by Vanessa Hua
Scarlett admired the buyer and his disregard of tradition, of etiquette and expectation, the kind of attitude that drove Boss Yeung to build his factories in China and compelled Mama Fang to scheme at Perfume Bay. Irrepressible ambition had spurred Scarlett to leave home, and was just what she needed to provide for her daughter.
Not long before she turned sixteen, she’d been struck with dread that she was bound to repeat her mother’s life, lacking in adventure, luxury, and love. She wanted to extend her world beyond the reach of her fingertips, and factories were hiring, if you were strong enough and could brave the journey hundreds of kilometers south, to the land of rice eaters, bandits, and barbarians.
Factories shut down during the two weeks of the Spring Festival, and after the holidays, workers switched jobs and scores of newcomers took their places. It was the best time of year to get hired. By the light of the full moon, she had slipped out of the bed she shared with her mother. She dug up the clay jar buried in the floor and stole their savings, a fistful of soiled bills and grimy coins. Ma wouldn’t have any expenses for a while; with one less mouth to feed, their stores would last longer and soon the spring vegetables would be ready to harvest. By the time Ma needed money, Scarlett would have sent back everything she’d taken, times ten.
She had hesitated at the doorway. The bed was warm with sleep, the embers glowing in the stove, and their ramshackle home almost cozy. Ma’s sleeping face was open and vulnerable. Snoring softly, Ma stirred, her arms reaching for the space Scarlett had vacated. She had groaned and Scarlett held still until Ma’s breath deepened again. Ma had called the migrant workers unfilial. She kneeled and rested her head beside her mother for a few breaths, which amounted to the closest physical affection that had ever passed between them. Scarlett drew the comforter over her mother’s shoulders and left. She walked all night to the provincial capital, following signs and tracks to the train station.
To stay awake, she’d sung quietly to herself, revolutionary songs celebrating heroes who could stop a gun with their chests, hold a bomb in their hands, and stand in a fire without moving. The Party taught her the lowliest could make the country great, but the factories promised independence and a future different from the one handed down to her. She rode for three days, dozing in a smoky, packed train on a wooden bench beneath a bare lightbulb, harsh as an interrogation chamber. She had ignored passengers who spit watermelon seeds and chicken bones onto the floor and played raucous card games. As the train moved south, more and more teenage passengers boarded, also in search of work. The air was thick with sweat and possibility. Upon arrival, she bought a fake identity card with the last of her money. You weren’t allowed to work in the factory until you were sixteen, a month away, a month Scarlett couldn’t wait. She’d started on the assembly line of a shoe factory, living in a dormitory, twelve girls to a room, in a village made vertical, suffocating in summer and freezing in winter. Her pay was docked if she talked back to her supervisor, if she fell behind production goals, and her schedule—to shit, to shower, to work, and to eat—was timed to the minute.
She quit that factory and joined another girl whose friend promised a job with good wages. When they arrived at the squat concrete building, however, an oily man locked them into a room on the second floor. Scarlett had climbed out of the window and dropped into a trash bin to escape, while that girl remained behind, afraid to jump and unwilling to believe she had been tricked. Scarlett no longer remembered her name, only that she’d been pretty, apple-cheeked, and nervously tossed her head like a mare.
How easily Scarlett also could have been lost. No one in this world understood the journey she’d taken, the threats and disappointments she’d overcome, and how thin the line between survival and failure. Exaggerating, lying her way into a clerk’s job, and later still into human resources and sales while taking classes in English and negotiating skills. During those years, she’d taught herself how to accumulate seconds in which she might breathe. In which she might dream but also scheme.
At Boss Yeung’s factory, she’d worked with college graduates who were younger and softer. She had never questioned her place alongside them because of her work experience, her knowledge applied and theirs theoretical. She’d known her strengths then, and she had to remember now to act with confidence and daring.
