I HAD TO ACT QUICKLY. LEWIS HAD CALLED TO SAY THAT HE and a group of relatives were heading to Jiujiang. Liu Pei Ke, the youngest of my grandmother’s sister-cousins, was making a pilgrimage to Jiujiang from Texas to do upkeep on the family cemetery, and two of San Yi Po’s daughters were accompanying her. Oh, and San Yi Po had passed away in Taiwan a few months ago. No one had bothered to tell me.

“Wait until we all get there,” Lewis said. “We can figure out how to dig for the porcelain together.” Then he ordered me to book hotel rooms for everyone. “And make sure you book me a hotel room on a low floor. I don’t like a high room. And does the hotel have wireless Internet? How far is it from the airport?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” I said. I began to see how Lewis might have aggrieved Tang Hou Cun so much.

I feared that too many relatives would meddle. And Pei Ke’s loyalties were unclear. Some family members didn’t consider her a full-blooded relative, owing to her mother having been Ting Geng’s concubine, a common practice when the firstborn was a girl. Chen Bang Ning had told me that while Pei Ke—or Wu Yi Po to me—was working as a doctor on the mainland, she’d written a letter about San Yi Po’s husband, which ruined his chances of becoming a full general in Taiwan.

I contacted just about every old China hand or local Chinese that I could think of to ask how I should approach digging for the porcelain. The consensus was that I had a few options. I could try to lease the land without mentioning the porcelain or even my connection to it, making up some bullshit reason—building a new factory, for example—that would require digging. If I found something, and the local authorities didn’t care, it was mine. Another option was to try to talk to local intellectuals. Every county or town had a wenhuaguan, a center for cultural affairs, and these days local governments were looking for ways to promote their images in order to develop their economies. Someone at the wenhuaguan might take an interest in my quest and coordinate with the local authorities for me. Above all, my friends stressed, find a local whom I could trust with the real story of the porcelain. He or she didn’t necessarily have to be a government official, just a strong, capable person who could help me think of solutions.

The next morning I stood on the boulevard in front of my hotel and tried to flag down a taxi that could take me to the wenhuaguan, but no one knew what I was talking about or where it was. Finally one driver, instead of speeding away, pulled his parking brake and called a friend to ask if he might know. “Please, have a seat, sit down for a bit,” he said as he discussed the possibilities with his friend. He hung up and gestured for me to close the door. “I think I know where it is, and if it’s not there, maybe they’ll know where to go,” he said.

He didn’t use his horn the entire ride and was so decorous, and thus so out of place in Jiujiang, that I asked for his name and phone number for future trips. Yu Sifu handed me his card. The building where he dropped me off turned out not to be the wenhuaguan, but a woman there gave us directions to where it was, about a ten-minute walk. There I was told that the wenhuaguan had moved about a year before, and a motorcycle taxi finally took me to the right place. I explained myself to the man in the office, and his ears perked when I mentioned my family’s connection to Rulison. He gave me the phone number for a Zhen Laoshi who had been involved with Rulison, and I dialed it on the porch.

“So what is it that you want?” Zhen Laoshi said after I introduced myself.

I didn’t want to tell him about the porcelain without feeling him out first. “To know more about the city when my grandmother was going to school,” I said.

“And who is your grandmother?”

I told him.

“I don’t know her, but I can look her up. You say she went to Ru Li?” That was the Chinese abbreviation for Rulison, which conveniently contained two native syllables.

“Yes, and her aunt also went there, Liu Ting Yi,” I said.

“Ah!” he cried. “I know her! She was my teacher! Please, come meet me at the Jiujiang Library in the morning. I have written some things about Jiujiang history that I can show you.”

Heartened, I flagged another taxi to make sure that there wasn’t a new factory sitting on my family’s old property. I described the route from my memory and hoped I would recognize the turns as we got closer. “When was the last time you were there?” the driver asked. “It’s changed a lot. A lot. They’re building all kinds of stuff.”

We drove past the electric plant and the petrochemical pipes for the oil refinery, and it was so dusty and sooty that water trucks had to wet the roads. As we approached Xingang, I began to worry that I might have come back too late. But once we turned onto Xingang’s main drag, I saw that the old property was exactly as I had left it, except for the water towers and a holding pond that had popped up just outside what would have been the front door.

I stopped the oldest of the old men passing by—there didn’t seem to be many people under sixty in town—and asked him if the cotton factory, which had seemed defunct the last time I saw it, was still active. “My grandmother used to live here,” I explained. “It was her grandfather’s house.”

“Who was that?” the man asked.

“Liu Feng Shu.”

“You mean Liu Da Xian Sheng?” the man said, his eyes widening in recognition. “Yes, he was the big landlord around here. Wait just a minute.”

He walked down the road and returned accompanied by a short, sinewy man with a choppy gait. It was Liu Cong You, the relative that Cong Ji had mentioned back in Jinan. Cong You introduced himself as my grandmother’s cousin and Cong Ji’s older brother. I knew that Cong Ji’s only brother died as a child, so I spent most of our conversation trying to figure out how I was related to him. He was difficult to understand, which I ascribed to a thick accent, but the cabbie, who had gotten out of the car and offered to translate for me, explained that he spoke the local Jiujiang dialect, not Mandarin. Liu Cong You was born in 1928, and his grandfather was one of my great-great-grandfather’s younger brothers. “I used to call your grandma Big Sister,” he said.

Cong You told me that the cotton factory on my great-great-grandfather’s land was actually still in use, and he offered to take me into it, charging through the turnstile next to the guardhouse before I could tell him I had already seen it. I had only wanted to verify that the situation had not changed, but I followed him through the gate and into the yard. The man in charge greeted us with suspicion and grudgingly allowed us to have a quick look around.

Cong You explained that part of my great-great-grandfather’s land had been acquired from his two younger brothers, both opium addicts, who sold their property to sustain their drug habits. Without land, those two other families declined. Liu Cong You’s mother went to work as a servant. The girls were sent off to live with other families. His uncles died young from tuberculosis. His father managed to get an education and worked for a logistics company but smoked and gambled away his earnings and died at fifty-six. “Our family didn’t prosper,” he said.

Liu Cong You was nine years old in 1938 when his family went about five miles into the countryside to hide from the Japanese. “Grandfather, his family had money, and we didn’t,” he explained. “They fled, we hid.”

After the war Cong You worked as a footman in my great-great-grandfather’s house for a time. “His temper was very odd,” he recalled. “If I did things wrong, he’d hit me on the head with his knuckles. Or he’d say, ‘If you were standing next to the rice steamer, you’d still starve,’ things like that. But he also taught me how to use an abacus, and every night he’d spend an hour or two teaching me.”

In 1946 Cong You crossed the Yangtze to work as a janitor in a Hubei elementary school. Two years later he went to Nanjing to seek a job with the arsenal where my grandmother worked, and he stayed with San Yi Po, whose husband took him on as a low-level assistant. Then Cong You’s father wrote him to return to Jiujiang—his filial duty as the only son. In 1950 San Gu got him a job as a cook at Rulison. Every evening San Gu made him study for two hours, and that’s how he got his education. He married a seamstress in 1953 and was promoted to librarian and then lab manager. He left Rulison in 1962 (“Because the pay was terrible,” he said. “I had six kids and one mother and couldn’t take care of them all”) and worked as an accountant for the Xingang transportation department, those abacus lessons from my great-great-grandfather paying off. He retired in 1984. His wife died in 2009. “I don’t regret it,” he said of his life. “I get more than a thousand yuan per month. I’m a very happy man.”

Liu Cong You said my great-great-grandfather was one of the first to flee when the Japanese arrived. “It was every family for themselves,” he said. Some of my great-great-grandfather’s belongings were moved into an in-law’s house. Another portion went to stay with a relative near where Cong You’s family hid from the Japanese. Cong You couldn’t be more specific about those belongings. “Grandfather spent his money on land and education,” he said. “The rest of the stuff like how much gold, silver, or jewelry, you wouldn’t tell people about that, so I don’t really know.”

Cong You claimed that it was his family who helped my great-great-grandfather after the Communists kicked him out of his house. Cong You’s father’s vices had disabused him of all his land, making the family clean in the eyes of China’s new overlords. Cong You’s father even helped Ting Gong arrange for my great-great-grandfather’s burial. But Cong You’s proletarian roots couldn’t protect him from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. He was publicly criticized and forced to wear a sign proclaiming him a dizhu goutuizi, a landlord’s running dog, or lackey. His entire family was sent to the countryside for three years of farm-labor “reeducation,” where he was sometimes forced to make a twenty-mile trip to fetch firewood with a handcart in the middle of the night. “Because of our overseas relatives, we all got punished for them,” he said. “We were all implicated.”

