A River of Stars

by Vanessa Hua

  Daisy sat down on the mattress, wincing. Her breasts had turned huge and lumpy, her nipples bloody, and when her son awoke from his nap, his cries were desperate. She squeezed her breast as she might an udder, so hard that she left bruises and pimples broke out. The milk dripping into his mouth set him off—more, more. She couldn’t force any out, any more than she could have commanded herself to fly. He was an alarming shade of red, dark as a pig’s liver. She’d named him after his father, but called him Didi, or “little brother” to Scarlett’s daughter. She couldn’t hide her envy of Scarlett, whose daughter heartily nursed, her jaws pumping like a piranha’s, her throat quivering with each swallow.

  Liberty. A name Scarlett had picked because of its meaning and its chiming syllables, bright as bells. She couldn’t predict or control what her daughter inherited from her and from Boss Yeung, but she could teach her to define the world by its possibilities and not its limitations, something she hadn’t learned until she left home.

  Becoming a mother made Scarlett reconsider her own childhood. The day she had picked her English name, she’d spent hours on the assignment. Nothing from the textbook, nothing too common and boring for her. Nothing too fantastic, not like her scrawny classmate who claimed Cinderella, though there was little hope she would ever transform into a princess. A boy had picked Fish, translated from his name in Chinese, while another picked Lonely, because it sounded like his name, Long Li. Pointless. Why use Chinese to speak English? Something would get lost in translation. Your Chinese self should remain a given, your inheritance, while your English identity could be entirely different. An identity in which you might take risks. In the last of the daylight, she’d been practicing her new signature, the swooping curves of the tall S and the double t like grass, in letters no bigger than a grain of rice, to fit more onto the page. Her workbook had to last through the school year. Under her breath, she repeated the name over and over: the hard scrape of the first syllable, and the softness of the second.

  Ma had nagged her to gather greens for dinner. She always interrupted when Scarlett seemed too intent on her studies, but complained her daughter was lazy, a stupid egg, if she had less than perfect marks. After she returned with dirt deep under her fingernails, she discovered Ma studying her signature. “What’s this?”

  The Cultural Revolution had ended her mother’s schooling, and even processing the forms at the clinic tested the limits of her education. She neither understood nor read any English.

  “My English name. Red, like the flag. It’s patriotic,” Scarlett said.

  “What’s wrong with your name?”

  “I need an English name for English class.”

  “You are Chinese. You are in China.”

  Not forever, Scarlett had realized then. This name might be hers for years, might fit the life she hoped would take her from the village. To the city, to the moon, away, away, away.

  “It’s a name foreigners can remember and pronounce.” Scarlett rinsed her hands in a plastic basin and dried them on a rag.

  “When will you meet a foreigner?” Ma tossed the workbook aside and chopped a long white radish.

  “Before you will.”

  Ma grew up a few kilometers away, this valley the whole of her world. She’d never left the county. “I’ve eaten more salt than you’ve eaten rice,” she snapped, claiming the authority from years of experience that Scarlett could never match.

  In her fury, Ma thrust the workbook into the stove, but didn’t stop Scarlett from pulling it out, singed and smoking. Scarlett threw it to the ground and stomped out the embers. The edges charred black, the floating ash choking and stinging, punishment Scarlett bore in silence. And later still, Ma would spoil dinner, leaving the radish half-raw and bitter and boiling the greens until soggy. Later, Ma would pick another fight, chasing Scarlett with a broom, their shouts spilling into the lane.

  Scarlett didn’t know how fully she would someday assume her chosen name. Jumping from factory to factory, walking away from her clothes, her jobs, her friends, her hairstyle, her history at each turn and never looking back. Through all those years, through all those changes, she kept only her name, a name that now gave rise to Liberty’s.

  * * *

  —

  Scarlett tried to help Daisy nurse—adjusting her shoulders, getting another pillow to prop up the baby—but she couldn’t teach something that she’d never actually learned. Her success came not from prior knowledge or study, but out of luck, luck that Daisy had had in abundance until now.

