In search of my family’s buried treasure

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/04/in-search-of-my-familys-buried-treasure-china

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In the summer of 1938, the Japanese army landed in Jiujiang, a major trading port on the Yangtze river near my great-great-grandfather Liu Feng Shu’s hometown of Xingang. As the Japanese advanced, Liu directed his workmen to dig a large hole in the garden, deeper than a man was tall and as wide as a bedroom. They lined the pit with bamboo shelving, on which they stacked the family’s heirlooms: antique furniture, jade, scrolls, and Liu’s prized porcelain collection, all carefully packed in straw. The men laboured after dark, filling the vault to its brim before covering it with a false floor and replanting the vegetation on top.

One night in July, shortly after the burials were completed, a raggedy Chinese soldier knocked on the door and asked for something to eat. After Liu took him in and fed him, the soldier said, “Why have you not left yet? The city has fallen. The Japanese are here.”

The next morning, my great-great-grandfather and his family stuffed as much jewellery and silver as they could fit in their pockets and bundled their clothes in knapsacks. They barricaded the heavy front doors and fled for Sichuan province, where the Chinese army had retreated, leaving behind the buried treasure.

Liu had been born to a modest, landowning family as China’s last imperial dynasty – the Qing – was crumbling. Though he earned the second-highest score on the district-level imperial civil service examination, he declined a government position, instead returning to his village of Xingang, where he established a private school and invested his earnings in land. In the tradition of Chinese scholar-gentry, Liu patronised the arts and collected porcelain by the crate. He filled his house with vases of every shape and size, decorative plates, figurines of Buddhist gods, tableware, and dowries for his five granddaughters. The collection supposedly included valuable imperial wares.

The family lived a wealthy, comfortable existence in post-imperial, Republican China. Though a staunch Confucian, Liu had his sons study at engineering colleges and, at a time when women often didn’t even receive names, sent his granddaughters to a nearby Methodist boarding school where they learned English and received western educations; my grandmother was not the first woman in the family to earn a college degree. The family summered on nearby Mount Lu in Guling, the missionary retreat established by an Englishman, Edward Selby Little, their villa sitting across a small stream from that of the Chinese military and political leader Chiang Kai-shek. Occasionally, the girls would see the generalissimo out on his evening walk. “Hello, Mr President,” they said as he passed by. Chiang would wave and warn them to be careful around the water.

If my parents told me about Liu and his buried porcelain, it never registered. Growing up in Utah, I paid little attention to family stories, most of which concerned overcoming hardships that I, preoccupied with overcoming my own hardship of being Chinese and non-Mormon in Salt Lake City, couldn’t relate to and didn’t care to hear about. As far as I was concerned, the Chinese people in my life, with their loud, angry-sounding manner of speaking and odd habits, were from another planet and had travelled to Earth for the sole purpose of embarrassing me.

By the time I went to China to look for my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain, armed with little more than strands of a family legend, I still had far more questions than answers. How much porcelain and silver was buried? Were there really imperial pieces in the collection? Where was the old family house? Did it still belong to us? Had anyone ever tried to recover the porcelain? What happened to it?

But my family’s long march had splintered it over thousands of miles and two continents, an estrangement that hardened when the Communists took the mainland in 1949. My grandmother, the oldest of her generation and a chemist working in a Kuomintang research laboratory, and her cousin, married to a high-ranking Kuomintang officer, fled to Taiwan. My grandmother’s family eventually resettled in the US. The rest of their family – sisters, cousins, my great-great-grandfather – stayed behind in China, and for decades neither side knew anything about the other.

When I arrived in Shanghai, where my 96-year-old grandmother had moved after many decades in Texas to live with one of my uncles, many of the principal characters were long dead, and those old enough to still remember the porcelain were elderly and unknown to me.

I soon learned that when the porcelain was buried, my grandmother had already graduated from Ginling women’s college in Nanjing (just months before the Rape of Nanking) and headed south to teach at a missionary school in Guangzhou, and then Macau. Though Macau remained a safe haven for most of the war, food shortages after Hong Kong fell in 1941 forced my grandmother into her own harrowing trek back to Chongqing, China’s wartime capital.

Though her memory remained impressively sharp, she preferred the family history to remain buried. The old fears and grudges – including against Liu, who had prevented her from pursuing her desired medical studies – from the wars and dislocations had ossified over time, and she discouraged me from seeking out other relations.

Navigating family mores was nothing like navigating China, which unfolded relatively easily once I relearned the Chinese that I had forgotten. But through a mixture of patience, persistence, and felicitous timing, I eventually arranged to visit my grandmother’s cousin in Taiwan, Liu Pei Yu, who had remained close to their grandfather and had helped with the burials.

She turned out to be as chatty as my grandmother was reticent. As the widow of a Kuomintang military officer, her loyalties were clear. In her stories, the Kuomintang were the noble heroes, while the Communists are “red bandits”, “ghouls” or “bastards”, the Communist sympathisers in the family were “traitors”, and she gave dates as “the nth year of the Republic of China”.

From her, I learned about Liu’s scholarly achievements, the small empire he built in Xingang, the respect he commanded from the villagers, his heroism in taking his family to safety during the war, and how he died in 1951 after being kicked out of his house and forced to live in a pigsty by the Communists. She even had a box of photographs from her childhood, my first real glimpses of a time that, until then, had been more myth than reality. But she could only speculate about the fate of that buried porcelain, as the Sino-Japanese war was just the start of a series of catastrophes for the country, and when she returned to see her hometown well after the cultural revolution, it was so changed she could barely locate Liu’s house. By then, everything belonged to the government, anyway.

