A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  “Nali,” he said, but acknowledged her compliment with a small laugh as he turned the cup. God, the clay, she thought again, the warm light; it’s perfect. And the design. Grasses waved in the summer breeze, baby chicks scuttled, a hen bent over and scratched. Another hen turned and looked at her, her own tail feathers flouncing high in the air—

  Lia stopped. She cleared her mind. She looked away for a minute, glanced out through the plate-glass door to the work yard with its tables, its potting wheels, its thousands of pots in the heavy, still light of late afternoon. Had she just seen that? Then back to the cup, carefully. Yes. The tail feather curled. It was the ruffled feather. She pulled a photo image of the collection’s chicken cup, its fang gu copy, from her memory. The same. The feather had the flip.

  “Mr. Yu,” she said, turning now to the potter, “I cannot bow low enough.”

  “No, no,” he said appropriately. “Nonsense.”

  “No, I mean it. It’s devastating. But if I may ask. Have you ever made another with this . . . feather?” She motioned lightly with her eyes. She knew he understood. A signature such as this was always perfectly conscious.

  “Oh yes. The feather itself? More than a few times, when the chicken motif is used. But this exact style, after the Chenghua prototype—we did another one of these too. If I remember it was the year before last.”

  “And what became of it?” she asked carefully.

  “I sold it to a businessman.” His eyes slid to Bai. “One of them.”

  She nodded. From there, of course, it could have gone anywhere. But Potter Yu was the one. He had to be. “Mr. Yu.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know you are famous among pots people? Do you know what we call you?”

  “What?”

  “We call you the Master of the Ruffled Feather.”

  Yu smiled.

  “It’s true, it’s true, we do.”

  “Ei! I confess, here in our studio we curl the feather, that is our style. Isn’t it amusing how people say a thing, and it sticks, then others say it! Well, similar sounds echo each other, isn’t it so? Ei? But the truth is, the Master of the Ruffled Feather is not I! I don’t do the painting anymore. I’ve not done so for a long time.”

  “What?” Lia looked at him.

  “Really, it’s the truth, the Master of the Ruffled Feather is someone else! I haven’t the eyesight to paint anymore.” He looked at her strangely. “Don’t you know this? It’s true for many families here. All the generations may work together, but it’s the young people whose painting reaches the highest marks. Especially the teenagers. They have the hands and the eyes.”

  “I didn’t know this,” Lia admitted, stunned at herself—here she was, led along by her fantasy: Old man equals master. How clichéd. And yet her colleagues thought the same. They often talked about how much they feared any fang gu artist who could truly, gorgeously paint—since it was so often the “rightness” of the painting that made a piece real and not fake—and this most respected foe was always imagined as a man, and never a young one. Certainly not a teenager. She gathered her composure. “If I may ask,” she said, “these years, who has been the master painter in your family?”

  Yu let out a pleased growl of a laugh and used the flat of his hand to push open the glass door. “Yu Ling!” he bawled, sticking his head out. He pulled back in, grinning. “You’ll see for yourself,” he said, and he and Bai exchanged looks.

  The door cracked open and a young girl stepped in sideways, her hair back in two braids, dark soft eyes. She looked like a child, though she could have been fifteen. “Laoyeh,” she said in greeting to him.

  “My granddaughter,” he said. “Yu Ling. Yu Ling, Miss Fan and Mr. Bai.”

  “Pleased,” she said, and bobbed her head to them.

  “Are you the painter?” Lia asked.

  “Yes.” Yu Ling was too shy to look up, and only did so in quick darts. “I paint the pots.”

  And my God, you’re just starting, Lia thought. “Words can barely express my compliments,” she told the younger girl in a voice full of warmth. “Your work is very, very fine.”

  The girl gave one small, satisfied grin and then averted her eyes again. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You can go,” Yu told her.

  The girl left and the elder potter turned back to Bai. Lia listened as the two men slipped into Jiangxi dialect. Bai paid for the cup—only five thousand ren min bi, she saw. A bargain. A paltry sum. He was a lucky man.

