A River of Stars

by Vanessa Hua

  “Buyaolian,” Daisy shot back. Shameless.

  “You like getting cheated?” Daisy asked him. He was holding two carved turtles, tiny in his hand. Vendors found American-born Chinese the most gullible of all foreigners, with their fat wallets, ignorance of local customs, and their misplaced trust in their brethren.

  “She needs it more than me,” he said.

  Daisy had looked where he was looking, at a little girl paging through a book underneath the stall. She brushed past him. She hated him for making her see Taiwan through his eyes, every cripple, every beggar. Though she hurried through the market, he caught up to her.

  “I wasn’t insulting you,” he said. “You seem like someone who stops something bad from happening.”

  Daisy now repeated his comment with pride. He’d described exactly the woman Daisy wanted to be, and he’d been the first to see that possibility in her.

  No wonder she’d fallen for him.

  Daisy had already told her what happened next: over the winter, her boyfriend had returned to Taipei to visit his ailing grandmother. A month later, Daisy discovered she was pregnant. Some girls found special doctors online who made the problem go away, but she didn’t want to decide alone.

  She’d messaged him, called him, but he’d never answered. Busy with school—or another girl? She never said she was pregnant, only that she needed to talk to him. When she finally wrote to him with the news, he had called her immediately and proposed over the scratchy video. He gnawed at his fingernails as if he might chew off his hand. Before he could wire her money for a plane ticket, a gust had plastered her shirt against her belly, revealing her secret to her family. After taking away her phone and laptop, cutting off contact with him, her parents shipped her to Perfume Bay. Even though Daisy was a U.S. citizen, she hadn’t lived in America long enough to pass on automatic citizenship to a child born outside its borders.

  Her boyfriend could have passed on his U.S. citizenship, if he’d claimed paternity. But her parents told him that she’d terminated the pregnancy.

  As controlling, as vindictive as Scarlett’s mother had sometimes been, she never lied.

  Daisy never had a chance to tell him what happened, not after her parents had grounded her at home, and not while she’d been held prisoner at Perfume Bay, where Mama Fang denied her access to laptops and phones.

  Scarlett didn’t have the heart to tell her that the boy must be relieved to be free of this burden. He wasn’t ready to raise a child, and neither was Daisy, but he should still know the truth.

  * * *

  —

  Scarlett staggered up the hill. She felt a hand at the small of her back—Daisy’s, supporting her. Hummingbird heart in her throat, Scarlett checked the map. They’d been traveling for more than two hours, by foot, by bus, and by BART to get to the university, now a few blocks away. Though she didn’t want Daisy to make the trek from Chinatown alone, she wasn’t going to be much help.

  As a group of students approached, Scarlett searched their faces. Like a bodyguard, she had taken to checking crowds, as if hunting for assassins and escape routes. Until she and her daughter had their papers, she could never be at ease. She noticed that Daisy’s belly rendered her invisible to the students; the men didn’t seem to find her attractive, and the women didn’t compare themselves to her. Watching them walk past, Daisy couldn’t hide her hunger to join them. The hulking engineering building came into view. Perched on the hillside, covered in mottled green tile, it resembled one of those drawings that skew with the perspective, all arches, arcades, and sloping lines. Inside, Daisy hung flyers on bulletin boards—the characters for Little Dumpling, her nickname for her boyfriend—in huge print, like a wanted poster, asking him to call in a matter related to the McDonald’s pie à la mode. He would understand the code words.

  At the McDonald’s in Taipei, William had always ordered an apple pie—fried, not baked—and vanilla ice cream—dairy, not chemical frozen yogurt—both unavailable in the United States after a push to turn menus healthy. He prided himself as a traveler, not a tourist. Tourists sought out McDonald’s for its clean bathrooms and precision-cut French fries, for the whiff of Wichita in Moscow or Johannesburg, for the global might of an empire where the sun never set on Ronald McDonald. A traveler ordered like a local, he said, choosing the regional specialties on the menu, corn soup and fried chicken in Taiwan and the shrimp burger in Japan—items that signified you were an insider with a discerning palate, who could find gold even at a fast-food restaurant.

