. For the rest of the day I indulged in violent fantasies of tearing the driver apart while berating him with immaculate Chinese and resolved to learn the Chinese word for “motherfucker.”

  I INTENDED TO STAY IN CHINA FOR JUST A YEAR, BUT AFTER a few months I had learned nothing more about my family’s porcelain. I hadn’t even found my own apartment, despite Andrew’s frequent hints that I had freeloaded long enough. At work, Richard moved me to the corporate relations department, where I had marginally more to do, editing press releases, but mostly I waited for the delivery of the English-language dailies in the afternoon. On weekends I played basketball and poker with a group of ABCs, many of them former SMIC employees, whom I’d met through Andrew. Though my Chinese had improved as a matter of course and immersion, I still couldn’t really speak it outside taxis or restaurants, and I risked becoming one of the expat dilettantes whom I so readily impugned.

  Having shaken the illnesses that dogged me when I arrived, I regained my weight by rediscovering Chinese food. My mother had eschewed many typical Chinese dishes that she found too greasy, so I knew what couscous was long before san bei ji, clay pot chicken cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and sesame oil and dressed with ginger and basil. Or yu xiang qiezi, spicy, stir-fried sweet and sour eggplant that was the platonic ideal for topping a bowl of rice. Though my family frequently ate dim sum on the weekends, it wasn’t until I moved to China that I discovered boluo bao, pineapple buns, named for the checkered crust of golden sugar on their tops and best eaten steaming hot with a slab of butter sandwiched in the middle. Or xiaolongbao, the famous steamed soup dumplings, delicate bite-size morsels that sagged like water balloons when picked up between chopsticks, were placed on a spoon with a splash of vinegar and shredded ginger, and were then popped whole into your mouth.

  Despite the horror stories that street vendors cooked with oil reclaimed from sewers, or that the meat of the yangrouchuan lamb skewers was actually cat, I managed to eat street food with no ill effects, breakfasting on jian bing, a thin eggy crepe wrapped around pickled vegetables and a smear of chili sauce. For lunch or dinner, I gobbled shengjianbao, another type of soup dumpling, but larger, thicker skinned, and pan-fried to create toothsome sesame-sprinkled tops and browned bottoms with the crunch of a perfectly cooked french fry. These were rested on soup spoons in order to bite a small hole in the top to release the steam and suck out the minced pork juices, and then were eaten with vinegar in two or three meaty, doughy, oily mouthfuls.

  As the vise of the Shanghai summer loosened, the air grew sharper, and autumn in the city brought blue skies and soporific temperatures. One afternoon at the office, a headline in the Shanghai Daily caught my attention: “Police Hunt for Treasure Trove of Old Coins.” A one-hundred-year-old residence in Nanhui, a transitioning rural district of Shanghai between Zhangjiang and the airport, was being developed into an entertainment center. Junkmen visited the construction site every day to gather scrap metal, and one day a neighbor heard a shout that gold had been found. Moments later the neighbor saw people scattering from the construction site with jars of coins. Apparently the junkmen, looking for metal with homemade detectors, had unearthed jars full of silver coins. As quickly as the initial discoverers fled, more treasure hunters descended on the site, and an overwhelmed security guard called the police, who were able to recover a few of the jars containing coins that had circulated during the 1920s. Once the police took control of the site, the local cultural relics department found another jar full of silver coins marked “Mexican Republic” and estimated that they had been buried at the end of the nineteenth century, though the reasons for the burial were unclear. Efforts to recover the rest of the coins taken from the site were under way. “Any relics found under the ground or sea in China belong to our country and not to individuals,” an official was quoted as saying.

  That weekend I returned to Richard’s house to visit my grandmother, whom I had seen only in glimpses since I arrived in China. Halfway through the first bar of Für Elise, Richard opened the door. “Ma!” he shouted. “Huan’s here! He wants to hear your stories!”

  I found my grandmother in the kitchen, watching the ayi make jiaozi, dumplings of minced pork and chicken, scallions, and garlic folded into hand-rolled skins and then pan-fried or boiled. My family ate them doused with soy sauce infused with chopped chilies and more garlic. The ayi mentioned that about fifteen cloves of garlic had gone into the meat mixture. My grandmother nodded as she dredged a jiaozi in sauce and said, “You have to have garlic with jiaozi.”

