Mingmei Yip - Song of the Silk Road

“Ouch!” he exclaimed.

Lingzi immediately came to her son’s rescue. “You OK, son? You want some Chinese medicinal oil?”

“Oh, no, mother, please don’t poison me with pungent oil!”

I kicked him again.

“Something wrong?”

“Alex, you need to eat. Look at the menu and decide what you want.”

“Lily”—his eyes penetrated mine—“I know what I want.”

I hissed, “Alex, please let’s order and not keep her waiting.”

Finally, to get things started, I ordered a Coke, Alex a beer, and his mother tea.

When the drinks arrived, we all lowered our heads to sip our beverages, trying to hide the awkwardness of each other’s long-missed presence. While occupied with the book signing I had pushed my concern for Alex’s health to the back of my mind. Now, looking at his hollow face and loose clothes, I felt a surge of worry.

When Lingzi left for the washroom, I asked, “Alex, tell me the truth, are you OK?”

“Lily, I’ve been sick.”

My heart flipped. “What’s wrong?” I was almost afraid to hear his answer and prayed to myself that Alex did not have anything terrible like cancer.

“When I returned to New York, the doctors found out I had pneumonia. I was hospitalized for more than a month because of some other complications. I had an IV in for three weeks and had new doctors coming to look at me every day. Later, when I was finally discharged from the hospital, Mom and Dad moved me to Dad’s vacation house in the Hamptons.”

That was why Alex had never answered the phone, because he’d almost died, not because he’d fallen in love with a pretty girl his age! Worse, I had been occupied with writing my memoir and had not been there for him. It was his parents, whom I had disliked from the moment I’d met them, who had saved my lover’s life. I was wrong to have thought they were cold and mean to Alex. Even if they were, they showed their love by getting him the best possible care when he was seriously ill.

Alex reached over with his napkin to wipe my face. “Don’t be sad, Lily, I’m fine now. It just takes time to gain the pounds back….”

Just then Lingzi came back. Alex grabbed my hand under the table; I held on to it for dear life.

I said to the mother and son, “Alex and Lingzi, please tell me how you two found each other.”

The mother sighed, then spoke in Chinese. “Hai, twenty-two long, agonizing years.”

I feared that once a mother started to talk about her child—baby or adult—she couldn’t stop. But at this point the waitress returned and we hurriedly opened our menus and ordered.

As if able to read my mind, Lingzi said, “I know you two can’t wait to be left alone, so I’ll be quick. Twenty-three years ago I was a theater student here at Columbia University. It was a miserable and humiliating experience for me—until I finally admitted to myself that I can’t act and gave up. Depressed, I started to drink too much. Then one night I met a guy and… that’s how Alex and his sister came to be. I never saw his father again. I was broke and had no choice but give them up for adoption. After that, I went back to Taiwan without knowing that my girl….”

At this point, Lingzi stopped. She took out a handkerchief to wipe tears. Alex silently put his arm around his mother.

She went on. “Lily, when you have a baby, never think of giving it up to someone else.”

“Didn’t you try to find Alex?”

She shook her head. “I really didn’t know how to. So you don’t know how pleased I am when Alex found me.”

I turned to her son. “Alex, how did you track down your mother?”

“My parents knew who she was because it was a private adoption. They wouldn’t tell me before, but when I was in the hospital and they thought I might die, they told me.”

Lingzi chimed in. “All I had was a picture until he met me at the airport.”

“Alex, you are very good at tracking people down. How did you know that I would be in San Francisco?”

“Two days ago when Mother and I passed by here on our way to Chinatown, I spotted a poster announcing your reading tonight.”

The rest of the meal was spent catching up with the events of the past year. When the waitress came to ask if we wanted dessert, Lingzi suggested we leave.

At the hotel lobby, she said, “I’ll leave you two alone together. I will get a taxi and go back to my hotel. See you both tomorrow.”

As I was thinking how to respond, Alex whispered into my ear. “Please, Lily, let me stay with you.”

I chuckled despite myself. “But…”

“No but….”

I turned to say good-bye but found that Lingzi was already gone.

We had barely entered my hotel room when Alex grabbed me, but I pushed him away so I could get a good look at his face. After all, we hadn’t seen each other for many months.

But Alex pulled me right back and stubbornly rested his lips on mine and his hands on my body.

“Alex,” I was mumbling between kisses, “can’t I at least take a good look at you?”

“Can’t I at least get a good taste of you?”

It was hopeless. So I let him behave like a hungry baby searching for his mother’s swelling nipple.

But after so long we were a little awkward with each other, so we talked for a while. Alex wanted to know what had happened to me in China after his departure.

After I told him everything, he said, “Just like me, you have two sets of parents. So we’re both fellow orphans and soul mates.”

He lifted my hand and ran his tongue along my palm.

When I tried to say something, he put a finger across my lips and said, “Shhh…” while starting to unbutton my dress.

