Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

“I think that guy from Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, was pretty innovative,” I said.

“An exception that proves the rule.”

I was running out of Chinese innovators. “What about the guy from Wang Computers?” I said. “Wasn’t he Chinese?”

“Yeah, and his company went under. You know why? Nepotism! This is what I’m talking about.”

“You know, if you hate being Chinese so much, we’ve made a lot of medical advances so people can change themselves,” I said. “Michael Jackson wanted to be white too.”

“I’m just saying. There’s a reason why Chinese people have to copy everything.”

“Your degree of self-loathing is incredible.”

“I’m just talking facts here, man,” he said. “I’m a realist.”

As we left the supermarket, I asked Andrew who could afford to shop there on a regular basis. “The rich,” he said. We paused under an escalator and used a section of it to plot an imaginary graph. “Okay, here’s China.” He drew a horizontal x- axis. “And here’s their income.” He drew a vertical y- axis. “Here are most of the people.” He marked off 90 percent of the x- axis. The last 10 percent fit between his thumb and forefinger. “This is the middle class,” he said, referring to 90 percent of the space between his fingers. “They make, oh, two to five thousand RMB a month.” That was roughly what the local engineers made at the company. He narrowed his fingers. “Here is the upper middle class, who make more than ten thousand RMB a month. That’s you and me.” He brought his fingers together until they were almost touching. “And here are the rich.” Those were the ones buying up all the luxury apartments, driving Ferraris, and eating fifty-dollar-per-pound cherries.

“How do they get rich?” I said.

“They start their own companies and get contracts from the government.”

“Could I do that?”

“Sure, if you had the political connections. But you don’t.” Andrew shook his head. “Richard does. He could make himself a lot more money than he is.”

“Why doesn’t he?”

Andrew sighed. “Because he’s a Jesus freak.”

THE NEXT EVENING Andrew suggested we pay our respects to our uncle, the man enabling me to come to China for our family’s porcelain. I had always wanted to like Richard, the requisite rich uncle of the family. I bragged about him plenty: smart, successful, committed to his causes, wealthy without ostentation. But my family was too Chinese for my uncles to engage their nephews with the easy congeniality I saw in American families, so I mostly remembered Richard as overworked, stressed out, and as likely to explosively express his disapproval as he was to be affectionate. It was difficult to know what he expected, which made it difficult to relax around him. Even talking on the phone with him about the job had filled me with anxiety, as if I were meeting royalty without any understanding of the protocols.

I followed Andrew over the bridge to Richard’s three-story, five-bedroom, six-bathroom villa abutting the canal. Richard had filled every available spot in his garden with trees and shrubs—camphor, pomelo, peach, lemon, and rosebushes. His wife, Scarlett, who was as even-keeled and intuitive as Richard was impulsive, liked to kid that Richard’s designs had “no white space.”

The other half of Richard’s garden was given over to the chickens, ducks, and geese that he had received as gifts, and the groundskeepers collected their eggs every morning and placed them at Richard’s door. At the far end of his property, he had built an aviary to house the pheasants someone had given him. It wasn’t unusual for Richard to receive as gifts chickens live and butchered, sections of pigs, and even a year-old Tibetan mastiff, a massive creature that barked nonstop and terrified everyone for the few months that she stayed staked in a corner of his garden until he donated her to the company’s security guards.

I had last seen Richard three years earlier, when I finally visited Shanghai one summer during graduate school, meeting up with my mother on her annual trip to see my grandmother. Back then the company living quarters had yet to mature, staked with rows of camphor saplings that shivered like wet dogs, and fresh soil still ringed the apartment buildings, reminding me of anthills. The villas had not yet broken ground, and the other side of the canal remained a blanched tract of desolate land that appeared to be in a state of ecological shock. The company had made its initial public offering in the spring, but the stock had since dropped about 40 percent, which might have explained the lukewarm welcome I received from both Andrew and Richard. Richard was preoccupied with work and mostly left me alone, except for nagging me to get a haircut every time he saw me.

I didn’t see much of China, or even Shanghai, on that trip, spending most of my month there bedridden with fever and diarrhea. I recovered in time to accompany my mother and Richard to church one Sunday and marvel at the size of the building and congregation and the number of worshippers who lined up after the service to shake Richard’s hand or pitch him a business proposition. Then, in the crowded parking lot, he asked if I felt like getting a haircut later. I rebuffed him again, and he erupted, screaming at me for not taking his advice (“I even offered to pay for it!” he said, no small gesture for a man who removed the batteries from his laser pointers when not in use) and for being disobedient, willful, and stupid in general. He turned to my mother, excoriated her for raising such a disobedient, willful, and stupid son, ordered her into the car, and left me to find my own way home. In hindsight, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole episode was how none of the other congregants seemed to notice his tantrum, going about their postchurch business as if this kind of thing happened all the time. After walking in circles for a while in the blazing heat, I eventually found my way back to the living quarters.

Andrew laughed when I reminded him of this episode. “I can’t believe you’re still harping on that haircut incident,” he said.

“So?” I said. “He’s never apologized.”

“He won’t. I’m sure he’s forgotten it even happened.”

My hair had not changed much since then, and I braced myself as we rang the doorbell, which played the opening to Beethoven’s Für Elise . Richard answered, dressed in his after-work outfit of long denim shorts and a white T-shirt. He exhibited the typical Chang phenotype: a large, round head on a thin neck, a slight hunch, and a gangliness in his limbs that made him seem taller than five foot seven. Though he was nearly sixty years old, his face remained cherubic, light pooling on his cheekbones, chin, and nose. His bare feet had the same shape as my mother’s.

We followed him into the house, which he had designed himself and featured the utilitarianism of a scientist, the expediency of a businessman, and the eccentricities of a middle-aged Chinese man. The tiled floors were heated. The ground-floor bathroom had an automatically flushing urinal. The décor was strictly exurban immigrant, and crosses and Christian scriptures hung on the walls. Most of the furniture, and many of the rooms, served mostly to store stuff. In addition to animals, he received trunkfuls of food and drink as tribute and acquired so much wine that he ran out of shelf space on which to store it, so he bought a couple of wine refrigerators, even though much of the wine was barely of drinking quality and he didn’t drink. In his office, bookshelves overflowed with technical manuals and business and management tomes, and there was a tatami room for hosting Japanese businessmen.

Richard said nothing about my hair and betrayed no memory of the incident at all. My grandmother was napping, he said, so I would have to wait to say hello to her. He ushered us in and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the sound of drawers opening and closing. Then he returned with a tape measure and pencil and ordered me to stand with my back against one of the weight-bearing columns in his dining room.