by Huan Hsu
The neighboring house had belonged to another xiucai, who also bought porcelain by the boatload. That house was the only Qing dynasty home on the block, locked up behind a cement wall and an iron gate. The square pillars on either side of the gate had traces of red posters, which could have been either Lunar New Year greetings or Maoist denunciations. Tang’s wife eyed the loquat trees in the yard, sagging with fruit, and climbed up on a chair to pick them.
“Come on, we have many more places to see,” Tang Hou Cun said. “I’ll show you how much land your grandmother’s family had. So much land. Our silver dollars were in jars this big.” He traced out the size of a watermelon with his hands. “We still haven’t gotten you home.”
The final leg of our journey took us over newly built roads as wide as airplane runways, designed to accommodate heavy trucks but that had been appropriated by local farmers for threshing wheat with old-fashioned flails. We picked up a friend of Tang’s, a man named Liu but of no relation to me. This Liu’s family had sharecropped for my great-great-grandfather, and he mentioned without prompting that they turned over only forty percent of each harvest to him, a confirmation I was happy to hear.
Finally, we made our way into my great-great-grandfather’s former village, now a dirty warren of honking scooters, narrow unpaved streets, and decrepit concrete buildings. As we drove, I reflexively checked the surroundings against the information I’d gleaned over the past few years. The village was indeed a half-day’s walk east of Jiujiang. The fields along the river that had belonged to the family were as expansive as my relatives had described. After we made a left at the main intersection, wound around a gentle, inclined turn, and stopped before a tall metal gate, I saw that part of my great-great-grandfather’s estate really had been converted into a cotton factory.
The factory gates were closed and secured with a rusty lock. Tang led me up a side path between the factory’s wall and a sagging apartment complex to a promontory from which we could view the entire property.
“Can we go in?” I asked.
“No,” Tang said. “The gate is locked, and we don’t have guanxi with the people in charge.”
He shrugged, seemingly content to show me the house from afar, and I momentarily panicked. I had not come this far, spent this much time, only to be deterred on the doorstep. “What if I just climbed over,” I said, putting my hands on top of the wall.
“No, no!” Three sets of arms grabbed me.
“You’ll hurt yourself, and how could we explain that to your parents?” Tang said. “Let’s walk around the other side—maybe there’s an entrance there.”
Along the rear wall of the old house were pomelo and loquat trees, perhaps offspring of the ones that Si Yi Po had climbed as a child. We found a rickety ladder made of scrap wood leaning against the wall, and moments later we were standing in a roofless house. “So this is where my grandmother grew up,” I said. “It’s smaller than I imagined.”
“Oh, this house?” Tang Hou Cun said. “It’s not ours. It was built with our bricks by other people after the family fled. The old house used to be over there.” He pointed to a stand of pine trees. “There’s nothing left of it.”
We walked into the overgrowth. “This used to be really good feng shui,” he said, referring to the landscape before 1949. “The area was empty except for your great-great-grandfather’s house. It was up on a hill, overlooking the road to town and a lake full of lotus plants and fish.” But after the flood in 1954, he explained, the entire village had relocated to higher ground; my great-great-grandfather’s house was now one of its lowest points. The lake was drained years ago, Tang Hou Cun added. The land had been auctioned off and was slated to become an industrial park.
I asked Tang if he thought it would be possible to dig for the buried porcelain.
“We can dig for it, but we need to figure out where it was first,” Tang Hou Cun said. “But I’m sure no one’s ever dug for it.”
Tang held his arms before him like divining rods and closed his eyes. The air buzzed with cicadas. “The washroom was over there, I think,” he said, motioning for me to follow him to a small clearing. “There was a big cistern we used for baths.
“And over there was the kitchen,” he said, pointing to another area. He put one palm against his head and thought. “That retaining wall used to run all the way along the property. That means the garden would have been …”
He led me to another spot near where someone—perhaps the same person who constructed the ladder we took over the wall—had planted a few rows of wilted vegetables. “… about here.”