In no time, we were rolling, entangling and disentangling in the soft, spacious hotel bed. The sheets and covers immediately transformed into the hot, shifting sands of the golden desert. Alex’s long fingers, like the little desert lizards, ambushed me from all sides. When he entered me, I dug my nails deep into his back and, like a bloodthirsty desert animal, sank my teeth into his neck. Then, as his sex lingered inside mine and our tongues darted around inside each other’s mouths, I felt we were nothing but one huge ball of sexual energy. Gaunt as he looked, Alex hadn’t lost a bit of his sexual qi.

Watching him, I felt as if I were back in my little cottage in the desert, the warm morning sun melting all my worries.

After love, we cuddled against each other, savoring the just-accomplished war of sex.

I caressed his bony face. “Alex, can you not scream so loud? What if people next door hear us? We might see them when we go out in the morning. Then I’ll have no face left.”

My lover’s knowing fingers circled my breast. “Lily, what do you think people come to a hotel for? To watch TV?”

The next morning we made love again, and after that, we ordered up from room service.

He said, “Lily, I feel as if I’d been looking for you my whole life. To find you I had to travel to Xian, all along the Silk Road, into the Taklamakan Desert, even to New York.”

“Alex, but now it’s over, and you have me right here with you.”

He looked straight into my eyes, his expression serious. “Lily, will you marry me?”

I said jokingly, “I guess there are no more excuses to say no anymore?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Of course.”

Alex and I had our small but cozy wedding ceremony in a small church in lower Manhattan. Besides Lingzi Lee, Frank Luce, Donna Adler, and their respective spouses and children, we only invited a few other people including, of course, my agent and my editor, as well as a few friends and classmates. Frank, and especially Donna, seemed to have gotten over their animosity toward me. After the service they went up to congratulate us.

Donna pecked my cheek, then smiled her heavily made-up smile. “Lily, take very good care of Alex for us. He’s still a child.”

I nodded.

Frank gave me a bear hug, adding, “My son, what a lucky man!”

I nodded again, my eyes brimming with tears.

Three days after the wedding, Lingzi went back to Taiwan. Unmoved by our constant pleadings, she adamantly refused to stay.

“Life here is not for me. You two live very well, no fights, no drinking, and no cheating, eh? Also, give me grandchildren, quick! Besides, I’m getting old, I don’t want to be a ghost wandering in foreign land.”

We chuckled.

“One day, you two bring your little ones to visit me in Taiwan.”

After the wedding, I finally settled down to begin writing again—in fact to finish my second book, which was actually the first one, my coming-of-age-family-saga novel. Alex went back to graduate school in Columbia’s East Asian Studies Program. To honor our encounter, he chose the history of Silk Road travel as the subject of his thesis.

“But I doubt anyone will ever read it after the huge success of your memoir.” He smiled.

Then he looked at me seriously. “Do you really have the yin eye, Lily?”

I nodded. “Sometimes. But I need to meditate hard and channel all my energies to open it. The Silk Road has a thousand years’ worth of spirits, but here there are not so many. Anyway, now I am interested in the living, not the dead. So, I don’t want to do this anymore. But I will send some money to Keku.”

“Excellent idea!” Alex enthused.

One rainy day, after a meeting with my editor in midtown, I waited for a taxi in the heavy downpour. My one hand frantically waved at any yellow passing cars while my other hand held a wind-battered umbrella. Finally, a cab appeared in front of me. When I was about to open the door, a soaked and disheveled man tried to grab the taxi away from me.

“Asshole!” I screamed.

He turned, and I couldn’t believe who it was.

A down-and-out Chris!

“Chris, what are you doing here in the rain without an umbrella?!” I yelled.

He looked so embarrassed that his face turned the color of a tomato. “Oh, Lily, I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to…”

“But you did.”

“I just got a call from Preston’s babysitter telling me that Jenny’s sick, so I…”

“No need to explain. Is she OK?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m in such a hurry.”

“So you’re still…”

“Yes, we’re still married, if that’s what you want to know.”

“So am I now.”

“I know. I read about you.”

“OK then, go ahead, back to your wife and kid. But I suspect Jenny will recover now that I am out of your life.”

I waved to the pathetic face I’d once found so irresistible. “Good-bye.”

“Take care, Lily.”

“You bet.”

Back home I didn’t bother to tell Alex—who was busy cooking in the kitchen—about the accidental meeting, but took out Master Soaring Crane’s last pouch and read:

Maintain the balance of yin and yang and everything will last.

Then my husband came out to sit down with me. As he rested his head on my lap, he placed his hand on my stomach, feeling the someone inside me kicking.

I wondered, Would our little he or she have as many adventures as Alex and I did on the way to true love?

Anyway, we’d find out in twenty or thirty long—or short—years.

Petals from the Sky

Peach Blossom Pavilion

SONG OF THE SILK ROAD Mingmei Yip ABOUT THIS GUIDE

The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of this book.

Discussion Questions

1. Why does Lily Lin finally decide to go to the Silk Road and carry out all her unknown aunt’s seemingly impossible demands? Would you do the same if given the chance?

2. What do you think about Lily’s ex-professor and lover Chris Adams? Does he care about her or just use her?

3. Lily falls in love with men very easily. How does this affect how you regard her character?

4. Alex Luce falls in love with Lily—who is eight years his senior—and chases her through some of China’s most dangerous places. Do you think love between an older woman and a younger man can end up happily?