The Eye of Jade

by Diane Wei Liang

  “How much do you think the dealer originally paid for it?”

  “I’d say perhaps thirty-five to forty thousand yuan. That’s a lot of money for a Chinese, especially when the seller is from the provinces.”

  “Do you know which dealer bought the bowl?”

  “No. But you may be able to find out. It won’t be easy to get people to talk, but everything has a price—especially these days. Ah!” Pu Yan’s eyes lit up. He waved his right hand. “Here comes my granddaughter.”

  Mei turned around. The girl in pink approached carefully. Her cheeks were flushed with warmth from skating. Her flat chest moved rapidly up and down. As soon as she saw her grandfather’s extended arms, she ran to him, her skinny ponytail flapping behind her.

  “Hong Hong, this is Miss Wang, the lady I told you about.”

  Hong Hong looked at Mei with her big eyes.

  “Would you like some coconut milk?” Pu Yan whispered into his granddaughter’s ear. The ponytail nodded. Pu Yan waved at a passing waitress for the drink and asked Hong Hong to sit next to him.

  “How do you know Old Chen?” Pu Yan asked, relaxing in his chair.

  “Uncle Chen is an old friend of my mother’s. They went to the same high school in Shanghai,” said Mei. “Where do you know Uncle Chen from?”

  “Did he not tell you?”

  “No.”

  Pu Yan sat up and pushed the teacup to the side. Mei had a feeling that he was going to tell her a long story. People of Uncle Chen and her mother’s generation loved talking about the past.

  “Chen Jitian and I met through sheep,” said Pu Yan earnestly.

  “Sheep?”

  “Have you been to Inner Mongolia?”

  “No,” said Mei. “But one day I’d like to go there.”

  “You should. It’s a beautiful place, in some ways a bare place, good for the soul. I was there during the Cultural Revolution. We were called smelly intellectuals back then. Chairman Mao said we needed reform, so we were sent to labor camps to work with our hands and feet.

  “Before I went there, I thought of Inner Mongolia as lush grassland dotted with white sheep under blue sky. I imagined lazy summer days filled with the scents of lavender and dandelions. How wrong I was. Life wasn’t like that at all. Most of Inner Mongolia is desert, the Gobi Desert.

  “Winters were long and harsh, summers were hot and short. There were sandstorms in spring and autumn. To make things worse, we had a diet that consisted of only one ingredient—mutton: braised, boiled, roasted, or cooked whichever way. Whenever you walked into the canteen, the smell hit you.

  “One thing I did like was herding sheep. I liked to take them to a good feed. I liked to be alone with the vastness of that wonderland. Most of all, I enjoyed being far away from the camp, far away from being bothered. I had this old smelly dog called Not Yet Dead who liked nothing better than lying at my feet and farting. I liked him, too.

  “One day I decided to explore a new steppe that someone had told me about. I got there at noon. The sun was shining. Clouds moved like train engines across the sky. I let the sheep loose and lay down on the grass.

  “Do you know how it felt to be there? It felt like being lost at sea. The wild landscape extended as far as the eye could see. It was easy to forget who you were in that overwhelming vastness. The land had such a power. It could make you lose your sense of self and make you feel as though you were a drop of water melting away in what was merely an illusion of life.

  “I think I must have gone to sleep after a while, because when I woke up, the sky was dark. The wind had picked up, swaying the long grass. I kicked my useless dog, and we started to gather the sheep together to go back. But not long after we started off, a sandstorm caught us. Soon we couldn’t see where we were going.

  “Somewhere along the way—not exactly going back to the camp, as it turned out—we ran into another herd of sheep. The two herds got mixed up. The other herd had two shepherds, one very young, almost a boy, and the other a stout man who was confused and out of his wits. So we all shouted and tried to pull our herds apart, trying to move on—where to, I had no idea. Not Yet Dead jumped up and down, barking.

