by Vanessa Hua
He wasn’t the usual factory boss, paunchy and red-faced from too much drink, sunburned from golf, with a clutch of fawning concubines, one for every night of the week. With high cheekbones and deep-set, watchful eyes, he had the look of a Mongolian warlord. Scarlett curled onto her side, pinned down by her belly, feeling as though she might never rise again. She’d pictured herself someday with a settled life, with a husband—someone solid as Boss Yeung, if not him exactly—a home, and a family. Now someday had arrived with nothing except the baby.
The pregnancy had come between them. She buried her face into the pillow. She couldn’t escape Perfume Bay’s bitter scent of herbs, which reminded her of her mother’s foul medicinal brews. A lifetime ago, she’d stopped relying on Ma, and yet now she wanted her mother’s fingers cool against her cheek, applying a poultice that would harden against her skin, crack off, and relieve the pain.
Something scratched the walls of Perfume Bay, branches in the wind or a burrowing rodent that would gnaw at Scarlett in the dark. She had been dreaming of spies peering into her window, of cameras hidden in the overhead light, of an eye in the sky. After a hard kick from her xiao dou, her little bean, Scarlett gasped. Did Little Bean dream of what lay beyond the murk? More kicks pummeled her from the inside, and she pressed her hand against an unyielding elbow or knee. Back and forth they pushed until the baby squirmed away, and they both drifted off to sleep.
* * *
—
The next morning, the nurses passed around the newborns just back from the hospital. For Scarlett, Perfume Bay had been a crash course in motherhood. She’d learned that while each newborn was much like the others, with a scrunched monkey face and oversized, lolling head topped by an identical blue-and-red striped knit hat, each little roly-poly body wrapped in an identical blue-and-red striped receiving blanket, she was still expected to exclaim superlatives for each one.
The other guests gasped at the bruise on her cheek, which looked even worse today, and Countess Tien fussed over Lady Yu. Although Scarlett tried to appear unbowed and unapologetic, she seethed at herself for losing her temper. Diu lian, loss of face, shameful to fight with Lady Yu.
Scarlett didn’t say the courtly titles she’d given the other ladies out loud, but she could think of them no other way. Her secret taunt, for how they carried themselves like descendants of the royal line. With her bejeweled hands, Lady Yu cradled Countess Tien’s baby. Her pinched features softened as she touched his nose. “What a noisy thing!” she said, careful not to attract the attention of jealous spirits with praise. She could soothe the fussiest infant, while Scarlett’s own lack of interest in children seemed a personal failing.
In her two decades away from her home village, she hadn’t spent much time with children, and their laughs, their screams, and their whines seemed to belong in a realm that she watched but did not herself inhabit. New waves of teenage migrant workers arrived daily in the factory cities, and after a few years, some returned to their provinces to marry. If they came back to the city, their children remained in the village, in the care of grandparents. They saw their children only during the Spring Festival, crawling one year, running the next, and they brought them toys and clothes that were already outgrown upon arrival. The fate that Scarlett’s baby would have had, if Boss Yeung hadn’t been the father.
Bundled up, in slippers and a Perfume Bay velour tracksuit, Countess Tien had taken the most traditional precautions to rest in the month after delivery, forgoing showers and outings, as though she were living in the Ming dynasty, without the benefit of indoor plumbing, clean water, or science. Precautions Boss Yeung wanted for Scarlett, too.
Countess Tien fretted whether her son’s wife, decades from now, would demonstrate proper respect to her. “She won’t look after me, not like a daughter.”
“Who says a daughter has to look after her mother?” Daisy slouched in a chair in the corner. Privately, Scarlett agreed, even though Daisy was their collective nightmare, the troubled teen that their babies each had the potential to become. Her parents must have sent her to Perfume Bay to hide her condition. She twirled her pigtails. “Mine can go to hell.”
Neither she nor Scarlett were moneyed married wives, not like the other guests. Surprisingly nimble late in her third trimester, Daisy had the build of a gymnast but for her basketball belly. From behind, she didn’t look pregnant, not like Scarlett whose hips, buttocks, and thighs had swelled like a bear fattening for hibernation. After Daisy had been caught sneaking out, Mama Fang had installed bars on the windows of her room.
