A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  The driver was carrying Lia that morning along the shores of Houhai Lake, the bending trees half obscuring the long finger of water. She remembered that this was the body of water to which candidates who failed the imperial examinations came to drown themselves. There were always those who chose to hurl themselves in the water rather than return home to face their parents. Now their ghosts were here forever, mourning by the banks of the lake.

  The idea that anyone could feel so tied to their family interested her. She herself, in her tiny family web, had always seemed to be someone’s project, and this was a thing to be escaped as much as a thing to which to cleave. There was only so much that she could endure of being repaired by others. Albert had never done it. Dr. Zheng had never done it. That was one reason she respected them, loved them.

  Her real father had never tried to fix her, not that she respected him or loved him. She felt a bitter chuckle weave up her throat. She had only met him once. She had tracked him down; the encounter had been so dispiriting that she had often wished she was able to forget it. In her world she kept the door on him closed.

  She’d found him living in a single room, subsisting on four or five minor patents. He was her and her mother to the tenth power: junk, piles, effluvia. There were subscriptions to professional journals, indexed, spanning decades. There were years of canceled book-request slips from the public library, alphabetized. He was a prisoner of proliferation. Like her apartment, his was crowded—but it was squalid, not artful. And the last insult: He looked like her. Same columnar frame, same drooping eyes. Although she was beautiful, in her way, she knew: She had long, abundant hair and eyes that may have been a bit sad but also radiated humor and intelligence and warmth. And she knew she had a high-wattage grin. She could always crack the ice with a smile. No, she wasn’t so like him.

  Forget him, she thought.

  Just then the driver turned away from the lake and into the gate of the villa. Her heart lifted at the thought of today’s pots, just ahead, waiting. She didn’t need to think about her father. He could stay in his memory room. He didn’t have to come out.

  In Hong Kong Stanley Pao sat back on a leather couch and talked to Gao Yideng on the phone. “And for what percentage? Mmm, I don’t know. Five more tenths of a point. Yes.” Stanley smiled faintly. He was in his seventies, a sleekly plump, patrician man who wore his white hair pomaded straight back, just long enough to disappear neatly under his collar. He liked to sit with one hand on his rounded stomach. He spoke in slow, measured tones and never dropped his refinement of manner. He lived alone here in this magnificent old apartment in Happy Valley, which looked over the racecourse. He had always lived alone, except for his prized Pekingese dogs. He had never married. He was the sort of man after whose personal life people did not ask and whose partners, whoever they were, did not appear with him in public.

  Not that he didn’t let some of his vices show. One of them was horse racing. Not only could he see the track from his windows, he could see the giant screen over the track for simultaneous video close-ups. At dawn he watched the horses exercise as he took his tea. But mostly, he followed horse racing on his computer, which was always kept running on a side table in his porcelain room. A keyboard always lay beside him on the couch. Results from races around the world appeared regularly, and in between, charts of thoroughbred bloodlines and streaming reams of racing data ran endlessly down the screen. Offtrack betting, in some form or another, was available in most cities of the world. Horses raced every day. Stanley played right here, placing bets, paying out or collecting through the keyboard on the sofa beside him. It was one of the games he loved in life. Though business was fun too. He listened to Mr. Gao. Ah, now the commission sounded right. Now he was getting close to feeling satisfied. “I think this will be possible,” he said. Nothing jolted Stanley off his phlegmatic calm. “Of course,” he said, “the porcelain must be fully inside Hong Kong.”

  Both men, several thousand miles apart, smiled into their phones. This was the beauty of Hong Kong’s law, as they knew.

  “So I transfer it to the American representatives. They’ll contract their own packing and crating?” Stanley knew the details of a job like this well. He had been a private porcelain dealer for many years, receiving selected clients in this room. He only served those lucky enough or powerful enough to be invited here to his home, where his beloved prizewinning dogs ran free in the outer rooms; where here, in his climatically controlled inner chamber with the racetrack view, millions of dollars’ worth of rare porcelain was on casual display, cluttered, grouped on tables and floor and shelves and every available space. Fine pots from the Ming and Qing and the Tang and the Song. Piles of art books with relevant cross-references to museum collections around the world. Yet there were many fake pots in the room too. There were fakes even an amateur could spot, and also fakes that would fool anyone—even him, the éminence, if he didn’t know better. The interplay between doubt and faith, between the eye believing and the eye distrusting—this was the real surge for Stanley Pao. This was what kept his soul afloat.

