by Vanessa Hua
He told her to ship it ahead.
“You can’t arrive empty-handed,” she had said. She eyed the tin of peanut candies he’d bought for his family—a favorite of his eldest daughter. He would be spending the holidays with them all in Hong Kong. “Not even you.”
Early in the morning on the first day of the Spring Festival, she climbed the hill behind her village, where the mobile phone signal was the strongest. Tradition dictated you were to live this day as you would all year, with a new haircut, a new set of clothes, new shoes, cleared debts, and feasts with family. She stamped her feet, trying to stay warm, her body grown used to the mild winters of the south. The scent of burning straw hung in the air, tinged with manure. Somewhere in the village, pigs snuffled. A little girl in pigtails, her breath steaming in the cold, watched Scarlett from the doorway until a harsh voice summoned her back inside. She called Boss Yeung. If he answered, then he loved her. She pictured him in a kitchen, reading the newspaper, the morning light falling across his face. His thick hair unruly and mussed from sleep. His family in bed, away from him, somewhere, anywhere she didn’t have to imagine.
He didn’t pick up.
She trudged back home, where she broke several rules that shriveled the new year’s bounty of good fortune. She sliced an apple (no cutting) and knocked over her teacup, which shattered on the damp floor (no breaking). She had pushed shards into the corner to start a trash heap (no sweeping, to avoid clearing out the year’s new luck).
Ma had never remarried, for no one wanted a widow with a vinegar disposition. She jerked the splintered broom out of Scarlett’s hands. “Clumsy!” she had shouted, thereby breaking another new year’s day rule: no arguing. Unmarried, childless, Scarlett was no more than a teenager to Ma. And Scarlett couldn’t help reacting like one.
Ma had yet to enjoy any of the good luck she worked so hard to preserve. “You never listen,” Ma said. “If you listened, you wouldn’t be running around like a ghost.”
A hungry ghost with no home and no family, forever roaming and restless. Condemnation, even though Ma didn’t know about the affair with Boss Yeung. Condemnation for all the choices that kept Scarlett alone. Her self-sufficiency, her greatest strength and her greatest fault.
“You’ll die and no one will remember you,” Ma said.
Condemnation over the men she’d dated, whom she’d rejected as too ugly, too childish, too short, too lazy, lacking in a sizeable apartment or goals. Condemnation for the life that refuted her mother’s in every way. Ma’s lack of a grandchild must have felt like a curse from all the women whose pregnancies she had ended.
Squatting, Ma had scooped up the remaining shards, nicking her fingers, blood dripping down her hands. Scarlett offered her a clean rag, which she batted away. Wordlessly, they piled the shards into the corner. Ma had been the last surviving child, out of six brothers and sisters lost to disease, to accident, to revolution. An orphan, a widow, who’d lost her only son and her husband in the same year. No one left to share her memories of childhood, no one else to confirm whom she’d been before she took a job at the clinic. No wonder Ma held on to the rituals that promised fortune and abundance, rituals that Scarlett would now have to decide if she wanted to pass on to her daughter.
The bus rumbled through the wide intersection. They had to be getting close to the hospital. Another contraction hit and Scarlett clenched her hands until the pain passed. She could reach out to her cousin Dongfeng online, the one who’d opened a hair salon in Hefei, the provincial capital. Her cousin spent all her free time online, plastering social media with her every sigh, with her every pose. She could get a message to the village and to Ma. Eventually, but not now, while Boss Yeung was hunting her down. Not now, when Ma would have to wait years to meet her grandchild.
The bus stopped a block from the hospital. The path through the grounds wound past flowerbeds, a patchy lawn, and a concrete fountain dry except for a dribbling rust stain. A legless man and a fat woman, both in hospital gowns, sat in wheelchairs, their tawny weathered faces turned up to the sun.