  Erbaiwu, half a brain! Why not order from a street vendor, Scarlett wondered, for a fraction of the price? And try as he might, William would never be native. Only someone with the privileges of an American would so readily try to give up those privileges.

  Although Daisy shared stories bit by bit about her life, Scarlett didn’t reciprocate. She couldn’t, not with someone less than half her age who—despite her pregnancy—seemed so unripened. Scarlett had long since fallen from the tree.

  William was a year older than Daisy, but sometimes it felt like she’d gone off to college, not him, she said. She was the firstborn and he was the baby of his family. Ma bao, a mama’s jewel, whose mother dictated his friends, education, career, and his wife. Although they were both ABC, his family had stayed while hers had returned to Taiwan. Both felt something missing in their lives, something they suspected they would only find across the ocean. He’d looked east, in search of a land where he wouldn’t feel out of place, wouldn’t be taunted as meek and nerdy. He watched anime and trained in martial arts from an herbalist–calligrapher–kung fu master. To impress her, he’d bust out backflips on their outings, in the park and on the sidewalk.

  Unlike her boyfriend, Daisy faced west, listening to indie rock bands and browsing travel guides for cities she had yet to visit: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco. She might be staking too much on this boy, who sounded compassionate yet tianzhen, naïve. Keeping the baby must have been the first major decision of their lives, and they were both so young that taking responsibility must have seemed like an achievement.

  Maybe the loss of Daisy and of his baby had shaken him. Maybe he’d never been enrolled at Cal, and little of anything he told Daisy had been the truth. Had he wanted to impress her with his stories? Scarlett’s time with Boss Yeung—their nights together, their trips, his promises—had been a lie, too.

  Daisy’s love hadn’t been complicated, compromised by marriage, by age, by class—all the differences that led Boss Yeung to betray Scarlett. Maybe he felt he’d done her a favor, offered a helping hand to a peasant by trying to buy her off. Scarlett would yank him down with her before she let him believe he was pulling her up again.

  The night she’d conceived, Boss Yeung had lingered inside her, and they’d been cozy as nesting dolls, cozy as she’d never been. He kissed her shoulder. “I—” he said. He didn’t continue. He’d waited until they couldn’t make eye contact to attempt a confession he couldn’t force out in the end. Did he love her or was he going to leave her? He’d started to withdraw and she had settled against him, a few seconds that had determined their end.

  She and Daisy peered into classrooms and lounges where students scribbled into notebooks and pecked on their laptops. Back in the hallway, Daisy stroked her hand on the high dome of her belly, a fortune-teller reading her crystal ball. “I’ll catch up.”

  To make a life with her boyfriend, she would have to graduate from high school, pass the entrance exams, and apply to Cal. If she found him, if she got in, his parents could look after the baby while they both attended school. If, if, if. Unlike Scarlett, Daisy wasn’t worrying about their basic survival—a privilege the teenager had from birth, a privilege she wasn’t even aware of having.

  Daisy hung a flyer beside a bright yellow leaflet with perforated tabs. She tore one off, explaining it listed an information session for financial aid and scholarships.
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  “Can’t your parents pay?” Scarlett asked.

  “My parents!” Daisy couldn’t hide her scorn. She could never trust them again. She’d been sent to Perfume Bay not only to give her son citizenship, but also to conceal her pregnancy. Her father had been appointed to a high government post, and he didn’t want the scandal public. If she returned to Taiwan, her parents would send her to boarding school, keeping her apart from William, and she would become a stranger to her baby. They would adopt her son and expect her to refer to him as her brother.

  If she refused, they’d find a way to take him and then disown her, she said. They’d lie to the authorities just like they’d lied to William and his family, and lie to her son, turning him against her.

  She couldn’t depend on her younger sister for help. She had been the one to spot Daisy’s bump and gleefully inform their parents; her sister had always resented Daisy for telling her what to do. She resented Daisy’s U.S. citizenship and its bright prospects, and she’d resent Daisy’s son, too, pinching and taunting him in secret.

