by Huan Hsu
In Kaohsiung, there wasn’t enough housing to accommodate everyone coming from the mainland, and the family squeezed into a three-room house that they shared with another couple. Once new housing was built, my grandparents’ job grades were high enough that they were able to move out into their own place.
During a bout of tuberculosis, my grandmother turned full bore to Christianity, which led her to leave the armory to raise her children full time. To make sure they didn’t suffer through the same deprivation as she had, she sold off her jewelry to pay for their food. All the cookies—baking appealed to her chemistry background—and jams that they couldn’t find in Taiwan, she made from scratch, using the fruits and vegetables available. When Richard got older, he used to ask her why he couldn’t find the tomato jam from his childhood in any stores. Once the children were grown and attending college, my grandmother accepted a post at the Ginling Girls’ High School in Taipei, founded in 1956 by alumnae of Ginling College.
When the Kuomintang first arrived in Taiwan, everyone was preoccupied with counterattacking the mainland and assumed a victorious return was imminent. As China suffered through the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Chiang Kai-shek saw his opportunity to retake the mainland. But he had lost international support, particularly from the Americans, and after a series of defeats in skirmishes with the Chinese army, he scrapped his plans. “If the Americans had given their okay, we’d have been victorious at that time,” Chang Guo Liang said. “We’d have been back for decades.”
Chang Guo Liang was desperately lonely in Taiwan, living first in the singles’ barracks on the army base, then with my grandparents, and then in another series of homes. But with all lines of communication broken (due as much to Taiwan’s policies as China’s), it was difficult to know what friends and family were going through on the mainland. Occasionally a letter would get smuggled through Hong Kong, but from 1949 until the 1970s, when mail service was normalized, families remained in the dark. Chang Guo Liang gave up hoping that he would ever go home and married a bendi ren, or “native” Taiwanese.
We took a right at a newly built administration building and emerged onto a wide intersection. “This used to be just a wooden bridge,” Chang Guo Liang said. On the other side stood the arsenal, encircled by a concrete wall topped with razor wire. An old water tower rose up from the compound. The arsenal was still in use, Chang Guo Liang said, though I saw no activity, only a few military trucks and a treadless armored vehicle. My family, along with Chang Guo Liang, had lived inside those walls when they first arrived in Kaohsiung.
Clouds knitted on the horizon, so we returned to the apartment, where Chang Guo Liang’s wife had prepared a dinner of pork meatballs with soy sauce and tofu, mustard greens, scrambled eggs with tomato, cabbage, and winter melon soup. We ate in front of the television, while Stanley watched cartoons and ignored his grandfather’s exhortations to eat more.
Chang Guo Liang finally returned to the mainland in the late 1980s, a few years after China began allowing family visits. A letter sent to his old address in Sichuan province sat in the village until someone happened to recognize the name and deliver it to Chang Guo Liang’s younger brother. Though his family house had been torn down, Chang Guo Liang still made annual trips to China. I asked him if he thought of himself as Taiwanese or Chinese.
He didn’t answer immediately. “I think …” he began, “it’s all the same.” He laughed. “Taiwan’s fine, the mainland’s fine. In my heart, I think it’s all one country.”
THE NEXT MORNING Chang Guo Liang and I rode the bus into the city to see the lane where my mother, Lewis, and Richard had grown up. We walked up a wide, leafy boulevard and turned left into a narrow side alley. Once lined with arsenal employee housing, much of the lane had been redeveloped with low-rise flats. A new six-story apartment building stood where my grandparents’ house once had. At the end of the lane, a few of the original employee houses remained, one-story, fenced by brick walls, with corrugated metal roofs.
Chang Guo Liang recognized a man his age and had a quick conversation with him. I looked up and down the lane, feeling no special connection to it, perhaps because my family had not felt one either. I didn’t remember anyone making trips back to Kaohsiung or even speaking about it with much fondness. My mother had gone back to Taiwan only once or twice in my lifetime.
