Mingmei Yip - Song of the Silk Road

“Alex, you’ll probably forget me once you’re back home.” Though I hoped he wouldn’t.

“Why do you say that?” It was the first time he raised his voice at me.

“I just think…”

“Don’t I matter to you?”

“Alex, you’re too young to…”

He cut me off again. “I’m not the child you think I am, and I know what I want. If you don’t want me, just say so!”

I stood there, speechless. I didn’t know if I was too stunned by his outburst or because it was true that I didn’t want him—at least until I got my three million dollars.

He pushed a step further. “Say you love me.”

I couldn’t—although I did love him. If things didn’t work out, I wouldn’t have the heart to break his heart.

So I just stood there like a dummy—under my lover’s sad-eyed inquisition and his parents’ puzzled scrutiny.

“Then please sort out your feelings first before you say yes or no. I can wait. I’m still very young, remember?”

After a long, silent look, Alex crawled inside the car beside his parents and pulled the door shut with a bang. Then the car sped away, leaving a trail of dust to blind my teary vision.

Back in my little cottage, I spent most of my time sitting on my tire sofa and staring out the window, watching the sun’s glorious rise and its spectacular descent. While birds glided over the golden sand, my heart ached with a pain I hadn’t known existed. The desert, with its forever shifting dunes, sometimes appeared to me like a meditating giant, sometimes a voluptuous mantra-chanting goddess. But now in all its guises, this whooping sand saddened me, especially in the twilight, when Lop Nor’s sad face emerged, followed by Chris’s not-quite-forgotten one, and, most painful of all, Alex’s face, sometimes eager, sometimes angry, sometimes hurt.

As Alex called me the “desert enchantress,” I hoped my life was destined to be exciting and adventurous, not a nine-to-five existence—or nonexistence—to make the rich boss even richer, or that of a high-society housewife busy planning parties and private school board meetings, squeezing out time in between for hairstyling, manicure, pedicure, facial, spa, massage, and Paris–London–Fifth Avenue shopping.

I sighed. What a mess this desert trip had turned out to be.

Every night in my solitary bed I fidgeted and desired Alex’s warm body, trying to re-create the feeling of his hands searching my face, breasts, and between my thighs. I missed him terribly, but I was also relieved, in a way, that he was gone—so I could focus on my three-million-dollar mission.

Life would move on. Always.

My next stop would have to be visiting the monk, which I’d been dreading for a long time—especially the “hanging-upside-down-lotus.” Although I’d lost my virginity at seventeen to a neighbor nerd just to be rebellious and allowed a few men to share my bed in my twenty-nine-year existence—for love (a need), sexual pleasure (a bonus), filling up my loneliness (a desperation), and asserting my female power (a challenge), I’d never considered myself loose. I was but a victim of my own weakness, not that of my yielding vagina but of my vulnerable heart. I told myself that I fell for men so easily because I possessed a rare ability to see past their exterior to discover something special, or even mysterious, within.

This had first been pointed out to me by one of my high school classmates who’d always disapproved of the boys I fell for. One time she looked at me with disapproval. “Lily! What do you see in that assless ass? Is it because you feel sorry for him? I don’t even want to breathe the same air that he breathes. Yuk!”

When I was in my teens, my mother would sometimes ask me to go to the market to pick a fresh red snapper for dinner. I’d always hated the crowded, noisy, filthy place, especially the slippery floor and the stench like a homeless person’s armpits. Working my way between the haggling housewives, I’d hold my breath while pushing through to look for my mother’s dream snapper. With disgust, I’d quickly flip the pile of fish, then pay without bargaining so I could leave the place as quickly as possible.

But one time something magical happened. When I was looking for the right fish, I saw a beefy chunk of a man kneeling with one leg beside a huge block of ice. With his large hands, this gigantic flesh slab was attacking the other, frozen slab with an ice pick, shattering it to pieces.

I could never explain how I felt at that moment. Somehow, eyes glued to this testosterone-filled chunk, my whole being seemed to merge with his pounding, muscular arms and fierce concentration. I watched him in a state of ecstasy, completely forgetting my own existence, not to mention the filthy market and my mother’s dream fish.