  “They failed me,” Daisy said. “I won’t let them fail my baby.”

  She stroked her belly, her fierce expression softening. She stopped a student in a striped button-down with rolled-up sleeves and asked in Mandarin, “Do you know William Wan?”

  He clutched the strap of his backpack, slung over his shoulder, and replied hesitantly in the same dialect. “Excuse me?”

  Scarlett was relieved. She’d taken English classes off and on for years, nights and weekends, methods that ranged from yelling vocabulary at the top of her lungs to falling asleep listening to cassette tapes. After she met Boss Yeung and her diligence wavered, much of her English had faded into static. If Daisy had switched into English, Scarlett would have been left in the dark.

  “William Wan. He’s Chinese. About your height,” Daisy said.

  He laughed. “That describes most of us.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You can’t tell the difference between us?” She and Scarlett were about the same height. She had a point, but Scarlett wanted to pull her aside and advise her that the biting tone did her no favors. Then again, with her spirit, Daisy swayed men as Scarlett never could.

  “Do you have a picture? Maybe I’d recognize him,” he asked.

  “He has a mole under his right eye. His hair is short and spiky.”

  He eyed Daisy’s belly and asked for a flyer. “If I meet someone by that name, I’ll give this to him.”

  After he left, Daisy sagged, feisty when granted an opponent, lost without one. In the lobby of the building, they discovered that the flyers had been torn down. She poked her head into the nearest office. The receptionist glared at Daisy, they argued, and as the woman reached for the phone, Daisy slunk out.

  “Flyers need a stamp from the Student Affairs Office—no exceptions,” Daisy fumed to Scarlett.

  They stopped in the restroom, where their reflections startled Scarlett. She was still getting used to her shaggy bob streaked auburn. She sat on the toilet and sighed, resting her swollen feet squeezed into cheap canvas sneakers. She studied the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom door, the phone numbers and names and words whose letters she could identify and sound out but whose meaning she couldn’t decipher. Short of standing in the school plaza with a sandwich board and a bullhorn, Daisy couldn’t get a message to her boyfriend. Unless—the graffiti. Here she could add her plea to a captive audience. In block letters, at eye level, where dozens of students would see it each day. No—not here—not in the women’s bathroom. The men’s. Above the urinals and in the stalls.

  A slim chance, but the only chance Daisy might have to get past the school’s censors. In the men’s room across the hall, they shouted hello, hello before pushing open the door—empty. While Scarlett stood guard, Daisy left her mark with a Sharpie that squeaked on the metal and tile, her desperation beating out little staccato thumps.

  Daisy burst through the door with a kung fu kick. She was beaming. Petty vandalism revived her as no prenatal vitamin ever could. Beautiful and fiery as she must have been the night she met her boyfriend. She raised her leg again, poised to kick in every door in the hallway, thunderbolts thrown by a goddess giving birth to the world.

  Chapter 6

  Boss Yeung was jet-lagged, blinking in the hazy Southern California sunshine that felt like a violation. The sky should have been dark, he should have been asleep on the other side of the world, and Scarlett should have been resting at Perfume Bay in the final days of her pregnancy.

  He’d landed that morning at LAX, on a nonstop from Hong Kong. Perfume Bay’s website had listed this outdoor Chinese mall as a local attraction for its guests. Scarlett might have shopped here regularly, visiting its sprawling supermarket, boutiques pumping Canto-pop, and restaurants wafting cumin and garlic. A month ago, she could have stopped here for supplies before leaving town, or maybe she’d holed up nearby. He wanted to retrace her steps.

  He entered a boba tea shop on the upper level, an outpost of a Hong Kong chain, and at the counter, he ordered jasmine bubble tea with a fat pink straw and the chewy tapioca balls that Scarlett loved.

  “I’m looking for…” Boss Yeung trailed off.

  “Do you want to add whipped cream?” the clerk asked. “Chocolate syrup?”

