I was shocked by this. He was high up in the Red Guards, and from all I'd read, they broke down the doors of people's houses and destroyed all the antiques they found. This was one of the reasons that there are so few antiques left on the Chinese mainland.

"My father loved antiques," he continued. "Whenever he would buy a chair, a table, or a statue, he would tell me its story and point out how one could tell its age. He passed his knowledge on to me, but I didn't really grow to love old things until I was faced with smashing them."

He scratched his temple with a long nail on his pinkie finger and looked somber as he remembered.

"I had two assistants whom I trusted, and, together with other guards, we would storm into a house. It was I who would direct what to do. So if I saw something truly old and valuable, I would tell the other guards that it was worthless and command them to leave it alone. Small, good things I had to take, and I gave them to my assistants to smuggle to their homes for safekeeping, for when it was all over. I couldn't take anything myself because, being a commander, I lived in an army barracks."

"That was very brave," I told him. I was in awe of his daring, because if he had been found out, he would almost certainly have been killed.

"Oh, no." He shook his head decisively. "I was so young and afraid of nothing. And at that time, there was disaster everywhere. It was such a mess you could basically do as you liked. Sadly, none of the small things survived the period. I looked up my assistants not long ago, and they told me that over time the things had gotten scattered away."

I asked Mr. Kuo about Pu'er tea, which he sells for one hundred dollars for a small cake and which is renowned for its medicinal and slimming qualities.

"Pu'er tea grows only in Yunnan," he told me. "And only the oldest tea, the hundred-year-old tea, has the healing properties. In the old days, they would compress the tea and bring it to Beijing by a long caravan of horses. They could not see all of the horses as they rode, so they attached these bells"—he pointed to the bell over the table—"to the horses' manes. When the horse was all right, the bell made one sound, when he was in trouble, falling or something, it made another. I hung them here to remind us of that."

He performed the tea ceremony then, pouring the boiling water from a long-spouted kettle so that it made an eight-inch arc in the air as I had seen in Chinese historical movies. He poured the water over the teapot as well as into it, repouring and straining it four or five times until finally he offered me a tiny cup of the perfected concoction. It smelled like gardenias, and as I drank the light and faintly smoky liquid, it occurred to me that the average Chinese life has as many twists and turns as the back lanes of Shanghai.

It's that way with my daughter, too: She is Chinese, adopted in 1994 from Anhui, a province known for its poverty, and now she's back, an expat in her own country.