by Huan Hsu
The story of Guling began in Victorian England, where a twenty-year-old Cambridge University student named Edward Selby Little fell under the influence of the American evangelist Dwight Moody. A firm believer in the English right to rule, obligation to disseminate its culture, and privilege to be rich and imperial, Little prepared himself for missionary work in California before receiving a mission post in China.
In 1886, at twenty-two years of age, he landed in Shanghai with his wife and headed to his post in Jiujiang. Before Little, most missionaries in China could be dismissed as, in the words of one contemporary observer, “educated, characterless nonentities.” They spoke little to no Chinese and came prepared with little more than the Victorian assuredness that the world would bend to their will. But Little mastered both spoken and written Mandarin and proved himself an extraordinarily capable missionary, raising money, building churches, and winning converts like few others.
After a few years of watching his colleagues languish in the fetid summers of Jiujiang, he formed a plan to build a retreat for Europeans on nearby Lushan. He envisioned it as an alpine resort where they could recover from and escape the smothering heat, insects, and illnesses that characterized the Jiujiang summers. Little turned his attention to the mountaintop, where he found “a wild waste and a few stray charcoal burners. One solitary temple broke the solitude, or rather emphasized it. There were no persons claiming ownership of this land as far as could be ascertained.”
Little’s mastery of Chinese had been a prescient accomplishment, for the fulfillment of his plan became a saga that would bring him into conflict with almost every level of officialdom of the day. He had the gall to believe he could not only have the mountain but also make it into a town, using what amounted to local Chinese slave labor to dig a road and haul goods, furniture, and building material to the top. He was beaten and his house was broken into, but he would not be swayed. He didn’t persuade the mandarins so much as he wore them down.
Eventually Little achieved his vision. The “wild waste” developed into a pleasant village with almost a thousand lavish summer homes, dozens of churches (including a synagogue and a mosque), at least three swimming pools, and a sanatorium. But its heyday didn’t last long. The Sino-Japanese War reached Lushan in 1938, and foreigners were ordered to vacate their homes by February 22, 1939. Kuomintang generals moved into Guling’s villas—Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, Soong Mei-ling, a devout Christian, patron of the missionaries, and the owner of one of the largest villas on the mountain, had been a fixture on the Guling scene for years. Zhou Enlai, years before he became China’s premier, traveled to Lushan as the Communists’ negotiator to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to unite against the Japanese; a few days later Chiang delivered his famous speech that marked the turning point of the war. After the Communists seized China, the government held two major party meetings on Lushan, endowing the villas with a “Washington slept here” importance that, perhaps more than anything, had saved them from the wrecking ball. Now Lushan’s mansions were divided into hotels, residences, and memorials to Chinese luminaries.
I made a tour of the town, marveling at its cleanliness and the melting pot of architectural styles, from Gothic turrets to Japanese gardens. One of the largest and most handsome of the old villas, Villa 175, was a thick medieval stone complex with a sprawling driveway guarded by a row of robust seventy-foot-tall pines. According to the mistake-ridden sign at its entrance, it had been built by an Englishwoman in 1896 and then sold to an American missionary, who in turn sold it to the Kuomintang in 1946. That same year the American ambassador John Leighton Stuart resided there, and during the 1970 Lushan conference Mao himself had stayed there. There were no neon tubes or electrical wires defiling its edifice. The windows had not been replaced with the white, modern frames that were so common with new construction. Except for the short tongue of red carpet, the same shade as the Chinese flag, protruding from the doorway, the villa’s exterior appeared untouched. The front door was open, and I walked inside, where I saw a small counter and many Chinese-style conference rooms. A pair of employees carrying folded white towels chased me out, barking that the villa was “not open.”
I found my way to the creek and He Dong Lu, the street to the creek’s east and the site of Soong Mei-ling’s former property, the Meilu Villa. According to San Yi Po, our family’s villa was on the other side of the creek. I bought my ticket to the Meilu Villa and toured the grounds. It was the only villa where both Communist and Kuomintang leaders stayed. In 1959, when Mao arrived for the party conference, he entered the Meilu courtyard and supposedly shouted, “Chiang, here I come!”
