by Vanessa Hua
* * *
—
Short and stocky as a gingerbread cookie, the officer wore aviator sunglasses, masking her expression. Her brawny partner stood behind her. Though she’d identified herself, Boss Yeung hadn’t caught her name. Neighbors must have reported an intruder. Stonily, she asked him to step outside and for his identification. That much he gathered, as he cursed himself for his limited English: he read some, understood less, and spoke almost none at all.
She wasn’t much older than Viann, and the stiffness in her manner made her seem a recent graduate of the academy, eager to prove herself yet already assuming, already resenting those who questioned her authority.
Sunlight winked off her badge, and her poly-blend pants had a knife-edge crease, with no stains or loose threads. She’d left the engine running on the patrol car, its radio crackling with a garbled shaman’s chant. Her partner headed around the corner to the backyard, where he would presumably find the busted window screen.
“How much?” he asked. In China, he had settled such matters by paying the fine on the spot. He hadn’t withdrawn much from the airport ATM, sixty dollars minus what he paid for lunch, and he hoped it would be enough.
Her mouth hardened, and she repeated her request for identification. The dry heat was making him light-headed. He reached for his passport, in a travel pouch tucked into his waistband. The officer ordered him to keep his hands up and she patted him down. Yesterday, he’d been a chief executive, used to deferential and preferential treatment, but here he was nothing.
The officer’s belt bristled with a walkie-talkie, a nightstick, keys, and a gun—a gun. Police in China didn’t carry guns. They didn’t have to, but Americans were violent, and so too their police. Patches of sweat began blooming under his arms and on his back, and his bowels went hot and loose as a bowl of ramen.
She found nothing on Boss Yeung, and neither did he. His identification had gone missing, along with his wallet and mobile phone. He pointed at his car, mimed pulling open the glove box, hoping she’d understand. She nodded and followed him. He got into the car. Maybe he’d left everything under his seat, tucked in the sun visor, or under the rental paperwork? No. He popped open the glove compartment and out spilled amber bottles of his medication, which he’d stowed for safekeeping after taking a dose in the mall parking lot.
He was drowning in the car’s toxic fumes of hot plastic and air freshener. He’d paid for his boba tea, and then—he must have left his wallet in the shop, or dropped it in the parking lot. The officer scrutinized his bloodshot eyes, his nervous hands, his rumpled clothes, and his scarecrow frame—that of a junkie, of a thief in search of his next high.
After he climbed out of the car, she asked if he had—had what? He didn’t understand the word, until she said, “doctor.” She must want the prescription. He didn’t have one on him. She made the motion of opening the car door, with a look that seemed to be asking for permission. If he resisted, he’d seem guilty. He nodded, and she motioned for him to sit on the curb.
She held each pill bottle up to the light: the pale blue painkillers, white and canary-yellow pills to boost his blood counts and keep the disease at bay, taken three times a day, once before bed, on an empty stomach, or with food, each dose a bitter reminder he’d become an invalid. Chinese medicine, too. Prescribed by an herbalist, the tiny black balls smelled like burning autumn leaves and in the eyes of this American, it must have seemed like dark magic.
He felt naked, her scrutiny intrusive as a finger jammed down his throat. The officer frowned and checked to make sure he remained sitting. He noticed the black metal bars on the rear windows of the squad car parked behind his. She’d arrest him, detain him, and tie him up in legal proceedings, wasting time that he didn’t have. He couldn’t try bribing her again, not with his wallet gone. Then he remembered the change he’d stuffed into his back pocket. The bills, damp as tofu skin and stained by the touch of many hands, filled him with as much jubilation as if he’d won the lottery.
“I help,” he said. The officer ignored him, or perhaps she didn’t hear over the crackle of the walkie-talkie. He waited until a woman walking her poodle passed. Officials who campaigned most loudly against corruption had the blackest hands, and the officer wouldn’t want witnesses. He stood and rapped on the trunk, trying to get her attention.