  The ah chan was ready to go, and polite good-byes went around. “I congratulate you again, Mr. Bai,” she said. “It is a great day for you.”

  “Yes!” He was grinning. “With greater days on the way. Potter Yu? I thank you. Good business. Good luck. Miss Fan? Good luck.”

  “Bici,” she answered.

  Then he was gone, the door clicking and jingling behind him. After a silence she said, “I think I’ve met him before.”

  “It’s possible. Bai is everywhere.”

  “Why do they do it?” she said, thinking about men like Bai. “They take so much risk, buying up zu chuan,” heirloom holdings, “transporting them out.”

  Yu gave his low laugh again, and this time tempered it with a sad shake of his head. “For them the money is everything. They think all the time about money. Though they are fools with it! They get it and then they spend it as fast as they can and then they are poor again. Then again they get it. So what should they fear? Death?” He laughed, his eyes almost disappearing behind the lined mask of his face. “Why?” He wiped at his eye. “There’s nothing for them to fear! Open the door, do you see it or not? Here is the fact. If they have enough money they can make even the spirits on the other side do whatever they want.”

  13

  She walked down the main street in Jingdezhen, her mind shimmering with excitement. She had part of the story now, at least. Her pots were the Wu Collection, forgotten, discovered, sold, and the center of local rumors since. This felt real to her; it clicked with the little she’d heard from Gao. Not only that, now she knew the Master of the Ruffled Feather . . . a teenage girl. She still couldn’t get over that one.

  Her walk was giddy through the drifting clots of people on the sidewalks, past the open storefronts with their goods stacked up, mostly pots, pots of every size, quality, and description. Nothing great, most of it crude and cheap, much of it fang gu. This alone was enough to awaken the thrill in her. She scanned the stalls, a predator. When she saw a row of Chenghua chicken cups, she stopped and bent to look.

  Unfortunately they were poor copies. She’d seen much better ones for sale in other places.

  “You have good eyes,” the proprietor said approvingly from his chair. He touched his thick glasses for emphasis, a cigarette smoldering in his hand.

  She looked up at him through the crowded forest of pots on the counter. “Yes, Chenghua chicken cups,” she said. “After the Ming prototype.”

  “Well.” He made a small laugh. “They’re not Ming, exactly.”

  “No,” she said, and thought, that’s an understatement. She picked one up and turned it over. It did have a reasonable facsimile of the Chenghua reign mark.

  “Still, they’re old,” he assured her, “just not quite that old.”

  “Old?” she said, playing along. “Let’s see. They’re not Kangxi using Chenghua marks—“”

  “No. They are a little later than Kangxi. You have good eyes!”

  “Not Yongzheng—“”

  “No. But, xiaojie, they are nineteenth century. They are copies made in the nineteenth century. Trust me on this, they are.”

  “Well. I could concede that they might be a few months old. Or maybe just a few weeks.”

  “Good eyes,” he said again. This time they both laughed. She waved and stepped out of his stall and back into the flow of the sidewalk. Her cell phone went off and she flipped it open. “Wei.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Hi,” she said. Michael. Th
e sound of his voice wrapped around her.

  “I was wondering whether you were finished with work.”

  She grinned, weaving through the crowd. “I am finished, actually. For today. But I’m not in Beijing. I had to leave for a few days. I’m down south. In Jiangxi Province.”

  “Where?”

  “A town called Jingdezhen. Near Nanchang. South of the Yangtze.”

  “Are you on the porcelain trail?”

  “I am.”

  “Why there?”

  “Oh, but this is the place.” She looked around at the honking, hill-climbing downtown, the cluttered jumble of little concrete buildings, the profusion of pots, all colors, all sizes, piled up, multiplying everywhere. “This is our holy city.”

  He couldn’t hold in a joyful little toot of laughter. “Oh, really? Have you met the Maker?”

