A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

“Do you think it is real, then?” he said, pushing her. “Made in the Xuande reign?”

  She turned the bowl each way in her hands one more time, then replaced it on the table. “I believe so. Though as I said it is not so very fine. Still, I cannot prove its age. I have never seen it anywhere, in any catalog or any listing, no, I am sure of that.”

  “As far as you recall.”

  “Well, actually, I do recall. I make it a point to retain all such things.”

  He raised his brows in a look that said, elaborate.

  “It’s just my hobby, memory.”

  “Memory,” he said after her.

  “Mnemonics. Cultivation of memory. I’ve been working at it since I was small. And, you can see, I happen to be interested in porcelain.”

  He looked at her, surprise and calculation twining in his face. He pointed to the third piece. “What about this one?”

  Of course, she knew and he knew that memory was only half of what made a great pots expert. Half was the database. The other half was feeling and instinct. Only then could one distill. That was what made a great eye.

  She studied the third pot. It was a blue-and-white moon flask with the same kind of overt, studied heap-and-piling she had seen on the bottleneck vase. The Ming style had been much admired in the Qing, but when artisans of that later era had attempted to replicate it, they’d been inclined to go too far. Not that that made the piece a fake, exactly. Fine works from the best Qing reigns had enormous value, whether after a Ming prototype or not. The painting, of a young scholar being carried over the waves on the back of a dragon after a triumph in the imperial examinations, was finely wrought, if a touch mechanical, in the way Qing wares often were. She needed more details.

  She turned the flask over and looked at its base. Da qing qian long nian zi. Made in the reign of Qianlong, great Qing Dynasty. Plausible. But then she looked more closely at the character qing. Two parts of the left-hand radical were connected by a diagonal stroke, which was technically incorrect.

  That character’s wrong, she thought.

  And then in the next instant, blooming over the first thought before her heart even beat again, she knew she had seen it before. This fluke—or signature, whatever it was—was stored in her memory.

  So she went inside in her mind, to the examination yards. She visualized a quiet night, a stone walk lined with cubicle doors. On each door was a character, a concept she had chosen out of love: similitude and grace and impersonation. Finally she stood in front of the door marked peng, to flatter, to shower with compliments. Here she kept memories of minor imitative works, the lesser fang gu pieces, the merely decorative. Not here. To the next pair of doors, marked zi and da, which together mean vanity; here were memories of the forgers who could not resist leaving telltale signs on their fang gu . . . and here—she looked again—here was the man who had written qing this way. He worked in Jingdezhen in the 1840s, in the reign of Daoguang. He’d operated outside the imperial workshop system, a freelancer. He didn’t last. Foolish of him to have always left his signs on the mark and period. What was his name? Ask again. Wait. Wei Yufen. Yes. Wei Yufen.

  “Wei Yufen,” she said to Dr. Zheng.

  His eyes looked like they were going to drop off his face. He opened his mouth and closed it again as if he thought he must have heard her wrong. “Say it again,” he said.

  “Wei Yufen. This was made by Wei Yufen.”

  “I am amazed!”

  Oh good, she thought, with her usual crashing dissonance of triumph and terror. That meant she was right.

  “So it is a fake?” he prompted.

  She turned back to the piece. It was actually quite wondrously made. “Real or fake, it was made by Wei Yufen in the reign of Daoguang, but after the Ming prototype.”

  “Miss Frank.”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you like a job?”

  “Yes!”

  How awkward she must have seemed then, Lia thought; how young. She was better now. She had experience. No one had to fix her; she was right already. And she could do this. Yes. She finished eating and got up to leave.

  In another restaurant, in the Beijing Club across town, Gao Yideng met his friend Pan, a Vice Minister of Culture. They sat in the high-ceilinged bar, its walls filled with shelves and lined with books. Gao had exactly twenty-five minutes to allocate but appeared relaxed and companionable behind his brandy. “Heard any news?” he asked his friend.

