The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  He began to cry. I had no idea who Dr. Bai and his daughter were. I suspected that he seldom had an audience. He wept some more.

  I still hoped that Zhen Laoshi could be the man everyone had advised me to look for, a knowledgeable, connected local who sympathized with my quest, so I asked him what he had done for work. He said that he had graduated from the normal university in 1963 and worked as a teacher and a principal until 2004, after which he devoted all his time to researching Jiujiang history. “There are lots of people like me in China, who laid the cobblestones,” he said, choking up again. “We didn’t ask for anything—we just did it for the country.”

  I tried to think of something that wouldn’t make him lose it, and I asked him about the Rulison school. “Rulison was a journalist, who funded the school, and Howe built it up,” he said. “Jiujiang was a melting pot for Chinese and Western cultures. All the missionaries would get beaten when they went to Nanchang, but not in Jiujiang. Sun Yat-sen was right—if you bring up Jiujiang, you bring up Jiangxi. Sun chased off the Qing dynasty, but he couldn’t finish the job; the Communist Party finished it. Look at how good our lives are in China. In twenty years we’ll be on top. In America, they spend, then save. In China, it’s the opposite. That’s why the United States is in debt, and why China is going to pass the United States!”

  He stood up. “Most people didn’t care about educating girls, but right here was Rulison,” he said, shaking with emotion. “And if you stayed and graduated, it was free. The Chinese have always thought this way. If you help, you’re good, we’ll believe you. Now Tong Wen and Rulison get money from America, but we don’t want it! That’s why I’m happy you came. You can see that China isn’t lagging. Chinese people are proud.”

  He barely squeezed out his last sentence before breaking into tears again. I put my head in my hands. The man reading at the next table had heard enough. “You think Chinese people are proud?” he said, snapping his newspaper. “Because I think they’re bei’ai.” Bei’ai means a mélange of negative emotions, including grief, sorrow, depression, and melancholy.

  Zhen Laoshi composed himself. “Well,” he said, “you have your opinions, and we have ours.”

  “But you’ve been chirping that stuff in my ear for more than an hour.”

  “That’s your opinion, then.”

  “I don’t want to have an opinion. I just want to sit and read my paper.”

  “I’m ready to leave, anyway,” Zhen Laoshi said. We collected our things. I walked him outside, thanked him for his time, and waited to see which direction he went so I could go the opposite way.

  SO ZHEN LAOSHI had proven unreliable. And Tang Hou Cun, despite knowing that I was in town, didn’t call or answer his phone. I called Uncle Cai in Lushan, the member of the local development board, and told him I would like to see him. “Yeah, sure, I’ll be in Jiujiang this week,” he said. “Maybe we can have dinner then.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “One more thing—I also wanted to ask for your advice on something.”

  “I don’t have any advice.”

  “I haven’t even asked the question yet.”

  “I’ll give you a call when I’m in the city, and we can have dinner, and you can tell me what you’re thinking,” he said, ending the conversation. “Send me your phone number.”

  I still had not heard from Tang Hou Cun, so I went over to his apartment. He seemed preoccupied and agitated. Apparently the impending arrival of the overseas family members had stirred old resentments from being slighted by Lewis many years ago. “We all met in Wuxi,” Tang Hou Cun explained. “You call me, I’m going to go, and I don’t need you to pay for my ticket. I’m not country folk. Pei Sheng was there, everyone, and we went to a company to meet a foreign man in Wuxi. Lewis introduced him to Pei Sheng and his cousin but not to me. I don’t know why. But I spent two thousand RMB to see the family, and you don’t even acknowledge me? Then I took them all to the train station, and when I was about to step into the train with them, he told me to get off! He completely ignored me and treated me like a second-class citizen. Do I look like a bad man? No education? I know they think mainlanders are poor, that we’ll ask them for money. But we’ve never asked for anything. Lewis’s temperament is so bad. When he came, he didn’t see the family cemetery. Neither did Richard. I don’t know if this is a Christian belief or what. Just ignored us.”

