The Porcelain Thief

That weekend I returned to Richard’s house to visit my grandmother, whom I had seen only in glimpses since I arrived in China. Halfway through the first bar of Für Elise, Richard opened the door. “Ma!” he shouted. “Huan’s here! He wants to hear your stories!”

I found my grandmother in the kitchen, watching the ayi make jiaozi, dumplings of minced pork and chicken, scallions, and garlic folded into hand-rolled skins and then pan-fried or boiled. My family ate them doused with soy sauce infused with chopped chilies and more garlic. The ayi mentioned that about fifteen cloves of garlic had gone into the meat mixture. My grandmother nodded as she dredged a jiaozi in sauce and said, “You have to have garlic with jiaozi.”

I asked her why, thinking it related to some ancient Chinese proverb or principle of traditional Chinese medicine. My grandmother paused, pinching a jiaozi between thin metal chopsticks with a dexterity I would never achieve. She looked at me over the plastic eyeglasses obscuring half her face and replied, in English, “Tastes better.”

After we finished our jiaozi, we moved down the hall to her room so she could floss and brush her teeth, all original and all very healthy. I had not spent time with her since my grandfather’s funeral in 1997, when she was already in her eighties. Now ninety-six and less than five feet tall, she seemed even smaller than I remembered. The many layers of clothing she wore, even in the middle of summer, disguised her frailness. Her hands tremored too much for her to write, her eyes had cataracts that she refused to treat, and she didn’t hear very well. She seldom left the house, spending most of her waking hours at the desk in her room praying or reading scripture with a magnifying glass. When she napped, lying on her back inside a mosquito net with her mouth drawn over her teeth, she looked dead. Still, she remained in good health, and her mind was especially sharp.

When I was young, I always envied how a day with the grandparents, for my friends, was an anticipated event, skiing or tennis followed by a meal at a nice restaurant. But my grandparents had been old, infirm, and inscrutable for as long as I could remember them. Visits to Texas, where they lived with Richard at first and then in a senior home, typically consisted of us staring at each other in silence. The liveliest thing I ever witnessed them doing was singing in their senior choir or playing mah-jongg. Though my grandmother had helped care for my brother and me after we were born, I couldn’t remember her touching us except for the occasional pat on the arm. When my grandmother called on Christmases and my birthdays, my vocabulary limited our conversations to ni hao ma? (hello, how are you?) and, after a sufficient period of awkward silence, zai jian (goodbye). Probably because of this, I never learned to respect her the way I should have.

We sat in chairs next to her bed. It wasn’t clear if she remembered that she was the reason I had come to Shanghai. Perhaps she didn’t believe that I actually moved there just to ask her about her family’s porcelain.

“Did you go to church last Sunday?” she asked. “How was it?”

“Boring,” I said. “There’s no pastor, not until December.”

“Do you take Andrew with you to church?”

I laughed. Andrew was even less interested than I was. “No.”

“I hope you can be an ‘encourager’ to him,” she said, using the English word. She showed me the current page on her daily devotional calendar: “Remind me to be an encourager to others.” “How are things with him? Is he very bossy? Wants to ‘dominate’ you?” Another English word.

“Yeah, he’s like an older brother.”

My grandmother chuckled. “Yes, like a big brother,” she said. “You should help each other. Your nature is better than his, your temper is better than his, so don’t take it personally.”

“So I want to hear your stories,” I said, fumbling with my voice recorder.

“What would you like to know?” she asked.

“Your, um, house,” I said. I didn’t know the word for “family.”

My grandmother seemed to understand and began talking about her grandfather. I tried to follow along, scribbling terrible phonetic equivalents of words to look up later. Her grandfather was bad tempered but principled. Her grandmother was compassionate. They lived outside the Jiujiang city limits, in the countryside. My grandmother listed relatives who lived with her or nearby, but I couldn’t understand their names—most of which I was hearing for the first time—or kinship terms. The Chinese had unique terms for every possible family relationship, of which I knew only a few. After about a half hour, unable to keep up, I thanked my grandmother and told her I would come back another day. This was the longest I had ever spoken to her, if that’s what you could call it.

