by Huan Hsu
“It makes no sense,” the chang zhang said. “What good is planting a tree and then taking it right out?”
“It doesn’t make sense to us, either, but this is his dream,” Yu Sifu said. “It’s something he really wants to do, so just let him do it. He’s not going to leave anything, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about!” Cong You said.
The chang zhang looked pained. Yu Sifu repeated the arrangement, twice, three times, while Cong You observed what a clean transaction it would be, but the chang zhang never made a visible assent. Finally he dipped his eyes, and we had our permission. We thanked him and left to find trees and tools.
“How many trees do you want?” Cong You said.
“As many as possible,” I said. “How about three, with big roots?” I wanted an excuse to dig as deep as I could.
Cong You had a shovel and a pickax in his house, and I walked the street looking for a hand trowel. None of the hardware shops carried them; the closest thing I could find were thin masonry trowels for spreading cement, and the shop owners tried to persuade me that they were suitable substitutes. And no one sold trees. The only nursery that anyone knew of was an hour away by car. Cong You inquired with some neighbors, who said they had plenty of trees. We followed them out of the village center, across a newly tarred road with a row of wan saplings on the median strip, to a massive building site where old houses and trees were being cleared for new housing. A few stands of homes and trees remained, their perimeters gnashed by machinery. The trees that the neighbor showed us were all too small or too large or already encased in concrete. I spotted a few fruit trees, about twelve feet tall with foliage that suggested substantial roots, in the garden of one of the remaining residents. “What about those?” I said.
“If I were them, I wouldn’t let us take those trees,” Yu Sifu said.
No one answered the door, and we moved on. “This place is all going to be flattened,” Yu Sifu remarked. “It’s only a matter of time. They’re going to lose those trees anyway.”
Cong You said that he knew another spot to look for trees, and we followed him back into the village and turned down a road that cut between rice fields. In the brush along the road, we found two camphor trees and a loquat tree. These had sprouted from large old-growth trees that had been cut down for wood, he said, and would have nice, big roots. He jumped into the brush with the shovel and began digging. Yu Sifu and I shouted for him to stop—it wasn’t proper for him to be doing such work with two young men standing by. Fine, Cong You said, but he wouldn’t allow me to do it, either. He walked back up the road to find a worker to dig up the trees. A while later he returned with a friend who looked even older, carrying a pickax and a shovel. The friend got to work on the trees and began hacking through the roots just a few inches below the surface.
“Wait!” I cried. “That’s too shallow. Get as much of the root as possible.”
Cong You’s friend complied, but the underground sections were still just a foot or so long. These were not the roots I had hoped for, but they would have to do. We carried the trees through the village back to the factory to plant them, but were told that the chang zhang had left for lunch and would return in an hour or so. Cong You reminded the man that we had already cleared everything with the chang zhang, and we headed down to the empty lot. I was just about to sink the blade of the shovel into the soil when a factory employee ran down from the office and told us to stop. The chang zhang had called and said we weren’t to do anything until he returned. I began worrying that he would renege on his promise. “He can’t go back on his word,” Yu Sifu assured me. “That’s why I confirmed it so strongly with him.”
I took Cong You, his friend, and Yu Sifu to lunch, which I barely tasted, unable to think about anything except finally being allowed to dig on my great-great-grandfather’s property. All the other Lius had left Xingang, Cong You’s friend said, gone to the city or Shandong or overseas. Cong You was the only one left, and it fell to him to keep the jiapu, two volumes of the Liu genealogy that contained the twelve generations that were born in Xingang (I was the fourteenth generation, but since jiapus were patrilineal, my name wasn’t recorded in it). When I tried to pay for lunch, Cong You shoved me away from the cashier with surprising strength.
On the way back to the factory, I stopped to buy a carton of cigarettes for the chang zhang. Yu Sifu helped me pick the brand, Jinsheng, which he said wealthy people smoked. The chang zhang arrived at the factory a few minutes after we did. “Offer him the cigarettes,” Cong You whispered. I approached the chang zhang as he parked his electric scooter next to his office and presented him the carton. He physically recoiled and refused to even touch the cigarettes. I sheepishly put the cigarettes back into my bag, and we walked down to where my great-great-grandfather had buried his porcelain.
