reveal a wall safe whose existence Sih Hsuin never suspected. Shouying extracts three wooden flats wrapped in satin rags. Even Sih Hsuin can tell what they contain: generations of Ma family profit, from the Silk Road to the Bund, sunk into movable form.
Ma Shouying rakes through handfuls of sparkling things, considering each for a moment, then chucking them back into their trays. At last he hits on what he’s after: three rings, like small birds’ eggs. Three jade landscapes that he lifts to the light.
Sih Hsuin gasps. “Look the color!” The color of greed, envy, freshness, growth, innocence. Green, green, green, green, and green. From a pouch around his neck, Shouying produces a jeweler’s loupe. He sets the jade rings in the light and peers at them for what will be his last look. He hands the first ring to Sih Hsuin, who stares at it as at a rock from Mars. It’s a sinuous mass of jade trunk and branches several layers deep.
“You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote—the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that none may pass. Ah, but engineers have no use for the past, do they?”
The words confuse Sih Hsuin. He can’t read his father’s sarcasm. He tries to hand the first ring back, but his father is busy with the second.
“Another tree stands in front of you—Fusang. A magical mulberry tree far to the east, where they keep the elixir of life.” He palms the loupe and looks up. “Well, you’re off to Fusang now.”
He hands the jade over. It’s detailed beyond belief. A bird flies above the topmost tangle of foliage. From the crooked branches hangs a row of silkworm cocoons. The carver must have used a diamond-tipped microscopic needle.
Shouying presses his magnified eye up close to the last ring. “The third tree is all around you: Now. And like Now itself, it will follow wherever you go.”
He gives the third ring to his son, who asks, “What kind of tree?”
The father unwraps another box. Dark lacquered wood unfolds on two sets of hinges to reveal a scroll. He undoes the scroll’s ribbon, which hasn’t been loosened for a long time. The scroll unrolls into a series of portraits, wizened men whose skin droops more than the folds in their robes. One leans on a staff in a forest opening. One peers through the narrow window in a wall. Another sits underneath a twisted pine. Sih Hsuin’s father taps the air above it. “This kind.”
“Who these men are? What they do?”
His father regards the script, so old Sih Hsuin can’t read it. “Luóhàn. Arhats. Adepts who have passed through the four stages of Enlightenment and now live in pure, knowing joy.”
Sih Hsuin doesn’t dare touch the radiant thing. His family is rich, of course—so rich that many of them do nothing anymore. But rich enough to own this? It angers him that his father has kept these treasures secret, and Sih Hsuin isn’t a man who knows how to get angry. “Why I don’t know about this?”
“You know now.”
“What you want I do?”
“My word, your grammar is atrocious. I assume your instructors in electricity and magnetism were more competent than your English teachers?”
“How old, this? One thousand years? More?”
One cupped palm calms the young man. “Son: listen. You can only store a family fortune so many ways. This was my way. I thought we would gather these things and protect them. When the world returned to sanity, we’d find them a home—a museum somewhere, where every visitor would connect our name with . . .” He nods at the Luóhàns playing on the threshold of Nirvana. “Do what you like with them. They’re yours. Perhaps you’ll discover what they want from you. The main thing is to keep them out of the hands of the Communists. The Communists will wipe their asses with them.”
“I take these to America?”
His father rolls up the scroll again, wrapping the frayed ribbon around the cylinder with great care. “A Moslem from the land of Confucius, going to the Christian stronghold of Pittsburgh with a handful of priceless Buddhist paintings. Who are we missing?”
He places the scroll back into its box, then hands it to his son. Taking the box, Sih Hsuin drops one of the rings. His father sighs and stoops to retrieve the treasure from the dusty floor. He takes the other two rings from Sih Hsuin’s hands.