Everyone ignored Daisy, and the theoretical daughter-in-law continued to vex Countess Tien. “What if she turns my son against me?”
“Disown him,” Lady Yu declared.
Mama Fang peered over her bifocals at Countess Tien. “To please your son, she’ll have to please you.”
On the muted television, children danced, the girls in sequined crop tops and miniskirts over shorts, and the boys in tracksuits. Lady Yu pointed to the center of the stage. “That girl has glasses!” Chinese parents were blunt when it came to calling out physical imperfections in children. Their weight, their eyesight, their teeth, assessed like any other possession.
Countess Tien’s baby farted, loud as a bicycle horn, creating the snickering commotion that Scarlett needed to excuse herself. When the other guests engaged in mind-numbing talk of colic remedies, potty training, and educational toys, she wanted to flee. Motherhood and its self-sacrifice still seemed remote.
She began edging off the couch, but Mama Fang stopped her, depositing the baby into her arms. “You need practice.” Relentless, she reminded Scarlett of those cunning grannies in the ancient tales, who enabled liaisons between maidens and masters, traded gossip for taels of silver, the go-betweens who weren’t the villains or the heroes but upon whom the plot hinged.
Mama Fang carried three passports—U.S., Panama, and Hong Kong—and like a movie action hero or container ship, freely chose which flag to fly. On that premise, she’d founded Perfume Bay, because what parents wouldn’t give a child every advantage within their reach?
She instructed Scarlett to support the head of the baby, who had the unfocused stare of a coma patient. He was exceptionally unattractive, with pin-thin limbs and a face mottled with autumn leaves of eczema. Scarlett clasped him against her chest. If she proved herself adept as a mother, Boss Yeung might turn reasonable. If he gave her a chance, she would offer him one, too.
The baby wore a 24-karat gold pendant stamped with his Chinese zodiac sign, the year of the snake. For their child, Boss Yeung had sent one fashioned out of a U.S. gold coin and embossed with bald eagles, one clutching branches in its talons and another roosting in a nest. Ugly and gaudy, it belonged around the neck of a chain-smoking Macau gambler, not their son.
The pacifier fell out of the baby’s mouth, and when she tried to catch it one-handed, the baby slipped from her grasp. Thump. Facedown, spread-eagle on the carpet. Silence, utter silence, until he shrieked and everyone shouted at once: Aiya! Gan shenma!
Countess Tien wept, asking if he’d been hurt, if he’d have a flat nose. The other women leaned away, as if Scarlett were diseased. She bit her lip, dismayed. Mama Fang scooped him up and checked him over. He wasn’t bleeding. He’d suffered a fright, nothing more. “Babies are sturdier than you think,” she said lightly. “He has iron bones. An iron head.”
Knotting her hands, Scarlett squeezed until the bones ground together. Her hands had been busy and useful until she became pregnant, and the pain now cut through the numbness that had settled over her at Perfume Bay. Countess Tien kissed the top of her baby’s head and insisted on going to the emergency room. Mama Fang summoned the van to take them there, arranged for an herbal potion to calm the countess, wrapped the baby in a red quilted blanket, and as she followed them out the door, distracted him with a rattle drum, the tiny beads pattering like rain.
; Chapter 2
Inside the examination room, the tech squirted warm jelly onto Scarlett’s belly, tattooed with the dark line of pregnancy. Scarlett had requested an ultrasound a week ahead of schedule because she yearned to see her baby. The local clinic had Chinese doctors and staff, and the tech, Gigi, was originally from Chengdu. Within minutes, she’d shared her life story, how she’d come to Los Angeles on a special nursing visa, how her wages kept her family’s hotpot restaurant afloat and her brother in school.
Scarlett soon stopped listening. She had to leave Perfume Bay before she went crazy, before she hurt anyone else. She had a temper, but she’d never been one to catfight. Always restless, she was now skidding out of control, a scooter on gravel. She’d dropped a baby! She wanted to fly to Hong Kong and decide what to do next, but if she stayed here beyond her thirty-sixth week, which began in a few days, no airline would let her board.