  “Yes! As a matter of fact I have. And it turns out the real master is his granddaughter, who’s fifteen at most. God. She can really paint. One day she’ll be my undoing.”

  “And why is that?” In a flicker his voice had dropped its bantering humor and now put out the warmth of wanting to know.

  “Because what she makes looks so real,” Lia said.

  “And what’s real and what isn’t could undo you?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, meaning it. And then she thought, you too could undo me. If I crossed the line with you, and learned it was not real.

  “Are you coming back?” he said.

  “Yes, late tomorrow. I have more work in Beijing. I’m not done.”

  “Good news for me,” he said.

  “And for me. I’d love to see you. But not the minute I get back, if that’s okay. I have to go see the collection first. The next day, though—should I call you?”

  “Just come find me,” he said.

  “Okay, then.” She could feel that sneaky grin of interest in another person tugging at her face. She felt a rising sense of lightness in her midsection. “I think I know where you are.”

  The Jingdezhen Airport opened only when there was a flight, and when Lia stepped out of her taxi there the next afternoon it was still locked up. In time, though, workers arrived and unlocked the flimsy glass door. Forty minutes later it could have been any little wood-benched airport, anywhere. Families sprawled, young women bounced babies, businessmen carried boxed porcelains and briefcases.

  She sat down and watched a woman opposite her share one set of mini-headphones with a teenager, each with a plug in one ear. They were whispering along with a Cantonese pop tune. There was something sweet about them. They sat with their legs splayed out and their toes tapping. Sisters? Lia thought. Aunt and niece? They were so unconscious of themselves in the middle of the crowd, eyes far off, bonded to each other. She couldn’t stop looking at them.

  “Miss Fan?” said a voice from her right.

  It was the ah chan. “Mr. Bai,” she said. “How surprising.”

  “Not really,” he said half ruefully. “There’s only one flight a week.”

  “True,” she said. She could guess from his stacked lash-up of brocade boxes what business took him north, to Beijing. He had eight or nine of them in a twine-knotted net, with a handle he’d improvised on top. She wondered if he had the chicken cup.

  “You return to Beijing?” he asked.

  “Yes. This was just a quick visit for me. And you?”

  “Business,” he echoed, and smiled.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  On the plane she saw him sitting some rows ahead of her with his friends. They were full of swagger, laughing, enjoying one another.

  She slept for a while. When she awoke it was to the sound of the muddy intercom system, the voice speaking Chinese through waves of static. She tuned in to it. They’d be late in landing, and something about the situation on the ground in Beijing.

  Now she was awake. Situation?

  “What situation?” she asked the man sitting next to her.

  “Bu da qingqu,” he said, I’m not clear. He had been sleeping too, his mouth open, his head collapsed on his shiny pinstriped shoulder, and had just jerked back to consciousness. He rearranged himself with a series of small, staccato throat-clearings and fumbled in his briefcase.

  The ah chan Bai turned from the front of the plane and met her eyes with his, a simple nod of acknowledgment. She nodded back. He probably didn’t know anything either.

  The plane landed and taxied normally but then stopped a few hundred yards from the terminal. First fifteen minutes, then a half hour, then forty-five minutes, everyone nervous and shifting in their seats. She could feel the fear. These days, anything during air travel that carried even the hint of strangeness plunged people into trembling alarm. Lia listened, eavesdropping on the Mandarin around her, and realized that no one knew what was going on. Whatever it was, it had happened after they left Jingdezhen.

  Finally the engines roared up again and they rolled to the gate. Lia spilled out into a cavernous hall with the others, pouring through the crowd, hurrying over the mirror-polished faux-stone floors. All around she heard a rolling, burry wash of Mandarin spotted with pockets of English and other foreign languages, everything bouncing off the gleaming surfaces up to the high metal rafters above. Why were there so many people? In the press of faces she read agitation, fear, anger. She wished she didn’t have to hear. She wanted to take her hearing aids out. It was too much.

