by Vanessa Hua
Daisy had insisted they attend. They needed more pictures to prepare for their immigration interview, and she could practice running the cart, whose income they would report as hers until Scarlett received a work permit. To build a paper trail, they’d filed for a permit for the festival, and set up the cart not far from the stage, tucking the babies in a playpen under a mottled sycamore tree.
William hadn’t replied to Daisy’s cryptic notes posted to his feed, which gave clues about McDonald’s apple pies and the night market in Taipei. She’d suggested he perform at this rally in San Francisco and take part in this historic moment. A message in a bottle speeding along currents, with the chance of getting a response just as remote. Maybe he wasn’t checking, or he thought it was a scam. Or he no longer cared.
Scarlett handed buns to the babies, who buried their faces into the softness of the bread. Liberty grasped the roll with both hands, her expression serious, methodically nibbling, while Didi nipped with the eagerness of a puppy. She piled toys and books around them, the stuffed caterpillar and a plastic mirror. Didi lost himself in activities, insisted on emptying a box of toys one by one, protesting if they ended his playtime. He wanted to see every task to its end and put everything in its place.
Liberty was curious and demanding, with an inherited restlessness that she wouldn’t outgrow and would have to learn to resist. Sometimes when Scarlett interrupted, her daughter pulled away, eyes flashing with a thermonuclear defiance, a heat that fed off itself.
The sticky sweet scent of marijuana smoke drifted from somewhere in the park. Under the high blue dome of the sky, it felt like spring, not the middle of winter. Onstage, the speaker was talking about the fight that began ten years ago. Daisy was a quick study, careful not to dish up too much meat or slop on the sauce, topping off her attempt with an artful sprinkling of scallions. Some customers slid cardboard signs under their arms—EQUAL LOVE NOW! and NOW WE ARE MORE AMERICAN—as they ate, while others had attached fluttering Stars and Stripes and rainbow flags onto their backpacks. Once the line started getting longer, Daisy became flustered. When Scarlett touched her arm to put her at ease, Daisy frowned. Neither of them had been one of those girls who snuggled with their friends, or linked elbows while walking down the street, tilted their heads together at the movies; they’d have to work on their casual public affection.
In Chinatown, they hid their rings and their change in status. Another secret. A lie of omission that should have been easy to carry out, and yet Scarlett felt guilty for deceiving Old Wu and their neighbors. Elsewhere, she and Daisy had to remember to call each other my wife. Strange to say, but less strange than if she had used Chinese endearments, laopo—the woman she’d grow old with—or haizita, the mother of her children. Eventually, their marriage would end and she had no doubt Daisy would become another’s laopo, another’s wife. Scarlett might never again.
Daisy pushed back her bangs, smearing plum sauce on her forehead. “The steam trays should go in reverse, and customers could pick up from this side. Flow from left to right,” Daisy said. Though she disagreed, Scarlett nodded. The more involved Daisy became in the cart, Scarlett thought, the less time she’d have to yearn for a ghost.
Didi studied the crowd with an intensity that could penetrate concrete and Liberty tugged at her socks. Daisy told Scarlett that she was leaving to take pictures of the festival for their photo album, to show they were part of the lala community. Scarlett called after her, holding up a hanbaobao. “You haven’t had anything to eat.”
“Later,” Daisy said.
Unless Scarlett could summon Daisy’s boyfriend out of the air, unless she could promise his love, nothing she did would soothe her. Scarlett fiddled with her wedding band, already tarnishing. The crowd smelled like the beach, suntan lotion, and sweat. Techno pumped out from the speaker, the beat throbbing through her. She checked her phone. She’d missed a call from Manager Kwok. A woman with hair dyed the color of whiskey asked if Scarlett had considered installing an online ordering system. Customers made suggestions all the time, asking for a chance to franchise, invest, or build a website; last week, someone had proposed serving hanbaobao on the jet of a tech mogul. Scarlett had a sheaf of business cards in bold colors on stiff and heavy paper from people who wanted to work with her—for her. Outlandish ambitions that grew less outlandish with each repetition, and if she wasn’t careful, she, too, might believe she could achieve the wealth and might of an emperor. Here in America, she might change the world—but she had to hurry before someone else did.