After selling her first bag, she lined up for another turkey, rubbing the grubby five-dollar bill between her fingers, as if by sorcery she might conjure a stack of money. She savored the yeasty aroma of ink and the greenback’s distinctive feel of wealth and durability. Like Boss Yeung, she could make something cheaply and mark it up. Like Mama Fang, she could sell her services to customers willing to pay a premium. She reached the front of the line. Although she worried volunteers might turn her away for taking part in the scam, the enthusiastic young woman handed Scarlett a sack and wished her a happy Thanksgiving.
If she hurried and sold this bag, too, she could get back in line for a third time. When she returned to the corner, however, the buyer had driven off. Though the five dollars in her pocket and the giveaway sack she carried were a windfall, her disappointment tasted sour as vinegar, as if she’d been denied a bonus she’d been working toward all year.
Her stomach growling, she swallowed a clot of saliva to quell her hunger. Across the street, a steam cleaner roared down the sidewalk, its rotating brushes spitting out a harsh chemical detergent that fouled the gutter. The sack grew heavier as she climbed uphill. Her calves ached, and when she reached Chinatown, she’d gone weak in the knees. Her senses assaulted by the chirp of fake crickets for sale, the red paper lanterns strung over the street—year-round, not only during festivals—to attract the tourists who shot photos of pagodas that housed discount gift shops instead of gods. The Chinese penned up in this neighborhood were a curiosity, like the tigers in the zoo that she and Boss Yeung had visited.
That day, Scarlett had pictured him as a father. Not to their child—she wasn’t pregnant then—but to his three daughters. A little girl in pigtails, bouncing with excitement by the cage, had dropped her skewer of raw meat, and twice he’d picked it back up for her. Scarlett’s heart had thrummed at the gentleness she didn’t expect to see in him—akin to discovering he could play the piano or speak Russian. A hidden talent, a hidden history of a life much bigger than what she knew of him.
A life she would never know. And he had never known her, not if he believed she would give up her child. All those months together, they had been strangers. If she couldn’t trust her judgment of him, how could she trust any of her decisions?
Not that he was a model father. His youngest daughter had dropped out of university, the middle was regularly arrested for shoplifting, and his eldest, Viann, was the only daughter he mentioned by name, polished, clever, and ambitious, a leader in the making, the kind of daughter a modern man wanted to raise but not to marry. His favorite, until he learned that Scarlett was having a son.
He would have said his desire for an heir was ancient and noble, not subject to the trends that dictated the lives of Lady Yu and Countess Tien. He wouldn’t treat his son like an accessory. He would have claimed he was nothing like Scarlett’s neighbors in the village who placed two daughters for adoption before their son arrived.
She walked past a music shop blasting that silly refrain: “I love you hot.” Classic Canto-pop, swelling, sentimental, orchestral, sung by stars formed from the same injection-molded plastic. She spotted Daisy across the street, carrying not one but two sacks of groceries, knotted on the handle of the rickety stroller where her darling, her daughter waved her fist. Daisy had strapped her son onto her back, where Didi peered out. She must have won the sympathies of a volunteer who decided that Daisy, with two infants, had double the need. Scarlett had to work twice as a hard to attain the riches given to Daisy. She wasn’t competing with Daisy, yet she felt outwitted and flat-footed.
Two grannies called out, “Twins!”<
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Scarlett fought back her annoyance. She wanted Liberty’s resemblance to her to be unmistakable, for the world to acknowledge that her daughter could never belong to anyone else.
At a bubbling tank of turtles, Daisy turned the stroller to give Liberty a closer look. She squatted down, pointing something out. Scarlett squirmed. She never thought to stop; her daughter usually rode in the sling, head tucked out of sight. If you remained in Chinatown too long, the narrow alleys and tiny rooms could dwarf you, like those miniature trees in a pot. None of them had ridden a cable car, visited the Pacific, or strolled along the streets with mansions outside of Chinatown. “Daisy, Daisy!” she shouted. If she got past thinking about money, there was so much to see, so much they could do for almost free.
Daisy didn’t seem to hear her and walked on. Scarlett ran after them, trying to catch Didi’s attention, hoping he might squeal in recognition. The sack slipped out of her hand and groceries spilled onto the sidewalk. Scarlett kneeled down, scooping up the dented cans. The sidewalk was gritty, the cement draining what heat she had left in her. Her body felt heavy and awkward, and when she tottered back up, she discovered that Daisy had disappeared.
