The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  Back at the Sculpture Factory, I recounted my experience at the research center to Ding. He didn’t seem surprised. “So they weren’t interested in helping,” he said. “But I guarantee if you’d had a laowai face, they’d have been willing to help.”

  I returned to the city archives the next day, hoping to finally resolve the mystery of my great-granduncle, Ting Geng. Instead Mr. Liu said, “We can’t look this up. We only have post-Liberation records.” I didn’t bother asking why this contradicted what he had told me the day before.

  “Have you gone to Fuliang yet?” he asked. “Fuliang has all the pre-Liberation records. They can look it up for you very easily. Let me make a call for you.” He phoned the records department in Fuliang and had a short conversation. He handed me a name, phone number, and address. “Go find Mr. Chen,” he said. “He’s expecting you.”

  I went back to Fuliang, but this time to the archives, housed in a monumental tile-covered building with a slight curve in the middle. In the foyer hung two tile landscapes, under which a group of disinterested guards had gathered. I strode past the guards and up the stairs, where I found Mr. Chen.

  Mr. Chen looked through the xianzhi, or county history. It was full of gaps, skipping entire decades. “Nope,” Mr. Chen said. “There are some other Lius, but no one named Liu Ting Geng.”

  “What if he wasn’t a commissioner but a minor official who worked in the government?”

  “That’s not in here. I can’t look that up. If he did any important work, it may have been recorded—you could check the Qing records. But if he was just a regular guy, it wouldn’t be recorded.”

  What was I expecting? A proper archive with acid-free paper and white gloves? Instead, I got a few minutes to glance through a book published in the 1990s. Mr. Chen brought me tea in a plastic cup so thin it seemed ready to melt. He stepped out to have a smoke, leaving me to flip through the history book, which contained mostly census information and mostly from after 1949.

  Mr. Chen stepped back into the room. “Hey, tell you what, I’ll try to look through the Liu family history for you,” he said. “I’ve looked through a lot of them but never Liu. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.” We exchanged contact information, and I left him the names to look up. “You can’t rush these things,” he said. “If you were in a hurry to find them, you couldn’t do it. These things take time. But I’ll see what I can find.” I never heard from him, but it was exemplary treatment from a bureaucrat.

  Liu Feng Shu with either Liu Cong Ji or his older Liu Cong Ji and Wu Yi Po on the Rulison campus, circa 1937. brother Liu Cong Jia, at a Jiujiang studio during the 1930s before the family fled Xingang. This is the lone photograph I have of my great-great-grandfather, discovered among San Gu’s possessions after she died in 1998.

  Liu Cong Ji and Wu Yi Po on the Rulison campus, circa 1937.

  Undated photograph of Liu Pei Sheng, my Si Yi Po. She sent this photo to Fang Zhen Zhi in 1946 when they were courting, and he has managed to hold on to it ever since.

  My grandmother (back row, right) with assorted family members at San Gu’s engagement to Kuomintang officer Guo Wen Can in the summer of 1948. She would not see many of them again for nearly 30 years. Adults, front row, left to right: Guo Wen Can, San Yi Po’s mother (Lady Cai), San Gu; back row, left to right: Si Yi Po, San Yi Po, Dai Chang Pu, my grandfather Zhang Xi Lun, and my grandmother Liu Pei Jin.

  My grandmother holding Richard, circa 1952, about a block from the family house in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

  Fang Zhen Zhi in Moscow during his years as a visiting scholar from 1957 to 1959.

  San Yi Po’s husband, Dai Chang Pu (back row, left), with Chiang Kai-shek (front row, center) on Jinmen Island, circa 1960. As a high-ranking “political warfare” officer, Dai Chang Pu’s responsibilities included rooting out Communist sympathizers inside Taiwan’s military.

  Si Yi Po and Fang Zhen Zhi with their family in Beijing in 1964, while Fang was on furlough from his top-secret work developing China’s nuclear capabilities.

  Si Yi Po and Fang Zhen Zhi with their family in Beijing in 1969 or 1970. The eldest daughter, Fang Wan Ling (back row, right), had just returned from three years of “reeducation” in Yanan.

