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Chapter One
WEDDED BLISS
An old man steps off a ferry at the docks on a chilly winter afternoon. Weng is tall and gaunt, and stooped, carrying his bag not by the handles but cradled in his arms like a baby. His face is peanut-shaped, swelling at the cranium, narrow at the ears and wide again at the jaw and chin. His skin is tight, almost translucent. His thick glasses, hanging from his ears, wobble on his low nose. The old-style collar of his padded jacket is buttoned at the neck. In dusty cotton shoes he treads gently on the ribbed ramp that crosses from the boat to the labyrinth of barriers that leads the way out.
For the greater part of a century Weng has carried himself with the demeanor of a scholar, bowing his head to the task at hand, sticking to tedious clerical work in the backroom—copying down records, sorting files-while political tumult howled fire and ice outside. This way he has survived with his wits about him to become Old Weng. He has lived to indulge his deepest impulse, the understanding of old things—to handle them, collect them, deal in them. It is the passion that runs in his veins and defines his life.
The tea in his jar has gone bitter now. Hungry and weary after the journey downstream from his hometown, he is excited nevertheless to be arriving in Shanghai. His step has an extra pulse of energy and his eyes glint as he approaches a pedicab man who is sitting with his feet on the pedals ready to go. Old Weng bargains the man down. The man boasts that in the course of the day the tray on the back of the pedicab has already carted acomputer system in many boxes, a tub of live crabs, tight-bound pries of magazines, and an assortment of passengers.
Now it carries Old Weng, who crouches over the bag in his lap, his legs dangling.
The city that enchanted him as a young man has changed almost beyond recognition, yet somehow the atmosphere remains the same, as if some of the ghosts have stayed on. The sunset glow seems to make the wide river melt into the dark coppery sky just as he remembers. Boat lights, vaguely disembodied, make steady tracks. Fairy lights twinkle in scalloped strings along the waterfront as the buildings light up at the end of the working day, the grand old edifices of imperial stone dwarfed by the glass façades of a new economic empire, projecting ever upward.
The pedicab creeps along at street level, weaving through the bustle, turning down a narrow lane, cutting through to another grand, crowded thoroughfare. Old Weng climbs down outside Shanghai's newest, tallest tower and pays the fare. The automatic doors of the building open and shut like the mouth of a puffing fish, letting him in. Seeing his reflection in the sliding screens of glass as he goes inside, dreaming of his youth, the old man almost fails to recognize himself. Then he makes his way across the sea of green marble to the elevator.
Gold letters shadowed in black spell out the name on the door of an office on the forty-first floor: Shanghai Art Auctions International. The jaw-doors open again for Old Weng and he enters the pool of cold halogen light where the desks float, empty, and all the computer screens but one are dark.
He squeezes the bag in his arms.
"Young Shen," the old man said warmly as the young man came forward to greet him.
"You must be tired," Shen replied, courteously, with a touch on the elbow, leading the visitor to an armchair by the window. "Tea?" he said, fetching two mugs of tea and setting them down on the low table. The old man removed his woolen cap and warmed his hands around the mug. He removed the lid and raised the tea to his lips, blowing the dark leaves across the steaming surface before putting down the mug and waiting for the leaves to settle, as was his custom.
Brightness played over Shen's face as he nodded appreciatively at his visitor's old-fashioned way.
"How old are you now?" the old man asked.
"Thirty this year," Shen replied.
"San shi er li," commented Old Weng. "The age Confucius says a person should settle their affairs."
In time, perhaps, Shen's head would grow into the same shape as Old Weng's. For now Shen's cheeks were chubby and his face had a molded look, as if a potter had shaped it. His skin was pale. His hair was black and shiny as raven's wings. He could not help his eagerness as he pointed out the space on the table where the old man should unpack his things.
Old Weng tugged at the zipper to open the canvas bag. The first parcel was tightly wrapped in layers of newspaper and crisscrossed with knotted string that he painstakingly untied. Young Shen watched impatiently. One layer of newsprint after another was peeled away, like the skins of an onion, until the object appeared. It was a celadon ewer with a good, rich glaze. Old Weng turned it in his hands. It was several centuries old but had no reign mark. It must have come from a rustic kiln and was very good of its kind. Rough, rather scarce. The celadon was a smoky green, like cloud reflected in turbid water. It was, in any case, only a chaser.