The smell hit her, a greasy finger beckoning her to a take-out counter of a café. Hypnotized, she handed over the five-dollar bill in exchange for a quarter of a duck the clerk whacked apart, his cleaver flashing like a master swordsman’s. In the steamy shop, blood rushed to her cheeks. Before she was out the door, Scarlett was cramming the fatty flesh and crispy skin into her mouth, savoring the taste of wildness, of wings beating in flight.
* * *
—
It was said the cunning traded their way up, a flea for a dog, a dog for a hen, a hen for the hand of the village beauty. Scarlett had a different prize in mind: her rent. Full for the first time in months, she could think clearly. Her landlord was rumored to be going into debt to pay for his daughter’s wedding, and she had to come up with something he wanted as much as her rent.
She cut through an alley jammed with trash bags, its cobbles slick and stinking, and returned to Evergreen Gardens where she knocked on the door of Granny Wang’s. After recovering from her stroke, she spent her days unraveling old sweaters and knitting with the recycled yarn. She’d made orange hats for the babies. Stooped, Granny Wang wafted the sharp scent of Tiger Balm ointment. Housebound for the most part, except when she bought her groceries and visited her doctors. Though she now had a permanent limp, Granny Wang could elbow through the tightest crowds for a market bargain. In her palms, she rotated metal balls to keep her hands dexterous, with the delicate sound of a temple gong summoning worshippers to prayer. She stared into the giveaway bag so intently that Scarlett could tell Granny Wang wanted one. Because Daisy had procured two bags of groceries, Scarlett would gamble with her own.
“Shameful, I can’t, I can’t.” Granny Wang politely refused even as she was reaching for the sack that Scarlett held up to her. She followed Scarlett’s gaze to the dusty plum liquor on top of her bunk bed. A few weeks ago, Scarlett had seen the bottle while bringing her scavenged wool sweaters, and Granny Wang now offered it to her. “Rub it on baby’s gums, when she’s teething.”
The bottle filled her with a sense of possibility: the sound of its sloshing like splashes at the beach, the scent of time and refinement, everything she wanted for her daughter. Back in the apartment, the cold damp extinguished her excitement. In the chill of late autumn, they had to string their laundry overhead instead of hanging it outside the window, turning the air humid and making the ceiling feel low as a coffin. Daisy was playing with the babies on the double mattress that she and Scarlett shared. Scarlett squeezed around the portable cribs, the stacks of diapers, baby clothes, and crates converted into storage. Her breasts were close to bursting, of her and yet apart from her, a time bomb tick-tick-ticking away the minutes she’d been apart from her daughter.
Daisy gave her a crumbly roll that Scarlett wolfed down. “Where’s your bag?” Daisy eyed the bottle of plum wine. She sniffed the air, as if to check whether Scarlett’s breath had the sour tang of alcohol. Scarlett hoped she couldn’t smell the duck she’d eaten. She should have explained, but didn’t want Daisy pitying her if she failed in her quest. She swaddled the bottle and tucked it into a crate for safekeeping until she could figure out her next trade. “How did you get two bags?”
“I asked if there were any extra,” Daisy said. Her blitheness irritated Scarlett and steeled her resolve to keep her plans a secret awhile longer. Petty, perverse, but she didn’t want Daisy to interfere. Daisy might top her and trade away the items in her giveaway bags for a new car or a trip to Europe.
Scarlett sank onto the bed and pulled aside her cotton bra. She nursed Liberty, the electric tug of milk flowing through her breast. Her daughter, her eyes closed, throat pulsing with each gulp, awed her. No one had ever needed her like that. Motherhood had cracked her open, left her raw and vulnerable as a crab without its shell. She yawned, her eyes sandy with exhaustion after what felt like centuries of overtime shifts. As a teenager, she had routinely worked seventy-hour weeks, until her hands curled and her back bent into assembly line position in bed. Women her age weren’t meant to have babies. Her mother had been just out of her teens when she’d given birth to Scarlett, and as a widow, had been young and strong enough to till the family plot by herself.
