by Huan Hsu
“What happened to it?” I asked.
“It’s all gone. Stolen, probably.”
“Who do you think stole it?” I said. “The Japanese?”
“No.”
“Your grandfather’s worker, Old Yang?”
“No way,” she said. “He was very loyal. He would not have dug it up. It was stolen by other people. They came at night and dug it up. You know who?”
I shook my head and leaned forward.
“Relatives. I heard it was my san shen de niangjia,” she said, referring to the in-laws of her uncle Ting Gong. “They were rednecks. They had money but no culture. We had education, and they really disliked people like that. Strangers probably wouldn’t have known about it or its value. So I think it was taken by someone who knew the value, insiders or family members.”
I tried to hide my disappointment. Then I imagined tracking down those family members and looking on their shelves. “If you saw some of the porcelain, would you be able to recognize it as your family’s?” I said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare say it was mine,” she said. “Other people had porcelain, too. But I could say yes, my family owned that piece before.”
“What if,” I said, “I wanted to go back to Xingang and see for myself?”
“There’s nothing to see!” she said. “When the Communists took our house, they used it as a workshop, and then I think they tore it down to open a factory, I’m not sure. Now you can’t find the burial sites out in the yard, and the environment”—she used the English word—“has been completely disturbed. When my cousin went back after the Cultural Revolution, she stood there and couldn’t even figure out where the house had been. They tore down all the houses, changed the streets—everything’s changed. It’s impossible to find the original location. And if you did, it’s all probably gone.”
“Did your grandfather draw a map or anything when he buried his things?” I said.
“No, and if he did, it’s no use,” she said. Xingang suffered a major flood in 1954 that devastated the village. “It’s all different. There’s no context. I’m guessing all the things we buried might have been already dug up. Those people knew our family would have buried things, so they dug our garden with purpose. And even if they didn’t dig them up, you can’t find them. Who are you going to ask? The people there probably don’t even remember the houses. Impossible.”
“But you weren’t there when it was buried. You never went back. Isn’t it possible that some of it could still be there?”
“You’re dreaming,” my grandmother said. “Don’t choose this fantasy. You’re thinking like a child.”
“A child?” I said. “How am I a child?”
“This stuff happened seventy years ago. How can you understand it? Your Si Yi Po went back, couldn’t make sense of anything.” Her youngest sister, Pei Sheng, was Si Yi Po, “Fourth Grandaunt,” to me. “My uncle’s son, he grew up there, went to school there, and when he went back, he couldn’t make heads or tails of things,” my grandmother continued. “It’d be better if Er Yi Po”—Pei Fu, the middle sister, “Second Grandaunt” to me, who died in Jiujiang in 2002—“were still around. She was older when it all happened. The valuables, they’re all gone. I can’t encourage you to go back.”
“Why not?” I said, making a note to find out who this “uncle’s son” was. Despite having gone through the Liu genealogy many times, I still had a poor grasp of who everyone was, who was still alive, and where they lived. And my grandmother, who didn’t appear to be close with any of them, didn’t offer to connect me. “What harm is it for me to find out for myself?”
“People will be all over you,” she said, rubbing her arm. “They’ll make you meet all these people, take you to the family cemetery.”
That didn’t sound so bad to me, and I told her so.
“They’ll see you’re from the city and ask you to get them a job,” she said. “That’s why I don’t talk to relatives back there. I don’t want them to know how well Richard’s doing here, or everyone will flock to him for a job.” She had unhappy memories of her father, the railroad chief, having to deal with extended family members trying to use their guanxi with him to get hired.
“Maybe I just want to see where you’re from,” I said, making an appeal to filial piety. “What about the family cemetery? Is that still there?”
“No, don’t go looking for my parents’ graves!” she said. “The countryside is full of people who will think you’re rich and bother you for money. Lots of people think I’m arrogant about not being the same as them. But it’s because we received a missionary school education. And Chinese people’s traditional education is to be jealous of others, to criticize, to have confrontations. If you’re not good enough, they’re too good for you. If you’re too good, they’re jealous of you. So interactions with people are complicated.”
