A Cup of Light Read online

  The shouts of vendors washed into the car, the roaring and gunning of vehicles, the bursts of recorded music from thrust-open doors. Character signs blinked and glowed in the night, advertising stores, restaurants, businesses; trees and awnings were festooned with light. They turned south on Jiaodaokou and then west into a long hutong, a narrow lane lined with stone walls rising to the old-fashioned curved roof eaves. In through a double gate, then they stopped. Already an attendant was removing Lia’s bags and walking them away to a side court.

  “The driver will return for you at eight in the morning,” Gao Yideng told her from the front seat. He took out another card and wrote on it. “My mobile phone.” He handed it to her. “It’s always on. Call me anytime, dark or light.”

  “Thank you.”

  He looked at her speculatively. She stood under the glow of the streetlamp, not unattractive, odd-looking, prim with intelligence. She also seemed strong. He would enjoy this. “Peaceful night, Miss Fan,” he said courteously.

  “The same.”

  She walked away from the car, thinking, why this place? Foreigners usually stayed at big, well-appointed hotels with conference rooms and Internet trunk lines. Secrecy, she guessed. Discretion.

  Her courtyard did have charm. Four inward-facing rooms looked out from under wood-arched verandas, intricately painted in ersatz Qing style. At that moment she realized she’d have to draw on her last reserves to even walk the last few steps to the door of her room, where surely there waited at least a bed. A yawn ballooned up in her throat. She liked it well enough. It would do.

  When some hours later she opened her eyes again, in that small room in a side court in Beijing, she did not get up right away but let herself drift. Her hearing aids were out and she was in an ocean of peace. She liked to reach back to this, her silent void.

  It was not until she was seventeen months old that she had been diagnosed and fitted with hearing aids. When they were ready, the audiologist pressed them in and suddenly the sharp, blinding noise of the world exploded in her head. She burst into tears, terrified. Nothing in her life could have prepared her to imagine sound. Later, of course, she came to love being able to hear—for what it was. To her it had its limitations. She also liked not hearing. She liked to lie like this, right now, with her hearing aids out, in the silence. The empty space had a soothing pressure.

  She remembered what it was like before. What she did hear was bloated, underwater versions of sounds—especially when people tried to talk at her. It was impossible for her to make any sense of the stretched-out, distorted noises that came from people’s mouths. She also heard what she later understood to be the tinnitus commonly associated with her type of sensory neural hearing loss—a roaring, a remote wind, an intermittent wall of interference. She wondered if this was a set of signals from the world around her, but it too proved unintelligible.

  Luckily the language of objects, with its patterns of form and color and feeling, made sense to her from the start. She started with the things in their apartment. Her mother, Anita, had loved things and constantly acquired them. She shopped, she walked galleries, she cruised flea markets and junk stores. She took Lia. And this in its way was Lia’s first tongue, the language of longing and being sated. By the time she started hearing, and others began to “fix” her, certain things in her were already fixed. Objects spoke to her with their form and their finish, their shape, their physical soul. She wanted to know and feel all of them she could.

  Yet even to understand the objects in a single room, in a single drawer, took such concentration. One leaf contained a neural branchwork of almost infinite complexity, as well as endless shades of green. External factors such as the play of light and the movement of air multiplied things further. Yet the object itself was constant. It stayed where you put it. You could study it for a lifetime, you could spend years knowing it; it would not change. It would still be there, be the same.

  At first she cataloged things by feelings. There was the white-lit joy in the round, perfect forms of her toys; the statuesque upward longing of the legs of a table; the tristesse of sun slanting down on her mother’s grouping of statues and vases and antique dolls. These became her first memory-markers. They led her, in her mental maze, to the rooms of memory that contained what she knew. This was always her system. It was right for her. Much later she read about how Seneca of Rome had been able to repeat back two thousand names in order, and King Cyrus of Persia had recited the law in twenty-two languages—and then she knew she was not alone. Remembering made sense to her. It was something she was born to do, even if it meant she was born in the wrong time. Some kids played sports, some studied piano; she worked at memory.