On the way back to Chang Guo Liang’s apartment, I asked him about the porcelain jar. He never met my great-great-grandfather and couldn’t remember my grandmother or any of her sister-cousins talking about him. He didn’t know the story of the buried porcelain and wasn’t sure what jar my grandmother was talking about, except that he didn’t have it. I supposed it was probably like someone asking about a spoon or a sweater or some other utilitarian item left with him half a lifetime ago. Nor did he have any old photographs of the family. “Oh, we had so many photos, but when we moved, we threw them all away,” he said. “It’s such a shame. And the ones we kept, we can’t find them anymore.”
WHEN I WAS in Shanghai, I heard a Taiwanese businessman explain the cross-strait relations between China and Taiwan. There were parents with a child, the businessman said. When the child was born, the parents were too poor to take care of him, so they put him on the street and hoped that someone else would take him. And many countries, with abundant culture and resources, did just that. The child grew into a bright and talented young man, full of potential. By then his birth parents had grown very rich and decided they wanted the child back. But the child thought, Wait a minute. You left me by the roadside in a pile of shit, and now you want to tell me what to do? We came from the same family, the businessman said, but we’ve taken very different roads.
In the years following the civil war, it seemed that Taiwan based its identity on whatever the mainland wasn’t. Communism versus capitalism. Cultural Revolution versus cultural protection. Traditional characters versus simplified. Wade-Giles romanization versus pinyin. Every aspect of daily life could be parsed to oppose the mainland. Even now the Taiwanese insisted on calling their metro system the jie yun, or “rapid transit,” instead of the mainland term ditie, or “subway.” Whatever the motivations, it was heartening to know that Chinese people could achieve such progress but also disappointing that it was limited to Taiwan.
When Chinese on the mainland brayed about recapturing China’s past glories, I heard insecurity. When they mentioned China’s five thousand years of history and culture, I saw a long line of failures and missed opportunities. It was easy to blame these failures on China’s feudal system, in which all power was concentrated in one man who was more interested in maintaining that power than in developing his country. Or on China’s history of xenophobia. But in actuality, reformist emperors did exist, and China did study the West. The problem was those reformers didn’t last long, and unlike the Japanese, who studied the whole Western knowledge system as they modernized, the Chinese focused on expediency. They relied on missionaries to make timepieces or scientific instruments, and when the missionaries left, so did the knowhow, and the Chinese could only make copies rather than innovate.
Instead of practical technologies, the Chinese invested in pondering the principles for ruling a country—Confucianism. But when the country abandoned the imperial exam system in 1905, its philosophical foundations became irrelevant, and so did its economic base of agriculture and taxes. Those systems didn’t modernize to keep pace with a changing world, so while the West rose, China languished.
In a roundabout way, I was basically pondering the “Needham question.” Joseph Needham, the eminent Cambridge biochemist, polymath, polyglot, and polyamorist who was a better friend to China than I could ever hope to be, crisscrossed China during the Sino-Japanese War on a friendship mission to provide moral and material support to Chinese academic and research institutions, and along the way he recorded the whole of China’s intellectual history. Upon returning to England, he embarked on the landmark Science and Civilisation in China book series attempting to catal
og every invention or idea that had ever originated on Chinese soil.
As Needham studied the endless ways in which the Chinese had demonstrated inquisitiveness, inventiveness, and creativity, he couldn’t help wondering why, for all China’s scientific accomplishments, modern science, for instance, had not developed in China. Why had this tradition of achievement all but stopped in the Ming dynasty, and how could China have been so poor and backward for so long?
Needham postulated many reasons, such as China’s reliance on an ideographic language system, its system of governance, and its geography, but he died in 1995 without finding his answer. Other scholars had put forth their own theories—one prevailing idea was that the Chinese just stopped trying—but recently a backlash had developed. One of Needham’s collaborators, University of Pennsylvania sinologist Nathan Sivin, was a particularly eloquent critic, writing, “It is striking that this question—Why didn’t the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution?—happens to be one of the few questions that people ask in public places about why something didn’t happen in history. It is analogous to the question of why your name did not appear on page 3 of today’s newspaper.”
