Mingmei Yip - Song of the Silk Road

Back home, I immediately plunged into reading Mindy Madison’s documents. I flipped through the thick stack, reading a section here and skipping another one there. At first glance, I was quite relieved to find that the routes to take, cities to visit, people to meet, and things to do didn’t seem all that daunting. However, as I read further, the requests started to become a little weird, one even perverse.

At the edge of a desert called the Taklamakan, I needed to retrieve something (it was not specified what) buried in a small, ruined town.

I had to meet with a blind fortune-teller on a certain mountain and tell him nothing but lies about everything.

And the perverse one:

I had to seduce a certain monk in a certain temple and have sex with him in the “hanging-upside-down-lotus” position, something I, though I considered myself pretty open about sex, had never heard of. Would I get a brain hemorrhage? I couldn’t help but chuckle—not that I found this funny, but just hoping the chuckle would somehow dissipate the uneasy feelings that were emerging inside me.

After I finished reading, I let out a sigh. The whole thing struck me as peculiar. Very peculiar. And scary. If my “aunt,” Mindy Madison, had already done these things, then why pay me to repeat them? There must be something not quite proper—or downright crooked—going on behind all this, but what, I had no idea.

Like a bad cold, the uneasy feeling refused to go away.

The following morning I called Shun Lee Palace and told the owner I wouldn’t be in that day due to female discomfort. I needed a whole day to clear my mind and plan for my immediate future. Since I already had fifty thousand in my bank account and would receive another huge sum in six months, should I just quit my job for the trip? Or ask for a six-month leave? But what if I failed to complete my journey? What if I got sick or even died on the road? Murdered? Strangled by silk? Engulfed by sand and eaten alive by horrible insects?

On the other hand, if all of these were really going to happen, why should I care, as a ghost?

Since my early teens, my dream was to be an adventurer exploring exotic, mysterious places, especially the Sahara Desert. The soft, tender, sensuously shifting golden dunes were to me crawling dragons, or voluptuous goddesses striking elegant yoga poses. When the sun shone on these masses, I saw the ferocity of an attacking tiger and the docility of a retreating virgin. However, I’d never imagined that my dream to visit a desert would be realized so soon, albeit not the Sahara but the Taklamakan.

Silk Road. I felt a smile hovering on my face as the two words tenderly rolled on my tongue. In my mind I felt rainbow-colored silk caressing my body, rendering me achingly mysterious and desirable. I imagined myself as a tall, robust woman. By Chinese standards my five feet five inches is tall, but at 118 pounds I should have more flesh.

I was dressed in a bright turquoise sarong with matching scarf, balancing a jug of milk on top of my head. The sand oozed through my long, bronze toes as I wriggled to the rhythm of the undulating milk. The sun, like a yellow mask, began its spectacular descent behind my back. Exotic birds flapped their wings, then flew across the orange sky as it turned blood red….

If the desert was a lover, I was ready for a passionate affair!

But my elation soon drained away as I read more of the strange demands from the aunt. Would there really be three million dollars waiting for me at the end of the journey? Or was it just an elaborate scam, a come-on with some inscrutable motive?

But curiosity, my sense of adventure, and greed won out. I decided to quit my waitressing job and depart for China but keep my three-hundred-square-foot studio. I’d always felt different—the bright dot of brilliant red among a vast expanse of green. An earth-shattering lion’s roar amidst the mundane drones of everyday life.

After all, this was a once-in-a-thousand-incarnations chance.

I told myself that if I didn’t come back alive from the Silk Road, So. Be. It. At least I’d die in a romantic place—not as a back-straining, leg-numbing waitress; a stomach-rumbling, mind-constipating novelist-to-be; or a bed-warming, albeit not-childbearing, mistress.

I exclaimed, “I’d rather die a goddess of adventure than a waitress of no venture!”

Then the great Indian poet Tagore’s line flashed in my mind: “Even though the sky had no trace of me, I knew I’d flown through it.”

Yes, I was going!

There was only one person whom I needed to tell about my impending departure. Chris Adams, my creative writing professor turned lover.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens declared, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” How true for me, too, in my two cities—Hong Kong and New York. The worst of times was that I lost both my parents in Hong Kong in a year—my father of liver cancer and my mother of a heart attack not long after. The best of times was that Chris Adams, then my professor of creative writing at New York University, felt so sorry for what had happened that he let me graduate even though I hadn’t quite finished my novel, a requirement for the MFA degree. Not only that, his contact with a restaurant owner helped me get my waitressing job at Shun Lee Palace.

This had all happened a year ago, in 1995.

With my twenty-five-thousand-dollar income, I was able to rent a tiny, rent-controlled studio three blocks from work for five hundred a month, and I settled in my beloved city, the Big Apple. Feeling I had to repay my professor’s kindness, one day while his wife and kid were visiting her in-laws out of town, I went to his apartment, then straight to his bed.

Of course, affairs don’t just start on one person’s initiation. As the Chinese say: “You can’t press down the cow’s head if it doesn’t want to drink.” Chris Adams and I had been flirting since the first day I took his creative writing course. Toward the end of each class, he’d ask a student to read aloud a passage from the classics—Macbeth, Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, when he’d pick me to read, it was always something like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary. The message was quite obvious. The result was I’d finally become the woman who, though not his wife, shared the wifely duty of warming his bed, and—true to his class—in all sorts of creative ways.

