by Vanessa Hua
Son. Sons.
“Doesn’t your son like dumplings? Bring him along,” Boss Yeung said. “He’d like to see Viann, wouldn’t he?”
She smiled tightly. Uncle Lo’s eldest son was affable and soft-spoken, bland as tofu, taking on the color and flavor of any seasoning.
“I’ll worry, until you’re settled,” Boss Yeung told her.
“A pretty girl needs a pretty boy,” Uncle Lo said.
“How about Teddy?” Boss Yeung asked. Uncle Lo’s younger brother, recently divorced. Stoop-shouldered, stunted from growing up in Uncle Lo’s shadow. All the younger Lo men were dull, perhaps as a matter of survival.
“You don’t want ugly grandchildren!” Uncle Lo said.
“I may never see my grandchildren,” Boss Yeung said.
What started off as rhetoric cut Boss Yeung with the truth of it. The end might come soon, with so much he would never see, never touch or taste. Never hold.
“They’ve been asking about you at the club,” Uncle Lo said. “The steam will make you feel like new.”
To sit in hot, wet quarters with Uncle Lo seemed a chamber of hell, akin to the pit where demons ripped out the tongues of gossips, snipped off the fingers of adulterers, and crushed those who abandoned their children.
“It’s too much,” Viann said. Too much for Boss Yeung’s fragile immune system.
“I’ll clear out the sauna for us.” Boss Yeung shuffled off without replying. Uncle Lo must sense that Boss Yeung wanted nothing to do with him.
In the bathroom, his piss dribbled out. He was bald, his body swollen on steroids, his skin dark and tough in patches. Viann would forget he’d ever been whole and healthy, at a safe remove where he could remain high in her estimation. She’d forget the days when he lifted her up to see into the fish tanks in restaurants. When he used to carry her into the house after she’d fallen asleep in the car, and she’d tuck her head into the crook of his neck. When she was still an only child, and he had no doubts about her paternity.
One afternoon, after drinks with Uncle Lo, he’d lurched into the nursery and discovered Viann with a pair of scissors. She might have been four. “What are you doing?” he asked.
She’d snipped out dozens of flowers printed on her cotton blanket, the blades still swishing and clicking in her chubby hand. “I’m picking flowers for my dolls.”
He took the scissors from her. “Where did you get these?”
From the top of the dresser, where her mother left a pair. Viann had pulled out each drawer, like a flight of stairs and climbed up. Her foot had plunged through the bottom of one, and all the drawers were cockeyed in their tracks.
Uncle Lo chuckled. “Clever!”
His presence had spared her punishment, turning Boss Yeung playful and proud at this proof of her intelligence and determination. Now, every time Uncle Lo had intervened on Viann’s behalf seemed cause for suspicion.
Viann knocked. Uncle Lo had finished what he’d had to say to her, and now wanted to talk to him, she said. He wasn’t going to get to avoid talking to him. He took the phone from her, turned off the speaker, and pointedly closed the door in her face. She remained in the hallway, eavesdropping, casting shadows that crept under the crack.
Uncle Lo told him the detective had uncovered murky surveillance video at a gas station north of Los Angeles, a shot trained on the tail end of a white van that resembled the one that had gone missing from Perfume Bay. His knees shaky, Boss Yeung shut the toilet lid and sat down.
The front of the van was out of the frame and the vehicle blocked the view of the driver getting in and out, but in the video, the runaway teenager had circled the vehicle, carrying a squeegee. Scarlett did not turn up in the footage from inside the convenience store, and the clerk didn’t remember serving a pair of pregnant Chinese women. But the hospital security cameras—which had shown Scarlett driving off—and this video, taken the day after their disappearance, seemed to suggest that Scarlett and the girl had escaped together in the van, and not separately in the chaos of that evening.
The detective was looking for more footage along the I-5, and planned to put the boyfriend’s parents under surveillance, tap their phone line, and go through their trash to see if they were harboring the fugitive mothers and their newborns.
“She’ll turn up, with her hand out,” Uncle Lo said. “Her kind always does.”
“She’s a stubborn one.”
