Song of the Silk Road

by Mingmei Yip

  He studied the two objects for a few moments. “I’ll destroy these so there’s no evidence they ever existed.”

  “Destroy? Please don’t! Can’t I keep them?” Fake or not, they were beautiful pieces, and I’d gone through a lot to get them—the mountain path with no stairs, the hanging-upside-down-lotus, my sane performance of insanity to trick Floating Cloud.

  Lo laughed. “Don’t even think about it. Now give me the piece of clay you scraped from the terracotta soldier and the herbs.”

  I handed them over. When he was staring at the clay, I asked, “What’s the use of this tiny bit of dirt?”

  Lo cast me a chiding glance. “This is enough to prove the soldier is a fake and that Miss Madison didn’t, nor have any intention to, steal it in the first place. So, after the clay is proven fake and the two museum pieces genuine, the government will not detain her anymore, let alone execute her.”

  Next, Lo, to my surprise, not only examined the snow lotuses but also rubbed them against his nose and sniffed them with great affection. “You have no idea how important this is for your mother. Snow Lotus is the number one Chinese herb to cure cancer and prolong life. If she can be released from prison and recover, it’ll be a happy ending.”

  Happy ending? Definitely not for me, three million dollars poorer than I’d expected to be.

  He gave me a stern look. “So my advice is, be loving to your mother. That’s the reason you were told to read the Filial Piety Classic at the Stele Forest at the start of your trip—to remind you to be filial.”

  Oh… that’s the reason. But I was filial to my mother, the one who had raised me in Hong Kong. Now my head was spinning at these revelations, and I felt too confused to argue.

  The next day, Lo arranged a car to take us to the prison. Again he led me into the hellish institution and went through all the procedures with me, but after that, he took his leave.

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “No. Today it’s your private meeting with Miss Madison. I’ll be waiting in the car.” He handed me a thermos he’d been carrying. “This is the snow lotus decoction for your mother. Make sure she drinks it all.”

  Today Mindy Madison still looked weak but seemingly in slightly better spirits. I realized how I must seem to her eyes—suspicious, cold, heartless, stubborn. But could I be blamed? I had to deal with a stranger who not only plummeted into my life as my newly revealed mother but also was a cancer victim, a criminal, a death row prisoner—and whose mess I was now supposed to clean up.

  Madison’s haunting eyes, hollow in her paper-white face, stared at me like a famished child’s. My heart sank. I’d never seen anyone so pale. It was clear that her blood, her qi, and her soul itself were all draining fast as she was about to pass from this body and this life to the next.

  I handed her the thermos. “Mr. Lo said for you to drink all of it.”

  She took it, poured the liquid into a filthy plastic cup, and faithfully downed its contents in long, noisy sips.

  After that, she reached to hold my hand, and this time I let her. That was the least I could do for a person approaching the end of this journey. So I was willing to let her absorb my life’s vibrancy and my body’s warmth as she was losing hers.

  “I know it’s difficult for you to accept me as your mother,” she said in her smoke-thin voice.

  I avoided her hungry-ghost gaze as I felt her hand icy cold like that of a skeleton in a medical lab. “But you are not my mother.”

  “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 str
anger 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?”

  “Because you couldn’t possibly know he was Floating Cloud until you heard his sex mantra.”

  How perverse. I didn’t mean only Madison, but also myself, since I’d willingly succumbed to her request—for three million dollars. “But who else could it be there besides Floating Cloud? The other is just a kid.”

  “When I tracked him down, there were several monks in the temple,” she said, then picked up the plastic cup and drank the remaining snow lotus tea, her eyes avoiding mine.

  Some silence passed before I asked, “Then what about the blind fortune-teller, why tell him nothing but lies?”

  “Because if he really can perceive the truth, then he’d vehemently refute your lies, and in that case you’d learn about my real situation.”

  How convoluted—truth and lies bouncing back and forth like ping-pong balls. “Why did you go to him in the first place?”

  “When people’s lives stop making sense, all they can turn to is mysterious knowledge—metaphysics. After Wang Jin’s death and your supposed one, I was so desperate I thought of ending it all. But I visited Master Soaring Crane for guidance. His advice was that everyone needs to generate their own good karma and be their own bodhisattva.” Madison smoothed her scanty gray hair with her chopstick fingers. “That’s why I asked you to reclaim that clump of hair.”

  “Ha!” I exclaimed. “So I risked my life visiting the Taklamakan Desert just for a clump of hair?”

  “Because the hair now should be in the hands of nuns embroidering a Buddha image.”

  This karmic drama was getting more and more weird. “How’s that?”

  “It’s for merit, for my next life. Just like writing the sutra in one’s blood. When the nuns weave my hair into the Buddha, it will alleviate much bad karma that I have made for myself in this life.”

  I stared at her semibald head. “That long, shiny hair is yours?”

  She smiled dreamily. “Yes, Wang Jin used to really love my hair, which he referred to as my black waterfall. But it’s destroyed by cancer.”

  “I’m sorry…. But why would you bury it in the Taklamakan?”

  “That was a promise I made to Wang Jin. He always wanted to travel the Silk Road and enter the mysterious desert with me, but he died before he had the chance. On his deathbed, he urged me to go so he could see the places with me.”

  “But he was dying!”

  “I brought his ashes with me.”

  “Oh….”

  “Since he liked the Taklamakan so much, I decided to bury some of his ashes there—together with my hair—that way, if when I died I could not be buried with him, then at least we’d be together. The rest of his ashes I carried home.”

  I fell silent, trying to put together all the pieces of this Silk Road puzzle. So the “dust” that Alex and I had found inside the box and that he had thrown out was Wang Jin’s ashes! But of course I was not going to t
ell Madison that.

  She patted the back of my hand. “Lily, just think of your trip as a valuable life experience and a bittersweet memory to savor during your old age. Something that money cannot buy.”

  I laughed. “Sure, since there’s no money for me.” I thought for a while, then asked, “Are there any more things you want me to do?”

  “Visit me often so we can make up for lost time.”

  “You mean your time lost. I’ve been perfectly happy living my life in New York.”

  “Sorry to drag you into this. But trust me, Lily, you won’t regret it. You’ll understand after I pass away.”

  “Maybe you’ll live forever, as most cunning people do; they cheat death….”

  She cut me off and rushed on, seemingly trying to blurt out whatever had been stuck inside her throat for all these years. “My daughter, there is something I need to let you know before it’s too late.”

  “What is it now? More unpaid services?”

  She ignored my sarcasm, her voice urgent. “I didn’t have the heart to tell you earlier. You’re Wang Jin’s daughter, not the old man’s.”

  I almost fainted at this declaration. I couldn’t believe that not only had this trip robbed me of my three million dollars, it robbed me of my parents, too. True, I had been given another pair, but I hadn’t really been looking to replace the ones I’d thought I had.

  When I was about to protest, Madison turned to open a drawer, took out two large envelopes, and handed them to me. “Look at what’s inside when you are back in your hotel but bring them back to me.” She paused to take several deep breaths. “I’m tired now, otherwise I would tell you more about your real father. Maybe next time.”

  Although I hated my father, suddenly learning about a new one was too much. Sometimes you can only bear so much truth. So I was relieved that she was too tired to tell me. “Yes, maybe next time. So why don’t you rest now.”

  She stared deeply at me. “I want you to promise me that you will go to your father Wang Jin’s grave, to offer him respect and tell him that you’re his daughter.”