  My grandmother Liu Pei Jin in the 1960s, perhaps when she was serving as dean of students at Ginling Girls’ High School in Taipei, Taiwan.

  My grandmother at Ginling College in 2002, the only time she returned to her alma mater. She had contributed money toward the construction of a new building on campus; her name appears with other donors on the plaque behind her.

  Left to right: Me, my brother Fong, Ramey Ko (a cousin), and Andrew in Dallas in the summer of 1985.

  The SMIC headquarters in Shanghai. Beginning in 2000 as a cluster of trailers on a tract of farmland, the company has since grown into an international manufacturing giant boasting some of the most advanced technology in China.

  After Xingang suffered a massive flood in 1954, the village reassembled itself on higher ground. This is one of the few older houses remaining on what had been Xingang’s main street, at the end of which stood my great-great-grandfather’s estate.

  Much of the farmland in Xingang along the Yangtze River that my great-great-grandfather once owned has been sold off for development. This billboard on one of his former fields offers a glimpse of Xingang’s future.

  On the way to visit the grave of Liu Pei Fu (my grandmother’s middle sister and my Er Yi Po) near the Chen Jia Ba Fang village. From left: me, Chen Bang Ning, Wu Yi Po, San Yi Po’s son-in-law, Uncle Lewis, San Yi Po’s two daughters, and Aunt Jamie.

  Uncle Lewis paying his respects to San Gu in the relocated family cemetery. The gravestones are modern, and whether they are paired with the correct remains—or any remains at all—is a matter of faith.

  Commissioned in 1728 as a kind of pictorial inventory of emperor Yongzheng’s favorite antiquities from the imperial collection, the 60-foot-long handscroll Guwan Tu, or “pictures of ancient playthings,” depicts about 250 assorted objects with such detail that corresponding physical objects have been identified and experts still rely on it to verify antique porcelain and other collectibles. © The Trustees of the British Museum

  MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER WAS ALREADY IN HIS seventies when he arrived in the wartime capital of Chongqing with his family in tow. They had survived a months-long journey of nearly one thousand miles from Xingang, and his bucket of silver was empty. Fortunately San Gu was already in Chongqing with Rulison, and Liu enrolled Pei Yu and Pei Sheng in school. As relatives of a faculty member, their tuition was waived, and San Gu covered their room and board.

  The principal of Rulison’s brother school, Tong Wen Academy, which had also retreated to Chongqing, invited Liu to teach Chinese classics, providing him with a small income. And despite her differences with her grandfather, my grandmother regularly sent money, shoes, and clothing from Macau. Her school provided room and board for its faculty, leaving teachers to invest most of their paychecks in gold, jewelry, or British pounds, but my grandmother forwarded the bulk of her salary to her grandfather.

  As the war ground on, Liu’s middle son, Ting Geng, also died of tuberculosis, leaving my great-great-grandfather with only one living son, the estranged Ting Gong. The granddaughters began finishing high school. This life of exile and dependency didn’t suit a proud Confucian like my great-great-grandfather. With two dead heirs and pennies to his name, he risked becoming a liulang, a drifter, if he stayed in Chongqing any longer. He had begun plotting his return to Xingang almost as soon as he got to Chongqing, scouring the papers for news about the Japanese and chatting up new arrivals for information.

  He made his way back east as incrementally as he had come, dropping off Pei Ke and her mother in Guizhou with Pei Fu, arranging Pei Yu’s marriage to Dai Chang Pu, and leaving Cong Ji with his father, Ting Gong.

  Sticking to waterways, he hired small boats until he finally reached Poyang Lake, still patrolled by the Japanese. He slipped into the
lake at night and made for the opposite shore, but then saw a bright light on the water. Thinking it might be a Japanese boat, he told the boat master to turn around and hide in the reeds. But the light didn’t move, and so they edged back into the lake, following the path illuminated on the water. They continued slowly until they reached a small temple with a single burning candle. A short distance beyond the temple, he arrived home. A few days later, when he went back to look for the temple that had guided him, he couldn’t find it. My great-great-grandfather wasn’t a religious man, but that night he felt as if Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, had pointed him home, and from then on he would tell people that if their hearts were right, the bodhisattva would protect them.