  I apologized on their behalfs. Tang Hou Cun didn’t seem assuaged, but I pressed on and asked him about digging for the porcelain.

  He waved his hand vigorously. “I can’t help you,” he said. “Number one, I don’t want to get involved in Liu family business. Number two, you’re not the one to do it. This is the Lius’ wealth and property, and you’re not a Liu. It should be Liu Cong Ji’s son, or your Wu Yi Po. But I can’t help you. Otherwise people will say that I’m greedy.”

  WITH JUST TWO DAYS left in Jiujiang before Lewis and Wu Yi Po arrived, I was determined to accomplish something. I’d lain awake the night before trying to come up with a plan and thought that I’d hit on a good one. Uncle Cai had blown me off, Tang Hou Cun wouldn’t help, and Zhen Laoshi was unstable, so I dialed the last local person I knew, Yu Sifu, the taxi driver.

  We drove into Xingang amid the familiar dust and smog. Yu Sifu parked at the intersection where Xingang’s two roads met, and I stopped in a market to buy a pack of cigarettes for later. I had forgotten where Liu Cong You lived and found him by asking people on the street. He emerged through a furniture shop wearing a thin white T-shirt, canvas shoes, and navy pants many sizes too large for him, cinched with a belt.

  I asked if he could take me to see the house again. We walked down to the alcove overlooking the property. There I asked him again where my great-great-grandfather’s house and garden had been, and I explained to him what I hoped to do.

  “No way!” Cong You said, waving his hand. “It’s the state’s now—you won’t be able to do anything.”

  “Are you sure? I’m not asking for much from them.”

  “Impossible.” He frowned and dug his chin into his chest.

  “What if we asked the cun zhang?” I said. The office of the village chief was just down the street.

  “He won’t agree, either.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “A young guy. He doesn’t know or appreciate any of this history. But if you want to talk to him, I’ll take you there.”

  We marched a few houses down to the two-story white building housing the village administration. In the courtyard, a woman smashed dark seedpods with her feet. All the officials had gone home, she said. They wouldn’t come back until the next day. We returned to the car, where Yu Sifu was waiting. “Did he tell you what he was thinking of doing?” Cong You asked him. I didn’t see any use in trying to keep my plan a secret and explained my reasoning to Yu Sifu.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Yu Sifu said to Cong You. “It’s the state’s, yes, but it’s not that big a deal, is it? The factory is already closed down, and they’ve rented it out to private citizens.”

  We stood at the intersection. “Should we ask the village official first?” I said.

  “No, this isn’t something you should involve him with,” Yu Sifu said. “He doesn’t care about these things. I think you should talk to the factory manager.”

  Yu Sifu checked his watch. He had to hand off his car in one hour. “We should make a decision,” he said.

  “Okay, let’s ask the manager,” I said. “First him, and then the village head if he doesn’t agree. We’ll just keep going higher if we need to, right?”

  “Yes, that’s how you should do it,” Yu Sifu said.

  We walked into the factory, where we were met by the manager I had encountered the other day. He invited us into his “office,” a concrete cell with a rusty bed frame and a box spring. I offered him a cigarette from the pack I had bought, which he accepted and set on the table. I explained my idea to the manager, with Yu Sifu and Cong You filling in the gaps,
and he seemed receptive. “I understand, but it’s my son who owns the company, so I’ll have to consult with him first,” he said. “I can’t just make this unilateral decision. It’s not a big request, but I have to make sure it won’t bring me trouble later. So I’ll call my son today. Come back tomorrow at nine a.m. and I’ll have an answer for you.”

  As we got back into Yu Sifu’s car, he reassured me that he didn’t think I was going to have any trouble. “But if it is a problem, just tell him that you’ll compensate him,” he said. “A few hundred RMB should be enough.”