  He listened carefully to Gao Yideng, but at the same time he also made a decision about betting on a race at Saratoga. One hundred U.S. dollars on number three in the fifth. An amusement, an intriguing moment he would set up for himself, later when the results of the race came in. “And the Americans and I will arrange air shipment.”

  “Yes.”

  “And none of the pieces will be sold in Hong Kong?”

  “No.”

  The elder man allowed himself a long and thoughtful sigh of disappointment. “Regrettable,” he said. Pots of truly celestial quality were so impossible to find.

  He himself swept Hong Kong for imperial pots constantly. Daily. He spent a lot of time on Hollywood Road, that narrow looping curve on the hill above Central where the dealers in art and antiquities strung along in constant competition with one another.

  When Stanley walked down Hollywood Road, his first clue that a shipment had come through was the sight of Unloader Ma—a big, beefy Chinese who wore balloon-shaped shorts and a billowing T-shirt the year round. He was the man who took the crates off the trucks. He went up and down the street freelancing.

  When Unloader Ma had things down and stacked on the sidewalk, Uncrater Leung would take over. Leung was the opposite of Ma. He was a wiry, well-muscled man, older, gray-headed, with attentive, long-fingered hands. In his trademark cargo vest with innumerable pockets, he’d go through the mountains of rough-textured pink paper in the packing crates, removing the pieces in their bubble wrap but also checking every inch, never missing any separated handles or lids or loose pieces. While he worked, the pink paper would twist and wave in the wind down the street. Often this would be the first sign Stanley Pao would see—a skinny, wind-skipping banner of pink paper. And then Pao would walk faster, because he would know Uncrater Leung was working up ahead. And that meant something new was in town.

  And with any luck, it might be something good.

  There was one other way to find out if something choice had come into Hong Kong, and that was to go down and eat at the Luk Yu. Not at dawn, when the venerable four-story teahouse was packed with Chinese stockbrokers. Not at eight or nine, when the people who kept birds came in. Not at ten or eleven, when the art dealers showed up. The best way to find out was to go at noon, when the ah chans came for breakfast. They always ate at the Luk Yu. They hated for their rivals to see them and know whether they were in town or not, but at the same time they couldn’t resist seeing which of their rivals was there. So they all went to the Luk Yu.

  And when they celebrated, it was special.

  They always did it the same way. There’d be abalone spilling over platters, big steaks, baat-tow or eight-head, eight to a catty, smothered in oyster gravy. And then there’d be the pig’s lung soup with soaked almonds and stewed pomelo skin. Roast squab with Yunnan ham. Then shark’s fin. The victorious ah chan, the one who had scored, would treat all his friends. And two
thousand Hong Kong dollars would be stuffed in his favorite waiter’s pocket on the way out.

  “All right,” Stanley said to Gao Yideng. “Until our next meeting.” As soon as he clicked off, he dialed his chauffeur. He had an itch to go to Central and sniff his luck on the humid air, see how his destiny hung around him, open his senses to the bracing aromas of portent. “Ah Yip,” he said in his customary drawl when the second ring clicked over to his driver’s voice. “Bring up the car.” He looked at his watch. It was quarter to twelve. “I am of a mind to lunch at the Luk Yu.”

  “I’ll take this one,” Lia said to the woman behind the counter, and pointed to a tabletop box of fake Peking enamel, topped with a large brass knob shaped like two mandarin ducks. Her mother would love it. She might even give it a spot on the sideboard in her little dining room, where the cream of her animal canisters from around the world was displayed. This was by no means Anita’s only collection but one of her longest-running, and it gave Lia real pleasure to unearth something that would make an addition to it. Her mother had spent years acquiring animal canisters, figurines of Depression glass, geometric trivets, and antique photographs of men in military uniform, to name only a few of her obsessions. Anita had been buying these, scheming over them, placing them and rearranging them for years.

