The first one came from his mother. A plain tablet, blue-white, about the length of a finger. He wore it for six years.
In 2019 he came off a scaffold — three metres twenty, onto a sand pile. He got up and walked. Undressing at home, he found the jade snapped clean through the middle, the break new and square.
His aunt said it had taken it for him and that he should replace it straight away.
The second one was Hetian, two thousand eight hundred yuan.
In 2023 he went into the back of a truck. The airbag came out and he bit through his lip. At home the jade had a crack in it, not all the way through — he could see which way the fracture ran.
He bought a third.
This one he did not wear. He wrapped it in red cloth and locked it in a drawer. He wanted to see what would happen if he did not wear it.
Last winter something happened. He was in hospital nineteen days.
The first thing he did when he got home was open the drawer.
It was there, wrapped, whole. He unfolded the cloth one layer at a time.
It broke in his palm. The sound was very small. His hand was warm.