by Huan Hsu
As the oldest girl in the house, Pei Fu acted the boss, and the other girls avoided her, finding her selfish, bossy, and aloof. For a time Pei Fu dressed in boys’ clothes and made everyone address her as “Mr. Liu” or “sir” instead of “miss” or “young lady.” When the seamstresses came to make the girls’ clothes, she demanded the cap and tunic of Qing dynasty officials. Because of Pei Fu’s seniority, she was allowed to serve the cakes, cookies, and sticky rice treats to guests. The rest of the girls envied her duties, as she could help herself to the snacks before she put them back into the cupboard.
Pei Sheng was the only one who dared to defy my great-great-grandfather. Every morning when he left for his daily rounds, she’d sneak out behind him, whispering to her sisters to close the door after her, and spend the day exploring the countryside, climbing trees, or playing with the daughters of sharecroppers. Usually she made it back before her grandfather. Sometimes she lost track of time, but no matter how many times she was punished, she’d be right out the door again the next morning.
Still, the sisters enjoyed a gentler grandfather than my grandmother had. Perhaps it was just his advancing age, but he treated his wife better and even laughed with embarrassment while she excoriated him for mistreating her and the villagers. If he was in a good mood, he’d tell stories, and when he did lose his temper, he fizzled and popped but didn’t explode. He seldom struck his granddaughters and forbade their mothers from spanking them when they misbehaved. “You should spank boys more and girls less,” he said. “Girls aren’t at home for very long. They get married off, and you want them to have happy memories of home.”
Continuing the tradition that his son Ting Zan began, Liu sent the rest of his granddaughters to Rulison. His neighbors couldn’t understand why he was spending so much to educate women. “What he spends on tuition, we could live on for the rest of our lives,” they muttered. But it had become fashionable within his class, and the Christian morality being taught in missionary schools wasn’t that far removed from the Confucianism on which Liu had been raised. The girls loved Rulison, where they could laugh, sing, or argue and wouldn’t be bothered as long as they followed the basic rules. On summer vacations, the girls retreated to Lushan, the ancient mountain with a handsome resort for Jiujiang’s foreign missionaries and Chinese elite, where their villa sat across a small stream from Republic of China president Chiang Kai-shek’s. Occasionally, while playing in the creek, the girls would spot the Generalissimo or his Wellesley-educated wife, Soong Mei-ling. “Hello, Mr. President,” they said as he passed by with his bodyguards. Chiang would wave and warn them to be careful in the water.
The girls’ country idyll ended with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Liu followed the developments in the newspapers he picked up every morning. As the fighting spread inland, banditry increased, and the girls were sent to spend the nights at sharecroppers’ houses. By the summer of 1938 Japan’s gunboats were steaming up the Yangtze, and its bombers made sorties over my great-great-grandfather’s fields to strafe Jiujiang, a strategic port and—due in part to Ting Zan’s work—railroad junction. In Poyang’s fertile waters, home to a rare species of freshwater dolphin, Chinese mines multiplied.
Jiujiang’s mission schools packed up and relocated to the Chinese interior. San Gu evacuated with Rulison, and my great-great-grandfather entrusted her with Cong Ji, the only male heir and the family treasure. My great-great-grandfather released his servants except for Old Yang, who had served the clan for as long as anyone could remember, and sent the newlywed Pei Fu off with her husband to Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, Jiangxi’s westerly neighbor, and where they hoped to enroll in one of the many universities that had relocated there. Pei Fu took with her her late mother’s jewelry and four hundred silver dollars, money that her late father, Ting Zan, had set aside for his daughters’ dowries before he died. Then my great-great-grandfather and Old Yang got busy burying his treasures. They worked at night, when visitors wouldn’t be expected and neighbors would be asleep. Of the three granddaughters left at home, Pei Sheng was too disobedient and Pei Ke was too young, so Pei Yu helped carry the objects from the house to the pit.