  It was always a great moment when she presented a new find to Anita. She could feel the glow between herself and her mother, the light of pleasure that could not be faked. Lia sensed at those moments that she was fulfilling her mother’s truest desire, for Anita lived through the lines of her collections and wanted Lia to live there too.

  Lia smiled to herself, watching the clerk in the Beijing shop wrap up the faux-enamel box. She loved her mother, even though the constant half-giddy improvisation that was Anita’s parenting had included some terrible mistakes.

  As a small child Lia had only one annual link with her father, a Christmas card. These cards were among her first treasures. She had whole myth systems around them. He existed; these were his relics. One day she’d find him.

  And then when she was nine she learned that all the cards had been written and mailed by her mother. Every year her mother had sat down and invented a message to her daughter, faked another person’s handwriting, and gone out and mailed it to her. Anita so needed everything to be right—at least, on the surface, to look right—that this for her was a nurturing act. Years later Lia understood. But then, on that day, she felt only rage.

  She locked herself in her room. To her waves of tears and her kicking of the wall, Anita kept coming back with her sweet, half-reasonable protests. She’d lost track of him, she’d wanted to lose track of him, it had been best, she hadn’t wanted Lia to be hurt. Anything to keep her from being hurt. Yet Lia felt at that moment as if she were being more than hurt, worse than hurt, maimed actually, killed by love. “But it’s because I love you!” Anita kept calling to her through the door.

  Lia threw all the cards, one for each year of her life, into her metal wastebasket. Fakes. They were fakes. She lit a match to them. She knew she would pay for this later, but for once in her life she did not care. They went up in a quick whuff of flames. Only then would she open her door and stand defiantly in front of the little fire, the backs of her legs smarting and tingling from the jumping heat.

  Now she was a mature woman and she saw that her mother had done the best she could. Of course she could not remake the world for her daughter. Why would she even try? And yet Lia herself tried, she knew she did; she tried all the time. Her system was just a little different. Better too. She fit the package into her purse and stepped out of the shop into the roaring street.

  At the same time in the south, in Jingdezhen, the ah chan answered his phone. “Wei.”

  “Old Bai.” It was Zhou.

  “Ei,” Bai answered companionably. In all the loose-knit society of ah chans, there were many who called themselves Bai’s friends, but Zhou was one he really trusted. It was Zhou’s help he had asked with this job.

  “The others are worried,” Zhou said.

  “About Hu and Sun?” Bai had a bad feeling himself about the two of them trying to move that pair of huge famille-rose vases.

  “They’ve not arrived.”

  “Oh,” Bai said. Not good. Very not good. This was their third day out. Hu and Sun should be in Hong Kong by now.

  “They’re not there. I’ve talked to Pak and Ling.”

  Gentle knots formed in Bai’s midsection. “Call Old Lu,” he advised. “As soon as there’s word in Hong Kong, he’ll know.”

  “All right,” Zhou said. “Keep your handphone.”

  “It’s on,” Bai assured him. He was walking down the street, taking his wife out to an evening meal.

  “I’ll call you later.”

  Bai slipped the phone in his pocket and went on walking with Lili along the putting, honking, cement-and-asphalt streets with their open-mawed retail stores and stalls. Bins spilling out into the street were piled with baskets, metal goods, hardware, but most of all porcelain, because porcelain was the heart and bones of Jingdezhen. Bai bought his wife a length of plum velvet and he saw with satisfaction how the package made an acquiescent weight against her legs, and how she smiled at the feeling of it against her.

  He felt good in his fine cotton shirt, open two buttons down, his woven leather shoes. Bai liked to dress as if he were a wealthy Italian stepping off a yacht. An art dealer, a learned man.