I TRIED TO VISIT my grandmother every weekend, sitting with her while she squinted over her medicine or slurped her lunch of rice noodles in a broth with bits of ground pork, pumpkin, egg, and vegetables. No one seemed very interested in translating for us, so we made do with my very limited Chinese and what English my grandmother had retained. That allowed me to grasp the topic being discussed, but since I had no control over the language, I couldn’t control the conversation. When I felt myself drowning, feet clawing for bottom, I attempted to gain purchase by asking questions about her life.

“My story is still later,” she’d say, with a hint of annoyance, and continue on with her story about some relative.

Her energy would flag after about an hour, and I would say goodbye. Though I often left our visits feeling confused and overwhelmed, I also felt energized to be finally speaking with my grandmother. I managed to glean the basic story of her childhood as the eldest of five sister-cousins, her schooling, and her immediate family. She recalled the arrival of the Japanese and the chaos of the war and, without prompting, confirmed both the existence and the burial of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain.

One Saturday, after I gathered that Japanese officers had occupied my great-great-grandfather’s house during the war, I speculated to Andrew that the trail for the porcelain might lead to Japan. “So are you going to get us kicked out of two countries?” Andrew said. “Going to Japan is idiotic.”

His forcefulness took me aback. “Why?” I said.

“It’d be one thing if you had a name, like Colonel Nagasaki in some city. What makes you think you’ll need to go to Japan?”

“Jesus, I said ‘might.’”

“There’s no way you’re going to Japan,” Andrew insisted.

“Why not? The Japanese were the ones occupying the town. It’s reasonable that a Japanese guy could have taken the stuff.”

“So? Why would you go to Japan?”

“I didn’t say I was going. I said it was a possibility.”

“So there’s an infinitesimal chance, and you’re going to go?”

It was typical of Andrew, ascribing to me motivations that I hadn’t even considered yet. “I’m not going to argue with you about what percentage of chance ‘might’ means,” I said. “It’s a possibility, that’s all.”

“Well, I ‘might’ date a supermodel, but I’m not going to.”

“Not with that attitude, you’re not.”

“There’s no way you’re going to Japan. They won’t even compensate comfort women from the war.”

“Who’s asking for compensation?” I said. “Why are you so keen on disagreeing with me, especially when I’ve just barely started? Forget it. This is infuriating.”

As my grandmother wound up her family history, she must have wondered why I kept visiting and asking her the same questions. I probably asked her five times for all the names of her relatives, but I still couldn’t manage to create an accurate family tree because I couldn’t comprehend her answers. The day she spoke of leaving Macau through Guangzhou Wan, I wasted the whole time trying to figure out what a wan was (a bay). Her Jiujiang accent, which I had never noticed before, added to the confusion. A workmate taught me a Chinese expression that described these conversations: Ji tong ya jiang. A chicken talking to a duck. They were both birds, they sounded sort of the same, so they went on clucking and quacking and thinking they were having a dialogue.

My grandmother, having dispensed with the biographical information, began using my visits to interrogate me about my dating status, followed with long-winded testimony, evangelizing, and parables. I heard her entire conversion story. Even a retelling of her time as a science teacher at a missionary school in wartime Macau was framed as a fable about industriousness. “I had no home to return to, so I focused on teaching,” she said. “The big point here is that teachers worked hard, students worked hard. This is a lesson.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Did you know how your family was doing back in Jiujiang?”

“I wrote letters back to my grandparents at home,” she said.

“Did you keep any of them?”

“There were lots of things I didn’t take with me from Macau,” she said. “A whole suitcase of photos. But that’s my family business, we don’t have to talk about this stuff. My point is to say that we all worked hard, because—”

“Grandma, you already told me this! I’ve written it down many times!”

Of her time in Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War, she mentioned running into one of her college professors, who was later swept up by the Communists. “Don’t write this,” she said. “Absolutely don’t write this.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, playing dumb.

“The part I just said, these people killed by the Communists,” she said. “Don’t write this political stuff.”

My grandmother refused to discuss “political stuff,” which turned out to cover just about everything I was interested in knowing, and her stories grew vague and obtuse. Regarding one of my great-great-grandfather’s sons, her uncle, all she would say was that he graduated from the prestigious St. John’s University in Shanghai. “I think he was an economics major, but he didn’t use it,” she said. “I think he taught English after graduation.”