Perhaps it was only natural for me to speculate. As I unearthed pieces of my family’s history and tried to weave them into a coherent narrative that I could follow back to the porcelain, I was also creating a new version of it. I disturbed the long-buried memories of my relatives because I hoped these shards might yield some unified truth. But there was no end to trying to know what happened to my family’s buried treasures, just as there was no end to speculating about China’s unhatched scientific revolution.
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu wrote, “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” No matter how hard I tried to project something into the emptiness inside my family’s porcelain—a goal, a heritage, a solution—it remained empty. Just as no matter what explanation I gave for China’s miscarried possibilities, they remained unborn. Until we knew what had been, we were free to write what might still be. To seek was to have purpose. To wonder was to breathe life into possibilities.
For all Taiwan’s comforts, I was eager to return to the mainland. I missed its urgency and dynamism—even the confrontation. Perhaps because Taiwan had spent most of its modern existence looking at the mainland with longing, its cities embodied impermanence; Taiwan wasn’t just a government in exile, it was a people and a culture in exile. Sinologists and archaeologists could bemoan the current state of affairs on the mainland until they were hoarse, but they wouldn’t stop heading there, and neither could I. As one anthropologist in Taiwan told me, “China has it ALL. It’s where the things are.”
I WOUND UP IN JINGDEZHEN BY ACCIDENT. WHILE ON A long weekend trip with some friends to Huangshan, declared by Ming dynasty scholar Xu Xia Ke (same Xu as my Hsu) as a mountain without peer and where the SMIC vice-president had nearly died of a heart attack, I looked on a map and saw that Jingdezhen was less than one hundred miles away. Having heard so many people talk about it in fantastical terms, and having felt their disapproval when I told them I had not yet visited, it seemed only right to take the short train ride to the origin of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain. I left my friends at some hot springs midmountain and hailed a taxi to the train station.
We sped past jagged peaks and long tunnels, the only car on the highway, which the driver said was new and greatly reduced travel times to and from the mountain. At the train station, map vendors, restaurant hawkers, and pedicab drivers accosted me as soon as I exited the taxi. I fended them off and bought some fruit and a dan bing, a spring onion crepe fried with a beaten egg, from one of the food stalls on the square. Though the station was located in Huangshan, most of the storefronts around the plaza claimed to be in Tunxi, and I asked the proprietor about the discrepancy.
“Less than ten years ago this town was called Tunxi,” he said. “But someone in the provincial government decided to change it to Huangshan. They wanted more tourists, and Huangshan is much more recognizable.”
I spent the train ride facing a thin, manic young man with a spiky haircut talking nonstop to his seatmate, a placable man in his forties or fifties who looked to be an uncle or workmate. The younger guy’s speech was drenched in ma des, a filler word equivalent to fuckin’, as in, “That fuckin’ bitch at the fuckin’ train station was getting on my fuckin’ nerves, so I told her to fuckin’ shut up.” The young guy asked what I was doing on the train and how much I’d paid for my ticket.
“Twenty-five kuai,” I said, using the monetary term with a meaning similar to “bucks.” About $3.50.
“That’s a fuckin’ lot,” he said. “Too fuckin’ much.”
The train pulled into Jingdezhen past midnight. I followed the passengers out of the station, where they seemed to evaporate into the hazy night. I crossed the deserted street to look for the hotel that I had booked last minute from Huangshan, selected for its proximity to the train station. A woman appeared from an unlit doorway. “I’ve got girls, mister, very young, very beautiful,” she said. “Seventeen years old.”
THE NEXT MORNING I rode the elevator to the lobby of the Ban-dao International Hotel, some attempt to build business-class accommodations for businessmen who never came. The receptionist and security guard were the same as the night before; when I entered, they were chatting about where they dreamed of traveling (she, New York and Paris, and he, Tibet) while a bat circled overhead. The only signs of porcelain were the two tall vases lurking behind high-backed chairs in opposite corners of the lobby.
