The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  “Or people might have dug it up,” I said.

  “No way. Only three people knew about it.”

  “But both Grandma and San Yi Po said that relatives dug it up after their grandpa took the family west. What if it’s still in Xingang? How do I persuade people to let me see their porcelain without making them feel like I’m going to accuse them of stealing or try to take it back?”

  Lewis shrugged. “Well, Huan,” he said, “sometimes you have to bury the history and try not to dig it up. But let’s go ask Wu Yi Po.”

  We found her watching television in her room. She opened a package of biscuits for us, crunchy and faintly sweet. “No,” Wu Yi Po said, “Grandpa never dug up what he buried. When he came back, there was still the war with the Japanese, and the civil war right after that. It was constant fighting, and he never got the opportunity to recover his things. It’s possible the other relatives or neighbors dug it up, because no one was there, and they all knew we had money, but our family never dug it up.”

  Wu Yi Po thought for a moment. “You know who may have taken it, was Tang Hou Cun’s uncle,” she said. “He was a degenerate gambler, and when Grandpa died, he put a ladder over the wall and took everything out of the house. No one stopped him.”

  “Where would those things be now?” I asked.

  “Long gone. Sold off to pay his gambling debts.”

  I sighed. “These stories, they just keep changing,” I said. “I thought talking to more people would make things clearer—”

  “But they just make things more confused,” Wu Yi Po said. “Yes, I know. But that period was so messy. No one really knows the history. But go with your San Yi Po. Her memory was good.”

  “I heard that the only three people who knew about the porcelain were Grandfather, Old Yang, and San Yi Po,” Lewis said. “She helped carry things.”

  “San Yi Po was Grandfather’s favorite,” Wu Yi Po said. “She was very jingming.” Shrewd and astute, having both book and street smarts. “She had good social skills and knew how to deal with people, so Grandfather taught her everything. He trusted that she would be fair and not greedy or selfish when it came to dividing up his things after he was gone. That’s why she was by his side when he buried his things.”

  THE NEXT DAY I accompanied Wu Yi Po to the quarry, where she was going to buy some polished stone blocks for the cemetery. We boarded an ancient bus blaring Chinese pop ballads for a teeth-rattling, stomach-churning ride. The houses along the road all had red-tiled roofs, courtesy of the local government. The rice harvest was coming in, and the paddies were drained, with dry stalks bundled into cylinders. We took the bus all the way to the end of the line, where stone workshops had clustered at the foot of Lushan. The year before, Wu Yi Po had made a tour of China and Taiwan visiting family. At San Yi Po’s, she saw recent photographs of the family cemetery, which looked “like a junkyard.” Liu Cong Ji was technically responsible for the cemetery’s upkeep but was unable to travel, so Wu Yi Po appointed herself as the caretaker. On this trip she hoped to beautify some of the cemetery’s landscaping.

  Wu Yi Po told me that I had met her before in Dallas when I was young. I couldn’t remember, and I wondered why it had been only once, when my family went to visit my grandmother almost every summer. “Your grandmother and I were very close,” she said. “From 1988 to 2004 we’d see each other twice a month.”

  Wu Yi Po was only four years old when the family fled, and her memory of the war years was spotty. “I remember standing on my grandfather’s lap and brushing his beard,” she said. “Ting Gong, the St. John’s graduate, he was so dirty. He threw his socks everywhere, spit everywhere. That habit came from the Qing dynasty, smoking shuiyan, tobacco from water pipes. It created lots of phlegm, and they spit it out. Between the Japanese war and Liberation, that’s where my memory is best.”

  After the war she attended the Rulison school. Four American teachers remained, but they all left in 1949 when the Communists arrived. Jiujiang was taken without a fight. The Kuomintang government simply left, and after three days the Communists landed in boats. Wu Yi Po remembered them being professional and courteous. They slept on the streets, announced to all the businesses to carry on as usual, and moved into the vacant government buildings, sealing up all the files. It was almost eerie how calm things were. “We were all holding our breath, trying to wait and see what happened,” Wu Yi Po said.