Shen, who had been hovering, sat down at last in the chair opposite Old Weng, allowing the veteran collector to take his time.
From even more layers of paper the next parcel revealed an unblemished piece of blanc de chine. It was a small figure of a woman, slender and turning, her eyes downcast, with one hand nestling a pearl in her lap and the other held against her heart in a gesture of blessing. The glaze was pearly, white as snow yet shimmering like gauzy sunlight.
"Guanyin," said Shen, identifying her as the Goddess of Compassion. One bare foot poked forward from where she stood in the heart of a lotus that floated like a boat in curling wavelets.
"Dehua-ware," confirmed the old man with a nod, locating the kiln and by inference the dynasty, Ming, from which the piece came.
"Very fine," Shen observed, running his finger over the delicate modeling.
The old man smiled with pride, fully aware of what he had, not merely the object but the connoisseurship required to recognize it too. He casually handed it to Shen, who took it between his palms and rotated it, admiring the detailing of drapery and jewels.
Then, as if in an afterthought, Old Weng pointed out the mark that identified the maker by name. "He Chaozhong," he said. He was the most renowned maker of all. But by then Old Weng was already untangling the string from the next parcel, his nimble fingers producing a deep red bowl that he upended to show the reign mark of the Qianlong Emperor on the base. The bowl had such presence and authority that it simply was, and at the same time it seemed to center the whole open-plan office of Shanghai Art Auctions International. A spectacular piece, its oxblood glaze, like liquid garnet, absorbing the strange light of this world, three centuries remote from the time when it was made, as it reflected the faces of the two men who peered into it.
Shen put the blanc de chine Guanyin on the table and, with a nod of permission from the old man, let his fingers reach for the bowl that the Emperor himself must have praised. It was neither hot nor cold to the touch. It felt glossy, almost viscous. "Not bad," Shen grinned. He felt a ripple up his spine as beneath the glaze he deciphered the veiled pattern of a dragon in the clouds.
He got his pad and calculator.
While Shen was working out prices, Old Weng steadily opened the last of the parcels. This one was rectangular, wrapped in two layers of newsprint from the People's Daily and an inner layer of brown paper. It contained a book that was bound traditionally in several loose stitchings that were sandwiched between red cloth boards and fastened with red silk ribbons, two on each side. Old Weng untied the little bows and presented Shen with the first of the four slim bindings that made up the book. The characters on the title page were woodblock-printed: large, chunky, and black as soot. Six Chapters of a Floating Life, Shen read out. Of which this was Chapter One.
He turned the first page. The print ran in regular spaced columns. Words caught his eye. Flower names. Boats.
"It's the earliest printing," explained Old Weng.
Shen picked up each of the separately bound chapters in turn. "Only four?" he asked.
"Ah!" sighed the collector, his lips curling back to reveal the gaps in his teeth. "The last two chapters are missing."
"Missing?"
"Lost. They've never been found."
"Never?" Shen looked up with interest. "You mean the book was never finished."
"It was never published in the author's lifetime," the old man explained. "The final chapters may have gone missing from the author's papers or may have got lost on the way to the printer or may never have been written after all. He wrote only for himself and his friends. It's an account of his life."
"What was his name?"
"Shen Fu."
"Shen-like me?"
"That's right. It's the same character."
The old man chuckled as the younger man looked more intently at the book, holding it so tightly in his hands that for a moment the pages seemed to grow from the tips of his fingers, the paper a layer of his skin that had been stamped and peeled away. Shen tried some lines from the opening page on his tongue, doing his best to decipher the formal language, then he looked into the old man's eyes in wonder.
"I can feel it drawing me in," he said.
Since the Book of Songs begins with a poem about wedded bliss, I will begin this account by speaking of my marital relations and let other matters follow. My only regret is that I was not properly educated in childhood. All I know is a simple language and I shall try only to record the real facts and real sentiments. I hope the reader will be kind enough not to scrutinize my wording. That would be like looking for brilliance in a tarnished mirror.
