by Vanessa Hua
He searched Perfume Bay room by room. The guests had left in a hurry, casting aside tracksuits, slippers, and sanitary pads thick as bricks. The mess had the feel of a helter-skelter evacuation from the unexpected approach of bombers on the horizon. Dusty footprints tromped across the carpet, traces of a man’s heavy boot. Police? The services at Perfume Bay were legal. Maybe Mama Fang hadn’t paid her taxes, maybe she’d been running a secret side business. He recoiled from a giant pair of tan underpants, but then reflexively noted the quality cotton spandex fabric and the double-layer crotch—this assessment second nature to him, after years of manufacturing clothes, electronics, and consumer goods.
Back in his childhood, his mother used to drop coins into monks’ metal alms bowls, a clattering display of her devotion. Ever practical, she piled oranges on the family’s ancestral shrine in the living room, lit votives at the local Catholic church, and festooned musky marigolds at the Hindu temple. Whatever god or gods ruled the universe, she’d ensured their favor for her family.
Boss Yeung didn’t believe in any kind of luck except the kind you made. He’d rebuilt the fortune his father had squandered at the horse track and on a string of mistresses. At his death, his father left debts and a shortbread recipe that his grandfather, a houseboy, had learned from the British. Armed with that paltry inheritance, Boss Yeung searched for a source of cheap, high quality butter—with the taste of pasture and sky—and when he combined it with rice flour, icing sugar, and cornstarch, the biscuits were simultaneously light and rich, crisp and melting. He spent extra on sturdier, glossier plaid tins customers coveted as gifts and used as kitchen storage, landed orders with the most fashionable department stores, and charged four times as much as his competitors to make the biscuits a luxury. With his success, he expanded with new factories, with new lines of business: plastic flowers so lifelike a honeybee might sniff them and mobile phones affordable enough for an amah to call home to the Philippines every week.
He retrieved a baby’s sock curled on the floor, as big as his thumb. He’d forgotten how tiny, how helpless newborns could be. Shortly after the birth of their first child, his wife had fallen ill. Though he could have left Viann with the amah, he soothed her like no one else could, rocking her until she fell asleep against his chest. If she started to wake, he’d take a deep breath, to let her know he was still there.
As infants, his daughters all seemed to have a strong resemblance to their father—him in miniature, crowned with thick tufts of hair. With each passing year, though, the girls became more his wife’s, dressed, fed, and schooled as she wished. Each time he returned from his business trips to his factories, clients, and suppliers after months on the road or on-site, he felt more and more like an interloper. His daughters became strangers and his wife stranger still, and he had only Uncle Lo to confide in.
They were both outsiders in Hong Kong, born into unpromising circumstances, tolerated but never accepted by those born rich, those who had been attending the same private schools and respectable social clubs since the time their grandfathers and great-grandfathers achieved the monopolies in palm oil, in shipping, in shrimp paste and oyster sauce from which their families’ wealth sprung.
A lifetime ago, Boss Yeung became an ally of Uncle Lo after tipping him off about a rival publisher inflating its circulation.
“It’s not fit for fish-wrap!” Uncle Lo had said, and bought him a snifter of brandy. Uncle Lo drank two shots to every one of his and told stories ten times as wild. He’d escaped China by clinging to an inner tube and swimming to Hong Kong. He’d sold candy aboard trains, jumped onto the tracks to save a little boy, the son of a publisher who gave him a job in the newsroom. He’d once climbed barefoot into a python’s cage, and had punched out a conniving upstart in the boardroom. He seemed to have dirt on everyone in Hong Kong.
From the beginning, Boss Yeung had known he couldn’t keep up, but around Uncle Lo, no venture seemed too daring, and in the decades since, both men had prospered.