  She glanced at the clock. Seven-fifty. Driver at eight. She rolled off the bed and stood up and stretched and checked herself in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were puffy. They were gray and expressive, but they had a sad downcast tilt to them. Swollen, they looked pathetic. She applied a cold-soaked cloth to them, counted to thirty, and pulled it off. Nope. The same. She gave up.

  She rummaged in her suitcase. Already things were spilled out over the floor. She pulled out a gray skirt and a long gray tube-shaped top. Had she brought any other colors? She pushed the disorganized pile aside. A flash of red, salmon, chalky white—yes, there were a few other things. Everything was knit, nothing wrinkled. She always traveled like this. She pulled her clothes on in front of the mirror, watching her straight up-and-down body. She looked okay. She always felt she barely got by with dressing and adornment. At least she’d figured out how to put herself together, though it was an act, on a certain level. She leaned over from the waist to fasten her antique-penny-colored hair at the crown of her head, then stood up and braided it all the way down.

  Hitching up her leather bag and her computer, she stepped out into the soft morning air. Shiny-leafed camellias crowded up along the covered walkway. Above the arching roofs the sky was blue, faintly tinged with the brown of pollution. Through the old round gate she could see the car waiting. Oh, my pots! she thought. Finally.

  The driver took her northwest along Gulou, past the drum tower, and through a maze of hutongs to the shores of Houhai Lake, a long, thin finger of water here in north central Beijing. They drove along the lake and then turned sharply into the walled grounds of a sprawling white house trimmed with red verandas.

  A uniformed man in the gatehouse nodded them past. She jumped out and ran in. The garden was gorgeously tended, with light pooling down through trees over rocks and ponds, but she walked quickly through it and up a few slate steps to a stone-paved veranda. At the front door, under the incandescently painted roof overhang, a small man in a brown suit was waiting.

  She returned his polite greetings and followed him in over the worn, thin carpeting. It took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark. Then she saw they were crossing a long living room, green walls reaching high up to ornate moldings and European chandeliers, curtains drawn behind square, Chinese-style arrangements of couches and tea tables. The must and smell of decades rose with every soft scuff of their feet. At the end of the living room, they followed a corridor past a dining room filled with Swiss clocks and a whitewashed, light-filled kitchen. Then the man opened a screen door and they stepped down into an enclosed inner court, across the grass, and up the steps on the other side. He clicked open the glass-paned doors and flung them wide.

  “The light should be here, I believe.” He reached into the room and brushed the wall. The room choked in an incandescent flood.

  She stood staring. It was a vast room filled with wood packing crates. They made four neat rows. She counted. Forty crates. Forty of them. That couldn’t be. There were supposed to be twenty pots, which would be one crate. If there were forty crates of pots, there were— She hesitated.

  “Mr.—” She turned to look for the man. He was gone.

  2

  She went to the first crate, the one nearest her. It opened easily.

  At first all she saw was th
e nest of packed, tight-spiral wood shavings, flattened by years, springing up as if breathing at last. She sank her fingers in and rustled through. There, the first box. Her fingers traced its cotton-cloth-covered shape.

  She unrolled a length of thick felt on the floor and set the indigo-dyed box on it. She eased the ivory bit from its loop and tipped it open.

  Resting in the silk was a covered jar in underglaze blue, ornately bordered and inscribed in a faux-Arabic script. She recognized the Zhengde period, 1506 to 1521. The court had been infatuated at that time with the motifs of the Middle East, like this ten-inch jar, almost perfectly potted. She lifted it and checked the mark and period. Yes. Made in the reign of Zhengde.

  She turned on her laptop and brought up her template for measuring, describing, and recording. She entered everything about the Zhengde jar, carefully, quickly, heart going fast. There had to be eight hundred pots in this room. She made digital photos all the way around the piece, recorded all its physical details. At the same time she memorized what she saw and assigned it a place in her memory world. There were already many thousands of pots in there. Pots were the workhorses of her memory, the marching majority of its inhabitants. She loved adding to their number.

