by Vanessa Hua
She had to give up the expansion she’d been planning: a private villa or two in the backyard of Perfume Bay; tours of Stanford and Harvard, the future alma mater of these American-born children, tacked onto the beginning or end of the trips; and even surrogates. You could get a baby with U.S. citizenship, without going through the indignities of pregnancy, and without traveling abroad—services that many of her clients would have eagerly added after spending tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments and sex selection, rounds of acupuncture, and offerings to Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy.
She had to set her ambitions elsewhere now, but she’d always had more ideas than lifetimes.
* * *
—
Mama Fang returned to her car, and as she strapped herself in, her mobile phone rang—Uncle Lo.
“Any news?” he asked.
News about Daisy and Scarlett. If his detectives couldn’t find them, how could she? Although she’d learned never to look back, she hoped they were safe, clean, dry, and well-fed, or living on the streets after their money ran out. Or if they were dead. They’d been spotted heading north, and Mama Fang sometimes wondered if they might have taken shelter in Cupertino, too, if she might come upon them at any minute. By now, they both would have delivered their babies.
Each day Scarlett remained on the run, each day she survived without Boss Yeung, she triumphed over him and men like him. Scarlett would never know how closely Mama Fang’s convictions echoed her own.
“How’s Boss Yeung?” Mama Fang had despised him—he’d all but wanted her to track the frequency and quantity of Scarlett’s bowel movements. She blamed him more than herself for Scarlett’s disappearance.
A long pause. “It’s hard to know. He’s still in the hospital. His condition changes from moment to moment.” He exhaled, and she pictured him blowing out cigarette smoke. “Just find her.”
“The newspaper,” Mama Fang said. “Advertise in the classifieds of your newspaper, in all the Chinese newspapers. Offer a reward.”
Uncle Lo couldn’t hide his scorn. “You think they’re telling people their names? Why not hire a skywriter?”
“Offer her a reward,” Mama Fang said. “So much she can’t refuse.”
Silence, not the click of a hang-up. Her heart lurched. “Money makes the mare go,” she added. A proverb, of the kind he used to teach her, long ago in Hong Kong. “Even a nag like Scarlett.”
He didn’t laugh, gave no salty grunt of appreciation. “She won’t go anywhere after we find her.”
Taking Scarlett’s child from her seemed punishment enough, but Uncle Lo appeared to have harsher retribution in mind. “Call me if you hear something,” he barked, and hung up.
She studied the phone, willing it to flash with an incoming call—Scarlett’s. The phone remained silent. Mama Fang couldn’t allow herself such foolish thinking. Even if Scarlett had the number, she wouldn’t have called for help. Scarlett would find her way, just like Mama Fang always had. A car honked, and the driver motioned with his hands, checking if Mama Fang was going to pull out. She shook her head.
She might never find Scarlett, but she could still return to the good graces of Uncle Lo. Her ideas intrigued him—always had, and always would, so long as he profited from them. She’d been planning to call the real estate agent after the weekend, but now found herself dialing the number. The name was Chinese. Would the agent be taking the weekend off, or like so many immigrant Chinese, did she work every day except during the Spring Festival?
The agent answered on the first ring.
Chapter 10
When her daughter cried without end, Scarlett strapped her onto her chest and walked ceaselessly, like a soldier on Chairman Mao’s Long March. Past the bubbling tanks where catfish bobbed and gaped, the markets pungent with bitter greens and oranges, past the stores selling hell money and incense to honor the dead. Liberty would fall asleep within a few minutes, soothed by the heat of her mother’s body, the swaying steps, and the steady beat of her heart.
She and Daisy never walked together, granting each other a reprieve from their joint captivity. They were guarded and solitary women; their passage into motherhood felt as if they themselves had been wrenched through a birth canal once more.
One night, after Didi had been clingy and fussy for hours, Scarlett offered to watch him while Daisy showered. His bowels let loose and she changed him. Taping down the flap, she remembered to tuck his penis in, to keep him from peeing up his shirt. She wondered if she would have been a different mother to a son. If she would have tussled with him like he was a puppy, or expected him to carry her on his back when she was old. As she rubbed his belly, he kicked her in the nose, so hard she saw stars.