She spun around, and he flashed the bills at her, his hand quick as a blackjack dealer’s. She thrust her face into his and barked something at him. She sounded angry, and he wondered if he’d sunk himself deeper into trouble. He sat down on the curb, watching to see what she would do next. Returning to the car, the officer picked up a bottle with a loose cap and pills cascaded with a clatter onto the seat, onto the floor mat, and likely every one of the car’s crevices. She bent over, scooping up pills.
If he’d been thinking clearly, he wouldn’t have slipped around the corner. He wouldn’t have crossed the intersection and flagged down the bus. But then, the fleetness of his step wouldn’t have returned, either, nor the speed and strength he thought he had lost forever.
* * *
—
Until he mentioned Mama Fang, the Chinese receptionist remained tight-lipped, and wouldn’t confirm Scarlett had visited the clinic.
“She’s a client of Perfume Bay,” Boss Yeung said. “You saw her about a month ago.”
The receptionist’s expression darkened like a thunderhead.
“She’s a client of Mama Fang.”
“Mama Fang,” she muttered, and he suspected the proprietor of Perfume Bay had left the clinic with a large bill. “You’re in touch with her?” Her nails, long red talons, tapped her desk with indignation. “Ask her!”
“She told me to come here. Before we meet this afternoon.”
Mama Fang had said no such thing, but the doctors of Lum Femcare must be interested in finding her. “Please,” he said. “I’m the father. I can pay any remaining charges.”
He was the only man in the waiting room, and he could feel the patients staring at him. They, too, were all Chinese. Shifting uncomfortably, their ample bottoms spilling out of their seats, their breasts swelling into udders, and their inquisitive faces round and gleaming. No matter how much the women had wanted their children, each at some point must have cursed the man who’d done this to them, the father who wouldn’t suffer the aches of pregnancy and the agony of labor.
The receptionist exhaled, and Boss Yeung wondered if the financial hit had threatened her job, if the clinic might close. He told her he could put the doctor in touch with an investor at Perfume Bay, who could take care of the rest of the bill.
After she left her desk, he studied photos of the babies tacked onto the walls. Round cheeks, chubby fists, little faces in cozy knit hats, and wearing embroidered silk tunics from their red egg parties. Jealousy stabbed through Boss Yeung’s chest. These mothers had always been certain of their children’s whereabouts, memorized the curve of their noses, every mole, the shape of their big toes. Boss Yeung could only guess at his son’s. His son! What traits would his son inherit from him: The same long fingers? His bowlegged walk? The set of his mouth, or the intense focus that he was starting to understand might drive others away?
Until now Boss Yeung hadn’t understood why she’d fled. After escaping the police this afternoon, he grasped how fear and anger fueled your first steps, and how defiance kept you going.
The longer she remained on the run, the harsher the punishment Uncle Lo would try to exact. He’d made the hunt his, compelled to intervene because he’d been the one to refer her to Perfume Bay. Married to a daughter of Communist royalty, he had the backing of the Party to go after his enemies: a supplier who cheated him was imprisoned and died a month before his release. A rival lost his factory to eminent domain, after the government rerouted the subway through his neighborhood. Uncle Lo wanted Scarlett jailed, somewhere she could think upon her crimes,
and with each passing day, Boss Yeung wavered.
The receptionist returned to her desk and began typing, her fingernails clacking on the keyboard. A patient interrupted. “I’ve been waiting for an hour!” Her skin was blotchy as rotting strawberries, and her body seethed like an overgrown garden.
The receptionist glanced at her. “The doctor will see you soon.” She pulled out a file.
“I’m going to pee on the floor,” the patient warned, and the receptionist waved her in. A moment later, the patient shouted she needed toilet paper.
Sighing, the receptionist got up, leaving the paperwork that held the secrets of his baby’s health, his growth and progress, secrets that might shed light on Scarlett’s state of mind and hint at her whereabouts. Secrets to finding his cure. Reaching over the counter, he snatched the file and might have escaped for the second time that day, but for the mother squeezing her double stroller through the door—twins, two girls with lace headbands and dumpling cheeks. The mother apologized, flustered.
He tried to ease the stroller through. The wheels caught on the doorjamb, the toys hanging off the stroller’s handle rattled crazily, and the newborn on the right gasped, a held breath that sucked the air out of the waiting room, stopping time yet also carrying the inevitability of a cresting wave: the piercing howl that would follow.