  Pan drank deeply. He understood the question. For years now Gao had been a major donor to several of the museums under Pan’s purview, and Pan had clearly noted a passion for porcelain. Gao loved to know what was being bought and what was being sold within China. He also loved the gossip about things being spirited out of the country. They both knew that as fast as privatization was bringing China’s heirlooms out of the shadows and onto the market, at the same rate they were draining away. It may have been a trickle next to the flood of goods being smuggled in to China, but it was a bad loss all the same. Pan wiped a sheen of sweat off his brow. “There was a shipment of gold-leafed Buddhist statues, Han Dynasty, intercepted in Shenzhen last week. And they caught a fairly sizable cache of porcelain leaving through Yunnan.”

  “What’s going to happen to it?” Gao’s eyes were bright with interest.

  “It will be a choice of several museums. We have to hold more discussions.” When antique masterpieces were seized, they went to the government for allocation—if they made it past corrupt and avaricious local officials.

  Gao listened attentively. Of course, he was not being real with Pan. His questions were atmospheric. What he really wanted to know was what came through between the words. So far, very good. Pan had still not heard anything about his own pots.

  And of course Gao would not be the one to tell him. “My dear friend,” he said with a crinkling of sunny warmth, and raised his glass to touch it against that of the other man. They clicked, raised them to their mouths, and drank, Gao taking his first sip and Pan draining the last drops of his. Gao smiled over the top of his glass, in the dim light from the egg-shaped lamps all around them. “Always a pleasure to see you.”

  Michael Doyle, the wide-chested man from the back court, rolled his bike out to the hutong. The rapid, high-pitched clicking of the wheels followed him out of the main gate, where life and noise rose around him. He swung onto the seat in a single movement and pedaled into the brown miasma, weaving through the people, their talking and laughter, the carts and the bicycles down Houyuan'ensi Hutong. The lane all but disappeared ahead of him in the dirty mist.

  It was unwise to exercise outdoors in Beijing, even now, even after they’d improved the air some, but Doyle didn’t care. He’d been ill already. It might come back but this was no longer a thing he feared. Not that he wanted it. But he was prepared.

  He rode west through the flat, interweaving labyrinth of walled lanes, the mass of his body balanced easily on the thin wheels of the bike. Through the open doors set in stone blocks, worn down by centuries, he peered into the bricked-up tunnels where people lived. There were only a few neighborhoods like this left around the city, this infill of tightly built rooms that had used up every square meter of the old courtyard homes decades ago, as the population swelled and people needed more space.

  He remembered the house he’d had in L.A., the flat-angled roof and the little white room next to the kitchen where they ate. But he was here to forget that. He put his mind on sounds. There was the creak of wheels coming up behind him, punched through with the vendor’s three-syllable cry. Wind made a shushing ruffle in the overhanging branches. He pedaled under the trees.

  Wooden gates passed him with old brass joins, geometric patterns of rivet; tiny shops with sliding aluminum windows selling soda, gum, cigarettes, and local phone service, one yuan a call. He thought about all the things that had brought him here, the white wall and the IV drip of his own hospital room; his wife’s suitcases, ready. She’d been a saint to him through his illness. Nothing
but love. Didn’t leave until he got better.

  So he’d taken this fellowship. He wanted to cycle for hours in the smoggy hutongs. He wanted to pound the extreme border. He wanted to leave life behind. China forced him awake with its strangeness, despite the dark-gray, head-in-the-yoke heaviness of its quotidian life. He had thought it would be a good place to let go. So far it had been.

  Finally his mind felt empty and good as he hurtled west through the leaf-spotted light, legs going, fingers loose on the handles. He breathed deep, as deep as he could, almost feeling the particulates, welcoming them, inviting them in to sear and settle on his lungs. World, he thought, come in.