“I didn’t expect him to do that,” Yu Sifu said.
We set down our trees and tools. The chang zhang joined a few workers taking a break in the courtyard while machines processing cotton groaned in the warehouse. “So,” Cong You said, “where should we dig?”
As I surveyed my options, I began to realize just how unlikely it was that my gambit would yield any buried porcelain. Even with much of the land occupied by warehouses and outbuildings, and the concreted yard between the structures, the open area that I could dig took up almost an acre, a sizable portion of which was covered with thick stands of young trees or already claimed by the vegetable patch. And for all I knew, my great-great-grandfather’s garden might have been sealed under the concrete on which the chang zhang and his employees sat, watching my every move.
I settled on digging three holes in a line beginning on the edge of the concrete yard and moving toward the vegetable patch. I took the shovel and sank it into the ground. Cong You’s friend grabbed the pickax and started digging another hole, working as quickly as he could. “Please, uncle,” I said, “you don’t have to help. Let me do it.”
He continued digging. “No, no,” he huffed, “it’s fine.” A few powerful, efficient strokes later, he was halfway to the necessary depth for planting the tree.
“Stop digging!” I hissed. “I’m not being polite here. This is something I want to do myself.”
I walked over and snatched the pickax from his hands. He and Cong You stood to the side while I finished the three holes. I tried to take as long as I could, and dig as deeply as I could, but the soil was dry and full of debris, and every time I looked up to see what the chang zhang was doing, he was staring right at me. I turned up fragments of old bricks and roofing tiles, a piece of a decidedly modern blue and white mug, and as I got deeper, a few shards of clay storage vessels. I struck the top of a metal pipe, stuck vertically and firmly. Each shovelful of dirt made my folly all the more obvious, yet also raised my hopes anew, and I tried to formulate a plan in case my next thrust hit the wooden top of the vault—I had been so consumed by the digging that I hadn’t considered what I’d do if I actually found something. Sensing the chang zhang’s agitation, I turned my back to him, pretended like I was dusting off my shoes, and quickly palmed a piece of a storage vessel and a shard of a blue and white bowl or teacup that had surfaced. Cong You and I “planted” the trees, and I made a big show of taking photographs, using it as an excuse to examine the property more closely. The trunks of the trees were so thin that their crowns appeared as three small green clouds hovering a few feet over the ground.
I asked Cong You’s friend what he remembered about my great-great-grandfather’s place. “This whole row was the Liu family houses,” he said, pointing to the warehouse farthest from the street, at the bottom of the slope.
“Where was my great-great-grandfather’s garden?” I asked.
“There, where the concrete is,” he said. “This vacant area here—that was Cong You’s family’s garden.”
We pulled out the trees, packed up the tools, and left.
“I don’t feel that satisfied,” I told Yu Sifu.
“I was hoping to find some traces of my family, you know, like spoons or bowls or things.”
“Oh, we weren’t digging nearly deep enough for that stuff,” he said. “Think about it. That factory was built there, and before that things had been built over many times. I mean, we’re talking almost a hundred years ago. You need to dig three, four times deeper to find your family’s things.”
THAT NIGHT AS a heavy rain fell, I fantasized about sneaking back into the factory with a shovel, but I had no equipment and no way of getting there, and how much progress could I have really made in a few hours before dawn? I had thought that the mere act of digging would be enough, but it only raised more questions; I would not be satisfied until I tore open the entire place. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe I had conducted this search the way I had—naïvely, indirectly, protractedly—because part of me wanted my family’s things to stay buried. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. I had created my own mythology, and maybe that was enough.
