The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  “Let me tell you, when we were fleeing, we were really pitiful,” she said. “We’d hide under trees and sleep during the day, and when dusk came, we started walking and didn’t stop until dawn.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “What use was there being scared?” She swiped the air as if back-handing a mosquito. “There were so many refugees. We saw dead people all the time on the roads.”

  During the war, San Yi Po remained in Chongqing until she finished high school at the relocated Rulison school, where San Gu taught. Tired of the itinerant life of a refugee and eager to attend college, she made arrangements to enroll in her top choice, Soochow University. Then one day San Gu told her she needed to go to Guizhou, where her mother and younger sister, Pei Ke, were living with Pei Fu.

  “Why?” San Yi Po asked.

  “They want you to help take care of your mom and Pei Ke,” San Gu said.

  What San Gu didn’t mention was that my great-great-grandfather had arranged for San Yi Po to marry. He’d selected her husband, Dai Chang Pu, a junior officer in the army’s special operations corps, on the basis of having seen him sew a button, figuring such a man would be a capable provider for his granddaughter. Dai happened to be a Jiangxi native and a graduate of Tong Wen Academy, Rulison’s brother institution, and recognized my great-great-grandfather’s name. Stationed far from home and eager for company, he agreed to the marriage.

  “But what about college?” San Yi Po asked San Gu.

  San Gu replied that Grandfather had lined up a teaching job for her, too.

  “But I can work somewhere else and send them money and support them that way,” San Yi Po said.

  “Pei Fu works all day, so someone has to be there to take care of your mom and sister,” San Gu said. “Besides, you don’t have a choice. Grandfather’s waiting for you.”

  San Yi Po relented. When she got to Guizhou, Pei Fu told her of the marriage agreement. “Who the hell is getting married?” San Yi Po demanded.

  “You,” Pei Fu said.

  San Yi Po, ever the obedient granddaughter, married Dai Chang Pu on Christmas Day 1941, just a couple of months after their introduction. “I couldn’t disobey my grandfather,” my grandaunt said. “But it turned out okay.”

  Dai Chang Pu was just a captain when they married, but he was tapped for the air force’s zheng zhan—political warfare—department and rose through the ranks. When I asked Uncle Lewis, who like all young men in Taiwan had completed two years of compulsory military service, what zheng zhan meant, he explained that it was the equivalent of the military police, tasked with rooting out subversion, especially Communist sympathizers. Dai Chang Pu was nominally the second-in-command wherever he was stationed, but everyone knew he was really in charge. Running afoul of him could at the very least make a soldier’s life difficult, or even result in his execution, which meant that zheng zhan officers were despised as much as they were feared. “They were the people in the army in charge of brainwashing you,” Lewis said. And just in case it wasn’t clear, he added that these people were “assholes.”

  Dai Chang Pu retired in 1958 and died in 2001. “They say no affection in a marriage is a bad thing,” San Yi Po said. “But it can also be a good thing. Everyone compromises with each other. Our temperaments were total opposites. He liked to put on a good face and host all these important people. Me, I was very casual. He could be so annoying, saying I had to wear these clothes and behave this way. But we made it through sixty years. Long ago that was your whole life—get married, have kids, live your life. We were pretty good, actually. Pretty harmonious.”

  THE DISTANCE FROM China to Taiwan was only eighty miles, less than Cuba was from Florida, yet I couldn’t have felt farther from the mainland. Shop floors and streets were remarkably clear of litter. People took their waste home with them, where they sorted it and then delivered it to recycling trucks that made rounds in the evening like ice cream trucks, complete with jingles blaring from their speakers. Seemingly humble eateries became hubs where Chinese of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds gathered. Drivers stopped for pedestrians; the first few times I let cars pass in front of me, their operators smiled and waved thank you. The old factories in the overgrown hills had displays reporting the day’s air particulate concentrations, and construction sites posted all the same notices as in Western countries: the developer’s information, the phone numbers for questions or complaints, and the running total of incident-free workdays.