Standing inside the cotton factory, I asked Cong You where my great-great-grandfather’s house had been. He pointed to the warehouses. And when I asked him to locate the garden, he said he wasn’t sure. “Here,” he said, waving his hand over a vast area that included the concreted square as well as the empty lot. “Do you mean where the buildings are or where we’re standing?” I said, trying to get him to clarify. He simply repeated, “Here.”

The vegetable patch that I had seen before was still there, and the man from the factory said it was planted by the employees. I spotted a porcelain shard next to the chili peppers. I didn’t want to overstay, or raise suspicions any higher than I already had, so I excused myself.

IN THE MORNING I went to the Jiujiang Library to meet Zhen Laoshi, the man I hoped would be my local advocate. I followed him to a small reading room on the top floor where old men sipped tea from thermoses as they leafed through newspapers. Zhen Laoshi was born in 1944 and had taken two years of physical geography with San Gu beginning in 1957, after the Communists reorganized the Tong Wen and Rulison schools into a single coeducational institution. “She was an outstanding teacher,” he recalled. “Always very well put together, quiet, never got angry like other teachers, and carried a Western purse.”

He showed me a book of Rulison’s post-1949 history and pointed out San Gu’s name on a roster of teachers from 1953. She was forty-three years old then, taught fourteen classes of physical geography each week, and earned 245 yuan per month. I flipped through the rest of the history book, looking for information from my grandmother’s time at Rulison. All I found was a 1933 faculty roster and a 1948 faculty roster with nothing between. “It was so long ago,” Zhen said. “How could they save it until now?”

Zhen Laoshi had independently researched Jiujiang’s history for the past thirty years. He produced one of the books he had written, a single edition of photocopied pictures of historical Jiujiang mounted to the pages with tape or glue and handwritten information that he had collected from books and interviews. He was a fine artist, and where photographs could not be found, he sketched in the buildings, including one of the field on the Rulison campus where San Gu had set up a weathervane, anemometer, and platforms for conducting experiments.

I asked him what Jiujiang would have been like when my grandmother was studying at Rulison.

“All the supplies passed through Jiujiang, so it was very alive and raucous and had a great economy,” he said. “This was probably when your grandmother was here. Then in 1937 all of Jiujiang fled. Rulison went to Sichuan. The Japanese wanted Jiujiang, which was a strategic spot, and occupied Rulison and Tong Wen. They put antiaircraft guns there and ruined it. There were only four thousand people in the city, from one hundred thousand. Because of the Japanese war, the Japanese were raping women …”

He paused briefly, and I sensed emotion welling up in him. “My aunt was going to school, and her classmate jumped in a well to commit suicide to avoid being defiled by the Japanese,” he continued. “My aunt is ninety-three now, and she told me this story last year. I wrote a book about Jiujiang during the Japanese occupation. I interviewed three hundred people. Dr. Bai’s daughter came back and wanted to protect Jiujiang—”

He began to cry. I had no idea who Dr. Bai and his daughter were. I suspected that he seldom had an audience. He wept some more.

I still hoped that Zhen Laoshi could be the man everyone had advised me to look for, a knowledgeable, connected local who sympathized with my quest, so I asked him what he had done for work. He said that he had graduated from the normal university in 1963 and worked as a teacher and a principal until 2004, after which he devoted all his time to researching Jiujiang history. “There are lots of people like me in China, who laid the cobblestones,” he said, choking up again. “We didn’t ask for anything—we just did it for the country.”

I tried to think of something that wouldn’t make him lose it, and I asked him about the Rulison school. “Rulison was a journalist, who funded the school, and Howe built it up,” he said. “Jiujiang was a melting pot for Chinese and Western cultures. All the missionaries would get beaten when they went to Nanchang, but not in Jiujiang. Sun Yat-sen was right—if you bring up Jiujiang, you bring up Jiangxi. Sun chased off the Qing dynasty, but he couldn’t finish the job; the Communist Party finished it. Look at how good our lives are in China. In twenty years we’ll be on top. In America, they spend, then save. In China, it’s the opposite. That’s why the United States is in debt, and why China is going to pass the United States!”

He stood up. “Most people didn’t care about educating girls, but right here was Rulison,” he said, shaking with emotion. “And if you stayed and graduated, it was free. The Chinese have always thought this way. If you help, you’re good, we’ll believe you. Now Tong Wen and Rulison get money from America, but we don’t want it! That’s why I’m happy you came. You can see that China isn’t lagging. Chinese people are proud.”

He barely squeezed out his last sentence before breaking into tears again. I put my head in my hands. The man reading at the next table had heard enough. “You think Chinese people are proud?” he said, snapping his newspaper. “Because I think they’re bei’ai.” Bei’ai means a mélange of negative emotions, including grief, sorrow, depression, and melancholy.

Zhen Laoshi composed himself. “Well,” he said, “you have your opinions, and we have ours.”

“But you’ve been chirping that stuff in my ear for more than an hour.”

“That’s your opinion, then.”

“I don’t want to have an opinion. I just want to sit and read my paper.”

“I’m ready to leave, anyway,” Zhen Laoshi said. We collected our things. I walked him outside, thanked him for his time, and waited to see which direction he went so I could go the opposite way.

SO ZHEN LAOSHI had proven unreliable. And Tang Hou Cun, despite knowing that I was in town, didn’t call or answer his phone. I called Uncle Cai in Lushan, the member of the local development board, and told him I would like to see him. “Yeah, sure, I’ll be in Jiujiang this week,” he said. “Maybe we can have dinner then.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “One more thing—I also wanted to ask for your advice on something.”

“I don’t have any advice.”

“I haven’t even asked the question yet.”

“I’ll give you a call when I’m in the city, and we can have dinner, and you can tell me what you’re thinking,” he said, ending the conversation. “Send me your phone number.”

I still had not heard from Tang Hou Cun, so I went over to his apartment. He seemed preoccupied and agitated. Apparently the impending arrival of the overseas family members had stirred old resentments from being slighted by Lewis many years ago. “We all met in Wuxi,” Tang Hou Cun explained. “You call me, I’m going to go, and I don’t need you to pay for my ticket. I’m not country folk. Pei Sheng was there, everyone, and we went to a company to meet a foreign man in Wuxi. Lewis introduced him to Pei Sheng and his cousin but not to me. I don’t know why. But I spent two thousand RMB to see the family, and you don’t even acknowledge me? Then I took them all to the train station, and when I was about to step into the train with them, he told me to get off! He completely ignored me and treated me like a second-class citizen. Do I look like a bad man? No education? I know they think mainlanders are poor, that we’ll ask them for money. But we’ve never asked for anything. Lewis’s temperament is so bad. When he came, he didn’t see the family cemetery. Neither did Richard. I don’t know if this is a Christian belief or what. Just ignored us.”

I apologized on their behalfs. Tang Hou Cun didn’t seem assuaged, but I pressed on and asked him about digging for the porcelain.

He waved his hand vigorously. “I can’t help you,” he said. “Number one, I don’t want to get involved in Liu family business. Number two, you’re not the one to do it. This is the Lius’ wealth and property, and you’re not a Liu. It should be Liu Cong Ji’s son, or your Wu Yi Po. But I can’t help you. Otherwise people will say that I’m greedy.”

WITH JUST TWO DAYS left in Jiujiang before Lewis and Wu Yi Po arrived, I was determined to accomplish something. I’d lain awake the night before trying to come up with a plan and thought that I’d hit on a good one. Uncle Cai had blown me off, Tang Hou Cun wouldn’t help, and Zhen Laoshi was unstable, so I dialed the last local person I knew, Yu Sifu, the taxi driver.

We drove into Xingang amid the familiar dust and smog. Yu Sifu parked at the intersection where Xingang’s two roads met, and I stopped in a market to buy a pack of cigarettes for later. I had forgotten where Liu Cong You lived and found him by asking people on the street. He emerged through a furniture shop wearing a thin white T-shirt, canvas shoes, and navy pants many sizes too large for him, cinched with a belt.

I asked if he could take me to see the house again. We walked down to the alcove overlooking the property. There I asked him again where my great-great-grandfather’s house and garden had been, and I explained to him what I hoped to do.

“No way!” Cong You said, waving his hand. “It’s the state’s now—you won’t be able to do anything.”

“Are you sure? I’m not asking for much from them.”

“Impossible.” He frowned and dug his chin into his chest.

“What if we asked the cun zhang?” I said. The office of the village chief was just down the street.

“He won’t agree, either.”