When the slicing was finally done, he tossed some of the crushed ice into a plastic bucket, then stood up to hand it to a woman—his wife, I guessed. It was then that I noticed he was unusually tall, at least six feet if not more. His blood-stained, blue overalls, black gloves, and plastic booties gave him an intimidating yet detached look, far more imposing than the trying-to-look-tough-and-rough models in a men’s fashion magazine.

My feet remained rooted in this place I’d always hated as I continued to ogle this man, mesmerized by his street performance.

Fifteen minutes later, when he stood up to deliver his umpteenth bucket of ice, his gaze shot in my direction and our eyes met. My already-accelerated heartbeat instantly doubled in tempo, followed by a tightening throat. I was struck by a passion so intense that I felt I would just collapse into his arms on the spot amidst the bleary-eyed fishes.

Since I didn’t know how to properly react to our fleeting eye contact, I simply smiled like an idiot struck delirious by some unnameable, mighty force. But alas, this moving mass of muscle didn’t seem to acknowledge my existence at all. Instead, I was cruelly jilted by his disdainful gaze, which quickly shifted to glower at the woman beside him. “Hey, bitch! How many times have I told you not to spill ice on the ground? Eh? Stupid!”

Just then there was a loud Thuuummmp! It was a bloody fish head flying off a nearby chopping board, unwittingly killing my burgeoning lust, right then and there.

On my way home holding the plastic bag with the fish squirming inside, I realized it was my love of literature that had turned the man into an object of romance and had transformed him from a fish vendor into a knight striding on his plastic boots to rescue me from the chaotic piles of smelly fish. In reality, he was probably an illiterate scoundrel whose wife-abusing, child-beating addictions were the only entertainments in his miserable, stinking life.

The next day after I told my classmate about this incident, she laughed so hard that she had to squat on the floor, knees trembling.

“Lily,” she blubbered, “you’re amazing! You read too many novels! Instead of inventing attractive traits for men, from now on you should dig out everything disgusting about them so your appetite for love will be smothered instantly!”

I did listen to her, and by doing my best not to let my passion run loose like a wild dog chased by a drunk, I saved myself a lot of wasteful emotions. Until I met Chris and then Alex. And maybe Lop Nor.

I had only myself to blame for all my messy relationships. No matter how much I’d tried to suppress my feelings, I love men and love falling in love with them. Because, with different men, I become a different woman. For Chris, I was a diversion from his duty-filled, boring, married life, and I felt flattered that I could provide the excitement—in life and in bed—that his wife could not. For Alex, maybe I was an exotic dish on the remote Silk Road, a feminine comfort in the masculine desert, and a solace for his loveless childhood. That, too, I was happy to provide. With Lop Nor— although nothing had happened between us—if he was really in love with me as I might be with him, I’d be a cool shower in the hot desert and a glimmer of light in his dark, tragic life.

With all the men in my life, there was only one in whose eyes I was but worthless and good-for-nothing—my father.

I’d been my mother’s only child growing up in the British Colony of Hong Kong. But not for my father; he had four boys with his other wife, whom I had only met a few times.

My mother lost her parents, both factory workers in Canton, when she was only fifteen. Out of sympathy, her aunt, who worked as a janitor and could barely feed her own three kids, took my mother in. But when she heard that an uncle had planned to escape by sea from China to Hong Kong at the next full moon, she dragged my mother to the pier to send her on the uncle’s boat.

When my mother arrived in Hong Kong, she was hungry, penniless, and bitterly hated by the adult relatives. The treacherous sea had engulfed three of them, and the survivors, all blaming my mother for bringing bad luck, abandoned her at an orphanage the following day. For two years, while working as a janitor in exchange for lodgings and meals, Mother was often beaten and starved by a sadistic attendant. One day after a severe beating, she ran away and wandered the streets for hours. Then she spotted a church and her tired feet carried her in.

My mother cleaned for the church in exchange for meals and lodging. Considered a beauty because of her slim figure, oval-shaped face, and silky, waist-length, ink black hair, Mother was soon noticed by a middle-aged man. He came to the church to atone for his sinful nature—dishonest merchant, negligent father, philanderer. The sinner then seduced Mother, got her pregnant, and took her as his mistress. That man was my father, and the to-be-born baby was me. According to Mother, after my father had taken a look at my face and then my lower body, he exclaimed, “A crack! Money losing stuff!” then left without a word. In old China, girls were called “money losing stuff” since they only grow up to marry and adopt another family name. A crack is, of course, where the fortune leaks.