  To do so she used the age-old method of maintaining an imaginary structure. Through history, mnemonists had done this, stored their memories in temples, palaces, or villas they kept in their minds. Lia had chosen the layout of the old imperial examination halls in Beijing, to which candidates once came from all over China to sit for the three-day exam of their lives. The complex had thousands of cubicles in orderly rows, the door to each marked with a different Chinese character. For her this was ideal. She could continue memorizing all her life and never use it all up. At its simplest level, the memory world was a repository of all she knew, indispensable in documenting the history of pots. But on a deeper level, where knowledge and imagination intersected, this world of brick-paved lanes and cubicles sometimes brought history to life so that she could actually see it unfolding. Whole scenes, events, lives played in front of her eyes. She didn’t talk much about this to others. It was hers alone.

  But now she needed to make only a surface visit to the memory world, for provenance on this Zhengde jar. She was quite sure it was genuine, and old. Therefore it had to have been recorded somewhere. And somewhere she would find it.

  She sat down cross-legged on the floor to concentrate, her hands around the jar. She felt it through the pads of her fingers. Once connected to it she walked into memory in her mind’s eye. She saw herself passing through the wooden gates into the examination yard, walking down the central avenue where she kept all the reference lists and catalogs. If this underglaze blue-and-white jar was made during the Zhengde reign, chances were it was described, part of the Palace collection or some private inventory.

  She found it in the middle section of the avenue, which housed the records of the Palace collection. The jar was listed in “Gems of Porcelain,” a catalog of album paintings created for the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century. It was there, one of Qianlong’s choice pieces, the blue-and-white faux-Islamic jar.

  A smile creased her face at that transient sense of completion brought on by a stroke of insight. Listed in Qianlong’s “Gems of Porcelain”. . . She finished the entry and replaced the jar in its silk-padded box. That was one. She returned it to its crate. Now another.

  Standing over the big, old-fashioned wooden packing case, she dug through the shavings with the glee of a child. She could hardly wait for a sufficiently decent hour to call Zheng and tell him.

  The ah chan, called Bai, walked in the new morning light through Tian Hua Tang Park in the town of Jingdezhen. The broad-leafed glade cast shadows on the lawn and the crossing cement paths. This was Jiangxi Province, in the rolling mountains of southeast China. Bai’s home was here, a small apartment on a gravel street up the hill. In that apartment he studied porcelain. The accumulated virtue of thousands of years of art was not easily known, but Bai believed that every hour of study paid him back tenfold in business success. It took a lot of knowledge to tell the real from the fake. And even in the realm of what was real, one had to have knowledge to successfully offer a small price for a quality article, jia lian wu mei, and resell high.

  Bai walked the path down through the park, around the tree-shaded lake, and into downtown Jingdezhen, the center of China’s porcelain world. For a thousand years this entrepôt of artists, potters, painters, and forgers had been home to the emperor’s kilns. Now the place was a mishmash of factories and artisans and backyard producers, a cobweb of ancient streets blaring TV sounds and tinny music and the pneumatic sputter of machinery.

  Through the Communist era, the town had been dominated by huge ceramics factories, turning out modestly priced dishware for the world’s discount stores. But in the early 1990s the era of privatization took hold and most of the factories closed. Instantly, the artists and small manufacturers sprouted again like mushrooms after rain. Once more, Jingdezhen was what it had always been: a decentralized, polyglot ceramics production center where the greatest Chinese artists lived and worked.

  Few of them created modern pieces. Most strove to reproduce the great works of the past. Some of these were great works in themselves, every bit as demanding as their originals. Yet Jingdezhen was also the place where the real thing could be found—rare, magnificent antiques—because here the traffic in pots was brisk and continuous.