  Taiwan felt like the mainland with polished edges, even down to the language. The Taiwanese accent was a soft drawl, and the manner of speaking was hushed. They ended their sentences with a breathed “oh,” a bit like the Canadian “eh.” But the differences in syntax and diction between Taiwan and the mainland, similar to British and American English, resulted in a different kind of Mandarin. In Taiwan avocados were e yu li, or “alligator pears,” while on the mainland they were niu you guo, “butter fruit”; Australia was Ao Zhou instead of Ao De Li Ya; and bicycle was jiaotache (“foot step vehicle”) instead of zixingche (“self-powered vehicle”). Other mistakes could be more fraught. Chewing gum, or kou jiao on the mainland, meant “blow job” in Taiwan. Requesting a wake-up call, or jiao chuang, from the hotel receptionist was actually asking for morning sex. Every time I spoke, I cringed, hoping I wouldn’t be taken for a mainlander.

  A cynic like Andrew might have pointed out that the cleanliness, efficiency, and courtesies that I adored were influences from Japan, Taiwan having been a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945, when it was returned to China as one of the conditions of the Japanese surrender in World War II. Most elderly Taiwanese spoke Japanese and didn’t bear the same animus as mainlanders did toward the people that had made a host of educational, economic, and public policy modernizations on the island; many street and business signs still contained Japanese characters. Whatever its origins, Taiwan struck me as the ideal China, both a reminder of its cultured past and an example of what it could become: a functioning democracy with a free press, universal health care, and a strong middle class. Though little of Taiwan’s infrastructure was truly old, its sights, scents, and sounds budded from ancient, authentic Chinese roots, and the people seemed to have found a way to participate in a global culture without sacrificing their own.

  And the best thing about Taiwan’s culture was its food. While the obsession with eating here was no different from on the mainland, and food remained the primary social organizer, it had been refined to place added importance on quality, cleanliness, and freshness. I could see why my ABC friends always returned from trips to Taiwan noticeably heavier. I normally couldn’t stand Chinese breakfasts but could eat a fried you tiao and a dan bin every morning, washing it down with chilled, freshly pressed soy milk. Though I had not grown up with Taiwanese beef noodle soup and the side dishes commonly served with it, it still somehow triggered nostalgic comforts. Taiwan’s famous night markets offered dozens of drinks and snacks both sweet and savory; I could graze for a week without eating the same thing twice. Around the corner from San Yi Po’s apartment was the world’s best shop for fengli su, flaky pineapple cakes. I made trips across town just to get a cup of xingren doufu, a chilled dessert resembling an almond milk flan topped with fruit cocktail that I could have eaten by the gallon and that had the most Proustian associations of all.

  And of course, there was the fruit, which flourished thanks to the island’s volcanic soil and varied terrain. I used the markets as a marathoner would water stations, snatching a fistful of fruit every time I passed one. Peeled, sliced, and bagged mango; a creamy, sugary custard apple, best eaten with a spoon; a box of juicy local pineapple chunks; or my favorite, crisp ruby-red wax apples, tasting faintly of rosewater.

  One afternoon outside the Chiang Kai-shek mausoleum complex, Taiwan’s answer to Tiananmen Square, I wandered over to a large booth advertising wild strawberries. But instead of baskets of fruit, I found young volunteers handing out pamphlets for the Wild Strawberries, a protest moveme
nt. The name was a reappropriation of the pejorative nickname for Taiwanese born in the 1980s, having grown up in prosperity that their parents couldn’t have imagined, and stereotyped as being indulged, selfish, apathetic, and “easily bruised.” With its multiple security checkpoints, CCTV cameras, undercover police, and labyrinth of barricades, you’d be tackled in Tiananmen Square before you got your sign out of your backpack. To witness a large group of Chinese people perform an act of protest, on the founding father’s memorial site, no less, was both jarring and emotional. For the first time since moving to China, I felt proud to be Chinese.

  BUT TAIWAN’S CIVILITY, democracy, and progressiveness didn’t come easily or perhaps even naturally. When the Communists ended the Republic of China in 1949, they also cut short one of the most intriguing what ifs in history. The same zeitgeist that had led to the revolution in 1911 had also nurtured free-floating intellectuals who eschewed the imperial civil service system and grew disillusioned with traditional Chinese culture, which they blamed for China’s precipitous fall from power and inability to keep up with Japan and the West. This self-examination coalesced on May 4, 1919, when thousands of students massed before Beijing’s Forbidden City in one of the largest mass demonstrations in Chinese history, a thousand-year storm of intellectual exuberance that pushed China into a national renaissance. In what became known collectively as the May Fourth Movement, Chinese intelligentsia criticized Confucianism, agitated for new scholastic traditions and moral values, and sought practical solutions for coping with Western countries, such as establishing a civil, academic society.