* * *
—
Boss Yeung rubbed his face with both hands, fighting the urge to take a nap on one of the many beds at Perfume Bay. Not long before he’d met Scarlett, doctors had diagnosed him with a chronic blood disease, its course unpredictable. A patient might live two months, two years, or two decades more. The doctors had asked about his family history, if he’d inherited the illness from his mother, father, or a grandparent. Impossible, he said. Exposure to chemicals at his factories—it must have been that. His bloodline wasn’t tainted. If his ancestors had cursed him, then he’d cursed his children. He told no one, not his wife or his daughters or Uncle Lo. He didn’t want their pity or their fear, or the prayers of the Celestial Goddess, who had extracted a fortune from his wife. Besides, a cure might be found before he experienced his first symptoms.
The illness had unleashed something in him, sent him chasing after new business and chasing after a clerk in his factory. Scarlett’s compact, sturdy strength stirred him, and so too her youth, the thick locks that she shed onto his pillow, hair without end that he could have woven into a rope to climb down from a tower. They spent most nights together at his apartment on the factory grounds. Her pregnancy seemed a good omen, for what dying man could create life? When the ultrasound revealed a son, it seemed his fortunes had turned. Although he had dismissed the religion and rituals of his mother and his wife as superstition, he now began grasping for signs and omens. For certainty.
Because no greater certainty existed than the rights, privileges, and protections of every U.S. citizen, he sent Scarlett to Perfume Bay. Uncle Lo had promised she would have VIP status.
They had arrived early for her flight. While at the airport café, he marveled at the size of her belly. Her pregnancy had filled her out, softening her sharp angles and her sharp temper, and after a series of fights, she’d begun eating the traditional diet he wanted for her and the baby. He already missed her body, tucked next to him in his bed, and her calm navigation on their weekend drives. She studied maps for days, weeks in preparation, and had an unerring sense of direction, like a bird that migrates to another hemisphere and finds its way back.
She thought they should postpone her trip to Perfume Bay. He’d been waking up drenched in sweat, and she wanted him to see a doctor. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he’d said.
The departures hall had echoed with chatter and the clack and whine of suitcases as passengers sprinted toward the security gate. The new terminal was all curves and skylights, the latest foray by foreign architects who came to China to build projects at a speed and scope like nowhere else. A dizzying futuristic white reflected in polished stone floors, cold and barren as the moon. If he told her about the illness ticking within, she wouldn’t leave him. First he’d have to admit to her—therefore to himself—that he might sicken, might die. Chimes sounded, followed by an airport announcement. He couldn’t make out the words over the hiss of the steamer on the espresso machine.
As Scarlett walked toward the counter to get a refill of hot water, a tai tai with huge sunglasses tried to flag her down, asking for sugar. Scarlett was dressed in black, just like the attendant behind the counter, but so were a few other travelers in the café. The tai tai—a haughty Chinese housewife with a diamond ring big as a gumball—had sized up Scarlett as part of the servant class.
Scarlett shook her head. The tai tai sighed in irritation and offered her a crumpled yuan note. Taking in the scene, Boss Yeung rose, ready to intervene in case Scarlett lost her temper and cursed out the tai tai. He waited as Scarlett returned with a glass sugar dispenser, and without saying a word, started pouring into the tai tai’s cup. Even after the tai tai said, “Enough—enough!” Scarlett kept pouring, finally emptying the dispenser all over the table. The tai tai opened her mouth, as if to protest, but the sight of Scarlett’s fury seemed to silence her.
“Would you like anything else?” Scarlett asked.
&nb
sp; Boss Yeung pulled her away while the tai tai fled, knocking over a suitcase in her haste. Scarlett would send herself into labor, getting worked up like that! She was unrepentant, angry that he’d interrupted her revenge against the tai tai, who must represent every wealthy woman who had snubbed her, and maybe served as a stand-in for his wife. She could have been angry that he was sending her away. He’d come to believe if they’d left things differently that day, if he’d told her how much she meant to him, all their later troubles might never have followed.
* * *
—
He found no sign of her at Perfume Bay. None of her clothes, not her honey-scented body lotion that she rubbed on her belly to prevent stretch marks. Without Scarlett, he’d been robbed of his senses, found himself in a world without color, light, sound, taste, or touch. After Scarlett left, orders had fallen, credit tightened, and a worker on the assembly line killed herself by jumping off the roof of the dormitory. A teenager, a girl far from home, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, crushed by the seven-day workweeks and fifteen-hour days. To prevent copycat suicides, the plant manager put a new lock on the door to the roof, gave raises, and hired a monk to purge the factory of evil spirits.