Until then I would continue looking for the likeness of my family’s lost treasure in every piece of porcelain that matched its age. Even when I showed the blue and white shard to Edie later, and she dated it to the nineteenth century—“That could have belonged to your family,” she said—I wondered how I could ever know for sure. My great-great-grandfather’s porcelain, objects that had distilled slowly and incrementally out of a culture that simmered for over five thousand years, had boiled away in the new China’s eyeblink immolations, leaving only vapors. At best, they had been swallowed up and paved over, imprisoned with other relics of old China, for which the country, bent on crowing about its past from the distant remove of its ageless present, no longer had any use.
Perhaps that was the natural state of excess. China had too much history, Jiangxi too much porcelain, and the diaspora too many stories like my family’s. I was reminded of what a local pastor had said to me one night at dinner, when we had ordered far too much food and I watched in amazement as he stuffed down all the leftovers, including nearly a half-gallon of rich pork and mushroom soup, out of habit. “Back in the day, there wasn’t enough, so you couldn’t waste food,” he said between cheek-swelling gulps. “Now that people have so much, they waste it like nobody’s business.”
THE PHONE IN my hotel room woke me at seven a.m. “Man! Where the hell are you?” Lewis demanded. “We’re all having breakfast.”
“Doesn’t it go until nine-thirty?” I said.
“Just get down here.”
The dining room was full, the hotel staff setting out chafing dishes of greasy noodles, wilted vegetables, hard-boiled eggs, and other Chinese breakfast items. Two of San Yi Po’s daughters occupied one table with the younger daughter’s husband. I sat with Lewis and Wu Yi Po, a small, vigorous woman who greeted me with a smile and squeeze. She had short graying hair and wore running sneakers, track pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a quilted vest. She carefully picked out the yolks of her two eggs and ate only the whites, a habit she shared with both my grandmother and my mother.
Lewis had filled her in on the porcelain. “I’ll do what I can,” she said. Over the years in America, she had developed a chattiness that she punctuated with light pats on the arm or shoulder of the person to whom she was speaking, and her English was nearly flawless.
“So there really was porcelain?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said. “There was a lot of it. My grandfather loved his porcelain. I remember one guy came over once to show him his collection, and my grandfather said, ‘This is junk! I have stuff in my kitchen that’s older than this.’ ”
“Was there still porcelain after the war?”
“Yes, but fewer than before. There was a mao tong, a big cylinder for putting umbrellas. All kinds of porcelain in the kitchen for tofu, bowls, and things. I think there was one set we brought out for Chinese New Year. Mostly blue and white, mostly from Jingdezhen.”
“Okay, what do you need me to do here?” Lewis said. “We need to get our story straight, so we’re all speaking the same language. First, we have a confrontation with them.” He bumped his fists together. “Then we’ll compromise. And we’ve got a big group, so they know we’re serious. We’ll go ask for the house back, and then hear what they have to say, if we need to get documentation or anything, and then we’ll ask to buy or rent it. But we don’t tell them about the porcelain.”
“No, definitely not,” Wu Yi Po said. “Otherwise they’ll dig it themselves!”
“Right, we don’t tell them a goddamn thing,” Lewis said. “Just tell them we want it back for sentimental reasons, and we’ll think about what we want to do with it later. Then we dig, and if we find something, we’re gone. And if we don’t, we’re still gone.”
I knew much of Lewis’s optimism was just manic posturing, but I couldn’t help getting excited. Maybe I had gone about it all wrong. Maybe I should have waited for help. I hoped that I hadn’t ruined anything with the tree stunt, which I didn’t mention.
“I have a very good present for the official, too,” Lewis continued. “I brought a mint set of American coins. I brought two sets, one for Chen Bang Ning and one for an official, but maybe it’ll be better to give the official both.”
Chen Bang Ning arrived to take Wu Yi Po to run some errands for the cemetery, which the family would visit together the next day. I had no choice but to join the rest of the family on a tour of Jiujiang.
Lewis changed into an outfit that only he could pull off, slacks with a University of Georgia baseball cap, a nylon University of Georgia jacket, and a University of Georgia belt buckle. “Goddamn, I haven’t been back here in twenty-five years,” he marveled. “There weren’t any tall buildings last time. Last time I was a big shot. Now I’m a nobody. That’s a big difference. But the culture hasn’t changed.”
