by Huan Hsu
“I had to do it,” San Yi Po told her. “If I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have sounded right. How else was I going to explain it?”
“Did you have to say I introduced him to her?”
“Well, he’s technically your colleague.”
My grandmother needn’t have worried. Their grandfather took the news about Fang Zhen Zhi in stride. “Well, if it’s already gone this far, there’s nothing to be done now,” he said. “You tell Pei Sheng that I’m not going to blame her, and I’m not going to meddle. She can make her own choices. Her happiness is in her hands. Just tell her to come back. I’d like to see her.”
Despite her grandfather’s frequent pleas to come home for a visit, Si Yi Po always found an excuse not to go. I’ll go back in a year or two, she told San Yi Po. My kids will be a little older and easier to travel with. And we can all go back together.
SI YI Po’s vivacity made it easy to forget that she had suffered a stroke a few years before. At first I didn’t notice anything wrong with her mind. The first afternoon I spent with her, she seemed to have no trouble remembering details from her childhood, or stories about the family, or the trek to Chongqing, or her grandfather’s porcelain.
“The ceramics in our home were given by others as well as bought by Grandfather himself,” she said. “His students came to visit him every year at Chinese New Year and brought him gifts.”
“Were they valuable?”
“They were all bought in Jingdezhen. Maybe there were some imperial porcelains, because Grandfather’s students were mostly wealthy. They must have been valuable.”
I asked if she knew what had happened to the buried porcelain.
“Maybe the Japanese dug them up,” she said. “It was not by locals or anyone in the family.”
“Are you sure the relatives didn’t do it?”
“They wouldn’t dare, because of the Japanese.”
That seemed logical. If the house had been occupied by Japanese officers, no one would have risked going into the garden to retrieve buried valuables, even if they had known where to dig.
Other times Si Yi Po’s recollections petered out or swerved onto tangents upon tangents, sometimes all in the same sentence. In the middle of describing what her grandfather liked to eat, she would begin talking about neighbors in Beijing who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Family members died and then came back to life. One day she would say that my great-great-grandfather wasn’t interested in porcelain. The next, she would talk expansively about how much he loved collecting it and have no recollection of what we had discussed before. She didn’t seem to know that my grandmother had passed away and believed so fully that San Yi Po was my grandmother that I stopped trying to correct her. She wasn’t making up her memories, but they had unmoored from their original context and drifted into a mosaic with no beginning, end, or order. It wasn’t all that different from my own uncertain understanding of how the fragments of our family history fit together, or what was real and what was imagined, and with fewer and fewer people to ask for the truth.
“When we went back, the Japanese were gone, but we needed to be aware of the Communists, so we buried the porcelains,” Si Yi Po said.
“Again?”
“We didn’t bury them all at first. We put them in the pigpen. Later we didn’t think it was a good idea, so we buried them.”
“That’s during the Sino-Japanese War?” I said.
“Yes, that was during the war,” she said. “The Japanese had surrendered. After the atomic bomb, the Japanese were no longer as vicious. So we buried the porcelains.”
“Wait,” I said. “I thought that as the Japanese were approaching during the Sino-Japanese War, your grandfather sent you all to Lushan, and at the same time, he buried the porcelain.”
“Oh, that I’m not sure. I know he buried them but don’t know where. Your grandmother knows. The porcelains were buried in the same place as the land deeds.”
“Why did your grandfather bury the deeds?” I asked.
“He thought once the war is over, the deeds and the land would still be ours.”
“Which one? The civil war or the Sino-Japanese War?”
“Grandfather built two houses in Nanjing,” she said, answering a question only she heard. “Then they were gone.”
“What happened to the deeds and the silver dollars?”
“We don’t know. No one asked about them once they were buried. Nobody was home, and they were taken from us.”
