The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  Western missionaries, unlike their commerce-oriented brethren, weren’t only interested in extracting wealth from China and were thus primed to be more sensitive to these unequal exchanges. The first attempts by American architects at sinicizing missionary buildings focused on the roof and simply capped four otherwise Western walls with a sloping roof and overhanging eaves superficially modeled after the ones in Beijing’s Forbidden City but without their actual structural design. For the Ginling College campus and grounds, the school’s president commissioned a Yale-trained New York architect named Henry Murphy, who had gained renown by successfully melding Chinese aesthetics with Western techniques in the construction of a medical campus in Hunan province—the Xiangya Medical School that my grandmother had wanted to attend. Murphy understood that Chinese-ness extended below a building’s roof, too, and would go on to design buildings for Beijing University and the Nanjing government. For all the new ideas being introduced inside those buildings—sturdy, high quality, and reminiscent of Ming dynasty palaces—the buildings themselves were perhaps the most visible reminder of the possibilities in balancing Chinese history and tradition with Western progress.

  Working with a shady local land buyer, Chinese architects, and Shanghai builders, Murphy oriented the campus on an east–west swale and placed the college buildings at the foot of the hills to shield them from cold breezes; since the college was closed during the hottest months, winter comfort was the priority. He secluded the dormitories at the west end, forming four corners of a quadrangle. To protect the students from rain and snow, he connected the dormitories and academic buildings with covered walkways. Other accents included ponds, artificial streams, arched bridges, and a traditional Chinese courtyard. As Murphy pushed for a local style throughout, the interiors had exposed ceiling beams and columns, ornamental lamps, and latticed screens.

  The new Ginling College campus opened in 1923, ready to accommodate four hundred students. The reaction to the building was overwhelmingly positive, and the provincial commissioner of public works claimed that it was the first time foreigners had adapted Chinese architecture to modern practices. A Ginling sociology professor summed up the aesthetic as “Chinese temples adapted to the use of Western science.”

  When my grandmother arrived on campus in 1933, the curriculum she studied was modeled after the elite women’s colleges in the United States, and all classes except for Chinese language and literature were taught in English. Smith College donated thousands of dollars each year (including the entire cost of the social and athletic building) to its “Chinese sister” and sent more than a dozen graduates to Ginling as teachers, who wrote glowingly of the neatness and intellectual curiosity of their students. While the rest of the country swung from one ideological pole to another, Ginling’s students were a robust hybrid of East and West, “having much more regard for family ideals, and more appreciation of the finer things in Chinese culture, while at the same time, they are not so narrowly nationalistic and also appreciate the best things in Western culture,” as Ginling founder Matilda Calder Thurston reported.

  Wang Laoshi and Chen Laoshi walked me down the hill toward the old Ginling quadrangle, following the slope of a creek bed that had long since been paved over. Wang’s father was a real estate developer in Shanghai. Though a Buddhist himself, he sent his children to missionary schools, “because they were better in every way,” Wang said. She was sent to one of the best, the McTyeire School, an elite school for girls that the Soong sisters had also attended. Attending Ginling was a foregone conclusion for Wang.

  Chen’s background was more modest, growing up in Ningbo, a former treaty port south of Shanghai on which the Japanese dropped fleas contaminated with bubonic plague during the war. Her father was a Qing dynasty xiucai who converted to Christianity. He had met Chen’s mother at church. When Chen and Wang arrived at Ginling in 1948, there were approximately five hundred students. The next year, after the Communist takeover of the mainland, only about one hundred remained.

  The foreign teachers stayed until 1950, and Wang and Chen still remembered them clearly. On weekends the girls would take them out to the markets and shops near campus, or celebrate a classmate’s birthday, or take in a movie. Wang received an allowance from her family, while Chen worked in the library for spending money. Wang became a sociology major; Chen, a biology major. “If not for Liberation, I could have graduated in three years,” Chen said. She didn’t say what she had hoped to do afterward.

