How intriguing growing up knowing that somewhere far across the seas in a foreign land there may be a priceless heirloom collection of the world's finest porcelain, buried in a huge hole by your great great grandfather, as he escapes with his family from the advancing Japanese army! Author Huan Hsu is an ABC - American Born Chinese, having grown up straddling the three worlds of the US, China and Taiwan. As a journalist he has a desperate curiosity to find out if the porcelain collection is still buried, or even if it exists at all. He pulls on his big 'find my inner Chinese' boots and travels to China to dig out the story.
What unfolds is an enormous amount of discovery, not only about his ancestry and his family, but also about himself. He finds he has to leave his American self very far behind as he learns the language, learns how to get on with those he works with and mixes with, and tries to get answers to the multitude of questions he has. He travels widely too, locating many family members, some of whom live in China, some who live in Taiwan, getting their stories, sifting through the wildly diverse accounts of what happened firstly in 1938 when the family was scattered throughout China and Taiwan, and then what happened after the war with the Nationalists and Communists at loggerheads, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, and latterly China as a power house of manufacturing and economic growth. Through all this the myth of the porcelain continues to bubble.
There is so much in this book - part memoir, part travelogue, art history lesson, China's story over last 130 years. Huan Hsu is a very engaging and talented writer, with an inquiring and open mind to all that is going on around him - a true traveller. I enjoyed it very much and learnt a lot about what modern day China is like, the opening up to the West, the still many, many untold stories of dislocation, 're-education', oppression, starvation, torture. And is there reconciliation for the family in unearthing the family treasure? Well, that would be telling, and would take away from the journey of discovery that this whole book is.
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