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The Porcelain Thief
Huan Hsu
Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China
Crown
April 2015
On Sale: March 24, 2015
410 pages
ISBN: 0307986306
EAN: 9780307986306
Kindle: B00N6PBEUQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
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.
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