IN CONTRAST TO Si Yi Po, Fang Zhen Zhi remembered events with impressive clarity. My family had not told me much about him, except that he had been a scientist and helped develop China’s nuclear weapons program. One afternoon, after sitting through another of Si Yi Po’s rambling monologues, I walked over to Fang Zhen Zhi’s side of the apartment and asked him about his life.
He was born in 1918 in rural Anhui, one of China’s poorest provinces. His great-grandfather had run a village sishu, and his grandfather had passed the first level of the imperial exam, but the revolution of 1911 ended his prospects as an official. Fang Zhen Zhi’s father was a bright man but from a family too poor to afford schooling, and who worked as a traveling salesman, peddling knives, scissors, and porcelain in Yangtze River towns.
Fang Zhen Zhi grew up in a straw hut. He remembered hearing his father’s pockets jingling with copper coins when he came home for the new year, after which his mother would take him by the hand and make a round of the surrounding villages, paying back what they had borrowed while his father was away. When he was six years old, he got malaria, and his mother interpreted his fever and chills as signs that he was possessed by a demon. She ordered him to run around the courtyard where they processed the rice harvest until the demon left his body, chasing him with a willow branch to keep him running.
Then Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition moved through the area, attempting to suppress the warlords and reunify China, and he remembered being terrified of the soldiers. “My generation had the impression in our minds of old China being invaded by other countries, domestic power struggles, warlords fighting each other, and Chiang Kai-shek’s so-called unification, which fell short in reality,” he said. He spoke clearly and slowly to make sure I could follow him. “It was nonstop war.”
But Fang Zhen Zhi’s father got to know some porcelain businessmen in Jingdezhen and built his own porcelain store, and then a small factory. Fang Zhen Zhi could finally attend school, starting in a sishu and then testing into a progressive middle school founded by a Qing dynasty scholar who had studied Japan’s education system. He learned math, chemistry, and physics and woke up early every morning to recite English essays in the park across from the campus.
He passed the entrance exam for high school in the provincial capital just as the Sino-Japanese War began. The school moved several times to escape Japanese bombardment, setting up temporary campuses all over the province. In Wuhan, the Japanese came close enough that the students had to make a run for boats on the Yangtze, which took them to Leshan in Sichuan province, where Fang’s family had relocated.
Feeling restless after his second year of high school, he decided to sit for the university entrance exams, just to see how much he could learn if he studied through his summer vacation. He learned enough to gain entrance to the engineering college at Northwestern Union University, a consortium of engineering schools that had relocated to Shanxi during the war. Not long afterward the Japanese leveled Leshan. Fang Zhen Zhi’s father’s business was ruined, and the city was strewn with charred bodies. One of Fang’s father’s employees had ignored the air raid sirens and remained in the store. The gold jewelry he wore had melted on his body. Fang Zhen Zhi’s father picked it off the corpse and gave it to the man’s surviving son. Fang left for college before he even finished high school and graduated with a degree in metallurgy in 1943, after which my grandparents’ materials research lab at the Jinling Armory recruited him. The lab needed four people but managed to get only two. “The
re was no freedom and it paid badly,” Fang explained to me. But the lab was headed by a Harvard Ph.D., and that was enough to induce a bright, curious young man like Fang to take the job.
When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, many of the ordnance factories and armories wound down and waited for redeployment. Employees took advantage of the change to relax, checking in at work before heading off to one of the famous Sichuan teahouses. But Fang didn’t want to spend his days idling in a teahouse; he wanted to peiyang rencai—develop his talents to develop the country. “The Japanese had left, but the Kuomintang needed development or else it wasn’t going to last long,” he told me. “All kinds of industries needed to be improved.”
He heard that Tsinghua University was sponsoring Chinese students to study in America, so he started studying English. With no teachers or classes available to him, he got copies of Reader’s Digest from the American consulate and read them cover to cover. He applied to study metallurgy, a concentration that accepted only two students from the entire country, and took the exam in August 1946. “I didn’t dare think I would make it, but I figured it didn’t hurt to try,” he said.
