A River of Stars

by Vanessa Hua

  “Look, look!” Scarlett pointed at a bike messenger laboring up the hill. Bicycles fascinated him, the wheels turning round and round, but the sight didn’t soothe him now.

  Outside the front door of their apartment, Daisy took a deep breath and smoothed her son’s hair. She didn’t ask why William hadn’t come along to Portsmouth Square; maybe she thought Scarlett had wanted to give her a few minutes to prepare herself. All these months, she’d been whiplashed between hope and despair, losing sight of who she was and what she wanted besides him. Scarlett ached for her. This bright beautiful comet of a girl brought to a standstill over a boy who most likely didn’t deserve her. She’d begun to move past that struggle and now Scarlett had pulled her back in. She almost blurted the truth, but Daisy pushed ahead. Her hands shook, unable to get the key into the lock. Scarlett took it from her and opened the door.

  Daisy rushed in and peered around the empty apartment in confusion, as if expecting him to pop out from under the bed or behind the front door. “Where is he?”

  “You weren’t leaving,” Scarlett explained, and told her what had happened at the Pearl Pavilion.

  Daisy froze. Was she going to hurl the baby bottle she was holding, toss shoes, books, everything within her reach? She sank to the ground, her chest heaving, her son shrieking in her arms. A mother and a teenager, too, a girl who yearned for the boy who completed her. Scarlett wanted to tuck her into their softest blanket with the babies, envelop Daisy in their sweet scent of shampoo and talcum, and turn the radio on low. She squatted beside Daisy, not daring to touch her. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Daisy ignored her. Standing back up, she stalked the narrow path between the cribs and the window. She swiveled her hips into a figure eight, a trick they’d learned calmed Didi. As if a switch had been flipped, he went quiet. Scarlett couldn’t tell if the calm was only momentary, if Daisy would shout at her, if she’d flee back to Portsmouth Square.

  Daisy looked upward, her thoughts turning and turning until she arrived at a solution. You could see it, how the bolts and pins of her thinking slid into place, how figuring out a problem calmed her. She excelled at taking tests and would coolly extinguish a fire in the lab while others fled.

  “Get Manager Kwok to say he bought the van from you.” She offered Didi his pacifier again and this time he accepted it, his eyes heavy.

  “Shouldn’t he say he’s never seen me?”

  “If he denies it, the detective will hang around Chinatown. Manager Kwok can say you were going to Seattle.”

  The detective would spend weeks chasing down the false lead. Daisy’s face lit up with another burst of inspiration. “And—that you were in the company of a man. A young guy, someone that Manager Kwok had never seen before, who spoke with a Fujianese accent. And that his hands were all over you.”

  It would throw off the investigator. Daisy had surprised her again.

  Scarlett pawed around the toys and handed Liberty a rattle, then picked up her phone. She didn’t know if Manager Kwok had betrayed her, kept the van and taken the detective’s reward money. If he was now leading the detective to Evergreen Gardens. She hated putting herself at someone’s mercy, but Liberty was depending on her now—Daisy and Didi, too. She texted him and within a minute, he called.

  “He’s gone,” he said.

  “Gone? Did he leave his number?”

  Manager Kwok snorted. “He left in a hurry.”

  “Was he— Did he get hurt?”

  In the silence that followed, she guessed that the detective had been scared off, probably dispatched with threats or a beating by Shrimp Boy. The detective had brought it upon himself, waving around cash, acting as if he could buy his way into Chinatown’s secrets. Manager Kwok’s pride had been at stake.

  But he had also done it for her. He viewed himself as a guardian of the neighborhood. She pictured him in his office, in his wingback chair, a glass of cognac before him. The starburst of wrinkles around his eyes that deepened when he was tired.

  “There was a man,” Scarlett said, her anger, her hurt at Boss Yeung’s betrayal, no less than the night Mama Fang tried to bribe her.

  “There always is,” Manager Kwok said gently.

  Until Chinatown, Scarlett had never felt herself accepted, not in her village, not at any factory or apartment. She’d come to San Francisco to recede into anonymity. If you let down your guard, thieves and swindlers preyed upon you. Boss Yeung had tried to steal her child, and she’d lost much of her savings—and nearly her freedom—to Lawyer Loo.

