by Huan Hsu
The principal held out his hands in a conciliatory pose. “We’re so sorry,” the principal said. “We weren’t expecting you. If you’d just called, we’d have made arrangements. Please accept our apologies.”
In a blink Lewis switched from anger to grace. “It’s fine,” he said, smiling and making expansive motions with his arms. “We just didn’t think it was right, whether or not we’d made an appointment. I’m sorry for getting upset.”
The principal dispatched two underlings to show us around the campus. One of them produced a camera, and we all posed for a photograph. The principal took the booklets from Wu Yi Po with two hands. “And of course we’ll accept these booklets,” he said, flipping through one for our benefit. “We’re very grateful. We’ll put them in our library.”
As we reentered the old campus to begin our tour, one of the underlings circled us like a paparazzo, snapping photographs, and the other prattled about the school’s history, its size, and the age and number of its camphor trees. “Hey,” I said to Lewis, “what was that all about?”
“Sometimes I’m a son of a bitch, but it works, man,” he said.
“Where was this when we went to see that official?”
“Oh, this is easy,” he said. “Getting the house back is kind of difficult.”
The underling led us back into the Tong Wen building and unlocked the doors to the exhibitions. The wooden floors groaned under our feet. On the walls were old photographs, arranged in a rough chronology from the schools’ founding through the Communist takeover. There was a portrait of an elderly Gertrude Howe, her name written as Hao Geju in Chinese in the caption. The photographs from before 1949 showed students wearing dresses and bobby socks, or skirts and leggings, faculty dressed in a mixture of Chinese and Western clothes in various colors, a group of boys in basketball uniforms, and costumed girls giving dance performances on the lawn. After 1949 the dress became uniform and drab. There were shots of girls drilling with wooden rifles, students working in factories, farms, and fields, and a “political exercise” parade through downtown Jiujiang. In a photograph of the school’s students and faculty gathered before the Rulison dormitory in 1954, everyone wore shapeless, dark clothing. Before them, occupying the most prominent position in the frame, was their farming equipment.
Wu Yi Po peered at the photographs, looking for people she knew or recognized. “Oh, there’s Ms. Ferris!” she said, pointing to a smiling woman with short hair and bangs swept to one side. “She had a mouth. Spoke her mind. She said something and got run out in 1950.”
In another group photo, she pointed to a man wearing a light-colored worker’s jacket. “See that guy?” she said. “That’s the guy after Liberation who would watch you.”
The underling seemed anxious to return, so we let him close up the rooms and said goodbye. We walked up the hill to the old Rulison campus, where the dormitory and academic building remained, their handsome brick exteriors and window trims tangled in a web of electric wire, water pipes, air-conditioning units, and corrugated metal awnings. The arched colonnade of the academic building’s patios on each floor had been sealed up to create more interior space, and the corridor that had connected it to the dormitory was gone. The courtyard between the buildings was taken up by a blue metal structure on which someone’s laundry dried.
San Gu had lived at the end of the second floor of the dormitory, Wu Yi Po said. The campus had been oriented toward the street, from which a treelined drive entered, curving past a lawn, a basketball court expressly for the girls, a pecan tree that the girls liked to pick from, and residences for the foreign teachers, where Ms. French sometimes invited students to have tea with her. “It’s all gone,” Wu Yi Po said. “Oh, they changed so much.”
MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER had been one of three xiucai in Xingang. He was good friends with the other two, Tang Hou Cun’s grandfather, Tang Hua Xian, and his younger brother, Tang Ren Zhi, who served as the general manager of the Minsheng Shipping Company, which ferried goods up and down the Yangtze, from Shanghai to Chongqing. The three of them were said to have been in constant competition over who had the best porcelain collection. Tang Ren Zhi’s position put him in regular contact with the Fuliang county commissioner in Jingdezhen, and he later wrote a biography of the commissioner. Tang Hou Cun reckoned that their friendship dated to about 1912. That might have been the detail that San Yi Po had appropriated in her recollections of her father. According to Tang Hou Cun, Tang Ren Zhi, who had lived next door to my grandmother’s mother, had the most and best porcelain of the three village scholars, and as the leakage of imperial goods became more audacious after the Qing abdication, Tang Ren Zhi acquired a number of imperial porcelains, some of which were given to him directly by the Fuliang commissioner.