Lewis had come to Jiujiang the first time in 1984 as the vice-president of China operations for a Thai conglomerate that was one of the first and largest foreign investors after the country opened; he built poultry production plants and feed mills across Jiangxi, including one in Jiujiang. When he learned that Pei Fu had Parkinson’s disease but the family couldn’t buy medicine for her, he mailed it from Hong Kong every month for five years. The first time he met Tang Hou Cun, he was living in a hovel that didn’t even have a bathroom, and he took credit for getting Tang Hou Cun a promotion by bringing him along to his meetings with high-level government officials. He also gave a few hundred yuan to Tang Hou Cun’s widowed mother whenever his work took him through Jiujiang.
THE NEXT DAY we visited the family cemetery. Lewis traded his baseball cap and jacket for a dress shirt and a University of Georgia Bulldogs tie. The drive to Xingang was the same, a straight shot through the petroleum plant, but the industrial zone beyond it had spread. New roads crisscrossed Xingang, wide and dusty and lined with white concrete and long plastic pipelines waiting to be buried. The stretch of winding single-lane road to the cemetery was much shorter than I remembered.
After lighting firecrackers (for announcing our visit) and burning stacks of fake money (for keeping the ancestors rich in their afterlife) in the cemetery, we piled back into the cars and headed for the old Liu house. Trash burned on both sides of the road, making Lewis cover his mouth with a handkerchief. The car stopped on the road where the front door of the house would have been, were it still standing. A cluster of eight enormous white water tanks blocked part of the view. Everyone seemed satisfied with having seen that much, but Lewis insisted on taking a closer look. Liu Cong You was waiting for us at the gate of the cotton factory with his sister and one of his daughters. The relatives greeted one another, and Liu Cong You led the group through the gate for a quick look around. The chang zhang was there, scowling. I tried to avoid making eye contact with him.
I asked Wu Yi Po if anything looked familiar. “In my memory, there was a building here,” she said, pointing ahead. “And then a garden, a little slope, and trees. The old house would have been there, where that building is.”
“Was it the same size?”
“Yes, about as big,” she said. “Not as tall, though.”
We left to meet Tang Hou Cun at a restaurant in the village. After lunch, we all headed to the river to see the levee that my great-great-great-grandfather had built. It extended from the northern tip of Xingang perpendicular to the river for two hundred meters, then made a right angle at a temple and ran straight along the river for more than a kilometer, two gentle, vegetation-covered slopes that met about twenty feet above the fields. A dirt road ran along its crest. “There was a big flood in 1860,” Tang Hou Cun said, “and Liu Fu Chu, Grandfather Liu’s father, cooperated with two of his friends to build this dam. He wasn’t an official or anything, just built it himself and saved the village. He didn’t get anything for it. Didn’t ask for anything, either. That’s not how things were. People talked well of you afterward. That was enough.”
The levee was concreted over later and overrun in the flood of 1954. Chen Bang Ning began to tell stories of the area, going back to the Three Kingdoms era. I caught only bits of what he said and turned to Wu Yi Po for help. “Ah, that’s China,” Wu Yi Po said. “There’s too much history. No one can keep it straight.”
Tang Hou Cun sang the praises of my great-great-grandfather again, but this time with uncharacteristic archness. He had participated in a lot of baijiu toasts at lunch. “The Liu family made all its money in two or three generations,” he said. “But you all didn’t utilize the Liu history or culture. Otherwise you could’ve set up a factory or farm or something.”
Back at the hotel, Lewis and I independently drew maps of the layout of the old house based on what we’d heard from relatives, and they matched. I asked him what he thought about our chances for digging. “That’s why I insisted on seeing the house,” Lewis said. “The ownership is very complicated. They can tell us a good story: prior to 1954 it was ours, but after the flood it was all destroyed. You can ask for your old house back, if it’s still there. But if there’s no house, no way. I think there’s a less than one percent chance for us. We’re never going to get the property back. If Richard had invested here, we could ask to lease the land, but now no fucking way.”