Mingmei Yip - Song of the Silk Road

Ellen kept mailing me rejection letters from various publishers big and small until one day, unexpectedly, she called.

“Lily, congratulations! An editor from Center Books is very enthusiastic about your memoir and wants to publish it.”

These were the sweetest words I’d heard for a long time.

I screamed into the phone. “Oh, my God, am I dreaming?”

“Yes, a dream coming true.” She paused for suspense before blurting out, “They’re offering you a six-figure advance—one hundred thousand.”

This time my voice hit the jackpot. “Oh, my God, are you sure you got the figure right?!”

“Are you saying that I can’t do my job?” she joked.

“Of course not! Just… sounds too good to be true.”

“Congratulations, Lily, for writing such a wonderful book!”

Of course with the one-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, my earlier dread of having to look for menial jobs like waitressing or babysitting faded like morning fog.

The nine months before the book was actually going to come out dragged by. I occupied myself revising and taking care of other tasks such as selecting pictures and reviewing the cover design. My editor particularly liked the love story between Alex and me, which made me agonizingly sad and nostalgic. Would I cross paths again with the love of my life? Or as with my mother, had we just rubbed past each other’s shoulders among a huge crowd in this Red Dust?

Though at first I’d been tempted to include my affair with Chris to render my memoir more juicy and salable, I soon decided against it because it just didn’t feel right to hurt him or his family for my own gain. And what if Alex read all about my affair with Chris?

Anyway, at the moment both men seemed, for different reasons, to be out of my life.

But now that my manuscript was finally accepted for publication, I decided to call Chris to share the good news. After all, he’d been my mentor for a long time.

To my surprise, his department secretary told me he was on sabbatical to write a book and wouldn’t be back for another month. She asked me to leave a message, and I did. There must be something wrong that Chris took a sabbatical without letting me know. In the past, he’d used his time off so he could spend more time with me, or fuck me, to be exact. There was something seriously wrong. What was it?

But Chris never called.

Then, a month before my book was due to come out, I opened the New York Times and discovered an interview with him about his new novel— Romancing the Silk Road .

It was clear as day that not only had he stolen my story, he’d even beat me in getting his out. So he could drink the first sip of the nutritious soup—as the popular Chinese saying goes. No wonder he’d disappeared and avoided me for so long. He was hiding somewhere to write his—actually my—story.

I almost suffocated in my own anger as I read the Times article. Did this constitute plagiarism? I thought so. But I had to read the book to be sure.

I dashed down to the street, hurried to the nearby Barnes & Noble, and snatched up a copy of Romancing the Silk Road . From the back cover, Chris’s intense eyes stared back at me, as if mocking my stupidity and carelessness.

“Asshole!” I spat.

When I was leaving the bookstore, I cast another look at his picture displayed at the front in the window and spat out, “Jerk!”

I finished the four hundred fifty pages of Romancing the Silk Road in three days. I was even more bitter to have to admit to myself that Chris was an excellent writer. He was able to pull readers into the story, to make them vicariously experience all the adventures, dangers, discomforts, and mystery of the desert. But there was no question that he’d gotten all of it from my journal. However, since I’d left out my affair with Alex, the love story in his novel was between the English professor, based on himself, and his student—me. Very clever. The ending of the story was that “I” refused to go back to civilization, married a Uyghur, converted to Islam, and settled in the desert, while “he,” the professor, heartbroken, went back to his teaching and writing his memoir. So in the novel, he was the victim because “I” was the one who’d mercilessly left him for an exotic man to live in a strange land. The rest of the novel was lifted in toto from my adventures.

“Shit! Shit! Chris, how could you do this to me!?” I screamed as I picked up the phone and dialed his number over and over but got only his impersonal, recorded voice. I responded by leaving a very personal, angry message. When he heard it he would at least know where I was coming from.

In ten minutes, just when I was about to call again, the phone rang. I snatched up the receiver and screamed, “How can you do this to me?”

“Lily?”

It was my agent.

“Ellen, I’m so sorry. I thought it was someone else.”

“Did you read in the New York Times about Romancing the Silk Road ?”

“Yes.”

“So you know.”

“Yes.”

“How could this have happened?”

I had no choice but told Ellen everything.

A long silence but for some deep exhalations on both ends.

“What are we going to do now?” I asked timidly.

“I just called your editor and discussed this with her. She said that Center Books will probably sue Chris Adams for plagiarism, or will arrange a press meeting for you to tell all. You have the credibility, since you had the firsthand experience and he didn’t. During the meeting, you can show reporters your notes taken during your trip, your mother’s and your healer friend’s journals, all the photographs and stuff like that. He’ll look very bad, so maybe we won’t even have to take legal action. You ready for this?”

“I think so.”

“Lily, may I ask you something personal?”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you have a romantic relationship with Chris Adams?”

“Yes.” Ashamed, my voice came out weak and vulnerable.

Her response surprised me. “Good, that’s a great story for the media. A famous novelist and university professor took advantage of his student’s dire situation to seduce her, then plagiarized from her work based on her courageous solo journey. Lily, you’re going to be a star in all the major media. The publisher’s publicity and I are working on it right now. Just be sure you’re available for all the interviews.”

Before I could respond, she had already hung up.

Musing on the whole thing, I suddenly remembered Master Soaring Crane’s pouches. I took the piece of paper out of the second one and saw:

Damn! I should have looked at it sooner because that was the very mistake I made—not keeping my journal hidden from Chris.

Three weeks later when my memoir, The Mountains of Heaven, came out, I was thrown into a series of frantic activities. In the end my publisher didn’t need to sue Chris for plagiarism. I just told my story and it worked. My memoir shot up to number ten on the New York Times best-seller list, the highest commercial success any new author could dream of. I wondered if Chris now remembered what he had once told me: “Any writer would run over his or her mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and any remaining family members to be on the New York Times best-seller list, even if only once.”

Ha! I didn’t even have to do that, for both of my parents, in fact, both pairs of my parents, were no longer on this Red Dust for me to “run over.”

Chris’s Romancing the Silk Road did not fare well because of the bad publicity. I even heard a rumor that he was blacklisted and wouldn’t get any more contracts.