  But if you let down your guard, others might, too. After she’d taken Old Wu to the hospital, the ladies at Evergreen Gardens dropped off food, tins of biscuits, plates of noodles from a double batch they’d made for dinner. After she’d come to know Manager Kwok, he’d sheltered her. And—Daisy. After the intensity of their early days, they had to be apart more often than together. It surprised Scarlett, how much she missed Daisy each day—her sharp tongue, her sharp wit, and her capable hands.

  She felt bound to this place and to these people. To the gusts off the bay that swirled dead leaves into a cyclone, mesmerizing Liberty. To the scent of the meltingly soft egg tarts from the corner bakery that Didi would eat by the fistful if allowed. The groan of the cars laboring up Chinatown’s steep hills. To the early morning sunlight, golden on the eaves and against Liberty’s cheek. The sweet naps and happy squeals in the apartment, the babies tugging toys back and forth, in a family that fit no definition but their own.

  * * *

  —

  Scarlett tightened the blanket around herself and the babies, bundled up and tented in her lap against the winds whipping along Ocean Beach. Every few meters, the orange-red of bonfires flickered like beacons on the second weekend of the new year. In the distance, a group was beating drums and chanting. The ritual felt ancient, people banding together for warmth and courage on a cold winter night. Closer by, a woman in a puffy jacket and wool cap twirled a bucket of fire on a metal chain, mesmerizing loops and spirals that hurled in the air. The chain rattled, the medieval sound of a knight’s clanking armor. How powerful the woman must have felt, swinging the wide arcs of fire to ward off enemies, dragons, and all else that lay beyond in the dark. Her friends whooped and cheered, and sipped surreptitiously from flasks to avoid getting hassled by the police. The ends of their joints glowed like fireflies.

  Earlier that day, Daisy had made the arrangements with the driver of the Pearl Pavilion van. He’d be back in an hour with Scarlett’s cart. Tonight would be a busy one, as it had been during the holidays, but before Scarlett went to work, Daisy had wanted to celebrate.

  Last week, after Scarlett had fallen ill with a cold, Daisy had delivered the hanbaobao trays for yet another one of Madame Tom’s parties. She lived in a spacious apartment with her husband up the hill from Chinatown, with gleaming hardwood floors, crown molding like the piping on a cake, and a huge bay window overlooking the city. Her salary at the community college couldn’t have been much, but like many Chinese, Madame Tom might have bought real estate early and often with her husband. In a city surrounded by water on three sides, the Chinese knew no better investment.

  Daisy had been carrying in the last two trays of hanbaobao when a man in a gray suit, with the blond swoop of hair and cleft in his chin of an old movie idol, offered to help. She was leading him into the kitchen when Madame Tom swooped in to scold her. “Lazy girl!”

  Daisy gathered that he was a man of some importance, maybe from the college or the city government. Madame Tom offered him a hanbaobao. “You must try one. I don’t know what you call it—sliders?—except Chinese.” She asked him about the mayor and his wife.

  The mayor? If Scarlett had made the delivery, she would have left as quickly as she could. She lacked permits to prepare food, to work, and soon even a legal visa. But Daisy had seized upon the encounter as an opportunity. After
Madame Tom left to greet another guest, Daisy cornered the man, telling him about the problems at the cadaver exhibit. The devotees of the Celestial Goddess had been protesting, she said, seeking a public official whose support they would return many times more. He listened attentively and took down her phone number, out of politeness or as a means to escape her. After eating a few hanbaobao, however, he must have felt inclined to help. Within days, the city’s health department had started conducting an investigation into the exhibit, which shut down for the time being. It was all over the news.

  With that settled, Daisy would no doubt find another cause this year. As much as Scarlett tried to sway her, the girl had an iron will. Scarlett had been thinking about the night she herself had left home. Ma might have known. She was a fitful sleeper, and in retrospect, quiet as Scarlett had been in slipping out of the house, it seemed unlikely Ma hadn’t woken up. She might have pretended to sleep, might have chosen to let Scarlett go, a daughter who wasn’t like the others in the village, a daughter Ma had decided to let make her own way in the world.

