Chapter 1 — The Mask Isn't Real

The price alert bell rang loudly on the phone screen, and Vuong Uyen Nhi almost dropped the bowl of sticky rice paste she was stirring on the factory floor.

At nine o'clock in the evening, the Moon Painting workshop was deserted; only she was sitting at a wooden table stained with the colors of three generations of craftsmen, on one side was a stack of uncle Cuoi's masks not yet covered with paper, on the other side was a phone propped up on a clamp stand, opening the online auction "Southeast Asian Folk Art" of Indochine Heritage Auctions. She had opened the auction out of curiosity, because sometimes people still sell some old Mid-Autumn Festival toys under the name of "Vietnamese handicraft products", most of which were industrial pigments that had nothing to do with the teacher's workshop. But as soon as shipment number 114 appeared, her finger stopped in mid-air.

"Lot 114 — A Pair of Papier-Mâché Masks, Uncle Cuoi and Ms. Hang, attributed to master craftsman Dang Ba Tuyen, circa late career, believed lost work."

Close-up shot rotated three hundred and sixty degrees. She zoomed in with two fingers, so close that the colored powder fibers on Ms. Hang's cheeks broke into a smile on the screen. The drawing of the eyes - the "eye mark" that teachers always tell to save for last, when the hand is completely still - here is a bit stiff, a bit too even, as if the artist is afraid of making mistakes so he goes through each stroke with a steady hand, lacking the lively trembling inherent in the brushstrokes of a seventy-two year old who still holds the brush himself.

But what made her so sure that her heart beat faster was not the drawing.

She flipped the photo to the corner inside the mouth of Uncle Cuoi's mask - where the auction house's camera lens accidentally scanned when rotating the product, perhaps they didn't know what that place meant. She squinted, pulled the photo to full screen, and used two fingers to spread it again.

There's nothing there.

There was no double crescent moon that her teachers had taught her to carve with the tip of a sharpened bamboo stick, at a fifteen-degree angle, just before covering it with the final layer of paper. In the last five years of his life, he only taught her how to make that sign - not because he was biased, but because he said "what only one person knows is called a sign, what two people know is a rumor". A work "at the end of his life" by Mr. Tuyen, made during the period when he only used this type of mark, but it was empty in that place - it could not be real.

She immediately typed into the chat question and answer box below the shipment, her hands shaking slightly because she was both angry and nervous.

"Hello, I am a student of artist Dang Ba Tuyen, currently managing the Moon Painting workshop where he used to work. I can confirm that this pair of masks is not his work. I need to talk to your appraisal department."

Three minutes. Five minutes. The price kept jumping up steadily, from eight thousand dollars to nine thousand two hundred dollars, each step as if someone was standing somewhere waiting just to push the number up. She tried calling the hotline number printed on the website. The female operator's English voice politely announced "all staff are currently busy, please leave a message", then switched to voicemail.

Finally, after nearly twenty minutes, a line of text appeared in the chat box, coldly concise:

"Thank you for your feedback. The shipment has passed internal appraisal and has full provenance records from the seller. We respectfully acknowledge your comments but the auction will continue as scheduled."

Uyen Nhi reread that line three times. "Origin records." She almost laughed, a dry laugh without any joy. Documenting the origin of a fake item is as easy as making up a name.

She put the phone down on the table, hugged her knees with both hands, and looked around the workshop. The white fluorescent light shone down on the row of wooden molds lined up on the shelves - some were more than fifty years old, the wood was shiny like an old person's skin, the bottom of each mold was engraved with the year it was first used, the numbers were mostly worn away because the hand of the person holding the mold had rubbed against it countless times. On the wall, there was a black and white photo of Mr. Tuyen when he was young, holding a paintbrush, bending down to mark a lion head half the size of his body.

Two years ago he passed away. The factory is still there, thanks to her efforts to maintain it, but the orders are gradually decreasing, only enough to survive the Mid-Autumn Festival and then survive the remaining months with a few special orders from regular customers. Yet now someone is selling his "final work" for nearly a hundred million dong for a pair of fake papier-mâché masks, and she - the only person in the world who knows with a hundred percent certainty that they are fake - is pushed aside by an automated text message.