  Then the changes began. Students had to fill out forms asking for their surnames, names, and chengfen, or “social classification.” That was a new term coined by the Communists; the Kuomintang had not used this word. And Wu Yi Po had to fill in “landlord” every time.

  That summer students attended a mandatory “brainwashing program” to shouxun, or “receive training.” “It was so funny,” Wu Yi Po said. “They wanted to educate you about the Communist Party, what they were doing, and they’d tell all the stories how the Western powers invaded China, made China poor, how the Kuomintang abused people, that’s their story. Most of their officials were not well educated, so they tried to make the speech as long as possible. They thought the longer the better, and oh my gosh, we were so bored. They just talked bullshit.”

  Some of the students couldn’t believe they had to listen to people with grade school educations lecture them on history, and corrected them. Nothing happened to those students at the time, but they were later barred from attending their desired college or pursuing their desired vocation. In each of those sessions, a cadre recorded what everyone said, and the pressure on the students to save themselves led some to say whatever the cadres wanted to hear. “You have to say, and if you don’t say, you’re kicked out of there,” Wu Yi Po explained. “You wanted to get close to them to get some benefit. Sometimes they’d just make things up. Or they’d twist words or take things out of context, and that hurt a lot of people.” Wu Yi Po was disqualified from participating once they learned of her background. The rest of the summer she avoided talking to her classmates. “It was very cruel,” she said. “You isolate yourself. You don’t know what would happen the next day. You feel your hairs stand up.”

  “I knew things were not going to be good for me or my family,” she continued. “Most of the time I like to say something, but I kept quiet then. It’s kind of instinct. The sixth sense. You can sense the cold there. And you cannot keep too quiet, either, or they’ll say you’re hiding something, so you have to join the group, laugh. You had to pretend. I just did whatever to protect myself.”

  Ting Gong advised Wu Yi Po to get the hell out of Rulison, so in 1950 she tested into a military nursing school and left Xingang. By joining the army, Wu Yi Po hoped to distance herself from her family background. But it also meant she could never go back, not even when Ting Gong wrote her to report her grandfather’s death. Don’t tell anyone, he warned her. Don’t show any emotion.

  “Of course you feel sad, but at the same time, you had to take everything and not let it out,” she said. “Don’t feel anything, don’t say anything, just do your work. I don’t even like to think about it now, because it’s no use. You can’t do anything about it. Besides, you were young, you hoped you’d get a better future later in life. I got a chance to get out of there. I wanted to keep moving.”

  In school, she kept a low profile—“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” she said—and hoped to slip through the cracks of the nascent bureaucracy. She had a brief scare when she insulted the team leader of one of her training courses, an incompetent, illiterate woman who was nonetheless put in charge because she was politically suited for the position. One day Wu Yi Po couldn’t take it anymore and muttered, “Bullshit, she can’t even speak right.” Someone overheard her and reported it, and Wu Yi Po received a warning. “After that I learned my lesson,” she said. “Never say anything to anyone, ever.”

  She breezed through the rest of her courses and graduated in 1952. She had just turned eighteen but was sent to the Korean front to help treat soldiers. She worked in an operating room for
a year and a half, doing “lots of bone and plastic work.” During the war the Communists arranged marriages for older Chinese soldiers, and Wu Yi Po was introduced to a commander many years her senior. When they asked about her background, she said her parents had died and that she had lived with her grandparents and aunt. Her grandfather had a bit of land and sometimes rented it to someone. “They didn’t ask for details,” Wu Yi Po said. “I was already in the army, and a lot of people wanted to get married, so they needed a supply of girls. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

  After the Korean War, Wu Yi Po attended medical school and lived in Dongbei for many years. She got a chance to go to the United States as a visiting scholar in 1986 and after the Tiananmen Square massacre applied for refugee status.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Lewis, Wu Yi Po, and I caught a taxi for the gongxiaoshe department, to find Liu Ping, the local official who the chang zhang told me had authority over my family’s old property. We drove to a plain three-story building in an alley crowded with food carts next to a shopping center; only some tattered red banners on the doorframe indicated we were in the right place.