He was also the only one of my great-great-grandfather’s sons to survive the war. But my grandmother wouldn’t say more. “There’s some stuff that has to do with Communists that I’m not going to tell you,” she said.

“Tell me what?”

“Breaking the law. So this you don’t want to know. Stuff that has to do with politics, Communists, it’s better not to talk about it.”

“But he might have an interesting story,” I said. I had not yet mentioned that I wanted to go look for the buried porcelain.

“Just say he graduated from college and then taught school,” she said. “Leave it at that.”

The more I pressed, the more resistant she became, which only tantalized me more. “You’re just a xiao wawa,” she said once, calling me the equivalent of a “wee babe.” “You don’t understand.”

Andrew never expressed any interest in our family history or my conversations with our grandmother, but when I recounted these exchanges with our grandmother to him, he didn’t seem surprised. “The Changs put the ‘fun’ into ‘dysfunctional,’” he said. And it all started with our grandmother.

I CAME HOME from work one evening to find a pile of hard-sided suitcases blocking the doorway. Andrew sat on the couch with the owner of the suitcases, his father, Lewis, watching television. “What kept you?” Andrew acknowledged my entrance without taking his eyes off the television.

“One of the vice-presidents advised me to stay late,” I said. “He sounded pretty serious. I didn’t want to get in trouble with him.”

Lewis laughed and slapped at the air. “Shit, the only thing he’d do to you is pray for you,” he said.

Uncle Lewis was the eldest sibling, belligerent, profane, speaking primarily in exclamation marks and, perhaps owing to his time at the University of Georgia for a graduate degree in veterinary science, a self-described Chinese redneck. The family attributed his temperament to having been raised by servants while my grandparents were working as government scientists. The servants had frequently scolded and beat him for no reason. When my mother was born, the ayi said to Lewis, then just three years old, “Your mom has a daughter now, so she doesn’t love you anymore.” My grandmother didn’t learn of the reasons for his frequent tantrums until later, and she didn’t dare punish the servants for fear they would take it out on Lewis behind her back. By the time Richard was born, my grandmother’s youngest sister had moved in with them and she could release the servants. “These no education Chinese people, their knowledge isn’t good,” my grandmother had explained. “It’s all negative. We’re Christians, and that’s all about loving each other, but Chinese people, they’ve never had discipline, they teach you to hate each other. No one has taught them otherwise. No education, no Christian love.”

Long retired after a career in Asia as an industrial agriculture executive, Lewis and my aunt Jamie lived in a tony Dallas suburb most of the time, but as the co-owner of the apartment that I shared with Andrew, Lewis made regular trips to China and kept a bedroom full of things that he constantly reminded us not to touch. He and Richard mostly avoided each other, owing to internecine hostilities that stretched back for decades. The first was a land deal in Texas gone bad. More recent was when Richard started SMIC and Lewis assumed he would be offered a job. “Sorry,” Richard said, “that would be nepotism.” When Richard built the executive villas, on the cusp of the Shanghai housing bubble, Lewis assumed he would be able to buy one at the employee discount. “Sorry,” Richard said, “that would be nepotism.” Lewis bought an apartment through Andrew, but relations between the brothers had never thawed. Now whenever Richard came up in conversation, Lewis usually referred to him as “asshole.” But there were lots of assholes in Lewis’s book. Richard. All the “phony” Christians at Richard’s company. The Kuomintang president of Taiwan, Ma Yin-jeou. Me and Andrew, occasionally. For Lewis, Chiang Kai-shek’s name was never preceded by the customary “Generalissimo” but rather “That Son of a Bitch.”

Lewis spent most of his visits in his bedroom, watching Taiwanese television from a pirated satellite feed while he made Internet phone calls to friends, or forwarded e-mails of conspiracy theories and crude jokes from the laptop perched on his knees. Once I overheard him talking about me to someone on the phone. “My nephew, Huan,” he told the caller, “as in Qi Huan Gong.” It was common for Chinese to offer context in order to distinguish their names from homonyms, sort of the way someone might say “V, as in Victor” when spelling a name aloud.