  Liu found the outer wall of his estate, along with some of the satellite dwellings on the edges of the property, almost completely destroyed, the bricks scavenged by neighbors to build their own structures. But the house itself remained sturdy. The roof was intact and the front door was closed as tightly as when he had left; but when he went around to the back entrance, he discovered that it had been opened and the contents of his house ransacked. He learned that the Japanese had occupied the house and used the yard as a drilling area.

  He set about rehabilitating his house and reclaiming his fields, which his sharecroppers had continued working in his absence. When he reckoned it was safe enough, he sent for Ting Gong’s wife and Pei Ke, the youngest of my grandmother’s cousins. One day Japanese officers paid him a visit. They urged him to chu shan, or leave his hermit mountain and come out of obscurity to take a government position, to collaborate with them. “I’ve got one foot in the grave,” he said. “I can’t leave my mountain. What would you have me do?”

  “Help us maintain order.”

  “You have your country, and I have mine,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to do your country’s work for you.”

  “It’s your society,” they said. “You’re not working for our country. You’re maintaining order in yours.”

  “We have very good order,” Liu said. “We’re very harmonious. Our people are not the ones committing crimes.”

  Later the Communist guerrillas descended from the mountains to ask him for help. “I’m seventy!” Liu said. “I don’t understand military organization or strategy, I don’t know how to fire a gun, I can’t keep up with you when you run. Wait until I fix everything up and have a harvest. Then I’ll provide some supplies. This I can do for you.”

  Then the war ended, the Japanese retreated, and my great-great-grandfather slowly rebuilt his life and wealth with Old Yang’s help. He collected harvests and rent from his farmers again. The Communists were still around, making trouble, but my great-great-grandfather figured it was only a matter of time before they were defeated.

  For now his postwar life was peaceful. Four of his five granddaughters were married. His remaining son, Ting Gong, had a good job in Nanchang. His only grandson, Cong Ji, graduated from Tong Wen and went to Nanjing for college. His youngest daughter, San Gu, had come back to Jiujiang with Rulison, where Pei Ke, his youngest granddaughter, attended school. He even saw the bright side of Ting Gong’s mistress; it allowed Ting Gong’s wife to stay in Xingang to help care for him. His experiences during the war had left a lasting impression. Whenever neighboring families expressed disappointment over the birth of a girl, he would always try to correct them. “Girls are good!” he’d insist. “During our family’s time of greatest suffering, it was our girls who took care of us.”

  AFTER A BRIEF AUTUMN, THE WINTER IN JINGDEZHEN WAS as cold and damp as the summer was hot and humid. Making ceramics in such conditions was difficult—throwing cold clay was a nightmare, and finished bodies took forever to dry—so the city’s workshops went into hibernation. Few of the shops and restaurants heated their spaces or even closed their doors; the proprietors simply bundled themselves up and slurped hot tea. Even my luxury apartment was so poorly insulated that standing directly in front of the heating unit did no good. I was almost relieved when my aunt Scarlett, Richard’s wife, called from Shanghai to report that my grandmother had gone to the hospital and that I should come back as soon as possible to pay my respects.

  Returning to Shanghai was disorienting because it felt so different not just from Jingdezhen but from the Shanghai that I had left just a few months before. The taxi ride from the Shanghai Hongqiao airport to the Zhangjiang living quarters was nearly silent—the city had begun to issue fines for honking—and the newly completed elevated freeway above Longyang Road made the trip a snap. There were more strollers on the streets, and more people stood to the right on escalators. The trappings of wealth were obvious and increasing, and construction projects had left more and more areas with the anodyne internationalism of an airport shopping zone. I couldn’t help feeling a pang of nostalgia for the coarseness of “old” Shanghai and the specificity of all the things—the street food alleys, the pajamas on the street, even the laundry hanging in the trees—that I used to find backward.

