A Cup of Light Read Online Free PDF

becoming faintly severe. Sad and severe, bad combination. She smoothed up her hair. Maybe she should stop wearing it in a braid. But it was truly most flattering to her head to have everything come to a point on top. Really, she said to herself, look. She tilted her face. You’re all right. You can’t complain.
    In Jingdezhen, the ah chan Bai walked the first of three sets of broad, shallow steps up to the Long Zu Temple. This was a temple to the local god. Towns and villages in China often worshiped gods of local repute. Sometimes these were heroic historical personages who had morphed into legend; sometimes they were spirits who were thought to control the region’s prosperity. The god of wind and fire who inhabited the Long Zu Temple was the latter sort, overseeing the art of porcelain in Jingdezhen and the fortunes of all men who had their hands in it. He was the god of the kilns.
    Bai’s European shoes made a satisfying patter up the worn-down stone steps. Large statues of temple dogs guarded each level. At the top, a stone walk divided a grassy terrace where a caretaker raked in a pleasingly ineffective rhythm.
    Walking into the temple, Bai’s mind flew back through the hush of spirituality to thoughts of his home. He saw the land his family had occupied since the reign of Jiaqing, given up under Communism, and then reclaimed again. The mountains were fragrant and dense with leaves. It was a place of brushworked beauty. But he was a modern man, a Chinese of the global era, and so he had gone to the city. There was nothing for him back in Hunan.
    He stepped into the cavernous main hall. It was dark. The ornate, timbered ceilings were lost above in the shadows.
    For hundreds of years this main hall had held the principal altar to the porcelain god. Now it was a museum, open to the public. He strolled past a dusty exhibit, with a fake altar and some token signage; the real altar, for those who still worshiped, was kept quietly in the back. At the end of a short hall he stepped around a sign forbidding passage in both English and Chinese.
    Others were forbidden. Not people like him. He entered the small room from the side and stood before the little shrine, eyes lowered before the bronze altar-figure. Electric candles with glowing red bulbs framed the statue, along with bowls of fruit in twin pyramids and incense smoke curling upward. He took three sticks and left a coin in their place.
    The first two he lit on the small oil lamp burning next to the incense, chanting under his breath for his two friends, Hu and Sun. He worried for them. The two men were leaving tonight, carrying their futures on their backs. They were transporting a pair of magnificent Yongzheng period famille-rose vases, each four and a half feet high. Neither had ever moved anything of unusual size. They’d been reluctant to bring in partners. Destiny, thought Bai. Safe passage. He rocked the two burning sticks between his hands and stuck them in the bowl of sand. There was so much smuggling in China. Most of it, though—most of the volume and the value—was goods smuggled
into
China. It was an unstoppable flood, everything from cars to cell phones to tankers full of oil pouring into the country. Billions of dollars’ worth of goods, staggering levels of lost revenues in Customs. Bai always hoped, in his prayers, that this incoming flood would continue to displace governmental attention from the activities of men like him.
    Now the third incense stick. This one was for him. He suspended it in the lamp flame until it caught. The glowing tip was his success, the sure burn his safety. If he made it through he could take Lili to Hong Kong. Just take her and go. His own glow started deep inside him, in the pit of his middle, and spread upward.
    Bai perched the stick in the sand by the others and brought his offering out, unwrapped it from its layers of cloth. It was a pot, of course, a Wanli blue-and-white stem cup. It was