I had a backpack full of dirty clothes and a phone number for something called the Pottery Workshop, which a gallerist in Shanghai had given me. If I wanted to know about Jingdezhen and porcelain, the gallerist said, the Pottery Workshop was a good place to start. But the hotel employees didn’t recognize the Pottery Workshop, and I didn’t know what it was called in Chinese, so I decided to walk to People’s Square, which formed the center of many Chinese cities.
The hotel doormen argued over the best way to get there. “My way is faster,” one said.
“His way exposes you to the sun the entire time,” the other said. “My way has trees.”
I took the second doorman’s advice. Though Jingdezhen lies about fifty miles south of the Yangtze River, its hot and humid summer climate shared the same characteristics as the trio of river valley cities—Chongqing, Wuhan, and Nanjing—that earned themselves the moniker of China’s “Three Furnaces.” I walked north through the sopping heat along a shaded street of small storefronts, including scooter retailers, restaurants, fruit stalls, and two sex-toy shops. For a city synonymous with one of China’s most beautiful creations, Jingdezhen wasn’t much to look at, a third- or fourth-tier city in a poor province. The architecture consisted of monotonous variations on a cube, often clad in sanitary tiles caked with water stains and dirt. The refuse on the streets, the dust and smog and sweat choking the air, and the traffic noise made Shanghai seem like Switzerland. One of the few attempts at beautification were the streetlights and the crosswalk signals encased in columns of blue and white porcelain. At the southern edge of People’s Square loomed a Walmart the size of a football stadium.
Across the street from the Walmart, construction crews worked to clear an equally monstrous tract of land next to an open-air ceramics market and a shopping mall, each stall offering the same cheap, decaled vases, dinnerware, and tea sets. It was difficult to overstate just how ugly it all was, loud colors and clashing styles as unsubtle as their surroundings. Anchoring People’s Square was a concrete tower connecting four pedestrian bridges, painted to look like blue and white porcelain.
I phoned the Pottery Workshop, obtained the address, and hailed a taxi. We drove through the winding, chaotic city center and then made a right onto a boulevard with antijaywalking railings running all the way down both sides. We passed a man standing over a sidewalk trash bin, squeezing the blood out of a headless snake, its body still c
oiled defiantly around the man’s arm. Tall brick smokestacks began to appear above the houses, and the driver aimed for a pair on our left. He told me that there was a saying in town that someone in every family was involved in porcelain and he estimated that there were probably thirty to forty thousand workshops just in our immediate vicinity, though all I could see were crumbling houses. As we approached the pair of circular chimneys, hunched-over old men began appearing on the roadside, pushing handcarts loaded with ceramics to and from the kilns that I still could not see.
The driver dropped me off at the main gate of a 1950s-era factory. I walked in and found the Pottery Workshop’s office, on the second floor of one of the larger buildings. In the office the woman I had spoken with on the phone asked if I could speak Chinese. “Yes,” I said.
“Well, why were you making me speak English, then?” she said. “So what kind of tour guide do you want?”
“English would be better,” I said.
“English would be better,” she muttered as she dialed someone on her phone.
A minute later an attractive young woman with a dash of freckles across her nose walked in and introduced herself as Jacinta. She wore skinny jeans and a fitted plaid top, and her chocolate hair was cut in a bob. I figured her for Japanese, but she was actually from the Shanghai suburbs and a fourth-year student in ceramic arts at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute, a large four-year university in town. She spoke impeccable English with an American accent, using words like dude and pain in the ass. I was amazed to learn that she was completely self-taught, mostly from watching American television series, movies, and teen soap operas.
Jacinta seemed puzzled and somewhat suspicious about my presence. To express an interest in porcelain without also being an artist struck her as odd, and I disappointed her when I failed to recognize the principles—minor celebrities in the ceramics world—behind the Pottery Workshop. Founded by a Hong Kong artist, the Pottery Workshop was an effort to reestablish a modern creative industry in Jingdezhen, offering artist residencies, manufacturing designs, and selling its own line of wares. It hosted weekly salons by visiting artists and a Saturday-morning market for JCI students to sell their work.