  We climbed the stairs to the top floor. I expected Lewis to take the lead, having dealt with and gotten what he wanted from Chinese officials far above Liu Ping’s position. If he was just a fraction as insistent here as he was with other people, Liu Ping would have no chance. Emboldened, I started thinking about where we could rent excavation equipment and wondered if I should contact an archaeologist I’d met in Jingdezhen. But Lewis dawdled, waiting for me to go in first. “So what are you going to say?” he asked.

  I told him, but he looked skeptical. “Yes, that might work,” Wu Yi Po said, grabbing his arm. “Give it a shot. Why not?”

  I led them up the stairs, but Liu Ping’s office was empty. In another room I found a pair of men at their desks, smoking. Liu Ping was out, one of the men said, expecting us to leave. After a bit of cajoling, I convinced the man to call him.

  He had a brief exchange with Liu Ping in the local dialect and then handed me the phone. I noticed that Lewis was still in the hallway, suddenly preoccupied with his phone. I introduced myself to Liu Ping and tried to explain my desire to rent the property.

  “Oh, no, I can’t do that,” Liu Ping said. “If you want to do that, you need to talk to the Lushan or Jiujiang government.”

  “I see. Which one?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Sorry, you said either the Lushan or Jiujiang government. Which one should I talk to?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  He seemed to be doing it on purpose, and I thought it best to get off the phone before I said something impolite. “Sorry, my Chinese isn’t very good, and I’m worried I’m misunderstanding you,” I said. “Maybe you can talk to my grandaunt. She’s here beside me.”

  I handed the phone to a startled Wu Yi Po, who looked as if she weren’t expecting to provide anything more than moral support. “Hello, with whom am I speaking?” Wu Yi Po said in her most pliant voice. “Are you local? So am I! Can you speak Jiujiang dialect? Yes? Wonderful! Please feel free to speak Jiujiang dialect.” She explained that she was a Xingang native and repeated our desire to rent the property, but he gave her the same runaround. I looked for Lewis, who still had not entered the office.

  Wu Yi Po hung up, and we left. “He said he can’t help us and that we need to go talk to the Xingang government, or Jiujiang government, or whatever,” she reported. “He wasn’t clear with me, either. But the point is he’s not going to help and isn’t going to introduce us to the right person, either, so we have no guanxi if we try somewhere else.”

  Lewis finally spoke. “That was a polite way of telling us to fuck off,” he said.

  We walked back to the street and stood in front of the shopping center. I wasn’t sure what more to do or say. Wu Yi Po nodded toward a KFC. “Why don’t we get a coffee,” she said. Lewis said he wanted to get his shoes shined and would meet us in the restaurant.

  Wu Yi Po and I drank our coffees in silence. After a few minutes, Lewis rejoined us. “What the hell, man?” I said. “What happened in there?”

  “I know my limitations,” he said. “I could tell right away that they weren’t going to help. There wasn’t anything I could do there. I used to have power. Not anymore.”

  “Great,” I said. “Now what?”

  “Now nothing,” Lewis said. “If you stay here, they’re going to just pass the buck.”

  “Maybe we should just tell them about the porcelain,” I said. “See what they say.”

  “Why the hell would you let someone else dig for our stuff?” Lewis said. “If we’re not going to dig it, no one is.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. Lewis stared out the window. “Hey, Huan,” he said, “China changes. You think in 1983 I knew China would be like this? I’d be a billionaire. If Wu Yi had known, would she have left? Maybe you can’t dig, but you can pass this story down to your son, and by then China will have changed, you can buy land, and he can do it. It’s like Yu Gong Yi Shan.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “It means ‘foolish man moving mountain,’ ” Lewis said. “It’s a story.” Wu Yi Po nodded in recognition. “This old man in ancient times lived in a house right in front of a mountain,” Lewis continued, “and it was very inconvenient for him to go anywhere. So one day he went out with a shovel and started to try and move the mountain. The other people in the village all laughed at him, said he was a fool. And he said, ‘What are you laughing at? Maybe I can’t move it, but I have sons, and my sons will have sons, and eventually we’re going to have enough people to finish the job.’ And they did it!”