Daisy returned, humming the lullaby she’d sung with her boyfriend. The sound sweet as a lark’s, but repetition turned the tune into the whine of a dentist’s drill and drove Scarlett out of the apartment.
In the hallway, Old Wu tried to stop her. “Guniang!” Young maiden. He showed a certain gallantry—or a certain obstinacy—by using the title when Scarlett was clearly anything but. A nickname just for her, and she suspected that he might be developing a crush on her.
The other residents at Evergreen Gardens called her Big Sister, while Daisy was known as Little Sister.
“It’s dark. You might get lost.” Old Wu eyed her swelling nose.
“I can find my way back.”
“It’s not safe.”
She reminded him they had walked home from dinner last week. The restaurant had picked up his tab, and he’d insisted on paying for her and Daisy.
“With me,” he said.
As if he’d protected them! She didn’t need his coddling or anyone else’s. She’d lived in cities where muggers on mopeds tore earrings out of your earlobes and snatched the sunglasses off your face.
“I’ll just go around the block a few times,” she told him. She ventured past the shuttered storefronts, along humming cable car tracks, and into a neighborhood north of Chinatown. Nothing here worth scavenging, the sidewalks picked over by this time of night. Nothing else would fit in their apartment, which was crammed to the ceiling. Her stomach growled. She and Daisy had been thinning their rice porridge until it was almost translucent, flavored with a few drops of soy sauce, and hadn’t eaten meat in weeks. The flesh on her stomach sagged, so stretched out she could lose a fist in herself, but her ribs and her hips jutted out as they hadn’t since she was a girl, the year that drought left the earth cracked as a turtle’s shell. Though her milk still flowed, nursing left Scarlett ravenous and often she bit the inside of her cheek to quell her pangs. As frugally as they lived, they were almost out of money, and in two weeks, by the first of December, they would have to pay rent, six hundred dollars. Unfortunately, Daisy seemed no closer to finding the father of her child than when they’d first arrived, no closer to providing the shelter and financial support she’d promised them both. No one had responded to the graffiti scrawled in the campus bathroom.
They couldn’t sell the other passports stolen from Perfume Bay. No one wanted a Chinese passport, except a North Korean trying to sneak across the border, or a terrorist on a watch list. At least they’d had the satisfaction, as they ripped apart the passports, of the trouble they must have caused Mama Fang.
Footsteps came up from behind her, and Scarlett wheeled around, her arms tightening around Liberty. Only a granny, hurrying home. Every time she lulled herself into forgetting Boss Yeung, a stranger’s glance lingered, or a shadow crossed her path, reminding her of the rough hands that could wrench Liberty from her arms. She was never more than a few steps away from her daughter, but very soon, she and Daisy would have to trade off babysitting between shifts. If they could find work. Daisy had never held a job, never spent any money but her parents’—and now Scarlett’s. Without papers, Scarlett could land only the worst positions, where you cleane
d and scraped and dug and kneeled six days a week, where bosses cursed you, groped you, and held back your wages.
She stroked Liberty’s head, her wispy hair now grown into a fringe. What if she returned after work to find the apartment ransacked, her daughter whisked off, policemen waiting to clap on handcuffs for kidnapping? Boss Yeung wasn’t the only threat. After her visa expired, authorities could pick her up at any time. Forever at risk, forever on guard.
Under the marquees of the strip clubs, the lights were bright as day. Bars spilled out drunken men, red-faced as the god of war, and women in tiny dresses flaunted legs muscled as a weight lifter’s. In China, they would have been mocked for having legs lumpy and ugly as a white radish. The customers lined up at a cart for bacon-wrapped hot dogs topped with grilled onions and peppers. The vendor, with his tawny skin and a tilt to his eyes, resembled the Uighurs, the tribesmen in China’s far west, but he talked in round sounds that she guessed might be Spanish. Noticing her watching, he smiled and nodded at her.