I left the Meilu Villa and continued down the road, entering the former American quarter. I passed the Kuling Hotel, its name painted in red and still visible on the wall, a textbook businessman’s house, and the old library, KVLING carved above its threshold, to an Episcopal church with stained-glass windows. (Little and other foreigners had modified the spelling of Guling to emphasize its cool summers.) At the bottom of the street was the former Kuling American School, a large four-story stone building that had been transformed into a hotel, air-conditioning units attached below its blue-framed windows like ticks. The school used to sit above two tiers of soccer and baseball fields, but the woods had reclaimed the clearings.
As the light faded, only the white of the dogwood blossoms broke through the palette of fog and moss. I looped back to He Xi Lu, where San Yi Po said I would find our family’s villa. I walked the entirety of He Xi Lu, inspecting every building I saw, but I found nothing resembling the row of villas that San Yi Po had described, just a stretch of wild land with a scattering of shabby buildings, a woodshop that the men inside told me had been built after 1949, a few newly constructed hotels, and an office for which no one knew the history. There were no villas directly across from Soong Mei-ling’s; the closest one had been turned into a memorial for Zhou Enlai, because he had stayed there for a time. The woman posted at the entrance didn’t know anything about the place and shooed me away.
I headed back to the main drag for dinner. Tang Hou Cun had put me in touch with an Uncle Cai, a relative on my grandmother’s mother’s side who lived in Guling, and he was waiting for me at a restaurant styled after a Qing dynasty teahouse. Cai was the head of a state business development enterprise that rented out properties. He estimated that of the nearly one thousand villas built during Little’s time, approximately eight hundred remained. The city had renovated the exteriors of the post-1949 buildings on the main shopping street to match the historical architecture, and it had prohibited new construction that either interfered with views of the mountain or destroyed historic buildings. Some of the new buildings were so faithful to historical designs that I couldn’t tell the difference. “There are no other places like Lushan in China, a mountain town like this,” Cai said. “It’s unique.”
Over mantou, sparerib soup, cabbage, and chicken with tofu, Cai admitted that some villas had been torn down. “Twenty years ago we started one of the first projects in town,” he said. “We didn’t think about history or culture and tore down twenty-four villas before we realized we were wrong. It’s a real shame. Yes, the business aspect of the project was improved, but it couldn’t compare to what we lost in culture and history. I still feel bad when I think of it. That first mistake was our tuition in learning how to do things better. Now all new buildings have to be architecturally similar to the historic ones, and you can’t touch exteriors of the old buildings except to restore them.”
Perhaps the villa of San Yi Po’s memory had been one of those torn down. I brought up my great-great-grandfather’s property in Xingang, and I told Cai that I hoped something could be done about returning it to the family.
“If your uncle Richard had mentioned this when he came to Jiujiang, they would have preserved all that land and rebuilt the house,” Cai said. “When Richard came back, he didn’t even mention his connection with Jiujiang at all. Not a single mention was in the paper. My older
brother was the number one in Xingang, and last year he told me to go find Richard and ask if he wanted their land back. But I don’t know him. How am I supposed to get in touch with him? Now it’s too late. They’re auctioning it off to factories.”
Lushan was an oasis, but I couldn’t stay on the mountain. I knew I was nearing the end of my search and that a showdown awaited. I rushed through the meal so that I could catch the evening screening of Romance on Lushan, one of the first post–Cultural Revolution movies produced in China and filmed on Lushan. Built in 1897 for four thousand silver dollars, the movie theater at the head of He Xi Lu had originally been the Union Church. The photograph in the lobby depicted a magnificent church with a peaked roof that doubled the building’s height, but the caption made no mention of its original purpose, simply reading, “Theater’s original form in 1897.” It was converted to a theater, and its roof flattened, in 1960. On one wall hung a framed certificate from the Guinness group recognizing Romance on Lushan for setting the world record for “longest first-run of a film in one cinema”; the movie had played in this theater every day since its opening on July 12, 1980.