Just before they left, Liu filled a bucket with silver dollars, hoping it would last them until they returned to Xingang, and buried the remainder of the silver. Now refugees, the family first headed south for Lushan. Other relatives without the means to make such a trek stayed in Xingang or scattered into the surrounding countryside. The Liu girls had tried to stuff their packs with the entirety of their possessions, and before long a trail of toys and clothes formed behind them as they walked up the mountain. The baby of the group, five-year-old Pei Ke, followed along with an aunt, clutching a pack of fruit candy. Every time she began to cry from exhaustion, the aunt popped a piece of candy into her mouth.
When they reached Guling, the mountaintop resort, they found that the foreigners had already evacuated, and the villas, including their own, were crowded with frantic families who had occupied the first empty house they found. Liu managed to secure a hotel room, hanging French and American flags on the door as a protective measure, but the refugees flooding into town quickly depleted its supplies. The family waited on Lushan for a week, each day bringing no rice, only more hungry mouths as the fighting coiled up the mountain. Then one morning Liu became aware of Japanese ships massing on the Yangtze. He gathered the family and left that instant.
Too afraid to use the road, they stumbled along a creek down the backside of the mountain. Near the foot of Lushan, they ran into one of my great-great-grandfather’s former students, fleeing with his pregnant wife and his sister, and they traveled together for a ways. The wife was to give birth at any moment, but she refused to impose on a stranger and deliver in an unfamiliar house, so she struggled along, held up by her husband and sister-in-law. They fell behind my great-great-grandfather’s group, and then Pei Sheng heard gunfire. They ran back to find that the wife had been shot through her stomach. The husband and sister-in-law tried to drag her with them, but the wife asked them to set her down. “I’m not going any farther,” she said. “I know I’m not going to survive. Come and visit this place in the future. When your children grow up, take them here.”
My great-great-grandfather aimed for Nanchang, the provincial capital eighty miles due south, where Ting Gong worked. They hid and slept under trees during the day while Japanese planes patrolled the countryside. At dusk they started walking and didn’t stop until dawn, never knowing where enemy soldiers might lie. No one dared to use a torch or lantern, so they felt their way along small roads and mountain trails guided by the glowing tips of incense sticks that they appropriated from temples, or they followed the sound of jingling coins in Liu’s pocket. When Pei Ke couldn’t walk any farther, Old Yang put her in a basket and carried her on his shoulder pole.
A coal truck took them into Nanchang, but Ting Gong had already left for Pingxiang, near the mountainous border with Hunan province. It wasn’t an accident; Ting Gong had badly damaged his relationship with his father when he abandoned his wife for a cousin. Liu sent word to his son to come back, thinking to leave Pei Yu and Pei Sheng in his care, and arranged for the group to settle in Nanchang until the matter was resolved.
In a fit of adolescent hubris, Pei Yu and Pei Sheng decided to join the military. A recruiter placed them with a unit of other girls in the Kuomintang’s youth corps, but they found themselves unsuited for the constant drilling, cold-water baths, and meatless meals. Aiya, forget it, they decided, and sneaked off to reunite with their grandfather, who was still waiting for his son to return. Though the war had turned toward Nanchang, Liu didn’t want to subject the girls to more travel. “No problem!” the sisters cried. “If our unit catches us for deserting, we’ll be shot! Let’s go!”
From Nanchang, they hopscotched west, the war at their heels, staying in one place just long enough to plan their next move or until the fighting got too close. It was a motley group, my great-great-grandfath
er and Old Yang, both in their seventies, leading a pack of women and children. The surviving family members would later describe its composition in a kind of verse: a house of the old, the weak, the distaff, and the young. Sometimes they could buy food and accommodations. Sometimes there was nothing left to buy and they dug up overlooked vegetables in abandoned gardens and scavenged empty houses for food. One night, exhausted, the family stopped at a clearing where people were already sleeping. They found an empty space and fell asleep. The next morning they woke to see that all the sleeping bodies around them were actually dead soldiers.
