The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  In the midst of Fang’s teaching, a special central committee chaired by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai began handpicking scientists for a secret project to develop nuclear weapons, code-named “the Ninth Institute.” Fang was one of the scientists tapped, and his inclusion was based almost entirely on a misunderstanding. While searching for teaching materials for his X-ray course, he found a useful book that a professor at the Moscow Institute of Steel had written. So Fang took a crash course in Russian and translated the book into Chinese. Thousands of copies of the translation were printed and distributed throughout the country, labeled “college teaching material.” The committee putting together the Ninth Institute saw the book, took note of the “author,” and added him to their roster. “That’s all they knew about me,” Fang said.

  Fang was assigned to conduct pulse X-ray physics experiments, studying the internal process of nuclear explosions. He had never heard of such things. He took his concerns to a meeting with a high-level director in the Communist Party’s Central Committee, who received him courteously but said that his hands were tied. “The list was signed by the vice premier,” he said. “There’s no way to decline this.”

  “But don’t you see this is a big change of course in my profession?” Fang said. “I’ve never even touched this field.”

  “Well, they want you, so just change course,” the director replied.

  Fang couldn’t even tell his family where he was going, only that he was being transferred and wouldn’t be home for a while. In 1963 he reported to his new unit on the arid Qinghai plateau, one of the most remote places in China. Dotted with brackish lakes and surrounded by massive mountain ranges, including the Himalayas to the south, it was roughly the size of France and known as the roof of the world, with an average elevation of fourteen thousand feet. Frost covered the plateau for half the year. The air was so thin that even walking up a flight of stairs was difficult at first.

  The Ninth Institute constructed a complex on a large grassland inhabited by only a few nomadic Tibetan herders. Fang quickly saw that, despite the disruption to his career, he was surrounded by the top scientists in China, men with doctorates from America and Europe; he counted eight fellow returnees from American graduate schools. A sense of mission permeated the unit, and since the project was a national priority, requests for staff or equipment fast-tracked through the bureaucracy. “There were green lights all over the country for this job,” Fang said.

  As the director of experiments, Fang had everything he needed to succeed, but he still wondered if he could really fulfill his duties in a field so far from his specialty. Fortunately, all those esoteric courses he had taken at the University of Missouri, which had no bearing on his teaching in Beijing, had exposed him to the basic knowledge he needed at the Ninth Institute.

  The room had grown dark. Da Biao Yi called us into the kitchen for dinner, where she had set out bowls of dumplings and cabbage. Fang Zhen Zhi continued talking while we ate, and dumped the remainder of the cabbage into his bowl so there wouldn’t be leftovers.

  He would remain with the Ninth Institute for the next sixteen years, going home once a year for forty days. When the Cultural Revolution broke out in Beijing in 1966, Premier Zhou Enlai ordered that no one touch the Ninth Institute, but even the prestige and remote location of the Ninth Institute couldn’t insulate it forever. In 1968, as Lin Biao became Mao’s designated successor, Zhou Enlai lost influence, and the Ninth Institute sank into the Cultural Revolution.

  Lin Biao sent two propaganda teams to Qinghai to “cleanse the team of classes.” Fang and three other scientists who had studied abroad were denounced and stripped of their positions. The Red Guards locked them up, along with hundreds of others, in a research building. Every day they were made to bow to a portrait of Mao and sit in the hallway until it was time for them to write “confessions” detailing their personal histories, their capitalistic and bourgeois thoughts and behaviors, and any other antirevolutionary actions. They weren’t allowed to do any work other than clean the bathrooms. “The urinal had a layer of urine stains,” Fang recalled. “We couldn’t remove the stains with detergent, so we used broken glass to make the ceramic shine. Made them sparkling clean. Fortunately, your grandaunt didn’t witness this.”