She wouldn’t say more, reminding me that she was not the serene, transcendent sage that I had envisioned. In our conversations, she revealed herself as a person with her own neuroses and anxieties, many of which had petrified over time. I sought omniscience, exposition, and a searchable archive, but she was the product of a life experienced, not just observed, and could no more easily detach herself from it and its limits or its consequences than anyone else.
“Anyway,” my grandmother said, “the stuff we buried the first time during the Sino-Japanese War wasn’t completely dug up. They overlooked some things. My family even gave me a porcelain jar, about this big.” She held her hands two feet apart. I assumed she had received the jar after the war, before she went to Taiwan. “But the cover was gone, so it wasn’t complete.” When she emigrated to the United States, she left that jar in Taiwan with a man named Chang Guo Liang. When I asked my mother about him, she described him as an apprentice to my grandfather who had practically grown up with the family.
My grandmother also mentioned that her cousin Pei Yu, my San Yi Po (Third Grandaunt), also lived in Taiwan and knew all the details about the porcelain. She had even helped with the burials. “She probably has a few bowls left,” she said. But she discouraged me from visiting her. “She’s very weak and out of it,” she said.
And she absolutely forbade me from going to Xingang. “They’re our family, but they’re country people,” she explained, spitting out “country” like a rotten piece of fruit. “Don’t go to Xingang. Don’t contact those relatives. Promise me this, Huan.”
“Fine,” I said. I gave up and left, thinking I’d try again with her another day. Later that night my grandmother phoned me. “I want to tell you something,” she said, sounding very serious. “You shouldn’t go to Jiujiang. Really, I don’t want you going to the country. I can explain, but you won’t understand. It’s very dangerous.”
WITH THE SPRING came the financial crisis, ruining any hope of a profitable quarter and casting a pall over Richard’s company. I cashed in my vacation days to take a solid month off to work on my Chinese. As the summer went on, clouds and haze piled on top of each other, building a woolly layer of insulation that suffocated the city with heat and humidity. One morning a high tropospheric gust snagged the swath of gray and peeled it back, exposing a rare blue sky. I escaped to a swimming pool in a longtime expat complex for a couple of hours and then rushed to Chinese class, still wearing my swimming trunks. At one of the busy intersections near Jing’an Temple, posted with (largely ignored) traffic attendants with white gloves and whistles, I waited for the light to change. As usual, when the light turned red, the right-turn traffic didn’t stop or yield, and as I stepped into the crosswalk, a white van traveling in the same direction made a right. I continued walking and the van continued turning, putting us on course to meet in the crosswalk. At the last second, I stopped, the van curved around me, inches from my nose, and I discharged more than a year of pent-up anger by slapping the side-view mirror.
The mirror exploded, and the sound of breaking glass cut through the din, catching everyone’s attention. As soon as I felt the mir
ror crumble, my anger evaporated, replaced by guilt, and I stood in the intersection feeling naked and very alone. The van stopped, leaving tire marks on the road, and the driver burst out, a stocky man with a buzz cut and red shirt. He charged me, grabbed my left wrist, and with his free hand struck me on the shoulder and chest again and again. He also tried to choke me, but his arms were too short, so he couldn’t quite get his thick fingers around my throat, resulting in repeated, uncomfortable pokes in the neck. His hands were unusually large and incredibly strong. I tried to twist my arm out of his grip, then karate-chopped at it with my free hand, but the fleshy vise clamped on my wrist didn’t budge. “What did you do that for!” he screamed. “Who do you think you are?”
My first instinct was not to run, or fight back, but to protect the phone in my left hand, on which I had recorded many of my conversations with my grandmother and which had become one of my most valued possessions. But the man showed no signs of stopping, and after about a dozen more strikes, I yelled in English, “Get the fuck off me!”
The man’s eyes widened, and his red face turned even redder. “Don’t give me that English!” he said. “You know what you did! You’re going to pay for that.”