When he hung up, I asked him what a Qi Huan Gong was. “Not what,” he said. “Who. He was the emperor of China.”

“Wait a minute, really? An emperor? How long ago?”

“A long time ago. Two thousand years at least.”

Qi Huan Gong, Lewis explained, wasn’t technically an emperor. He was a powerful hegemon with a title that translated into English as “duke,” and he ruled the state of Qi in northeastern China, roughly what was now Shandong province, during the Spring and Autumn Period around the seventh century B.C. Qi reached its pinnacle under his rule, and Qi Huan Gong is regarded as something of a Chinese founding father.

“Why have I not been told about this?” I said.

“I don’t know. Ask your mom.”

“What else do you know about my name?”

“Your dad wanted you and your brother to have ‘wood’ in your names,” Lewis said. “He and his brothers were ‘silk,’ and you guys are ‘wood.’” According to Chinese tradition, the names of descendants in a lineage incorporated a character from a set of about a dozen characters, all of which were auspicious words and in sequence formed a kind of poetic verse. Each successive generation used the next word in the sequence in its names, and once those were exhausted, a new verse was chosen.

“Why has it taken thirty years for me to find out that I have the same name as an emperor?” I said.

“See, next time someone asks you your name, you just tell them, ‘Huan, as in Qi Huan Gong,’” Lewis said. “Everyone will know what you’re talking about.”

Though Lewis’s antics mortified Andrew, who shooed him out of the house whenever he had guests, I enjoyed Lewis’s company. I had remembered him having an even more volcanic temper than Richard, but he seemed to have mellowed with age and revealed himself as the only one on that side of the family who didn’t see the world through the narrow prism of Christianity. I could speak to him as plainly as he did with everyone else, and he always had time to explain Chinese or family history. And he was the only one who encouraged me when I talked about looking for our family’s porcelain.

I CONTINUED TO PRESS my grandmother for more names and personal details, and she continued to ignore me. During one rambling parable about two of her former neighbors, she was so vague that I had trouble keeping the characters straight, and she refused to be more specific. “You don’t need to know these things,” she said. “What I’ve told you is enough.”

“Why don’t you want to say?”

“I just said—”

“If you don’t know, that’s fine, but—”

“Because this is my gexing,” she said. It was just her personality. “I’ve given a lot of testimony, and whether it’s mine or others’, I’m not going to discuss it with you. People with names, I’ll discuss. People without names, I won’t discuss. There were two boys and two mothers, that’s all you need to know.”

I bristled when she said “testimony.” I was tired of being surrounded by people who saw everything in religious terms. And I was really, really tired of people telling me what was good for me. “If you’re just going to tell these stories, I don’t want to hear them,” I said. The words had been dammed up for a while. “You’re just telling half stories. I’m asking what people’s names are, and you won’t tell me. It’s so annoying.”

My grandmother rubbed her arm. “I’ve written down a lot of testimony, and I’ve never used names,” she said. “What’s so important about names?”

“How can you tell a story without names?” I said. “I don’t care if it’s a real name or a fake name. All this ‘he’ and ‘her’ and ‘him.’” Chinese didn’t have gendered pronouns, just ta for all occasions. “It’s confusing.”

“Some people, I don’t know their names.”

“That’s fine, but the people you do know, they don’t know you’re saying their names.”

“That’s individual philosophy,” my grandmother said. “I just don’t like doing it. It’s not virtuous.”

“I know, I know. You don’t want to gossip.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m a Christian.”

“It’s not a matter of being Christian,” I said. “I know you only want to say good things about people. You don’t want to say bad things.”

“Even the good things, I’m not going to use names.”

I took a deep breath. “Why?”

“It’s in the Bible. Don’t tell other people’s secrets.”

“But there are names in the Bible! And there are tons of bad stories about people, with names.”

“Yes, there are names in the Bible, but it also teaches us how to act,” my grandmother said. I thought I caught her smirking. “The Bible teaches us not to leak other people’s secrets. Of course, you haven’t read as much of the Bible as I have.”

“Okay,” I said, knowing I was about to pass a point from which it would be difficult to return. “I don’t think I want to hear any more of your stories.”

“Fine. Don’t listen. I have my own ways of doing things.”