  As the country attempted to sort out its very Chinese-ness, every strand of its social fabric was reconsidered: science, engineering, philosophy, political science, economics, architecture, literature. But this “new culture” movement wasn’t so much a call to embrace the West and Western democracy as it was a break from the old while the new was still being formulated, and ideas ranged far and wide. Chen Duxiu, one of the leaders of the May Fourth Movement and the dean of Peking University, cautioned that establishing a constitutional democracy in a country with thousands of years of feudalism and imperialism would be nearly impossible without first changing the Chinese character. Chen would later gravitate to the left and cofound the Communist Party. By 1920 the strands of the Communist Party’s genetic material had begun to braid.

  For all the progressive ideas on Chiang’s platform, he was a failure on the mainland. Today’s Chinese revile him as much as they revere Sun Yat-sen. Chiang’s government lasted only from 1912 to 1949, most of which he spent trying to legitimize his party’s tenuous rule amid natural disasters, uncooperative warlords, Japanese incursions, and the Communists. I had always thought of Chiang Kai-shek’s obsession with defeating the Communists as a principled, noble pursuit. The charitable portrait of Chiang—Christian, pro-West, pro-democracy—was that he played a losing hand as well as he could have. He lost China but saved Taiwan, which developed into one of the economic “tigers” of Asia. And he preserved the National Palace Museum’s collection—China’s most precious hoard of art—from possible ruin.

  But to his many detractors, Chiang was the very straw man—wealthy, powermongering, corrupt—that galvanized the Communists. He was a bigamist, a fair-weather Christian, a crook who diverted tens of millions of dollars from the American government, earmarked for the war effort against the Communists, into his own pockets, and the thief who stole China’s treasures. During the Sino-Japanese War, he was so obsessed with defeating the Communists that his own military officers had to kidnap him and threaten him with execution before he agreed to engage the Japanese.

  When Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang loyalists—including my grandparents and their young children—retreated to Taiwan in 1949, they intended to regroup and organize as a “government in exile” for the inevitable failure of Mao’s grand social experiment. “The sky cannot have two suns,” Chiang told an aide. Chiang, of course, underestimated Mao’s deftness as a nation builder. As Mao created a country of peasants with no ties to any historical or foreign influences, the thread of Chinese history that gave rise to the May Fourth generation continued with the Chinese enlightenment in exile. As a result, this tiny island became the world’s repository of Chinese culture.

  But the Taiwan that I reveled in didn’t just spring forth fully formed. While the Kuomintang cast Mao as a despotic thug, Chiang was the one with ties to crime syndicates, and the Kuomintang was stricken with corruption. The Chiang-led government in Taiwan could be as brutal as Mao in purging dissent. Thousands of Taiwanese were killed, imprisoned, or disappeared in the “228 Massacre” (a Tiananmen-like crackdown on protests against carpetbagging Kuomintang officials in Taipei on February 28, 1947) and the “White Terror” (the forty years of martial law and suppression of political dissidents) that followed. As recently as 1995, it was taboo to even speak of the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, which might have explained the pitch of my parents’ after-dinner discussions.

  That same year a tsunami of protests spurred the government to apologize, erect a monument to the 228 victims, and enact political reforms that led to the island’s first direct presidential election, in 1996. Then in 2000 the opposition party, known as the Greens to the Kuomintang’s Blues, crushed the incumbents by an almost two-to-one margin, leading to the first peaceful transfer of power in five thousand years of Chinese history. The result was an atmosphere where the right to vote was cherished and voter turnout approached 80 percent.

  In 2011 Taipei opened the 228 Memorial Museum, in the 228 Peace Memorial Park, located on a wide, quarter-mile-long road that was once called Long Live Chiang Kai-shek Road but was later renamed after the Ketagalan aborigines who originally inhabited the Taipei area, to “celebrate liberation from authoritarianism.” The museum’s purpose seemed to be both “never forget” and “celebrate freedom,” two phrases that appeared frequently in the exhibitions.

