The stylist snipped at Scarlett's hair, the shears rasping. Scarlett was grateful she wasn't chatty. She glanced into the mirrors and saw Daisy in the chair beside her, her eyes closed. She must be as exhausted as Scarlett felt. To disguise themselves, they were lopping off their hair. They might have saved a few bucks by doing it themselves, but Scarlett didn't want to end up looking like a lobotomy patient. Besides, if they'd stayed a minute longer in their apartment, they might have gone mad. Evergreen Gardens was permeated with the smell of many bodies and many years, the steady accumulation of sweat, steamed rice, and sesame oil. Their tiny apartment held a double mattress left by the last tenant, and milk crates stacked high, packed with their diapers, wipes, clothes, and other baby supplies. Their stockpiling reminded her that she would never travel light again. Each day, Old Wu had dropped off another find: portable cribs and umbrella strollers like new. Even with his help, the money she'd taken from Mama Fang and received from the sale of the van would dwindle quickly. He'd confirmed that the big and busy hospital in San Francisco accepted patients in an emergency without insurance and with every kind of malady. Together, they'd practiced the route and peeked into the hospital: red brick with wrought-iron window frames and a few cracked panes, the complex resembled a haunted house, but inside the hallways were clean, the equipment modern, and the staff seemed calm and efficient. Without Old Wu, they wouldn't have gotten settled. She was grateful for his attentions, which must have gone far beyond his usual efforts, but maybe none of his other neighbors had ever needed as much help. Others at Evergreen Gardens seemed to have noticed his sweetness toward her; a few times, they'd come in together from the street, and the aunties standing in the hallway had fallen silent, probably gossiping about them. Scarlett's due date was fast approaching, which added urgency to her days. If she and Daisy didn't cover their tracks, they'd get caught, putting an end to all they wanted for their babies. That morning, in the middle of their apartment, water had gushed from between Scarlett's legs, spattering the floor. She'd been certain she was going into labor until she realized she'd pissed herself—another humiliation that her body wanted to squeeze in before delivery. The salon was thick with the smell of hair spray, chemical solutions, and burned hair. The scissors poked Scarlett's scalp and she yelped, jerking away. The stylist didn't apologize and resumed cutting. Scarlett had pointed out what she wanted in a dog-eared magazine, but how many times had she walked into such salons, requesting a trim but leaving with a bob, asking for a body wave and getting a dowdy perm? Chinese stylists—here or back home—had minds of their own. "Not too short," Scarlett reminded her. "You don't want the baby pulling on it," the stylist said. Scarlett studied the wet hair piling up on the floor, hair that Boss Yeung used to run his fingers through, hair that had grown long in their months together. That was all behind her now. She'd begun thinking about the future. Not only next month, but next year, the next two years and longer still. She wouldn't return to China, which she might have known from the moment her flight descended over Los Angeles. To stay in America, Scarlett would have to find a job and fix her papers. Only then would she be safe from Boss Yeung, who must have detectives fanning out after her. She didn't have enough money to hire an immigration consultant. But if they found Daisy's boyfriend, his family could help Scarlett pay for a lawyer. At Boss Yeung's factory, the men had expected even the most senior women on staff to serve tea and defer to them in meetings. All around China, princelings, the pampered children of high Party officials, prospered, drawing upon connections that Scarlett lacked. And Scarlett, born in the countryside, didn't have the papers that made her eligible for public schools and hospitals in China's cities, and neither would her daughter, who would be born overseas. If she and Boss Yeung had remained together, he could have paid the fine, giving their child a mainland residency permit. Without him and his support, her daughter could only attend the worst schools, dim, crumbling, and poorly run. The other students would jeer at her, the bastard daughter of a single mother, second-class in every way. In America, without these limits, Scarlett and her daughter could attempt so much more. She no longer feared he'd disown the girl she carried. Now she was certain that he would steal the baby out of spite, if Scarlett couldn't get her papers in time. The Americans would side with him. That boy from Cuba, whose mother drowned trying to bring him here—he'd been sent back to his father. The pregnancy had changed Boss Yeung as much as it had changed her, or maybe she'd never known him. All the qualities that drew her to him, all the qualities she'd thought they shared, she now questioned. Clever or duplicitous? Determined or single-minded? Clear-eyed or cruel? He used to awe her, when he made his rounds at the factory, his stride long, his gaze sharp, when he addressed the battalions of workers in their jumpsuits and caps lined up in front of the gates. How powerful he'd seemed. He'd done this, made this, was in charge of all these people. The women in their hairnets straightening as they passed, murmuring, "Lao ban, lao ban." The boss, the boss. Much of her life in the city had been ephemeral: new streets paved and blocks demolished overnight, and the neighbors revolving through her apartment building. Strange as it sounded, the business that Boss Yeung built up had seemed a monument for the ages. He'd been solid, steady like no other man had been in her life: not the father she didn't remember, not those she dated