In one city on the border of Jiangxi and Hunan, they found a landowner who had more rooms than he needed, so the family could stay for free. Still, Liu insisted on teaching the man’s children as payment and refused to accept the excess garden vegetables that the man offered. Whenever they took refuge in a city with a functioning or relocated school, he registered the girls for classes. My grandmother, who after graduating from Ginling College had taken a teaching job with a missionary school in southern China, followed the progress of her family through the occasional letters her grandfather mailed along the way.
Over the next few months, they traversed Hunan province, moving through Liuyang, Taoyuan, and Yuanlin; they fled Changsha hours before the Kuomintang burned it in a reckless attempt to discourage the Japanese from entering. By the time they reached Guizhou province, they had journeyed hundreds of winding miles from home, and it would have been illogical not to go to Chongqing, the Republic of China’s relocated capital, where San Gu and Cong Ji had gone with the Rulison school and where Liu thought he might find his middle son, a civil engineer.
As they got closer to Chongqing, signs of the Kuomintang’s militaryindustrial complex appeared. Liu’s party made its final push to safety in the backs of military trucks, trying not to suffocate in the whirlwind of dust kicked up from the wheels. By then my great-great-grandfather was no longer the lord of Xingang, whiling away his later years in the leisurely routines of a country gentleman. He was just another old man, far from home, running for his life.
AFTER A STRETCH ON THE MAINLAND, WHICH IS WHAT Taiwanese called China, Taiwan felt like an oasis of order and tranquillity. It started as soon as I got to the airport in Shanghai. While the gates for domestic flights resembled Shanghai’s subway platforms, the passengers for Taipei queued and boarded without pushing or shoving. The flight landed in Taipei late, but everyone waited in their seats and spoke to each other or on their phones in hushed voices. Bins full of fake DVDs and displays explaining why fake handbags were prohibited greeted us in the baggage area. Cartoon characters and bubbly script dominated the public signage.
I had come to find Liu Pei Yu, the third “sister” in my grandmother’s generation (though actually a cousin), and whom I called by the kinship term San Yi Po. According to my grandmother, San Yi Po had helped bury my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain and might still have some pieces. Uncle Lewis, who was friendly with the family, had arranged for my visit. The Taipei scrolling past the taxi window on the way to San Yi Po’s apartment didn’t appear to have changed much since my first and only other trip to Taiwan. I was fifteen years old, annoyed at having to spend the summer away from my friends, and I complained nonstop about the food, the heat, the humidity, the noise, and the Chinese people. Any hope of making a connection with the country where my parents grew up vanished when, a few days after arriving, I contracted a virus and spent the rest of the month feverish and shitting myself in my sleep.
Much of modern Taipei’s architecture, largely constructed in the 1970s and 1980s with little sophistication in aesthetics or design, looked even more weatherbeaten and haphazard than Shanghai’s. Neon signs crowded the city’s long avenues, protruding from buildings as if trying to wave down a bus. There were so few traces of colonial-era Taiwan, let alone old Taiwan, that filmmakers making a movie set in 1940s Taiwan had to shoot it in Thailand. Even the city’s iconic piece of architecture, the Taipei 101 building that for a moment had stood as the tallest in the world before Shanghai’s World Financial Center surpassed it in 2007, seemed incongruous. Rising above the drab city like an obelisk, it only underscored how unremarkable the rest of the place was.
Lacking Beijing’s primacy or history, Shanghai’s modernity, or Hong Kong’s internationalism, Taiwan’s capital of “only” about two million people felt sleepy and undistinguished. Most of Taiwan’s tourism came from mainlanders or Japanese visiting their former colony in the tropics, the way the Dutch might check out Indonesia. The infrastructure wasn’t geared toward Westerners, and it was hard to find good Western food. The level of English was often little better than that on the mainland, and the Taiwanese were just as shy about speaking it, leading to plenty of Chinglish and awkward translations (“tuna floss” for dried, shredded fish; a law firm named “Primordial”).
