AS I HEADED SOUTH FROM TAIPEI, THE COUNTRYSIDE wrinkled into green folds. Soon I entered Taiwan’s mountainous tea country. Chinese tea culture stretches back thousands of years, when emperors insisted that their tea be picked only by virgins who—for fear it would taint their crops—weren’t allowed to eat anything smelly or spicy for two weeks beforehand. Mainland China’s most famous tea region, Wuyishan, a range of craggy, fog-bound peaks in Fujian province, was described in a Tang dynasty monograph as having the perfect conditions for growing tea. Taiwan’s mountains offered some of the same growing conditions as Wuyishan, and British entrepreneurs set up plantations on them during the nineteenth century with seedlings from Wuyishan’s tea trees. As the story went, those seedlings developed unique characteristics in Taiwan that altered the processing slightly, which resulted in a distinctive flavor. “But you can’t say they’re different,” one tea expert told me. “Their environment made them this way.”

When the Japanese arrived in 1895, they codified the tea tradition, developing rituals around its brewing, serving, and drinking. Fifty years later the Kuomintang brought the remnants of China’s tea culture; they might have lost the mainland, but they were going to preserve their history and traditions in Taiwan. Children in Taiwan grew up hearing that they were the fuxing de jidi, or revival base, for Chinese culture.

While mainland China suffered under trade embargoes until 1971, Taiwanese tea became an important export. The chayiguan, or teahouse, appeared. Chinese teahouses were traditionally rest stops for travelers to eat, drink, and take in an opera performance, but Taiwan’s were for cultured people. Chayiguans served high-quality teas, developed an etiquette for brewing and drinking tea, and perhaps most important, provided a place for political dissidents to meet when martial law was still in place.

When China opened and Taiwanese began returning to the mainland, they brought their tea—and their tea culture—with them. It was this tea culture, born in China and nurtured in Taiwan, that began the rediscovery of Chinese culture by the mainland and was inexorably linked to porcelain. The connection of tea with everyday life, including the vessels used to prepare and drink it, was the beginning of modern China’s reacquaintance with its ancient traditions.

THE MAIN DOOR to Chang Guo Liang’s apartment on the southern outskirts of Kaohsiung was open, and through the mosquito screen I saw him jump out of his chair, almost tripping as he ran to greet me, while a toy poodle mix yapped. Chang Guo Liang was a compact man with white hair, a large nose, and a pinched expression that made me think of a hare. He wore gray slacks, a red T-shirt, and socks with individual toes that gave him little purchase on the bare floor.

All his years in Taiwan had done little to affect his native Sichuan accent, which sometimes made him difficult to understand while we sat in his living room and talked. I had not learned of his existence until recently, but he knew all about me from my grandmother, whom he phoned regularly. His house was spare, the kind of concrete box that Chinese people furnished but never seemed to finish. A three-dimensional photograph of Jesus knocking on a door stood on a shelf, a piece of embroidery that read “Always Rejoice” hung on the wall, and an old Mitsubishi sewing machine was tucked into the corner. Chang Guo Liang’s twelve-year-old grandson, Stanley, slouched on the sofa and watched cartoons while he played a handheld video game.

It was late afternoon, still light enough for a stroll, so Chang Guo Liang changed into a collared shirt and slipped into silver and blue running shoes. We wound our way out of the mammoth apartment complex and headed toward a small river that Chang Guo Liang followed for his daily walks. He wanted to show me the old arsenal where my grandparents had worked. The surrounding area had been rice paddies and sugarcane fields when my grandparents first arrived, and much of it didn’t appear far removed from those days. The rest had been colonized by major thoroughfares, new high-rises, shopping centers, and plastics factories. A frightening number of feral dogs roamed the empty lots.

Chang Guo Liang was born in 1925 in a village near Chongqing. His parents were porcelain merchants. He remembered Japanese warplanes bombing Chongqing in 1938 and the city burning for days on end. The movement of consumer goods effectively stopped after that, and although the family had no political leanings, Chang Guo Liang’s father asked a family friend to get Chang Guo Liang a job in the arsenal where my grandmother worked; he would be safer there than in the army. He was assigned to my grandfather’s department to do metallography—cutting material, polishing it, and then inspecting it under a microscope. Chang Guo Liang had only a middle school education, but he was bright and quickly picked up the names of the different alloys and how to test them. As my grandfather rose to become the head of the department, he brought Chang Guo Liang with him.