Old Weng smiled, looking at Shen with the vital gloss of young manhood still on his skin. "It is a love story," he said good-humoredly.
Shen exhaled deeply. Love? He did not know if he had ever experienced it. Beauty, yes, the intense beauty of perfectly created objects—but that, he suspected, was not love. He inserted the four chapters neatly between the red boards, tied the four red ribbons, and handed the book back.
He began writing figures in pencil on the pad. The auction house took a commission of 15 percent from the vendor and another 10 percent from the buyer over and above the hammer price. The estimates had to be in line with the market, a little higher to indicate quality, but not so high as to frighten off bargain hunters. The eventual selling price, however, need bear no relation to the estimate, which was chiefly a benchmark to print in the catalog, a piece of bait to dangle.
In the old days when the trade was forbidden, the risks high, covert dealers like the old man had been forced to take what they could get. Now with the market open and rich Overseas Chinese ready to pay to recover a part of their heritage, prices had soared. The celadon was scarce. The Guanyin was rare. The oxblood bowl was more than rare—it was unique. They settled on high reserve prices for all three. The old man found the figures diverting. He would never in several lifetimes have had so much money to spend himself. But all those zeroes missed the point. The pieces did cost time and money and alertness, the exchange of favors and a lifelong pursuit of stray threads. But the value of treasured pieces was ultimately a quality of the civilization that made them, a chance excellence with the power to travel forward into the future, intensifying as it went.
The book was different, though. A first edition was an item for specialists only. It did not speak for itself beyond language in the way the bowl did. It needed to be passed on through the hands of those who, in reading it, would appreciate it properly. It could not just sit on a shelf. The estimate they agreed on for the book had three zeroes less than for the bowl—and even there Shen admitted he was flying blind. He knew very little about old books. Four chapters of a book of six chapters. A minor literati classic, a memoir. They agreed it was a curiosity.
They chatted under the bright white light, just the two of them drinking tea among the filing cabinets and computer terminals of the spacious office. Shen's American boss had left early, as usual, leaving Shen to lock up. Refilling their mugs with hot water, Shen knew enough not to pry into Old Weng's trade secrets. Old Weng managed to find extraordinary things deep in the hinterland of the southern country and he was unerring in his assessments. Shen recognized himself as part of the system of flow and exchange, part of the circulation of timeless objects. He was pleased to be admitted to Old Weng's domain in that way.
The old man folded the official receipt from the auction company into the inside pocket of his padded jacket, resettled his glasses on his ears and stood up. He was tall even with his stoop, but the curve of his spine made him seem to be bowing to the yoke. Perhaps, in an abstracted way, although he operated strictly by himself, implicating no one else, he served the past rather than the present and carried the burden of all those fallen dynasties. He was repaid by the livelihood their old glories provided him, a steady trickle with large sums on rare occasions but never enough to make him do away with his cloth shoes. It was understanding, not money, that he accrued.
Carefully he packed away the used paper and string in his bag. "Till next time," he said, shaking young Shen's hand as they parted at the elevator. Then he was off in search of a hole in the wall down an unlit lane where he could eat spiced peanuts and chicken and drink yellow wine.
Shen rewrapped the three ceramics in bubble plastic and locked them in the safe. He looked at his watch. The time for eating had almost passed. He ran his fingers through his hair, then he sat down in the chair where the old collector had sat and found a cigarette. His hand reached for the book. He peered at the columns of text through a blur of smoke and a curtain of hair until his vision jumped into focus and he could read the literary words.
I was born in the year 1763, in the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, when the country was prosperous and at peace. I knew great joys and great sorrows, but, as the poet says, our life is little more than a spring daydream, and in a moment all is vanished forever. My name is Shen Fu, the son of a humble country administrator.
