Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok Read Free Book Online Page A

yellow: the famous tulip fields. No hills, no skyscrapers, no forests. This alien landscape seems bizarrely orderly and unreal. I, an urban introvert, am disconcerted by all of this verdant openness.
    The flight attendant announces that we’re about to land, in both English and Dutch. I wish she’d stop doing that. I know we’re going to a foreign country, but the constant Dutch on the flight hammers the point home. What am I doing? Of all people, I’m completely unprepared for this. What can I do for Sylvie anyway? Sylvie is extraordinary.
    Sylvie was named a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School, and graduated in the top five percent of her class. When I was flailing around after college, I asked her how she’d done it. She had just started her management consulting job and, like old times, we were following Ma around the temple in Chinatown after Chinese New Year.
    “A lot of it is keeping your head clear, Amy,” she said, holding the tip of her bundle of three incense sticks into the flame of the oil lamp until they caught fire. “Princeton, MIT, Harvard, it’s the same pressure. Everyone’s just razor sharp. At Harvard, this one woman was so fast with numbers, it was like she’d swallowed a calculator. People would open their mouths and words like ‘IMF austerity measures’ and ‘trilemma of free-capital flows’ would pop out. I was very intimidated at first. Sometimes people think it’s about competing with each other because they divide you into sections and everyone inside a section is graded on a bell curve. That kind of thinking makes you insane. I never considered anyone else. I only made sure I competed against myself.”
    I fanned my incense sticks and hers to put out the flames. Thick plumes of smoke spiraled upward. “Umm, so positive thinking saved you?”
    She flushed a bit, the dimple in her cheek appearing. She carefully wedged her incense into the sand-filled urn in front of the enormous golden statue of Kuan Yin, goddess of compassion, and bowed low a few times, her posture perfect. Then she turned to face me. “That and I figured out how every syllabus was structured and only spent time on the important issues. I had no choice—I had the receptionist job at the construction company in the afternoon and waitressed until late at night. I only had the morning to get my work done. I had to be really efficient. I’d let the others take the easy questions in class and wait to answer the hardest ones. I’m Asian and a woman, which shouldn’t matter but did anyway. It was clear sometimes that no matter how hard I worked, I didn’t qualify to be a member of the in club. But the worst was the money.” She sighed and rubbed her eyebrow. “Everything cost hundreds of dollars. I didn’t know that an unspoken part of the Harvard MBA was the social aspect—all those invitations to events and galas where you could rub elbows with powerful people. There was no way I could keep up, so I didn’t try. I’m no good at making people like me, anyway.”
    I had finished my bows and knocked her with my shoulder. We’d had this conversation before. “That’s ridiculous, Sylvie.”
    She hugged me then, enveloping me in her scent of smoke and oranges. “That’s your superpower, Amy, not mine.”
    My throat chokes up. Why haven’t I heard from her? Like I said, Sylvie is extraordinary. Remove the extra and that’s me: ordinary. I’ve just wasted so much money buying this expensive plane ticket to the Netherlands, where I won’t be any use at all. I am sick to my stomach. What will happen to me and my loans now that Sylvie’s—I stop myself before even thinking the word. How could I be so selfish?
    I’m overwhelmed the moment I step inside Schiphol Airport, a name I can’t even begin to pronounce. It’s futuristic and spotlessly clean, a spaceship complete with a disembodied female voice reminding me to “Mind your step” at the end of every automatic walkway. The people seem to be