Ring fades as antique snapshots trace a Chinese family circle

My friend Haitao held up a round copper bowl in the palm of his left hand and gripped a squat wooden stick mallet with a carved handle in his right. He whacked the bowl with the mallet, which he waved around in a circle as the ringing faded, and stuck out his tongue.

This was a ching temple bell which he had picked up from the little antique shop his mother runs in the flea market a few subway stops away. He had spent the morning going through boxes of old photographs before going to lunch at a Yunnan restaurant with his mother while his father stayed at home.

“He’s waiting for his new teeth. He’s getting six of them,” he said.

He flicked through his phone, showing me pictures he had scanned of his maternal grandfather, a sharp dresser with a taste for bespoke suits cut in the English style who came from a family of prosperous merchants. He was careful where he wore them after 1949, and when the Cultural Revolution started he burned his best suits along with everything else of value.

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“He was afraid that if the Red Guards found anything, they wouldn’t just take it but they would target the family more,” my friend said.

He got a job in a factory later but never lost the discipline of the barrack room, taking care into old age to remain perfectly dressed and groomed with shoes highly polished and not a hair out of place

By the time Deng Xiaoping launched China’s economic transformation with his programme of reform and opening up, Haitao’s mother’s family had given up on business. But his father was soon discovering that a longstanding interest in antiques could lead to unanticipated opportunities now that China had opened up to foreign markets.

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His father’s side of the family could not have been more different than his mother’s and his paternal grandfather was, as my friend put it, “a real communist”. When he was 12 years old, the Red Army were approaching his village with a view to picking up new recruits.

The older boys, who were 15 or 16, knew the local terrain better than the advancing soldiers so they escaped across the mountains but they left my friend’s grandfather behind. The army took him with them but he was too young to fight, so they put him to work as an orderly, cleaning and cooking for the officers.

He got a job in a factory later but never lost the discipline of the barrack room, taking care into old age to remain perfectly dressed and groomed with shoes highly polished and not a hair out of place. Haitao’s father, on the other hand, was opening one antique shop after another and embracing the wild new world of commerce with an abandon that would be his undoing.

Between 1982 and 2009, China steadily tightened restrictions on the export of antiques, although it was still easy enough to smuggle individual items or small consignments out of the country. But Haitao’s father formed a consortium with about 30 other dealers to supply a buyer in Singapore, regularly shipping container-loads of furniture and other objects to him.

Delayed on the way to meet the other dealers at a warehouse to load a big shipment one night, he saw police cars ahead of him as he approached. He turned back but the others were arrested. Some of them were jailed and the rest had to pay big fines.

Haitao’s father was happy to escape but he felt responsible for the fate of the others and he sold all but one of his shops and all of his inventory to compensate them. After this debt of honour was repaid, he turned his back on the business and dedicated the rest of his life to fishing and drinking.

Haitao’s mother took over the running of the shop, which served as a showcase for a bigger wholesale business supplying a small number of resellers throughout China. The ching bell Haitao brought had been imported from Nepal and was part of a batch that were mostly bound for Inner Mongolia.

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The shop opens only a couple of days a week now (“whenever she feels like it”) and business has become tougher since the Covid pandemic. A number of the resellers Haitao’s mother supplied have gone out of business and the profit margin on items such as the bell has dropped from 50 per cent to less than 30 per cent.

“She doesn’t make any real money from it any more but she doesn’t care,” Haitao said.

“She likes showing my dad that she can do it and reminding him that her side of the family was always the one that understood business.”