Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

“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.”