  I noticed more local—or sea turtle—Chinese in what used to be expat havens, and why shouldn’t they? It was their country. The corrections extended to the reappropriation of the very expat havens themselves, with the opening of wine bars, bistros, and coffeehouses by Chinese, for Chinese. On the way back to the Zhangjiang living quarters, I snapped—in English—at a young guy cutting in front of me in the taxi line, and he responded in English.

  While I was in Jingdezhen, the ruling in the SMIC trial came down. A California jury found the company guilty of misappropriating sixty-one of the sixty-five disputed technology items. As part of the settlement, the company paid TSMC $200 million as well as stock and warrants worth about a 10 percent stake in the company, making TSMC one of the largest minority shareholders. Richard resigned. I was still on the company rolls, and the company could terminate my employment, which would cancel my visa, but I hoped that it would be a low priority in the reorganization.

  The next few weeks Andrew and I, joined by my brother, Fong, a government lawyer in Washington, D.C., visited our grandmother in the afternoons at the First People’s Hospital in downtown Shanghai. My grandmother had her own room on one of the top floors, accompanied by a rotating cast of family members and nurses. Sometimes she seemed almost sheepish, as if she might have overreacted. Other times she appeared to be in great pain, her face contorted with fear and panic, uttering soft moans as doctors hovered around her. It was my first time seeing a relative on her deathbed, and the smell of must and iodine clung to me when I left the hospital. Andrew and I often headed straight to the nearest bar after our visits.

  Too charged to cram ourselves into a taxi, we usually walked back to the subway station, wandering through what remained of the International Settlement’s old alleys and stately buildings. I had spent little time in this area north of Suzhou Creek, where many of the neighborhood’s smaller streets had not yet been redeveloped, and if I directed my gaze above street level, I could see pockets of Shanghai’s colonial history. The General Post Office Building, built in 1924, with classical columns and Greek gods on its baroque clock tower. The imposing art deco Broadway Mansions hotel from 1935, cubist setbacks on its shoulders. The Flemish revival Russian consulate building, and the Victorian Astor House hotel. To reach the Bund, we crossed the Waibaidu Bridge, an all-steel camelback truss bridge dating back to 1907 that looked like it had been transported from the Chicago River. These were the same things my grandmother would have seen when she brought her family through the city on their way to Taiwan in 1949.

  Dawn broke over this part of Shanghai, light schooling into the northern bend of the Huangpu and running upriver. Despite its reputation as a twenty-four-hour city, Shanghai does sleep, as I saw during late nights that stretched into the morning, the dim, empty streets overtaken by a spiritlike condensation. The fog wandered until the sky turned cerulean and the Huangpu ran gold, as if full of the money that the Chinese so feared would leak from the riverfront properties that the doors of the newly reope
ned Peace Hotel facing the water remained locked at all times. And when the fog burned away, changing state, as my grandmother soon would, as the buildings on my path from the hospital surely would, it lived on as an ever-shifting memory.

  When my grandmother’s body began to fail, Andrew and I made our final visit, and for all the practice I had speaking Chinese in Jingdezhen, I didn’t know what to say. My grandmother was conscious and lucid but had trouble speaking. Scarlett leaned into her ear and told her that we had come to see her, and then left the room.

  My grandmother whispered that she was glad to see us and that she hoped we would be good sons and Christians. I searched for something to say, a return to my monosyllabic childhood conversations with her.

  Finally Andrew cleared his throat. “Grandmother, thank you for all that you’ve done for us, helping raise us and taking care of us,” he said, his voice catching. “Please don’t worry about us. We will all be fine. Huan and Fong are smart, good-looking guys, and they’ll have no problem finding girlfriends. And I’ve got a girlfriend, so you don’t have to worry about me.” His eyes welled, but he continued with a farewell more eloquent and heartfelt than I ever could have managed. My grandmother closed her eyes and nodded. We squeezed her bony shoulders. She passed away a couple of days later.