In October his family returned to Anhui, and he moved to Nanjing with the armory. Then in December he received a letter of admission. He was approved to study abroad. His father sold a quarter of his inventory to pay for the steamer ticket and tuition and living expenses for one year in the United States. He married Si Yi Po, and one month after his first daughter was born, he boarded a boat for America.
A few weeks later he arrived at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. But he found the metallurgy department in decline, so he transferred to the University of Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla, where he found his academic nirvana. Advised by dynamic professors and free to indulge his intellectual curiosities, he became a scientific polymath, taking classes in atomic theory, X-ray analysis, atomic spectroscopy, and others far afield from his primary interest in aluminum and metal physics. In the summer he worked at a vegetable cannery in Minnesota, first operating a machine that sieved peas and then as a janitor, living with other Chinese students and Cuban field hands in a rickety dorm with wooden beds and no plumbing. He wrote Si Yi Po, followed the Kuomintang’s war with the Communists in the Overseas Chinese Daily, and reported on his courses to my grandmother.
Fang Zhen Zhi was still in Missouri when Chiang Kai-shek sounded the retreat to Taiwan. My grandmother and San Yi Po urged Si Yi Po to go to Taiwan with them, but she had an infant child and Fang Zhen Zhi was still in the United States. Fang Zhen Zhi told her that if she wouldn’t go to Taiwan, then she should stay with his parents in his remote hometown in Anhui, where the war wouldn’t touch her.
As the Communists closed in on Shanghai, my grandmother’s department was ordered to leave for Taiwan at once, and there was no time to notify Si Yi Po. She wouldn’t have been able to get to Shanghai in time anyway. My grandmother wrote Fang Zhen Zhi that she was sorry she wasn’t able to take Si Yi Po with her to Taiwan. Fang wasn’t concerned. His parents would take good care of his wife, and as for the Communists, they were simply a change in leadership.
When Fang obtained his master’s degree, his adviser recommended him to pursue a doctorate at the University of Florida. “But my wife and family were back on the farm, and they would have suffered,” Fang told me. “What good would any success of mine be if they were suffering?”
In December 1949, shortly after the Communists declared victory, Fang Zhen Zhi returned to China aboard the General W. H. Gordon, a troopship carrying about a hundred other returning Chinese students. Upon arriving in Tianjin, he was offered an associate professorship at the prestigious Beiyang University, founded in 1895 as one of the country’s first modern institutions of higher learning. The victorious Communists were recognized as having driven out foreign influences and reclaiming the country for the Chinese, and patriotic intellectuals like Fang Zhen Zhi respected them for it. The Communists were also contending with a brain drain that had left universities short on skilled teachers, and so they treated professors well and paid them good salaries, even better than government officials. Once Fang Zhen Zhi’s university housing was prepared, he sent for his wife and daughter, whom he had not seen for nearly three years, and at the dawn of what they expected to be a bright new China, they were reunited.
As the Communists remade China, pragmatism was a guiding principle. University curriculums were based on the country’s hardware needs, and Fang Zhen Zhi taught whatever was assigned to him, even courses in which he had no background. When the central ministry of heavy industry needed materials to build airplanes, Fang Zhen Zhi was ordered to organize a course on light metals to train four students how to extract aluminum oxide from low-quality ores. Somehow, between the papers he had collected from America on aluminum oxide, teaching materials in the Communist Party’s branch office, and his own ingenuity, his students graduated. One became a senior engineer at an aluminum oxide factory and another became a university professor, teaching his own course in light metals. In a harbinger of what was to come, the two other students were deemed to have come from “bad” family backgrounds and were forced to find work outside of light metals.
In 1952 the university system was reorganized, and Fang and his family moved to Beijing, where his department had been incorporated into the newly established Beijing Steel and Iron Institute, one of eight (an auspicious number) institutes erected in the same area of the city. Fang taught metallography, X-rays, and metal physics, and the family lived in newly built residences with two floors, three and a half rooms, and a private bath and kitchen. It was luxurious by any standard, and they played host to a rotating cast of friends and relatives.