* * *
—
The Pearl Pavilion neared the end of lunch service, its busboys clanking dirty dishes into the cart, the air thick with grease and the scent of chives and steamed dumplings. Spilled rice that resembled maggots and balled-up napkins littered the gold-and-brown swirls on the carpet. Boss Yeung had been sitting at a table for hours but hadn’t found Scarlett here, not as a cart lady, not in the kitchen, not as a customer. He’d been foolish to think he could find her where the detective could not. The waitress dropped off his check. She was busty, the seams straining on her red satin tunic top. She caught Boss Yeung staring and snapped at him, asking if he needed anything else. He didn’t want to ask about Scarlett outright. If she heard he was looking for her, she’d bolt, but he had no other recourse.
“Is there someone here named Scarlett? Who comes here, works here? She has a baby boy.”
The waitress shook her head.
“Scarlett might not be her name.” How strange he must sound!
A customer at the next table waved his order sheet at her, ready to pay. As she turned to leave, Boss Yeung showed the waitress the blurry selfie recovered from Ma’s phone and uploaded to his own. The waitress seemed irritated, but did he glimpse recognition in her eyes?
“Is there anyone else who might know?” Boss Yeung asked. “The manager?”
No, she said.
From across the dining room, a man in a blue blazer stared at him, his gelled hair like the prow of a ship, his mouth in a tight line. He muttered to a busboy, who nodded and hurried away. Did he work here? Boss Yeung couldn’t shake the suspicion that the man harbored ill will toward him. He loathed his shriveled body that made him the target of any would-be mugger or con man.
Walking through Chinatown, he searched the streets for Scarlett and their son, willing them to appear. He ended up by a Chinese dressmaker’s shop, where a bridal cheongsam hung in the window, cavorting dragons and phoenixes stitched in gold on red silk. Scarlett used to work at a garment factory sewing evening gowns. Maybe she’d come here looking for a job. Besides, seamstresses gossiped, didn’t they, in the long hours bent over their stitches?
Particles of dust and sheared cloth sparkled in a shaft of light coming through the shop window. The interior was hushed as a temple, the bolts of satin and silk and cotton absorbing every sound. The air smelled of chalk. The salesclerk ignored him until Boss Yeung announced in Cantonese that his daughter was getting married. He steadied himself on the counter, a glass display case of rhinestone barrettes. Would he live to see Viann married, to hold his first grandchild? Live to see his products sold in every country and on the moon under Viann’s direction?
The clerk thrust a business card at him, curtly replied he’d have to get on a waiting list, and warned that his daughter might have plans of her own.
With his slumped posture and sickly complexion, Boss Yeung must seem an unlikely sales prospect, too poor to afford the services of a custom tailor. He assured her that his daughter was interested, but she was busy, with an important job, and had sent him to Chinatown to collect information on vendors, the florist, the invitations, and banquet halls.
“What do you think about the Pearl Pavilion?” he asked.
She sniffed that the restaurant was living off its reputation. “They skimp on the meat.” The Pearl Pavilion must have fallen on hard financial times, she sa
id, because the manager was letting a lady street hawker use its kitchen to make roast pork buns called hanbaobao.
“Are the buns any good?” Boss Yeung asked.
“Not for me, not for you,” the clerk said. “For the young people.”
She summoned her assistant, Windy, who emerged from the stockroom. “Where’s the hanbaobao girl from?” Boss Yeung asked.
Windy didn’t know, but was almost certain she’d seen the woman in Chinatown, shopping at a market with her baby.
Her baby. He swayed, his knees weak. The clerk asked if he needed to sit down, if they should call his daughter. No, he said. The cart, where could he find the cart?
At night, outside the bars and clubs a few blocks away in North Beach, Windy said. “But not always the same place, same time. You feel lucky if you find it.”