Working, working, always working to make up his losses, Boss Yeung turned gaunt as a candle flame. Weary, the simplest tasks accomplished only through monumental effort. Even his walks around the factory floor seemed to take twice as long. He vowed never to be careless again, not in business, not with this pregnancy, and so for an additional fee, Mama Fang had provided daily reports about Scarlett.
Maybe Mama Fang had exaggerated and lied, just as she’d exaggerated and lied about the accommodations. According to her, Scarlett had stopped eating and Mama Fang forced her to drink cans of chocolate-flavored nutritional supplements. And she’d broken another guest’s finger, while fighting over the remote control; the medical costs had been added to the fees Boss Yeung had to pay.
Scarlett must have suffocated here, the air stale and hot with the scent of bitter herbs and vinegar. He couldn’t remember if he or Mama Fang had suggested that he take custody of their son. With her kind, her wishes dissolved into yours, and she anticipated what you needed before you knew yourself. If she’d been an entrepreneur in China, Mama Fang would have built an empire that rivaled Uncle Lo’s, one of those self-made billionaire queens who trafficked in commercial real estate, medicinal ointments from Tibet, and recycled cardboard boxes.
The night he’d authorized Mama Fang to pay off Scarlett, the night Scarlett had escaped, he’d come down with a high fever. He’d woken in sheets soaked in sweat, and all but crawled to his driver to take him home to Hong Kong. The rash on his calves had returned, a constellation of tiny red spots. Doctors confirmed his illness had turned aggressive and recommended a bone marrow transplant. A sibling or a child provided the best chance of a match. Boss Yeung had outlasted his younger brother and sister. His daughters, then. In the old tales, filial children cut out a chunk of their own flesh to feed starving parents, enslaved themselves to pay for funerals, and sat shirtless all night to draw mosquitoes away from their sleeping mother and father.
In the dining room, before the cook served the meal, he gathered their cheek swabs. To search their family’s past and predict future health, he told them, but secretly, he’d get their bone marrow typed. At least one had to match.
His wife had been away on a high-level, high-priced pilgrimage in the mountains with the Celestial Goddess. None of them knew about the baby. If they rejected the boy, Boss Yeung would cut off their allowances, disown them, and divorce his wife. Would they mourn their father when he died? Only out of obligation, not out of love, except for Viann.
Viann had opened her mouth, much like when she was a child and he would pop in a melon seed or haw flake. He swabbed up and down, applying firm pressure. Of all his daughters, she was the most likely to suspect an ulterior motive.
He dropped the swab into the collection tube and snapped on the top. “Maybe we’re descended from emperors,” Viann said.
Daughter No. 2 had gagged on the swab and tears sprang into her eyes. She didn’t want to know what genes she carried for disease and the years she might have left before the onset of symptoms. “It’s like reading the date on your gravestone.”
“Nothing’s set in stone,” Viann said. “Nothing defines you, not even your mistakes.”
A jab at No. 2, who was banned from several of Hong Kong’s finest department stores after pilfering luxury goods, avoiding jail time only after Viann intervened by cutting a promotional deal with the buyers.
Daughter No. 3 had dropped out of university to become an assistant to the Celestial Goddess. Her breath stank of wet dog, despite her strict vegetarian diet. After Boss Yeung swabbed her, she announced she’d live to 127. “A prime prime.”
“You might,” Viann said. “What’s the use of a long life, without meat or fish or drink? You must feel 127 already!”
No one matched. His two youngest shared half of Boss Yeung’s markers, and Viann, none at all, a consequence of fate and of genetics. He’d wanted a match between him and Viann, he admitted only then. Of his children, she was most like him, in her shrewdness and ambition.
