White Gold

Thousands of miles away from China, its first home, a set of porcelain teacups sits inside a white-varnished kitchen cabinet. It’s traveled across mountains, deserts, and oceans, and remembers not just the stories of the hands that have held it, but also the hundreds of years etched into its brothers and sisters now scattered across the world. It echoes the voices of elders hanging onto a fading world of traditions and relics they haven’t yet decided if it’s as dangerously terrifying as it is wondrously electrifying; of immigrants who’ve seen long working hours, thrown-out childhood dreams for a shot in the dark at something overseas, and foreign tongues and heavy accents; of teenagers and young adults burning down old cuffs for new dreams, relearning mother tongues, and nurturing a love-hate relationship with their Asian-to-American ratio; and of children watching films with heroes and villains who look like them and reading books with secrets, flaws, and dreams like theirs.

My grandparents had an old porcelain tea set etched with dragons and clouds and the Zhangjiajie mountains (the real-life inspiration for the floating rocks on Pandora from the movie Avatar). Those teacups held the comfort of thousands of years of folklore and legends as my grandparents’ world slowly crumbled and rebuilt itself in a nightmarish fashion during the Cultural Revolution in China. Through every day of protests and instability, crouched on the precipice of a tumultuous nation which no one knew what it would look like by tomorrow, the mountains and dragons stayed and fed my grandparents their tea.

After my parents graduated from college, got married, and set their sights on mei guo—the Chinese name for America, which means “beautiful country”—in search of this mysterious “American dream,” my grandparents’ tea set followed them in ratty suitcases and haphazard shipping boxes. Bank accounts shy of the few grand (or ten) needed for a move across the pond, and English just a little too broken, my parents accepted that the “beautiful country” would have to wait. Undeterred, my father set his sights on an education in Australia instead. The dragon tea set found them in a dingy, cockroach-infested, two-bedroom apartment in Melbourne that my parents shared with another student from Hong Kong. Through the long hours of my father working on his graduate thesis by day and chopping vegetables in a seedy restaurant kitchen by night, and my mother’s long days working her fingers raw in a sewing factory, the mountains and dragons stayed. They reminded my parents of the place from whence they came, and the place to which they’d one day arrive.

When I was born, in a Canadian city bordered by endless forests and mountains—not yet in the “beautiful country”—the porcelain tea set sat on the kitchen counter, just out of reach of my tiny fists as I listened to my parents tell stories of their magnificent adventures and animal sightings during their time in Australia. Unbeknownst to me, those teacups also held pound after pound of fear and anxiety that came with the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in Australia in the 90s—and the impossible decision to, after having fellow members of their community be pushed into subways and attacked on the streets, leave the place they had slowly begun to think could be “beautiful” too. With legal paperwork and finances still too high of a mountain to climb for America, they packed their bags and their dreams of raising children somewhere safe as soon as their Canadian green cards came. Those teacups went back into ratty suitcases and packing boxes—but through my parents’ broken English and unbreakable dreams, those mountains and dragons stayed.

Mama and Baba eventually made it to the “beautiful country”—I walked past those porcelain teacups every day after school, stared at them when I wanted to put off my homework, and ignored them the day I became an American citizen. I made black tea and sipped from those cups while I learned chemistry and French and calculus or inhaled endless piles of novels. When I came home with my mother’s dumplings she made me for lunch untouched, determined to shove down every square inch of my identity that spelled “not American enough,” those mountains and dragons stayed and reminded me of the stories and culture from whence I came. When my parents were shoved down and muzzled and denied opportunities at work for their perpetual state of foreignness, I raged at all the ways we were constantly reminded we would never be fully welcome here, convinced for a minute that shattering those teacups would make our problems go away—and let those mountains and dragons stay. When my people were once again shoved into subway tracks and attacked in the streets, and I watched my parents be transported back to the very place they fought tirelessly to escape just thirty years prior, I brought out the mountains and dragons on those teacups and told them that this time, we’d stay. That they worked too hard to give me an opportunity to live out my dreams in the “beautiful country” for all the stories those teacups now hold to go to waste.

When I walked into that Delft museum in the Netherlands at twenty years old and saw shelf after shelf, wall after wall, of porcelain plates and vases and teacups that looked just like my grandparents’ porcelain tea sets, then watched the museum curators talk about the European obsession with “white gold”—how they copied the ones from China and made it their own—I thought of those mountains and dragons etched on my family’s teacups back home. Beneath my anger at the falsified authenticity lay a glimmer of comfort—comfort that, while those Dutch white and blue colors may look the same, the stories they tell most certainly do not. That it’s really a shame so few people can look at those blue and white ceramics and not think to ask themselves: what stories can this vase tell me? What have your flowers and ridges seen? That the most those vases have seen are a poor attempt at technical replication, and the walls and faces of kings and collectors who saw it for nothing more than a piece of white gold—and never the thousands of years of folklore and legends, the rise and fall of political empires, the shattering and rebuilding of immigrant dreams, and a reclaiming of where those blue flowers may actually call home.

I have one of my grandparents’ teacups with me today. From their kitchen to my parents’ apartments, across oceans and continents, it now sits on a kitchen shelf of my own. And although I don’t often make tea in it, I like to look at it every now and then to listen to the stories it tells me. I send my dreams and fears to it, knowing those diligently-etched mountains and dragons would stay, and find solace in the fact that through all the generations it’s survived, it’s finally come home.

Yi-Ann Li is a junior studying Psychology and English Literature. She’s got a corner of her heart permanently saved for her two dogs, Calgary and Melbourne, and loves to tempt life by drinking ungodly amounts of coffee with extra cream despite being lactose intolerant. In her spare time, she can be found sporadically reorganizing her Spotify playlists and scribbling in her journal.