  Daisy bowed her head, her body trembling with silent sobs while her son’s crying slackened into hiccups. Scarlett slid over a bowl of stew, forced a spoon into Daisy’s hand, and took Didi into the crook of her arm. He flopped against her bare chest, his eyes closed, his lips chapped and puckered.

  Though she couldn’t show Daisy, she could show him. She hesitated. Was nursing another woman’s son odd, apt to make Daisy jealous, serve as a reminder of her failure? Was the act old-fashioned, backward, transforming her into a wet nurse, a servant to Daisy? Her son rooted his head against Scarlett, his mouth millimeters from her nipple, his hunger undeniable. Daisy slurped down the stew and tipped the bowl, draining the broth.

  “I can—do you want me to?” Scarlett asked. It wasn’t her decision or Daisy’s. Didi fell upon her and suckled, his mouth at an awkward angle, holding the tip of her nipple until she settled him onto her. Plenty pulsed within her. Daisy set down the bowl, yawning until she noticed her son was nursing. She snatched him away. Scarlett yelped and milk spurted from her breast, spattering her arm and torso. Didi wailed.

  “Did you ever give blood?” Daisy asked.

  Scarlett jerked her head, no. Why did it matter? She curled over, trying to stem the pain caused by Didi unlatching abruptly.

  “Did you ever sell it? Your plasma.” Daisy jiggled her son, which made him cry harder. Liberty woke and answered his hungry sobs with her own. Scarlett gritted her teeth and picked up her daughter and nursed her on the other side.

  Daisy must think Scarlett was tainted, one of those peasants who peddled their plasma, the leftover blood pooled with other donors and pumped back into their veins polluted with HIV.

  Scarlett had never sold herself, but Daisy, Mama Fang, and Boss Yeung kept assuming that she had and would. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands, a curse caught in her throat. She shouldn’t turn on Daisy, who was as lost and terrified and exhausted as she was. Stiffly, she told Daisy that Old Wu would buy formula, the expense added to what she owed.

  * * *

  —

  As soon as they could, Scarlett and Daisy made the trip to City Hall to pick up the birth certificates. The aunties warned them against going outside, which would upset their energy balance, causing aches they would suffer now and in their old age, but Scarlett couldn’t wait any longer. She needed legal proof that Liberty belonged to her and that Liberty belonged in America.

  City Hall’s gilded dome was elegant and imposing. At the security check-in, the bored guards searched their bag, pushing aside the spare diapers, wipes, extra onesies, changing pad, burp cloths, powdered formula, and bottle—more belongings on this short trip than she’d had with her when she’d escaped her village as a teenager. She had to protect her daughter against the calamity found everywhere these days: in the boiling pot that might splash on Liberty’s tender skin, the gutter into which she might tumble, booby traps springing from each unguarded moment.

  As they walked away from the metal detector, their footsteps echoed on the marble. She’d never been inside a building as grand as a palace, and she felt as if she were seeking an audience with a king. The sense of power was forbidding but also reassuring: whatever decree, whatever papers were issued here carried the weight of a nation.

  Inside the windowless room lit by sickly fluorescent bulbs, Daisy helped her fill out the forms. Scarlett left the
space for the father’s name blank, and slid the money order across the counter to pay for the birth certificates, each shaded pink and blue like a sunrise, printed on paper heavy with legitimacy. No matter what happened, even if authorities forced them out, her daughter had a claim to America. As limited as her opportunities might be in China, Liberty could someday make her way back here.

  Outside, Daisy asked Scarlett to snap a photo of her and Didi, one of dozens taken each day, she explained, to provide her boyfriend with a record of every moment he missed: bath-time, the grunt and strain of a bowel movement, peekaboo with a blankie. At least she wasn’t a teenager who took endless selfies, but when it came to her son, nothing was too incidental.

  A woman walking by offered to take a photo of all four of them. Neither baby looked at the camera, Daisy squinted from the sun, and Scarlett was openmouthed, mid-sentence, yet it felt like their first chance to celebrate since they’d emerged from birth.

  “I— Thank you,” Daisy said.