Before I fell out of favor with Tang Hou Cun, he had mentioned that some of Tang Ren Zhi’s collection of imperial porcelains had survived. They used to be in Jiujiang but were recently moved to another town. He didn’t explain why, but I got the impression it was for safekeeping, part of the same tradition that had resulted in the National Palace Museum collection’s interprovincial travels.
On my last evening in Jiujiang, I called Tang Hou Cun and asked if he would take me to see those porcelains, and he agreed. We took a taxi to Ruichang, a town about thirty kilometers directly west of Jiujiang and known primarily for raising the best shanyao, or medicinal yams, in the province. It used to take hours to reach from the city, the taxi driver told me, but now it would be about thirty minutes thanks to the new highway. The highway was indeed new and, despite the light poles planted every few meters on each side, completely dark and choked with dust. It didn’t seem to bother the driver, who left the windows open, forcing me to put my shirt over my face just to breathe. “Yes, it’s bad,” the driver said when I mentioned the dust to him. “It didn’t used to be, but they’ve industrialized both sides of the highway. Lots of dust.”
The windows stayed open, and we soon reached Ruichang’s central roundabout, cluttered with construction and lit mostly by neon lights diffused through the nighttime smog. After pulling over twice to ask for directions, we took one of the unlit arteries to a gloomy Communist-era apartment building with metal bars over the ground-floor windows. Tang Hou Cun’s relative, an elderly man wearing slippers, emerged from the shadows to greet us and led us into one of the jail-like first-floor apartments. The flat was dim, lit by bare bulbs and cluttered with old junk and outdated calendars, and consisted of one large, concrete-floored open space divided into a living room and kitchen by a threadbare floral print sofa. Opposite the barred windows were a row of bedrooms. Through the doorway of one I saw a mattress and a stack of silk-covered boxes. The relative introduced us to his grandson and granddaughter-in-law, a couple about my age, who rose from the kitchen table and stood nervously while Tang Hou Cun repeated the reason for our visit. No one invited us to sit down or offered tea. The grandson walked into the room with the boxes. “Okay,” Tang said to me, “we’ll take a look at the pieces and then we’ll leave.”
The grandson returned with two boxes, cleared a spot for them on the kitchen table, and removed a blue pear-shaped vase and a flambé red ru vase with decorative handles and a squared mouth. They had been gifts to Tang Ren Zhi from the Fuliang county commissioner. The grandson handed them to me one by one. Everyone stood, unnaturally tense, as if someone might be watching through the windows or I might break the pieces or run out with them.
“This is a jihong ping and a cui lan ping,” Tang said, either wanting to show off his ceramic bona fides or remind me that he thought my Chinese was terrible. Cui lan, or “blown blue,” he explained, referred to how glazers would use their mouths as bellows to spray the glaze onto the unfired vase. Even in the weak light, the vase pulsed with a rich blue luster, as if layered with every shade in the spectrum. Jihong, or “sacrificial red,” was a radiant shade of crimson that potters had sought to replicate for centuries but was so costly and complicated that it gave rise to the jok
e “If you want to go broke, make red glaze porcelain.” Just as Europeans would later mix eggshells and bones into clay in search of the arcanum that would fire into perfectly white porcelain, Chinese craftsmen hoped that adding crushed coral and agate to their glaze formulas would create the depth they sought for their red. According to one of the many legends surrounding Jingdezhen, the Ming emperor Xuande demanded red porcelain for worshipping the sun god and issued an imperial decree for Jingdezhen to produce it. The craftsmen tried again and again to no avail (archaeologists in the 1980s discovered acres of smashed red porcelain), and Xuande imprisoned, tortured, and threatened to execute those who failed. Finally the daughter of a jailed potter threw herself into the flaming kiln in protest, and when the doors were opened days later, they discovered the pieces were perfectly fired and colored. From then on that red was called jihong.