  5

  After she’d found the chicken cup she’d called Gao’s shouji, or handphone, using the number he had written on his card that first night. She left a message that she would like to talk to him. He left her one in return asking her to meet him for dinner, apologizing with precise courtesy for not having invited her to dinner already, he was at fault, he’d been away from Beijing. So she took a taxi that evening to the address he gave her.

  The car passed rows of stores selling Mongolian cashmere, Italian shoes, designer watches, and the newest flat-screen televisions. She saw an old man on a wooden stool selling candied crab apples on skewers, the sticks radiating in a sticky red starburst from his pole. Next to him stood another man, leaning on a Mercedes, talking on a cell phone. Just past this they turned into an alley, bouncing on potholes and uneven pavement, past the office blocks and the white-tile apartment buildings. These high-rise palaces were where most Beijingers seemed to be living now. They were full of the things that promised to make life right: rushing elevators, reliable plumbing, and high-floor windows revealing a stationary army of near-identical buildings receding across the city’s smoggy plain. But down here the alley twisted between smaller, older buildings, and the car finally stopped in front of one of them with a simple wood-framed entrance in Japanese style.

  Inside, Gao Yideng was waiting for her on the floor of a tatami-matted room, shoes off. He rose to greet her. He probably had multiple wireless devices in his pockets connecting him with associates all over China, but here in this little restaurant room he appeared solitary and relaxed. “How do you find the pots?” he asked.

  “They are magnificent. As you must know.” They settled in across from each other.

  He poured green tea. “I hope you understand why at first we failed to mention the full . . . extent of things.”

  “I think I do,” she said. And in fact, despite the shock of arriving here and seeing hundreds of pieces, that aspect of the situation now seemed favorable. Only she and Dr. Zheng knew, and their position was undeniably better for it.

  Food he had selected began arriving at the table. They talked about Beijing, the modernization, the rate at which everything was being wiped away. Sake was served. They both leaned back slightly from their cushions to allow the kimonoed Chinese waitress to pour. Neither touched the alcohol. “There is one piece that fascinates me,” she said finally.

  “Which?”

  “The chicken cup. Do you know it?”

  “From the reign of Chenghua, that one?”

  “That one.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know it.”

  She took her time eating a small piece of eel off the tips of her chopsticks. Interesting, she thought; he knew the piece and he said so, straight out. Moreover, he knew it was Chenghua. She wondered what else he knew. Obviously he had an affinity for pots. Which type was he, the tycoon or the connoisseur?

  In her experience, those who collected pots, who owned them, fell often into two types. There were the corporate heads, tycoons, self-made men who had achieved wealth and now wanted discernment. They wanted the best, all at once. It was not necessary for them to love what they bought.

  Then there was another kind of buyer—the person like her, but with money, who loved pots. Sometimes these clients had art-history knowledge rivaling that of well-known scholars. Sometimes they were obsessive and crazy. From Gao’s knowledge, and his clear avidity, she would take him to be the porcelain-lover type. On the other hand, he fit the life-profile of the tycoon. “The Chenghua cup is lovely,” she said. “A wonderful piece.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But if it is real”—she spoke casually—“if it is real its discovery is rather important. Forgive me if you already know. I have no wish to waste your time outlining the obvious. But only eighteen of these cups are known to have survived in the world. That would make this the nineteenth cup. If it’s real.”

  He took an edamame pod from the plate and easily, using only the tips of his chopsticks, split the pod and extracted the shiny little bean. She watched with admiration. She couldn’t control chopsticks like that. He placed the bean inside his mouth. “If it is real,” he repeated.

  “If it is real, its discovery is of importance,” she said succinctly, still keeping her voice light, playing out his line.

  He looked at her. “Is it not the case that of the eighteen cups, two are here in China? Among the holdings of the Palace Museum?”

  “That’s so,” she said.

  “Most are in Taipei.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Eight. Mr. Gao. Are you saying that this is one of the two cups from Beijing?”

  “No,” he said in quick retreat. “I don’t know that.”