“What’s he like?”

“A young guy. He doesn’t know or appreciate any of this history. But if you want to talk to him, I’ll take you there.”

We marched a few houses down to the two-story white building housing the village administration. In the courtyard, a woman smashed dark seedpods with her feet. All the officials had gone home, she said. They wouldn’t come back until the next day. We returned to the car, where Yu Sifu was waiting. “Did he tell you what he was thinking of doing?” Cong You asked him. I didn’t see any use in trying to keep my plan a secret and explained my reasoning to Yu Sifu.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Yu Sifu said to Cong You. “It’s the state’s, yes, but it’s not that big a deal, is it? The factory is already closed down, and they’ve rented it out to private citizens.”

We stood at the intersection. “Should we ask the village official first?” I said.

“No, this isn’t something you should involve him with,” Yu Sifu said. “He doesn’t care about these things. I think you should talk to the factory manager.”

Yu Sifu checked his watch. He had to hand off his car in one hour. “We should make a decision,” he said.

“Okay, let’s ask the manager,” I said. “First him, and then the village head if he doesn’t agree. We’ll just keep going higher if we need to, right?”

“Yes, that’s how you should do it,” Yu Sifu said.

We walked into the factory, where we were met by the manager I had encountered the other day. He invited us into his “office,” a concrete cell with a rusty bed frame and a box spring. I offered him a cigarette from the pack I had bought, which he accepted and set on the table. I explained my idea to the manager, with Yu Sifu and Cong You filling in the gaps, and he seemed receptive. “I understand, but it’s my son who owns the company, so I’ll have to consult with him first,” he said. “I can’t just make this unilateral decision. It’s not a big request, but I have to make sure it won’t bring me trouble later. So I’ll call my son today. Come back tomorrow at nine a.m. and I’ll have an answer for you.”

As we got back into Yu Sifu’s car, he reassured me that he didn’t think I was going to have any trouble. “But if it is a problem, just tell him that you’ll compensate him,” he said. “A few hundred RMB should be enough.”

YU SIFU PICKED me up the next morning, and we made the drive back to Xingang. I learned that he was thirty-six and from Guling, where his wife was a tour guide, and that they had an eight-year-old son. “It’s a nice place,” he said of his hometown. “But they’re so focused on the tourism industry that they don’t pay enough attention to education, so the schools are not very good and the teachers are not paid well.” So like scores of Americans, they moved to a place with better schools, buying a house in Jiujiang city, where they lived with his retired parents. They rented out their house on Lushan for most of the year and spent the hottest parts of the summer there. “The weather’s only good in the summer,” he said. “Other times it’s so wet from all the fog. Nice for growing special fog tea, but not nice to live with. Nothing ever dries. Your towels and blankets stay wet. The spring water, which is very tasty and sweet, has a lot of minerals, so if you drink it all your life, you tend to get kidney stones.”

We parked at the top of Xingang’s main street, collected Liu Cong You, and went into the factory. It turned out that the man we spoke to the day before was a longtime subrenter of the factory who had no decision-making power. He called the chang zhang, or factory director, the real man in charge, and directed us across the yard to another small “office,” with dusty upholstered chairs, a bed, and a desk. “Offer him a cigarette,” Cong You whispered as the chang zhang approached. “You need to learn how things are done here.” The chang zhang entered the room, an older man with a sagging, sallow face, distrustful eyes, and a mouth that hung open to reveal rotten teeth. He seemed annoyed and spoke mostly in grunts as I introduced myself. I pulled out two cigarettes and offered them to him. He refused.

That threw me, so I started talking before I lost my nerve, reciting the pitch that I had been practicing the past few days. I explained that the factory was built on my great-great-grandfather’s old property, and that I had come all the way back from America to see my ancestral roots. “Now that I’ve finally made it here, I’m overcome with emotion,” I said. “It’s so meaningful to see where my family came from. There will be a group of overseas relatives coming here soon, to also see this place for the first time, and I would like to plant some fruit trees and flowers on the patch of vacant land, to both beautify the spot and also pay my respects to my forebears. It will be a nice surprise for my relatives when they arrive. I would do all the work and the trees and flowers would be yours to keep.”

I thought this proposal would be a slam dunk, having seeded it with all the things I thought Chinese found irresistible. What Chinese man, especially one who lived through all the deprivations of the past sixty years, could argue with fruit, filial acts, and free labor?

The chang zhang began shaking his head and waving his hand before I even finished. He turned to Liu Cong You, whom he apparently knew, and said, “I don’t know anything about this history. This has been a cotton factory since I was born. I’m fifty-nine years old, and I’m going to retire next year, and I don’t want anyone coming back to me later and bothering me about the property.”

He shifted his attention to me. “You say this used to belong to your family,” he said. “That’s none of my business. This was a cotton factory in 1950, and it has been ever since. Whatever it was before, I have no idea. And I don’t want anyone leaving anything here that they can come back and try to use to claim the land—you understand what I’m saying?”

Liu Cong You nodded emphatically and said, “Yes, of course, that’s the way it is.” I glared at him.

Yu Sifu spoke. “Look, he came from so far away, and he probably won’t have any opportunity in the future,” he said. “He just wants to do this little thing.”

“No way,” the chang zhang said. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your family had to do with this. That’s none of my concern. If you leave something here, what’s to stop you or someone else from coming back and bothering me in the future about this property? You say you want to leave it for your family to see. What if the trees and flowers die? Then there’s nothing for them to see, and it’s my fault. And what if I want to build something else, or the government wants to build something else, and those trees are there? It’s going to be trouble to cut them down.”

“What if he signs something promising not to bother you?” Yu Sifu said, reading my mind.

“What good is a contract? That’s no use to me. That’s not going to stop anyone from bothering me. It’s just a piece of paper.”

“Contracts are very powerful where I come from,” I said. “You can trust me, I won’t bother you later at all. What can I do to make you comfortable, to reassure you?”

“Nothing.”

The more options I suggested to the chang zhang—think of this as a gift to you, think of this as beautification, think of all the fruit you’ll enjoy—the more resistant and paranoid he became. Then Yu Sifu brought up the prospect of compensation, the last card we had to play.

The chang zhang shook his head again. “That’s not the issue,” he said. “It’s not about money. It’s about putting something in the ground and then leaving it there. That’s going to bring me trouble.”

“But it won’t,” I said, feeling desperate. “I promise you. You have to believe me.”

“How do I know? How can you promise that?” He told me to go to the gongxiaoshe, or district development office, and find the official who supervised the property, a man named Liu Ping. “If he agrees with you, then there’s nothing I can do. But I’m not going to make any decision.”

“If it will make you comfortable, I will go talk to the official,” I said. “But we’re already here, and it will take another half day to find him. I only have this opportunity to do this, which has been a dream of mine for many years. What if we went and talked to the village head?”

“No, he’s not going to have any influence on this matter, only the district official,” the chang zhang said. “If he agrees, then I agree, but only if he says so. I can’t give you the say-so. I won’t give you the say-so.”

I sat back on the bed and imagined horrible deaths for the chang zhang. So this was what the past century had done to China, I thought, scorched it of intelligent, reasonable, cultured people and transplanted uneducated, inept, paranoid thugs in their place. At that moment, I could not have hated Chinese people more.

The conversation ended and we left. “What exactly was his hesitation?” I asked Yu Sifu. “I understand that he’s worried about us trying to come back and stake a claim to the property, and that the whole overseas Chinese thing is a complication rather than a benefit, but what can I do to reassure him? I offered to sign a contract. I offered to compensate him. What else can I do?”

“The more options you suggest, the more problems he has,” Yu Sifu explained. “He just doesn’t believe you. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“That’s right, there’s nothing you can do,” Cong You echoed.

“Hey, uncle, do you want to help me or not?” I snapped.

“I want to help you, of course! But what you’re trying to do can’t be helped. Mei ban fa! I’d love to help, but this just isn’t possible.”

I sighed. “So I guess all we can do is find the official he told us about.”

“You can, but the odds of getting him to agree are pretty small,” Yu Sifu said. “He’s going to think just like this guy.”

“Maybe he’s open-minded.”

“I doubt it. The odds of that are also very small.”

“Great,” I said. “What if I offered to rent the property?”

“Actually, that might have gotten you somewhere,” Yu Sifu said. “If you just went in at first and said you wanted to rent the place, what’s the next step, you could have talked straight business.”

“So I messed things up by talking about my family and stuff?”

“Yeah, that just made him nervous. He wants to ensure his houdai ziyou.” That is, he wanted to ensure that his future generations would be free of trouble.

