A Cup of Light Read Online Free Page A

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
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. . . 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, egrets, 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