Warm Sunlight Through Smoke Over Hetian Jade

Maozi was a very unusual person. On the one hand, he was a petty thief; on the other, he was fiercely loyal and righteous. He had little formal education, yet was remarkably good at counseling people. We heard many of his stories, but his favorite was always his trip to Lop Nur. Adili preferred to talk about his adventures in the wilderness. He used to be an office worker, and during vacations or gaps between jobs, he liked to go out into the wild in search of glass stones and ore. Sometimes he would spend 26 days alone in the Gobi Desert, where he encountered wolves and bears. But in 2015, he happened to come into contact with Hetian jade, and fell hopelessly in love with it. He quit his job and stopped going into the wilderness, devoting himself entirely to making Hetian jade his livelihood. By chance, on the advice of Xiao Ke from Shifosi, I went to Saiyibage Township in southern Xinjiang, where I met a 17-year-old boy with Down syndrome. His father was a folk jade carver, and the boy was called Xiaopang. Whenever he saw a beautiful woman, he would grin foolishly, drooling. But this boy, who seemed so foolish, was utterly obsessed with jade. When Xiaopang was a baby, whenever he cried, his father would put a piece of Hetian jade in his hands, and he would stop. As he grew older, his uncanny nature became clear: he could accurately tell the good pieces of Hetian jade from the bad. Because they were poor, his father was nearly 50 before he managed to marry a woman with an intellectual disability. They had Xiaopang, whom his father cherished like a precious gem. The boy helped the old man escape poverty and prosper. But their good fortune did not last. At first I had disliked Xiaopang, but as I grew increasingly fond of him, moved by the purest and most steadfast feelings within him, a terrible accident happened. A fire broke out, and he died in the flames trying to save the Hetian jade he loved.