ABSTRACT
A waterlogged cardboard box washes up on the muddy banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The fisherman, currently employed by the authorities to recover pig carcasses, thousands of which have already floated downstream due to unscrupulous farming practices (Davison, 2013), reaches out towards the box, tearing through the sodden cardboard with his boat hook. Polystyrene packaging beads spill out, virgin white against the grimy shore. Seeking a change from decomposing porcine finds, he sits down and starts to examine the contents of the box. Inside are several items carefully packed in bubble wrap and tissue paper. The largest piece turns out to be a porcelain jug. It is glazed and covered in printed imagery and text. The box also contains a ceramic paintbrush, a number of small porcelain boots and a collection of porcelain tags threaded with twine. Intrigued, the fisherman finishes his shift and takes the flotsam back to his wife, who is waiting nearby in their one-storey breeze-block house. The jug is displayed on a shelf in the kitchen where it gradually fills with cooking utensils. The brush breaks in two after being played with by his grandchildren and the pieces are cast back into the river where they descend into the silt. The labels, made from thin slabs of porcelain paper clay, are gradually broken and discarded. Sturdier, the boots survive longer as toys, before eventually being tidied away into a shoebox and forgotten. The jug remains, now minus the handle which was never intended for serious use. The fisherman occasionally looks at the photographs on the jug of foreign men from long ago, their eyes staring back at him through a veil of cooking oil and soot. He wonders who they were and why they floated to him one day while he cleared dead pigs from the river.
