Song of the Silk Road by Mingmei Yip

selfish—picking his brain about snow lotuses in the Mountains of Heaven. However, I never left his store without buying a few herbs—usually the more expensive kind—as a token of my appreciation for his knowledge and his willingness to share and, most important, to bond with him.
    One time, when I bought some very expensive ginseng from him, he said, “This herb is extremely hard to obtain, its price is astronomical, and what you can get in most stores is fake. . . .”
    “Fake? How?”
    “They mix it with thin wires to increase the weight so the store can charge more. But when you buy from me you always have your money’s worth. And you get the real herbs, some I even risked my life for.”
    It didn’t matter whether I believed him, just whether I could get more information about herbs on the Mountains of Heaven out of him. However, I was glad but also surprised that our friendship could develop so easily. Was I really that interesting? Or maybe he was simply lonely?

    One morning after entering Lop Nor’s store, I found that he was not, as usual, sitting behind the counter fussing with his herbs and the tiny scale.
    “Lop Nor, Lily’s here,” I called, but no one answered.
    I looked around, then went through the store to the backyard. There was Lop Nor, bare-chested and wearing kung fu pants fastened at the ankles. He was standing with his muscular feet wide apart on the thin rim of a large, round, water-filled urn, seemingly focusing hard on his martial arts stance.
    I stopped to watch, trying my best not to make any noise that might break his concentration. Lop Nor’s hands were alternately pushing forward and drawing back huge, imaginary waves. Then, about fifteen minutes later, to my utter amazement, the water inside the urn started to bubble, emitting a gurgling sound. Gradually, the sound increased in volume and the bubbles in ferocity. It was then I realized that the water was boiling by itself with no fire under it!
    A loud, involuntary “Wah!” shot out from my mouth.
    Swiftly Lop Nor jumped down from the urn, his eyes drilling holes in mine. “Miss Lin, what are you doing here?!”
    His voice was loud and harsh. He had never before talked to me like that.
    “Sorry, Lop Nor, I didn’t see you in the store so I came out and found you here.”
    He slipped on his thin jacket while still penetrating my eyes with his tigerlike ones.
    “Sorry,” I added nervously, “but the door was unlocked.”
    “I must have forgotten to lock it. When you come back to this courtyard next time, please alert me right away. I don’t want to be put off balance by the presence of feminine energy,” he said, swiping away big beads of perspiration on his broad forehead with a white cloth.
    “You’re able to sense that?”
    “Yes, but I didn’t want to break off the qi in the middle of my practice. Not until you cut it off. I’m done now. Let’s go back to the store.”
    Both awed and intimidated, I humbly followed this qi -boiling-water master back into his shop.
    After we sat down by the counter, I asked, “Lop Nor, how can you make the water boil without fire?”
    “I focus my qi .”
    I was too stunned to say anything.
    He smiled a little. “Actually I borrow it from the universe.”
    “How can someone do that?”
    “It takes many years of bitter practice plus a profound understanding of qi distribution in the cosmos.”
    He went on to tell me some amazing stunts of qigong masters. His grandfather could direct qi from his fingertips to extinguish five lit candles and send a row of people stumbling back without even touching them.
    “With qigong , you control all the energies of the universe.”
    I knew even if I asked more it would be to no avail. My Westernized, ignorant mind was too shallow and unprepared for anything so grandiose. So, after some silence, I changed our conversation to what was most on my mind—visiting the Mountains of Heaven for the special snow lotus.
    When I mentioned my desire to