  To the right she saw the sign EXIT AND BAGGAGE CLAIM. When they passed through the security doors they hit an even bigger crowd. The massive hall where people customarily came to meet arrivals was jammed with Chinese. She threaded through them in a thin line of exiting passengers, ducked through the doors, and ran outside.

  Taxis were in a snarl. She picked one outside the hive and circled to it. A head taller than everyone else, obstinately Caucasian, she cut through the traffic at a sprint. The driver was too surprised to say no when she yanked open the door to his cab.

  “Qu nar?” he said to her, Where are you going?

  “Jiaodaokou Nan, Gulou Dong, neige lukou,” she said, Corner of Jiaodaokou South and Gulou East. He pulled out. They came to the airport exit, he paid the toll, and she waited until they were flying along the Jichang Expressway to speak again. “What is it, this thing that’s happened?” she said. “What’s going on?”

  He looked at her in the mirror.

  “At the airport.”

  His eyes went back to the road. “A flight coming to Beijing crashed.”

  “Oh. But that’s terrible.” She sat back like she’d been pushed. Phillip, she thought. Phillip had been bound for Beijing. “What airline?” she said.

  “China International.”

  “Oh. Awful.” To herself she was thinking: China International. A Mainland company. Phillip would never take a Mainland airline unless his flight had been canceled and he had no other options. However. Such things happened. She would call the office right away. “Did it crash on landing?” she asked, because she had seen no indications at the airport, no lights, no blinking chaos of emergency. Just all those people.

  “No. It exploded over the ocean.”

  “Oh. That’s very bad,” she said quietly, fearing the worst kind of scenario. “What happened?”

  “Do I know? How can I know? No one says yet.” He pointed to the radio. “But some boats in the area saw a light streaking up. So people are already saying it was shot down.”

  “Shot down?” She leaned forward in her seat, trying to tick through the possibilities in her mind. Which terrorist organization? A domestic insurgent group? “Who would have shot it down?”

  “The U.S., is what people say.”

  “The U.S.!” That is not remotely possible, she thought. How could it be in the interests of the U.S. to shoot down a passenger jet? Not the U.S. Not deliberately. She was sure of it. She looked up at the man behind the little Plexiglas partition so many of the taxi drivers used in hopes it would protect them from assault and theft. She could tell
by the narrowing of his eyes and the tight look he threw into the mirror that he didn’t agree.

  Well, she thought, he wouldn’t; there were deeper tides at work. Whenever U.S.–China relations got rough, the well of China’s nationalistic resentment seemed to open up again. It was always there. And even though there were times when the government encouraged such sentiment for its own reasons, the sentiment itself was real, a true net of memory under everything, memories of slights and wars and victimization by foreign governments—despite the manifest greatness of the civilization. Despite that. So galling. Yes, and wasn’t this one of the very things she had always so loved about this place: that historical memory was so long, so widely held. It was one of the ways art and culture had endured. Yes. And here was memory’s flip side, the chronic remembrance of guochi, national humiliation. “Whatever happened, it’s terrible,” she said.

  He was looking at her in the mirror. “Are you American?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What then?”

  “Me?” She bristled, covered it. “Xin Xi Lan ren.” New Zealander.

  “Ei.”

  “It’s a tragedy.”

  “Jiu shi le ma,” he answered, Isn’t that so.

  Talking to him had become uncomfortable and she leaned against the window, staring out at the walls and overpasses and buildings, the construction sites. Probably the crash was an accident. The Chinese government would investigate and they would find out and they would make an announcement saying so. At least that was what she hoped. She looked back at the line of the driver’s jaw, the hardness in his eyes.

  It had better happen soon, because Phillip was on his way and they had to finish. Phillip. Her mind went back to its whirling. Phillip would never fly China International. Would he? Ten to one he was waiting at the guesthouse.

  The driver took her to the mouth of Houyuan'ensi Hutong. She got out there and paid him, walked quickly away from the roaring boulevard and down the lane to the guesthouse.