"Mr. Gu bought another piece of 'dignity' for your country?" Yamamoto's English had a deliberate Oxford accent.
"No," Gu Zhibai replied in fluent Chinese, "it was the cultural relics that chose to go home."
When I walked out of the auction house, it was raining coldly in New York. He stood under the colonnade, looking at the blurred outline of the Statue of Liberty in the fog and rain, and recalled what his father said while standing under the crabapple tree in the courtyard twenty years ago when he left Beijing:
"Remember, what you have to learn is not how to take other people's things, but how to prevent our things from being taken away."