I turned the vases over to see that both bore the reign mark of Guangxu, the second-to-last emperor of the Qing dynasty, though the blue one’s mark was pierced through and the red one’s was rubbed away; effacing the seal was a common practice when the emperor gave imperial wares as gifts. These were real imperial porcelains, not in a museum, an auction house, or wealthy collector’s home. They had remained in China for their entire existence, no more than a hundred miles from their birthplace, and had somehow managed to survive a century in which everyone, Chinese or otherwise, seemed intent on removing them or destroying them.
“So do you all live here?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Yes,” the grandson said.
“Huan, no time for conversation,” Tang snapped. “Take some photos, and then we’re leaving.”
It didn’t occur to me until later that those vases might very well have once belonged to my great-great-grandfather. Wouldn’t the trio of Xingang xiucai, in the spirit of erudite competition, have bought and traded porcelains with one another? And for all the exalted figures in the Liu genealogy, there seemed to be just as many shady characters who weren’t above stealing the family porcelain. Tang Hou Cun’s no-good father was still around when my great-great-grandfather fled to Chongqing, when I imagined him at his most desperate. Who would have stopped him or someone else from digging up the Liu treasures or selling the details of their location to someone while my great-great-grandfather was away, or after he died? Tang Hou Cun had even told me that the Tang families were the ones who really “played” porcelain, and many of the pieces in my great-great-grandfather’s collection were the ones they didn’t want. Perhaps Tang was rushing me because he worried that I might try to reclaim the vases.
I fumbled with my camera and snapped some blurry, underlit photos. Stalling, I asked the grandson how the family had managed to keep these pieces for so long. “They were hidden in the walls of their house during tumultuous times,” the grandson answered.
“They’re great pieces,” I said. “You should display them.”
That elicited a sharp, humorless laugh from the grandson. “Our financial standing isn’t good enough to display them,” he said, shaking his head.
Tang had pressed himself alongside me and began to physically move me toward the exit. There was so much more I wanted to ask. “Well, they’re worth something now,” I said, hoping to admire the vases just a little longer. “You could put them in auction.”
“They mean too much to the family,” the grandson said. “Someone tried to buy them a few years ago, but we refused to sell. They have too much sentimental value. We’ve had a fire, a flood, and two earthquakes, and we’ve protected them well. We won’t sell them.” Then Tang Hou Cun pushed me out the door and back into the darkness.
A Note on Sources
UNDERSTANDING CHINESE HISTORY CAN FEEL LIKE TRYING to drink while you’re drowning, and the excess of perspectives, room for debate, and changing understandings often resign the amateur historian to, instead of verifying the truth, making sure information is not untrue. When it came to my family history, I had no choice but to take my relatives’ words for it, though I attempted to triangulate what they told me as much as possible. With regards to Chinese history, particularly local histories, my first encounter with it was often in conversation, after which I would look up whether or not what I was told was, indeed, the case—a process limited by the number of available English-language sources. Though I try to present as broad a historical context as possible, it’s up to the reader to decide what and how much to believe, just as I had to. Any inaccuracies are unintentional.
Much as the blurring of fact and mythology is part of Chinese history, so too was the case for my family’s history, especially the dialogue that I recount verbatim from relatives. Since so few primary sources from my great-great-grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s, or even grandmother’s generation survived, I was left to trust the recollection of family members in reconstructing dialogue for those scenes.
Certain background sources were not as fraught and were thus invaluable. For Chinese history in general, I leaned heavily on Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China. Material on the Palace Museum’s history came from Bruce Doar’s research. The background on the construction of the Ginling College campus came from Jeffrey W. Cody’s article “Striking a Harmonious Chord: Foreign Missionaries and Chinese-style Buildings, 1911–1949.” Essays by Pankaj Mishra and Ian Johnson provided information about the Great Leap Forward. Other sources I consulted include Jin Feng’s The Making of a Family Saga: Ginling College and Colossus Unsung by Bob Molloy.
