Mandarin Gate by Eliot Pattison Page B

instinct says this is not a reproduction.”
    The man sank into a chair, his gaze fixed on the little dragon. “So you’re here to tell me it belongs to the state,” he declared in a tight voice. His long, thin face seemed to grow weary as he spoke.
    Shan studied the man for a long moment, his eyes were deep, uncertain pools. There was great intelligence in them, and also a hint of fear. “My father had a small collection of seals from the imperial times,” Shan explained, “which he cherished. When I was very young he would take me in the closet and show them to me with a candle, exclaiming over the history they must have witnessed. Sometimes he would visit antique stalls in the market, hoping to find a document with a seal print that would match. But by then the Red Guard had burned nearly all the imperial documents. When we were sent for reeducation in the country he buried them in a field and never was able to recover them. Probably long since destroyed by a bulldozer.”
    The man stared at Shan. “It was one of a matching pair,” he ventured at last. “I had to trade the other years ago for medicine when my daughter first became ill.”
    Shan pushed the intricately worked seal across the table to the man, who stroked it with a gentle hand, gazing at it with a sad smile. He pushed it back to Shan as a police radio barked from the street outside. “It is not safe here. If those goons had found it today they would have stomped it under a heel and laughed. It has a new guardian in the mountains.”
    “Jamyang is dead,” Shan stated.
    The man’s eyes widened in alarm. “No. Not Jamyang. He knows how to survive.”
    “I was with him when he killed himself.”
    The man’s face twisted in pain, draining of color. He pressed a fist against his mouth as if to stifle a sob, then dropped his head into his hands. “I think I shall make some tea,” he declared with a sigh.
    “I am called Yuan Guo,” the stranger explained as he waited for his hot plate to boil water. “I raise goats.”
    Shan paused a moment. There had been another Yuan, on the tablet in the mountains. “I am called Shan Tao Yun,” Shan replied. “I inspect ditches, which means mostly I dig mud and manure. I didn’t always inspect ditches. You didn’t always raise goats.”
    Yuan’s expression began to warm. “In Harbin,” he said, referring to one of the large cities of Manchuria, “I was a professor of history, ever since the university was reopened twenty-five years ago. I decided to join the Pioneer program. The state promises me land rights if I stay five years. And meanwhile”—he gestured about the sparse, cold room—“I get all this.” He lifted a fork and began chipping leaves from a brick of tea. From a room down the darkened hall came the sound of coughing.
    “I met an old relative of yours, Yuan Yi. I want to bring him back to you.”
    Yuan’s hand froze in midair as he spun about to face Shan. “You mustn’t!” he cried out, then he seemed to collect himself and turned back to silently sprinkle the leaves into two chipped cups before joining Shan at the table. “Please,” he said in a low, plaintive voice. “He must stay on the mountain. He too is in exile.”
    Shan waited until his cup was filled, then spoke through the steam of his cup. “Perhaps you should start with Harbin.”
    Professor Yuan Guo had lived most of his life in Harbin, he explained, and had been a graduate student at the university there until it had been shut down by Mao, then worked at a locomotive factory until the university had reopened. He had helped establish the Chinese history department and had married another professor, who had worked in a chemical factory during her reeducation. She had died of cancer ten years later. Yuan had raised his daughter alone, then had retired four years earlier and enjoyed a peaceful existence reviewing old manuscripts in the university library until his daughter Sansan had been arrested for