  Not that it mattered much. Wang and Chen graduated in 1952, the last class to graduate from Ginling, and by then the government was making their decisions for them. They were sent to Anhui province to assist the government with the confiscation of property from landowners like my great-great-grandfather. Back in Nanjing, they became kindergarten teachers. Then, by dint of being missionary school graduates, they were brought to the university to help with translating documents. “I learned to type really well in middle school,” Wang said. “I could do it without looking.” They retired in the 1980s, refusing offers to work in the foreign language materials department, and went to volunteer at the Ginling College Library. “Look at the two of us,” Wang said. “We graduated together, worked in Nanjing together, we’re closer than sisters!”

  We stopped at a small bluff behind the former 200 Building, home to the science department where my grandmother would have taken her classes. To our left was the 400 Building, a dormitory. Farther up the rise was Wu Yifang’s old residence. “She took this small path down to her office every morning,” Wang said. “It all used to be just hills and trees, and paper lanterns lit the path. It was so pretty.”

  Wu’s old path was blocked with construction debris, so we wound our way down to the former Chapel and Music Building. “During the Cultural Revolution, we didn’t go to church or worship,” Chen said. “We burned our Bibles when the Red Guards came around to search our houses and confiscate contraband.”

  “Aiya, we burned so many things,” Wang said. “All our school photos. We were afraid they’d be used against us.” Wang had grown up in an elegant four-story house in a wealthy part of Shanghai, but during the Cultural Revolution the government took one floor after another until the family was left with only the fourth floor.

  “I even burned my diploma and wedding photos,” Chen said.

  “It’s such a shame,” Wang said. “Because those are the very things we want now. But they’re gone.”

  We emerged at the old campus, a grassy quadrangle ringed with hedges and a small sign reading, in English, “Beauty needs care, please do not step on the grass yopian.” Surrounding the quad were the original Ginling College buildings, nestled among trees as old as they were, and we faced the 100 Building, the central reception hall and gymnasium that also housed a social room where the students were allowed to receive male visitors. All the red pillars, the curved, overhanging roofs, and the ornate eaves recalled a smaller-scale Forbidden City. The buildings were all university offices now. A few were sheathed in bamboo scaffolding, undergoing repairs.

  Wang had an appointment, and Chen needed to pick up some medicine from the hospital, so we said our goodbyes. Chen apologized for not being able to tell me anything about my grandmother. But I had learned plenty. I had always envied people who could rattle off their family histories—perhaps a quirk of Utah, where the Mormon Church had built the largest genealogy library in the world. Now, standing on the campus where my grandmother had studied as a young woman even younger than I was, her future yet to become my history, I could see that my family was not confined to my parents and three spectral grandparents. (My paternal grandfather died before I was born.) For a long time the disparate things about China in my consciousness—Marco Polo, the Ming dynasty, the wars, Mao, Tiananmen Square—and the few physical pieces of China I grew up with at home, remained as unremarkable as the furniture and about as interesting. And even once I noticed them, the stories behind these things were just shapes in a dark room. But now their connections
lit up like landing strips, showing me where I stood and pointing where I needed to go next.

  I had not been a good grandson. My relationship with my grandmother fell far short of Confucian standards. But here at Ginling I felt the greatest attachment to her, as well as her absence. The decades-long trek that my family began in 1938 had splintered it, over thousands of miles and countless upheavals, and had so estranged some members that I had spent most of my life not even knowing of their existence. In a general way, I had been following my grandmother’s life in reverse—America, Taiwan, Shanghai, and now Nanjing. But she had never gone home, living most of her adult life in exile, without completing her long march. I hoped that once I reconnected with the living members of her generation, once I made my way back to Xingang, I could both piece the family back together and finish her journey.

  AS I PREPARED TO MAKE ONE LAST PUSH FOR XINGANG BEFORE my visa, which SMIC had still not canceled, expired, I called Uncle Lewis and asked him about what San Yi Po had told me, that he had already gone to look for the porcelain. He had not, he said. Yes, he had traveled to Jiujiang a couple of times during the 1980s for work. Before the second trip, San Yi Po had even drawn him a map of the house, but he had not gotten around to look for the old family property, much less tried to dig.