  Sometimes Red Guards tortured Fang, tying his hands behind his back and raising him up by the arms, a position they called “flying a jet,” while they shouted at him to confess this or that. When they thought he had had enough, they let him down and sent him back to the hallway, where the Red Guards kept close watch over him. “It sounds bad to be under guard, right?” Fang said to me. “But there was something good: you didn’t get to commit suicide.”

  During one torture session, the vice-director of Fang’s lab, an old revolutionary who had fought the Japanese and was in charge of administrative matters, heard Fang’s screams and suspected that his time was coming. He sneaked into the carpenter’s shop and hung himself from a beam. They found his body the next day and dumped it with a truckload of coal ash.

  By 1970 the storm of the Cultural Revolution had mostly passed in the rest of China, and people accused of minor “crimes” had been released. But for the Ninth Institute, the worst was yet to come. Lin Biao fabricated three “counterrevolutionary” cases in Fang’s unit, which gave him the power to seal off the entire grassland and “reform” the unit. Fang and his supervisors were jailed. Three members of the Ninth Institute were outright executed by the Red Guards.

  A director in the explosives production unit was pressured to confess that he was organizing a spy ring of a hundred-odd members. The Red Guards told the director to list every member’s name and duties, and Fang’s name was included. The soldiers ate it up and demanded more, so the director concocted more lies. “It was all phony, done under interrogation to save himself,” Fang said. “He later reversed his story, said he made it up. The soldiers got angry. He was a small man, and they pushed his head against the cement wall until he died. He was a director of a research unit, an important person. Nothing could be done.”

  Fang was then accused of buying faulty equipment. “You cost the socialist base more than ten million RMB,” the Red Guards said. That was a capital crime. Somehow Fang managed to convince them that the contracts for that equipment had been signed before he was even tapped for the Ninth Institute. “I almost got shot,” he told me. “But that’s how they tried to get you back then.”

  Lin Biao ordered the Ninth Institute moved, and Fang and his colleagues boarded a windowless train and relocated to a gulch in northern Sichuan. They were placed under house arrest in homes vacated by civilians. The guards changed the detainees’ surnames to Niu, or “Cow.” Fang, now Old Cow, lived under constant threat that someone might fabricate some charge against him. It only took one person to report him and a second to corroborate. If a third person chimed in, the case was final, and he would be executed.

  Fang stayed in that gulch for three years, let out of his dark room occasionally to perform manual labor, until the Cultural Revolution burned itself out. He reckoned that, including suicides, more than two hundred members of the Ninth Institute had died. Incredibly, Fang’s first instinct when the turmoil passed was to get back to work. “In the end there was not much to say,” he explained. “They were all mad. So many old leaders, who made such contributions to the country, were purged and died of unknown causes. Our own suffering was not worth mentioning. When it was over, it was quickly forgotten. We still had work to do. The worst fear of those who came back from abroad was that they wouldn’t get positions where they could work and make a contribution to the country.”

  Sixteen years after Fang began work in the Ninth Institute, he petitioned the Central Committee to go home. His team’s experiments had never failed. He had accomplished everything asked of him. The institute had achieved China’s first generation of atomic weapons. In September 1979 he was allowed to return to Beijing. He reclaimed his house at the Steel and Iron University, which had been t
aken up by two other families during the Cultural Revolution, punishment for being “reactionary academic authorities.” Fang left the university for the physics research institute at the Academy of Science, where he worked on China’s space program until he retired in 1989.

  We had moved back into Fang’s rectangular living room, arranged like an academic’s office with a large desk beside the window and shelves of books against the wall. I saw a copy of an article he had authored with his graduate adviser, “The Structure of Metal Deposits Obtained by Electrochemical Displacement upon Zinc.” It was based on his graduate thesis and published in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society in 1951, two years after the Communist takeover, and his name appeared as C. C. Fang. His adviser had sent him the copy. Fang Zhen Zhi sat on the sofa, facing the television, fanning himself. I asked him if he ever thought about leaving China, given all the years of mistreatment he had suffered.

  Never, he said.