“Nothing that a laojiao can’t cure.”
Uncle Lo had to be joking. At this kind of labor camp, Scarlett would be forced to make shoes or cheap electronics, getting “re-educated”—brainwashed or worse.
If Scarlett had gotten this close to San Francisco, she would have stayed. Of all the cities in America, she’d mentioned San Francisco the most. She might still be here, and Boss Yeung had to find her. When he returned to the living room, Viann was rinsing his bowl.
“You should go out. Before it gets too late,” he said.
“You can’t be left alone.” She spoke so softly he wasn’t sure if the words were intended for him.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said. “The doctors cleared me to travel.”
She looked past him. “What if you fell?”
“I’ll nap. I can’t fall far in bed.”
“What if there was a fire?” she asked.
He wasn’t a toddler who would play with matches.
“What if you left the apartment?” She locked eyes with him, and he understood she had questions that she couldn’t yet bring herself to ask: Why had he left Hong Kong without telling anyone? Why had he been in Los Angeles? Business, he could have said, but the look she gave challenged him not to lie.
“My trip, I came because…because I was looking for my son.”
Viann stared at him.
“For your brother.”
Her nostrils pinched as if he’d turned into a rotting fish. “My brother?”
“I…” He faltered. She must know that factory bosses had mistresses, even if he’d been faithful until Scarlett. Every man cheated if presented with temptation and opportunity, in need of softness and warmth along with the sex.
“Who?”
“Someone from the factory.”
Scarlett’s low laugh, her love of maps, her lively intelligence—Viann wouldn’t want to hear any of it. She held herself so still he knew that she was on the verge of exploding.
She sneered. “The factory?” She must picture an assembly-line worker, a teenager in tight jeans. “What a bargain.”
“It’s not— She’s not—”
She slammed the bowl onto the marble floor, a mess of shards and spattered porridge, shouldered her purse, and left without another word. In the silence that followed, he wondered if he’d confessed with exactly that outcome in mind.
* * *
—
Eyes watering, he took another bite of the fried chicken laced with peppercorns from Sichuan that numbed his mouth like Novocain. Sick of his invalid’s diet, he’d ordered a tableful of dishes at the basement restaurant in Chinatown, packed with a Chinese-only clientele who ordered from handwritten menus on strips of pink paper pasted on the walls.
His first chance to feel alive and his last chance on this trip to visit Chinatown and resume his search for Scarlett. Though he didn’t know if she’d ended up here, he had to try the neighborhood where newcomers from their country landed. He’d have to persuade her to give their son his birthright. Not in America, but in Hong Kong, where the boy would be steeped in the family’s legacy. Scarlett would remain his mother, with important duties yet to be defined. She couldn’t deny how much more Boss Yeung could provide for their son and for her.
Sated, he sipped his tea and paid for lunch from what he’d stolen out of Viann’s suitcase—money that was technically his, from her monthly allowance, two hundred doll
ars tucked into a shirt pocket. He crumpled the napkin in his lap. Viann. He’d hurt the one person who loved him, and for what—for the sake of a baby he didn’t know. He’d never forget the sorrow in her face. She must know the significance of a male heir: a future in which she would run Yeung Holdings only until her brother was old enough to take the reins. Twenty-five years or so of her life given to the company, only to end up as a footnote in the family history.
In his final years, his father had been a drunk. On his deathbed, he’d begged Boss Yeung to redeem the family’s name. A man’s job. He himself never had to speak as a father to a son, never had to teach a boy how to become a man. Boss Yeung had learned not to emulate: not to gamble, not to spend extravagantly.
What would he tell his own son, if he had the opportunity? To honor your parents, carry on the family line, to build upon the foundation he’d laid down. To rise early, and be neither envious nor fawning. He couldn’t remember giving any advice to his daughters, though Viann had absorbed these lessons on her own.
He walked through Chinatown, but couldn’t go for long without sitting down again. The block lengthened with each shuffling step, and when a granny elbowed him to get by, he felt as if he might break apart on the sidewalk. Every woman with a baby caught his eye. Coming up too close, staring for too long at the babies, he must have seemed like a kidnapper. One mother clasped her arms around her baby and glared at him, and another veered around him and sped up, the toys rattling on her stroller like wind chimes in a storm.