It wasn’t all smooth. Mao had launched a series of political movements, dubbed the “Three Anti” and “Five Anti” campaigns, ostensibly to eliminate corruption and waste but in reality a scheme to punish and purge his opposition, real and imagined. The private business sector was effectively crushed, and farmers were forcibly corralled into workers’ communes. Then, after a brief interlude when intellectuals were encouraged to offer criticisms of national policies, the “antirightist” campaign developed to crush those who participated.
The antirightist campaign gave way to the Great Leap Forward. Intoxicated by unrealistic visions of exponential increases in China’s agricultural and industrial output, the country embarked on one of the great misguided attempts to disregard natural and physical realities. Mao had no real plan for the Great Leap Forward, other than repeating “We can catch up with England in fifteen years” as a mantra. Unfortunately, all the country’s best agronomists, demographers, and statisticians, everyone who might have raised questions about the probability of achieving such astronomical figures, had been purged during the antirightist movement. “It was the time of ‘putting politics in charge,’ ” Fang explained. “You didn’t have professionals in charge.”
What followed was an astonishing example of delusion. Workers engaged in baseless, idiotic practices, like close planting of seeds (which to the uninitiated would seem to produce higher yields but only resulted in the death of all seeds because the soil didn’t contain enough nutrients to support them), while songs like “We Will Overtake Europe and Catch Up to America” played over loudspeakers. Because sparrows ate sowed seeds, Mao declared war on them, exhorting peasants to bang drums, pots, pans, and gongs in order to keep the birds aloft until they died of exhaustion. The Chinese did in fact kill plenty of birds, even if the provincial records aren’t to be believed, but that only freed grasshoppers and locusts to decimate crops. Farmers—the ones who actually understood how to plant—were taken out of the fields to build reservoirs and irrigation canals, dig wells, and dredge rivers. Grotesque exaggerations and absurdities were propagated; during one commune inspection, local officials claimed that dog meat broth made their yam fields more productive.
The pressure to meet the central government’s unrealistic output demands left n
othing for farmers to eat—campaigns were launched to dig up grain that peasants had allegedly buried, and those who denied hoarding food were tortured and killed. What the state didn’t take, natural disasters like droughts finished off. In one county in Henan province, a million people (out of eight million) died of starvation. With more harvest than was even available already promised to government granaries, the locals were left with nothing to eat. Meanwhile China sent grain to countries abroad, often without charge.
Compounding the catastrophe was the herding of villagers into communal canteens, because of an associated plan to boost steel production by melting down farm and kitchen tools in backyard furnaces, which worked out about as well as one would imagine. With their cleavers and woks consigned to the furnace, families could no longer cook for themselves, and the state took total control of the food supply. Police blocked villagers from leaving rural areas. As the famine continued, people resorted to cannibalism, either by exhuming the dead or by killing the living, sometimes even their own family members. Mao blamed the failures of the communes on “rightists” and opportunists in the party. He purged dissenting officials and had his objectors and skeptics murdered.
Given this backdrop, Fang thought himself fortunate to have been sent to the Soviet Union in 1957 to spend two years studying at the Moscow Institute of Steel. Though not without its own peculiar isolation—foreign journals were even more difficult to obtain than in China—and propaganda machine, the Soviet Union was blissfully free of China’s social controls and political movements. Qualified professors ran the universities. Citizens read in public without fear of being labeled class enemies. Many professors owned holiday cabins outside the city and took their leisure time seriously.
When Fang returned to China, the antirightist campaign had subsided, and he settled back into his teaching. In addition to his lectures, he ran experimental labs, having acquired X-ray machines from East Germany and Hungary, some of the first in a Chinese university. He established a graduate program in metallurgy. The Beijing Physics Society asked him to teach an advanced course on solid-state physics for university professors.