  I asked her why, thinking it related to some ancient Chinese proverb or principle of traditional Chinese medicine. My grandmother paused, pinching a jiaozi between thin metal chopsticks with a dexterity I would never achieve. She looked at me over the plastic eyeglasses obscuring half her face and replied, in English, “Tastes better.”

  After we finished our jiaozi, we moved down the hall to her room so she could floss and brush her teeth, all original and all very healthy. I had not spent time with her since my grandfather’s funeral in 1997, when she was already in her eighties. Now ninety-six and less than five feet tall, she seemed even smaller than I remembered. The many layers of clothing she wore, even in the middle of summer, disguised her frailness. Her hands tremored too much for her to write, her eyes had cataracts that she refused to treat, and she didn’t hear very well. She seldom left the house, spending most of her waking hours at the desk in her room praying or reading scripture with a magnifying glass. When she napped, lying on her back inside a mosquito net with her mouth drawn over her teeth, she looked dead. Still, she remained in good health, and her mind was especial
ly sharp.

  When I was young, I always envied how a day with the grandparents, for my friends, was an anticipated event, skiing or tennis followed by a meal at a nice restaurant. But my grandparents had been old, infirm, and inscrutable for as long as I could remember them. Visits to Texas, where they lived with Richard at first and then in a senior home, typically consisted of us staring at each other in silence. The liveliest thing I ever witnessed them doing was singing in their senior choir or playing mah-jongg. Though my grandmother had helped care for my brother and me after we were born, I couldn’t remember her touching us except for the occasional pat on the arm. When my grandmother called on Christmases and my birthdays, my vocabulary limited our conversations to ni hao ma? (hello, how are you?) and, after a sufficient period of awkward silence, zai jian (goodbye). Probably because of this, I never learned to respect her the way I should have.

  We sat in chairs next to her bed. It wasn’t clear if she remembered that she was the reason I had come to Shanghai. Perhaps she didn’t believe that I actually moved there just to ask her about her family’s porcelain.

  “Did you go to church last Sunday?” she asked. “How was it?”

  “Boring,” I said. “There’s no pastor, not until December.”

  “Do you take Andrew with you to church?”

  I laughed. Andrew was even less interested than I was. “No.”

  “I hope you can be an ‘encourager’ to him,” she said, using the English word. She showed me the current page on her daily devotional calendar: “Remind me to be an encourager to others.” “How are things with him? Is he very bossy? Wants to ‘dominate’ you?” Another English word.

  “Yeah, he’s like an older brother.”

  My grandmother chuckled. “Yes, like a big brother,” she said. “You should help each other. Your nature is better than his, your temper is better than his, so don’t take it personally.”

  “So I want to hear your stories,” I said, fumbling with my voice recorder.

  “What would you like to know?” she asked.

  “Your, um, house,” I said. I didn’t know the word for “family.”

  My grandmother seemed to understand and began talking about her grandfather. I tried to follow along, scribbling terrible phonetic equivalents of words to look up later. Her grandfather was bad tempered but principled. Her grandmother was compassionate. They lived outside the Jiujiang city limits, in the countryside. My grandmother listed relatives who lived with her or nearby, but I couldn’t understand their names—most of which I was hearing for the first time—or kinship terms. The Chinese had unique terms for every possible family relationship, of which I knew only a few. After about a half hour, unable to keep up, I thanked my grandmother and told her I would come back another day. This was the longest I had ever spoken to her, if that’s what you could call it.

  I TRIED TO VISIT my grandmother every weekend, sitting with her while she squinted over her medicine or slurped her lunch of rice noodles in a broth with bits of ground pork, pumpkin, egg, and vegetables. No one seemed very interested in translating for us, so we made do with my very limited Chinese and what English my grandmother had retained. That allowed me to grasp the topic being discussed, but since I had no control over the language, I couldn’t control the conversation. When I felt myself drowning, feet clawing for bottom, I attempted to gain purchase by asking questions about her life.

  “My story is still later,” she’d say, with a hint of annoyance, and continue on with her story about some relative.

  Her energy would flag after about an hour, and I would say goodbye. Though I often left our visits feeling confused and overwhelmed, I also felt energized to be finally speaking with my grandmother. I managed to glean the basic story of her childhood as the eldest of five sister-cousins, her schooling, and her immediate family. She recalled the arrival of the Japanese and the chaos of the war and, without prompting, confirmed both the existence and the burial of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain.

