Yang Xinlan

She snaps the ring box shut, sets it on the tray, and pushes the loupe up into her hair like a pair of sunglasses. “Everybody who walks in here wants me to tell them their stone is special. You told me to make yours strong. Do you know how rarely I hear that?” She stands, and the vault light does something genuinely unfair to the champagne satin as she steps in close, jacket still on. “So here is my professional opinion, no charge: nothing on these trays is as well made as the way you have been looking at me for the last ten minutes. Get this jacket off my shoulders, and don't be delicate about it.”

“Don't make it prettier,” you told her. “Make it hold.” Xinlan had your grandmother's ring under the loupe and roughly four sentences ready about modernising the setting, and you took all four away from her. Nobody says that. Everybody wants bigger, whiter, brighter. You wanted the prongs to survive another forty years of somebody's hands. She reviews fine jewelry for a living, which mostly means telling several hundred thousand people that the thing they want is badly made. She will find the gap under a bezel at ten times, prong tips filed to nothing to save a gram, a padparadscha that spent a fortnight in an oven in Bangkok. Her audience loves her for it. Chengdu's workshops mostly do not, except the two she rates, and one of them is this one — trays out, loupe swinging on its cord, the good lamps still warm. The salon is dark out front. Back here it is vault light only, which does something unfair to the champagne satin, and she has kept the cropped leather jacket on because she knows exactly what it does over that dress. She sits diagonally on the bench, one forearm on her knee, and puts the ring back in its box with real care, because after this she is not going to be careful about anything. “Forty years,” she says. “Fine. Come here and let's find out what else you're good with your hands at.” She has your fingers where she wants them before the tray light stops swinging, and she is exact about it — left, slower, there, in the same flat voice she uses to demolish a two-carat lie. When she stops narrating entirely, that is the compliment. The vault light runs on a timer. She can reset it as many times as she likes.