I stood outside the factory wall, thinking. None of us wanted to go try to find a local official on short notice. But I was resolute about putting a shovel into the dirt of my great-great-grandfather’s property. I no longer cared about recovering any porcelain. I just wanted to complete the act, if only to score points against that evil chang zhang and, by proxy, the five thousand years of craven history and fifty years of thuggery from which he had sprung.

I snapped my fingers. “Hey, what about this?” I said. “What if we got some trees, planted them, and then took them out? We’ll fill in the holes and not leave any trees there?”

Yu Sifu and Cong You looked at each other. “That actually might work,” Yu Sifu said slowly, as he ran it through his mind. “There’s no trace of anything, and that’s what he’s worried about. Yes, that might work.”

We filed back into the factory and walked around the yard looking for the chang zhang. “You think he’s hiding from us?” Yu Sifu said, only half joking.

After a few minutes, the chang zhang walked out of a warehouse. Yu Sifu took the lead this time, explaining our new proposal, and the chang zhang didn’t immediately say no. Sensing an opening, Yu Sifu pressed forward, while Cong You, again the yes-man, interjected encouragement. “You see?” Cong You said. “There’s nothing left, no trace. We’ll just come in, plant some trees, maybe let him take some photos, take the trees right out, and we’re gone.”

“It makes no sense,” the chang zhang said. “What good is planting a tree and then taking it right out?”

“It doesn’t make sense to us, either, but this is his dream,” Yu Sifu said. “It’s something he really wants to do, so just let him do it. He’s not going to leave anything, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about!” Cong You said.

The chang zhang looked pained. Yu Sifu repeated the arrangement, twice, three times, while Cong You observed what a clean transaction it would be, but the chang zhang never made a visible assent. Finally he dipped his eyes, and we had our permission. We thanked him and left to find trees and tools.

“How many trees do you want?” Cong You said.

“As many as possible,” I said. “How about three, with big roots?” I wanted an excuse to dig as deep as I could.

Cong You had a shovel and a pickax in his house, and I walked the street looking for a hand trowel. None of the hardware shops carried them; the closest thing I could find were thin masonry trowels for spreading cement, and the shop owners tried to persuade me that they were suitable substitutes. And no one sold trees. The only nursery that anyone knew of was an hour away by car. Cong You inquired with some neighbors, who said they had plenty of trees. We followed them out of the village center, across a newly tarred road with a row of wan saplings on the median strip, to a massive building site where old houses and trees were being cleared for new housing. A few stands of homes and trees remained, their perimeters gnashed by machinery. The trees that the neighbor showed us were all too small or too large or already encased in concrete. I spotted a few fruit trees, about twelve feet tall with foliage that suggested substantial roots, in the garden of one of the remaining residents. “What about those?” I said.

“If I were them, I wouldn’t let us take those trees,” Yu Sifu said.

No one answered the door, and we moved on. “This place is all going to be flattened,” Yu Sifu remarked. “It’s only a matter of time. They’re going to lose those trees anyway.”

Cong You said that he knew another spot to look for trees, and we followed him back into the village and turned down a road that cut between rice fields. In the brush along the road, we found two camphor trees and a loquat tree. These had sprouted from large old-growth trees that had been cut down for wood, he said, and would have nice, big roots. He jumped into the brush with the shovel and began digging. Yu Sifu and I shouted for him to stop—it wasn’t proper for him to be doing such work with two young men standing by. Fine, Cong You said, but he wouldn’t allow me to do it, either. He walked back up the road to find a worker to dig up the trees. A while later he returned with a friend who looked even older, carrying a pickax and a shovel. The friend got to work on the trees and began hacking through the roots just a few inches below the surface.

“Wait!” I cried. “That’s too shallow. Get as much of the root as possible.”

Cong You’s friend complied, but the underground sections were still just a foot or so long. These were not the roots I had hoped for, but they would have to do. We carried the trees through the village back to the factory to plant them, but were told that the chang zhang had left for lunch and would return in an hour or so. Cong You reminded the man that we had already cleared everything with the chang zhang, and we headed down to the empty lot. I was just about to sink the blade of the shovel into the soil when a factory employee ran down from the office and told us to stop. The chang zhang had called and said we weren’t to do anything until he returned. I began worrying that he would renege on his promise. “He can’t go back on his word,” Yu Sifu assured me. “That’s why I confirmed it so strongly with him.”

I took Cong You, his friend, and Yu Sifu to lunch, which I barely tasted, unable to think about anything except finally being allowed to dig on my great-great-grandfather’s property. All the other Lius had left Xingang, Cong You’s friend said, gone to the city or Shandong or overseas. Cong You was the only one left, and it fell to him to keep the jiapu, two volumes of the Liu genealogy that contained the twelve generations that were born in Xingang (I was the fourteenth generation, but since jiapus were patrilineal, my name wasn’t recorded in it). When I tried to pay for lunch, Cong You shoved me away from the cashier with surprising strength.

On the way back to the factory, I stopped to buy a carton of cigarettes for the chang zhang. Yu Sifu helped me pick the brand, Jinsheng, which he said wealthy people smoked. The chang zhang arrived at the factory a few minutes after we did. “Offer him the cigarettes,” Cong You whispered. I approached the chang zhang as he parked his electric scooter next to his office and presented him the carton. He physically recoiled and refused to even touch the cigarettes. I sheepishly put the cigarettes back into my bag, and we walked down to where my great-great-grandfather had buried his porcelain.

“I didn’t expect him to do that,” Yu Sifu said.

We set down our trees and tools. The chang zhang joined a few workers taking a break in the courtyard while machines processing cotton groaned in the warehouse. “So,” Cong You said, “where should we dig?”

As I surveyed my options, I began to realize just how unlikely it was that my gambit would yield any buried porcelain. Even with much of the land occupied by warehouses and outbuildings, and the concreted yard between the structures, the open area that I could dig took up almost an acre, a sizable portion of which was covered with thick stands of young trees or already claimed by the vegetable patch. And for all I knew, my great-great-grandfather’s garden might have been sealed under the concrete on which the chang zhang and his employees sat, watching my every move.

I settled on digging three holes in a line beginning on the edge of the concrete yard and moving toward the vegetable patch. I took the shovel and sank it into the ground. Cong You’s friend grabbed the pickax and started digging another hole, working as quickly as he could. “Please, uncle,” I said, “you don’t have to help. Let me do it.”

He continued digging. “No, no,” he huffed, “it’s fine.” A few powerful, efficient strokes later, he was halfway to the necessary depth for planting the tree.

“Stop digging!” I hissed. “I’m not being polite here. This is something I want to do myself.”

I walked over and snatched the pickax from his hands. He and Cong You stood to the side while I finished the three holes. I tried to take as long as I could, and dig as deeply as I could, but the soil was dry and full of debris, and every time I looked up to see what the chang zhang was doing, he was staring right at me. I turned up fragments of old bricks and roofing tiles, a piece of a decidedly modern blue and white mug, and as I got deeper, a few shards of clay storage vessels. I struck the top of a metal pipe, stuck vertically and firmly. Each shovelful of dirt made my folly all the more obvious, yet also raised my hopes anew, and I tried to formulate a plan in case my next thrust hit the wooden top of the vault—I had been so consumed by the digging that I hadn’t considered what I’d do if I actually found something. Sensing the chang zhang’s agitation, I turned my back to him, pretended like I was dusting off my shoes, and quickly palmed a piece of a storage vessel and a shard of a blue and white bowl or teacup that had surfaced. Cong You and I “planted” the trees, and I made a big show of taking photographs, using it as an excuse to examine the property more closely. The trunks of the trees were so thin that their crowns appeared as three small green clouds hovering a few feet over the ground.

I asked Cong You’s friend what he remembered about my great-great-grandfather’s place. “This whole row was the Liu family houses,” he said, pointing to the warehouse farthest from the street, at the bottom of the slope.

“Where was my great-great-grandfather’s garden?” I asked.

“There, where the concrete is,” he said. “This vacant area here—that was Cong You’s family’s garden.”

We pulled out the trees, packed up the tools, and left.

“I don’t feel that satisfied,” I told Yu Sifu. “I was hoping to find some traces of my family, you know, like spoons or bowls or things.”

“Oh, we weren’t digging nearly deep enough for that stuff,” he said. “Think about it. That factory was built there, and before that things had been built over many times. I mean, we’re talking almost a hundred years ago. You need to dig three, four times deeper to find your family’s things.”