Those cries—that need. The mother popped a pacifier into one newborn’s mouth, which she spat out. He yanked the stroller again, to no avail, and the mother picked up her daughter, shushing as the other twin wailed, thrashing her head back. She’d give herself whiplash.
He dropped the file and opened his arms, and the desperate mother thrust the baby at him so she could tend to the other one. He crossed his arms, clasping the baby against his chest, as her head fell back, tiny and bird-bone light. He supported her neck, and with his other hand, cradled her bottom. The overhead light transfixed her, and he turned to give her a better view over his shoulder. Viann had loved lights, too. The baby smelled like fragility, like talcum powder and diaper cream.
The receptionist returned and retrieved the file from the floor. Although he braced himself for her scolding, she told him the doctor could see him now. He handed the baby back to her mother, the quivering heat fading quickly, too quickly, from his chest.
At her desk, Dr. Lum was younger than he expected, perhaps ten years out of medical school. Stanford, he noticed with approval. Her hands were scrubbed clean, the nails squared-off, and she emanated the scent of antibacterial soap, of probing efficiency. In addition to her diplomas, the wall behind her featured posters of Mickey Mouse and a papa bear tucking his baby into a cradle. He didn’t bother with pleasantries. He needed a bone marrow transplant, he said, and his daughters didn’t match. Unexpectedly, his eyes welled with tears he’d never allowed himself.
“Children usually aren’t matches,” Dr. Lum said. “You need at least six of the eight markers, and children typically have half from each parent.”
He explained that daughters No. 2 and No. 3 had four of his eight markers, and Viann, none at all.
“None?” Dr. Lum asked. “That’s impossible.”
“My doctor’s a VIP.”
“None?”
“None.”
“Then she’s not your daughter.”
He must have contaminated the sample, or a technician must have mixed up Viann’s swabs in the lab. He’d have to get her tested again. Yet his doctor in Hong Kong had seemed so agitated. Hesitating, unlike his usual brusque manner. Suppose—suppose the test had been accurate. What if his doctor wanted to spare a terminal patient the news that he’d been a cuckold almost three decades ago?
Dr. Lum didn’t know him and didn’t care about preserving long-held illusions. He swallowed, his tongue unbearably thick and disgusting. For months after giving birth to Viann, his wife had stayed in bed and wept, pushing the baby girl away. That distance always remained between mother and daughter. A coolness, born out of jealousy and resentment, he’d always believed, as his wife’s beauty faded and Viann’s blossomed.
Boss Yeung spread his hands in his lap, long fingers that he and Viann shared. Dr. Lum flipped open the chart and told him that the baby was healthy, with a strong heartbeat and developing normally.
Did his wife consider each subsequent daughter a punishment for her affair? Her guilt might have driven her into the plump arms of the Celestial Goddess. If he wasn’t Viann’s father, then who? Did his wife have a fling with an old classmate, or an instructor at the club? She’d briefly taken tennis lessons. A friend’s husband? His thoughts were like feathers in a storm, whirling out of his grasp. He tried to remember her friends, from the days before the Celestial Goddess.
A friend—of his? He had no friends, no friends but Uncle Lo. Uncle Lo, who’d resisted pairing his son with Viann. Uncle Lo, who had twelve acknowledged children. Uncle Lo, who’d always taken an interest in Viann, arranging pop stars to visit her birthday parties and an internship at his flagship magazine. He struggled to catch his breath. Uncle Lo had his pick of women and never would have betrayed him. He couldn’t recall a single moment of suppressed ardor passing between his wife and his friend. It had seemed she considered Uncle Lo an irritation, fuming when he kept Boss Yeung out until dawn.
Early in their marriage, she had been loyal as a dove, and thrifty, too, careful to make use of every scrap of food and to tailor their clothes to remake them like new. In those days, he’d been ignorant of the mechanics of sex and had bought a manual, as if she were a radio to take apart and put back together. A geometry lesson of angles, an engineering feat of completed circuits, with little of the tenderness, passion, and spontaneity she must have craved. The years sped by. Even after she began worshipping the Celestial Goddess, he’d been faithful to her. Until his diagnosis. Until he met Scarlett.
