him.”
Jack threw me a glance. “Does Dr. Yang have paintings? Is that what you mean?”
Anna nodded. “Three. Literally, I grew up with them—they were in my room.”
Paintings that valuable, in the nursery? Mrs. Yang must have spotted me trying to keep my jaw from dropping. She said, “We hung them there to remind us. What was really precious, what was valuable, what could be lost.”
“I see,” I said.
Anna flushed. “But no one ever said anything about him,” she went on. “Chau, I mean. Until I was old enough to go through Daddy’s books and start asking questions. That’s Daddy’s way anyhow, waiting for people to ask things. Then he told me Chau’s story, the outlines of it. And that he knew him, back in China. But that’s all. I never knew … Mom, why didn’t you tell me?”
Mrs. Yang stayed silent. Asked and answered already; Anna wouldn’t get a second response. I recognized that Chinese-mother policy.
Anna gave up, started again. “But always, as long as I can remember, I loved those paintings, and Chau’s other work in the books I found. It just … it spoke to me, in some special way. In art school I started copying it, over and over. Chau’s paintings are so beautiful. Do you know them? Graceful, controlled linework, and such precarious composition … and they’re so entirely political. Completely committed, but never at the expense of the art. I wanted to learn from that. I wanted my work to be like that.” She paused. “When I got back from China…” A catch in her voice; she went on, “When I had to leave without Mike, I was so angry, and so helpless. Daddy tried, and other people, and there’s the whole movement here, but it’s all about begging and waiting, isn’t it? It’s horrible.” Another pause, this time longer. “I didn’t know anything to do except make art out of it all. So I tried, but nothing worked out. It was all garbage and I threw it away.
“Then I started to think about Chau. What would he do, what would he make? I started a painting, not a copy but something new, using everything I knew about him. I used the same paper he did, the same inks. You can still get them, they haven’t changed in centuries. It was the discipline, you know? The painting was pine branches, and a wren. Nothing political, just a technique exercise, but it absorbed me. I can’t tell you how grateful I was for that, just to be able to be out of my thoughts for a while, putting ink on paper.” She stopped, fingering the curtain.
“As I was finishing up, wishing it weren’t over, I heard Mike’s voice. Oh, not really.” She shook her head impatiently, though none of us had said anything. “I wasn’t crazy. But he used to read his poems to me, and I heard him reciting one about a tree in autumn, tall against a gray sky, alone as the cold wind blew the leaves away and the birds flew south. So in Mike’s calligraphy, as closely as I could, I put the poem on the painting. Partly just because it kept the painting time going, you understand? That was what I wanted most. Then when it was almost done, I came in to work on it one day and it caught me by surprise. It really looked like a Chau. Not that I’m that good. Obviously I’m not, no matter how hard I work at his techniques or his style. An expert could tell, of course he could.” Her voice caught again; then she went on. “But I realized. The poem was what made it a Chau. The balance of politics and art. The funny thing is, it’s not one of Mike’s political poems, not when he wrote it. You can read it that way now, but then it was only about a tree. Before his trial, if someone had put it on a painting, that’s all it would have meant. But now, a painting in Chau’s style with a poem of Mike’s—in China I’d have been arrested.”
Maybe it was the comfort in telling the story, in saying Mike’s name; maybe it was the relief in getting through it without dissolving in tears; or maybe it was just exhaustion; but Anna now turned back, stood for a moment, and then walked over to once again sit beside Jack. I stole a glance at her mother, found her still face unreadable.
Jack angled toward Anna, elbows on his knees. “I can’t wait to see these paintings. You are that good and I bet they’re spectacular. But I still don’t get the problem.”
Anna reached toward the coffee table, straightening photographs that didn’t need it. “I pinned the painting up and started a second one. That one, I had a poem of Mike’s in mind, about how lions and tigers can rampage through the forest but they can’t stop the cicadas from singing. Tiny bugs, dozens of them, and a wild tiger face, a paw.… I was working on it when Pete came in. Pete Tsang, you know him?”
“Yes. We saw him last night, at East Village.”
She stopped. “You went to the studio?”
“Because of the photo. I knew the papercuttings were yours.” He added, “Can’t miss ’em.”
I was glad he’d said that because it brought a small smile from Anna. Not from her mother, though, and Anna’s smile faded as she went on. “Pete’s been working with an artists’ freedom network for years. The kind of international human rights group the Chinese government hates. They took up Mike’s case as soon as he got arrested. They won’t give up. I don’t know if they can do any good but at least they keep trying.” She ran out of photos to straighten, so she drew her hands back to her lap. “Pete saw the paintings, the pine one and the one I was working on. No one else in the studio had any idea but Pete knew right away what they were and he understood why I was making them. He was the one who suggested, a couple of weeks later, that if people thought they were really Chaus, that might work for Mike.”
“Pete said to claim they were authentic?” Jack asked skeptically. “That doesn’t sound like him. And what did he mean? Help how?”
“We weren’t going to claim they were authentic. But we weren’t going to announce to the world they weren’t, either. We were just going to show them. Next week.”
“Asian Art Week,” I said. I looked at the guys. “That’s the splash.”
Anna said, “Splash?”
“My client thought someone might be planning to unveil them next week, to make a big splash. I think he was thinking more art world than political, though. Or,” I paused, reflecting on who my client was turning out to be, “maybe not.”
Anna nodded. “It would explode. It’s more than just Asian Art Week, it’s Beijing/NYC. You know about that?”
“There was a poster outside your father’s office.”
“The Chinese government’s bringing over a group of officially approved artists. They’re showing off, how vibrant the art scene is in China, all that. It’s a big deal, big opening party, all the critics, everyone.
“Chau may not be taught much, people here might not know him, but everyone in that world, the collectors, the
