The Secret Letters of the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (18 page)

“Exactly,” he said. “One of the best times I have ever had was building sand castles with my wife and daughter at the beach in Qingdao. The shell that Julian gave me has served beautifully to remind me of the perfect moments of that perfect day. And those memories are a form of wealth.”

We were both quiet for a moment. I was thinking of another beach, another woman, another child. But something was still nagging at me.

Finally I said, “But Gao Li, if you are now a wealthy man, why not just quit? Spend all your time on the simple pleasures.”

He laughed. “Good question,” he said. “My wife asks me that all the time.”

He took a sip of tea and then placed his cup back down on the table in front of us.

“Work is also a pleasure for me, Jonathan. But it’s more than that. Remember that coffee shop we stopped at?”

I nodded.

“That’s not the only small business I have invested in. For every large venture I undertake, I try to find at least two small businesses to support. I look for people who think they can change their own lives as well as the lives of others. Small businesses in country villages and crowded cities; family enterprises and individual college students; entrepreneurs with ideas and a heart. And I follow these little businesses like traders follow the market swings. The men and women I give money to turn my dollars into new lives—they extend my help farther than I would be able to do on my own. And they help me build a better world in the process. Making a difference has now become more important to me than making money. This realization has made my life so much more joyful, Jonathan.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. Mr. Gao’s story made me feel humble.

Gao Li shook his head. Then he looked over at the window, at the brilliant lights of Shanghai spread out before us. I didn’t say anything. He seemed to be thinking about something.

Eventually Gao Li started again.

“A few months after Julian had his heart attack, he wrote me a letter,” he said. “I have to tell you, I wasn’t sure I wanted to open it. I was afraid that it might be another lawsuit. But it wasn’t. It was a handwritten note. Julian said he had quit his practice, had sold all his belongings. He had traveled. He had learned things. And he said that he was very glad he had lost the suit against me. He said I was a man he would like to get to know better.”

Gao Li was smiling at the memory. “I will never forget the closing lines of that letter,” he continued. “‘Lasting happiness,’ Julian wrote, ‘comes from the size of our impact, not the extent of our income. Real fulfillment is a product of the value we create and the contribution we make, not of the car we drive or the house we buy. And I’ve learned that self-worth is more important than net worth. But I think you know that already, Gao Li.’”

“And you did,” I agreed.

“And I did,” said Gao Li.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT,
back at my hotel, I stood at the living-room windows and gazed out at the skyline across the river. The view was marvelous during the day, but after sunset the skyline took on the look of some fantastic futuristic amusement park or an elaborate display of abstract sculpture—spectacularly colored spheres, columns, spires, cylinders, gleaming and sparkling like electrified crystal. Even driving back to my hotel from Gao Li’s place had been a wonder. The city skyline crowded with jewel-toned light. I had never seen anything like it.

But I thought of what Mr. Gao had said to me that evening. All this glitter was seductive. I would have loved to spend more
time here to explore the city, but the feelings Gao Li’s office, the Bentley, the helicopter, the actor, even this hotel suite had evoked in me were more about pleasure than real happiness. Maybe that was the key distinction Gao Li had been trying to make. How could I expect these kinds of riches to make me happy when I had been finding it impossible to enjoy even the simple joys of my life? It seemed to me that both Julian and Gao Li had found something that most very rich people will never have: a feeling that they have enough.

The truth was, right now, here alone in my hotel room, thousands of miles from home, if I could have any one thing, it wouldn’t be a yacht or a fancy car or a sprawling mansion. It would be an answer.

I
DREAMED THAT NIGHT
of the curving Cape Breton roads I had driven earlier that week. They had made me think of Juan, made me think of his last moments. He lived outside the city, and he was driving home in the evening, the rush hour long over. It was a spring night; the roads were dry. He was on a stretch of highway that ran through wooded areas near his home. It was a route he drove every day, yet somehow he had crashed through a steel barrier and plummeted into a ravine. The medical investigator said that he had suffered multiple life-threatening injuries, but that the cause of death was a massive heart attack. Emily, his wife, said that work stress had led to his death. I had no doubt about that. By the time he climbed into his car that night, Juan was a gray specter of the man I once knew. The last few years at work—the pressure, the isolation, the abandonment by friends and colleagues—that had
destroyed him. But there was one question that no one was asking. One question that haunted me. One question I desperately wanted answered. But it was a puzzle for which I might never find the solution.