Out of breath, he braced himself against a lamppost. His doubts about Viann’s paternity made him more desperate to find his son, born from his blood. His son starting life, just as Boss Yeung was leaving his. At funerals, weren’t children a comfort to the living? Their plump bodies and new skin, the features and mannerisms passed down and passed on from the departed. His son, his infant son, dressed in a coarse mourning tunic, a squiggle of black cloth pinned to his chest, peering into the coffin where Boss Yeung would recline in three layers of silk finery, his face waxy with makeup. His son’s stubby fingers reaching for him. It could be the only touch to ever pass between them.
His head spun. Needing to rest again, he stumbled into a dim sum palace where a hostess shouted into a microphone, calling for customers. The restaurant was alive with chatter and the festive clink of chopsticks against porcelain, two floors of diners, tables of ten, three generations of snoozing babies and kids on iPods, parents and grandparents slurping. Families, all.
He ignored the twinge in his back, strained by walking, he told himself—not the flu, not the pain that had heralded his last relapse. He tried to slump onto the last chair in the waiting area but a granny in a walker beat him to it. Her granddaughter flanked her, glowering at him like a guardian foo dog statue. He leaned against the silver wallpaper, sticky with grease. Even if he hadn’t fallen ill, even if he hadn’t taken a mistress, he hadn’t had a noisy family meal in years. On his rare dinners home, a few days out of every three months, he choked down his wife’s bland vegetarian cuisine while checking his phone before retreating to his study. On his last trip to Hong Kong, Viann had talked about a new project she’d initiated at the shortbread factory: installing insulation, double-paned windows, compact fluorescent lighting, and solar panels on the roof. Some days, Yeung Holdings was selling back energy to the power company.
Her ingenuity should have pleased him. Instead, he’d rewarded her with a condescending smile, and told her they’d use it for the red envelopes of lucky money given to children during the Spring Festival. Symbolic and inconsequential. He’d treated her badly, then and now. Had she returned to the condo and discovered him missing? He hadn’t left a note and wasn’t carrying a cellphone. Or was she riding aimlessly in a cab, shaking with rage, unable to face him and unwilling to go elsewhere? Crying, calling Uncle Lo. If she only knew how Uncle Lo might have rejected her long ago. Boss Yeung’s stomach cramped and he clenched to keep from shitting himself. He was a practical man, not cerebral, not a scholar or a poet, but he hated how he’d become a slave to his bodily functions. The line to the bathroom snaked down the hallway, full of sharp-eyed, sharp-elbowed, hard-hearted matrons who wouldn’t let him cut. His bowels settled. He’d hurry back to the throne of a toilet at the condo, a fancy Japanese model that could do everything except pull his pants back up and wipe his nose.
Air, he needed air. Gasping, he stumbled outside, drawing in deep breaths. He studied the apartments above the shops, no doubt hovels with peeling lead paint and mold billowing across the ceilings. Heat crept up his neck. He’d wronged Scarlett, but she still shouldn’t have fled.
In his compromised state, a cough from a wheezing old man, a sneeze from a waitress fighting the flu, any and all errant germs could bring him down, and by the time he hailed a cab to the condo, his body blazed.
* * *
—
He awoke in the hospital, his lips cracked and throat scorched. Viann was curled beside him, her head against his chest. She mumbled and when he brushed his hand along her back, her breathing slowed and evened. The scent of sleep, of her greasy hair and a trace of her citrus perfume. A few minutes later, she stirred awake. He didn’t move, letting her climb off the bed and compose herself.
She must think him a hopeless case. In and out of the hospital, for now, for a while, for the rest of his miserable, truncated life. When he opened his eyes, Viann was standing by the bed. She’d tied back her hair and smoothed out her blouse. She was far too thin, her head a sunflower on the stalk of her body.
He cleared his throat. “Did you get any sleep?”