Tang pointed at the ground. “This is it,” he said. “This is probably where they buried the porcelain.”
I HAD TO ACT QUICKLY. LEWIS HAD CALLED TO SAY THAT HE and a group of relatives were heading to Jiujiang. Liu Pei Ke, the youngest of my grandmother’s sister-cousins, was making a pilgrimage to Jiujiang from Texas to do upkeep on the family cemetery, and two of San Yi Po’s daughters were accompanying her. Oh, and San Yi Po had passed away in Taiwan a few months ago. No one had bothered to tell me.
“Wait until we all get there,” Lewis said. “We can figure out how to dig for the porcelain together.” Then he ordered me to book hotel rooms for everyone. “And make sure you book me a hotel room on a low floor. I don’t like a high room. And does the hotel have wireless Internet? How far is it from the airport?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” I said. I began to see how Lewis might have aggrieved Tang Hou Cun so much.
I feared that too many relatives would meddle. And Pei Ke’s loyalties were unclear. Some family members didn’t consider her a full-blooded relative, owing to her mother having been Ting Geng’s concubine, a common practice when the firstborn was a girl. Chen Bang Ning had told me that while Pei Ke—or Wu Yi Po to me—was working as a doctor on the mainland, she’d written a letter about San Yi Po’s husband, which ruined his chances of becoming a full general in Taiwan.
I contacted just about every old China hand or local Chinese that I could think of to ask how I should approach digging for the porcelain. The consensus was that I had a few options. I could try to lease the land without mentioning the porcelain or even my connection to it, making up some bullshit reason—building a new factory, for example—that would require digging. If I found something, and the local authorities didn’t care, it was mine. Another option was to try to talk to local intellectuals. Every county or town had a wenhuaguan, a center for cultural affairs, and these days local governments were looking for ways to promote their images in order to develop their economies. Someone at the wenhuaguan might take an interest in my quest and coordinate with the local authorities for me. Above all, my friends stressed, find a local whom I could trust with the real story of the porcelain. He or she didn’t necessarily have to be a government official, just a strong, capable person who could help me think of solutions.
The next morning I stood on the boulevard in front of my hotel and tried to flag down a taxi that could take me to the wenhuaguan, but no one knew what I was talking about or where it was. Finally one driver, instead of speeding away, pulled his parking brake and called a friend to ask if he might know. “Please, have a seat, sit down for a bit,” he said as he discussed the possibilities with his friend. He hung up and gestured for me to close the door. “I think I know where it is, and if it’s not there, maybe they’ll know where to go,” he said.
He didn’t use his horn the entire ride and was so decorous, and thus so out of place in Jiujiang, that I asked for his name and phone number for future trips. Yu Sifu handed me his card. The building where he dropped me off turned out not to be the wenhuaguan, but a woman there gave us directions to where it was, about a ten-minute walk. There I was told that the wenhuaguan had moved about a year before, and a motorcycle taxi finally took me to the right place. I explained myself to the man in the office, and his ears perked when I mentioned my family’s connection to Rulison. He gave me the phone number for a Zhen Laoshi wh
o had been involved with Rulison, and I dialed it on the porch.
“So what is it that you want?” Zhen Laoshi said after I introduced myself.
I didn’t want to tell him about the porcelain without feeling him out first. “To know more about the city when my grandmother was going to school,” I said.
“And who is your grandmother?”
I told him.
“I don’t know her, but I can look her up. You say she went to Ru Li?” That was the Chinese abbreviation for Rulison, which conveniently contained two native syllables.
“Yes, and her aunt also went there, Liu Ting Yi,” I said.
“Ah!” he cried. “I know her! She was my teacher! Please, come meet me at the Jiujiang Library in the morning. I have written some things about Jiujiang history that I can show you.”
Heartened, I flagged another taxi to make sure that there wasn’t a new factory sitting on my family’s old property. I described the route from my memory and hoped I would recognize the turns as we got closer. “When was the last time you were there?” the driver asked. “It’s changed a lot. A lot. They’re building all kinds of stuff.”