Not much choice compared to the scores of hawkers in Chinese cities who sold every kind of food on a stick, from the air, land, and sea: skewers of roast quail, barbecued squid trailing tender tentacles, and glistening jewels of crab apples. She’d strolled and snacked at night markets since she was a teenager eager to spend her first factory pay. She missed the frenetic bass blaring from stalls, salt and smoke and meat, bubbling cauldrons of oil, aisles packed shoulder to shoulder, people lit with excitement, staying up late after lying low during the heat of the day, compelled to browse all night, never looking back at the stalls they’d passed because something better was ahead.
The vendor tapped his tongs against the grill to entice her. She looked away. She could almost taste the hot dog, the skin snapping under her teeth, the crunch of green peppers and onions. Down the block, a car service arrived and a customer who had taken a couple of bites of her hot dog tossed the rest into the trash. A gym-toned blonde, she probably would have regretted finishing it. The hot dog rested on a folded newspaper, still steaming, fresh off the grill. Scarlett’s fingers twitched. She hadn’t eaten since this morning, and she was dizzy with hunger. No one was watching, and she wouldn’t have to reach very far inside the garbage can. No. As she took a deep shuddering breath, Liberty stirred against her, and Scarlett walked back home.
* * *
—
Two months after giving birth, Scarlett still felt off-kilter. Sweat dripped between her swollen breasts, pooled in her armpits, and trickled down her back.
Manager Kwok eyed her but said nothing. Pockmarked with a boxer’s nose, he resembled Jackie Chan, but had none of the actor’s boyish charm. She’d sold Manager Kwok the van, which she’d seen headed out on deliveries, a reliable ride that he appreciated enough to grant her an interview. She wasn’t willowy or young enough to be hostess in a tight qi pao, but she could take her place among the sullen legion of cart ladies squawking out their specialties, shrimp dumplings, egg tarts, or pork buns. She’d arrived in mid-afternoon, following the lunch shift that left the restaurant wrecked: rice ground into the carpet, tables piled high with dirty plastic dishes, the air thick with the scent of grease, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Chinatown was always hiring new arrivals: restaurants in search of girls to pass out flyers, a garment factory seeking seamstresses, and a foot massage parlor searching for therapists, establishments that wouldn’t ask for work authorization papers or any papers at all and kept double accounting books.
She folded her arms against her chest, and then let them drop to her sides. Her arms felt empty without Liberty, whom she’d left bawling at the apartment to get to the interview on time. At the door, she’d lingered, and Daisy had urged her to go. It was the first time either of them had cared for both babies for more than a few minutes. Millions were being made in San Francisco, at tech companies that rivaled the biggest ones in China, but Scarlett found no gold in the streets of Chinatown. She could start at the lowest rung of jobs, wash dishes at a restaurant, clean an office and try to climb up, though this time she wasn’t a teenager, this time she couldn’t consume herself in industrious self-improvement.
Because her baby was three weeks older, Scarlett felt she should look for work first. They both lacked high school degrees, but Daisy—with her perfect English and her talent in science and math—might be able to find a higher-paying job. Tutoring? Daisy seemed to lack the patience for students who couldn’t keep up. Salesclerk? She wouldn’t cave in to demanding customers at a boutique or coffee shop. Daisy never talked about what jobs she wanted. To admit she needed a job would be to admit that she wasn’t about to find her boyfriend. Pining for him had shrunk Daisy’s world and stolen her ingenuity, and Scarlett couldn’t allow her to wallow much longer.
Hugging herself, she realized she was wearing her wraparound shirt inside out, the seams striping the sleeves. She tugged on the cuffs, hoping Manager Kwok wouldn’t notice. The job was hers to lose. She asked about the model motorcycle on the liquor cabinet. “You ride?”
No, he said brusquely. “Not anymore.”
Maybe he’d given it up, following an accident, or his wife forced him to quit after they started a family.
“Have you eaten here?” he asked.
“Many times! Your soup dumplings are the best I’ve had.”