In 1947, two years after the Japanese surrendered, the munitions factory returned to Nanjing. From Chongqing my grandparents, their two infant children, and Chang Guo Liang boarded the Tian Xiang Lun, or “Heavenly Peace,” of the Minsheng line, the largest privately owned shipping company in China at the time, and steamed east on the Yangtze. Chang Guo Liang remembered the wind sweeping veils of sand from the tops of the cliffs as they passed through the Three Gorges and Yangtze River dolphins flipping and rolling in the ship’s wake near Dongting Lake. They stopped in Jiujiang to buy household items, but the water was low and a rowboat had to transfer them to shore. My grandmother, pregnant with Richard, was able to see San Gu, Pei Ke, and Cong Ji, who were all at Rulison in the city, but didn’t make it back to Xingang to visit her grandfather. By the time they returned to the ship, the weather had changed; the waves swelled and their caps turned white. Docking the rowboat next to the ship for reboarding was a dangerous maneuver that risked being smashed against the hull or carried downstream by the swift current. Somehow Chang Guo Liang managed to hook the rope with a gaff and saved the day.

My grandparents lived in Nanjing for less than two years before Chiang Kai-shek sounded the retreat to Taiwan. Everyone rushed to leave before the ports closed. My grandparents, their three children, and Chang Guo Liang arrived in Shanghai in the middle of winter and moved into a ramshackle dormitory made of bamboo and mud near the pier in Wusong, the site of China’s first railway. Much of the mud had fallen off, and when the wind blew, snowflakes swirled in their room. Without running water or a stove, Chang Guo Liang trudged thirty minutes past frozen ponds and streams and dead automobiles to fetch hot water, his hands numb despite wearing two pairs of gloves.

While my grandfather’s unit waited for its boat, my grandmother took the children to stay with an old Rulison classmate who had married a high-ranking customs officer. Then one day my grandfather appeared and told them to get their things; the boat was leaving. Each person was allowed two pieces of luggage. My grandmother left a few cases of belongings with her classmate, who in turn gave my grandmother a gold ring for safekeeping. My grandmother’s belongings were all taken by the Communists, and the classmate never got out of China, suffering greatly during the various movements against intellectuals and elites, but my grandmother managed to return the ring after China reopened.

The family boarded the ship on January 2, 1949. Richard celebrated his first birthday on the boat. At the mouth where the Huangpu joined the Yangtze, they passed the wreckage of the Jiangya, sunk a month before by a Japanese mine and claiming more than two thousand lives. While my grandmother and her family stayed in a passenger cabin, Chang Guo Liang slept on deck with the rest of the single men. He wore as many layers as he could fit, and it was still cold. He got seasick. “Nothing was convenient,” he said.

My family did manage to bring with them a crate of Jingdezhen porcelains, perhaps bought in Jiujiang during the shopping trip on the way to Nanjing. My mother remembered seeing the wooden case in the closet in Taiwan when she was young, stacks of blue and white plates and bowls and covered jars for salt and fermentation. Over the years the pieces broke or got lost. None of them survived.

The ship sailed for three days before landing in Kaoshiung. Everyone who had been shivering with cold in Shanghai stripped to their undershirts to cope with the tropical climate. As they entered the harbor, they could see farm girls standing on the pier, dressed in pointed hats and wooden clogs. They lived in tents for a month, subsisting on moldy brown rice, eaten out of government-issued metal bowls. “It was so can,” Lewis once told me, using a word for “miserable.” Part of the poverty stemmed from Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of destroying resources instead of moving them to Taiwan; he didn’t want to leave anything for the new Communist regime, even if it meant that his loyalists on the island would suffer. “God, he was such a son of a bitch,” Lewis said. “I fucking hate Chiang Kai-shek.”

Lewis was originally supposed to stay on the mainland. My grandfather thought Lewis was too difficult a child and wanted to leave him with Pei Sheng, but my grandmother insisted that the family stay together. (Later, during the Cultural Revolution, when Taiwan was awash with images of the Red Guards running amok, my grandmother would joke, “Thank God we brought Lewis with us. Otherwise he’d have been the leader of the Red Guards for sure.”)

In Kaohsiung, there wasn’t enough housing to accommodate everyone coming from the mainland, and the family squeezed into a three-room house that they shared with another couple. Once new housing was built, my grandparents’ job grades were high enough that they were able to move out into their own place.