  And this trade in antiquities had spawned another world in Jingdezhen—the world of smugglers, ah chans, people like Bai. Without them the old masterworks would never make it out of China and into Hong Kong. And until such pots crossed that magic border they would never fetch more than a fraction of their potential price. Never mind that it was a terrible crime to take them out, punishable by death. A bullet in the back of the head. Banish bad destiny. There was unthinkable money in it.

  There were men all over China in this game—some smuggling out ancient religious statuary, others classical bronzes—but in Jingdezhen it was porcelain, and men like Bai were the traveling businessmen in the middle. In Hong Kong in particular, where they avoided names as much as possible, people called them ah chans. The generic form of address suited everybody. The buyers and sellers wanted to know as little as possible about the illegalities, while the ah chans themselves wanted to be known by no one.

  It was just past ten in the morning, early for Bai. Generally he slept late. Today his mind was a buzzing jumble of plans.

  Already the air around him was humid and raucous with birds. The hillside was a deep-green jumble of banana trees, bamboo, and miniature palms. He slid his hands into his pockets and his mind went to the thing he’d been thinking about, considering back and forth, all through the night. He had the opportunity now to take a really big job. Profitable—and dangerous. He didn’t like to risk so much. But for half a million ren min bi . . . Bai squeezed his eyes shut. He could do anything with that amount of money. He could take Lili, his third wife, and launch a business in Hong Kong. That was the real porcelain world. That was the place. He could become a dealer. A man of knowledge. His heart raced with the rightness of it.

  And if he failed, if he got caught . . . but this was a thought from which Bai had to willfully turn away. He could not get caught.

  Just leap, he thought. The jobs he was used to were smaller jobs, the modest shipments to Hong Kong, the few brocade boxes tied in plastic string, held so delicately between his knees on airplanes and in the cabs of rented trucks or cars. And there was always a celestial moment when the money changed hands in those fine Hong Kong ateliers. Then he was briefly not an ah chan at all but a real businessman, legitimate. A learned man in porcelain. A dealer and a scholar. Destiny favor me, he thought.

  He looked down the hill at the spreading smokestacks of Jingdezhen, where life was still grittily real. Where on the lawn below him, middle-aged people in soft clothes moved through tai chi in wobbly lines. Where in front of him, egret
s, tall, swaying, lifted and planted their long legs. The light ran warm and mottled down the path.

  He thought about what he had said to Gao Yideng, the man from Beijing who had called him. “Three days, then,” he said, agreeing. “We’ll meet in Shanghai. We’ll discuss it.”

  He had written down the address of the meeting place, a teahouse on Huashan Lu. And as soon as he hung up he started thinking. So many pieces to move. How? A ferry? Trucks? For this amount of money I can do it. Curse danger out of my path. I can.

  And he blinked the morning sun away from him as he moved down the street, into the busy center of the town, and closer and closer to the longed-for, cigarette-stained darkness of the Perfect Garden Teahouse, just a few blocks ahead.

  Lia sat on her heels before a pair of doucai Yongzheng bowls, decorated in brilliant enamel with the Eight Daoist Immortals among swirling clouds. She picked up one and cradled it. She understood the glaze through the glassy resistance it gave her fingers. To her, the clarity of this finish was what the word refinement meant. Just holding the pot, she was lighter and higher, a little more evolved.

  She put down the bowls and typed. Now again she came to the need for a linkup, some suggestive proof of origins, a tie-in to the web of art history. This time she didn’t need to go into her memory world. She knew already. There was a similar pair of bowls, executed and ornamented like these, in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Beijing.

  She picked up the next one. It was a blue-and-white dragon dish from the Xuande period. So fantastic. Waves of disbelief churned through her as she looked at it. How could an assortment this big, with this much cream, just materialize? Where had it been?

  The blue-and-white dish was fine, gorgeous in fact, of the quality that might have been owned by the aristocratic classes as well as the emperor. She had seen a lot of these in this first crate. Yet she had seen a few undeniable masterpieces too. Imperial pieces. This was the thing experts like her most dreamed of finding, pots commissioned by the emperor.