A Cup of Light

4

That night, walking across the lamplit entry court, she noticed a far gate opening into another set of courtyards. It was arrestingly irregular. Up close, she saw it was built of jagged ornamental rocks. She ducked her head and slipped through it. A court cut by rose-lined paths opened out in front of her. Thin steles of rock, shaped by nature, stood up punctuating the grass. Four rooms looked inward. Three of them had windows that were jammed: blue-and-white porcelain, severed stone Buddha heads, cups with fanned arrangements of brushes, knockoff ceramic san-cai camels and horses after the manner of the Tang Dynasty.

She saw at once that foreigners lived here, long-term residents. They used arty fakes to evince their personas, to specify and declare themselves. She did the same; she knew she did. She liked to think she did it with greater deliberation.

At home, in New York, the rooms of her apartment overflowed. In this she was like her mother, who had similarly packed the little Virginia place in which she’d grown up. She remembered easily the ripe tang of humidity on a day twenty-five years before, as they stood in the summer flea market together, rifling a bin of old buttons. Those were the times she remembered her mother happy, walking home, laden with finds, eyes alight with new things; she remembered herself basking in this reflection.

Though Lia’s apartment was full, her objects were fakes-great fakes. She had phony Russian icons and da Vinci drawings, a heaped-up altar of Buddhist statuary, and a Fabergé egg. And she had her pots, of course, the few copies she’d found that were good enough to live with. She was very demanding when it came to the pots in her home. And then her books; she kept her best, most transporting porcelain books stacked in squat columns, around the floor. She knew where everything was. The place mirrored her mind. She could put her hands on a book, on an image, in an instant. Now, her apartment was interesting, she thought with a vain thrill as she cast an appraising eye around the lit-up windows.

She saw a movement on the path and stopped. A thin cat with butterscotch stripes and high, skulking hindquarters walked in front of her.

She called to it. It froze.

She sank close to the ground, called it again. The animal lifted its amber eyes and looked at her, tail straight up and cocking steadily.

“Be that way,” she said to it. Then she stood and looked at the room at the end of the court. Vermilion support columns framed the door; its glass panel was etched in a repeating wood-scroll pattern. But the windows were empty. They were hung with plain white cloth at half-height, for privacy. Nothing else.

Just then a light flipped on in the room. She stepped out of the pool of brightness. A fair-haired man with a boxy chest walked across. He was carrying something. A CD player. He was changing the disc, and he spun the new one as he dropped it in; it caught the light. She held her breath. But he wore headphones. He couldn’t hear her.

He could hear music, though; she could tell by the rhythm in his step as he passed out of view. American, she thought. Though she couldn’t say why. It might have been carriage, or maybe attitude, or a way of wearing clothes. But she could tell.

She backed up. Then she was in the shadows and she slipped back out under the irregular rock gate, into the circle of lamplight, past the geysering fountain and the driveway, through the main gate, to the street.

Lia made her way to one of the theme restaurants currently popular in Beijing. She liked them. Some were based on gimmicks. There was a place called Fatty's, for instance, with a big triple-beam scale right inside the door. Anybody who weighed over one hundred kilos got thirty percent off for their whole table.

Other places were based on historical eras. Those were Lia’s favorites. There were the Maoist places, the Cultural Revolution places, the imperial places. The restaurant she walked into now was a faux-world of 1920s Beijing. The staff sported frog-button tunics, while old-fashioned acrobats, singers, and storytellers entertained from the stage. The food ran to pickled radishes and cabbage in mustard seed dressing and earthy braised soybeans mixed with the chopped leaves of the Chinese toon tree. Her chopsticks roved around the table, and she thought about her eight hundred pots.

She was an experienced appraiser. For nine years she had worked at Hastings. She remembered the job interview. She was given the on-the-spot test. It was the way Hastings always evaluated new hires.

“Don’t be nervous,” Dr. Zheng had said as he laid objects out in front of her. “Just tell me what you think.”

She knew to him she must have looked all wrong. She was tall. Her hair was pulled up in a tight braid, defiantly strict. And her clothes didn’t make sense.

No, as Dr. Zheng often said to her in the years that followed, laughing about it: She didn’t look anything like most of the women he hired. They wore pearls and suits and had pert Anglo-Saxon hair. But that didn’t matter, as he always reminded her. What mattered was the test. “Just tell me what you think,” he had urged her that day. She remembered how he extended his dry fingers to the first pot on the left, a blue-and-white bottle-formed vase, meiping style. They were all blue-and-whites. But not all the same. Not at all.

She remembered how she looked from one to another, comparing them. Then she lit on the first one. “It has a high-shouldered form in good proportion,” she said quietly. “Porcelain smooth, a good clear white-may I?” She moved to pick it up.

“Of course.”

She lifted the vase and rotated it. “No mark and period,” she said, and tilted the base, which was empty, in his direction.

She returned it to the table. She came closer to study the painting, hibiscus blooms framed by ornate medallions of scrolling leaves. “Beautifully rendered, spacing just right. But the blue-the intensity of it-there is something about the heap-and-piling.” She moved right up next to it now, studying the infinitesimal mounding of cobalt grains that fooled the eye into seeing a field of blue.

Yes, he thought. Keep going.

Now she put her hands on it again. She closed her eyes and brushed her fingers over the little mounds of cobalt. She looked like a person reading braille. “It’s just too deliberate,” she said. “It feels contrived. It’s in the right style for the Ming prototype, but it’s troweled on too much. I’d say it was made in the Qing, maybe in the Qianlong reign. Though it wants you to think it’s a vase from the Yongle reign in the middle Ming. That’s what it wants you to think.” She shot him a glance, half questioning.

He would only answer with an encouraging smile, and she turned to the second one, a Ming blue-and-white fruit bowl. “Sturdily made,” she began. “A little thick. The design is lingzhi fungus.” She turned it over and read the six characters, da ming xuan de nian zi. “Made in the Xuande reign, great Ming Dynasty,” she translated. “And this heap-and-piling…” She lifted it to the window, where the natural light was most revealing. “This one is deep, but free. It’s naturalistic.”

“So…?”

“It has that artlessness.” She looked at him. “It might really be from the Ming.” The bowl had a faint filmy coating all over it. She angled her index finger to set the slightest ridge of nail against it and scraped a patch clean.

She held the bowl up to the light. “I have seen more vivid blues,” she admitted. “It’s not quite the best of its type, is it?” She glanced at him for confirmation. “But I think it is from the Ming.”

“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.