  “I see.” She put down her chopsticks and smiled at him across the table. Her braid had come over her shoulder and she reached up and flipped it back. She could feel him looking at her ears again. Take a good look and wonder about me, she thought. You probably want to know why I use these old-fashioned things instead of implants. You’ll never find out.

  Of course Lia could have had cochlear implants if she’d wanted them. She didn’t. She didn’t want a plate surgically implanted in her head. Moreover, she’d be trading one electronic universe of sound for another, neither being the full, natural spectrum experienced by those who could truly hear. She’d gotten used to her set of speakers. They didn’t catch the high frequencies—the jingle of keys, the microwave buzzer—as well as implants did, but she really didn’t care. She didn’t want to change. She liked the ease with which hearing aids could be plucked out. No plate inside you. Your head was yours, your world your own.

  “Mr. Gao. I must compliment you. Whether the cup is real or not, it’s an exquisite piece. Beautifully made. Very hoi moon,” she said, and then repeated in Mandarin: “Very kai men jian shan,” Open the door on a view of mountains. “Truly it is one of the nicest works I’ve ever seen.” She looked at him steadily. “So perhaps on reflection you will decide not to sell it.”

  “Perhaps,” he agreed. “Suppose the cup is not real.” He looked back up at her. “Who do you say it is who made it?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that. Not yet.” She picked up her mottled stoneware cup of green tea and drank from it, left her sake cup alone. Interesting little lagniappe of a power play. Neither touched the alcohol. “But you could help me also, Mr. Gao, if you would be so kind. I can better sell your pots with a full story. Do you mind? A few questions?”

  “Of course I do not mind.” He leaned his bare gleaming head forward, the spirit of cooperation.

  “If I may—how did the pots come into your hands?” She let the question hang, and waited. She was prepared, of course, for him to lie; that was her departure point, her ground-zero assumption. If he was standing in for a government sale he would have any number of reasons for not wanting to tell her so. The decision-makers behind the transaction would not want it publicly known. In any case he had the visa. That said certain things.

  He settled his chopsticks down on their porcelain rest before answering her. “Originally, the collection was bought from a family in southern China. That was some time ago. It has been in storage.”

  She wrinkled her brow. Must have been some pretty deep storage, she thought. Things this big were very hard to keep quiet. “Before that,” she said. �
��Where was it before that?”

  “Buried on this family’s land.”

  “How?”

  “No one knew. Everyone who lived there was killed in the war. Another branch of the clan moved to the land later. Many years after that, they found all these crates while they were digging a garden.”

  Gao and Lia smiled at each other. The smile acknowledged that the tale he’d just told her was a very, very common story in the Chinese art world—a cliché, really. It was a patently predictable story to pass off. It could be false. It could also be the truth. “It is true,” he said as if following her thought.

  She felt oddly inclined to believe him—maybe. “Just your own guess,” she said. “How do you feel the pots came to be there?”

  He gave her a long look filled with speculation. Finally he shook his head. “No one knows.”

  No, she thought, that’s wrong. Someone knows. Stories, flares of lightning, surprising events: These were like wafts of smoke or fragrance over a town or a rural district. Many people sensed them. People whispered to each other. And they remembered. It was there.

  She waited and watched.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said at length. “It’s possible these pots were separated from the Palace in 1913.”

  “1913?” She was surprised. This date seemed to come from nowhere. The war years, when the collection was in flight, were what she would have expected.

  He saw her surprise. “It was because of your countryman! Your American! Mr. J. P. Morgan! It was he who in 1913 tried to buy the contents of the Forbidden City for twenty million dollars.” Gao pronounced the words with pinpoint pleasure.

  “Ah yes! You are right. I know that one. A great story. And what if he had succeeded!” And he almost had. Morgan dispatched an American man to Peking to make the deal, and the whole thing came shockingly close to consummation. But then Morgan died—with no warning. The deal stopped in its tracks.

  “It has been said that some works were moved out of the Palace for inventory during those talks,” Gao told her. “In such cases there are always things that are never moved back.”