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.”
“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