Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

My best source of information, my mother said, would be my ninety-six-year-old grandmother, who had returned to China after my grandfather died to live with my uncle Richard. The youngest and most evangelical Christian of my mother’s siblings, Richard had started out as an engineer at Texas Instruments and risen to a management position setting up manufacturing facilities in Europe. At age fifty, after spending two decades with Texas Instruments, having built his dream house in a north Dallas suburb where one of his neighbors was the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, he took an early retirement and established a semiconductor foundry in Taiwan called Worldwide Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, or WSMC. Richard served as the president of WSMC until 1999, when he sold the company to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, or TSMC, the behemoth global leader whose market cap was nearly 30 percent of Taiwan’s gross domestic product, for $515 million. In its report on the deal, The Wall Street Journal dubbed Richard the “Taiwanese Tycoon.”

On that same day he claimed to have received a vision from God to start a similar company on mainland China as a way of both developing its high-tech industry and spreading the gospel there. With a $1 billion investment from the Chinese government, and plenty more from top venture capital firms, Richard installed himself as president and CEO and named his new enterprise Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC. He broke ground on his venture in Shanghai while I was finishing up college and heading off to work at my first job, in a high-tech public relations agency in San Francisco, and he asked me to work for him every chance he got. My mother posited that he wanted me as his assistant, where I would learn the company and eventually take over for him. The stock options alone should have been enticing enough, but I demurred each time, not interested in the work, the industry, or China. My other uncle, Lewis, bought up as many pre-IPO shares as he could, and the general sentiment was that the stock could double, even triple, its initial price. Lewis would sometimes phone my mother just to berate her for not forcing me to join the company. “There’s a million dollars right there in front of him,” he’d howl, “and he can’t be bothered to bend over and pick it up!”

Ten years later Richard’s company boasted twelve thousand employees and manufacturing facilities in Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, and Chengdu, along with another fab—short for “fabrication facility”—under construction in Shenzhen; offices in Tokyo, Milan, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; and a $1.8 billion initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange (my aunt Scarlett helped ring the opening bell), larger than Google, which went public the same year. In the same spirit as the Methodists who had educated my grandmother nearly a century earlier, Richard built schools, health centers, and churches across China, all with the tacit approval of the Communist regime that my grandparents, scientists who researched weapons-grade ores for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, had fought against.

Because I could barely speak Chinese, and my grandmother, despite having graduated from a missionary boarding school and college, had never demonstrated much ability with English, I conscripted my mother to ask my grandmother questions about the porcelain and report back the answers, an imperfect arrangement that led to many outbursts over why my mother had not asked the obvious follow-up question or clarified a detail. One day, after hearing one complaint too many, my mother heaved a sigh. “We’re tired of trying to guess what you want to know,” she told me. “Especially Grandma. She says you should just go to Shanghai and ask her these things yourself.”

So I did. In 2007, equipped with only a few threads of a family legend and an irresistible compulsion to know more about it, I moved to China to find out what happened to my great-great-grandfather’s buried treasure. In order to obtain a long-term visa, I contacted Richard for a job. I could sense his vindication over the phone, and I doubted he took me seriously when I insisted that I was going to China for the porcelain first and foremost. He must have figured that it would only be a matter of time before I came to my senses.

My plan was simple. I would work at Uncle Richard’s company, take evening language classes to learn enough Chinese to speak with my grandmother about the porcelain, and use my weekends and holidays to look for it. Richard was notorious for paying low wages by American standards, but the cost of living in Shanghai was such that my monthly compensation—which included health insurance, three weeks of annual paid vacation, a biannual airfare allowance for trips home, reimbursement of moving costs, and heavily subsidized housing—could still fund the necessary travel, as long as I didn’t try to live like the foreigners on expat packages. What the actual search would entail beyond talking to my grandmother remained nebulous, but I told my friends and family that I’d probably be back in the United States after a year.

I ARRIVED IN SHANGHAI late one evening in August, connecting through Tokyo. As I walked through Narita to change planes, the Japanese had spoken Japanese to me. When I touched down at night at Pudong International, the Chinese spoke Chinese to me. I told everyone in English that I couldn’t understand them, and they all looked at me like I was crazy.

Stepping out of the airplane, even well past sunset, felt like entering a greenhouse, the concentration of wet, stifling summer heat that would later coalesce into the rainy season. My cousin Andrew met me at the terminal with a driver. Andrew was almost two years older than me, born in Montreal. He had spent his early years in Singapore and Hong Kong while his father, Lewis, my mother’s older brother, worked for a Thai multinational before the family settled in Texas, where, not knowing any better, Andrew showed up for his first day of elementary school in the Dallas suburbs wearing his Hong Kong schoolboy uniform: blazer, tie, Bermudas, knee socks, and loafers. He graduated from Baylor University with a philosophy degree and was an early pilgrim to Shanghai, joining our uncle’s company in 2000, when it consisted of a circle of temporary trailers on a stretch of farmland east of the Huangpu River.

Andrew and I had always looked different, and mutual acquaintances often expressed surprise when they learned that we were related. One of the photo albums in my parents’ house in Utah held a picture of the two of us as adolescents, building a sand castle at a Great Salt Lake beach, me, bow-legged and so scrawny that my protruding hipbones held up my swim trunks like an iliac clothes hanger, next to knock-kneed, heavyset Andrew wearing nothing but an unflattering Speedo and a grimace to keep his enormous eyeglasses from sliding down his nose.

When we were very young, our age difference was sufficient for him to know a lot more than me, and I was the one who annoyed him with elementary questions. I eventually caught up, literally, as evidenced by the series of rules in the doorway of Richard’s laundry room in Dallas, where our uncle had marked the heights of his nephews over the years. As our stature grew equal, our relationship also got more competitive. Andrew and I would stand back to back and argue who was on his toes or stretching his neck to make himself taller. In family photographs, he would stick his chest out and stand on his toes right as the shutter clicked, and it wasn’t until I was back home that I found out he’d cheated. I had heard that he had taken up marathon running after moving to China and worked himself into terrific, almost unrecognizable shape. But he stopped training after contracting tuberculosis, and by the time we reunited in Shanghai, his body had sprung back to its original form.