She had once asked why he and Uncle Lo had never gone into business together. He had dismissed the idea with such vehemence that she must understand that their camaraderie might not bear the open acknowledgment of Uncle Lo’s superior financial acumen.
Uncle Lo had arranged an appointment with a highly regarded specialist and launched a bone marrow drive, getting himself, his wife, and his children all typed, but the tycoon’s greatest gift had been his suggestion: a cure might be found in the baby that Scarlett carried, in the stem cells circulating through the umbilical cord. The men were in the steam room of Hong Kong’s most exclusive private club, with a years-long waiting list you joined in the hopes your children, yet-to-be-conceived, might someday terrorize their amah at the pool while you perfected your tennis stroke, relaxed over dim sum with a real estate magnate, or bet huge sums at each golf hole.
Around Uncle Lo, Boss Yeung felt chosen, marveling at how their friendship brought adventure to what would have been an otherwise predictable existence. And what did Uncle Lo find in him? A friend who could be counted on—for drinks until dawn, for secrets of any size—who was grateful for the attentions, but not overly, obsequiously so. Uncle Lo had enough of those.
“Your own blood is the most powerful medicine.” Uncle Lo leaned back, exposing the birthmark splashed on his chest.
“Then let’s join our blood.” Boss Yeung inhaled a cloud of steam and coughed. He’d always wanted their eldest children to marry.
Uncle Lo had resisted. “If our children are old enough to get married, then it means we’re getting old.”
The excuse wounded Boss Yeung. Why would his friend reject the idea of uniting their bloodlines—because he thought Boss Yeung’s was tainted? The future of that bloodline was slipping away, along with the chance of a cure. He entered the kitchen. Sometimes when Boss Yeung called Mama Fang, he’d heard the clank of pots and pans, and so her office must be nearby. Thirsty, he searched for a glass, but the cabinets were bare. Cupping his hands under the faucet, he slurped tap water with a mineral tang and walked into the ransacked office, with an upended leather desk chair, a dead plant, and filing cabinets. He sought files about the guests, jotted notes with details only he might understand were significant to Scarlett. He yanked out drawers—empty. Receipts scattered on the floor, including one for Lum Femcare, which sounded like a medical clinic. The slip listed an address on Foothill Boulevard, where he’d exited the freeway for Perfume Bay. He’d go there next.
The private investigator hadn’t found Scarlett, but he’d worked for a paycheck, not out of duty or love. A search of her mobile phone, left behind at Perfume Bay, turned up a listing for her mother, but the calls went straight to voi
cemail. Nothing on her Internet browser or work emails led to her village, either, and no one in the factory had heard from her. Scarlett’s apartment held few photos: a man with his daughter on his shoulders; a laughing woman on a carousel; and a blond man with a cleft in his chin, rugged as a mountaineer. Not friends or family but strangers, printed on the slips of paper that had come with the frames. A discovery that kneed Boss Yeung in the gut—how alone she’d been in the world.
The trail petered out in California, too, even though the runaway teenager had been the strongest lead. The boyfriend’s parents had been shocked to learn the baby they believed aborted remained gestating and did not allow his detective to interview their son. “Who’s to say it’s his?” they asked. The detective was still trying to track him down separately.
In the last bedroom, Boss Yeung found a square outline in the rug, matted down from a heavy load. From a massage chair, like the one he’d requested for Scarlett? A flash of blue caught his eye, a slip of paper sticking out from underneath the closet door. The blue of the Pacific, on the California page, which she must have torn out of the atlas he’d given her. He smoothed out the paper, worn soft as cotton after being folded and unfolded many times. She didn’t have many belongings, in a life where she never had belonged anywhere for long.
Scarlett would have stared at the map until the freeways were imprinted in her memory, a web of veins. The parallel lines of the 5 and the 99 and the 1 and 101, the ladder rungs of the 80 and the 10 and the 60, crossing the immense state. She’d torn it out in preparation for this trip. Even before leaving China, she might have suspected he would betray her and brought the map to plan her escape routes. He heard footsteps outside. Mama Fang! When he swung open the front door, two police officers stared him down.