  Lewis often rushed me off the phone whenever I called him, but not this time. He recounted his miserable experience on the boat from Shanghai to Taiwan (he threw up a lot), my grandmother’s stint as the dean of academic affairs at Ginling High School in Taipei (“The girls were very pretty, but their brains weren’t good”), and speculated that San Yi Po had called her father a xian zhang in Jingdezhen because it sounded more impressive.

  Contradicting another piece of San Yi Po’s information, Lewis said that Pei Sheng, my grandmother’s youngest sister in Beijing, had gone back to Xingang and might know something about the porcelain. San Yi Po had described her cousin as brainwashed on numerous occasions, and Richard had discouraged me from visiting Pei Sheng, whose kinship term for me was Si Yi Po, saying she had dementia, but I wanted to find out for myself.

  “Good idea,” Lewis said. “Let me give you Si Yi Po’s phone number.” He read it to me along with the number of one of Si Yi Po’s daughters in Beijing. He also began to tell me about Si Yi Po’s husband, a well-known scientist who had studied in the United States.

  “Hold on,” I said. “Do you have info for any other relatives?”

  “There’s another guy, Grandma’s tang di in Shandong,” Lewis said, referring to my grandmother’s younger cousin. “His name is Liu Cong Ji. He lives in Jinan.” That was the son of Ting Gong, the only male of my grandmother’s generation, who would have inherited my great-great-grandfather’s estate. He gave me Liu Cong Ji’s phone number in Shandong province.

  “And there’s a person in Jiujiang,” Lewis went on. “Grandma’s mom’s uncle’s son, Tang Hou Cun. He was an engineer, younger than Grandma by about twenty years. He’s been in Jiujiang his whole life. Give him a call, tell him you’d like to pay him a visit.”

  According to Lewis, Tang Hou Cun was also something of a poet and amateur historian and would probably be eager to help me. Lewis then instructed me on the Chinese phrases to use when I contacted these relatives. I was too busy trying to capture the sudden deluge of information to ask why my family released such valuable information at such random times or never thought to supply it in the first place. Not that there was any use in wondering. I was almost disappointed at how mundane it all was, leapfrogging me through time and space on the strength of a few mobile phone numbers. Little remained of the frontier China of my grandmother’s youth, but navigating my family’s psychology and social mores—that remained a heart of darkness.

  MY INITIAL IMPRESSION of Beijing was that all the Olympic investment had paid off. The 2008 Summer Olympics had been touted as the capstone of China’s ascension, when it would finally demonstrate that its software had caught up to its hardware. The effort put toward upgrading Beijing’s culture was as impressive as the construction of the Bird’s Nest Stadium or the shuttering of nearby factories to ensure blue skies and clean air. Citywide etiquette lessons were initiated: signs discouraged spitting, driving violations were aggressively ticketed, and the eleventh of every month was “queue up” day, the number a pictorial representation of two people standing in line. But now that the world wasn’t paying attention anymore, China didn’t seem to be, either, and its finely crafted facade had been succeeded by its old habits. The monumental sport and hospitality venues erected for the games had already acquired the patina of dust that eventually claimed everything in China. Smog obscured the sky, the opening of subway doors sparked a feeding frenzy, and trash was someone else’s problem.

  Still, Beijing was the traditional home of the best schools and best students, which infused the city with an intellectual and cultural buzz that Shanghai lacked. At Si Yi Po’s apartment complex just inside the gates of Beijing’s University of Science and Technology, in the northwest quadrant of the city that was thick with science institutes, I stopped to telephone her of my arrival, and an elderly man on a bicycle buzzed past me. “Hey, kid, don’t stand in the middle of the road when you’re talking on the phone,” he called over his shoulder.

  Si Yi Po came down to receive me, dressed in a black embroidered Chinese top and pants, with black clogs, her short white hair tucked girlishly behind her ears. She was ten years younger than my grandmother and wore a ready smile. I followed her upstairs to her third-floor apartment and met her husband, Fang Zhen Zhi, a small, hunched-over man wearing large eyeglasses and gray slacks pulled halfway up his undershirt and open shirtsleeves.