During a bout of tuberculosis, my grandmother turned full bore to Christianity, which led her to leave the armory to raise her children full time. To make sure they didn’t suffer through the same deprivation as she had, she sold off her jewelry to pay for their food. All the cookies—baking appealed to her chemistry background—and jams that they couldn’t find in Taiwan, she made from scratch, using the fruits and vegetables available. When Richard got older, he used to ask her why he couldn’t find the tomato jam from his childhood in any stores. Once the children were grown and attending college, my grandmother accepted a post at the Ginling Girls’ High School in Taipei, founded in 1956 by alumnae of Ginling College.

When the Kuomintang first arrived in Taiwan, everyone was preoccupied with counterattacking the mainland and assumed a victorious return was imminent. As China suffered through the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Chiang Kai-shek saw his opportunity to retake the mainland. But he had lost international support, particularly from the Americans, and after a series of defeats in skirmishes with the Chinese army, he scrapped his plans. “If the Americans had given their okay, we’d have been victorious at that time,” Chang Guo Liang said. “We’d have been back for decades.”

Chang Guo Liang was desperately lonely in Taiwan, living first in the singles’ barracks on the army base, then with my grandparents, and then in another series of homes. But with all lines of communication broken (due as much to Taiwan’s policies as China’s), it was difficult to know what friends and family were going through on the mainland. Occasionally a letter would get smuggled through Hong Kong, but from 1949 until the 1970s, when mail service was normalized, families remained in the dark. Chang Guo Liang gave up hoping that he would ever go home and married a bendi ren, or “native” Taiwanese.

We took a right at a newly built administration building and emerged onto a wide intersection. “This used to be just a wooden bridge,” Chang Guo Liang said. On the other side stood the arsenal, encircled by a concrete wall topped with razor wire. An old water tower rose up from the compound. The arsenal was still in use, Chang Guo Liang said, though I saw no activity, only a few military trucks and a treadless armored vehicle. My family, along with Chang Guo Liang, had lived inside those walls when they first arrived in Kaohsiung.

Clouds knitted on the horizon, so we returned to the apartment, where Chang Guo Liang’s wife had prepared a dinner of pork meatballs with soy sauce and tofu, mustard greens, scrambled eggs with tomato, cabbage, and winter melon soup. We ate in front of the television, while Stanley watched cartoons and ignored his grandfather’s exhortations to eat more.

Chang Guo Liang finally returned to the mainland in the late 1980s, a few years after China began allowing family visits. A letter sent to his old address in Sichuan province sat in the village until someone happened to recognize the name and deliver it to Chang Guo Liang’s younger brother. Though his family house had been torn down, Chang Guo Liang still made annual trips to China. I asked him if he thought of himself as Taiwanese or Chinese.

He didn’t answer immediately. “I think …” he began, “it’s all the same.” He laughed. “Taiwan’s fine, the mainland’s fine. In my heart, I think it’s all one country.”

THE NEXT MORNING Chang Guo Liang and I rode the bus into the city to see the lane where my mother, Lewis, and Richard had grown up. We walked up a wide, leafy boulevard and turned left into a narrow side alley. Once lined with arsenal employee housing, much of the lane had been redeveloped with low-rise flats. A new six-story apartment building stood where my grandparents’ house once had. At the end of the lane, a few of the original employee houses remained, one-story, fenced by brick walls, with corrugated metal roofs.

Chang Guo Liang recognized a man his age and had a quick conversation with him. I looked up and down the lane, feeling no special connection to it, perhaps because my family had not felt one either. I didn’t remember anyone making trips back to Kaohsiung or even speaking about it with much fondness. My mother had gone back to Taiwan only once or twice in my lifetime.

On the way back to Chang Guo Liang’s apartment, I asked him about the porcelain jar. He never met my great-great-grandfather and couldn’t remember my grandmother or any of her sister-cousins talking about him. He didn’t know the story of the buried porcelain and wasn’t sure what jar my grandmother was talking about, except that he didn’t have it. I supposed it was probably like someone asking about a spoon or a sweater or some other utilitarian item left with him half a lifetime ago. Nor did he have any old photographs of the family. “Oh, we had so many photos, but when we moved, we threw them all away,” he said. “It’s such a shame. And the ones we kept, we can’t find them anymore.”

WHEN I WAS in Shanghai, I heard a Taiwanese businessman explain the cross-strait relations between China and Taiwan. There were parents with a child, the businessman said. When the child was born, the parents were too poor to take care of him, so they put him on the street and hoped that someone else would take him. And many countries, with abundant culture and resources, did just that. The child grew into a bright and talented young man, full of potential. By then his birth parents had grown very rich and decided they wanted the child back. But the child thought, Wait a minute. You left me by the roadside in a pile of shit, and now you want to tell me what to do? We came from the same family, the businessman said, but we’ve taken very different roads.

