Chapter Thirty-Eight
San Francisco
Helen
Peony was six months old when I found out I was pregnant again.
I didn’t know how to tell Philip. I didn’t know when to tell Philip.
We were still living in Association housing, sharing a bathroom with two other families.
Every dollar we saved, we set aside toward a future apartment of our own.
I dreamt it’d be soon enough that Peony could practice crawling in our new home, but with a second baby on the way . . .
“Then we’ll stay in the Association another year,” said Philip when he found out. “I should be a head cook by then. Things will be easier.”
He was getting close. The month prior, he’d been promoted to line cook.
He was working hard, and I was grateful for the extra dollar an hour he brought home.
But lately I spent more time with his dirty clothes than with him.
A bucket of vinegar took his place by my bed, yesterday’s shirt soaking to get out the cigarette smoke.
At least I had Peony for company. Every day I trekked to the factory and carted home my three sacks of work.
My daughter slept on my back while I sewed, lulled by the whirr of my machine.
When I was done, I’d kiss her neck and be rewarded by a high-pitched squeal as she woke up.
After I changed her, we’d eat. Peony already had the adventurous tastebuds of a cook.
She liked steamed eggs and shrimp-head soup and baked apples, and with her three little teeth kernels she made whistling sounds whenever I made her favorite congee.
I loved her more than anything, but she was growing fast. With the new baby in my belly, it was getting harder for me to carry her up and down the hills every morning.
“Find a job closer to home,” my friends at the Association urged. “Didn’t you used to make cakes? I hear Mrs. Kwan at Far East Bakery is hiring.”
“She’s not going to hire a pregnant lady with a baby,” I said.
“How do you know? Mrs. Kwan is very nice. At worst, she’ll give your daughter a free cookie.”
A young mother herself, Mrs. Kwan had come to America and started her bakery with twin boys strapped to her front and back.
When she saw me with Peony, she brought out a stool for me to sit.
My timing was good; it was late afternoon and most of her staff had left for the day.
She gestured at the empty kitchen. “Bake something for me.”
Two restless hours later, I presented her with a dozen egg tarts. She picked one up, observing the pastry flake under her thumb, the soft yellow custard wobbling in its shell. She took a bite.
Without a word, she reached for the tray of walnut cookies on the counter and gave me the biggest one. “For your little girl, careful she doesn’t choke. I’ll see you tomorrow morning at five.”
I bowed my head, hardly able to contain my excitement. “Thank you, Mrs. Kwan.”
Mrs. Kwan treated her staff like family. Often she packed any unsold pastries into boxes for us to bring home, and when the shop wasn’t too busy, she carried Peony to the front, introducing her to the customers. Her kindness reminded me of Mama.
Not a day passed that I didn’t think of my mother.
This year would mark a decade since I’d left Tunglam.
I’d read in the paper that millions in China were dying from famine.
She must have known that we’d be divided by the invisible walls of war, so why hadn’t she tried to come with me?
It tormented me that I didn’t know her fate.
I’d written to my relatives in Guangzhou, and no one knew where she was.
I didn’t even know whether she was still alive.
I touched my bracelet, fingering its links. The charm had become a source of amusement among my friends. Mrs. Kwan thought it was a loaf of bread, Philip a golden tael. The only person who might know was Mama, but she was thousands of miles away, as unreachable as the bottom of the sea.
No matter how long it took, I would bring her home to me.
This I swore to myself—and to my children.
Early one September morning, as I was arranging mooncakes in the display case, a customer knocked on the bakery door.
“Sir,” answered Mrs. Kwan, “we’re not open yet.”
“Can’t I at least say hello to my niece?”
The voice sounded like Philip’s, a touch lighter. I dropped my tongs and turned around. “Francis!” I cried.
My brother-in-law was leaner than I remembered, and he sported new grays in his hair and a gold cross hanging over his shirt. I passed him the baby. “Does Philip know that you’re back?”
“No.”
I was dreading their reunion already. “He hates surprises.”
“He likes being right more,” Francis said cheerfully. “I’ll tell him all the names Sam Bou called me when I left, and that I should’ve come with you.”
“He’s off at four today,” I said, packing a box of baked pork buns and Philip’s favorite walnut cookies to arm Francis for their confrontation. “I don’t get home until dinnertime. If he doesn’t want to let you in, this should help win him over.”