Scarlett’s skin was sticky with dried sweat and her fingers grimy from clutching the bus’s handrail. She wanted a shower—better, a bath. She wobbled and Daisy caught her. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to gather herself together, before they staggered the last few meters to the entrance. In the lobby, Daisy filled out the paperwork. Her hands, holding the cup of ice water to Scarlett’s cracked lips. Her hands, changing the channels on the television, adjusting the bed and fluffing the pillows. The delivery room was dingy with jaundiced-yellow paint and scuffed linoleum floors. The scent of blood, vomit, sickness, and decay hovered beneath the cloying sweetness of disinfectant, like bubble gum and vinegar.
Hours passed. Scarlett was grateful for Daisy’s company, hard as it was to admit she needed help from anyone, hard as it was to groan in front of her. Though they’d been sharing the same bed for weeks, though they’d stopped averting their eyes when they changed their clothes, labor laid Scarlett bare. To Daisy, everyone more than a couple of years older must seem unfathomably ancient, unfathomably far, in another galaxy light-years away. Yet the teenager didn’t flee or faint. She seemed to be taking a forensic approach to this preview of her own upcoming ordeal.
If Scarlett had remained at Perfume Bay, Mama Fang would have held vigil at her bedside. No wonder she’d encouraged her clients to schedule C-sections, less than an hour of her time, and not half a day or more of labor. Boss Yeung hadn’t planned to witness their child draw a first breath, and Scarlett felt no guilt for disappearing and depriving him of their daughter’s birth. Every day she remained hidden served as a reminder of the limits of his power. Still, she missed his hand holding hers, his bargaining tactics—he would have demanded that the doctors and nurses keep Scarlett and their child foremost in their attention at all times.
Like their child, Scarlett and Boss Yeung were born under the sign of the enigmatic snake, said to be intelligent but reserved, acting according to their own judgment. There were twelve animals in all, rotating in a cycle, returning to your sign when you were twelve years old, twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight, and so on. Each return brought turbulence, requiring caution to avoid the year’s dangers—a superstition that Scarlett had never paid much attention to until now.
Daisy flipped the television to a talent show, where a man in blond dreadlocks to his waist strummed an acoustic guitar and sang what sounded like a lullaby. She sighed, and said she and her boyfriend had once performed this pop song at KTV, one of those karaoke clubs with private rooms that charged by the hour, where customers snacked on expensive fruit plates, sipped imported liquor, and nuzzled their beloveds under a disco ball.
Daisy rubbed her fist in the small of her back. There wasn’t much padding on the hospital chair. Judging by the girl’s wistful expression, Scarlett guessed karaoke might have been the first time the couple had been alone in a room, maybe even the first time they’d kissed.
The Indian anesthesiologist arrived and instructed Scarlett to sit up. Her gown flapped open, and she shivered as he swabbed her back. He returned a few minutes later to inject her with the epidural, the needle long and stout enough for knitting. She felt no pinch, only pressure against her skin, which had gone numb and rubbery.
Soon, very soon, she’d meet her daughter. Another contraction swept through her and Scarlett grunted, her body in the grip of a giant’s fist. She thought of her mother, her grandmother, all the mothers in the maternity wing. She felt a sense of connection rare in her life—to all mothers, to the universe itself—that she suspected would not last after her labor ended. Odder still, she felt a bond with cats, dogs, all animals that pushed forth their young between their legs. Though she held the traditional Chinese notion that animals were meant for work and for consumption, she was now acting sentimental as an American.
Were the drugs turning her woozy? Daisy read
aloud from a brochure she’d picked up at registration: how to make a cord-blood donation to a public bank. Scarlett had first learned about cord blood at Perfume Bay, the spoonfuls left in the umbilical cord that held potential cures for cancer, leukemia, spinal cord injuries, and more. Lady Yu had signed up, Countess Tien, too, for the service that would ship and store the stem cells for a family’s private use.
“How much?” Scarlett asked. The pain was gone, but not the sensation, the same immense pressure that turns coal into diamonds. She settled against the pillows.