  Taiwan took pride in confronting its ugly history and in having built a society that blended the best of traditional Chinese culture with new Chinese ideals, and I was proud of them for it. Whenever the topic of the mainland came up, the Taiwanese I met sighed and politely said that Taiwan had been a mess twenty years ago, too, but look at where it was now. But it was increasingly looking as if the mainland’s culture would subsume Taiwan’s and not the other way around. After developing independently of mainland China for so many decades, China’s economic might had made the two governments cozier. Travel restrictions had been lifted for Chinese travelers, airlines could fly directly between Taiwan and China, and mainland brides were in vogue on the island. After decades of holding on to the Wade-Giles romanization system as a matter of cultural pride and national independence, Taiwan finally relented to mainland Chinese pressure and adopted pinyin as its official system in 2009, a move that angered many citizens, who took it as another step in Taiwan’s assimilation into China.

  AT SAN YI PO’S insistence, I checked out of my hotel and moved my things into her spare bedroom, which was anything but spare, with boxes piled to the ceiling. Once I was settled, San Yi Po told me that she had found a shoebox with a small stack of black-and-white photographs. The one box was all she could find. “Oh, I’ve thrown away so many photos,” she said. “They wore out, so I tossed them.”

  Many of the photographs in the shoebox were pretty worn out themselves, and San Yi Po couldn’t always remember where they had come from or who their subjects were. But they provided some of my first real glimpses of my family’s history, including my grandmother’s early life. The oldest were a group of photographs of the Rulison school campus from the 1930s before the war: San Yi Po and classmates whose names she couldn’t recall relaxing on a green, or sitting on a long brick walkway lined with trees and manicured lawns, the portico of one of the school buildings peeking from neatly trimmed hedges. A young boy and girl standing in front of a beautiful neoclassical building with arched columns, which could have come straight from the campus of an American
school of the same period. A ghostly group of girls wearing white dresses, white leggings, and white flowers in their hair, their images faded to the point of transparency, performing outdoors on the Rulison campus. A tiny, blurry photograph of what appeared to be my grandmother in high school, dressed for a school production in an elegant white Chinese gown and holding an open fan over her breast. Another thumbnail-size photograph of a smiling young woman who looked like my grandmother, wearing a traditional qipao with daisy print. Or it might have been San Gu. San Yi Po didn’t know for sure.

  We found a photograph of San Yi Po and Dai Chang Pu at their wedding, she in a white, sleeved dress and he in a three-piece suit, holding a fedora in his left hand. And a studio photo of my grandmother and grandfather holding my mother and Lewis on their laps, probably taken in Chongqing around 1945. Then a family picture of my grandmother, grandfather, mother, Lewis, and Richard standing in front of their small Japanese-style house in Taiwan during the early 1950s. San Yi Po’s husband standing with Chiang Kai-shek on one of the islands in the Taiwan Strait in 1959. A few images of my grandmother, San Yi Po, and another Rulison alum with one of their former English teachers, a white-haired woman named Laura Schleman from Ohio, reunited in Taichung, Taiwan, in the 1960s. My grandmother wears a long qipao under a white cardigan with the top button fastened, looking preppy-Chinese. Finally, my grandmother in middle age, her hair swept up into a bun and wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

  For the rest of the week, I explored Taipei during the day and after dinner sat with San Yi Po and Da Biao Yi in the living room to hear their stories. As the widow of a high-ranking Kuomintang officer, San Yi Po’s loyalties were clear. In her recollections, the Kuomintang were the noble heroes, while the Communists were “red bandits,” “ghouls,” “thugs,” or “bastards.” The Communist sympathizers in the family were “traitors,” and she gave dates, as most Taiwanese did, in “the nth year of the Republic of China.” Unlike the older generation on the mainland, many of whom were nostalgic for the Mao years, San Yi Po preferred the current era of Communists. “Before, they were all gangsters and bullies,” she said. According to San Yi Po, my great-great-grandfather was even more wealthy, educated, and generous than I had heard, a man who let his sharecroppers keep seven, not six, bushels of every ten. (By now, I had met enough Chinese descended from landowners to know that if every landlord was as kind and generous as their families remembered them—just as families of American plantation owners always claimed their forebears treated their slaves well—the Communists would never have taken power.) As for his porcelain collection, well, it was as massive as it was peerless.