Chapter Thirty-Six
It was during the drive, someplace between Kansas and Colorado, that I realized I was pregnant.
Morning sickness was a misery. Twice an hour, we had to pull to the side of the highway for me to throw up on the road.
I took my moods out on Philip, whom I still hadn’t forgiven.
My husband had many faults, but I’ll grant him this: Not once did he complain on that trip, even when it ended up taking seven days instead of three.
To save money, we slept in the car. I took the backseat and Philip folded his arms over the wheel and rested his head in the crook of his elbows. I had no idea how he was able to sleep like that night after night, but we were younger then.
Toward the end of the trip, I slept more hours than I was awake. Often I’d jolt awake, finding the map still in my hand, and Philip turning off the radio. He’d learned not to play it while I was awake.
“Are we there?” I’d ask.
“Not yet. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know.”
Then, on the seventh day, in the middle of the Sierra Nevada, Philip nudged me awake. “Helen, look,” he said, pointing outside.
Ahead was a simple green sign that read Welcome to California. The three most beautiful words I’d seen in a very long time.
As we descended the mountains, I cranked down the car window, sticking my head outside to breathe in the fresh air.
The sun gilded everything it touched, and the hills were lush and evergreen.
Finally, as we crossed the bridge into San Francisco, the water gleaming beneath us like a sea of diamonds, I could see why we Chinese called America the Beautiful Country. And I couldn’t stop smiling.
San Francisco’s Chinatown made up only a few dense blocks, yet I immediately felt more at home than I ever had in Kansas City.
Aside from the restaurants, there was a jewelry store, a post office, several optometrists, and a slew of bazaars selling embroidered slippers and bamboo umbrellas and other colorful knickknacks.
Our first stop was the Yuen Family Benevolent Association, a gathering place for members with the Yuen surname.
It was a blue-bricked building with white curtains covering every window so you couldn’t look inside.
The woman at the front scolded us for being four days late.
The room we’d reserved had been given away, so there was only a single bed left in a communal room. We took it.
The next day, we searched for work. Philip for a restaurant job, me for anything—a baker or seamstress or maid.
It wasn’t easy. For every opening there were over thirty applicants, even to be a busboy.
Philip was confident at first, but each rejection chafed and eroded the hopes we’d had for our new life here.
He was practically begging for work as a temporary line cook, sometimes working under people many years his junior.
He never said it aloud, though I could tell every time his mouth tinkered back and forth that he wanted Francis to come so they could start a restaurant together. Yet no matter how I urged Philip to call his brother, he wouldn’t yield.
“Let’s get a loan from the bank,” I said. “We don’t have to start a restaurant—what about a café like the cha chaan tengs in Hong Kong?”
Philip considered, then he dismissed the idea. “Old Mr. Ling has beat us to it already, he just signed a lease.”
“Nothing to stop there from being two in Chinatown. Though . . .” I paused. “How about a bakery?”
I was talking from my stomach, which sorely missed wife cakes and egg tarts, pineapple buns and red-bean puffs.
A bakery would be easier on Philip, too.
Working as a line cook was hard on his body, and I didn’t like that during his breaks he smoked with his new friends.
It made him cough, and when he coughed I worried.
As if he could read my mind, Philip reached for a cigarette. “Tough to make a profit baking bread.”
“I told you to stop smoking. You have asthma, are you trying to kill yourself before I give birth?”
“It helps me think,” Philip said. “Once I find a real job, I’ll quit.”
I grimaced. “At least do it outside. It stinks up the room.”
Philip grunted. Ever since his argument with Francis, he’d been prone to melancholy. Smoking calmed him, or so he said.
While Philip kept looking for a better job, I walked up and down the hills in Chinatown, haunting the bakeries and sewing factories on Stockton for a job.
When I grew desperate, I asked the shopkeepers if I could sweep their floors or if I could clean their toilets.
No one wanted to hire a pregnant woman, and my bump was growing hard to hide.
Still I persisted, cursing the hills that pockmarked the streets, even steeper than Hong Kong’s.
New veins bulged from my legs and after walking only a few blocks I needed to squat down and rest on the sidewalk.
Eventually someone at the Association told me about a factory on Vallejo that needed home-based seamstresses.
Every morning, I walked forty minutes to pick up two ten-pound bundles of fabric that needed to be cut then sewn into dresses for Montgomery Ward.
It paid a dollar a bundle, which Philip said was criminally low, but I didn’t complain.
My years in Gu Ma’s factory meant I was fast, and soon I paid off the factory-grade Singer I’d rented from the Association and was sewing through three sacks a day instead of two.
The money kept us afloat until Philip finally found a full-time job.
When that day came, I broke down and cried. I still remember the sound of his key turning in the door, how he entered our room beaming, his arms laden with round boules of bread. He dropped the loaves onto the table, a blizzard of crumbs snowing over my lap, and declared, “I found work.”
Caruso was a family-owned restaurant in Fisherman’s Wharf, popular for its fresh clam chowder and shrimp scampi. At night, he’d bring back clam chowder and day-old sourdough bread that made me screw up my nose when I first tried it.
Still, it was a start. Like its bread, San Francisco would grow on me. It’d just take a little time.
That summer, a few months shy of my twenty-second birthday, I became a mother.
It wasn’t an easy labor. For sixteen hours, I toiled in the hospital bed, screaming so I wouldn’t hold my breath and disappear. Yet the moment I held my baby, whatever pain I’d suffered was gone. It was magic.
Her eyes were brown pinwheels, her mouth a tiny pink bloom. I counted her ten little fingers, and I counted her ten stubby toes, as I held her curled up in my arms. Everything was in place, even her shadow.
Americans were obsessed with love. Every other movie or song on the radio was about the beauty of two people coming together, falling in love wholly and completely.
Even at Caruso, Philip said they put a single rose on each table to create a more romantic atmosphere.
I’d scoffed and rolled my eyes, certain I was immune to it all.
Never did I fool myself into thinking I loved Philip. But with Peony, I fell in love at first sight.
I smiled. Maybe there was still hope for me yet.