We drove past the electric plant and the petrochemical pipes for the oil refinery, and it was so dusty and sooty that water trucks had to wet the roads. As we approached Xingang, I began to worry that I might have come back too late. But once we turned onto Xingang’s main drag, I saw that the old property was exactly as I had left it, except for the water towers and a holding pond that had popped up just outside what would have been the front door.
I stopped the oldest of the old men passing by—there didn’t seem to be many people under sixty in town—and asked him if the cotton factory, which had seemed defunct the last time I saw it, was still active. “My grandmother used to live here,” I explained. “It was her grandfather’s house.”
“Who was that?” the man asked.
“Liu Feng Shu.”
“You mean Liu Da Xian Sheng?” the man said, his eyes widening in recognition. “Yes, he was the big landlord around here. Wait just a minute.”
He walked down the road and returned accompanied by a short, sinewy man with a choppy gait. It was Liu Cong You, the relative that Cong Ji had mentioned back in Jinan. Cong You introduced himself as my grandmother’s cousin and Cong Ji’s older brother. I knew that Cong Ji’s only brother died as a child, so I spent most of our conversation trying to figure out how I was related to him. He was difficult to understand, which I ascribed to a thick accent, but the cabbie, who had gotten out of the car and offered to translate for me, explained that he spoke the local Jiujiang dialect, not Mandarin. Liu Cong You was born in 1928, and his grandfather was one of my great-great-grandfather’s younger brothers. “I used to call your grandma Big Sister,” he said.
Cong You told me that the cotton factory on my great-great-grandfather’s land was actually still in use, and he offered to take me into it, charging through the turnstile next to the guardhouse before I could tell him I had already seen it. I had only wanted to verify that the situation had not changed, but I followed him through the gate and into the yard. The man in charge greeted us with suspicion and grudgingly allowed us to have a quick look around.
Cong You explained that part of my great-great-grandfather’s land had been acquired from his two younger brothers, both opium addicts, who sold their property to sustain their drug habits. Without land, those two other families declined. Liu Cong You’s mother went to work as a servant. The girls were sent off to live with other families. His uncles died young from tuberculosis. His father managed to get an education and worked for a logistics company but smoked and gambled away his earnings and died at fifty-six. “Our family didn’t prosper,” he said.
Liu Cong You was nine years old in 1938 when his family went about five miles into the countryside to hide from the Japanese. “Grandfather, his family had money, and we didn’t,” he explained. “They fled, we hid.”
After the war Cong You worked as a footman in my great-great-grandfather’s house for a time. “His temper was very odd,” he recalled. “If I did things wrong, he’d hit me on the head with his knuckles. Or he’d say, ‘If you were standing next to the rice steamer, you’d still starve,’ things like that. But he also taught me how to use an abacus, and every night he’d spend an hour or two teaching me.”
In 1946 Cong You crossed the Yangtze to work as a janitor in a Hubei elementary school. Two years later he went to Nanjing to seek a job with the arsenal where my grandmother worked, and he stayed with San Yi Po, whose husband took him on as a low-level assistant. Then Cong You’s father wrote him to return to Jiujiang—his filial duty as the only son. In 1950 San Gu got him a job as a cook at Rulison. Every evening San Gu made him study for two hours, and that’s how he got his education. He married a seamstress in 1953 and was promoted to librarian and then lab manager. He left Rulison in 1962 (“Because the pay was terrible,” he said. “I had six kids and one mother and couldn’t take care of them all”) and worked as an accountant for the Xingang transportation department, those abacus lessons from my great-great-grandfather paying off. He retired in 1984. His wife died in 2009. “I don’t regret it,” he said of his life. “I get more than a thousand yuan per month. I’m a very happy man.”