Viann had the intelligence and drive that her sisters lacked, that he’d thought she must have inherited from him, from her father. From Uncle Lo? He felt as though everything he’d taken for granted had failed him, as if gravity had disappeared, as if air had turned into water. The room blurred around him and faintly, he heard Dr. Lum asking if he was okay. He found himself on the floor, staring up at her. In her grip he felt as a newborn must, drowsing against a parent. Oh, Viann. She might never have been his to give up.
* * *
—
The walk took longer than expected, and when he arrived at the outdoor mall, the sky had turned apocalyptic, the murky air slashed by streaks of rust and orange. Despite the heat, he was shivering and in a cold sweat after missing a dose of medication. He sat on the edge of the chlorinated water fountain, its blue tiles covered in hundreds of coins, shimmering like the scales of a fish. So many wishes—for his son, for himself. For Viann.
He had to get to the boba tea shop on the second floor, where he’d ask if the staff had found his wallet. He lurched to his feet. At the top of the escalator he teetered, then fell. Each tumble, a blow that split mountains and hatched new gods. As he filled with the light of an exploding star, ten thousand bronze bells tolled.
Chapter 7
Scarlett’s labor pains began on a sunny afternoon. She gasped, dropping her spoon into the porridge she’d been dishing up in the communal kitchen. She held on to the counter, her back aching and her belly cramping. She’d been feeling twinges since yesterday, but now her body seized up like never before.
Daisy dropped a tin of tea and rushed to her side. “What is it—is it…?”
Scarlett nodded, and Daisy shrieked with excitement. On the run, then in hiding, she would at last pass through to the other side. Her daughter, her daughter. As the tightness eased, Scarlett insisted on keeping to their plan: they’d take the number 10 bus to the hospital instead of calling an expensive cab. If they arrived too soon in her labor, the emergency room might turn them away. She and Daisy slurped down the porridge, uncertain when they would eat next, gr
abbed a bag with snacks, toiletries, and a change of clothes for herself and the baby, before catching a bus that rattled through the Chinatown tunnel and down the hill, past the glittering boutiques, the fortress of a courthouse, and along broad boulevards flanked by warehouses. The air scented with bodies packed tight, French fries and cigarettes.
Aside from scavenging expeditions within a few blocks of Chinatown, much of San Francisco remained a mystery to Scarlett. The trip took nearly an hour, delayed by double-parked cars, tourists fumbling for change, and shouting matches between the bull-necked driver and a pair of teenage girls in neon miniskirts. Scarlett panted, her legs spread out over two seats. When a teenage boy in sagging jeans tried to sit next to her, Daisy shooed him away. Slipping off his ear-buds, he noticed Scarlett bent over, gripping onto the seat handle, and muttered—according to Daisy’s translation—“Damn! Somebody call this lady an ambulance.”
With each bump and jounce, Scarlett prayed her water wouldn’t break. Her belly held floods that would sweep over mountains and rise to the heavens. The passenger window was tinted, scratched with thin white lines that crisscrossed Scarlett’s faint reflection. For the first time, she could see Ma’s face in hers, in the skin stretched tight around her eyes and in the cords in her neck. At this age, Ma had raised a daughter old enough to leave home.
Scarlett had last seen her during the Spring Festival. She’d planned to stay for a week, but left after two days in the wake of their endless arguments. She’d been pregnant, though she didn’t know it. Exhausted, from the twenty-hour ride in the packed train car. Lonely, because she’d parted from Boss Yeung.
Hundreds of millions of migrant workers returned to their villages for their annual visit. The factories shut down, and the trains jammed for days with fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters bearing gifts to make amends for their long absences. Westerners marked the arrival of spring when the weather fitfully began to warm, while the Chinese looked toward spring and its renewal from the depths of winter. In preparation, she and Boss Yeung had gone shopping beforehand. He’d suggested a puffy blue jacket, a hot water heater, rubber boots, and fleece blankets zipped in a plastic case, and offered to pay. She got everything, but paid for it herself, shouldering the load into two large duffels.