I shared the theater with about a dozen Chinese tourists, who smoked and talked through the entire movie. Released in 1980, Romance on Lushan was one of the first films made after the normalization of relations between China and the United States and told the story of Zhou Yun, the daughter of a retired Kuomintang general now living in America, visiting mainland China for the first time in 1972, during the Cultural Revolution. While touring Lushan, she meets a young man, Geng Hua, and they fall in love. Unfortunately for them, Geng Hua’s father is a Communist general who attended the same military academy as Zhou Yun’s father. They followed different parties and were rivals during the civil war, so the romance is doomed to fail. The film was dated yet charming in its limitations—depicting America and American life with any authenticity was impossible for a movie shot entirely in late-1970s China—and political correctness. A painfully long, overwrought scene of Geng Hua and Zhou Yun consists of them in a sun-dappled forest shouting “I love my motherland!” under the pretense of Zhou Yun teaching Geng Hua correct English. But the plot is pure Hollywood, the lovers reuniting on Lushan after the Cultural Revolution in 1977 and their fathers burying the hatchet between them.
I wasn’t expecting such an emphasis on reconciliation over dogma, just another of the many surprises I encountered in China and a reminder that this iteration of the country was only about as old as I was. Like Zhou Yun in Romance on Lushan, I was the offspring of Kuomintang loyalists, and though my journey to Lushan had not resulted in a romance, I did find a kind of love, if to love something is to accept it.
As an American in China, I had first found my footing in the vestiges of Western visitors to the country. That’s what I found so attractive about Shanghai’s colonial architecture, Ginling College, Guling. But as a huaqiao, I could also connect with the stories of international Chinese. That’s why I was so affected by my granduncle Fang Zhen Zhi in Beijing. Yes, his life corralled China’s modern history into an elegant personal narrative, but the part of his story that drew me in was not his coming of age in Republican China, or his work with the Chinese nuclear program, or his survival of the Cultural Revolution, but his having studied in Colorado and Missouri. As I untangled the antecedents to his going abroad, I was reminded that the country that had introduced itself to me as chaotic, brutal, and retrograde had a long history of often very progressive intellectualism, and that the centuries of exchanges between China and the West were neither unidirectional nor unequal. Being a huaqiao revealed a new world that I, by an accident of birth, could explore with as much or as little confrontation as I chose. I began to understand the concept of a huaqiao not as a burden but a privilege.
My passage through this former missionary holiday village, where its sturdy architecture masked its transience, made me wonder if perhaps the opposite could also hold true, if in the fleeting I could find something permanent. Could China be separated from her places, people, and things? I thought again of Fang Zhen Zhi, whose love of family and country made him give up pursuing an American Ph.D. and return to wartime China, and who was paid back for his loyalty with years of persecution. And yet when I spoke with him, his patriotism remained. The China that Fang Zhen Zhi loved might never exist again (if it had at all), but as long as the memories of it survived, it could remain eternal, both a product of China and wholly transcendent, just like the porcelain I sought. Corporeal beings eventually leave the world. Places persist under the capricious rule of bulldozers. Stories—of my family, of bygone China—don’t have to die. Even their fragments can be reassembled.
And in China there are shards everywhere.
AFTER THREE YEARS OF SEARCHING FOR MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S buried porcelain collection, I found myself squeezed into a black Mazda with distant relatives, cruising along the Yangtze River. We headed for Xingang, where my ancestors had lived for more than six hundred years, where twelve generations of them were interred in the family cemetery, and where we hoped to find my great-great-grandfather’s former estate and see if Tang Hou Cun could remember where the porcelain had been hidden.
“Look at all this land,” Tang said, waving his hand across the window. “It all used to belong to your family. That’s why you have culture and education.”