“What nonsense!” her boss said. “Why would a business make it hard for you to find it?”
Boss Yeung had to agree. The hanbaobao cart was starting to sound mythical, Scarlett and their baby, too.
“Sometimes you can find it online.” Windy tapped on her phone and showed him an app where people posted sightings of different food trucks and carts. If you were first to post it, you received more points. “It’s like a game.”
“Not any game I’d like to play,” her boss said.
Windy scrolled through the entries. “I’m not seeing anything,” she said regretfully.
He turned to leave and had reached the door when she shouted “Waaaah!” and called out the latest location of the hanbaobao cart: City Hall.
* * *
—
All around Scarlett, people snapped photos, overhead shots of the rally, of themselves, as if the moment didn’t exist until it had been recorded. Towers of stereo speakers flanked the stage and at close range, the words coming out were more felt than heard. Two burly men bear-hugged, and a pair of women—both willowy, one copper-skinned, the other terra-cotta—swayed together, their eyes closed. In the midst of the crowd, Scarlett felt the rumble of a single heart beating, shaking her from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.
She didn’t recognize the man until he said her name, his voice hoarse with illness or with emotion. He was scrawny as a baby chick, his face mottled, his back hunched, his step shuffling.
Boss Yeung.
Her body went heavy, filled with sand. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak, and the buzz from the crowd was suddenly coming from inside her skull. She’d feared this man, feared this day for months. She exhaled, her hands balled into fists. She’d never pictured him so fragile. If she shoved him—how she wanted to!—his rib cage might snap. She wanted him anguished and repentant, not dying. Not dead.
He was alone. She rushed over to the playpen, where Liberty gnawed on a rattle to block him from getting closer, planting her feet wide. She would fight him off and anyone else who dared to take her daughter away. He stared at Didi, the boy he believed his son and heir, and his yearning filled Scarlett with fury and sorrow.
“I never should have listened,” he said.
To Mama Fang? Even if the idea for the bribe had originated with Mama Fang, he’d agreed to it.
“You could have listened to me,” Scarlett said.
They studied each other. Her arms were meaty and her belly soft, that of a woman in her thirties giving in to gravity, of a new mother recovering from childbirth. His skin was the color of turpentine. The disease, whatever it was, had attacked him from within. She reached toward him, and then dropped her hands at her sides. She wanted to affirm the bony proof of his existence, and she could tell he wanted to touch her, too. She caught herself. She would never lose herself in him again.
“What is it?” she asked. “What happened to you?”
“Cancer. The kind that makes your blood sick.”
She leaned against the playpen, the rough scratch of the canvas holding her together. She didn’t know anyone who suffered from this disease. Not anyone who had admitted to it. Not her neighbor, curled over with cramps, heaving for months. Not her father, who returned from the mines coughing up blood. Not her classmate who burned with fever, who never came back from the hospital. Punishment, it was said, for an ancestor’s wrongdoing. There was no escaping the blood of the people before you. She understood that now.
Liberty’s cells sat in the deep freeze at the cord-blood bank. Technicians could fetch a cure born out of that very first cell, dividing and dividing as many times as there were stars in the sky to form a heart, brain, eyes, ears, fingers, toes. Their daughter held Scarlett and Boss Yeung within her, held multitudes infinite as the universe. He had to go at once. On the back of a napkin, Scarlett scrawled out the name of the cord-blood bank, Liberty’s name and birthday, and the hospital where she was born. A slim chance, but all the chance he might have.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Beach balls sailed overhead as the crowd cheered. “A cure,” Scarlett said. “Stem cells. From the baby.” A gift that she was giving freely and honestly, as Mama Fang—and Boss Yeung—never could.
“From our son,” he marveled.
She’d dreaded this, Boss Yeung finding out the sex of his child and rejecting the flesh of his flesh. She accepted that he’d spurned her, but to witness him turning his back on their daughter—she would grieve all over again.