  “But we couldn’t do it, so eventually, we herded all the sheep in the same direction. It was a miracle that we ended up back at my camp. I remember all these people running out to help us. Many of them had been watching and waiting for a long time.

  “After the sheep had been locked up, I invited the two shepherds to my dorm for tea. The chubby one was Chen Jitian. It turned out that the Xinhua News Agency had a labor camp not far from ours.

  “From then on, Old Chen and I frequently met up with our sheep. We shared food and chatted about life. Out there on the grassland, we had a lot of time, and we talked about all kinds of things. Sometimes we read Mao’s Little Red Book, the only book we had with us. Sometimes we talked about history or art or relics.

  “At the time, we were both frustrated with life, as almost everyone was. But I could sense that the kind of frustration was somehow deeper with Lao Chen. Yet because he was so nice, so agreeable and mild-tempered, his complaints were like a whimper compared to mine. The Chens moved back to Beijing a year before we did. But we kept in touch.”

  “Do you still see him and his family?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to. We are all so busy these days. I was glad to hear that he is finally a senior editor. He’d wanted it for a long time. I was happy, too, when he called. I used to help him a lot with his herds—he was probably the worst shepherd in the steppe, and in the two years I knew him, he never improved.”

  Hong Hong looked tired. Mei waved the waiter over and asked for the bill.

  “Would you like a ride home?” Mei ask Pu Yan. “I’ve got a car.”

  “Whoa, you must do pretty well!” exclaimed Pu Yan. Then he said in his singsong voice, “No, thank you. From here, the underground path leads directly to the subway station.” He took his granddaughter’s hand. “We will be home before long.”

  NINE

  THERE IS NEVER A CLEARER SPRING day than the one after a yellow sandstorm. That morning the sky was as blue and infinite as the virgin sea. The air was brisk, filled with watery particles of the morning mist now soaking up warm sunshine.

  Mei wore a pea-green coat belted over a black turtleneck sweater and black trousers. Her hair was pinned up in a French twist. A fake gold-chained Chanel bag she had bought at the Silk Market dangled from her shoulder as she walked, high heels clicking. She looked like someone with money, the only type of person who could afford to shop in Liulichang.

  Liulichang, the oldest shopping area in Beijing, was famous throughout China for works of art and antiques. A short distance from Tiananmen Square, outside Peace Gate, Liulichang flourished during the Ming Dynasty, when the emperor banned shops and theaters within the city walls.

  Mei remembered coming with her mother to the western half of Liulichang—the part that dealt with ancient books, calligraphy, and traditional Chinese ink painting—to buy ink stone and rubbings and to have Mama’s paintings mounted on scrolls. It was on one of these trips that her mother bought Mei a seal and had her name engraved on it by the craftsman at Rongbaozhai, the Studio of Glorious Treasures. But they had not been here in recent years. Liulichang was now frequented mostly by foreign tourists and the rich.

  The antiques market ran along the eastern half of the street. It had been rebuilt in the 1980s in the style of the previous century: two-story mansions with gray butterfly roofs and burgundy windowpanes. Mei eliminated state-owned shops from her search, as well as the bazaar types rented by small vendors. Only the big privately owned shops could afford to buy and sell something as expensive as the Han ceremonial bowl.

  There was one such shop on the north side of the street. It had a wide front room lined with glass cabinets of ink stones, jade, and coral ornaments. Mei’s first instinct was that it might just be the kind of place the seller of the Han Dynasty bowl could have stopped at. But once sh
e walked into the back room, she was disappointed to find it packed with Chinese ink paintings.

  On the wall, a large poster advertised a painter whose work was prominently displayed in the room. The artist was a National Second Grade painter and a member of the Chinese Painting Academy. The room itself was taken up by two large wooden tables piled with rolls of paper, color, ink, and brushes. A man dressed neatly in a tailor-made Mao jacket—and who bore a noticeable resemblance to the artist on the poster—sat on a long bench.

