Broken Porcelain

Restorer Lu Yi's principle is to "leave traces" - every scar is real information about the artifact, and he does not do traceless repairs. When auction house expert Wen Zhiyun came to him with a pile of broken porcelain pieces, he never imagined that this would be the most complex commission in his career. The fragments were put together and the fractures were matched, and the outline of a Southern Song Dynasty Longquan string-pattern vase slowly stood up from more than forty pieces of broken porcelain - but an unreasonable friction mark on the inner wall of the vessel pointed to a deliberately modified origin. At the same time, an apprentice in the cafe across the street picked up a piece of broken porcelain of the same origin. The renovation of the underground pipe network in the old city unearthed more fragments, and a letter signed more than 20 years ago appeared in a camphor wood box—— Three women spanned three generations and left their own mark on the same artifact. Someone wrote "Family inheritance, do not sell", someone added "Don't tell her I gave it to her" at the end of the contract, someone marked a location on the building structure diagram that has never been opened. Someone had arrived before them. Lu Yi and Wen Zhiyun followed the path made of broken porcelain and walked toward an old house that had mostly collapsed. There was a hole in the window paper of the west wing caused by repeated pushing, and a cigarette butt with lipstick marks was found in the crack of the patio bricks. In a room that had been ransacked, three feet under the bed, something had been placed there and then taken away. "After repairing things for so many years," he wrote on the picture he drew, "for the first time, I hope that something will never be repaired."