“From our daughter.” When she picked up Liberty from the playpen, the baby squealed, craning her neck to see this stranger.
“The ultrasound—” he said.
Liberty rooted at her mother’s chest, and though she had never nursed out in the open, Scarlett pulled aside her V-neck and let her daughter suckle. In that minute, the world held no one but them: Liberty’s dreamy eyes, and Scarlett’s head bowed over her in the only kind of prayer she knew. The next speaker took the microphone, a spark plug of a woman in a dark purple pantsuit. Liberty jerked her head up at the crackling sound. Scarlett straightened her shirt, and turned their daughter toward Boss Yeung. He didn’t reach for her.
Scarlett ached, not over the loss of a lover, but the loss of a father for Liberty. Soon enough, Liberty would begin talking. Soon enough, she would ask for her father, hungry for how he might shape her. If Scarlett’s father had lived, he might have taught her how to weave a basket to catch fish in the river, might have tempered Ma’s rage and encouraged her as Ma never did. If he had lived, Ma never would have taken the job at the clinic.
Boss Yeung seemed stricken, his hands curled at his sides. His shock would turn to disappointment, to disgust. He pulled out a sheaf of papers tucked inside his coat—a contract, demanding custody? He smoothed the pages flat and presented it to her. The pages flapped open and Liberty reached for them, curious. Scarlett shifted Liberty onto her hip. He held a notebook, much like the one she’d had as a child.
She gasped. It was her notebook, the one in which she’d first written her English name, the one she’d saved from Ma’s stove.
A cry escaped her lips and instantly she was that girl again, wanting so much more than the life handed down to her. Her feet fleet, determined not to let the earth—or her mother—break her. How many hours had she labored over that notebook? She could smell the chalk dust, the pencil shavings from the classroom. The pitted chalkboard and desks jammed with three students each. The whisper of her pencil across the pages flimsier than toilet paper. Her characters inside the workbook wobbly yet recognizable as her own. She’d assumed that Ma had turned the notebook to kindling. She’d been wrong. Ma hadn’t been vindictive; she’d held on to it all these years, maybe because she wanted to understand the mystery of her daughter. A daughter she’d cherished after all. If she’d asked Ma for help while she was pregnant, she might have protected the baby as she’d protected the notebook.
Lost, now found by Boss Yeung. She sensed he’d made the trip to the village himself, out of desperation but also i
n atonement, and held her notebook close all the way here. The rally at City Hall erupted into cheers. Boss Yeung had tracked her to her origins. Did he pity her or think her backward? She found neither in his steady gaze. News helicopters hovered over the demonstration, and passing cars honked in support. Liberty grabbed the notebook and waved it, the pages snapping like a flag.
“What’s her name?” Boss Yeung asked.
“Liberty.”
“What’s her name?” he repeated. “Her name in Chinese.”
“She doesn’t have one,” Scarlett said. “She’s an American.”
He sounded out the syllables, “Lee-bu-tee.” A name he wouldn’t have picked, a name it appeared he wouldn’t question. She slid Liberty onto her other hip, hugging her daughter with her left arm, her wedding band on display, where he couldn’t miss it. When he recoiled, she defiantly stared back at him.
Onstage, the speaker rallied the crowd. “It started off as the winter of love, but let’s make this the year of love!”
Daisy returned from taking pictures, her shoulders sagging, carrying herself as if bruised all over. She picked up her son from the playpen, nuzzling the top of his head. Boss Yeung seemed to catch sight of the matching ring on her finger, and then studied the other same-sex couples at the rally. Seeing Didi in his mother’s arms, Liberty lit up. Daisy approached Boss Yeung, her expression wary, ready to fend off this stranger far too interested in their family.
Understanding appeared to dawn on him. Not that Scarlett was a lala but that she’d found a way to stay in the United States without him. In his eyes she saw what might be admiration.
“Anyone getting married next week?” the speaker said. Shouts rose up, jubilation like a shock wave. “How about just married? Anyone here last week—this month—please join us onstage with those who kicked it all off ten years ago!”