A Cup of Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

not real. It was
fang gu,
a copy. This one, of course, was primitive, crude, quite inexpensive. Such a piece was perfectly adequate when dealing with spirits. Spirits were vain, easily fooled, known to be satisfied with even remote facsimiles.
    He stared at the rising ropes of fragrance, the glass eyes of the god. Maybe he was going to taste success. If he did, he’d get a new name. That was how it was among the ah chans. A man got his midlife name when he made his big win. Now they just called him Bai, or sometimes Long Neck Bai on account of the birdlike way his head sat on his shoulders. No more of that. Just Emperor. Emperor Bai.
Call me Huangdi.
Elated, filled with the sweep of blessing, sure all he desired was coming his way, he bowed low to the god and left.
    Jack Yuan took the call on the deck of his cliffside house in Cannon Beach, Oregon. The wet wind ruffled the plastic tied over a stack of logs and shivered the salt-air-stunted pines that grew up along the sides. The deck was cantilevered out over five hundred sheer feet of rain-wet rock. “This is Jack,” he said into the phone.
    He walked to the rail, listening. It was Dr. Zheng. He leaned over the roiling Pacific. Gleaming piles of black rock materialized, rose, then sank and vanished in the pulse of waves and foam.
    â€œI have some news,” said the age-darkened voice from New York.
    â€œI’m listening.” Jack curled his hand to shield the phone from the roar of the sea. Jack had never met Zheng in person, though he thought he knew him, knew him well, by his voice, by its range of shadings and its manifold moods. Jack had bought through him for several years now. He liked Dr. Zheng. He felt he could rely on the gentleman’s discretion.
    Discretion was important to Jack. He bought secretly. He wanted everything anonymous. He had an uneasy relationship with the advent of major money in his life, and he didn’t like people knowing what he had.
    In any case it was easy, collecting anonymously. He used proxies. He planted people at the auctions, speaking urgently in multiple languages into their cell phones, knowing that as the bidding went into the stratosphere the art people would be studying them, guessing, trying to connect them to buyers, dealers, and agents they knew. Meanwhile he would place the winning bid through the one person he knew no one would have been watching—the obvious person off on the side, speaking English. It was so easy to predict where people would look and what they would think. He felt a familiar dash of pity. Human society was so much less mysterious than he had once thought, than he’d hoped. It was sad.
    He hadn’t always been interested in Chinese antiquities; he’d bought other
objets
first. But there came a point when he had stared into the mirror at himself every day for too long, at his glossy black flat-combed hair, his cashmere golf shirts, his overengineered athletic shoes. He was neither white nor truly Chinese. Then he bought a few porcelains through Dr. Zheng. They were ancient and exquisite. They made him feel more himself, even though he was a lifelong baseball-cap wearer from Alhambra, California. “Has Miss Frank seen the porcelains?”
    â€œYes. She’s seen them.”
    â€œAnd they’re good?”
    â€œOh yes,” Dr. Zheng said in a voice oddly tickled with laughter. “More than that. Wonderful! But that’s not the thing.”
    And the thing is? Jack thought, waiting.
    â€œThere are more than you think.”
    â€œWhat?” A wave crashed down below and poured spray up against the rock face. Jack was straining into the phone. “How many more?”
    â€œEight hundred.”
    â€œWhat!”
    â€œEight hundred,” Dr. Zheng said again, slowly.
    I did hear that, Jack told himself wonderingly, staring out at the strip of red molten sun spread under the lowering clouds, fading its last into the ocean. “How is this