Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

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.”