  The woman had already walked away. She must be thanking me, Scarlett thought. For what?

  “If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be trapped at Perfume Bay.”

  “You would have found another way,” Scarlett said.

  “And gotten caught each time. You, though.” Daisy’s eyes held something that Scarlett didn’t expect: gratitude, maybe even admiration. It wasn’t easy for Daisy to ask for help. It wasn’t easy for Scarlett, either, but their circumstances had been overwhelming.

  Pigeons pecked and flapped at their feet.

  “You fought Lady Yu!” Daisy said. “You don’t let anyone bully you.”

  “But I did.” Until now, she’d never alluded to Boss Yeung or why she’d fled Perfume Bay. Admitting it, she felt a rush of shame and then a curious relief to reveal what she’d walled up. She was thankful that Daisy had the courtesy not to ask anything more.

  They stored the certificates in a biscuit tin along with their passports and savings, protection against the roaches and rats that skittered in their apartment at night. Scarlett snapped the tin shut and Daisy placed her hands on the lid, too, their fingers almost but not quite touching. Scarlett felt as newlyweds or explorers must, headed into the unknown, these possessions their only certainty, their pledge of a future together.

  Chapter 8

  For more than a week, no one realized Boss Yeung had gone missing. His factory managers assumed he was in Hong Kong, and his family believed him at the factory in China. At the hospital in Los Angeles, he was incoherent and anonymous, lacking identification or a cellphone. He remembered none of it: not his fall on the escalator nor the trip in the ambulance, where he’d called out for his daughter. Viann. Viann. Viann. The reptilian part of his brain, in charge of breathing, body temperature, and balance, had also known what else was necessary for his survival.

  When his senses returned, and the hospital notified his family, Viann was on the next flight out. En route, she contacted her friends from business school—at Harvard, she’d run with a crowd of international elites, the children of diplomats and industrialists—and asked for the best doctors, the best hospitals in the country after learning about his illness. The privileged upbringing Boss Yeung had provided for her—unlike his in every way—was paying off.

  She’d cornered doctors and nurses, demanding their attention. To curry their favor, she had platters of fruit skewers delivered to the break room and remembered the names of the staff and their interests—all of which kept Boss Yeung in their thoughts. He turned his veins over to the nurses, who flooded him with painkillers, steroids, and anti-inflammatories, and plumped him up with pints of blood, as if he were a vampire. When they flushed the IV line with saline, he grew accustomed to the rotten orange peel taste in his mouth before the rush of morphine followed, the tingling heaviness of his limbs and a detachment from the world that Buddhists spent a lifetime trying to perfect. Holding still, he watched as technicians performed endless scans of his gut and his heart: the scrolling moonscape, the wiggle of the aortic valve, the blue and red of blood pumping in and out. The universe he held within, of which he knew almost nothing, just as little as he knew of the universe outside of him.

  Viann told him the treatment options she’d analyzed on a spreadsheet: New York, Minnesota, and Houston had top cancer hospitals. For Boss Yeung, the choices seemed unbearably far from the last sighting of Scarlett. By now, she must have given birth to their son—their son! By now, she could be anywhere, but he sensed she was in California. Scarlett had asked if there was a maternity center in San Francisco. She’d always wanted to stroll across the Golden Gate and turn her face into the wind at the edge of the continent. He told Viann he didn’t want to travel far, and pushed for San Francisco. “For a hospital as high tech as Silicon Valley.”

  She got him into a clinical trial there, at a hospital where her classmate’s uncle was a world-class oncologist, a regular Op-Ed contributor to The New York Times, a wiry marathoner with soft hands and bright blue eyes. She borrowed a friend’s condo in a luxury high-rise in downtown San Francisco that had the look of a cruise ship tilted onto its propeller. Aside from trips to the hospital on the hill, they never left the apartment, with its sweeping view of the emerald bay streaked with whitecaps and dotted with sailboats.