Back on the mainland, I rushed to visit the remaining relations while I still could, a winding journey punctuated by dinner meetings with Chinese officials, altercations with reckless drivers, a frantic night searching for a rabies clinic in Jingdezhen, numerous illnesses, and plenty of wild goose chases. These were relations whom I had not even known existed, much less been familiar with their stories. And yet they welcomed me, the first of my generation to seek them out, with an unexpected warmth.

In Beijing, I met my grandmother’s youngest sister, Liu Pei Sheng, whose vivacity made it hard to believe she had suffered a stroke a few years ago. Her memory faded in and out, and I tried my best to coax clues from her. Her husband, on the other hand, a retired academic, could not have been more lucid. An American-educated metallurgist, he had been tapped for China’s nuclear programme in 1956, and for nearly two decades worked on an arid plateau in western Qinghai province running experiments. When the country began devouring itself during the cultural revolution, his position was such that he was singled out for torture, physical and psychological. His children were sent to the countryside for “re-education” and locked out of universities. Somehow, despite all the murders and suicides around him, he survived, and he recounted it all with remarkable equanimity.

But they could tell me little about the porcelain, so I went north to Jinan, in China’s agricultural heartland, to find the only male of my grandmother’s generation, who would have inherited my great-great-grandfather’s estate. Liu Cong Ji had also stayed on the mainland after the Communist victory, and, like everyone, had paid the price for his bourgeois background. His father, the only one of my great-great grandfather’s three sons to survive the war, was terrorised so unrelentingly during one of Mao’s campaigns that he killed himself. Liu Cong Ji showed me the only photograph of my great-great-grandfather that my family owned.

Once I made my way back to Xingang, still home to the Liu family cemetery, where my great-great-grandfather was buried, I could hardly keep up with all the relations I was introduced to, including the keeper of the jia pu, the recorded genealogy stretching back more than a dozen generations. By then, my journey had become more than a search for clues to lost treasure. It was a race to preserve stories before they, too, were lost, an accretion of the memories and piecing back together of the narratives that were far more fragile than porcelain. And the journalist in me couldn’t help testing and corroborating the information I had heard.

A native term for overseas Chinese is huaqiao. Hua means “Chinese” and qiao is a homonym for “bridge”. When I first heard the term, I imagined myself stretched across the Pacific Ocean with my head in America and my feet in China (or vice versa, a fitting confusion for an American-born Chinese), getting trampled on by people from both sides. But as I untangled the antecedents to my return to my ancestral home, I was reminded that being a huaqiao had also revealed a new world that I, by an accident of birth, could explore with as much or as little confrontation as I chose. And that I could spend the rest of my life tracing my roots through that world. I began to understand the concept of a huaqiao not as a burden but a privilege.

Truth is a shifty thing in families. I had hoped to find consensus, a unified theory that captured and explained the entire history of the Lius. Instead, each relation had his or her own version of events, often cast in light of their personal experiences, biases and insecurities. Liu Pei Yu, my grandmother’s cousin in Taiwan, remembered the porcelain collection having been as vast as it was valuable. Her cousin Liu Cong Ji on the mainland described it as nothing special, of mostly sentimental value. Were her memories gilded by a life spent in exile? And had he changed his in order to survive movement after movement targeting the gentry and intelligentsia? In the end, the truth is whatever you choose to believe.

Yet I was surprised at how much turned out just like my family had said. After three years of searching for Liu’s buried porcelain collection, I found myself squeezed into a black Mazda with distant relations, cruising along the Yangtze river to Xingang. The village was indeed a half-day’s walk east of Jiujiang, the port city where my grandmother and her sisters had attended boarding school, which still stood. The fields along the river that had belonged to Liu were as expansive as my relations described. After we made a left at the main intersection, wound around a gentle, inclined turn, and stopped before a tall metal gate, I saw that his estate really had been converted into a cotton factory after it was “liberated” by the Communists.

The factory looked as if it had been abandoned for years, the lock on its gate rusted shut. Weeds pushed up between the seams of the concrete courtyard around which long brick buildings were arranged. Grass and bushes grew wild on the vacant, northern end.

We found a rickety ladder made of scrap wood leaning against the wall, and moments later I was standing on my great-great-grandfather’s old property. We walked into the overgrowth, my grandmother’s local cousin, whom I called Uncle Tang, holding his arms before him like divining rods. The air buzzed with cicadas. “The washroom was over there, I think,” he said, motioning for me to follow him to a small clearing. “There was a big cistern we used for baths.”

“And over there was the kitchen,” he said, pointing to another area. He put one palm against his head and thought. “That retaining wall used to run all the way along the property. That means the garden would have been …” He led me to another spot where someone had planted a few rows of wilted vegetables. “… about here.”

Uncle Tang pointed at the ground. “This is it,” he said. “This is probably where they buried the porcelain.”

We looked, but it turned out not to be the place, and so the search continued. But I had closed the circle. Somewhere near where I stood, on this very patch of land, my great-great-grandfather had breathed the same air and dug the same earth. And I realised that no matter what I might find, I’d already discovered heirlooms far more valuable and enduring than Liu’s buried treasure: my family.

• The Porcelain Thief by Huan Hsu is published by Fourth Estate, £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59, including free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846