  She now understood why Ma had taken the job at the clinic. A young widow in the countryside had dim prospects; her daughter, even dimmer, and Ma had to support them, no matter how horrendous her duties. Scarlett had no doubt that Liberty might someday judge her harshly for her decisions, as harshly as she’d judged Ma.

  Digging out supplies from her backpack, Daisy told Scarlett to stay turned around. Scarlett hugged the babies, each one tucked into the crook of an arm. They held flashlights. Liberty shook hers like a rattle, while Didi waved his. On their own, each would have been frightened of the dark but together, they had the comfort and confidence of twins. She hoped that Didi would always have Liberty’s back, and Liberty would always have his. Underneath the blanket, the air was warm and moist, cozy in contrast to the cold, coarse sand around them.

  Out in the darkness, the Pacific pounded. At the edge of the world, you couldn’t help but think about what brought you here and what—and who—you had to let go. A year ago, she was pregnant but didn’t know it yet. A year ago, she and Boss Yeung had been at their happiest. She’d harbored a dream of someday visiting America and standing on this side of the ocean, gazing toward China.

  A year ago, Daisy’s life had also been about to change. A year ago, she’d been thinking about her homework assignments and how much she missed her boyfriend, wondering when she would see him next. Neither she nor Scarlett had known they were about to step through a threshold into motherhood, opening their eyes and their hearts in ways they couldn’t foresee. It was a riddle Scarlett still hadn’t solved: how small her life had become, parenthood confining as a swaddle, everything a blur except for a few meters around her, and yet how infinite, how intense the universe now seemed.

  Her papers. Her papers, her papers, her papers were never far from her thoughts; she’d have to figure how—if—she could get them fixed, or if she’d lost her last chance to Lawyer Loo, and would have to prepare for a life even further underground. She heard the click of a lighter and Daisy cursing softly as it went out. She tried again and when she told Scarlett to turn around, she was greeted by a bonfire, its light warm against her cheeks. She scooted around on her bottom, keeping the blanket tented around the babies. Daisy squatted beside her, her hands stinking of jellied gasoline. Her eyes were bright, reflecting a rainbow of flames.

  Later, Scarlett would learn the ruby color sprang from hand sanitizer mixed with a road flare, the rust from bleaching powder, the yellow from salt, and the emerald green from disinfectant. But at this moment, she marveled at the fire dancing on the sand, the heady stink sending them reeling against each other, their gasps and giggles echoing into the night.

  Chapter 20

  The taxi driver refused to go any farther. He didn’t want to damage the undercarriage of his car on the grooves worn deep into the dirt road that led to the village. Boss Yeung would have to walk the rest of the way. He asked the scrawny driver to wait. To get here from the airport, they’d had to ask for directions several times, and the driver said he wanted to return to familiar territory before sunset, which was in less than an hour. A five-hour flight north of Hong Kong, at this time of year the sky in this part of the country went dark by mid-afternoon.

  “I’ll need a ride back to the airport hotel,” Boss Yeung said. The driver, looking mournful, climbed onto the hood and lit a cigarette.

  Boss Yeung shuffled past stubbled fields, toward the wisps of smoke drifting from the cooking fires of Scarlett’s childhood village.

  After the factory hired a new worker, the other ladies had mentioned the search for Scarlett and the name sounded familiar to the girl, a friend of her cousin. A call confirmed that the cousin and Scarlett had worked together at a shoe factory years ago.

  Scarlett hailed from Five Dragons—the cousin was certain, because she’d briefly dated a boy from that village. Sometimes, Scarlett seemed a figment of his imagination, an embodiment of his feverish desires for youth, for immortality. In other moments, it felt like she was in the next room, and he only had to call out her name and she would come through the door, carrying their son.