THE WINTER IN Shanghai was overcast, cold, and wet. The Chinese didn’t employ radiant heating systems south of the Yangtze, relying instead on inefficient forced-air appliances that were easily overwhelmed by the damp chill. It didn’t help that the ayi, in her endless pursuit of fresh air, left the windows open every time she came to clean. The sun set before I left the office. I had not spoken to my grandmother since our argument.

One dark evening Richard informed Andrew and me that we had plans. He was having dinner with government officials, whose children were attending schools abroad and didn’t have much in common with local Chinese anymore. He offered Andrew and me to entertain them. “Goddamn, I hate having to preen for Communists,” Andrew complained. “At least dinner will be good. They eat well.”

In the car on the way to dinner, Andrew mentioned that the head of the Communist Party of Shanghai and other high-ranking officials had just been sacked for accepting bribes, abusing their power, and siphoning nearly half a billion dollars from the city’s pension fund. Most people expected the ousted party chief to be executed or, as Andrew put it, given “a nine-gram headache.”

I was still paranoid about my visa snafu and a brief stint giving English lessons to two men from the “public safety” department, which I was convinced were related. A few China-based reporters whom I had befriended told me that they were regularly called in for unannounced meetings with government honchos to discuss their work. They assumed that their phones were tapped and that they were being followed. But they said I probably had nothing to fear. The worst thing that could happen to me was being called an unpatriotic Chinese and told to leave the country. Besides, they said, being Richard’s nephew was pretty good protection.

Even so, I hoped to keep a low profile. “Can you do me a favor?” I asked Richard. “Can you just tell them I taught English literature when I was in the States? Don’t tell them I worked for newspapers or what I’m trying to do here with the porcelain.”

“Sure, sure.”

We met the officials at a Chinese restaurant in a shady quarter of the French Concession. Most of the diners wore the telltale signs of nouveau riche party cadres: ill-fitting suits of shiny material, garish belt buckles, cheap-looking leather loafers, and the ubiquitous designer man-purses slung over their shoulders. A four-foot-tall shark fin in a glass case rose prominently from the middle of the floor. A middle-aged man with dyed hair and stained teeth greeted us. This was Speaker Hu, head of the People’s Congress of Shanghai and one of the highest-ranking officials in the city. Speaker Hu had been in charge of Pudong when Richard started his company, and he remained an important ally in the local government. They met for dinner a couple times every year.

Already at the table were two other couples and their daughters. One of the husbands was the head of the government-run venture capital firm that was heavily invested in Richard’s company. The servers made a big show of setting out dishes of cold appetizers on the lazy Susan. Speaker Hu made formal introductions of the two couples and their daughters. One of the daughters, Bonny, worked for the British Council in Shanghai. She had gone to the top college in Shanghai and completed postgraduate studies in London.

Richard went around the table and gave short biographies for Andrew and me, trying to impress with our educational and work backgrounds. “He was a journalist in the States,” he said of me. “And he’s doing research on a project now.”

I sank into my chair, but Speaker Hu and his friends seemed more interested in whether I was married. Richard told them I didn’t speak Chinese very well but was learning—typical ABC, he said, as everyone nodded knowingly—while I concentrated on the food. Richard updated Speaker Hu on the company, and the conversation took place mostly over my head. As part of the youngest generation at the table, I was not expected to speak unless spoken to, a return to the boring, endless dinner parties of my childhood where I spent the whole time wondering if there would be dessert.

Then Speaker Hu asked Andrew about his impressions of China. Without hesitating, Andrew rattled off a long list of China’s problems. “And I think China really needs to improve two major things, the pollution and the health care,” he continued.

I considered tackling Andrew to get him to stop talking. I had seen the inside of a Chinese police station before, when I accompanied a non-Chinese-speaking friend to report a stolen purse. The officer in charge led us through a dark row of subterranean jail cells to a dingy questioning room with a single, barred window high above our heads, where he took down my friend’s statement. The room was empty except for a couple of metal chairs and four scarred wooden tables that had been pushed together to form a larger one that would have been just the right size on which to lay a person. Every single inch of the grimy walls between the floor and eye level was gashed or splattered with dark stains or the kind of streaks that result from flailing legs or missed kicks.