“I understand your feelings. Maybe emotionally I’m not, but by flesh and blood I am.”

“If flesh and blood mean so much to you, then why did you abandon me?” I asked, withdrawing my hand.

“I didn’t abandon you. I chose someone I trusted and loved to care for you, but my sister, Cai Mayfong, violated that trust. I’m very, very sorry, my daughter.”

“Daughter? Since when did you carry out your motherly duty? And why this meeting? What more do you want to say except sorry and more sorry?”

“Please, Lily, I beg you, don’t act so antagonistic. I’m a dying woman who wants to right the greatest wrong she ever did. Time is slipping through my fingers as they numbly count my remaining days. I don’t have long. So, can you forgive me?”

It took some moments before I reluctantly nodded, just for the sake of getting this over with. “All right, then, why don’t you explain how and why you let your sister raise me.” Despite the deepened pain on her face, I could not stop myself from being mean.

She went on. “As you know, Mayfong was older than me. In 1964, she managed to get into Hong Kong, then saved up the money to pay a snakehead to bring me in a year later. When I arrived, I realized that she had a relationship with a much older man who paid for her living and actually lent her money to bring me in.

“The old man did not visit often, having to divide his time with his wife and children. But soon after my arrival, he announced his intention to take both Mayfong and me as wives number two and three. I was shocked by this ridiculous proposal, and even more so by my sister’s consent and her urging me to do the same.

“From that day on, our relationship cooled. Mayfong warned me that if I turned down the old man’s proposal, she’d lose favor with him and we’d be in financial trouble. I was so unhappy that I cried most of the nights. Though I’d never told my sister, I had hoped that Wang Jin, my lover in Beijing, would be able to join me in Hong Kong.

“Two months later, as I tried to focus on my new job of weaving wigs in a factory, Wang Jin came to Hong Kong. He had started a business smuggling art and wanted to make contacts to sell it in the British Colony. For a week, I told my boss I was sick so I could stay with Wang Jin in a motel. Because Mayfong disliked him, I lied to her that I had to work overtime and would stay overnight at the factory that week.

“That was the happiest time of my life. But my happiness was short-lived. A week after Wang Jin’s departure, I was waiting for my sister to come home for dinner when the old man arrived without prior notice. Seeing that I was alone in the apartment, he forced me to have sex with him.”

“I’m sorry…. What did your sister say about this?”

“I never told her.”

“No? Why not?”

“Hai, you’re so naïve, my daughter. You think I can just blast to her face that her sugar daddy raped me?”

“But that’s the truth!”

She sighed. “Sometimes it’s better not to learn the truth. Anyway, Mayfong might not have believed a single word I said and thought I was the one who’d seduced him. So I swallowed the pain like bitter melon and kept my mouth shut.”

Slowly I tried to let Madison’s words sink in. How much was truth and how much was made up? Human nature can be so ugly and human relationships so complicated. Can’t one just live a simple, happy life without all the calculations and machinations?

Her smokelike voice rose again in the smelly cell. “Anyway, two months later I found out that I was pregnant—”

“Then who’s the…?”

“I had no idea then. It was not until I was six months pregnant and could no longer hide it under loose clothes that I told Mayfong about my secret meetings with Wang Jin. As the Chinese say, ‘No good fortune ever arrives doubly and no misfortune singly.’ Two weeks later I got the devastating news that Wang Jin was hospitalized for a liver infection.

“I wanted to go back to care for him and give birth to you. But Mayfong insisted that I stay to give birth in Hong Kong so she could tend to me. Then, before I could make up my mind, you came into this world three weeks early. This time Mayfong urged me to go back to take care of Wang Jin and leave you with her. So I went back to China, while not having the slightest idea that I’d never see you or Hong Kong again.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t know that Mayfong had caught a venereal disease from the old man and was infertile. She persuaded me to go back to China so she could raise you as her own daughter.”

Was this stranger in front of me an authentic, shameless liar or my authentic, shameful mother? And what about my other mother, the one in Hong Kong, was she really that evil?

Madison’s voice rasped in the stale prison air, interrupting my musings.