  YU SIFU PICKED me up the next morning, and we made the drive back to Xingang. I learned that he was thirty-six and from Guling, where his wife was a tour guide, and that they had an eight-year-old son. “It’s a nice place,” he said of his hometown. “But they’re so focused on the tourism industry that they don’t pay enough attention to education, so the schools are not very good and the teachers are not paid well.” So like scores of Americans, they moved to a place with better schools, buying a house in Jiujiang city, where they lived with his retired parents. They rented out their house on Lushan for most of the year and spent the hottest parts of the summer there. “The weather’s only good in the summer,” he said. “Other times it’s so wet from all the fog. Nice for growing special fog tea, but not nice to live with. Nothing ever dries. Your towels and blankets stay wet. The spring water, which is very tasty and sweet, has a lot of minerals, so if you drink it all your life, you tend to get kidney stones.”

  We parked at the top of Xingang’s main street, collected Liu Cong You, and went into the factory. It turned out that the man we spoke to the day before was a longtime subrenter of the factory who had no decision-making power. He called the chang zhang, or factory director, the real man in charge, and directed us across the yard to another small “office,” with dusty upholstered chairs, a bed, and a desk. “Offer him a cigarette,” Cong You whispered as the chang zhang approached. “You need to learn how things are done here.” The chang zhang entered the room, an older man with a sagging, sallow face, distrustful eyes, and a mouth that hung open to reveal rotten teeth. He seemed annoyed and spoke mostly in grunts as I introduced myself. I pulled out two cigarettes and offered them to him. He refused.

  That threw me, so I started talking before I lost my nerve, reciting the pitch that I had been practicing the past few days. I explained that the factory was built on my great-great-grandfather’s old property, and that I had come all the way back from America to see my ancestral roots. “Now that I’ve finally made it here, I’m overcome with emotion,” I said. “It’s so meaningful to see where my family came from. There will be a group of overseas relatives coming here soon, to also see this place for the first time, and I would like to plant some fruit trees and flowers on the patch of vacant land, to both beautify the spot and also pay my respects to my forebears. It will be a nice surprise for my relatives when they arrive. I would do all the work and the trees and flowers would be yours to keep.”

  I thought this proposal would be a slam dunk, having seeded it with all the things I thought Chinese found irresistible. What Chinese man, especially one who lived through all the deprivations of the past sixty years, could argue with fruit, filial acts, and free labor?

  The chang zhang began shaking his head and waving his hand before I even finished. He turned to Liu Cong You, whom he apparently knew, and said, “I don’t know anything about this history. This has been a cotton factory since I was born. I’m fifty-nine years old, and I’m going to retire next year, and I don’t want anyone coming back to me later and bothering me about the property.”

  He shifted his attention to me. “You say this used to belong to your family,” he said. “That’s none of my business. This was a cotton factory in 1950, and it has been ever since. Whatever it was before, I have no idea. And I don’t want anyone leaving anything here that they can come back and try to use to claim the land—you understand what I’m saying?”

  Liu Cong You nodded emphatically and said, “Yes, of course, that’s the way it is.” I glared at him.

  Yu Sifu spoke. “Look, he came from so far away, and he probably won’t have any opportunity in the future,” he said. “He just wants to do this little thing.”

  “No way,” the chang zhang said. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your family had to do with this. That’s none of my concern. If you leave something here, what’s to stop you or someone else from coming back and bothering me in the future about this property? You say you want to leave it for your family to see. What if the trees and flowers die? Then there’s nothing for them to see, and it’s my fault. And what if I want to build something else, or the government wants to build something else, and those trees are there? It’s going to be trouble to cut them down.”

  “What if he signs something promising not to bother you?” Yu Sifu said, reading my mind.

  “What good is a contract? That’s no use to me. That’s not going to stop anyone from bothering me. It’s just a piece of paper.”

  “Contracts are very powerful where I come from,” I said. “You can trust me, I won’t bother you later at all. What can I do to make you comfortable, to reassure you?”

  “Nothing.”