She nodded; her eyes were hollow and haunted. He shifted, and his flimsy hospital gown slipped off his shoulder. She recoiled. His swollen body must disgust her. Most anyone would flinch from the first sight of their parent’s wrecked body. He straightened out his gown, and she bowed her head and apologized. He asked her to raise the bed, then for water that he sipped from the cup she held to his mouth. He tried not to dribble, but his lips felt slack. She blotted his mouth with a napkin, and the briskness of the gesture reminded him of someone—of Uncle Lo. The wide set of her eyes was just like his friend’s, too. He’d been studying her surreptitiously, but until this moment, he’d denied the resemblance, told himself she’d inherited this quality from his father, or that trait from his grandmother. He couldn’t pretend any longer.
Uncle Lo would never submit to a paternity test, but during the bone marrow drive he’d spearheaded, hadn’t he gotten his entire family typed, in the ultimate show of their commitment? Boss Yeung could compare that test to Viann’s, the columns of dots, letters, and numbers serving as a crude approximation of the paternity test. Shared markers, shared blood. Not definite, but evidence enough to determine whether to take the next step: steal Uncle Lo’s DNA. The nick of blood on a razor tossed into the trash at the club. A stray hair plucked off his suit jacket. The saliva left on a glass of cognac, over drinks between two old friends.
Chapter 9
Mama Fang paused before the empty storefront, where dust inside glittered in a beam of sunlight. The counter could go there, by that pile of papers, and the desks back there, by the heap of metal fixtures. This location had good feng shui—though perhaps not so favorable after all, because the last business here had presumably failed. Yet the Chinese supermarket and the bank drew a steady stream of traffic to the strip mall, and most important, it was located down the street from the top-ranked middle school in Cupertino. She jotted down the phone number of the real estate agent listed in the window. On the drive here, she’d passed a shopping mall packed with cars between light poles adorned with banners of pumpkins and autumn leaves.
Soon after Scarlett and Daisy went missing from Perfume Bay, her neighbors had complained to police about the frequent turnover of pregnant women—a brothel in reverse—and the stink from the industrial-sized trash cans overflowing with diapers.
During the
predawn raid, the sound of heavy pounding reverberated through the house, the front door shook, and then the men in black uniforms and helmets burst in. Babies cried without end. The guests had to submit to hours-long interrogations. Within the week, Perfume Bay had been condemned as structurally unsound, the regrettable outcome of an unlicensed contractor and unpermitted renovations. Mama Fang had to refund her guests, in addition to covering their meals and hotel stays until they returned home to China and Hong Kong. Uncle Lo had lost his entire investment, but even worse, he’d lost face to all the clients he’d referred to Perfume Bay.
As soon as she could, Mama Fang moved north to Cupertino, a Chinese enclave in the heart of Silicon Valley, where no one would know her, a sprawling city of low-slung ranch houses and office parks surrounded by rolling hills. She had settled in quickly, for Chinatowns the world over shared markets selling live fish and dusty imported foods, cultural centers with the familiar clack of mahjong tiles and the whine of the opera, all attempts to remake, remember, and reclaim.
It wasn’t the first time she’d started over. Back in Hong Kong, she’d opened a series of businesses that expanded in scope and ambition, but with the handover to China looming in 1997, she joined the many who left. The wealthiest immigrated to Canada, the United States, and Australia, while Mama Fang arrived in Panama after sinking her savings into a residency permit she could afford. She’d heard the little curve of a country was a back door to the United States, and she married a retired American serviceman who wanted a nurse on the cheap. Medicine wasn’t too hard to learn with a bit of practice, and Mama Fang was a quick study. She’d changed his bedpans, administered an IV, and fetched him the beer he drank most hours of most days, its sourness leaking from his pores. She’d divorced him soon after her green card arrived.
With the money from her settlement, she’d bought a plane ticket and rented a cheap room fifteen minutes down the freeway from the Tuscan-style mansions with three-car garages popular with Chinese who were settling in the hills east of Los Angeles. After embarking upon several ventures, she’d eventually written Uncle Lo with her business proposal for Perfume Bay.