N
OTHING COULD HAVE BEEN
more in contrast with Shanghai’s glitzy, frenetic cityscape than the quiet, dusty expanses that spread out around me as I traveled the highway between Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona. After being in the air for the better part of the day, I had arrived in Phoenix in the early afternoon, picked up a rental car and headed out. Despite the fact that I had been moving back and forth between time zones like an airline pilot, I felt remarkably good. I didn’t think jetlag was something you were supposed to get used to, but I now seemed able to fall asleep when I needed to and to get up with the sun, wherever I was.

In a suburb on the northern edge of Phoenix, I pulled into a restaurant that was part of those ubiquitous chains that offer
quantity over quality. I was hungry, and this would be fast and easy. As I walked inside, I noticed a display of tourist pamphlets against the wall of the doorway. I plucked a few out of the rack before I headed to the hostess desk.

The hostess showed me to a table, and a young man, no older than seventeen I would guess, materialized at my side. I ordered a club sandwich and some juice, and the waiter disappeared again. I looked over at the small pile of pamphlets I’d dropped on the table. One in particular had caught my eye. It was about “vortex tours” you could do in and around Sedona. According to the pamphlet, the Sedona area is thought to be the location of at least four energy vortices—places in the landscape where the Earth’s invisible lines of energy intersect to create a concentration of power that could have extraordinary therapeutic properties. There seemed to be quite the cottage industry associated with these vortices: one pamphlet listed dozens of massage specialists, tarot readers, personal magnetic-field re-balancers, even past-life regression therapists.
Oh brother,
I thought. I was having enough challenges with
this
life without diving into another.

I wondered why Julian had sent the talisman out this way. Did the talisman have something to do with crystals or auras or energy fields?

By the time I had finished my sandwich, my young server was at my side, offering coffee and dessert. I declined but couldn’t help thinking about how much this young man reminded me of Lluis. He might not spend the rest of his days waiting tables, but I had a feeling that whatever he ended up doing, he’d do with enthusiasm and success.

I paid my bill, left the restaurant and crossed the parking lot to the rental car. It was time to head out to meet Ronnie
Begay. According to Julian’s directions, she lived about a hundred miles north of Phoenix.

After a few minutes on the highway, I rolled down the windows. The dry desert air felt good against my skin—a welcome change from the steaminess of Shanghai. I heard my phone beep but didn’t pick it up. I had to pay attention to the road.

The number of messages from the office had dwindled steadily. I hadn’t really expected to hear any more from Tessa, but Nawang had been quiet, too. Yesterday, she acknowledged this absence with an apology:
Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on everything, but it’s been crazy around here. For the past few days, Luke, Katherine and Sven have been holed up in the conference room with a group of men and women I don’t recognize. Rumor is that there will be an announcement by the end of the day, maybe tomorrow. No doubt a merger is under way, but everyone is trying to figure out if they are buying us or we are buying them. David is freaking out. He seems fairly convinced that he is going to be given his walking papers either way.

I tried not to feel happy about that. Ayame would not be impressed by my mean-spirited reaction.

I don’t know what to think about my position—or yours,
Nawang wrote.

I realized that the uncertainty didn’t worry me at all.

The inevitable reorganization at work would not be a threat to me. It would be an opportunity. If I got a severance package, I would use the freedom to talk with companies that might be able to offer me a position that suited me better. If the reconfigured company wanted to keep me on, I would see if there might be other places in the firm for me. Since Juan’s death, there had been a vacancy in the design department. Maybe I would see
about that. Either way, I could use the shifting business to my advantage. I felt excited about the prospect of change.

That was something new: looking at change without fear; or maybe not completely without fear, but with an acceptance of the fear that always came with any sort of significant upheaval in my life. Maybe I was becoming more like my sister, Kira.