As the man continued flailing at me, a series of thoughts crawled through my mind. Well, this isn’t so bad. Maybe he’ll finish soon. But what if he pulls out a knife or something? Should I fight back? But then I’d have to drop my phone. It had all happened so quickly that I still had headphones in my ears.
With one hand rendered useless and the other clutching my belongings, I turned sideways and crouched in a defensive pose. After punching me some more, the guy pulled me to his van, which had stopped just ahead of the broken pieces of mirror, scattered like the tail of a comet. He slid the passenger door open and said, “Get in!”
“No fucking way,” I said in English, and dug in my heels. “Get your hands off me right now.”
The woman in the van came out and attempted to act as mediator. The man, seeing that I wasn’t going to run, released my wrist.
I switched to Chinese and explained to the woman that the driver was by law required to yield to people in the crosswalk. “Fine,” she said, “but you still broke our mirror. So what are you going to do about it?”
“You picked the wrong guy to mess with,” the man said, breathing heavily. “I have a really bad temper. That’s why I wear red.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” I said. “You should be more like your wife. She’s reasonable.”
“She’s not my wife. She’s my co-worker.”
“Well, lucky her,” I said. “I feel bad for your wife.”
He either didn’t hear me or let it pass. “You need to pay for the mirror,” he said.
“Bullshit.” I had no idea what to do and hoped for a police officer to come upon the scene and take charge. A crowd had assembled, mostly older men who still lived in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and I began to fear the kangaroo court that my friends had warned me about. Traffic accidents and altercations in China were usually adjudicated by the principals on scene, with the help of the rubberneckers who invariably gathered. So long as the damage and personal injury remained nonfatal, the victim (yet to be determined) extracted a sum of money from the perpetrator and everyone went on their way. I was told that if one of the parties involved was a foreigner, the kangaroo court always ruled in favor of the local.
“Where are you from?” one of the older men asked.
“This isn’t about where I’m from,” I said. “It’s about him not obeying the law.”
The van man snorted. “You keep going on and on about the law,” he said. “Shut up about the law.”
“If you’d obeyed the law, none of this would have happened,” I said. “It’s your wrongdoing.”
“My wrongdoing! What does the law say about you breaking my mirror? You want to fight again?”
“Of course not. But if I’d kept walking, you would’ve killed me. So I got mad. I’m tired of Shanghai drivers disobeying the law.”
“If I’d hit you, I would have been wrong, okay?” the man said. “I would have had to pay reparations. You need to pay for my mirror. That costs six hundred RMB.”
The price was exorbitant. I kept repeating my side of the story until one of the elderly onlookers waved me over. “Just call the police,” he said. “Have them come over and sort this out.”
So I did. When the dispatcher answered, I told him, in English, that there had been an incident and someone had jumped out of his van and attacked me. “He just started hitting you?” the dispatcher said. His English was excellent. “Yes,” I said, thinking the full story could wait until someone arrived. “Okay,” the dispatcher said. “Someone is on the way.”
Before long a pair of police officers arrived. The older one let the chubby one take the lead. The van man gave his story first, in Shanghainese, which I couldn’t follow.
Then it was my turn. “I’m sorry, but my Chinese isn’t very good,” I began.
“Where are you from?” the chubby officer asked.
“It’s not important,” I said. “You see, I was crossing the street—”
“Hey,” the van man said. “The policeman asked you a question. You’d better answer him.”
“It’s just a question,” the officer said. “Don’t be nervous.”
“I’m Chinese, okay?” I said. “But I was born in America.” I told the officers my version of the events, reminding them of the law that pedestrians had right of way in crosswalks, and that I had confirmed the law before with police.
“And was the light green when you were crossing?”
“Yes.”
The chubby officer looked at the van man and frowned. He said something in Shanghainese, which incensed the van man, who restated his case with renewed vigor. I noticed that the man kept leaving out the part where he attacked me. “Stop lying!” I said. “Tell them about when you hit me!”