She opened the shipment page again, this time carefully reading the seller information section. The auction house hid the identity of the seller according to policy, displaying only the code: Seller ID #VN-0447. She clicked on the "see other lots from this seller" link — more a professional habit than hoping to find anything, because she expected the page to show an error or be blank.

The list showed eight other shipments, spanning the past two and a half years. A set of Mr. Dia masks "Northern craft village style". A pair of lion lions "unknown artists, 20th century". Three "private collection" Mid-Autumn breeds. And — she stopped at the sixth lot — a mask clearly marked "attributed to Dang Ba Tuyen, early period", sold ten months ago, priced at six thousand five hundred dollars.

Not once. Not a single appraisal mistake. This is someone who has sold and resold, regularly, methodically, under the same anonymous code, for more than two years — and at least twice during those times, they used teachers' names to increase the price ten times more than other "anonymous" items.

She scrolled down to the description of lot 114's provenance records, where the auction house briefly listed: "Collected from a family in Hanoi, kept since the early 2000s, transferred to an independent art broker in Vietnam." Nameless. No address. Not a single detail can be verified, except for the phrase "independent art dealer" — which sounds just professional enough that no one bothers to ask further, yet vague enough that no one can trace it.

She remembered that the teacher once said that when he was young, he was almost tricked by an antique dealer in the old town into buying his own wooden mold at a cheap price, then selling it to Western customers at twenty times the price, labeling it "family heirloom". He told the story in a laughing voice, like a funny anecdote, not expecting that one day his students would have to face a more sophisticated version of the same trick - not selling the mold, but impersonating the hand that created it.

Uyen Nhi turned off her phone screen and sat quietly in the darkness of the workshop, with only the table lamp shining down on the stack of wooden molds in front of her. Outside, the late summer cicadas chirped sporadically in the night of Yen Lieu village, in the distance there was the sound of a cargo motorbike passing by, probably the last mask shipment of the day delivered to the dealer in the street.

She looked down at her hands, the small calluses on the tips of her index fingers and thumbs - traces of countless times holding a bamboo stick to carve a crescent moon mark, many times rubbing paper to make it smooth, many times mixing colors until the ripe gac color was exactly what her teacher liked. If she didn't speak up, no one else in this world would know the difference between a real work by Dang Ba Tuyen and a skillful fake.

She reopened the notes app on her phone and typed the first line, slowly as if carving a knife on wood:

"Seller ID #VN-0447. Nine shipments. Over two years. Where to start?"

Outside the factory door, the night wind blew through the crack of the old wooden door, gently shaking the strip of colored paper hanging on the drying pole - pieces of red, yellow, and indigo blue paper still wet with glue, used to cover the last layer of the batch of masks Mr. Dia was in the process of making. She stood up, walked to the drying pole, gently touched a piece of red paper that was almost dry, then returned to the table and began searching in the old drawer - where her teacher's notebooks were kept, which she had never had the courage to open and read from beginning to end since the day he passed away.

That night, for the first time in two years, she opened the worn leather notebook, leafing through the yellowed pages, searching not for nostalgia, but for a name—any name that had appeared in the workshop long enough, close enough, to know the secret of a mark that should have only ever been held by two people in the world.

Most of the pages only record the color mixing formula and the ratio of sticky rice paste according to the season. On days when the sun is strong, you must shorten the drying time of the paper to avoid brittleness and breakage. But near the end of the notebook, sandwiched between two pages, she found a discolored business card, the edges curled from being left for a long time. Printed in simple foil: "Cao Nha Uyen — Collecting & Consulting Traditional Art." On the back of the business card, the teacher's familiar handwriting was hastily written with a blue ballpoint pen, with just one line: "Nha Uyen promised to ask for help - about Tuyen."

Uyen Nhi held the business card in her hand for a long time, her fingers gently rubbing the faded ink. She knew Nha Uyen - the woman who often visited the factory every Mid-Autumn Festival, bringing a few small gifts, always asking if the factory needed any support, the person who, since her teacher's death, had been silently introducing customers to her. But the name "Tuyen" she had never heard the teacher mention, not even once, during the eight years she studied.

She placed the business card on the table, next to a pile of wooden molds that still smelled of old wood, then reached out to turn off the table lamp. In the darkness, only the cold blue light of the phone screen shone on her face, where the auction was still running, the numbers were still jumping, and an unfamiliar name had just entered her story without her even knowing what it meant.