Destination: China

Book: The Song of the Silk Road by Mingmei Yip (NEW April 2011)

They did it again.  Got me to read a romance novel by disguising it as adventure travel. [amazon_link id=”0758241828″ target=”_blank” ] Song of the Silk Road[/amazon_link] is indeed all three–romance (with plenty of sex), an adventuring quest, and travel to exotic locales.

Lily Lin, a young woman born in Hong Kong and raised in the United States gets a mysterious assignment from an aunt she never knew existed.  She is promised that if she completes  the tasks successfully, she will earn three million dollars. As earnest money, she is given $50,000 for her trip. She leaves behind in Manhattan her hot affair with a married college professor and sets off on her adventure in China along the Silk Road where she soon becomes involved in another hot affair.

While the formula sounds enticing and the mysterious quest is a tried and true idea, the novel suffers from uneven writing and inconsistent development of characters.  At one moment flowery and poetic, the author’s style can suddenly change to awkward.  She seems to have endless imagination in describing love-making, but a limited store of figures of speech for every day activities.  Repetition becomes annoying when it is not so obvious it is amusing.  Over and over she tells us that Xian is the start of the Silk Road.  The forewarnings of danger get comical.

pg. 5/6: With my slightly trembling hand, I scribbled on the death-pale paper.

pg. 8: Like a bad cold, the uneasy feeling refused to go away.

pg. 9: What if I failed to complete the journey? What if I got sick or died on the road? Murdered? Strangled by silk? Engulfed by sand and eaten alive by horrible insects?

And then we run into the paucity of descriptive terms. This is just one example of many:

pg. 20: The meal was consumed almost in total silence, except for an occasional smacking of lips, slurping of soup, clicking of chopsticks, and signs from Chris’s mouth.

pg. 32: [note: another country, another man] We ate and chatted while clicking chopsticks, smacking lips, sipping tea.

These quotations from the narrator, the heroine Lily Lin did not help make her likeable.  It was hard to get a handle on whether she was a worldly 29-year-old sophisticate as she pictured herself (not to mention her frequent self descriptions of her mind-blowing beauty and fatal attraction to the opposite sex), or if she was just stupidly naïve. After all she fell for some of the oldest lies in the world from her married professor and then she took off on a dangerous quest to China, having barely asked any questions or investigated the story the lawyers told her.

Maybe I am just being a spoil sport–letting logic get in the way of a page-turner adventure interrupted only by steamy sex scenes.  So call me old-fashioned, but I think a good novel takes more than just a good idea.  It also calls for good execution.

On the other hand, if you can set aside my complaints and if you want to take a journey to some very interesting parts of China, Mingmei Lip writes like someone who has been there, describing both lesser-known sites and more famous ones, like the Terracotta Soldiers of Xian.

Besides Xian, Lily’s journey introduces the reader to Beijing, Dunhuang, and Xinjiang. We meet the Uyghur people of the Taklamakan desert and learn about their religion and their healers. We see a famous bazaar in Urumqi. She finally ventures a short way  into the Taklamakan Desert–the Go In But Never Come Out Desert–where we see both golden sands and dumpy motels.

My experience with the book was particularly disappointing, because the attractive Yip has published 8 books and although most are in Chinese, this is the third novel in English. I might chalk up stylistic differences to language difficulties, but that does not excuse an author who could very well work with an editor to improve.  She holds a PhD from the Sorbonne, and apparently is talented musically and artistically as well.

[Read in a Single Sitting agreed, and made some of my points better than I did.]

If you want to judge for yourself, and decide to buy the book, the link to the book title will take you directly to Amazon. It won’t cost you any more, but A Traveler’s Library will benefit. Thanks. Photo of Yingmei Yip comes from her web page. The rest are taken by adventurous photographers who share with Creative Commons License through Flickr. The author and publisher sent me a copy of the book for review.

Is the Silk Road one of the destinations on your bucket list? Would a book like this persuade you to go?