  One Saturday, after I gathered that Japanese officers had occupied my great-great-grandfather’s house during the war, I speculated to Andrew that the trail for the porcelain might lead to Japan. “So are you going to get us kicked out of two countries?” Andrew said. “Going to Japan is idiotic.”

  His forcefulness took me aback. “Why?” I said.

  “It’d be one thing if you had a name, like Colonel Nagasaki in some city. What makes you think you’ll need to go to Japan?”

  “Jesus, I said ‘might.’ ”

  “There’s no way you’re going to Japan,” Andrew insisted.

  “Why not? The Japanese were the ones occupying the town. It’s reasonable that a Japanese guy could have taken the stuff.”

  “So? Why would you go to Japan?”

  “I didn’t say I was going. I said it was a possibility.”

  “So there’s an infinitesimal chance, and you’re going to go?”

  It was typical of Andrew, ascribing to me motivations that I hadn’t even considered yet. “I’m not going to argue with you about what percentage of chance ‘might’ means,” I said. “It’s a possibility, that’s all.”

  “Well, I ‘might’ date a supermodel, but I’m not going to.”

  “Not with that attitude, you’re not.”

  “There’s no way you’re going to Japan. They won’t even compensate comfort women from the war.”

  “Who’s asking for compensation?” I said. “Why are you so keen on disagreeing with me, especially when I’ve just barely started? Forget it. This is infuriating.”

  As my grandmother wound up her family history, she must have wondered why I kept visiting and asking her the same questions. I probably asked her five times for all the names of her relatives, but I still couldn’t manage to create an accurate family tree because I couldn’t comprehend her answers. The day she spoke of leaving Macau through Guangzhou Wan, I wasted the whole time trying to figure out what a wan was (a bay). Her Jiujiang accent, which I had never noticed before, added to the confusion. A workmate taught me a Chinese expression that described these conversations: Ji tong ya jiang. A chicken talking to a duck. They were both birds, they sounded sort of the same, so they went on clucking and quacking and thinking they were having a dialogue.

  My grandmother, having dispensed with the biographical information, began using my visits to interrogate me about my dating status, followed with long-winded testimony, evangelizing, and parables. I heard her entire conversion story. Even a retelling of her time as a science teacher at a missionary school in wartime Macau was framed as a fable about industriousness. “I had no home to return to, so I focused on teaching,” she said. “The big point here is that teachers worked hard, students worked hard. This is a lesson.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “Did you know how your family was doing back in Jiujiang?”

  “I wrote letters back to my grandparents at home,” she said.

  “Did you keep any of them?”

  “There were lots of things I didn’t take with me from Macau,” she said. “A whole suitcase of photos. But that’s my family business, we don’t have to talk about this stuff. My point is to say that we all worked hard, because—”

  “Grandma, you already told me this! I’ve written it down many times!”

  Of her time in Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War, she mentioned running into one of her college professors, who was later swept up by the Communists. “Don’t write this,” she said. “Absolutely don’t write this.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, playing dumb.

  “The part I just said, these people killed by the Communists,” she said. “Don’t write this political stuff.”

  My grandmother refused to discuss “political stuff,” which turned out to cover just about everything I was interested in knowing, and her stories grew vague and obtuse. Regarding one of my great-great-grandfather’s sons, her uncle, all she would say was that he graduated from the prestigious St. John’s Univers
ity in Shanghai. “I think he was an economics major, but he didn’t use it,” she said. “I think he taught English after graduation.”

  He was also the only one of my great-great-grandfather’s sons to survive the war. But my grandmother wouldn’t say more. “There’s some stuff that has to do with Communists that I’m not going to tell you,” she said.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Breaking the law. So this you don’t want to know. Stuff that has to do with politics, Communists, it’s better not to talk about it.”

  “But he might have an interesting story,” I said. I had not yet mentioned that I wanted to go look for the buried porcelain.

  “Just say he graduated from college and then taught school,” she said. “Leave it at that.”

  The more I pressed, the more resistant she became, which only tantalized me more. “You’re just a xiao wawa,” she said once, calling me the equivalent of a “wee babe.” “You don’t understand.”

  Andrew never expressed any interest in our family history or my conversations with our grandmother, but when I recounted these exchanges with our grandmother to him, he didn’t seem surprised. “The Changs put the ‘fun’ into ‘dysfunctional,’ ” he said. And it all started with our grandmother.