“Free,” Daisy said. “And anonymous.” She flipped over the brochure and showed Scarlett the logo, a cartoon of three infant heads in shades of pink, yellow, and brown, topped with wisps of hair, the petals of a flower. The donation could go to anyone who matched. In China, the government harvested organs from executed prisoners, but in America, a donor apparently had to give permission. As valuable as the liver, heart, or cornea might be, here they ended up in the trash, cremated or buried, without the individual’s consent.
“Why not?” Daisy asked. Scarlett agreed. If the potential cures provided a few more days or months of life for a stranger, the donation—more than her birth on American soil—should secure her daughter’s right to live here.
* * *
—
Scarlett closed her eyes, bearing down, and with one last exhausted push, her daughter emerged, wailing. She felt turned inside out, run over, smeared flat. She’d lost almost all awareness of her surroundings in the final moments of delivery. Bombs could have gone off and she wouldn’t have looked up. She struggled to sit up, dazed by the bright lights, the commotion of the darting nurses and the beeping monitors. She’d done it, somehow she’d done it. Never in her life had she been at such peace, resting in the stillness of the eye of a hurricane. Joy bloomed in her chest. She reached out her arms, straining with the last of her strength, as the nurses wiped off the smears of blood on the baby and laid her against Scarlett’s chest. So tiny, so perfect, her skin warm and soft as kitten’s fur. She stroked the sweet curve of the baby’s ears and marveled at the tiny chips of her fingernails. The nurses slid a knit cap onto the baby’s head and placed a receiving blanket over her.
Scarlett craned her neck, trying to get a better view, and gently pushed back the cap, which had fallen over her daughter’s eyes. The baby’s mouth gaped, taking in her first breaths of air, and she was looking back at Scarlett. Probably, she was just as spent and shell-shocked by the ordeal; after months spent in the warm dark, she’d been pushed and squeezed into a whole new world of light, sound, and smells. It seemed just as unreal to Scarlett that her companion of all these months—the most difficult months of her life—was now outside of her.
She had the smushed features of a newborn, those flattened ears and that squashed nose, and it seemed too soon to tell whom she would take after. And Scarlett still hadn’t come up with a name. Everything she’d tried before giving birth had been too slippery or too clunky, but now one popped into her head: Liberty. Liberty Chen, three flowing syllables paired with an emphatic surname.
She looked up at Daisy, who was watching them. She didn’t fully understand Daisy’s expression of awe and disbelief until three weeks later, after she witnessed the birth of Daisy’s son, a slimy creature surfacing from the muck, with a thatch of dark hair and a high-pitched mewl.
Scarlett snipped the leathery umbilical cord, tougher than she expected. Daisy had done the same for her, a shared ritual that linked them for life. The nurses weighed him, flicked the soles of his feet, cleaned off the blood and waxy, creamy coating, and nestled him against Daisy’s chest.
“Those eyes,” Scarlett said. Black and shiny as watermelon seeds.
“Like Daddy’s.” Daisy kissed the top of his head. She hadn’t found her boyfriend, and Scarlett imagined that her longing for him would only intensify with a newborn. Daisy hummed a lullaby, the song she and William had sung at karaoke.
The doctor massaged Daisy’s belly, telling her to push, and with a gush of blood, the placenta slithered out, attached to the other end of the umbilical cord. Scarlett hadn’t seen her own, and she couldn’t stop staring at it—larger and more substantial than she expected. After the nurses dumped the placenta into a plastic bin, she returned to Daisy’s side.
The striped receiving blanket slipped off her son’s shoulder, and Scarlett tucked it back around him. He whimpered and from her bassinet, Liberty joined in with cries of her own. The nurse in charge had been flummoxed when Scarlett arrived at the delivery ward with her own newborn, and might have sent her away but for Daisy’s youth. The nurse didn’t want a teenager laboring alone, but had warned if Liberty caused too much of a commotion, she’d have to leave. Scarlett had nursed her on and off throughout the night and in the final stretch of labor, Liberty had napped in a sling tucked against her chest.
