But those visits to the village and the factory were nothing compared to how I felt when I went to Tibet. I had a rough time getting there, because while the authorities said I could go, they made it difficult to do so. But I got there, and as spectacular as Tibet is, I was appalled by what I saw. China talks about its “religiously correct” policy toward minorities. They can say all they want. At least as far as Tibet was concerned, it’s garbage. The Tibetans were persecuted relentlessly. Monks were considered dissidents and thrown in jail for twenty years for nothing. After that, I had a couple of run-ins with party cadres, petty officials who thought their position entitled them to treat everyone else like dirt. Still, I know you can’t equate the people with their government, so I left China, feeling on balance that I liked the place, and that eventually things would get better.
Not long after I had returned home, however, there had been that odious moment in recent Chinese history, the massacre in Tian’anmen Square. I remember watching the television as grainy pictures, a lurid red from the night lenses, were beamed around the world, and wondering if some of the wonderful young people I’d met had been hurt or killed. At that moment, I told myself I would never go back to China. Until Dory Matthews spoke to me from the dead, I never had.
Still, I am an optimistic person. Even before my return to China to try to buy Dory’s box, I knew that people clearly lived better lives. The country was modernizing at an unprecedented rate. Where once it had been a crime to be remotely bourgeois, now there was a new government directive: it is glorious to be wealthy. True, there were still the men in black, the army officials who considered themselves above the law, and that continued to make me uncomfortable. Beyond mere wealth, though, the people I’d seen had a degree of freedom they had not had in more than half a century, maybe ever. Dory had heard the same things I had, but it didn’t change anything for her. She said that while she loved Chinese history and culture, had made it her life’s work, really, she would never go back to Mainland China, that her memories of the place were of a war-ravaged country, with zealots of every stripe so determined to rule that they cared not how many people died in the process.
She had plenty of reasons to feel that way, regardless of whether she was right or wrong. It was difficult for me to argue with her when it came to her own experiences, the ones on which she based her opinions. Yes, I could make a case for the big picture, but what influenced her opinion was what she knew on an intensely personal level. True experience trumps theory every time. Dory had left China with her mother at the age of five. Young as she was, she still had very vivid memories, and they were not good ones. She told me that her father was from Shanghai, and had been a successful businessman. Her mother Vivian, also born in Shanghai to British parents, was well-off too. Shanghai was an enticing city in those days before World War II and the Japanese invasion: Chinese, but with some European influence as well; affluent, but also a little decadent. But the proverbial storm clouds were on the horizon, Japan having occupied Manchuria in 1931, putting the last Qing emperor, Puyi, on a puppet throne.
That must have seemed a distant threat at the time, but it came much, much closer. In July of 1937, the Japanese were at the gates of Beijing, and that city fell to them on July 29, 1937, in an incident known to us now as that of Marco Polo Bridge. In late 1937, Shanghai also fell to the Japanese and remained under Japanese control until the end of World War II.
On December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers captured Nanking, then the capital of China, and slaughtered their way through the city for several weeks, an ignominious event called the Rape of Nanking. It is said that during the war with Japan, something between ten and thirty million Chinese were killed, although there are many who believe that number is much, much higher. The Chinese people have come to regard the Japanese occupation of their country, which lasted through World War II, as the Forgotten Holocaust.
Amazingly enough, Vivian and her family managed very well during the Japanese occupation. In Shanghai, whole areas of the cities had in some sense been ceded to the large and powerful nations of Europe, like Britain, France, Italy, and Russia. The Japanese, at this point not willing to rouse the ire of such powerful foes—that would come later—left them alone. Vivian would recall that time as reasonably happy, home with her parents in a beautiful house on a hill complete with servants. The Japanese were not the only problem, however. The Chinese were fighting among themselves. There were two factions, the Red or Communist Army led by Mao Zedong, and the Koumintang, led by Chiang Kai-Shek.
At first Vivian thought the Koumintang would protect people from the Japanese, but in the end the Koumintang was another despotic force. No matter where she went, she found herself surrounded by fighting no matter how cocooned her existence.
It was during this turbulent time that Vivian met the man who would become her husband and Dory’s father. He had joined the Communist Army very young, in his early teens, according to Dory. His father had been with Mao in Xi’an when Mao became secretary of the Communist Party, and in 1934 had gone on the Long March with Mao. The Long March was one of the most famous strategic retreats in history, an almost five-thousand-mile march through difficult terrain over the course of just over a year. Only twenty thousand of the ninety thousand soldiers who set out with Mao survived. But it gave the army a chance to regroup, and at the end of World War II, Mao was able to push the Koumintang off the Chinese mainland to Taiwan. Those who had been close to Mao during that difficult time, and Dory’s father apparently was one of them, stood to benefit for the rest of their lives.
Dory was born in 1944 in the dying days of World War II. Perhaps Vivian thought that with the defeat of Japan, her life would return to normal. She was wrong. When Shanghai was about to be taken over by the communists, Dory’s mother had had enough. She got the last boat out of Shanghai. Dory’s father chose not to come with them, something that was a terrible blow to the five-year-old child. Instead he had gone to Beijing to take a senior position with the Communist Party. It must have been difficult for Dory’s mother, as well. She might have had British parents, but she’d been born in China and had spent her whole life there. She’d also been married to the same man for a number of years, even if she hadn’t seen much of him. Neither Dory nor her mother were ever to see Dory’s father again, or even to hear from him. Neither ever went back to China.
Dory’s most vivid memory was that of trying to board the ship, a small child surrounded by panicked individuals desperate to get out of the country, and of looking for her father. She’d told me about it more than once, and even after all those years, she’d choked up about it just a little.
And yet, despite all this, Dory wanted to give three silver boxes of inestimable worth back to the country of her birth, one about which she did not have a good word to say. And she wanted to give it to Xi’an, the town where her father formally became a communist. How much sense did that make? I’d felt bothered all along by her request in a kind of fuzzy, unspecific way, sensing that there was something wrong. I still thought so, if for no other reason than it seemed highly unlikely that the box could be first withdrawn from sale and then stolen within a few weeks. I’d tried to tell myself it was a coincidence. Did I really still think it was?