But where China’s modern cities were rank with sewage, rotting garbage, and industrial paint, Taiwan’s tumbledown alleys and narrow side streets were perfumed with tea, incense, and beef noodle broth that began simmering at dawn. There was such an emphasis on green space that park benches were even tucked into road medians. The bus drivers exchanged waves when they passed one another. And while the buses in China had weapons-grade air horns under their hoods, the horns in Taiwan were governed to beep like scooters’. Taxi drivers insisted I wear my seat belt. Without fail, cashiers and customers greeted and thanked each other during transactions. The subway platforms had painted lines to show where riders should line up, keeping the doors clear for passengers to exit first. In the stations, standers and walkers obeyed invisible barriers, and no matter how crowded a train might get, which they often did, no one intruded on my space or touched me without apologizing. One afternoon on a packed train, an exiting schoolgirl said, “Excuse me, pardon me for a second, could you please let me by, I’d like to get off the train,” to every single person she encountered on her way to the doors.
I ARRIVED AT San Yi Po’s apartment around noon, leaving my shoes at the door while her eldest daughter, whom I called Da Biao Yi, searched through a stack of house slippers for a pair big enough for my feet. San Yi Po lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a high-rise complex in Taipei’s Songshan district, a particularly charmless area of the city. The apartment had been provided by the military for San Yi Po’s late husband, a high-ranking officer in Taiwan’s air force, and it demonstrated that for all the differences between Taiwan and the mainland, their aesthetic sensibilities remained similar. The floral print sofas in the living room, sitting on glossy tile floors and arranged around a large flat-screen television, wore cheap bamboo seat covers. Clutter grew on table surfaces like mold. Though all the Liu girls had attended missionary schools, only my grandmother had emerged as a devout Christian, and the religious symbols in San Yi Po’s apartment were Buddhist ones. A glass cabinet took up one wall, full of knickknacks, military citations, and dusty bottles of brandy. If San Yi Po had any of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain, as my grandmother had suggested, she didn’t have it on display.
San Yi Po was eighty-seven years old and had recently broken her leg, confining her to a wheelchair. She lived with Da Biao Yi, who was six months older than Uncle Lewis, never married, and had worked for the national television company until her retirement. They shared a bedroom, sleeping side by side in separate beds. Da Biao Yi and her five siblings, most of whom were born on the mainland during the war years, spoke to each other in a pidgin Mandarin, Jiujiang, and Sichuan dialect, the product of having grown up in juan cuns, or military dependents’ communities, all over China. “Our speech has grown confused,” she laughed. “Our Mandarin isn’t correct, our Sichuan dialect isn’t correct, and if you asked me to use a correct Jiujiang accent, I wouldn’t be able to.”
I presented San Yi Po with a bag of fruit and a stoneware dish purchased from a boutique selling contemporary ceramics. San Yi Po, whose tastes apparently ran counter to mine, barely glanced at the dish before setting it
down on a side table, where the clutter immediately swallowed it up. Her live-in ayi, a young Indonesian woman, prepared a simple lunch served directly from the old pots in which they were cooked.
San Yi Po was the oldest daughter of Ting Geng, my great-great-grandfather’s middle son, a civil engineer who died of tuberculosis during the Sino-Japanese War. I had a hard time seeing any resemblance to my grandmother; San Yi Po’s chubby cheeks, doughy body, and slouched arms gave her the look of an overfed, elderly orangutan. Despite what my grandmother had said about her health, San Yi Po was as energetic and talkative as my grandmother was reserved. She gossiped about everyone, including my grandmother, whose devout Christianity had long puzzled her; she described my grandmother as having been too religious for her own good. It was nice to find a family member who liked to dish.
As a child, San Yi Po was the compliant granddaughter. She was the one my great-great-grandfather took with him when he inspected his fields, whom he taught how to settle harvests and accounts with the sharecroppers and keep accurate financial books. Cong Ji might have been the heir, but San Yi Po was who my great-great-grandfather envisioned would operate his empire when he was gone. So even though San Yi Po was only eleven years old when the Imperial Japanese Army reached the confluence of Poyang Lake and the Yangtze, she knew the complete story of my great-great-grandfather and his porcelain because she had helped bury it.