Anyway, I thought I had finally found some peace in life with my master’s degree, a salaried job, a roof over my head, a novel in progress, a part-time lover, and the choice to not go back to Hong Kong after my parents’ demise.

Not since this fortune had dropped in my lap out of nowhere. Who was this Mindy Madison? Was she really my aunt? Then why did she have an American last name? How come my mother never mentioned a sister? And why would my aunt want to leave her fortune to me now? Didn’t she have any children of her own? Why hadn’t she contacted me earlier? Besides, how did she get so filthy rich?

After I settled what Chris referred to as my cute little yellow bottom on the used sofa he’d given me, I picked up the phone. I was about to dial Chris’s office when my hand stayed suspended in midair. Should I also tell him about my upcoming big fortune?

There were many things I liked about Chris—his poet’s face, muscular Yukio Mishima body (his hero), erudition, detached manner, knowing hands, glib tongue (you know what I mean)… but, was he to be trusted? A wife-cheating man? While the question kept flip-flopping in my mind like a fish in a dry bucket, my fingers were already hitting the keypad.

“Chris?”

“Yes, Lily, my China goddess, I miss you. Shall I come to your place tonight?” That’s one good thing about Chris; he never used clichés like “China doll.”

“Where are Jenny and Preston?” Jenny was the wife and Preston the son.

“She’ll be at the book club and Preston will be staying overnight with his buddy.”

Chris always referred to the book club as a stupid idea for wasting time but a good one for killing it. And an even better opportunity to look for someone—to turn a lonesome into a twosome. But I assumed this was for him, not his wife—or me.

“Hmm…” Maybe I needed time alone to ponder my three-million-dollar future.

But Chris’s eager voice rose like a wisp of smoke emitting a seductive scent. “Lily, I’ll cook you your favorite kung pao chicken, sweet and sour pork, plus a new dish. How’s that?”

Could any woman resist a man whose hands could write best-selling novels, cook exotic cuisine, and discover his lover’s body like an adventurer exploring an untamed land? So that night I decided to try out his new dish and maybe even the hanging-upside-down-lotus. I covered the receiver to let out a chuckle.

Then I cooed into the receiver, “All right, can you make it at seven?” trying to sound like a real goddess, Chinese or whatever.

“No problem. Jenny will dine with her bookies. See you soon, my love.”

“See you,” I echoed dreamily.

Besides literature and writing, cooking was Chris Adams’s other passion. Not only did he love to cook for me, he’d buy all the meat, vegetables, and dessert and bring them to my studio. During the evenings when he was cooking, I was treated as regally as an agent by wannabe writers. My professor lover would insist that he’d take care of everything: shopping, paying, chopping, cooking, setting the table, even cleaning afterward. And of course, all these nice acts from the market to the patisserie to the cashier to the kitchen to the dining room would naturally lead to the one ultimate place: the bedroom. Not that I had anything to complain about. Chris was an excellent lover, searching my body with his poet’s hand, then entering me like a tiger preying on a rabbit, or a dragon plunging down a ravine. But this was not without guilt—he was, after all, a married man with a child.

That night, when we were lying in bed, exhausted and tranquil after lovemaking, I lazily stroked Chris’s soft, blond hair.

“Chris, will you be lonely if I’m away for six months?”

His voice, tinted with surprise, rose in the dark, sex-smelling air. “Lily, what are you talking about?”

“I’m going away for six months.”

“Why? What happened?”

Should I tell him everything?

“I’ve decided to go to the Silk Road, the desert, you know, my lifelong dream.” My voice sounded controlled yet calm.

“That’s nice. I’ve always dreamed of traveling along the Silk Road with you.”

This was not what I had expected to hear. “I… I don’t think so. Chris, you have your wife and child here.”

“I can make arrangements for them when I’m away.”

“Chris, please, this is not possible.”

“What? You don’t want my company?”

“It’s not that… but…”

“Then what is it? I can ask for a six-month sabbatical, you know, since I haven’t taken any leave for a long time.”

“Chris, I have to go by myself.”

“What do you mean you have to?”

“I…”

He cut me off. “But, Lily, what about your job? You just can’t quit working like that. You need money to pay your rent, buy food, travel. And the Silk Road—I thought your dream is the Sahara Desert. Anyway, why such a long trip now? You’re not an impulsive person.”

Chris sat up and flipped on the light. He looked even more attractive when agitated. And naked.

“Calm down, Chris. I just got another new credit card.”

“But you don’t want to be in debt! Why do this now?”

I had a good answer for that, just not for him. “Chris, I’m going to be thirty, so I think it’ll be now or never.”

“Don’t be silly.” He combed his hair with his sexy fingers, stared at the calligraphy ren—patience—on the wall, then turned back to look me in the eyes, his words coming out slowly and deliberately. “Lily, are you seeing someone else, a rich guy? And you’re now traveling with him to the Silk Road?”

I opened my mouth, but no words came.

“Tell me, do you have another lover?” His tone was hurt and angry.

But how could he be? That was exactly what he was doing to his wife!

“No. I just want to go to the Silk Road and the desert.”

“But why now? And why by yourself?”