  “You’ve lived into your nineties, but you don’t seem to have any regrets,” I said.

  “I’ve thought about this,” he said. “Probably because I came from a very poor family and gradually entered the intellectual world. Although I went through much undeserved insult and punishment in those political movements, my life was reasonably smooth. I went abroad, studied, and was able to apply what I learned. I know I am not very smart, but I worked hard and was serious. I changed the course of my research, I completed my mission, I have a sense of accomplishment. Your grandaunt will tell you that in general I didn’t help out much at home. I just sat at my desk, reading and writing until meals were served. I was away for sixteen years, caught in the political turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, and could not help my family at all. They had their ups and downs but kept on the right course. They went to good schools, got good jobs, married, and had kids. This was all your grandaunt’s doing. Compared to others, my family did well.”

  “And you have no anger toward the government?” I said.

  Fang leaned back in his chair. “Over time the frustration and the upset over unfair situations naturally gets diluted to the point where I have no special feeling about it,” he said. “All those years, you couldn’t say anything. They made the rules, and fighting it wouldn’t get you anywhere. I was like a piece of dough, squeezed into whatever shape they wanted. You sometimes run into unpleasant things, but what was the use of worrying? I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve hidden nothing from the Communist Party. I have no further plans or ambitions for myself. I receive a pension, I live in this house, it’s not very high, but not very low, either. Life is good. So considering the environment I came out of, to be lifted to where I am in society, I’m quite manyi.” He was satisfied.

  THE NEXT DAY Da Biao Yi made rotini pasta with two choices of meat sauce, pork and chicken, with fresh tomatoes, onions, and ketchup bases. “We like Western foods,” my aunt said. “Especially in the summer. Who wants to stand in the kitchen with a wok, stir-frying all this stuff?”

  The eldest of Si Yi Po’s three children, Da Biao Yi told me that she had been chadui during the Cultural Revolution. I used this term all the time when I upbraided locals for cutting in line, but back then chadui meant being sent to the countryside for “reeducation.” When I asked her age, she gave it in terms of the year she was supposed to take the gaokao college entrance exam (a continuation of the tradition of the imperial exams) or graduate from college, opportunities that her generation had collectively lost. “I was class of ’sixty-one,” she said. “My sister was class of ’sixty-five. Then the Cultural Revolution started, and everything was a mess. There was no school, no work. The factories were closed. No one had anything to do back then. Everyone was just waiting for their call, where to go. There were four options, and going to the countryside was actually one of the better ones.”

  In 1966 both Da Biao Yi and her sister were forced to shang shan xia xiang, or “go up the mountain, down to the countryside,” the term they used for their forced agricultural experience. They didn’t leave until 1969. Before the Cultural Revolution, she had attended the Beijing 101 high school, founded in 1946 and renowned as one of the best schools in the country. “Life was good for the family,” she said. “The seventeen years between Liberation and the Cultural Revolution, you had struggles and political persecutions, but for the most part, people like us lived well. Dad had a good job. Mom was in the library. We weren’t supposed to talk about salaries or things like that, but you knew who was doing better than others.”

  Then they were assigned to Yanan, about which they knew absolutely nothing except that there would be electricity and running water, so they figured it couldn’t be so bad. “Then we got there and saw that we were living in caves,” she said. “They would survey the land for good cave soil—it had to be packed down, like under a road, where the pressure made the soil hard. They’d level the front vertically and start digging the cave. Boys, once they got to be seven years old, they started digging caves. The thinking was that by the time they got to be eighteen or so and ready to marry, they’d have their cave dug by then.” The promise of running water turned out to be an empty one, and farmers, who had barely enough to eat as it was, didn’t welcome the arrival of more mouths to feed. They subsisted on millet, sprinkled with salt when it was available. “It was so dry,” she said. “No water. We had to walk to get water from ditches many times every day, carrying it in buckets. My sister was younger, and she took it hard. She cried and cried, it was so different than what she was used to. I was older. I took it okay.”

