When archaeologist Su Qing opens a tin trunk addressed by its sender to “You in 1900,” a fragment of an iron pot embedded with half a human tooth is seeping syrup. A blood-written note at the bottom of the trunk, “Don’t trust the museum glass,” oxidizes into the shape of shackles worn by enslaved people. Inside a scanner, the fragment resonates with the mast of the Sea Witch from 1847. In a star chart pieced together from iron-oxide particles, the iron-stomach armor of Zulu, an enslaved man, collides with the wok-shaped helmet of Huang Ming, a Chinese laborer. Blood on the armor and batter on the helmet’s rim congeal in midair, forming the original text of a contract.
Under an electron microscope, the fragment’s markings match the iron-pot-shaped birthmark that has newly appeared on the back of Su Qing’s neck. When she submerges the fragment in simulated seawater, every iron object in the lab begins to tremble. A miniature iron stomach springs from the anvil and starts digesting surveillance footage. The images it spits out show the belly of a Portuguese governor split open, its insides churning with three hundred iron pots, each bearing a human tooth.
When she pieces together a second fragment late that night, a star chart of transatlantic migration appears across the dome, every coordinate point suspended in boiling syrup. In the rusty sweetness spilling from the “Truth Taster” device, the briny tang of 1857 resonates with the heartbeat of Zulu and Huang Ming’s molten iron stomach. Iron objects throughout the entire building are sucked into the shape of an arrow pointing toward the museum. Meanwhile, the horn-shaped iron pot in the display case turns toward them in the magnetic light. The memories of civilizations sealed behind glass finally breathe out an unwritten, blood-red epic through the markings on the iron pot.