While I always chose the safe, obvious path, Kira had struck out on her own route again and again. After high school, she worked for half a year and then joined a youth exchange program, doing volunteer work at a number of orphanages. After college, she traveled the world, visiting marvelous destinations—from Malaysia, Bali and New Zealand to Sweden, Estonia and Russia—working here and there to support herself. During one of her journeys she visited a women’s cooperative in Guatemala. She was impressed with the things the women made—elaborately embroidered and decorated cushions and linens—and with the industry, hope and courage of the women themselves. When she came back home, Kira announced that she was going to find a market for the women’s products and help them sell their wares. Just a few years later, she was running a hugely successful fair-trade importing business and had storefronts in half a dozen major North American cities. When her twins were born, Kira decided to sell her business to one of her partners. She would take a few years at home and plan out her next career venture. When I expressed surprise that she could give up the enterprise she had worked so hard for, she just laughed. “I’m not going to live the same day over and over again, and call it a life,” she said.

J
ULIAN’S DRIVING INSTRUCTIONS
were simple enough. I turned off the highway, onto a small road about an hour and a half after I had set off. The road wound around until I came to a smattering of houses strung out along either side. Most were mobile homes, decked out with porches and awnings and other not-so-mobile additions. Interspersed among them were a few small, low bungalows. A number were set off by chain-link fences. Small patches of brown grass surrounded the houses, but the desert crawled right up to the edge of the struggling turf and stretched back away for miles. Eventually I spotted the street number on a mailbox that stood in front of a neat brown home. I pulled into the gravel drive, alongside a gray pickup truck parked in front of a small garage. As I climbed out of the car into the midday heat, I noticed that the front yard was festooned with various bits of brightly colored extruded plastic—children’s toys. No doubt the sound of the crunching gravel alerted Ronnie, who had swung the front door open just as I was stepping up to it.

“Jonathan!” she said, as if we were long-lost friends.

Ronnie was probably about sixty—her hair, which had some dark streaks, was mostly a silvery gray. Her bronzed face was lined, but not at all drawn. When she laughed, it looked almost as if the creases around her eyes and mouth were dancing.

She ushered me into the living room, cautioning me to watch my step around the toys and games that were scattered across the floor.

“Can you believe I cleaned this up once already this morning?” she laughed.

“I have a six-year-old,” I said. “I know how it goes.”

Ronnie moved into the kitchen and peered out the window. I
followed her gaze. In the backyard were a half-dozen children of various sizes playing some sort of game with a large inflatable ball. Ronnie told me they were her grandkids and her grandnephews.

The grandchildren were visiting for the afternoon, but the grandnephews were permanent residents.

“My niece,” said Ronnie matter-of-factly, “has been in and out of trouble since I can remember. Her father isn’t in the picture; her mother isn’t well and has never been able to help out. A few years back, things reached a crisis point. It looked like her kids were going to be taken away.”

Ronnie was now opening the kitchen window, calling out.

“Rose, make sure that Sammy gets a turn, okay?”

Then she turned back to me.

“José and I were the only ones in the family with the room and the resources to take the kids in.” Ronnie put her hand on her chest, as if she were pressing her heart back in.

“Best decision I made in my life,” she said with a smile.

Ronnie went to the fridge and took out a large jug.

“Iced tea?” she asked. When I nodded, she filled two glasses that were sitting on the counter and handed one to me. She left the other on the counter and moved toward the back door.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I promised the kids a snack, and I’d better get to it before I ruin their appetites for dinner.” Ronnie went out the door. I watched her through the screen as she headed into the garage. She came back a few minutes later with an enormous watermelon. When the children spotted it, they followed her into the kitchen, whooping and hollering. “Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon,” they chanted, as if calling for an encore at a rock concert.

“First of the season,” Ronnie said to me. “I know you can get it now at the grocery store any time of the year, but I never buy it until the hot weather really hits. It just tastes so much better in the heat.”

She told the children to go outside to the picnic bench, and she would bring them their snack when it was ready. The kids filed out the door.