  I WAS STILL thinking about that story the next morning, when I accompanied Wu Yi Po and Lewis to the former Rulison school. Wu Yi Po wanted to have a look around at her old school and drop off a few copies of my grandmother’s testimonial booklet at the alumnae office. For better and worse, China happens on its own time, so I tagged along to see what remained of the institution that had played such an important role for my family.

  Situated on a shady, treelined avenue along the lake, Rulison and its brother school, Tong Wen, once had adjacent campuses separated by a wall, but the wall had since been knocked down, the schools combined, and the institution of more than three thousand students was officially renamed “Jiujiang No. 2 Middle School.”

  We entered the front gate, along which hung red posters of Tong Wen’s famous alumni, student prize winners, and the top scorers from the previous year’s gaokao, arranged by the rank of the university to which they had won acceptance. A long walkway led to the original Tong Wen building. To our left, beyond a full-size soccer field, the terrain rose, and a few of the old Rulison buildings remained.

  We entered the Tong Wen building. The interior was spare, utilitarian, and downtrodden but fairly well preserved. Most of the doors, askew in their frames, were closed and locked. Between the cracks we saw exhibits and display cases relating to the school’s history. At the top of a flight of rickety stairs, we found a woman in an office. Wu Yi Po explained to her the family’s connection and showed her my grandmother’s booklet. The woman seemed uninterested and suspicious. She was in the education department, she said, and couldn’t help. We would have to talk to the principal. Wu Yi Po asked if she could open the doors to the history exhibition. The woman had already returned to her papers. Go downstairs and ask the person in charge of the building, she said, without looking up.

  Downstairs, Wu Yi Po knocked on the building manager’s door. A woman slightly younger than Wu Yi Po answered, looking angry. “Hello,” Wu Yi Po said. “I’m an old alumna, and they told me upstairs to ask if you could open the door to those rooms.”

  “Not possible. Go ask the principal.”

  “Oh, sure,” Wu Yi Po said, keeping her voice light. “Could you tell me where to find the principal?”

  The woman turned away and walked into the long, narrow room.

  “Can you
tell me the principal’s name?” Wu Yi Po continued, stepping into the doorway. “Miss? Miss?”

  The woman walked back and shut the door in Wu Yi Po’s face.

  “Fucking China, man,” Lewis said.

  Outside the building a group of students pointed us to the principal’s office, in an expansive multistory building encased in yellowing sanitary tiles. On the third floor we found the office for the alumnae association and were sent up one floor to the principal’s office. Lewis drifted away to play with his phone. At the principal’s office, a circumspect administrator stonewalled Wu Yi Po. Lewis suddenly appeared. “Listen to me!” he said, sticking a finger in the administrator’s face. “This is my aunt. Our entire family were alumnae of this school. My mother is Liu Pei Jin. I’m the former president of the Zhenda chicken farm. Your people were extremely rude to her just now. She’s come all this way from America, and you turned your back on her. I’m very upset with the way you’ve treated us.”

  The principal arrived, a middle-aged man with dyed hair and wearing dark pants and a white dress shirt, the picture of a second-tier city bureaucrat. Lewis shifted his aim without missing a beat. “My brother is Richard Chang,” he barked at the principal. “He came here a few years ago and met with the mayor and the party secretary. You know how many Zhenda chicken farms are in China? Two. And do you know why they are here? Me. We’ve donated lots of money to this school over the years, and yet when we show up, we had the door closed in our faces. My aunt’s being polite, but I have to say this. How can you treat her like this? I’m very angry.” Lewis went on, detailing every instance of rudeness we experienced and insinuating that we knew highly placed people who could make their lives miserable. It was dazzling to witness.