  Further confirmation he’d ordered a kiddie drink, an undignified choice for a man about to turn sixty. How to explain, where to begin with the clerk? The photo from her personnel file at the factory was so blurred you couldn’t make out her features, and he had no record of their affair, no proof that they were linked in any way but for the ultrasound that the technician printed at twenty weeks. A feat of technology greater than the moon landing, a blurry image of the son he’d always wanted.

  Ultrasounds hadn’t existed during his wife’s three pregnancies, all mysteries until delivery. Nine months spent predicting, puzzling over the baby’s health and sex. Carrying low or high, the mother’s predilection for sour or sweet, the mother’s age and the lunar month of conception, all factored into their calculations. Three times, his wife gave birth to a girl, with a mounting sense of inevitability and defeat.

  A relentlessly catchy tune came out of the loudspeakers, the one he’d been hearing in television commercials and thumping from shops in Hong Kong. The refrain was inane and in English, “I love you hot.” He would forbid his daughters from playing this song at home.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Bao Wu,” the clerk said. The Guardian. “He’s from San Francisco,” the clerk added, as if to explain the odd name.

  Boss Yeung knew the type: born in America, but idolized in Asia. When his eldest daughter had been a teenager, she had adored a floppy-haired heartthrob by way of Los Angeles.

  A new version seemed to appear every year.

  Back outside, at the first sip, he regretted ordering the bubble tea, which had a cloying sweetness that tasted counterfeit. There must be something in the air, something in the water in Hong Kong that couldn’t be replicated here. Nausea gripped him, a side effect of his medication, and he tried not to heave. Swaying on his feet, he pressed the sweating plastic cup to his forehead to cool down. He pictured Scarlett dead, their son and heir born early, born sick, hooked to tubes, or the tiny body unclaimed in the morgue. His every secret, stifled fear was surfacing at once, every worry that had driven him to America on this impossible mission.

  * * *

  —

  A half hour later, he studied the house at the top of the hill. Yellow police tape slashed across the front door, and in the alley, garbage cans stacked high with trash and recycling, tins of cooking oil, balled-up diapers, and flattened cardboard boxes of infant formula and baby wipes. Authorities must have shut down Perfume Bay, something Mama Fang neglected to mention in their conversations in the month since Scarlett’s disappearance.

  He wouldn’t
call her, not yet, not before he investigated. The diapers had been fermenting like thousand-year-old eggs, and he covered his nose to ward off the ammonia stench. The backyard’s weed-choked, yellowing grass, patches of dirt, and concrete patio had the charm of a prison camp, nothing like the photos from the website that featured a pond under a willow tree, a view of snow-capped mountains, and a young mother serenely cradling her plump son. With scant due diligence, he’d entrusted Scarlett and their child to this sham operation. In how many other ways had Mama Fang’s promises fallen short?

  Finding the sliding door locked, he crept along the house until he found an open window. He tried to pop off the screen, coated in grime, the dust thick as moss. He could have left then, but after envisioning a clue, a sheet of paper that would lead to Scarlett, he picked up a plastic lawn chair and swung it over his head, grunting with satisfaction when it tore through the screen. He pushed the chair under the window and climbed into a bedroom. The impact when he dropped to his feet jolted through his spine. He’d thickened about the waist, stiffened about the knees, no longer a naughty tree-climbing rascal, but he’d landed on his feet. Not many his age, not many in his condition could.

  Later this fall, he would complete what the ancients had deemed a full span of life, and the cycle would start over. Boss Yeung had outlived his father, his grandfather, possibly every male in the long line of ancestors that led to him. Against his protests, his eldest daughter, Viann, was planning a lavish celebration in Hong Kong, with longevity peach cakes gilded in 24-karat gold flakes. To celebrate him, but also to present herself as both the filial daughter and a deal-maker on the rise. The Harvard grad had been scheming with Uncle Lo, who had six more years to go before reaching this stage in life. An uncle not by blood or marriage, but by long association. Neither understood that Boss Yeung wasn’t eager to publicize his age and give off the impression that he was close to retiring, no longer in possession of the fire that lit the ambitions of his youth.