I needn’t have worried. When I came home, the brothers were in the kitchen sharing a cigarette, laughing over how Fortune’s Palace would fail without them. It was like old times, and Francis had even made ngau lam. Peony loved it as much as I did.
When he wasn’t searching for work, Francis joined me at the bakery, bouncing Peony on his knee and gossiping with my coworkers about the tourists who came asking for chocolate croissants.
He exchanged recipes with Mrs. Kwan and had chive-cutting competitions with Mr. Kwan.
I’d forgotten how fun he was. And how secretive.
He hinted about a lover who’d come with him from Kansas City, but he wouldn’t introduce us. When I asked about the affair, Francis was mysterious yet shy.
“She’s not Chinese?” That was the only reason I could think of to explain his behavior.
Francis merely smiled.
“Give it up,” Philip said. “You won’t get anything out of him. So long as she’s not Japanese, I don’t care.”
The notion of two unmarried people living together was scandalous, and I assumed that was why Francis hadn’t sought housing with the Yuen Family Association.
Philip and I had yet to visit his apartment.
Anything beyond Pacific Avenue felt like a different country, and besides, whenever Francis came over, the two brothers cooked enough food to last us through the week.
Six weeks before I was due, a searing pain pierced my side. I was sewing, and I gasped, nearly lancing my finger with the needle before I curled off the chair to the ground.
It was night, the stars in the black sky blurring into the moon, dripping silver.
I’d stopped paying attention to shadows since Peony was born, but tonight was different.
Tonight as I lay on the carpet, they glided out of every forgotten crevice.
Bold and moon-touched, they swam across the apartment in terrifying, faceless forms, with sharp claws and bared teeth.
Rationally, I knew they were Peony’s crib, a coat hanger, and my sewing mannequin, but irrationally, I couldn’t stop staring at where my shadow should have been.
And I knew that the demons had found me.
Another contraction reared. As my nails bit into the coarse wools of the carpet, I crawled to the phone and dialed Caruso’s. No one picked up.
After two more tries, I called Francis.
“The baby,” I whispered over the phone. “Help.”
I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew, I was in the backseat of Francis’s car. Peony was asleep in his arms, and a redheaded American that Francis had introduced as his roommate Eugene was parking in front of Chinese Hospital.
Eugene helped me out of the car. “She’s having a baby,” he told the nurse at the door in heavily accented but proper-enough Cantonese.
Normally I would have gawked and had a dozen questions. Tonight I simply touched his red hair for luck.
I didn’t remember much else. The contractions were gaining speed.
My entire body clenched, and when I couldn’t breathe, that shimmering cold washed over me, threatening to make me disappear.
I was in too much pain to stop it, so I screamed.
Francis gave me his hand and I squeezed, holding on for dear life.
Heaven help me, I would not turn invisible. I would not lose this child.
Half an hour later, I was on the surgeon’s table. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, he said, so he had to operate.
Someone placed a mask over my face, and the edges of the world blurred into the alabaster of the walls. When I awoke, my second daughter was in my arms. She weighed a dainty five and a half pounds and was so tiny her hand couldn’t encircle my finger.
She cried while I checked her for a mark like the one on my collarbone.
She cried when I counted her fingers and toes and checked her for a shadow.
She wouldn’t stop crying, and when I put her to my breast, wincing at the searing pain that came with the newborn’s early latch, I rounded my lips into a hoarse song.
It had been years since I sang, and my muscles struggled to turn the rough sounds into music, but my baby didn’t mind. Her entire body relaxed, soothed by the vibrations from my chest. She sucked merrily.
Peony had never needed me to sing to her; she slept well and easily. This one was different. Call it a mother’s instinct, but I knew. She would need my songs.
Francis came bearing a box of Nestle Drumsticks. I was ravenous, and I didn’t care about the old rules that I wasn’t supposed to eat anything cold after giving birth. While I feasted, my brother-in-law dangled a rattle in front of the baby.
She let go of my finger and flailed at Francis, her young ears entranced by the sound.
Francis chuckled. “I can already tell we’re going to be buddies.”
The rattle was bright yellow, a painted sun grinning on its wooden head.
Every time he shook it, my daughter beat her hand in the air, and I smiled.
My old house in Tunglam had faded to scraps of memory, yet I vividly remembered the line of marigolds in the garden—how they’d sway like little suns. Seeing them used to make me happy, too.
When Philip finally arrived, I had a name.
“Meet Marigold,” I said. “Marigold Mei Yoong Yuen.”