The antiques man on East 55th

Competition increased, but the real threat, Chen says, comes from online auctions.

"This is something I cannot see myself going into," says this man who has never owned a mobile phone and sees no need to have one.

"Buying an antique is essentially a touch-feel business."

Life has not changed much for Chen over 40 years. Every day he gets on a bus in the late morning and heads for the store from his home near Columbia University, just steps away from where he lived when he first arrived in New York.

"The benefit of this is that I got to go to all the events held at the university. I've never been too far away from what I used to do. Antiques and astronomy - my life has been running on the dual tracks of the past and the future."

Since leaving Shanghai in the 1950s Chen has gone back twice, in 2005 and 2013. His mother died in 1974, followed by his father seven years later. In his will he left the family villa in Xiamen, Fujian province, the scenic island city in southern China, to Chen, whom he believed "tends to think more" than his other children.

"Our house in Shanghai had to go, due to the construction of an underground tram line," he says.

Chen, an opera aficionado, has regularly attended performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Between 1985 and 2002 he sampled a large part of the city's countless restaurants offering unique dining experiences.

"I always went with a food critic, either from the Daily News or The New York Times, who diligently wrote down my opinions," he says. "Some asked me: Why don't you write yourself? Inertia ... you know, I'm a physics student.

"No other city is more like Shanghai than New York," said Chen, who in the late 1940s and 50s tapped into the Chinese city's hedonistic tradition, following his father to its famed theater houses from time to time.

The passing of time has given him a slightly hunched back and huge eye bags, but tastes acquired early in life are unchanged.

In 1952, upon Chen's departure from Shanghai to Hong Kong, his father asked the young man to take with him one of the most valuable things in the family: an ink and color on paper by Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien), widely regarded as one of the most accomplished Chinese artists of the 20th century.

That painting, featuring a classical beauty in flowing robes, is painted in Zhang's signature style heavily influenced by the cave paintings in the Dunhuang Grottoes in northwestern China.

"I took that painting for the artist to see during one of his visits to the US in the 1960s, and he offered to buy it back for $8,000 together with two of his more recent works," Chen says.

"I declined. It's still with me now."

(China Daily 05/25/2019 page9)