Huan Hsu is an ABC - an American-born Chinese - and he has had a lifelong love of digging stuff up. This penchant has stood him in good stead as a journalist; it made him a bit of a magpie as a child and it is what inspired him to travel to China to try to locate a rumoured family treasure trove. Liu, his great-great grandfather, had buried his family's priceless hoard of imperial porcelain in a vault in their backyard just before they fled ahead of the advance of Mao Zedong's Communists. The family was subsequently scattered to the four winds, and as far afield as America.
The memory of the stash faded or was deliberately forgotten, until only rumours remained.
The Porcelain Thief describes Hsu's search for it, which, of course, necessitated his taking a job with a wealthy uncle in Shanghai and learning the language and customs of his ancestral home. He faithfully chronicles his exasperation with the idiosyncracies of modern China - especially the lawlessness of Shanghai drivers - along with his growing admiration and affection for a people who have endured a long period of political tumult, both from external and internal causes.
The generation of his family who have personal memories of the family's porcelain collection are mysterious about it: they tell Hsu vague, often contradictory stories about its whereabouts and fate. And when Hsu finally feels ready to go in search of it, his family are of limited use to him; a reflection of the Chinese tendency to look forward and upward rather than down and into the past.
This is a wonderful, cleverly wrought portrait of China and the Chinese people, their troubled past and dynamic present, as well as a fascinating history of the imperial porcelain industry and its strange, contemporary off-shoots - a modern ceramic art movement, along with a booming trade in whole pieces and shards of the ancient product and an equally lively trade in fakes.