Mama Fang held everyone’s wallets, passports, and their cash in the safe in her office, part of her pledge to take care of every detail. That meant Scarlett couldn’t pay for the fare and couldn’t leave the country. And if she asked Boss Yeung for a ticket, he’d refuse.
The waxy tissue paper on the exam table crinkled beneath her. She would have to think of another way to find help, to play the part of a pregnant woman in distress. She could hitch a ride to the airport, but still, what of the ticket and the passport? Her mother would have to go into debt to assist her, if she could get in touch with Ma at all. She’d given her mother a mobile phone, but Ma always kept it turned off; she didn’t know how to check her voicemail although Scarlett had shown her dozens of times. Ma didn’t know she was in America. Except for Boss Yeung, no one else in China did, either, not her co-workers, not her neighbors.
The tech circled the wand around Scarlett’s navel. In China, Boss Yeung had bribed the nurse with a hong bao, a red envelope of lucky money, to give a secret sonogram. Her mystery, put on display. The government forbade sex identification, to prevent parents from aborting girls.
When told they were having a boy, Boss Yeung had bowed his head and clasped his hands to his mouth, speechless. His face had seemed almost young, and so unguarded she wanted to run her thumb along his jaw, to stroke the curve of his brows and down his nose and press this memory into her flesh. She’d never made him so happy, and never would again. After that day, after he’d peered inside her, he acted as if he had a right to her every thought, to her every move.
This machine was much fancier, with a large screen bright as a winter moon. Her baby would be bigger now, his features defined, his limbs longer, and body plump, in her second sonogram, the last before he emerged from between her legs.
She wished she could have told Ma. Her mother worked at a family planning clinic, tracking pregnancies throughout the district. The people had to sacrifice, chi ku, to eat bitterness for the sake of their country, and the more you defied Ma at the clinic, the harder she struck back. To enforce the one-child policy, she escalated her punishments: she issued fines to the schoolteacher who refused to urinate in front of her during the pregnancy test and to the teenager discovered in the fields screwing a man who wasn’t her husband. If you didn’t show up for your abortion, she locked up your parents in a dank cinder-block cell beside the clinic.
If anyone found out that her own daughter was pregnant and unmarried, Ma might lose the grim job that had sustained her as Scarlett never had all these years. If Scarlett had gone to her for help, Ma might have forced her to end the pregnancy.
“How much does Mama Fang charge?” Gigi asked. Having shared the details of her finances, she had no qualms asking about Scarlett’s.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.” Years of Scarlett’s salary.
“Waaah!” Gigi exclaimed. She pressed the wand down hard against the lower curve of Scarlett’s belly. “So expensive! You know, you can deliver for free.”
Scarlett winced from the pressure. “Free?”
“Some people just go to the emergency room when they’re in labor. The hospital can’t turn you away, even if you can’t pay. Even if you’re not an American.”
She had to be wrong. Boss Yeung wouldn’t have spent so much on Perfume Bay if labor and delivery services were free in the United States. A black-and-white blur appeared onscreen, and Scarlett felt like a bride in an arranged marriage just before the red silk is lifted to reveal her husband’s face. What if the tech found something wrong, what if his arm had shriveled, a hole was hollowed out of his heart, or a cleft palate twisted his lips? With each pass of the wand, Scarlett glimpsed a fish-bone spine, the cap of the skull, and the limbs folded like an umbrella, in a silvery shaft of light. The blobby images had little relation to the kicks and flutters deep within her, the secret connection that she and the baby shared that no machine could record.
“She’s a swimmer,” Gigi said. “Really moving around today.”
She.
The other sonogram. “They said I was having a boy.”
Mistakes happen all the time, Gigi said. “It can be hard to read.”
“Maybe you made a mistake.”
“Not today.” Gigi pointed an arrow at the baby’s crotch, at the three white lines that marked her sex. “Not this far along. She’s practically posing for us.”
