Mingmei Yip - Song of the Silk Road

During the following week, I ate and slept and waitressed at Shun Lee Palace as usual, but my mind had already flown to the Silk Road, where my body was enjoying a sauna under the hot sun, my bare toes and soles baking on the desert’s fiery golden sand and my eyes dreamy in the intoxicating heat.

I imagined caravans on their way to the mysterious East, with exotic, smooth-skinned women with veiled faces and bodies draped in luminous silk. Their skin as golden as the sand, they hummed strange melodies to the accompaniment of tinkling bells tied around the camels’ ankles….

The days crept by until I finally dragged my numbed feet back to the Mills and Mann office and settled the surreal affair in a banal, legalistic manner. I was briefed about the terms one more time and was given the fifty-thousand-dollar check.

Margaret Mills said, handing me a big manila envelope, “Miss Lin, here are the preliminary itinerary and the tasks you are required to carry out on the Silk Road. Details of your aunt’s document and her journey will be in Beijing for you to pick up from Mr. Lo.”

When I stood up to leave, the envelope pressed tightly against my chest, I caught a smirk on David Mann’s face. “Good luck with your aunt’s requests!”

After leaving the lawyers’ office on this note of high suspense, I went straight to the Chase Bank in Union Square near where I lived and deposited the check. Then I strolled around aimlessly, trying to clear my mind. Near the subway station, three teenagers were showing off their impossible skating skills by flipping, flying, and somersaulting in all directions, their skateboards scraping hard on the ground, making a threatening Zeeet! Zeeeet! Zeeet! sound.

“Watch out!” I yelled to the kids, and quickly stepped aside to avoid a possible hit and run—reminding myself that I was now a three-million-dollar heiress.

Queeeeiiit! A skateboard squealed to a halt directly in front of me. It was the youngest of the kids.

He saluted me, splitting a big, heart-melting smile, then shouted, “Yes, ma’am!” His rhinestone stud sparkled like morning dew on his impossibly smooth face.

I flashed him back a soon-to-be-millionaire smile, then continued to walk. Could anyone tell that this white-shirted and blue-jeaned Chinese woman was soon to be sporting nothing but designer clothes, flawless three-carat diamonds, and a three-hundred-dollar hairdo and dining only in high-end, fashionable restaurants? Hmm… actually, one person could. The young male bank manager. Although he had not made any comment, his smile had betrayed his approving mood. I couldn’t wait to see what his smile would look like (stretching all the way outside his face?) in six months—assuming I would come back from China alive and in one piece.

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.