THAT NIGHT AS a heavy rain fell, I fantasized about sneaking back into the factory with a shovel, but I had no equipment and no way of getting there, and how much progress could I have really made in a few hours before dawn? I had thought that the mere act of digging would be enough, but it only raised more questions; I would not be satisfied until I tore open the entire place. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe I had conducted this search the way I had—naïvely, indirectly, protractedly—because part of me wanted my family’s things to stay buried. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. I had created my own mythology, and maybe that was enough.

Until then I would continue looking for the likeness of my family’s lost treasure in every piece of porcelain that matched its age. Even when I showed the blue and white shard to Edie later, and she dated it to the nineteenth century—“That could have belonged to your family,” she said—I wondered how I could ever know for sure. My great-great-grandfather’s porcelain, objects that had distilled slowly and incrementally out of a culture that simmered for over five thousand years, had boiled away in the new China’s eyeblink immolations, leaving only vapors. At best, they had been swallowed up and paved over, imprisoned with other relics of old China, for which the country, bent on crowing about its past from the distant remove of its ageless present, no longer had any use.

Perhaps that was the natural state of excess. China had too much history, Jiangxi too much porcelain, and the diaspora too many stories like my family’s. I was reminded of what a local pastor had said to me one night at dinner, when we had ordered far too much food and I watched in amazement as he stuffed down all the leftovers, including nearly a half-gallon of rich pork and mushroom soup, out of habit. “Back in the day, there wasn’t enough, so you couldn’t waste food,” he said between cheek-swelling gulps. “Now that people have so much, they waste it like nobody’s business.”

THE PHONE IN my hotel room woke me at seven a.m. “Man! Where the hell are you?” Lewis demanded. “We’re all having breakfast.”

“Doesn’t it go until nine-thirty?” I said.

“Just get down here.”

The dining room was full, the hotel staff setting out chafing dishes of greasy noodles, wilted vegetables, hard-boiled eggs, and other Chinese breakfast items. Two of San Yi Po’s daughters occupied one table with the younger daughter’s husband. I sat with Lewis and Wu Yi Po, a small, vigorous woman who greeted me with a smile and squeeze. She had short graying hair and wore running sneakers, track pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a quilted vest. She carefully picked out the yolks of her two eggs and ate only the whites, a habit she shared with both my grandmother and my mother.

Lewis had filled her in on the porcelain. “I’ll do what I can,” she said. Over the years in America, she had developed a chattiness that she punctuated with light pats on the arm or shoulder of the person to whom she was speaking, and her English was nearly flawless.

“So there really was porcelain?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said. “There was a lot of it. My grandfather loved his porcelain. I remember one guy came over once to show him his collection, and my grandfather said, ‘This is junk! I have stuff in my kitchen that’s older than this.’ ”

“Was there still porcelain after the war?”

“Yes, but fewer than before. There was a mao tong, a big cylinder for putting umbrellas. All kinds of porcelain in the kitchen for tofu, bowls, and things. I think there was one set we brought out for Chinese New Year. Mostly blue and white, mostly from Jingdezhen.”

“Okay, what do you need me to do here?” Lewis said. “We need to get our story straight, so we’re all speaking the same language. First, we have a confrontation with them.” He bumped his fists together. “Then we’ll compromise. And we’ve got a big group, so they know we’re serious. We’ll go ask for the house back, and then hear what they have to say, if we need to get documentation or anything, and then we’ll ask to buy or rent it. But we don’t tell them about the porcelain.”

“No, definitely not,” Wu Yi Po said. “Otherwise they’ll dig it themselves!”

“Right, we don’t tell them a goddamn thing,” Lewis said. “Just tell them we want it back for sentimental reasons, and we’ll think about what we want to do with it later. Then we dig, and if we find something, we’re gone. And if we don’t, we’re still gone.”

I knew much of Lewis’s optimism was just manic posturing, but I couldn’t help getting excited. Maybe I had gone about it all wrong. Maybe I should have waited for help. I hoped that I hadn’t ruined anything with the tree stunt, which I didn’t mention.

“I have a very good present for the official, too,” Lewis continued. “I brought a mint set of American coins. I brought two sets, one for Chen Bang Ning and one for an official, but maybe it’ll be better to give the official both.”

Chen Bang Ning arrived to take Wu Yi Po to run some errands for the cemetery, which the family would visit together the next day. I had no choice but to join the rest of the family on a tour of Jiujiang.

Lewis changed into an outfit that only he could pull off, slacks with a University of Georgia baseball cap, a nylon University of Georgia jacket, and a University of Georgia belt buckle. “Goddamn, I haven’t been back here in twenty-five years,” he marveled. “There weren’t any tall buildings last time. Last time I was a big shot. Now I’m a nobody. That’s a big difference. But the culture hasn’t changed.”

Lewis had come to Jiujiang the first time in 1984 as the vice-president of China operations for a Thai conglomerate that was one of the first and largest foreign investors after the country opened; he built poultry production plants and feed mills across Jiangxi, including one in Jiujiang. When he learned that Pei Fu had Parkinson’s disease but the family couldn’t buy medicine for her, he mailed it from Hong Kong every month for five years. The first time he met Tang Hou Cun, he was living in a hovel that didn’t even have a bathroom, and he took credit for getting Tang Hou Cun a promotion by bringing him along to his meetings with high-level government officials. He also gave a few hundred yuan to Tang Hou Cun’s widowed mother whenever his work took him through Jiujiang.

THE NEXT DAY we visited the family cemetery. Lewis traded his baseball cap and jacket for a dress shirt and a University of Georgia Bulldogs tie. The drive to Xingang was the same, a straight shot through the petroleum plant, but the industrial zone beyond it had spread. New roads crisscrossed Xingang, wide and dusty and lined with white concrete and long plastic pipelines waiting to be buried. The stretch of winding single-lane road to the cemetery was much shorter than I remembered.

After lighting firecrackers (for announcing our visit) and burning stacks of fake money (for keeping the ancestors rich in their afterlife) in the cemetery, we piled back into the cars and headed for the old Liu house. Trash burned on both sides of the road, making Lewis cover his mouth with a handkerchief. The car stopped on the road where the front door of the house would have been, were it still standing. A cluster of eight enormous white water tanks blocked part of the view. Everyone seemed satisfied with having seen that much, but Lewis insisted on taking a closer look. Liu Cong You was waiting for us at the gate of the cotton factory with his sister and one of his daughters. The relatives greeted one another, and Liu Cong You led the group through the gate for a quick look around. The chang zhang was there, scowling. I tried to avoid making eye contact with him.

I asked Wu Yi Po if anything looked familiar. “In my memory, there was a building here,” she said, pointing ahead. “And then a garden, a little slope, and trees. The old house would have been there, where that building is.”

“Was it the same size?”

“Yes, about as big,” she said. “Not as tall, though.”

We left to meet Tang Hou Cun at a restaurant in the village. After lunch, we all headed to the river to see the levee that my great-great-great-grandfather had built. It extended from the northern tip of Xingang perpendicular to the river for two hundred meters, then made a right angle at a temple and ran straight along the river for more than a kilometer, two gentle, vegetation-covered slopes that met about twenty feet above the fields. A dirt road ran along its crest. “There was a big flood in 1860,” Tang Hou Cun said, “and Liu Fu Chu, Grandfather Liu’s father, cooperated with two of his friends to build this dam. He wasn’t an official or anything, just built it himself and saved the village. He didn’t get anything for it. Didn’t ask for anything, either. That’s not how things were. People talked well of you afterward. That was enough.”

The levee was concreted over later and overrun in the flood of 1954. Chen Bang Ning began to tell stories of the area, going back to the Three Kingdoms era. I caught only bits of what he said and turned to Wu Yi Po for help. “Ah, that’s China,” Wu Yi Po said. “There’s too much history. No one can keep it straight.”

Tang Hou Cun sang the praises of my great-great-grandfather again, but this time with uncharacteristic archness. He had participated in a lot of baijiu toasts at lunch. “The Liu family made all its money in two or three generations,” he said. “But you all didn’t utilize the Liu history or culture. Otherwise you could’ve set up a factory or farm or something.”

Back at the hotel, Lewis and I independently drew maps of the layout of the old house based on what we’d heard from relatives, and they matched. I asked him what he thought about our chances for digging. “That’s why I insisted on seeing the house,” Lewis said. “The ownership is very complicated. They can tell us a good story: prior to 1954 it was ours, but after the flood it was all destroyed. You can ask for your old house back, if it’s still there. But if there’s no house, no way. I think there’s a less than one percent chance for us. We’re never going to get the property back. If Richard had invested here, we could ask to lease the land, but now no fucking way.”

“Or people might have dug it up,” I said.

“No way. Only three people knew about it.”