  When he suggested they visit Chinatown, Viann dismissed the food as fit only for tourists, greasy and cheap. The residents were low-class, peasants spitting and squatting on the sidewalk. She hired a Chinese chef to prepare broths and porridges, dull and nourishing, and forced him to drink chalky chocolate protein shakes, thick as mucus. During his treatment, banquet dishes would have tasted mealy and metallic in any case. His eyes, his nose, and his mouth were always parched.

  When the burly nurse swabbed his hip and prepared the needle for the bone marrow biopsy, Viann took his hand for the first time in decades. His scabbed and swollen, hers cool and smooth. The gesture intimate, almost obscene. He jerked his hand away. Surrounded by the infirm and the elderly, she’d get sick. “Get out of here,” he said.

  “Hold still,” the nurse said, and Viann took his hand again. Before he could protest, the nurse plunged in the needle. He gasped and involuntarily squeezed her hand, tight. She didn’t flinch.

  The nurse exclaimed, and Viann translated. “You have hard bones. Hard as an Olympian.” Viann added her own aside: “A hard head, too.”

  His sixtieth birthday came and went, another day hooked up to the drip-drip of drugs at the imperceptible speed at which stalactites formed. Drowsing in the recliner, his head aching when Viann presented him with the longevity peach cakes. He gagged on the first bite, the red bean paste repellent, overly sweet and sticky as glue.

  With his condition stabilized, they made plans to return to Hong Kong. The day before their flight, he urged her to go sightseeing, to take a walk along the beach or go shopping.

  She resisted. “I’ve seen it before. Nothing here that I can’t get in Hong Kong.”

  He no longer could send her away with a roll of bills and orders to spend it. He’d never replaced his wallet or credit cards, and was entirely dependent on her, which hadn’t mattered until now. He didn’t even have a key to the condo.

  She cleared his bowl of porridge sprinkled with peanuts and scallions. He’d taken only a few bites. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  Boss Yeung feared she would try to spoon-feed him. “Go, go.”

  She set down the bowl, grabbed her phone, and dialed. She was calling back Uncle Lo; he’d left a message yesterday. She would often put him on speakerphone and Boss Yeung always begged off from joining the conversation, claiming he was too tired, too nauseous.

  Should he let their long association be destroyed by a hunch? His suspicions about his wife’s infidelity—and Uncle Lo’s—receded but hadn’t disappeared, deferred only until he was again of sound mind and body. If confronted, Uncle Lo would lie, both to protect their friendsh
ip and to prevent his empire from becoming further divided among his many heirs. Uncle Lo would do anything for Viann, anything except acknowledge her as his. He was going to send a driver to the airport to pick them up in Hong Kong, he said, and arranged for a police escort to avoid traffic. Boss Yeung twitched. The sound of his oldest and dearest friend’s voice had become grating as a donkey’s bray. Every time Viann laughed, his insides twisted.

  “I’m bringing dumplings—five dozen,” Uncle Lo said. From their favorite late-night spot.

  A long pause, and Boss Yeung knew he was supposed to make a joke, something about his gluttony. “And what will you have?”

  “Can you get a list of the ingredients?” Viann asked. She’d never allow the dumplings to pass through his lips. Resentment surged through him. If she took control of Yeung Holdings, she’d disregard his wishes. He regretted sending her to business school. She wanted to do away with haggling and handshakes, and bring in modern management practices. Maybe he’d held too much of the company in his head, but at work he felt necessary as he never did at home.

  “No pork,” she said. “Not unless it’s organic. Can you have her make a special batch with bitter melon and lily bulbs? To clear the heat from his system.”

  With a start, he realized she was treating him just as he’d treated Scarlett, and he understood now how much she must have chafed under his thumb. Being pregnant wasn’t like being sick, not exactly, but both conditions offered up your body for public discussion and put you at the mercy of people who thought they knew what was best for you. Everything turned upside down: daughter reborn as his mother, and him acting like a father to Scarlett. But he didn’t want to be coddled, and neither did Scarlett. He wished he’d listened—listened as he now wanted Viann to listen. More than that: he wished he’d known what she’d wanted.

  “The dumpling lady won’t give up her recipe,” Uncle Lo said. “Not even to her son.”