Deep Down (I) Read Free

she translated the cards sticking out of each box. “Dandelion for gallbladder cleansing, deer tail for back pain, dried lizard to improve weak kidneys, dried sea horse for asthma and, oh, for sexual problems, too.”
    Sexual problems, Jessie thought. The only problem she had was the lack of a man in her life. In fact, her past with guys was as gnarled and twisted as the sang roots she spotted heaped up farther back in the store, where a Chinese woman with a face webbed with wrinkles was pawing through a pile with a calculator in one hand.
    Sunny rattled off some Chinese to the old woman, though the only word Jessie could pick out was jen-shen. The Chinese word for the herb meant “root of life.” The woman’s wizened face lifted; she eyed Jessie as if she were going to price her to sell. Though Jessie had longed to see the inside of a ginseng shop in the land where much of the $52 million-a-year market was based, she had to keep herself from fleeing. The woman was not frightening, so what was wrong with her? Was she coming down with some exotic sickness, or were the smells and heat just getting to her? All this seemed so far away from her mother and Kentucky. And from the strange yearnings she’d had for Drew Webb, whom she knew was back in Deep Down.
    “She’s saying,” Sunny told her, “last year she had a root she displayed on velvet cloth go for six figures in American money. Came from Kentucky. She wants to know, you have any to sell?”
    “She must know it’s all regulated,” Jessie protested. “Did she get that root from the black market?”
    “She says she know nothing of black market.”
    Jessie’s head was beginning to pound. She had to get out of here. Her heartbeat sped up, as if she’d run miles.
    “Now with Americans putting jen-shen in power drinks and health foods,” Sunny was translating again, “costs going up…”
    Jessie squinted back into the dim reaches of the shop where women of all ages bent over rows of cardboard boxes on long wooden tables, sorting ginseng. When the shop owner saw where she was looking, she spoke to Sunny, who said, “She say her sorters, even if they are old, have soft, young hands from touching the jen-shen all day. She say the herb preserve yin, the life force, and good for aphrodisiac and keep people young.”
    If her head had not been pounding and her stomach roiling, Jessie would have laughed. If ginseng was a fountain of youth, why did this old woman look like some ancient sorceress who had stepped from the pages of a book on primordial myths? She had to get back into the calm of the hotel. She felt a stab of longing for her mother, for the cool, leafy coves in the skirts of the mountains.
    “I feel a bit faint,” Jessie told Sunny and managed a polite nod to the old woman. “Please thank her for speaking with me. I’m going to head back to the hotel.”
    She walked as steadily as she could, though she felt the urge to run. Had the other-side-of-the-world time zone difference given her delayed jet lag? At least her headache wasn’t caused by staring too long into a microscope at floating ginsenosides attacking tiny cancer cells and tumors in the test tubes. Hours of research sometimes made her eyes cross and her brain blank out. She felt like that now and, worse, as if something in the midst of these towering skyscrapers in old-new Hong Kong were chasing her.
     
    The shrill ring-ring, ring-ring dragged Jessie from deep, dream-haunted sleep. It took her a moment to recall she was in her Hong Kong hotel room. Exhausted, she’d collapsed in bed after her visit to Ko Shing St., almost as if that strange smell in the herb shop had drugged her. Her bedside table clock read 7:17 p.m. She’d missed the afternoon lectures and the tour of the city she’d signed up for. Maybe it was some conference attenders on the phone, wondering if she could meet them for dinner or why she’d missed the tour bus.
    She grabbed the receiver. “Dr. Jessica