  Si Yi Po and Fang Zhen Zhi had lived about twenty minutes down the road in a cozy two-story flat, but that happened to be exactly where city officials wanted to build the Olympic Stadium. They weren’t compensated but were offered replacement housing, for which they still had to pay another fifty thousand RMB to purchase. They accepted the move without fuss, just the latest in a lifetime of dislocations.

  Their new apartment had two living rooms, one for each of them, where they also slept, and a tiny bedroom for their live-in ayi. They put me in a bedroom on Fang Zhen Zhi’s side, the only one with air-conditioning and which doubled as a storage room, full of Chinese books and a Vogue magazine from many years ago. I scanned Si Yi Po’s room for porcelain and saw a plate commemorating their fiftieth wedding anniversary and a porcelain peach. Si Yi Po spent most of her afternoons on her side, watching Chinese opera on the television, which had been broadcast nonstop since the Olympics.

  Si Yi Po’s oldest daughter, whom like San Yi Po’s daughter in Taipei I also called Da Biao Yi, arrived with her husband to take us to lunch, where I gorged myself on the most delicious Peking duck I had ever eaten, along with crispy chicken, fried tofu, clay pot beets, and durian and pumpkin puffs. Si Yi Po and Fang Zhen Zhi held hands during the meal. Fang Zhen Zhi picked out the chicken’s brain with expert precision, and Si Yi Po asked the waitress to pack up the flower garnishes, which she said would look nice in a cup of water at home.

  When Si Yi Po was four years old, the patriarch of the Shi family in Xingang, who ran the general store and post office and was a good friend of my great-great-grandfather’s, asked for a marriage contract between Si Yi Po and his son, Shi Er Heng. Since the Shis were a prosperous family with good bloodlines, and Si Yi Po’s parents had passed away, my great-great-grandfather agreed. But then came the war and the relocations—Si Yi Po and Shi Er Heng met only once, briefly, and the two families fell out of touch long before the children were old enough to consummate the contract. Si Yi Po and Shi Er Heng didn’t speak or correspond and sometimes didn’t even know if the other was alive.

  During the war Si Yi Po finished high school in Chongqing and then went to live with my grandmother in Nanjing, where she helped take care of my mother and Lewis, and there she was introduced to an industrious young man in my grandmother’s department, Fang Zhen Zhi. Meanwhile
Shi Er Heng had graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy and joined the Kuomintang army as a company commander. Just as my great-great-grandfather had predicted, the Shi boy had grown into a tall, sturdy, and very handsome man. He was also something of a playboy, and the news of his indiscretions reached Si Yi Po, who threatened to cancel the marriage contract and cause a major loss of face for his family. Shi Er Heng hurried to Nanjing to beg for forgiveness, and Si Yi Po granted it, as long as he didn’t do it again. He left to join his company in Beijing, and within a month Si Yi Po heard he had already taken up with two different women. Si Yi Po wrote him a letter and told him the wedding was off. “I could overlook the past, but I have to be mindful of the present and the future,” she told him. “We had an agreement, but you didn’t honor your promise, so we’re finished.”

  Si Yi Po published an announcement in the local newspaper that she had canceled the marriage contract. None of her sisters would have ever considered doing such an unconventional thing, and with that Si Yi Po’s reputation for being the bravest among them was sealed.

  In 1946 Fang Zhen Zhi asked my grandmother if he could take Si Yi Po to Anhui province to meet his parents. My grandmother said yes. The two of them returned from Anhui married. No one had any inkling they had been seeing each other, meeting at San Yi Po’s house in secret while my grandmother was at work. A year later they had their first child. But Si Yi Po didn’t tell her grandfather about the marriage or the child and didn’t dare show her face in Xingang.

  It was up to San Yi Po to report the broken contract to their grandfather. “She married a colleague of Big Sister’s husband,” she told him. “He’s very outstanding. Big Sister introduced them.” That was a bit of a fib, and when my grandmother found out about that, she got angry. “Why did you drag me into this?” she said.