  When Mei asked, the man said he was indeed the artist, and he could paint anything on request. “How about a phoenix, like this?” He pointed at one of his paintings hanging on the wall. “Or red plum bloom in snow, perhaps?”

  Mei declined, thanking the artist, and left. She felt irritated that she had disappointed him. He reminded her of her mother. Ling Bai painted traditional Chinese ink paintings, too. She always said that her paintings weren’t very good, but Mei loved them and had filled her apartment with them.

  Mei crossed the street and entered a shop on the ground floor of a grand mansion. The shop stocked all kinds of goods, from medicine cabinets, wooden pillows, brides’ chests, and bronze Buddhas to opium pipes, stone tablets, and jade. Things seemed to be organized by size and height: Large pieces were stacked up by the back wall, while smaller items were displayed within reach of the shopkeeper’s hands. The room was dark. To compensate, there were a few traditional silk lamps, casting shadows.

  “Hello, miss, looking for something specific?” Mei heard a crisp voice coming from behind her. She turned around and saw a boy with smiling eyes.

  “Whatever you like, I can give you a really good price.” The boy came closer.

  “Is the boss here?” Mei asked. “I’d like a word.”

  The boy was disappointed. His smile shrank a little. “Uncle, someone wants to see you!” he hollered.

  Part of the black shadow that had covered most of the back wall broke off. It began to change shape. The light from the window drew out a profile—a flat nose, small eyes, age spots, and wrinkles that looked like fine cuts. It was an ordinary face, easily missed. The old man wore a black Tang jacket and a pair of black wide trousers, giving the illusion that he could walk through shadows. He peered about, moving as quietly as night.

  “This little sister wants to talk to you!” the boy yelled.

  When he reached her, Mei saw that the old man was a fraction shorter than she was.

  “I am disturbing you.” Mei took out a picture of the ceremonial bowl. “But I want to ask whether you have seen this?”

  “You need to speak up, my uncle doesn’t hear too well,” the boy said. He shouted to the old man: “The little sister asks whether you’ve seen this bowl!”

  The old man studied the picture, holding it inches from his eyes. He stared at it with such concentration that he could have been looking for some invisible code. “You a police?” he asked, rolling his tongue at the end of the sentence, the old Beijing way.

  “No. I’m a collector!” Mei shouted.

  The old man stared into her face the same way he had looked at the picture. Mei looked straight back at him, trying to catch a trace of his thoughts. But she couldn’t. This was a quiet man, she thought, who took his time and did things in slow motion.

  The old man returned the picture and said, rolling his eyes, “Sorry, never seen it before.” He turned around and walked back into the shadows.

  Mei bit her lip. For another minute, she watched the old man randomly rearranging his stock. The boy escorted her to the door and said, “Please walk slowly.”

  In one shop after another, the same thing happened. No one would tell Mei anything.

  Frustrated, she decided to break for lunch. She headed east toward Forward Gate, where one could find hundreds of restaurants, ranging from the most expensive Original Peking Duck House to small home-cooking establishments.

  Little shops crammed the narrow hutongs. Goods hung from low roofs like United Nations flags. People from all walks of life had come to the area to shop. Grannies carrying bamboo baskets, usually in pairs, hunted for small household goods like batteries, dishwashing liquid, and steel cooking knives as long as bricks. They waved the knives in the air, then tested them in shaving motions on their palms.

  “Not sharp,” one told the shopkeeper.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. The manufacturer makes swords for Shaolin monks,” replied the young vendor. He pulled out a bamboo stick and swiftly chopped off a slice.

  Groups of factory men from the provinces, all wearing gray Mao jackets and smoking cigarettes, wandered about excitedly, chatting loudly in their local tongue. Travelers came here to shop before making their connections at the nearby Beijing train station. Food vendors and passing cyclists shouted at the tops of their voices. “Mongolian lamb kebab, no taste, no charge!”

  “How much for the bag?”

  “I’d rather die.”

  “Eight-layer pancakes! Old Beijing taste!”