Ronnie placed the watermelon on a large wooden cutting board on the kitchen counter, took an enormous knife from a drawer and plunged it into the center of the melon. It made a satisfying
thwack
. Ronnie pulled the knife down through the wet fruit, cutting it in half and in half again. Then she began to slice each quarter as if she were slicing a dense loaf of bread. When she had cut up the first quarter, she picked up a middle slice and held it out to me.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had watermelon, but when I bit into the cool, sweet flesh I felt a rush of memory sweep over me. Another backyard, so many decades ago. My mother, her hair tied back in a bright scarf, a tray proffered in her outstretched arms.

This was the kind of thing Gao Li had been talking about. Here, at Ronnie’s house, the first watermelon of the season was still an event, a cause for celebration.

After Ronnie had taken a huge plate outside and then made a second trip to gather up the rinds and wipe a few faces, she returned and finally took a long pull from her iced tea.

“Hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but now I’ve got to start dinner.”

I sat in Ronnie’s air-conditioned kitchen as she set about preparing the family meal. Her daughter Rose would probably stay
with the kids, she said. Ronnie’s husband, José, would be home soon. He might bring his sister with him. They worked together.

“My house is never empty,” said Ronnie. “It can be exhausting, but I like it this way.”

She went to the fridge and pulled out a large bag of red peppers. As she washed them, she looked back over her shoulder at me.

“But I have something to give you, and it would be nice to have someplace quiet to talk. I thought that after supper we could drive out to the Red Rocks so you can see the sunset. You can’t come all this way without seeing it.”

S
EVERAL HOURS LATER
Ronnie and I were sitting on the edge of a massive boulder, staring at the striking red sandstone pillars that rose majestically out of the desert. As the sun dipped, the rocks seemed to take on its fading fire. They were glowing bright orange like embers. The scene reminded me a bit of the Temple of the Magician in the morning sun.

“I feel like I’ve seen this before,” I said.

“The movies,” said Ronnie. “Westerns.”

Yeah, I thought, that was probably it. But it felt special here somehow. As if I had a more personal connection to the place. I wondered if that had anything to do with what I had seen in the pamphlets.

“I was reading a little bit about those vortices,” I said to Ronnie. She winced.

“We call them ‘vortexes’ around here,” she said.

“Vortexes. Right. Are we close to them? Are any around here?” I asked.

“There’s one a couple of miles that way.” Ronnie waved her hand to the right, but didn’t offer any other details.

“You don’t sound as if you put much stock in that stuff,” I said to her.

Ronnie smiled and dug at the hard-packed earth with the toe of her shoe.

“Well,” she said slowly, “Native people in these parts never considered those spots particularly sacred—or at least they don’t think of them as any
more
sacred than the rest of the land.”

Ronnie bent down to brush the dirt from her shoe. “But that’s not to say this place isn’t special. My people have always had a connection to the land, and I believe in the healing powers of the earth. Of being one with nature.”

“But…” I said. There was clearly a “but” on its way.

“But,” said Ronnie. She was gazing back at the rocks now. The light was getting a little weaker. The rocks were glowing softly. “I really believe that the most powerful healing is anywhere people are. It isn’t confined to a place or a time or a circumstance.”

A small gray lizard scurried across the ground in front of us. I watched it disappear behind some brush.

“Did Julian ever tell you how we met?” Ronnie asked.

“No,” I said, “but I bet there’s a story.”

And there was. Ronnie told me that she had met Julian many years ago, when he was a high-flying lawyer. “Well, I didn’t know what he did then,” she admitted. “He told me later.”

Julian was driving down the highway one late afternoon, on his way to see these very rocks that Ronnie and I were gazing at
now. He was on a golfing junket in Phoenix, and he had rented a sleek sports car for his stay. He and a beautiful female friend had headed out with a loaf of bread, some cheese and an enormous thermos of martinis. They were going to have a picnic by the rocks as the sun went down. But before they had even reached the town of Sedona, their car broke down. Ronnie saw the bright yellow sports car parked at the side of the road, steam pouring out from under its hood. She pulled over and offered to give Julian and his companion a ride. Ronnie drove the two of them back to her place, where they called the rental company. It would send a tow truck and try to deliver another vehicle to her house.