And my name is Shen Fuling, thought Shen, and I am a member of the same great clan as you. While I was studying in America, I took the name of Sean, after the actor who played James Bond, because it was easier to adopt a foreign name. Otherwise people avoided calling you by any name at all, in case they got it wrong. Without a name they might soon forget your existence altogether. So I became Sean. Sean Shen. Like Sean Penn, people would ask. The movie star? Yeah, that's right.
My English was already good when I graduated from Fudan University in Shanghai. After my time at college I spoke like a native, only with greater consciousness of changes in register. My father, Professor Shen, was on the committee for academic exchanges between China and the United States. He is a distinguished historian of modern China and a leading Communist Party intellectual. As a dialectical materialist, he knew that global capitalism would triumph over all other ideologies and systems in the late twentieth century and that by harnessing those energies China would grow rich and preeminent once again. In that way he is still a revolutionary. He planned for me, his firstborn son, to become an economist and an American green card holder, an analyst of money flow for the transnational corporations that were extending their operations into China. It was his string-pulling that got me into the turbo-charged economics program at Georgetown University, along with all those jocks and nerds and geniuses, the sons and daughters of Washington lawyers and Wall Street traders.
That was when I became addicted to television, French fries, the Colonel, chocolate chip ice cream, pad Thai noodles. I worked out at the gym and developed muscle. I wore my campus sweatshirt with pride. But underneath I always remained a studious young gentleman from Shanghai.
On weekends I educated myself by visiting the city museum. It had a rich collection of Classical sculpture, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European painting, and American art from early folk craft through to the most contemporary installations. It rewarded me in ways that my economics studies failed to do. The museum also had an important oriental collection that included a traditional Chinese house plundered by a Yankee adventurer and removed to the States when China was on her knees in the late Qing dynasty. Inside that house a scholar's studio was set up replete with the finest old brush holder, ink-mixing bowl, and calligraphic scrolls. The objects were impossibly distanced from the life of their own culture, but respected there in that foreign environment to a degree I had never seen before.
There was one particular tea bowl in one of the glass cases to which I became quite attached. It was a rather inconspicuous bowl of a brown-gray color that appeared in hairline streaks, sometimes chestnut brown, sometimes ash gray—or the gray of faded cloth shoes, maybe with olive or a touch of violet in it. The glaze was named hate's fur for the crystalline lines that formed when the iron in the black pigment was fired at a certain temperature. The bowl was one to hold in your hand, although in the museum you were not allowed to do that. I checked it every time I went there, as if the bowl belonged to me. I suppose, in the isolation of my student life, that bowl of hare's-fur glaze was one of my few close associates. Thus I came to realize that my own culture lay hidden deep within me and that it would require work on my part to gain access to it.
The other piece that fascinated me was a stone head of the Buddha that came from a monastery at Mount Lu, far up the Yangtze River. The face with three-quarter-closed eyes was utterly quiet. That head, carved a thousand years ago, had been sawn off and souvenired by a booty collector. Somewhere out there was the headless body, a butchered trunk, dumbly awaiting the return of its graceful head. Maybe that was something I could do, put the missing parts together.
My visits to the museum made me change my mind about economics. I had complied out of filial piety, but I was not interested in following my shrewd old father's path to wealth and influence. I could never discipline my mind to the dry speculation of economics. I knew myself for what I was—a dabbler, a dilettante, susceptible to every kind of distraction.
A curator in the oriental department of the museum befriended me at that time. She was glad to have a visitor with whom to share her enthusiasms. She helped me transfer to the graduate program in art history. With only one economics semester to my credit—in which I learnt the idea of the unbendable laws of the marketplace—I was now able to devote myself to the study of beautiful things. My father was furious. He said I was a vain and selfish idiot, and from that day on he put all his hopes of restoring the family's fortunes in my younger brother, Fuming, who was supposed to have a head for business.
But I was happy, and being happy I excelled. Even before I graduated I was headhunted by a new auction house that was setting up in Shanghai in direct competition with the big international names. With all the right credentials—fluent English, a good American graduate degree, and a nose for Chinese antiquities—I found myself back in my hometown working for Shanghai Art Auctions International.
Settle your life at thirty, Confucius says. San shi er li. Get married. Make a home.
Well, I was to take another path.
(Continues...)