We drove the same route along the river that my grandmother would have taken by boat to and from Rulison, but the landscape bore little resemblance to the fractal sprawl of fields, farmhouses, and Buddhist temples of her time. Factories lined both sides of the highway, dwarfing the straw-hatted farmers still working narrow strips of soil squeezed between the neat grids of industrial-size lots. A gargantuan Sinopec oil refinery, more than a square mile in area, blackened the air. Cranes for moving shipping containers straddled warehouses like colossal metal spiders. Bulldozers crisscrossed old farm fields, leveling small rises and hills. On the corners of the vacant, denuded tracts stood giant billboards bearing artists’ depictions of the planned projects: chemical plants or manufacturing facilities with concrete and glass office complexes, water towers, and smokestacks, all connected with miles of aboveground pipelines. The air smelled of tar and burning trash, and the legions of multiton trucks hauling debris kicked up choking clouds of dust.
Tang Hou Cun twisted around from the passenger seat to face me. “This entire place will be factories soon,” he said. “First, they’ll build the roads, then they’ll develop everything. Like Shanghai’s Pudong.” The area was changing so rapidly that even my relatives, who made annual visits to the family cemetery, lost their bearings, only regaining them once we turned off the highway and entered what remained of the countryside, where the industrialization had not yet metastasized. The land shimmered as we wandered deeper through a series of undulating single-lane roads, passing fishponds, wheatfields, farmhouses, and old graves. Birdsong drowned out the hum of automobiles and machinery. For now this part of Xingang remained China’s lake country, speckled with oxbow lakes that had budded from the Yangtze as it writhed through the lowlands toward the Shanghai delta. On the horizon rested the glistening waters of Poyang, a hydrological accident produced sixteen hundred years before when forces snapped the river like a whip and sheared off an enormous oxbow that became the largest freshwater lake in China.
After pulling over again to look for landmarks and orient ourselves, we arrived at the family cemetery. Tang Hou Cun, his wife, his son, and I filed down a path past a small cotton field and old wheat to a clearing where a row of modest stone grave markers were set into a low rise. But this wasn’t the original cemetery. It certainly didn’t match the description that my grandmother had given me, up on a hill across a pond where the ancestors could keep watch over the house. Tang explained that the year before, all the coffins had been exhumed from the original cemetery because that land had been sold for development and moved to this site, along with the gravestones, on which red numbers had been sloppily painted
on their faces to keep them in order. I could only hope that the stones were properly matched with their remains.
“I know why your grandmother didn’t want you to come here,” Tang Hou Cun’s wife said. “She didn’t want you to see this. Her family was very wealthy, and they had everything taken from them. I don’t think she ever got over it. She carried that in her heart.”
Tang Hou Cun showed me the gravestones. All the main characters in my family’s history were there: my grandmother’s parents, San Gu, San Yi Po’s parents, Liu Cong Ji’s parents and brother, and my great-great-grandfather. Other headstones dated back to Qianlong and had ornate carvings of dragons, birds, trees in bloom, flowers, or lotus bulbs. “You should bow to them,” Tang Hou Cun’s wife said.
“I’m not sure how,” I said, feeling self-conscious.
“Just put your hands together and bow,” she said. “Pay your respects to them.”
“I’ll show you,” Tang’s son said.
I followed him, bowing quickly and feeling silly. “Hello, Grandpa,” Tang Hou Cun’s wife spoke to the graves. “Your great-great-grandson has come to see you. Please take good care of him, okay?”
We made a stop at my grandmother’s mother’s house, where construction vehicles had taken large bites out of the neighborhood’s topography. A Qing dynasty library had been reduced to a stone threshold and a blanket of roof shingles. But the yard behind the house had retained some of its ancient setting, with three pairs of steles on the bank of a pond ringed with willows and full of jumping fish. Each waist-high slab of stone appeared to be the original stele, too weathered to read, paired with a modern replica. They celebrated Xingang’s jinshi, those who had succeeded in the palace examination, the highest level of the imperial civil service test system and two steps above what my great-great-grandfather had achieved. “The scenery’s pretty nice, right?” Tang Hou Cun said. “You used to be able to take a boat to Poyang from right here.” Now the view ended at the highway cutting through the floodplain.