Scarlett brushed crumbs off her daughter. No longer a scrawny newborn with an alien’s scaly skin, she’d come to resemble Boss Yeung. No one feature, but her single-minded focus that shut all else out unmistakably made her his daughter. The puzzled squiggle between her eyes that caused Scarlett to gasp. At times Boss Yeung seemed to be accusing her, via Liberty’s face, asking why she kept them apart.
At the airport, the day Scarlett had left him, he’d been so weary. When the tai tai had insulted her, insulted him by treating her like a serving girl, he’d rebuked Scarlett as if she were a child, and their age gap never seemed as great as then. Had his vitality returned, or had it been the beginning of a long decline?
She burped her daughter, pleased by her heft, that flesh, that bone, that blood nourished by her alone. A certain hunger flickered across Daisy’s face. Her milk had dried up, and she never spoke of wanting to nurse. She must wish she could. She didn’t take easily to failure. “I thought you couldn’t drink if you nursed,” Daisy said, glancing toward the plum wine.
“It’s not for me.” Scarlett set Liberty on her belly, rocking her gently, willing her to roll over onto her back. Boss Yeung had doubted her ability as a mother, and Liberty thriving served as a rebuke.
She could have told him the heir he pined for was no heir at all. For eons, men around the world—peasants and emperors alike—had also yearned for a son. At his factory, several women were in management, more than Scarlett had seen elsewhere, and Boss Yeung seemed to value hard work and good ideas above gender—so long as you weren’t related to him.
Liberty fussed, frustrated that she couldn’t turn over.
“Have you tried putting her on her side?” Daisy asked.
“The bed’s too soft.” She pressed her fingers against Liberty’s torso and hip. The baby’s face twisted in alarm and she threw up, her vomit the gooey white of viper’s venom, warm and wet. Scarlett wiped her off with a clean rag, and Liberty squealed in protest. The blankets were spattered with sour milk, the stench of a cowshed. In the bathroom down the hall she rinsed off the rag, and when she returned, blotted on the blanket where Liberty kicked in the air. She couldn’t wash the blanket in the sink, and dreaded dragging it to the Laundromat.
Daisy’s son rolled over, from his belly to his back, on a foam play-mat adorned with the alphabet. He’d been turning over for a few days. “You’re lucky you can put Liberty down and she’ll be where you left her.” Her boast, intended or not, grated on Scarlett.
“The two babies—how was it?” Scarlett asked.
“When they both can get around—” Daisy shook her head. Scarlett pictured the babies grown into toddlers, tottering, running in opposite directions, into traffic, into danger.
“There are leashes,” Scarlett said.
The suggestion seemed to offend Daisy. “They wouldn’t need a leash at William’s.”
His parents’ house. Daisy’s usual big talk about the big house, big yard, and big meals they would have after reuniting with her boyfriend, when his family took them in. “It’s a five bedroom,” Daisy said.
“Find him then,” Scarlett said bluntly.
Daisy had to stop thinking that her boyfriend would save her. Since the night she’d run away from Perfume Bay, she’d been saving herself—and she couldn’t give up now. Because Daisy had broken off ties with her parents, because she wasn’t in school, William had swelled in importance. Although Scarlett cared enough for the teenager to wish that she could devote more time to her, Liberty consumed her. She had nothing left, not for herself, not for Daisy.
“We should hire someone who can. A detective.” Daisy leaned back on her heels.
You couldn’t trust a person who dug through garbage and tailed vehicles for a living. Snoops sold information to the highest bidder, and Scarlett didn’t want Boss Yeung or Daisy’s parents coming after them.
Until now, Daisy had never asked for anything, and kept track of what she owed Scarlett in a small notebook. With each passing day, it seemed unlikely that she’d find William and repay her share. After the babies arrived, the savings had dwindled faster, and Scarlett couldn’t waste money on outlandish schemes.