He frowned. “We don’t serve soup dumplings.”
She once could have talked her way into the job within minutes, but her thoughts had become perpetually fogged. “The pork buns.”
Manager Kwok nodded. “My favorite, too.” His phone pinged and as he checked his screen, she wondered if Daisy had calmed Liberty or if she’d been crying unabated for the last hour.
“What hours are you available to work?” Manager Kwok asked.
“Whatever’s available.”
“When can you start?”
“Tomorrow.” Her throat was parched, and she fell into a fit of coughing. “How busy does it get?”
“Nine hundred people,” Manager Kwok said. “On a slow day.”
“Waah!” She’d coax him with compliments. “How many employees?”
The figure he named seemed too low, every shift teetering into disaster, every shift ending in unpaid overtime.
Her expression must have betrayed her misgivings. Manager Kwok abruptly told her that someone had just accepted the position, but that he’d keep her name on file.
Scarlett clenched her hands, digging her nails into her palms. She shouldn’t have asked so many questions. Rejected: not because of her red-rimmed eyes or her hunched posture, but because she wasn’t as naïve as he wanted. She thanked him and shakily stood up. She felt a breeze and discovered her shirt had slipped open, exposing her milk-swollen breasts and her flabby belly covered in stretch marks. Manager Kwok stared at her not with lust, not with disgust, but with a humiliating pity that she fled.
* * *
—
At daybreak, Scarlett joined the line that snaked around metal barriers and down the block in the neighborhood that stank like a vast squat toilet. Those in front had been waiting since midnight. A week before Thanksgiving, a church was handing out frozen turkeys, hard and gleaming as the decapitated head of a marble statue. She inched forward as disco dance hits soared from outdoor speakers.
She brushed her arm against her chest. She winced. Usually she nursed every three hours, and now her breasts were tender, full and tight. She shivered under two layers of sweaters, blowing on her numb hands. She’d come first to hold a place in line among the Chinese, grannies in puffy jackets and bulky hand-knit scarves, teenagers with hoods flipped up and tightened around their faces, and uncles leaning on their canes. Other kinds of people, too: a towering transvestite in a crop top, oblivious to the cold, and a plump, ruddy-cheeked woman wearing at least five layers of skirts, as if she might break out in a can-can, and a man with a ginger-colored bushy beard. She’d never taken a han
dout, and if she’d gotten the job at the Pearl Pavilion, she wouldn’t have come. Her hunger now outmatched her pride.
An hour later, the straps cut into her hands, wrenching her shoulder as she carried the sack bulging with canned corn, fruit cocktail, a bag of spongy rolls, pasta sauce, and a frozen turkey, plus free tickets for a science exhibit in San Francisco. The clanking load whacked her hips. It was mid-morning, and Daisy hadn’t shown up with the babies. Waiting in line for charity must have seemed a poor substitute for finding her boyfriend by Thanksgiving. Maybe she’d decided it was too cold to go outside, or she didn’t want to leave the apartment. Useless. Lazy.
Harsh words, but they were entering their hardest times yet. On the corner, people jostled around a sedan with the trunk up, crowded with giveaway sacks. A man was handing out money in exchange for the groceries. Just as quickly, people returned to the church giveaway line. Scarlett stopped a Chinese granny with a child’s plastic flower barrette in her stringy hair, and learned sacks with turkeys sold for five dollars, and chickens for three dollars.
“What’s he doing?” she asked. The granny ignored her and pushed past with the determination of a woman who would have trampled children to get on a lifeboat. A scarecrow of a man hurried by. She guessed he’d used the money to buy liquor, drugs, whatever he wanted most, and not on a meal that would remind him of what he no longer shared with his family.
Even if the food had been remotely appetizing, the buyer obviously didn’t intend to eat it. He’d sell it for double what he paid here, maybe to a restaurant, or by walking door-to-door. He wore an expensive puffy coat, warm enough for Siberia, and sleek leather gloves, protection against the brisk wind. The sales seemed illegal, or at least against the wishes of the donors.