“But both Grandma and San Yi Po said that relatives dug it up after their grandpa took the family west. What if it’s still in Xingang? How do I persuade people to let me see their porcelain without making them feel like I’m going to accuse them of stealing or try to take it back?”

Lewis shrugged. “Well, Huan,” he said, “sometimes you have to bury the history and try not to dig it up. But let’s go ask Wu Yi Po.”

We found her watching television in her room. She opened a package of biscuits for us, crunchy and faintly sweet. “No,” Wu Yi Po said, “Grandpa never dug up what he buried. When he came back, there was still the war with the Japanese, and the civil war right after that. It was constant fighting, and he never got the opportunity to recover his things. It’s possible the other relatives or neighbors dug it up, because no one was there, and they all knew we had money, but our family never dug it up.”

Wu Yi Po thought for a moment. “You know who may have taken it, was Tang Hou Cun’s uncle,” she said. “He was a degenerate gambler, and when Grandpa died, he put a ladder over the wall and took everything out of the house. No one stopped him.”

“Where would those things be now?” I asked.

“Long gone. Sold off to pay his gambling debts.”

I sighed. “These stories, they just keep changing,” I said. “I thought talking to more people would make things clearer—”

“But they just make things more confused,” Wu Yi Po said. “Yes, I know. But that period was so messy. No one really knows the history. But go with your San Yi Po. Her memory was good.”

“I heard that the only three people who knew about the porcelain were Grandfather, Old Yang, and San Yi Po,” Lewis said. “She helped carry things.”

“San Yi Po was Grandfather’s favorite,” Wu Yi Po said. “She was very jingming.” Shrewd and astute, having both book and street smarts. “She had good social skills and knew how to deal with people, so Grandfather taught her everything. He trusted that she would be fair and not greedy or selfish when it came to dividing up his things after he was gone. That’s why she was by his side when he buried his things.”

THE NEXT DAY I accompanied Wu Yi Po to the quarry, where she was going to buy some polished stone blocks for the cemetery. We boarded an ancient bus blaring Chinese pop ballads for a teeth-rattling, stomach-churning ride. The houses along the road all had red-tiled roofs, courtesy of the local government. The rice harvest was coming in, and the paddies were drained, with dry stalks bundled into cylinders. We took the bus all the way to the end of the line, where stone workshops had clustered at the foot of Lushan. The year before, Wu Yi Po had made a tour of China and Taiwan visiting family. At San Yi Po’s, she saw recent photographs of the family cemetery, which looked “like a junkyard.” Liu Cong Ji was technically responsible for the cemetery’s upkeep but was unable to travel, so Wu Yi Po appointed herself as the caretaker. On this trip she hoped to beautify some of the cemetery’s landscaping.

Wu Yi Po told me that I had met her before in Dallas when I was young. I couldn’t remember, and I wondered why it had been only once, when my family went to visit my grandmother almost every summer. “Your grandmother and I were very close,” she said. “From 1988 to 2004 we’d see each other twice a month.”

Wu Yi Po was only four years old when the family fled, and her memory of the war years was spotty. “I remember standing on my grandfather’s lap and brushing his beard,” she said. “Ting Gong, the St. John’s graduate, he was so dirty. He threw his socks everywhere, spit everywhere. That habit came from the Qing dynasty, smoking shuiyan, tobacco from water pipes. It created lots of phlegm, and they spit it out. Between the Japanese war and Liberation, that’s where my memory is best.”

After the war she attended the Rulison school. Four American teachers remained, but they all left in 1949 when the Communists arrived. Jiujiang was taken without a fight. The Kuomintang government simply left, and after three days the Communists landed in boats. Wu Yi Po remembered them being professional and courteous. They slept on the streets, announced to all the businesses to carry on as usual, and moved into the vacant government buildings, sealing up all the files. It was almost eerie how calm things were. “We were all holding our breath, trying to wait and see what happened,” Wu Yi Po said.

Then the changes began. Students had to fill out forms asking for their surnames, names, and chengfen, or “social classification.” That was a new term coined by the Communists; the Kuomintang had not used this word. And Wu Yi Po had to fill in “landlord” every time.

That summer students attended a mandatory “brainwashing program” to shouxun, or “receive training.” “It was so funny,” Wu Yi Po said. “They wanted to educate you about the Communist Party, what they were doing, and they’d tell all the stories how the Western powers invaded China, made China poor, how the Kuomintang abused people, that’s their story. Most of their officials were not well educated, so they tried to make the speech as long as possible. They thought the longer the better, and oh my gosh, we were so bored. They just talked bullshit.”

Some of the students couldn’t believe they had to listen to people with grade school educations lecture them on history, and corrected them. Nothing happened to those students at the time, but they were later barred from attending their desired college or pursuing their desired vocation. In each of those sessions, a cadre recorded what everyone said, and the pressure on the students to save themselves led some to say whatever the cadres wanted to hear. “You have to say, and if you don’t say, you’re kicked out of there,” Wu Yi Po explained. “You wanted to get close to them to get some benefit. Sometimes they’d just make things up. Or they’d twist words or take things out of context, and that hurt a lot of people.” Wu Yi Po was disqualified from participating once they learned of her background. The rest of the summer she avoided talking to her classmates. “It was very cruel,” she said. “You isolate yourself. You don’t know what would happen the next day. You feel your hairs stand up.”

“I knew things were not going to be good for me or my family,” she continued. “Most of the time I like to say something, but I kept quiet then. It’s kind of instinct. The sixth sense. You can sense the cold there. And you cannot keep too quiet, either, or they’ll say you’re hiding something, so you have to join the group, laugh. You had to pretend. I just did whatever to protect myself.”

Ting Gong advised Wu Yi Po to get the hell out of Rulison, so in 1950 she tested into a military nursing school and left Xingang. By joining the army, Wu Yi Po hoped to distance herself from her family background. But it also meant she could never go back, not even when Ting Gong wrote her to report her grandfather’s death. Don’t tell anyone, he warned her. Don’t show any emotion.

“Of course you feel sad, but at the same time, you had to take everything and not let it out,” she said. “Don’t feel anything, don’t say anything, just do your work. I don’t even like to think about it now, because it’s no use. You can’t do anything about it. Besides, you were young, you hoped you’d get a better future later in life. I got a chance to get out of there. I wanted to keep moving.”

In school, she kept a low profile—“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” she said—and hoped to slip through the cracks of the nascent bureaucracy. She had a brief scare when she insulted the team leader of one of her training courses, an incompetent, illiterate woman who was nonetheless put in charge because she was politically suited for the position. One day Wu Yi Po couldn’t take it anymore and muttered, “Bullshit, she can’t even speak right.” Someone overheard her and reported it, and Wu Yi Po received a warning. “After that I learned my lesson,” she said. “Never say anything to anyone, ever.”

She breezed through the rest of her courses and graduated in 1952. She had just turned eighteen but was sent to the Korean front to help treat soldiers. She worked in an operating room for a year and a half, doing “lots of bone and plastic work.” During the war the Communists arranged marriages for older Chinese soldiers, and Wu Yi Po was introduced to a commander many years her senior. When they asked about her background, she said her parents had died and that she had lived with her grandparents and aunt. Her grandfather had a bit of land and sometimes rented it to someone. “They didn’t ask for details,” Wu Yi Po said. “I was already in the army, and a lot of people wanted to get married, so they needed a supply of girls. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

After the Korean War, Wu Yi Po attended medical school and lived in Dongbei for many years. She got a chance to go to the United States as a visiting scholar in 1986 and after the Tiananmen Square massacre applied for refugee status.

THE NEXT MORNING, Lewis, Wu Yi Po, and I caught a taxi for the gongxiaoshe department, to find Liu Ping, the local official who the chang zhang told me had authority over my family’s old property. We drove to a plain three-story building in an alley crowded with food carts next to a shopping center; only some tattered red banners on the doorframe indicated we were in the right place.

We climbed the stairs to the top floor. I expected Lewis to take the lead, having dealt with and gotten what he wanted from Chinese officials far above Liu Ping’s position. If he was just a fraction as insistent here as he was with other people, Liu Ping would have no chance. Emboldened, I started thinking about where we could rent excavation equipment and wondered if I should contact an archaeologist I’d met in Jingdezhen. But Lewis dawdled, waiting for me to go in first. “So what are you going to say?” he asked.

I told him, but he looked skeptical. “Yes, that might work,” Wu Yi Po said, grabbing his arm. “Give it a shot. Why not?”

I led them up the stairs, but Liu Ping’s office was empty. In another room I found a pair of men at their desks, smoking. Liu Ping was out, one of the men said, expecting us to leave. After a bit of cajoling, I convinced the man to call him.

