Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

This was more than a traffic dispute or a cultural misunderstanding. The driver was the Chinese Red Army, a column of armored vehicles rolling over the principles of right of way and common courtesy, and I was the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, armed with nothing but an umbrella, staring down the machine for the millions of oppressed pedestrians and bicyclists forced to run for their lives to avoid vehicles blowing through stop signs and red lights, making left turns from right lanes, crossing medians, and diving into bicycle paths. The honking got louder, longer, and angrier. I put my head down and kept walking. Go ahead and run me over, I thought, because I wasn’t budging. I had rights .

I walked all the way to the gate with the car crawling behind me, its horn sounding a continuous, grating wail. When I finally peeled off, the driver pulled up to me, rolled down his window, and screamed, “Ni you shenme yisi?” Basically, “What the hell is your problem?” I had neither the energy nor the vocabulary to retort. For the rest of the day I indulged in violent fantasies of tearing the driver apart while berating him with immaculate Chinese and resolved to learn the Chinese word for “motherfucker.”

I INTENDED TO STAY IN CHINA FOR JUST A YEAR, BUT AFTER a few months I had learned nothing more about my family’s porcelain. I hadn’t even found my own apartment, despite Andrew’s frequent hints that I had freeloaded long enough. At work, Richard moved me to the corporate relations department, where I had marginally more to do, editing press releases, but mostly I waited for the delivery of the English-language dailies in the afternoon. On weekends I played basketball and poker with a group of ABCs, many of them former SMIC employees, whom I’d met through Andrew. Though my Chinese had improved as a matter of course and immersion, I still couldn’t really speak it outside taxis or restaurants, and I risked becoming one of the expat dilettantes whom I so readily impugned.

Having shaken the illnesses that dogged me when I arrived, I regained my weight by rediscovering Chinese food. My mother had eschewed many typical Chinese dishes that she found too greasy, so I knew what couscous was long before san bei ji, clay pot chicken cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and sesame oil and dressed with ginger and basil. Or yu xiang qiezi, spicy, stir-fried sweet and sour eggplant that was the platonic ideal for topping a bowl of rice. Though my family frequently ate dim sum on the weekends, it wasn’t until I moved to China that I discovered boluo bao, pineapple buns, named for the checkered crust of golden sugar on their tops and best eaten steaming hot with a slab of butter sandwiched in the middle. Or xiaolongbao, the famous steamed soup dumplings, delicate bite-size morsels that sagged like water balloons when picked up between chopsticks, were placed on a spoon with a splash of vinegar and shredded ginger, and were then popped whole into your mouth.

Despite the horror stories that street vendors cooked with oil reclaimed from sewers, or that the meat of the yangrouchuan lamb skewers was actually cat, I managed to eat street food with no ill effects, breakfasting on jian bing, a thin eggy crepe wrapped around pickled vegetables and a smear of chili sauce. For lunch or dinner, I gobbled shengjianbao, another type of soup dumpling, but larger, thicker skinned, and pan-fried to create toothsome sesame-sprinkled tops and browned bottoms with the crunch of a perfectly cooked french fry. These were rested on soup spoons in order to bite a small hole in the top to release the steam and suck out the minced pork juices, and then were eaten with vinegar in two or three meaty, doughy, oily mouthfuls.

As the vise of the Shanghai summer loosened, the air grew sharper, and autumn in the city brought blue skies and soporific temperatures. One afternoon at the office, a headline in the Shanghai Daily caught my attention: “Police Hunt for Treasure Trove of Old Coins.” A one-hundred-year-old residence in Nanhui, a transitioning rural district of Shanghai between Zhangjiang and the airport, was being developed into an entertainment center. Junkmen visited the construction site every day to gather scrap metal, and one day a neighbor heard a shout that gold had been found. Moments later the neighbor saw people scattering from the construction site with jars of coins. Apparently the junkmen, looking for metal with homemade detectors, had unearthed jars full of silver coins. As quickly as the initial discoverers fled, more treasure hunters descended on the site, and an overwhelmed security guard called the police, who were able to recover a few of the jars containing coins that had circulated during the 1920s. Once the police took control of the site, the local cultural relics department found another jar full of silver coins marked “Mexican Republic” and estimated that they had been buried at the end of the nineteenth century, though the reasons for the burial were unclear. Efforts to recover the rest of the coins taken from the site were under way. “Any relics found under the ground or sea in China belong to our country and not to individuals,” an official was quoted as saying.

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.