A Cup of Light by Nicole Mones Page A

apartments. He had strung together a barely tenable web of bank loans, investors, and money from overseas relatives to do it. In the end all of them had profited hugely, but at first it was terrifying. He had the unbearable, pounding press of other people’s money riding on him. He had to look at the drab shell that was still Shanghai back then and say, yes, in ten years it will be transformed. And he’d been right. It had sprouted a gleaming, futuristic skyline. Land prices soared, though as in Beijing, building went too far and vacancy rates had been frightening. But Gao’s positions had been good, well timed and well chosen.
    And he had chosen well with this art collection too. He had acquired it at the right time and now he’d release it at the best moment. He knew a veiled government sale was perfectly plausible to the Americans, as long as the visa was in order—which it was. The visa to Hong Kong was the main thing. And the visa had cost him dearly.
    It was in Hong Kong that the Americans would take delivery of the art. And once in Hong Kong, the porcelains would be untouchable. That was what Hong Kong had always been, a free port, no questions asked. It had been so under the British and now, back under Chinese rule, it still was. Once art or antiquities were in Hong Kong it ceased to matter who had owned them, or how they had gotten there. They were legal.
    Caches of such past glory turned up all the time in China. To find art, to buy it as Gao had done and resell it in China—this was perfectly legal. It was getting it out of China that was hard. “Mr. Bai,” he said to the ah chan. “This contract will be quite demanding.”
    â€œI’m ready,” Bai said. “If you get me the right vehicle I can do it.”
    And Gao smiled his thin smile.
    Lia drew out a white Yongle vase, high and round-shouldered in the
meiping
style, incised with a design of delicate mimosa leaves. A pot like this was called sweet-white. The dulcet glow came from advances in clay and glazing made during the Yongle reign. She had once sorted through fragments of sweet-white discovered in a Ming stratum of an ancient kiln off Zhongshan Road in Jingdezhen. She saw through and through why sweet-white lent itself so perfectly to the subtly traced, incised style the Chinese called
an-hua
. And here it was in its fullness and perfection, right in front of her. The
meiping
vase was six hundred years old, and as nuanced and lovely as the day it was made. Similar to another one mentioned in an inventory of ceramic monochromes from the Palace Museum in Taiwan.
    She put her hands on the vase, wrapped her fingers in a loving net around it, closed her eyes to take it in. It was her fingers that finally understood a pot. It was through her tracing skin that she truly knew the softness of a sweet-white glaze.
    The more she had learned to touch pots, the less she had wanted to touch other things. It was too much. And her touch sense had too many memories of men in there too, men who had held her and had their hands on her and now were gone from her life. Each had left his imprint behind, snowflake-specific. Every man had had his own way of showing love, and not-love—removal, disdain, distractedness, impermeability, all the things that hurt—through the touch or the stroke or the supportive cupping of his hands. It was not easy to live with touch memory. So she reserved her hands and fingers. She wore clothes with pockets and used them.
    She’d been selective with men; at least there was that. She was glad now, but when she was younger she’d felt diminished by the fact that she hadn’t had so many lovers. She often waited a long time before meeting someone. She had learned not to look, not to wait, to focus on her work. Then she met a man she came within an inch of marrying.
    Evan was an heir to a newspaper family, fifteen years older and more confident. He had left the Midwest and come to New