He had a brief exchange with Liu Ping in the local dialect and then handed me the phone. I noticed that Lewis was still in the hallway, suddenly preoccupied with his phone. I introduced myself to Liu Ping and tried to explain my desire to rent the property.

“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” Liu Ping said. “If you want to do that, you need to talk to the Lushan or Jiujiang government.”

“I see. Which one?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Sorry, you said either the Lushan or Jiujiang government. Which one should I talk to?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

He seemed to be doing it on purpose, and I thought it best to get off the phone before I said something impolite. “Sorry, my Chinese isn’t very good, and I’m worried I’m misunderstanding you,” I said. “Maybe you can talk to my grandaunt. She’s here beside me.”

I handed the phone to a startled Wu Yi Po, who looked as if she weren’t expecting to provide anything more than moral support. “Hello, with whom am I speaking?” Wu Yi Po said in her most pliant voice. “Are you local? So am I! Can you speak Jiujiang dialect? Yes? Wonderful! Please feel free to speak Jiujiang dialect.” She explained that she was a Xingang native and repeated our desire to rent the property, but he gave her the same runaround. I looked for Lewis, who still had not entered the office.

Wu Yi Po hung up, and we left. “He said he can’t help us and that we need to go talk to the Xingang government, or Jiujiang government, or whatever,” she reported. “He wasn’t clear with me, either. But the point is he’s not going to help and isn’t going to introduce us to the right person, either, so we have no guanxi if we try somewhere else.”

Lewis finally spoke. “That was a polite way of telling us to fuck off,” he said.

We walked back to the street and stood in front of the shopping center. I wasn’t sure what more to do or say. Wu Yi Po nodded toward a KFC. “Why don’t we get a coffee,” she said. Lewis said he wanted to get his shoes shined and would meet us in the restaurant.

Wu Yi Po and I drank our coffees in silence. After a few minutes, Lewis rejoined us. “What the hell, man?” I said. “What happened in there?”

“I know my limitations,” he said. “I could tell right away that they weren’t going to help. There wasn’t anything I could do there. I used to have power. Not anymore.”

“Great,” I said. “Now what?”

“Now nothing,” Lewis said. “If you stay here, they’re going to just pass the buck.”

“Maybe we should just tell them about the porcelain,” I said. “See what they say.”

“Why the hell would you let someone else dig for our stuff?” Lewis said. “If we’re not going to dig it, no one is.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. Lewis stared out the window. “Hey, Huan,” he said, “China changes. You think in 1983 I knew China would be like this? I’d be a billionaire. If Wu Yi had known, would she have left? Maybe you can’t dig, but you can pass this story down to your son, and by then China will have changed, you can buy land, and he can do it. It’s like Yu Gong Yi Shan.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“It means ‘foolish man moving mountain,’ ” Lewis said. “It’s a story.” Wu Yi Po nodded in recognition. “This old man in ancient times lived in a house right in front of a mountain,” Lewis continued, “and it was very inconvenient for him to go anywhere. So one day he went out with a shovel and started to try and move the mountain. The other people in the village all laughed at him, said he was a fool. And he said, ‘What are you laughing at? Maybe I can’t move it, but I have sons, and my sons will have sons, and eventually we’re going to have enough people to finish the job.’ And they did it!”

I WAS STILL thinking about that story the next morning, when I accompanied Wu Yi Po and Lewis to the former Rulison school. Wu Yi Po wanted to have a look around at her old school and drop off a few copies of my grandmother’s testimonial booklet at the alumnae office. For better and worse, China happens on its own time, so I tagged along to see what remained of the institution that had played such an important role for my family.

Situated on a shady, treelined avenue along the lake, Rulison and its brother school, Tong Wen, once had adjacent campuses separated by a wall, but the wall had since been knocked down, the schools combined, and the institution of more than three thousand students was officially renamed “Jiujiang No. 2 Middle School.”

We entered the front gate, along which hung red posters of Tong Wen’s famous alumni, student prize winners, and the top scorers from the previous year’s gaokao, arranged by the rank of the university to which they had won acceptance. A long walkway led to the original Tong Wen building. To our left, beyond a full-size soccer field, the terrain rose, and a few of the old Rulison buildings remained.

We entered the Tong Wen building. The interior was spare, utilitarian, and downtrodden but fairly well preserved. Most of the doors, askew in their frames, were closed and locked. Between the cracks we saw exhibits and display cases relating to the school’s history. At the top of a flight of rickety stairs, we found a woman in an office. Wu Yi Po explained to her the family’s connection and showed her my grandmother’s booklet. The woman seemed uninterested and suspicious. She was in the education department, she said, and couldn’t help. We would have to talk to the principal. Wu Yi Po asked if she could open the doors to the history exhibition. The woman had already returned to her papers. Go downstairs and ask the person in charge of the building, she said, without looking up.

Downstairs, Wu Yi Po knocked on the building manager’s door. A woman slightly younger than Wu Yi Po answered, looking angry. “Hello,” Wu Yi Po said. “I’m an old alumna, and they told me upstairs to ask if you could open the door to those rooms.”

“Not possible. Go ask the principal.”

“Oh, sure,” Wu Yi Po said, keeping her voice light. “Could you tell me where to find the principal?”

The woman turned away and walked into the long, narrow room.

“Can you tell me the principal’s name?” Wu Yi Po continued, stepping into the doorway. “Miss? Miss?”

The woman walked back and shut the door in Wu Yi Po’s face.

“Fucking China, man,” Lewis said.

Outside the building a group of students pointed us to the principal’s office, in an expansive multistory building encased in yellowing sanitary tiles. On the third floor we found the office for the alumnae association and were sent up one floor to the principal’s office. Lewis drifted away to play with his phone. At the principal’s office, a circumspect administrator stonewalled Wu Yi Po. Lewis suddenly appeared. “Listen to me!” he said, sticking a finger in the administrator’s face. “This is my aunt. Our entire family were alumnae of this school. My mother is Liu Pei Jin. I’m the former president of the Zhenda chicken farm. Your people were extremely rude to her just now. She’s come all this way from America, and you turned your back on her. I’m very upset with the way you’ve treated us.”

The principal arrived, a middle-aged man with dyed hair and wearing dark pants and a white dress shirt, the picture of a second-tier city bureaucrat. Lewis shifted his aim without missing a beat. “My brother is Richard Chang,” he barked at the principal. “He came here a few years ago and met with the mayor and the party secretary. You know how many Zhenda chicken farms are in China? Two. And do you know why they are here? Me. We’ve donated lots of money to this school over the years, and yet when we show up, we had the door closed in our faces. My aunt’s being polite, but I have to say this. How can you treat her like this? I’m very angry.” Lewis went on, detailing every instance of rudeness we experienced and insinuating that we knew highly placed people who could make their lives miserable. It was dazzling to witness.

The principal held out his hands in a conciliatory pose. “We’re so sorry,” the principal said. “We weren’t expecting you. If you’d just called, we’d have made arrangements. Please accept our apologies.”

In a blink Lewis switched from anger to grace. “It’s fine,” he said, smiling and making expansive motions with his arms. “We just didn’t think it was right, whether or not we’d made an appointment. I’m sorry for getting upset.”

The principal dispatched two underlings to show us around the campus. One of them produced a camera, and we all posed for a photograph. The principal took the booklets from Wu Yi Po with two hands. “And of course we’ll accept these booklets,” he said, flipping through one for our benefit. “We’re very grateful. We’ll put them in our library.”

As we reentered the old campus to begin our tour, one of the underlings circled us like a paparazzo, snapping photographs, and the other prattled about the school’s history, its size, and the age and number of its camphor trees. “Hey,” I said to Lewis, “what was that all about?”

“Sometimes I’m a son of a bitch, but it works, man,” he said.

“Where was this when we went to see that official?”

“Oh, this is easy,” he said. “Getting the house back is kind of difficult.”

The underling led us back into the Tong Wen building and unlocked the doors to the exhibitions. The wooden floors groaned under our feet. On the walls were old photographs, arranged in a rough chronology from the schools’ founding through the Communist takeover. There was a portrait of an elderly Gertrude Howe, her name written as Hao Geju in Chinese in the caption. The photographs from before 1949 showed students wearing dresses and bobby socks, or skirts and leggings, faculty dressed in a mixture of Chinese and Western clothes in various colors, a group of boys in basketball uniforms, and costumed girls giving dance performances on the lawn. After 1949 the dress became uniform and drab. There were shots of girls drilling with wooden rifles, students working in factories, farms, and fields, and a “political exercise” parade through downtown Jiujiang. In a photograph of the school’s students and faculty gathered before the Rulison dormitory in 1954, everyone wore shapeless, dark clothing. Before them, occupying the most prominent position in the frame, was their farming equipment.

