Midnight Records: The Porcelain Mender
Zhou the porcelain mender mends a celadon bowl for a widowed old man at night — and beneath the glaze a tiny picture of a lantern-bearing child appears, the very image of the man when young.
Midnight Records: The Porcelain Mender
Old Zhou, nicknamed "Zhou the Mender," traveled from village to village mending porcelain. In his load he carried a diamond drill and a few copper rivets; a shattered bowl or cracked vase came to him, got drilled, riveted, and sealed, and was whole again.
He walked by day, but if a village where he lodged had someone bring a broken heirloom at night, he took it. He said the night was quiet and you could hear the crack in the glaze, so the rivets went truer.
That autumn a widowed old man named He moved in under the locust tree at the town's end, a man of few words. One night He knocked, holding a celadon bowl with a crescent bitten from its rim, a crack running from the chip to the heart of the bowl.
He said the bowl had been his late daughter's as a child. Sick and weak, she had dropped it and it broke. He had kept most of the pieces for twenty years. Now near his own end, he begged Zhou to make it whole, to take down to her.
Zhou took the bowl and studied it by the lamp. As he drilled the first hole, he thought something rose beneath the glaze at the bottom — the once-blank center slowly showed a tiny picture: a child holding a lantern, eyes curved in a smile, the very image of He when young.
He said nothing, and mended it in silence, setting the copper rivets in a crescent that exactly filled the missing piece.
He took the bowl and ran a finger over the little picture, tears streaming. "It's her. When she was small she loved to lift the lantern and chase the moon around the yard."
Zhou took no money. From then on he kept a rule: widowers, widows, lone old folk — he mended for free. The villagers laughed at his foolishness; he only said that broken things can be mended, but the gaps in a heart cannot, and if he could mend a vessel or two along the way, it was some small virtue.
When Zhou grew old and could no longer carry the load, he opened a small shop in town. At its door hung the copper rivets of his early years; when the wind struck them they rang, as if someone answering him.