  Mei found a small restaurant with clean tables and sat down by the window. She ordered a portion of spicy beef noodle soup that came in a bowl the size of a little bucket. She ate her noodles and stared through the lacy curtain at the boy who had been following her. Under a cloud of cigarette smoke, three men chattered loudly at the next table, their faces red from drinking.

  Mei left the restaurant, going west in brisk steps, her heels clicking. Darting around a corner, she paused, glancing back. She went on again, faster. With a few turns, she was back to the wide pedestrian-only street of Liulichang. She stood in the doorway of the first shop she came to and waited. He arrived.

  “Hey, why are you following me?” she asked, leaning against the wooden column at the entrance.

  Mei’s words caught the young racehorse by surprise. He stopped in his tracks. “My uncle asked me to,” he said, flashing an embarrassed smile.

  “Then let’s go see him,” Mei told him.

  Sitting on a dark rosewood stool in the back room, Mei counted out eight hundred-yuan bills, but she didn’t hand them over. “So you have seen it?”

  “Not exactly. I saw only pictures of it. Well, I think they were of the same bowl.”

  “You are not sure?”

  “At my age, nothing is sure,” said the old man. “It was over two weeks ago. A young man came here with some pictures of the bowl and asked me how much I’d pay for it.” He rubbed his hands as he spoke. “Young. I mean the small end of fifty.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “He said the bowl was from the Han Dynasty. We are talking over eighteen hundred years old. That’s what we call ‘hand-burning goods.’ The law says that anything from before 1794 cannot be exported, which means no foreigner will buy it. The Chinese can’t afford it. But that’s not to say there isn’t a way to sell it, you know what I mean? It’s a risky business, getting it out of China, could be life or death. So I told him if it was real, which he swore on his mother’s grave it was, he could be looking at, say, twenty thousand yuan. He never came back.” The dealer spoke slowly, pausing every now and then, searching for big educated words.

  Mei gave the old man a long inspection. His hair had thinned and dried out. His face had a perpetually apologetic look. He ran a biggish shop filled with things no one was interested in buying. Yet he kept piling in more in the hope that something would make him rich and the high fliers would have to look at him differently. Mei thought about the elaborate way he had haggled for the money she was holding. Here was a hustler acting big, she thought. He spoke of “ways” and “hand-burning goods.” From the look of him and his store, he had neither the means nor the nerve for them.

  “Frankly, I didn’t believe him,” said the old man. “There aren’t any real valuable antiques left anymore. My family has been in Liulichang for three generations. In the fifties, they came and bought up anything of value from the shops. Then the Cultural Revolution took care of whatever was left.” He stopped rubbing his hands togethe
r at the words “Cultural Revolution,” and for a moment, his eyes lowered.

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “The government—museums, libraries, universities, you name it,” he said. “Today there are only two ways you can find anything of real value. You are either a lucky grave robber or a lucky traveling antiques scout. This guy was neither.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Grave robbers don’t operate alone, and they usually have a few things to sell. This guy was on his own, and he had only one piece. He wasn’t a scout, either. He knew nothing about antiques. I tested him; he was a total layman.”

  “Do you have a name or a hotel?”

  The old man shook his head. “He only said that he’s from Luoyang.”

  “Can you tell me what he looked like?”

  “Let’s see. Medium height, strong. Big arms—a manual worker, no doubt, maybe a factory man. Not ugly, except for the scar.”

  “Where was this scar?”

  “On the left side of his forehead, just above the eye. It looked as if someone had cut him up pretty good.” The old man held out his hand for the money.

  “One more thing,” said Mei. “Who do you think he sold the bowl to?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Mei didn’t move. She wasn’t going to part with her money so easily. She knew that with people who liked to hustle, the best way to get them was to hustle back.

  “All right, there’s a shady character called Big Papa Wu in that mansion down the street. He isn’t a good dealer, but he seems to be doing very well. There’s something fishy about the man, if you ask me.”

  TEN