  The more options I suggested to the chang zhang—think of this as a gift to you, think of this as beautification, think of all the fruit you’ll enjoy—the more resistant and paranoid he became. Then Yu Sifu brought up the prospect of compensation, the last card we had to play.

  The chang zhang shook his head again. “That’s not the issue,” he said. “It’s not about money. It’s about putting something in the ground and then leaving it there. That’s going to bring me trouble.”

  “But it won’t,” I said, feeling desperate. “I promise you. You have to believe me.”

  “How do I know? How can you promise that?” He told me to go to the gongxiaoshe, or district development office, and find the official who supervised the property, a man named Liu Ping. “If he agrees with you, then there’s nothing I can do. But I’m not going to make any decision.”

  “If it will make you comfortable, I will go talk to the official,” I said. “But we’re already here, and it will take another half day to find him. I only have this opportunity to do this, which has been a dream of mine for many years. What if we went and talked to the village head?”

  “No, he’s not going to have any influence on this matter, only the district official,” the chang zhang said. “If he agrees, then I agree, but only if he says so. I can’t give you the say-so. I won’t give you the say-so.”

  I sat back on the bed and imagined horrible deaths for the chang zhang. So this was what the past century had done to China, I thought, scorched it of intelligent, reasonable, cultured people and transplanted uneducated, inept, paranoid thugs in their place. At that moment, I could not have hated Chinese people more.

  The conversation ended and we left. “What exactly was his hesitation?” I asked Yu Sifu. “I understand that he’s worried about us trying to come back and stake a claim to the property, and that the whole overseas Chinese thing is a complication rather than a benefit, but what can I do to reassure him? I offered to sign a contract. I offered to compensate him. What else can I do?”

  “The more options you suggest, the more problems he has,” Yu Sifu explained. “He just doesn’t believe you. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “That’s right, there’s nothing you can do,” Cong You echoed.

  “Hey, uncle, do you want to help me or not?” I snapped.

  “I want to help you, of course! But what you’re trying to do can’t be helped. Mei ban fa! I’d love to help, but this just isn’t possible.”

  I sighed. “So I guess all we can do is find the official he told us about.”

  “You can, but the odds of getting him to agree are pretty small,” Yu Sifu said. “He’s going to think just like this guy.”

  “Maybe he’s open-minded.”

&nbs
p; “I doubt it. The odds of that are also very small.”

  “Great,” I said. “What if I offered to rent the property?”

  “Actually, that might have gotten you somewhere,” Yu Sifu said. “If you just went in at first and said you wanted to rent the place, what’s the next step, you could have talked straight business.”

  “So I messed things up by talking about my family and stuff?”

  “Yeah, that just made him nervous. He wants to ensure his houdai ziyou.” That is, he wanted to ensure that his future generations would be free of trouble.

  I stood outside the factory wall, thinking. None of us wanted to go try to find a local official on short notice. But I was resolute about putting a shovel into the dirt of my great-great-grandfather’s property. I no longer cared about recovering any porcelain. I just wanted to complete the act, if only to score points against that evil chang zhang and, by proxy, the five thousand years of craven history and fifty years of thuggery from which he had sprung.

  I snapped my fingers. “Hey, what about this?” I said. “What if we got some trees, planted them, and then took them out? We’ll fill in the holes and not leave any trees there?”

  Yu Sifu and Cong You looked at each other. “That actually might work,” Yu Sifu said slowly, as he ran it through his mind. “There’s no trace of anything, and that’s what he’s worried about. Yes, that might work.”

  We filed back into the factory and walked around the yard looking for the chang zhang. “You think he’s hiding from us?” Yu Sifu said, only half joking.

  After a few minutes, the chang zhang walked out of a warehouse. Yu Sifu took the lead this time, explaining our new proposal, and the chang zhang didn’t immediately say no. Sensing an opening, Yu Sifu pressed forward, while Cong You, again the yes-man, interjected encouragement. “You see?” Cong You said. “There’s nothing left, no trace. We’ll just come in, plant some trees, maybe let him take some photos, take the trees right out, and we’re gone.”