Wu Yi Po peered at the photographs, looking for people she knew or recognized. “Oh, there’s Ms. Ferris!” she said, pointing to a smiling woman with short hair and bangs swept to one side. “She had a mouth. Spoke her mind. She said something and got run out in 1950.”

In another group photo, she pointed to a man wearing a light-colored worker’s jacket. “See that guy?” she said. “That’s the guy after Liberation who would watch you.”

The underling seemed anxious to return, so we let him close up the rooms and said goodbye. We walked up the hill to the old Rulison campus, where the dormitory and academic building remained, their handsome brick exteriors and window trims tangled in a web of electric wire, water pipes, air-conditioning units, and corrugated metal awnings. The arched colonnade of the academic building’s patios on each floor had been sealed up to create more interior space, and the corridor that had connected it to the dormitory was gone. The courtyard between the buildings was taken up by a blue metal structure on which someone’s laundry dried.

San Gu had lived at the end of the second floor of the dormitory, Wu Yi Po said. The campus had been oriented toward the street, from which a treelined drive entered, curving past a lawn, a basketball court expressly for the girls, a pecan tree that the girls liked to pick from, and residences for the foreign teachers, where Ms. French sometimes invited students to have tea with her. “It’s all gone,” Wu Yi Po said. “Oh, they changed so much.”

MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER had been one of three xiucai in Xingang. He was good friends with the other two, Tang Hou Cun’s grandfather, Tang Hua Xian, and his younger brother, Tang Ren Zhi, who served as the general manager of the Minsheng Shipping Company, which ferried goods up and down the Yangtze, from Shanghai to Chongqing. The three of them were said to have been in constant competition over who had the best porcelain collection. Tang Ren Zhi’s position put him in regular contact with the Fuliang county commissioner in Jingdezhen, and he later wrote a biography of the commissioner. Tang Hou Cun reckoned that their friendship dated to about 1912. That might have been the detail that San Yi Po had appropriated in her recollections of her father. According to Tang Hou Cun, Tang Ren Zhi, who had lived next door to my grandmother’s mother, had the most and best porcelain of the three village scholars, and as the leakage of imperial goods became more audacious after the Qing abdication, Tang Ren Zhi acquired a number of imperial porcelains, some of which were given to him directly by the Fuliang commissioner.

Before I fell out of favor with Tang Hou Cun, he had mentioned that some of Tang Ren Zhi’s collection of imperial porcelains had survived. They used to be in Jiujiang but were recently moved to another town. He didn’t explain why, but I got the impression it was for safekeeping, part of the same tradition that had resulted in the National Palace Museum collection’s interprovincial travels.

On my last evening in Jiujiang, I called Tang Hou Cun and asked if he would take me to see those porcelains, and he agreed. We took a taxi to Ruichang, a town about thirty kilometers directly west of Jiujiang and known primarily for raising the best shanyao, or medicinal yams, in the province. It used to take hours to reach from the city, the taxi driver told me, but now it would be about thirty minutes thanks to the new highway. The highway was indeed new and, despite the light poles planted every few meters on each side, completely dark and choked with dust. It didn’t seem to bother the driver, who left the windows open, forcing me to put my shirt over my face just to breathe. “Yes, it’s bad,” the driver said when I mentioned the dust to him. “It didn’t used to be, but they’ve industrialized both sides of the highway. Lots of dust.”

The windows stayed open, and we soon reached Ruichang’s central roundabout, cluttered with construction and lit mostly by neon lights diffused through the nighttime smog. After pulling over twice to ask for directions, we took one of the unlit arteries to a gloomy Communist-era apartment building with metal bars over the ground-floor windows. Tang Hou Cun’s relative, an elderly man wearing slippers, emerged from the shadows to greet us and led us into one of the jail-like first-floor apartments. The flat was dim, lit by bare bulbs and cluttered with old junk and outdated calendars, and consisted of one large, concrete-floored open space divided into a living room and kitchen by a threadbare floral print sofa. Opposite the barred windows were a row of bedrooms. Through the doorway of one I saw a mattress and a stack of silk-covered boxes. The relative introduced us to his grandson and granddaughter-in-law, a couple about my age, who rose from the kitchen table and stood nervously while Tang Hou Cun repeated the reason for our visit. No one invited us to sit down or offered tea. The grandson walked into the room with the boxes. “Okay,” Tang said to me, “we’ll take a look at the pieces and then we’ll leave.”

The grandson returned with two boxes, cleared a spot for them on the kitchen table, and removed a blue pear-shaped vase and a flambé red ru vase with decorative handles and a squared mouth. They had been gifts to Tang Ren Zhi from the Fuliang county commissioner. The grandson handed them to me one by one. Everyone stood, unnaturally tense, as if someone might be watching through the windows or I might break the pieces or run out with them.

“This is a jihong ping and a cui lan ping,” Tang said, either wanting to show off his ceramic bona fides or remind me that he thought my Chinese was terrible. Cui lan, or “blown blue,” he explained, referred to how glazers would use their mouths as bellows to spray the glaze onto the unfired vase. Even in the weak light, the vase pulsed with a rich blue luster, as if layered with every shade in the spectrum. Jihong, or “sacrificial red,” was a radiant shade of crimson that potters had sought to replicate for centuries but was so costly and complicated that it gave rise to the joke “If you want to go broke, make red glaze porcelain.” Just as Europeans would later mix eggshells and bones into clay in search of the arcanum that would fire into perfectly white porcelain, Chinese craftsmen hoped that adding crushed coral and agate to their glaze formulas would create the depth they sought for their red. According to one of the many legends surrounding Jingdezhen, the Ming emperor Xuande demanded red porcelain for worshipping the sun god and issued an imperial decree for Jingdezhen to produce it. The craftsmen tried again and again to no avail (archaeologists in the 1980s discovered acres of smashed red porcelain), and Xuande imprisoned, tortured, and threatened to execute those who failed. Finally the daughter of a jailed potter threw herself into the flaming kiln in protest, and when the doors were opened days later, they discovered the pieces were perfectly fired and colored. From then on that red was called jihong.

I turned the vases over to see that both bore the reign mark of Guangxu, the second-to-last emperor of the Qing dynasty, though the blue one’s mark was pierced through and the red one’s was rubbed away; effacing the seal was a common practice when the emperor gave imperial wares as gifts. These were real imperial porcelains, not in a museum, an auction house, or wealthy collector’s home. They had remained in China for their entire existence, no more than a hundred miles from their birthplace, and had somehow managed to survive a century in which everyone, Chinese or otherwise, seemed intent on removing them or destroying them.

“So do you all live here?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

“Yes,” the grandson said.

“Huan, no time for conversation,” Tang snapped. “Take some photos, and then we’re leaving.”

It didn’t occur to me until later that those vases might very well have once belonged to my great-great-grandfather. Wouldn’t the trio of Xingang xiucai, in the spirit of erudite competition, have bought and traded porcelains with one another? And for all the exalted figures in the Liu genealogy, there seemed to be just as many shady characters who weren’t above stealing the family porcelain. Tang Hou Cun’s no-good father was still around when my great-great-grandfather fled to Chongqing, when I imagined him at his most desperate. Who would have stopped him or someone else from digging up the Liu treasures or selling the details of their location to someone while my great-great-grandfather was away, or after he died? Tang Hou Cun had even told me that the Tang families were the ones who really “played” porcelain, and many of the pieces in my great-great-grandfather’s collection were the ones they didn’t want. Perhaps Tang was rushing me because he worried that I might try to reclaim the vases.

I fumbled with my camera and snapped some blurry, underlit photos. Stalling, I asked the grandson how the family had managed to keep these pieces for so long. “They were hidden in the walls of their house during tumultuous times,” the grandson answered.

“They’re great pieces,” I said. “You should display them.”

That elicited a sharp, humorless laugh from the grandson. “Our financial standing isn’t good enough to display them,” he said, shaking his head.

Tang had pressed himself alongside me and began to physically move me toward the exit. There was so much more I wanted to ask. “Well, they’re worth something now,” I said, hoping to admire the vases just a little longer. “You could put them in auction.”

“They mean too much to the family,” the grandson said. “Someone tried to buy them a few years ago, but we refused to sell. They have too much sentimental value. We’ve had a fire, a flood, and two earthquakes, and we’ve protected them well. We won’t sell them.” Then Tang Hou Cun pushed me out the door and back into the darkness.