I turned to address the officers and the crowd. “Listen, I came to China because I have Chinese blood and I love China and I love Chinese people,” I said. “But then I ran into you”—I pointed to the van driver—“and you’re a jerk. You’re an embarrassment to Chinese people. I’m embarrassed to be Chinese because of you.”
Everyone stared at me as if I’d sprouted another head, and despite the midday traffic, it seemed very quiet. The police officers broke off to discuss. After a moment the chubby one suggested that I pay the man a hundred RMB and settle it. By then I was resolute about saving both my money and my face. “What about him hitting me?” I said. “How much does he owe me for that?”
“Can you prove it?” the older officer asked. “Any witnesses who will confirm it?”
None of the onlookers claimed to have seen anything. Only the traffic attendant admitted to seeing the man grab me, but he wouldn’t say that he saw him hit me.
“All right,” I said to the driver. “If you want me to pay you, first let me hit you as many times as you hit me.”
The man squared himself with me and stuck out his chin. “Go ahead,” he said. “The policemen heard me give you permission.”
Everyone’s heads swiveled as if watching a tennis match. Ten minutes ago I might have taken a swing, but now I was just tired and late for my Chinese class. “I’m not going to hit you,” I said, stalling. “People who hit people are bad people. I’m not a bad person. I don’t want to be like you.”
We stared at each other for a while longer. “How about this,” the man offered. “How about I hit you one more time and we forget about the hundred RMB?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “What is it with you and hitting people?”
“I want my hundred RMB,” he persisted. “We’re all busy, let’s just settle it. Look, I’ve apologized, okay?”
“No, it’s not all right,” I said. “I shouldn’t have to pay you in addition to getting hit. If you wanted me to pay you, you shouldn’t have hit me. You’ve already gotten your compensation.”
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The man kept pressing, and I kept refusing. “Fine,” he said finally, “don’t pay, then.” He and the woman turned heel and walked to their van. Too spent to feel triumphant, I watched them open the doors, step up into the cab, and look back at me.
“Next time I see you, I’m going to hit you!” the man shouted, shaking his fist.
“Asshole!” the woman screamed.
WITH MY GRANDMOTHER AND SAN GU AT COLLEGE IN Nanjing, the household in Xingang was reduced to my grandmother’s two orphaned sisters, Pei Fu and Pei Sheng, along with Pei Yu and Pei Ke, the daughters of Ting Geng, who worked all over the province supervising road construction for the Kuomintang. Pei Yu and Pei Sheng, just one year apart in age, were so inseparable they might as well have been twins. The only male grandson, Cong Ji, bounced between Xingang and wherever his father, Ting Gong, the St. John’s graduate, was working.
For all his progressive attitudes toward education, Liu was as fengjian, or feudal (the character for feng means “sealed” or “closed”), as the next member of the gentry when it came to raising his granddaughters. Since respectable girls weren’t seen in public, they weren’t allowed to leave the house unless it was for school. They were forbidden any contact with boys or even walking the same path as them, which sometimes required some absurd maneuvering to make sure they never caught up to a group of boys or allowed a group to overtake them. They couldn’t answer the door when salesmen came by, much less buy anything. If they wanted a snack, they had to wait until someone brought home something from the market. Or they would have to pick something off one of the fruit trees, which the servants harvested and divided among the Liu families. With all the rules in the house, the girls joked that it was a good thing their grandfather had refused the post offered to him after the imperial exams. He would have been intolerable if he’d had official authority, too.
Although Liu employed as many servants as there were members of the household, the girls had to do chores. They got up at first light to sweep the floors (“Sweeping leads to longevity,” their grandfather told them), wipe the tables, and wash the teacups. Sometimes they got lazy, and once their grandfather left the house, they’d call in a servant to finish the sweeping while they retired to a daybed for a nap. As soon as they heard the tapping of the metal tip of their grandfather’s cane as he approached, they’d spring off the bed, snatch the brooms back from the servants, and finish the job.