  They wore the same boxy clothing as the farmers, cut from a thick navy cloth. Some nights after washing up with a bucket and a rag, they changed into the school dresses that they had been naïve enough to pack. “The farmers had never seen anything like that before,” she recalled. “They’d come from all around and stare at us. We’d sing songs—we mostly knew Soviet ones then—just to feel normal again, to imagine we were back at home, or school.”

  “Did you understand the reasons for making you do all this?” I asked.

  “Not at all! That’s what happens when you have people who have never been allowed to think for themselves, and then suddenly they do. It was like an explosion. If they’d had the freedom to think for themselves the whole time, things would have been very different. But they didn’t, so you had all kinds of crazy ideas flying around. Looking back, it wasn’t that bad. Don’t get me wrong, we suffered a lot at the time, but in hindsight, there were some good things that came out of it.”

  Da Biao Yi’s husband walked through the kitchen. “There were no good things!” he grumbled.

  “I said ‘looking back’!” she called after him. “At the time, no, but now people with this experience, they understand what it is to really suffer. They can adapt to misfortune. They are able to go up and down the ladder. If my son had had the option to go to the countryside for two years, I think it would have been really good for him.”

  Da Biao Yi stared in my direction but not at me. “Yes, chadui, shang shan xia xiang,” she said, shaking her head as she repeated the catch-phrases of her youth. “This generation doesn’t know much about it, not even my son. Whenever I get going on this, he just rolls his eyes and says, ‘Ma, you’re talking about ancient history again.’ ”

  For nearly thirty years after 1949, my grandmother had no idea what had become of her family on the mainland. During this time China swung from one movement to another, targeting just about every group in Chinese society: counterrevolutionaries, intellectuals, capitalists, “rightists”… the list was as long as it was capricious. Even in 1978, with Mao dead, the Cultural Revolution over, and Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy announced, my grandmother didn’t dare risk her family’s safety by trying to contact them. It fell on Lewis, who had heard too many stories about relatives he had never met, to reach out. They were in Canada then, and Lewis wrote a short note to Pei Fu reporting that my grandmother was in Canada (he left out the part about her time in Taiwan) and that the f
amily was well. He sent the envelope to the only address my grandmother knew, for Pei Fu’s husband: China, Jiangxi, Jiujiang, Xingang, “Chen Jia Ba Fang,” literally the “Eight Chen Brothers’ Houses.” Under the address, Lewis added, as only he would, “Overseas Chinese looking for relatives. Must deliver.” And just for good measure, “From Canada” in English. About a month later they received a reply from Pei Fu, who supplied them with the mailing addresses of Pei Sheng and Pei Ke. In 1984, while based in Hong Kong for work, Lewis arranged a reunion for the Liu granddaughters. They all met in Hong Kong and spent a week together except for Pei Fu, who couldn’t get permission to leave China; my grandmother would never see her middle sister before she died. “Everyone cried for many days,” Lewis recalled.

  My last night in Beijing, Si Yi Po shuffled into my room and sat down next to me. “Huan Huan,” she said, using my diminutive and patting my leg as she spoke, “when you go back to Taiwan, you tell San Yi Po that we’re all fine here, and that if she needs anything, something to eat from Jiujiang maybe, to just let us know. She never asks because she hates to be a bother, but we’re sisters, so it’s not a bother for me. And tell her to come visit when she has time. The older we get, the less chance we have. I haven’t seen her in so many years.”

  I didn’t try to correct her. She handed me the porcelain peach that I had seen in her room, about twice the size of a real one and painted crudely, and told me to take it. A relative had bought it for her eightieth birthday, she said. And when I asked which relative, she said that she couldn’t remember where it had come from at all. “Keep it,” I said, putting the peach back in her hands. “I’ll get it the next time I visit.” Si Yi Po smiled, which is what Chinese people do when they don’t know what else to do.