who soon left her after discovering she would never put their interests ahead of hers. When she was with him, she pondered places, possibilities she might never have noticed. She'd been intent as a mole on her goals—and as blind to the world above where she burrowed. With him, she'd raised her head. She studied his habits and how he ran the factory; she took his advice on dealing with her landlord. After he turned controlling, she told herself that no one had ever cared enough to make such demands upon her, and that he valued her as no one else did. She'd come to realize he must have deemed her worthless but for her womb. The prospect of an heir had made him as ruthless as one of those legendary emperors who waged wars, emptied royal treasuries, and swallowed crane eggs and tortoise soup for a chance at immortality. Scarlett shifted uncomfortably in the stylist's chair, her tailbone sore. She could taste the prenatal vitamin pill she'd swallowed an hour ago, their last chance to plump up their babies, to give them mighty lungs, bright eyes, and sleek skin, and their last chance to muster their own strength for the delivery ahead. Daisy squealed, staring into the mirror at the pixie cut that complemented the delicacy of her features. "I love it—but will William recognize me?" This afternoon, she was going to stake out the computer science department at Cal, the university her boyfriend attended. His email and social media accounts had been deleted, and if not for Daisy's bulging belly, it would have seemed to Scarlett that he might never have existed. Someday, he might make himself known. For now, he'd retreated from the world. Still, Scarlett understood Daisy's insistence that they find the father of her child so he could attend their son's birth. "You'll recognize him," Scarlett said. "We don't want anyone recognizing us." Daisy ran her fingers through her hair. "My head feels so much lighter." She started talking about the night she had met him, when he'd been bargaining in his broken Chinese at a market in Taipei. He offered the equivalent of twenty U.S. dollars for a knickknack worth two dollars. "I want two," he said. The knickknack seller gave him far less change than what he was owed. "You're getting played," Daisy informed him. "Don't cheat him," she told the vendor. "Na liang kuai na dai zhe qu." Mind your business. "Gun dan." Get lost. "Buyaolian," Daisy shot back. Shameless. "You like getting cheated?" Daisy asked him. He was holding two carved turtles, tiny in his hand. Vendors found American-born Chinese the most gullible of all foreigners, with their fat wallets, ignorance of local customs, and their misplaced trust in their brethren. "She needs it more than me," he said. Daisy had looked where he was looking, at a little girl paging through a book underneath the stall. She brushed past him. She hated him for making her see Taiwan through his eyes, every cripple, every beggar. Though she hurried through the market, he caught up to her. "I wasn't insulting you," he said. "You seem like someone who stops something bad from happening." Daisy now repeated his comment with pride. He'd described exactly the woman Daisy wanted to be, and he'd been the first to see that possibility in her. No wonder she'd fallen for him. Daisy had already told her what happened next: over the winter, her boyfriend had returned to Taipei to visit his ailing grandmother. A month later, Daisy discovered she was pregnant. Some girls found special doctors online who made the problem go away, but she didn't want to decide alone. She'd messaged him, called him, but he'd never answered. Busy with school—or another girl? She never said she was pregnant, only that she needed to talk to him. When she finally wrote to him with the news, he had called her immediately and proposed over the scratchy video. He gnawed at his fingernails as if he might chew off his hand. Before he could wire her money for a plane ticket, a gust had plastered her shirt against her belly, revealing her secret to her family. After taking away her phone and laptop, cutting off contact with him, her parents shipped her to Perfume Bay. Even though Daisy was a U.S. citizen, she hadn't lived in America long enough to pass on automatic citizenship to a child born outside its borders. Her boyfriend could have passed on his U.S. citizenship, if he'd claimed paternity. But her parents told him that she'd terminated the pregnancy. As controlling, as vindictive as Scarlett's mother had sometimes been, she never lied. Daisy never had a chance to tell him what happened, not after her parents had grounded her at home, and not while she'd been held prisoner at Perfume Bay, where Mama Fang denied her access to laptops and phones. Scarlett didn't have the heart to tell her that the boy must be relieved to be free of this burden. He wasn't ready to raise a child, and neither was Daisy, but he should still know the truth. — Scarlett staggered up the hill. She felt a hand at the small of her back—Daisy's, supporting her. Hummingbird heart in her throat, Scarlett checked the map. They'd been traveling for more than two hours, by foot, by bus, and by BART to get to the university, now a few blocks away. Though she didn't want Daisy to make the trek from Chinatown alone, she wasn't going to be much help. As a group of students approached, Scarlett searched their faces. Like a bodyguard, she had taken to checking crowds, as if hunting for assassins and escape routes. Until she and her daughter had their papers, she could never be at ease. She noticed that Daisy's belly rendered her invisible to the students; the men didn't seem to find her attractive, and the women didn't compare themselves to her. Watching them walk past, Daisy couldn't hide her hunger to join them. The hulking engineering building came into view. Perched on the hillside, covered in mottled green tile, it resembled one of those