Gigi showed her the baby’s face, ghostly through the static, a broadcast from a distant planet: the pointed chin, Scarlett’s, and the squat nose, Boss Yeung’s. The tech hit a button and the machine spat out grainy images.
Scarlett couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. If she so much as turned her head, she might topple off the exam table. She stared at the three lines, the sonogram exposing the parts she’d never gotten a clear view of on herself, exposing yet another daughter for Boss Yeung. A girl. A girl like her. Sharing her blood, her breath, her flesh.
If—when—Boss Yeung disowned his bastard, her daughter would need every privilege American citizenship afforded her. Scarlett couldn’t risk him summoning her back to China and demanding a refund from Mama Fang. She reached for her purse, on a shelf by the examination table, and dug around until she found the velvet box. Her T-shirt slid onto her sticky belly, clinging and clammy.
“Are you sure it’s not a boy?” Scarlett pulled out the gold necklace.
“A girl.” Gigi nudged the arrow again. “Three lines.”
Scarlett turned her cheek into the light, toward Gigi. The bruise from the catfight was fading but visible. She wanted the tech to understand the danger she was in. “It’s a boy.” The heavy pendant swung through her fingers, twisting and glimmering.
Gigi slipped the necklace into her pocket with an ease that made Scarlett wonder if the young woman had taken gifts from other expectant mothers with secrets of their own. “Congratulations.”
* * *
—
On Thursday, at six A.M., on the ninth day of the seventh lunar month, Lady Yu had an appointment to deliver her son, a day shy of her thirty-ninth week. Almost all the women at Perfume Bay booked their C-sections in advance. Some like Lady Yu had previously given birth via C-section, and others wanted to remove the pain and unpredictability of going into labor and make sure their child’s birthday fell on an auspicious date.
The mothers-to-be wanted to ensure their children weren’t born on the seventh day of the seventh month, the night of the Magpie Festival. On that day in the village, Scarlett and the other girls used to pray for a good husband, newlyweds wished the gods would grant them a happy marriage, and elders told children the legend as romantic as it was tragic. Long ago, two lovers—a humble cow herder and a weaver girl, a fairy in disguise—were torn apart when the Goddess of Heaven, the fairy’s mother, scratched her hairpin into the night sky, welling up a river of stars to separate them. Once a year, on the night of the festival, magpies would soar to the heavens, hovering wing to wing. The lovers crossed the universe on this quivering bridge of feathers an
d reunited for a kiss.
Lady Yu didn’t want her son’s fate linked to this day. Although he might not marry until two or three decades from now, she would align the heavens in his favor. After all she’d spent on fertility treatments, she considered Perfume Bay a bargain: giving your child U.S. citizenship at birth for twenty-five thousand dollars, compared to the hassles of the green-card program she’d heard about that required you to invest a half-million dollars, create at least ten new jobs, and then wait a few more years to obtain U.S. citizenship.
She wasn’t planning to emigrate, but wanted her family to collect passports as they might Ferraris or residences in New York and London. No riches cleared smoggy skies, no riches protected against tainted milk, no riches safeguarded against the poor who might rise again in China. Only your child’s American citizenship defended you from all your present and future ills.
On Tuesday evening—two days before the scheduled C-section—Nurse Sun wanted to send Lady Yu to the hospital because her blood pressure had risen and her feet had become puffy as steamed bread. Scarlett wondered if their catfight had caused the symptoms. Lady Yu refused to go. She didn’t have a headache, blurry vision, or pain on her right side, none of the riskier signs of preeclampsia. “The baby will wait,” she said at dinner, imperious, as though she sat in a sedan chair and not on a donut-shaped hemorrhoid cushion. Lady Yu wasn’t going into the operating room today, not on the unlucky seventh day of the seventh month, and not when her physician was unavailable.
Mama Fang hardened her jaw. She didn’t like being challenged, but must have understood that if Lady Yu enjoyed her stay, she would bring in many new customers. Scarlett stirred her soup, spongy fish bladders and lily bulbs boiled with pork bones. She was long accustomed to eating every part of the animal, but this menu—despite its benefits to pregnant women and new mothers—must be hard on the delicate stomachs of the other guests.