Acknowledgments
ONE OF THE MANY THINGS I WAS INTRODUCED TO IN CHINA was the idea of renqing, a kind of Chinese Golden Rule that I encountered throughout my time there and long afterward. This book would not have been possible without the countless—and occasionally nameless—people who exemplified renqing by assisting me without hesitation or expectation of reciprocation.
For those who can be named, I must start with my family. Thank you to Richard and Scarlett Chang for their boundless generosity, support, and concern for my well-being. A full accounting of all the reasons for my appreciation would be too long to list, and I hope that my affection for them is as evident as theirs was for me. To Lewis Chang, who was an indispensible source of both Chinese and family history, who never hesitated to help with matters big or small, book-related or not, and who has been one of my staunchest allies throughout this project. And to Andrew Chang, whose kindness was expressed in both faith and works, including reviewing early drafts of the manuscript.
A special thanks to my parents, who defied stereotype with their unfailing encouragement in my writing in general and the pursuit of this book in particular, for their love and sacrifices. They patiently and ungrudgingly served as counselors, research assistants, and translators, often in on-call capacities, and never once reminded me that I probably wouldn’t have needed so much help if I hadn’t complained so much about attending Chinese school when I was young that they allowed me to quit. Sorry about that. And I’m grateful for my lifelong friendship with my brother, Fong.
One of the greatest joys of writing this book was the opportunity to discover or reconnect with the far-flung members of my extended family, who never failed to humble me with their hospitality. My grandaunts, Liu Pei Yu, Liu Pei Sheng, and Liu Pei Ke, and granduncles, Fang Zhen Zhi and Liu Cong Ji, spent many days with me sharing their memories. Tang Hou Cun and Chang Guo Liang treated me as one of their own. It’s still difficult for me to comprehend everything that my grandmother Liu Pei Jin experienced during her life, which she lived with grace and love. I dearly wish that I could still talk to her.
When I joined SMIC, I gained another family, and I’m glad that those connections have remained even as we’ve been dispersed across the globe. My heartfelt thanks to all the friends who made contributions large and small to this book. Edie Hu for treating a broke writer no differently than one of her millionaire clients and allowing me to pester her with questions about porcelain history. All the folks in Jingdezhen, including Caroline Cheng, Ta
keshi Yasuda, Eric Kao, and Dryden Wells at the Pottery Workshop, Jacinta Huang, Ding Shaohua, Diana Williams, and Kai E and Huang Fei for helping me explore an endlessly fascinating place. Thank you to Karen Cohen for literally helping keep me sane. And Harriet, the undisputed greatest dog in the world; I hope you’re doing well in Shanghai.
I’m indebted to John Moffett at Cambridge University’s Joseph Needham Institute and Ching-fei Shih and Emily Lin from the National Taiwan University for reviewing portions of the manuscript relating to Chinese and porcelain history. Connie Shemo, Robert Murowchick, Sammy Or, Oliver Radtke, and Yibin Ni were also especially helpful in providing a better understanding of various parts of Chinese history. I did my best to get everything right, and any errors are both unintentional and mine alone. The Netherland America Foundation was kind enough to support this project with a grant.
I’ve been waiting many years to thank my writing teachers in print: Beverly Lowry, Steve Goodwin, Dick Bausch, Susan Shreve, and Nancy Schoenberger. Alan Cheuse, whose literary journalism class led me to Leonard Roberge, who edited my first story, and Erik Wemple, who gave me my first newspaper job, where I learned everything I know about journalism. I’m thankful to Josh Levin at Slate for the opportunity to keep writing while in I was in China.
Thank you to Howard Yoon, friend and agent, for his wisdom and guidance. I’m grateful to Vanessa Mobley at Crown for her unwavering enthusiasm and insightful edits in shaping the manuscript, and to Miriam Chotiner-Gardner and Claire Potter for carrying it across the finish line.
I’m writing this from Amsterdam, my home for the past few years and where I never expected my search for my family’s buried antiques would have taken me. But that’s all thanks to my wife, Jennifer, who reminds me every day that I found a treasure far greater than porcelain in China.