Huan Hsu. (2015). The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. Crown.

Huan Hsu. 2015. The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. Crown.

Huan Hsu, The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. Crown, 2015.

Huan Hsu. The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. Crown, 2015.

OverDrive Product Record

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The Porcelain Thief

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   • bioText:

     HUAN HSU, born in the Bay Area and raised in Salt Lake City, is a former staff writer for the Washington City Paper in Washington, DC, and the Seattle Weekly. He is the recipient of two Society of Professional Journalists awards and has received recognition from the Casey Foundation for Meritorious Journalism. His essays and fiction have also appeared in Slate, The Literary Review, and Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts. He currently lives in Amsterdam and teaches creative writing at Amsterdam University College.

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2015-03-24T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Porcelain Thief

fullDescription

A journalist travels throughout mainland China and Taiwan in search of his family’s hidden treasure and comes to understand his ancestry as he never has before.
 
In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather Liu’s Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a vast collection of prized antique porcelain, and undertake a decades-long trek that would splinter the family over thousands of miles. Many years and upheavals later, Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City and armed only with curiosity, moves to China to work in his uncle’s semiconductor chip business. Once there, a conversation with his grandmother, his last living link to dynastic China, ignites a desire to learn more about not only his lost ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering the language enough to venture into the countryside, Hsu sets out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have obscured both China and his heritage and finally complete his family’s long march back home.
Melding memoir, travelogue, and social and political history, The Porcelain Thief offers an intimate and unforgettable way to understand the complicated events that have defined China over the past two hundred years and provides a revealing, lively perspective on contemporary Chinese society from the point of view of a Chinese American coming to terms with his hyphenated identity.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Rob Gifford, author of China Road
   • content: "Huan Hsu blends a fascinating search for his own family's roots with an illuminating portrait of modern China. The Porcelain Thief is a wonderful read."
2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 16, 2015
     American-born journalist Hsu hears that his great-great grandfather, a landowner in Xingang, buried a large collection of porcelain when Japan invaded China in 1938. Hsu sets out to find this treasure trove more than 70 years later. The book recounts Hsu's travel to China and ensuing three-year search, "equipped with only a few threads of a family legend and an irresistible compulsion to know more about it." This compulsion drives the story as he meets and interviews family members and acquaintances, and gradually "unearth pieces of family's history and to weave them into a coherent narrative." He conducts his search, in his own words, "naïvely, indirectly, protractedly." While it is hard to argue with this characterization of the search and the book as a whole, the book's naïveté and indirectness enable the narrative to wander across genres. In addition to documentary and family history, Hsu explores China's social and political history, as well as his personal feelings about China, and the value of documenting and sharing Chinese family stories. Hsu's fluid writing helps to synthesize these threads into a coherent story well worth reading.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     January 15, 2015
     A former journalist and current professor searches for the rare porcelain buried by his great-great-grandfather in 1938, when Japanese invaders approached his property in Xingang, China.We don't learn until near the end what (if anything) Hsu discovered on his remarkable odyssey, which took lots of time and required confronting some tricky, even ominous, forces. His search involved the interpretation of a number of stories coming from family members-some, like a grandmother, were very reluctant to talk about certain aspects of the past-descendants of former neighbors, museum employees, experts in ancient porcelain, and local and regional authorities. The author traveled to Shanghai to begin his search, gaining employment with a relative and facing the frustrating knowledge that his understanding of Chinese language and custom was not sufficient for his needs. So he embarked on various plans of study and eventually became more or less competent. As he tells his story, he has to bring us along carefully, for he (correctly?) assumes that most readers do not know much about Chinese history and geography, and so he tells us a lot about the former, especially, often to the eye-glazing point. He also interweaves much family history-again, sometimes to an excessive degree. What fascinates him about his family will not always transfer to his readers, but his persistence in the face of numerous obstacles is beyond admirable. He journeyed to a host of remote locations-including, of course, the very much changed family property, where he eventually figured out how he could dig without too much official interference-and endured all sorts of reluctance and doubt from a variety of relatives and strangers. He offers plenty of intriguing information about Chinese history and culture, from wild Shanghai traffic to family dynamics. Some first-rate detective work sometimes obscured by excessively thick historical shrubbery.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

104

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A journalist travels throughout mainland China and Taiwan in search of his family’s hidden treasure and comes to understand his ancestry as he never has before.
 
In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather Liu’s Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a vast collection of prized antique porcelain, and undertake a decades-long trek that would splinter the family over thousands of miles. Many years and upheavals later, Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City and armed only with curiosity, moves to China to work in his uncle’s semiconductor chip business. Once there, a conversation with his grandmother, his last living link to dynastic China, ignites a desire to learn more about not only his lost ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering the language enough to venture into the countryside, Hsu sets out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have obscured...

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