Liu Cong You said my great-great-grandfather was one of the first to flee when the Japanese arrived. “It was every family for themselves,” he said. Some of my great-great-grandfather’s belongings were moved into an in-law’s house. Another portion went to stay with a relative near where Cong You’s family hid from the Japanese. Cong You couldn’t be more specific about those belongings. “Grandfather spent his money on land and education,” he said. “The rest of the stuff like how much gold, silver, or jewelry, you wouldn’t tell people about that, so I don’t really know.”
Cong You claimed that it was his family who helped my great-great-grandfather after the Communists kicked him out of his house. Cong You’s father’s vices had disabused him of all his land, making the family clean in the eyes of China’s new overlords. Cong You’s father even helped Ting Gong arrange for my great-great-grandfather’s burial. But Cong You’s proletarian roots couldn’t protect him from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. He was publicly criticized and forced to wear a sign proclaiming him a dizhu goutuizi, a landlord’s running dog, or lackey. His entire family was sent to the countryside for three years of farm-labor “reeducation,” where he was sometimes forced to make a twenty-mile trip to fetch firewood with a handcart in the middle of the night. “Because of our overseas relatives, we all got punished for them,” he said. “We were all implicated.”
Standing inside the cotton factory, I asked Cong You where my great-great-grandfather’s house had been. He pointed to the warehouses. And when I asked him to locate the garden, he said he wasn’t sure. “Here,” he said, waving his hand over a vast area that included the concreted square as well as the empty lot. “Do you mean where the buildings are or where we’re standing?” I said, trying to get him to clarify. He simply repeated, “Here.”
The vegetable patch that I had seen before was still there, and the man from the factory said it was planted by the employees. I spotted a porcelain shard next to the chili peppers. I didn’t want to overstay, or raise suspicions any higher than I already had, so I excused myself.
IN THE MORNING I went to the Jiujiang Library to meet Zhen Laoshi, the man I hoped would be my local advocate. I followed him to a small reading room on the top floor where old men sipped tea from thermoses as they leafed through newspapers. Zhen Laoshi was born in 1944 and had taken two years of physical geography with San Gu beginning in 1957, after the Communists reorganized the Tong Wen and Rulison schools into a single coeducational institution. “She was an outstanding teacher,” he recalled. “Always very well put together, quiet, never got angry like other teachers, and carried a Western purse.”
He showed me a book of Rulison’s post-1949 history and pointed out San Gu’s name on a roster
of teachers from 1953. She was forty-three years old then, taught fourteen classes of physical geography each week, and earned 245 yuan per month. I flipped through the rest of the history book, looking for information from my grandmother’s time at Rulison. All I found was a 1933 faculty roster and a 1948 faculty roster with nothing between. “It was so long ago,” Zhen said. “How could they save it until now?”
Zhen Laoshi had independently researched Jiujiang’s history for the past thirty years. He produced one of the books he had written, a single edition of photocopied pictures of historical Jiujiang mounted to the pages with tape or glue and handwritten information that he had collected from books and interviews. He was a fine artist, and where photographs could not be found, he sketched in the buildings, including one of the field on the Rulison campus where San Gu had set up a weathervane, anemometer, and platforms for conducting experiments.
I asked him what Jiujiang would have been like when my grandmother was studying at Rulison.
“All the supplies passed through Jiujiang, so it was very alive and raucous and had a great economy,” he said. “This was probably when your grandmother was here. Then in 1937 all of Jiujiang fled. Rulison went to Sichuan. The Japanese wanted Jiujiang, which was a strategic spot, and occupied Rulison and Tong Wen. They put antiaircraft guns there and ruined it. There were only four thousand people in the city, from one hundred thousand. Because of the Japanese war, the Japanese were raping women …”
He paused briefly, and I sensed emotion welling up in him. “My aunt was going to school, and her classmate jumped in a well to commit suicide to avoid being defiled by the Japanese,” he continued. “My aunt is ninety-three now, and she told me this story last year. I wrote a book about Jiujiang during the Japanese occupation. I interviewed three hundred people. Dr. Bai’s daughter came back and wanted to protect Jiujiang—”