Now Liberty howled, as if she knew that she would no longer be the sole focus of their attention. For weeks, Scarlett had tended to her baby as Daisy tended to Scarlett, propping her up with pillows and bringing her cups of tea and bowls of soup while she recovered from giving birth.
They had already suffered the sleep deprivation of new parenthood. With a second newborn, their sleep would shatter again and again.
The nurse glowered, and Scarlett carried her daughter into the hallway, down the elevator, and into the courtyard. A change in surroundings, a change of temperature sometimes calmed her, and Liberty quieted, gazing up at the peeling gray bark of the sycamore trees.
In the set of her mouth, didn’t she resemble Boss Yeung?—which shouldn’t have been a surprise yet it astonished Scarlett all the same. Such a burden, inheritance. When family gathered on holidays, the claims on their children invariably began. Your nose, shaped like your mother’s. Your long earlobes, like your grandfather’s. Traits, features, and habits from legions of ancestors, shuffled in each new generation. The body died, but blood lived on. Nothing had belonged to Scarlett alone until she left the village.
Liberty was sturdier than she looked, but Scarlett still found herself holding her breath around her. She wanted to believe Boss Yeung didn’t know where or how to find them, but every time she left Evergreen Gardens she felt jumpy as a soldier crossing enemy lines. She didn’t know who might be setting their sights upon babies of a certain age, who might be watching now. She glanced up uneasily at the windows that ringed the courtyard and went back inside.
* * *
—
At Evergreen Gardens, busybody grannies dropped off vats of gelatinous pig knuckle stew, bland mashed adzuki beans, and black silky chicken soup. A multitude of Mama Fangs insisted on their rules and rituals to protect the newest mothers among them.
Even though the October heat wave had transformed the building into a sauna, Granny Wang, leaning on her cane, slurred at them for not bundling themselves up, and Widow Mok warned them to avoid fans and open windows, tips to restore balance in a mother’s body. A draft that seeped into your bones would never leave you. Scarlett guessed that the tradition must have begun long ago to ward off infections in women weakened after delivery.
“I was once as tall as you,” Granny Wang told Scarlett.
“I was once as quick as you,” Widow Mok told Daisy.
Both old women had given in to the temptation of cooling themselves sometime in the month after giving birth, a moment that remained vivid in their memories: Widow Mok had leaned into a breeze, and Granny Wang had scrubbed her arms and face with a cool washcloth. After that, they were never the same again, they warned.
One afternoon, just after Scarlett and Daisy had gotten the babies down, they collapsed onto the mattress, ready for a nap of their own.
Someone knocked at the door. “Don’t answer,” Scarlett said.
“They’ll just keep knocking.” Daisy cracked the door open and Auntie Ng forced her to take a sloshing pot of soup.
“You should be in bed,” Auntie Ng chided. If Daisy had had more energy, she might have explained that she’d been trying to do just that. And if new mothers were supposed to remain tucked away inside, why did the ladies keep coming? She didn’t yet realize aunties specialized in contradictory advice. No matter how much you obeyed, they could still find reasons to scold you.
Daisy put the soup beside the two tureens they had yet to finish. They lived a primitive, feral existence, knuckles to the ground, incapable of speech for the most part. Unwashed and unkempt as vengeful ghosts, they stewed in the air fetid with the smell of spit-up, the overstuffed diaper pail, and their half-eaten meals filmed with grease. The conditions would have disgusted Boss Yeung, and would have been reason enough to assume custody of his child. Ma would have said they’d lost their senses. Not one, but two unwed mothers living in squalor together? They’d brought it upon themselves.
Daisy balled up a diaper and tossed it onto the top of the heap.
“It’s going to spill,” Scarlett said.
“I took it out last time.”
Scarlett wanted to start another heap, another and another until one of them gave in and took out the trash. Poor Old Wu! The stench—not to mention the wailing—must be coming through the walls to his room next door. He’d brought them bales of blankets that remained stacked against the walls. It might have been her imagination, but all of Evergreen Gardens moved sluggishly, irritably these days, kept up nights by two infants, and maybe they were finding their revenge in the guise of the endless soups.