  It had rained the night before, leaving the low concrete town in a state of fresh-washed June optimism. Bai and Lili turned off Jingyu and walked down a repeating, narrowing pattern of side streets, their road surfaces cracked and potted, sidewalks heaved up around the swelling, pulsing roots of trees. Here in the south, life multiplied almost before one’s eyes. It was one of the things that gave Jiangxi Province its red-soiled beauty. They stepped over the erupted, corrugated sidewalk and into the Hui Min, a tiny open-air restaurant.

  Lili was the third wife he had taken. Each of the women knew, sketchily, about the others, but they preferred not to know much and also to forget what they did know, as it suited. Each of his wives was from someplace else, as he originally was, undocumented, part of China’s floating population. He kept each of them in simple comfort if not in style. They all knew he had more than one place to lay his head, and with all things considered they accepted this. He was like a lot of other ah chans this way. They added wives. It was a tacit return to an old pattern of concubinage, although this was the modern world and one had to keep up appearances. The wives had to be in different places. They couldn’t all live under one roof as was done in the past. The ah chans liked to joke to each other that their wives, of radically descending ages, would all meet only once—at the man’s funeral.

  Neither of Bai’s other two wives lived in Jingdezhen. One lived in Houtai Township, a village in the hills forty kilometers northeast. The other—the original girl he had married near home, in his youth, under the naive impression he would remain tied to her forever—still lived outside of Changsha. He visited both of them when he could. He enjoyed seeing them. But Lili was his favorite. She was the love match. She was the newest and the youngest.

  Still, here in Jingdezhen, he didn’t stay with Lili all the time. He spent many nights in his own simple cement-walled apartment, a place he had bought and with it finally obtained his hukou, his residency permit, in Jingdezhen. It had been an important thing to have at the time he bought it and still today had value in the largely privatized economy, for it still got a person certain medical care and benefits and an acknowledged geographic notch in society.

  In his own place, Bai liked to stay alone. This was where he kept his books, his collections of auction catalogs, his museum publications, his files of photocopied articles from art magazines and academic journals. If he wanted to be a great dealer one day, he had to learn. He knew it was so.

  And as long as he could afford it, as long as he could continue to prevail over his risks, he’d keep
Lili in her tidy little room down in the warren of quickie dwellings below Jixing Street. She didn’t mind. It was better than the dirt village in which she grew up.

  Lili was a good girl, round-faced and red-cheeked. She was completely open to him and he felt safe with her. She loved him without any adult reserve. It made him want to do anything for her. They had married quickly and informally at the county registry office. With her he had begun to think, for the first time, that he might be ready to have a son. Here in Jingdezhen, or—if he really got half a million ren min bi—maybe in Hong Kong.

  When they married he had brought her to his apartment, just for a few days until he secured her a room down below the lake. The first night he had taken her on the bed. She had lain still with her arms and legs spread, as if nailed to the earth, but she had smiled up at him when he lay over her, her eyes round with surprise and pleasure, and he’d seen how she would learn. Late that night he awoke to see one light burning, on his desk, and to see her elegantly naked back to him, cut down the middle by her black braid, her face bent in wonder over the turned pages of an art book, porcelains, celestial perfections such as she, a village girl, had never seen. He lay perfectly still, watching her. For a moment he just wanted to watch her, her response to beauty, the glow of her pleasure over the rustling pages, while he let his imagination play over what he might do with her next.

  And now they entered the restaurant by sidling past its two giant burners out on the root-buckled sidewalk, the powerful flames chuffing up around the woks. The owner let out a hoarse cry of greeting and they called back, loud and good-natured.

  They sat in one of the two tables inside the stall, round, covered with white plastic. A tiny electric fan mounted on the wall rotated over them. “Have the eggplant with chiles and onions,” he told Lili solicitously. “Have the pork belly with potatoes.” Then he beckoned the owner in her sauce-splashed white apron. “Two Pepsis!”

  Lili smiled at this unexpected pleasure, her polyester red-checkered sleeve touching his, her arm against him discreetly. He felt the warmth from her. The Pepsi came in big, cold plastic bottles. To him it was a slosh of too-sweet yin, it made his teeth hurt, but was it not what international people drank? And was that not what he was now?