“In China, I realized things were more complicated than I’d thought. Wang Jin begged me to stay to assist him in his art smuggling business. Since I couldn’t abandon him in the middle of his sickness, I promised.

“Years passed and we were making a lot of money. I would have gone back to Hong Kong, but my sister told me you had died from pneumonia. Though devastated, I didn’t know that this was just the beginning of my troubles….”

I was shocked to hear of my Hong Kong mother’s cruel deception. But before I had a chance to ask any question, Madison rushed on. “One morning when Wang Jin was on his way to a meeting, he was run over by a car. The driver was never caught and none of the bystanders were willing to tell anything to the police. So it was ruled an accident. But I knew what had happened—he was murdered by one of his rivals.

“After Wang Jin died, I did not want to continue to smuggle, but Silk Road art was becoming fashionable and the money so great that I decided to take one last trip before all the art was taken by others. Then one day after I was back home in Beijing, four policemen burst into my apartment and arrested me. My trial lasted twenty minutes. I was convicted as a thief of national treasures—a traitor—and here I am.”

I wondered if all these tragedies—Wang Jin’s death and Mindy Madison’s imprisonment—were their bad karma from stealing and smuggling national treasures.

As if reading my mind, Madison said, “Wang Jin told me that when he first realized that the Westerners looted treasures from China, he was furious about it. But after learning how China neglected many of the treasures or let them be destroyed, he began to believe that they would be safer overseas. Of course he’d never imagine that someday he’d be murdered for protecting Chinese culture.”

Yes, of course, no prisoner ever thinks he or she is guilty—only unlucky. But I kept this thought to myself.

She sighed. “Now the only hope I have of not dying here is to prove that I didn’t steal the Diamond Sutra, the Gold Buddha, or the terracotta soldier.”

“That terracotta soldier is in the mausoleum, so how come it’s a fake?”

“The real one was stolen by a curator who replaced it with a fake. I know him personally. He was one of my many contacts.”

“Then how did the Diamond Sutra and the Gold Buddha end up in Floating Cloud’s temple?”

“Wang Jin had become obsessed with these two treasures and wanted to steal them but never drummed up a perfect plan. Then he was killed. So I decided to carry out his wish.”

“Even though security was lax, it must have been difficult. How did you do it?”

She chuckled, deepening her crows’ feet like nets ready to ensnare me.

“To begin with, Floating Cloud is not really a monk. His real name is Chen Dong and he was a guard in the Turpan Museum. The museum hired him because he was accomplished in kung fu. I met him when I was visiting the museum to figure out how to get the Buddha and the sutra. I could tell by the way he looked at me that he found me attractive, so I made a point to talk to him each time I visited, and finally we went to bed. When I offered to share the money I made selling the treasures, he agreed right away.

“So one day, he stayed on after the museum had closed to visitors while I watched the front entrance. He then took out the treasures and replaced them with the fakes. I waited in front for a long time, but he never appeared. He must have gone out through a back entrance and left Turpan immediately.

“I wasn’t willing to give up, so after I returned to Beijing I asked around among smugglers and art dealers I knew. Because the art world is a small one and I had many contacts, I soon heard rumors that he was hiding in a remote temple. Now I knew that when he was young, his family, being too poor to feed him, had sent him to a temple in the Mountains of Heaven to live as a child monk. After he’d grown up, he left the temple and got the job at the museum. No one knew which temple he was hiding in, but I made a lucky guess and tracked him down.

“My plan was to seduce him, get him drunk, then take back the Diamond Sutra and the Gold Buddha. It wasn’t hard to seduce him again, even as a supposed monk—I don’t think he’d been with a woman for a long time. But as I felt complacent about my plan, I also underestimated his intelligence. Instead of getting drunk himself, he put something in my drink. When I woke up, I found myself no longer in the temple but lying and feeling disoriented on the lower slope of the mountain.”

“Then what happened?”

“Not long after I went back home, I was arrested. Someone, I am sure it was Chen Dong, had written an anonymous letter to the government about the theft and naming me as the culprit. You know the rest.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to digest her strange explanations. Then I stared into her fathomless eyes. “Why did you ask me to repeat what you did? Couldn’t I have just stolen the treasures without seducing the monk?”