In the years following the civil war, it seemed that Taiwan based its identity on whatever the mainland wasn’t. Communism versus capitalism. Cultural Revolution versus cultural protection. Traditional characters versus simplified. Wade-Giles romanization versus pinyin. Every aspect of daily life could be parsed to oppose the mainland. Even now the Taiwanese insisted on calling their metro system the jie yun, or “rapid transit,” instead of the mainland term ditie, or “subway.” Whatever the motivations, it was heartening to know that Chinese people could achieve such progress but also disappointing that it was limited to Taiwan.

When Chinese on the mainland brayed about recapturing China’s past glories, I heard insecurity. When they mentioned China’s five thousand years of history and culture, I saw a long line of failures and missed opportunities. It was easy to blame these failures on China’s feudal system, in which all power was concentrated in one man who was more interested in maintaining that power than in developing his country. Or on China’s history of xenophobia. But in actuality, reformist emperors did exist, and China did study the West. The problem was those reformers didn’t last long, and unlike the Japanese, who studied the whole Western knowledge system as they modernized, the Chinese focused on expediency. They relied on missionaries to make timepieces or scientific instruments, and when the missionaries left, so did the knowhow, and the Chinese could only make copies rather than innovate.

Instead of practical technologies, the Chinese invested in pondering the principles for ruling a country—Confucianism. But when the country abandoned the imperial exam system in 1905, its philosophical foundations became irrelevant, and so did its economic base of agriculture and taxes. Those systems didn’t modernize to keep pace with a changing world, so while the West rose, China languished.

In a roundabout way, I was basically pondering the “Needham question.” Joseph Needham, the eminent Cambridge biochemist, polymath, polyglot, and polyamorist who was a better friend to China than I could ever hope to be, crisscrossed China during the Sino-Japanese War on a friendship mission to provide moral and material support to Chinese academic and research institutions, and along the way he recorded the whole of China’s intellectual history. Upon returning to England, he embarked on the landmark Science and Civilisation in China book series attempting to catalog every invention or idea that had ever originated on Chinese soil.

As Needham studied the endless ways in which the Chinese had demonstrated inquisitiveness, inventiveness, and creativity, he couldn’t help wondering why, for all China’s scientific accomplishments, modern science, for instance, had not developed in China. Why had this tradition of achievement all but stopped in the Ming dynasty, and how could China have been so poor and backward for so long?

Needham postulated many reasons, such as China’s reliance on an ideographic language system, its system of governance, and its geography, but he died in 1995 without finding his answer. Other scholars had put forth their own theories—one prevailing idea was that the Chinese just stopped trying—but recently a backlash had developed. One of Needham’s collaborators, University of Pennsylvania sinologist Nathan Sivin, was a particularly eloquent critic, writing, “It is striking that this question—Why didn’t the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution?—happens to be one of the few questions that people ask in public places about why something didn’t happen in history. It is analogous to the question of why your name did not appear on page 3 of today’s newspaper.”

Perhaps it was only natural for me to speculate. As I unearthed pieces of my family’s history and tried to weave them into a coherent narrative that I could follow back to the porcelain, I was also creating a new version of it. I disturbed the long-buried memories of my relatives because I hoped these shards might yield some unified truth. But there was no end to trying to know what happened to my family’s buried treasures, just as there was no end to speculating about China’s unhatched scientific revolution.

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu wrote, “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” No matter how hard I tried to project something into the emptiness inside my family’s porcelain—a goal, a heritage, a solution—it remained empty. Just as no matter what explanation I gave for China’s miscarried possibilities, they remained unborn. Until we knew what had been, we were free to write what might still be. To seek was to have purpose. To wonder was to breathe life into possibilities.

For all Taiwan’s comforts, I was eager to return to the mainland. I missed its urgency and dynamism—even the confrontation. Perhaps because Taiwan had spent most of its modern existence looking at the mainland with longing, its cities embodied impermanence; Taiwan wasn’t just a government in exile, it was a people and a culture in exile. Sinologists and archaeologists could bemoan the current state of affairs on the mainland until they were hoarse, but they wouldn’t stop heading there, and neither could I. As one anthropologist in Taiwan told me, “China has it ALL. It’s where the things are.”