  He had never visited Anhui province, said to be so poor a family of eight had to share a pair of pants. His factory hired many teenagers from here, but Boss Yeung hadn’t pondered the circumstances that prompted their migration from this heartland of wheat and noodles, wide open plains, so different than the lush rice paddies of the south. The farther north you went, the heartier and cruder the people. In this regard, Boss Yeung hoped that his son had taken after Scarlett. When he got off the plane in Hefei, the provincial capital, he’d noticed the local men had towered over him. It was said that northerners were sincere and honest, tending toward stupidity, while southerners were clever and skilled, tending toward duplicity. Nonsense, or maybe not. The land of your birth shaped you, even if later, like Scarlett, you led your life in opposition to it.

  He doubted he’d find her, but perhaps she’d gotten a message to her mother, letting her know that she was in America and that she’d given birth. Maybe she’d sent a photo in advance of the Spring Festival. A photo! At last he might glimpse his son. He passed under a village gate with blue-tiled eaves, upon which five rusty wire dragons perched. A flock of black-and-white magpies burst out of a stand of poplars along the river. He kicked aside chickens and slogged past gray brick homes splotched with fading whitewash. Somewhere in the village, pigs snuffled, settling down for the night. A little girl, her breath steaming in the cold, watched him from a doorway. Was she somehow related to Scarlett, a cousin, a daughter of a cousin? He searched for a family resemblance, Scarlett’s pointed chin and her thick chevron of eyebrows. The girl waved at him, and he waved back. She had a charming, gap-toothed smile. A scratchy voice called from inside and the girl retreated into the house, shutting a weathered wooden door.

  He wondered if Scarlett took after her mother, if he would encounter a vision of how she might age, a version of his lover that he most likely would not live to see. She never talked about her mother, but he assumed she was a peasant who spent her life in the fields, back bent, exposed to the wind and the sun that would turn her skin to leather. Would he recognize her?

  He’d start here, where he could tell people were home. A granny opened the door, her teeth nubby and brown. He offered greetings and she replied in an accent so thick and guttural it seemed a miracle that Scarlett had ever shed it. When he asked about her, the woman seemed puzzled. He wasn’t sure when Scarlett started going by her English name, if she’d adopted it only after she worked in the factories or sometime later. The granny disappeared inside and returned with a steaming mug of hot water. He pretended to sip—the water must carry a dozen kinds of contamination and sickness—and she asked if he’d eaten.

  “Do rest with us awhile,” she said. Poor, but more hospitable than he would have been if she’d arrived at his front gate in Hong Kong.
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br />   The next home was abandoned, the front door missing, with a collapsed roof and crumbling mud-brick walls. Its occupants probably now lived in a city. No one answered at the next home, though he heard pots clanking. The sun was fast slipping toward the line of hills on the horizon, and if he didn’t hurry, the driver would leave without him. He could try coming back tomorrow, yet this close to picking up the trail to Scarlett, he couldn’t bear to stop now.

  Another knock, another garbled conversation. An elderly man with hands gnarled as a gingerroot, his odor stale, dried sweat and black tea. The man didn’t recognize Scarlett’s name, the city where she worked, or the name and type of factory Boss Yeung ran. The gnarled man followed him. This unexpected visit would provide weeks of gossip. At the next house, the villager conferred with a granny carrying a baby on her hip. His son? No—this child was too big, already in pants split in the rear for potty training.

  A stout neighbor approached, unexpectedly taking Boss Yeung’s hand in hers. He almost jerked away in surprise. Her hands were warm, the pressure reassuring, telling him she would help him. More shouts, and soon a dozen people were following him—the very old and the very young—as if he were leading a parade. Boss Yeung felt ridiculous, but the attention could draw out Scarlett’s mother from her home.

  Ten minutes later, he’d completed his circuit of Five Dragons, whose total area and population were a fraction of any one of his factories. In a country of 1.3 billion, there could have been another Scarlett Chen, the same age and from this province, too. The new factory girl’s memories could have faded, and she might have mixed up the name. He seethed, cursing her for leading him astray. Cursing Mama Fang, Uncle Lo, and his own failing body. He’d never find her.

  Then he noticed a sour-faced woman carrying a bucket of water. She planted her feet wide outside a home he’d assumed had been abandoned, its roof missing many tiles, the front walls massed with dead weeds. The woman shouted at the gathered crowd and the gnarled man timidly replied with something that Boss Yeung couldn’t make out. He huddled close behind Boss Yeung, as if taking cover.