drawings that skew with the perspective, all arches, arcades, and sloping lines. Inside, Daisy hung flyers on bulletin boards—the characters for Little Dumpling, her nickname for her boyfriend—in huge print, like a wanted poster, asking him to call in a matter related to the McDonald's pie à la mode. He would understand the code words. At the McDonald's in Taipei, William had always ordered an apple pie—fried, not baked—and vanilla ice cream—dairy, not chemical frozen yogurt—both unavailable in the United States after a push to turn menus healthy. He prided himself as a traveler, not a tourist. Tourists sought out McDonald's for its clean bathrooms and precision-cut French fries, for the whiff of Wichita in Moscow or Johannesburg, for the global might of an empire where the sun never set on Ronald McDonald. A traveler ordered like a local, he said, choosing the regional specialties on the menu, corn soup and fried chicken in Taiwan and the shrimp burger in Japan—items that signified you were an insider with a discerning palate, who could find gold even at a fast-food restaurant. Erbaiwu, half a brain! Why not order from a street vendor, Scarlett wondered, for a fraction of the price? And try as he might, William would never be native. Only someone with the privileges of an American would so readily try to give up those privileges. Although Daisy shared stories bit by bit about her life, Scarlett didn't reciprocate. She couldn't, not with someone less than half her age who—despite her pregnancy—seemed so unripened. Scarlett had long since fallen from the tree. William was a year older than Daisy, but sometimes it felt like she'd gone off to college, not him, she said. She was the firstborn and he was the baby of his family. Ma bao, a mama's jewel, whose mother dictated his friends, education, career, and his wife. Although they were both ABC, his family had stayed while hers had returned to Taiwan. Both felt something missing in their lives, something they suspected they would only find across the ocean. He'd looked east, in search of a land where he wouldn't feel out of place, wouldn't be taunted as meek and nerdy. He watched anime and trained in martial arts from an herbalist–calligrapher–kung fu master. To impress her, he'd bust out backflips on their outings, in the park and on the sidewalk. Unlike her boyfriend, Daisy faced west, listening to indie rock bands and browsing travel guides for cities she had yet to visit: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco. She might be staking too much on this boy, who sounded compassionate yet tianzhen, naïve. Keeping the baby must have been the first major decision of their lives, and they were both so young that taking responsibility must have seemed like an achievement. Maybe the loss of Daisy and of his baby had shaken him. Maybe he'd never been enrolled at Cal, and little of anything he told Daisy had been the truth. Had he wanted to impress her with his stories? Scarlett's time with Boss Yeung—their nights together, their trips, his promises—had been a lie, too. Daisy's love hadn't been complicated, compromised by marriage, by age, by class—all the differences that led Boss Yeung to betray Scarlett. Maybe he felt he'd done her a favor, offered a helping hand to a peasant by trying to buy her off. Scarlett would yank him down with her before she let him believe he was pulling her up again. The night she'd conceived, Boss Yeung had lingered inside her, and they'd been cozy as nesting dolls, cozy as she'd never been. He kissed her shoulder. "I—" he said. He didn't continue. He'd waited until they couldn't make eye contact to attempt a confession he couldn't force out in the end. Did he love her or was he going to leave her? He'd started to withdraw and she had settled against him, a few seconds that had determined their end. She and Daisy peered into classrooms and lounges where students scribbled into notebooks and pecked on their laptops. Back in the hallway, Daisy stroked her hand on the high dome of her belly, a fortune-teller reading her crystal ball. "I'll catch up." To make a life with her boyfriend, she would have to graduate from high school, pass the entrance exams, and apply to Cal. If she found him, if she got in, his parents could look after the baby while they both attended school. If, if, if. Unlike Scarlett, Daisy wasn't worrying about their basic survival—a privilege the teenager had from birth, a privilege she wasn't even aware of having. Daisy hung a flyer beside a bright yellow leaflet with perforated tabs. She tore one off, explaining it listed an information session for financial aid and scholarships. "Can't your parents pay?" Scarlett asked. "My parents!" Daisy couldn't hide her scorn. She could never trust them again. She'd been sent to Perfume Bay not only to give her son citizenship, but also to conceal her pregnancy. Her father had been appointed to a high government post, and he didn't want the scandal public. If she returned to Taiwan, her parents would send her to boarding school, keeping her apart from William, and she would become a stranger to her baby. They would adopt her son and expect her to refer to him as her brother. If she refused, they'd find a way to take him and then disown her, she said. They'd lie to the authorities just like they'd lied to William and his family, and lie to her son, turning him against her. She couldn't depend on her younger sister for help. She had been the one to spot Daisy's bump and gleefully inform their parents; her sister had always resented Daisy for telling her what to do. She resented Daisy's U.S. citizenship and its bright prospects, and she'd resent Daisy's son, too, pinching and taunting him in secret. "They failed me," Daisy said. "I won't let them fail my baby." She stroked her belly, her fierce expression softening. She stopped a student in a striped button-down with rolled-up sleeves and asked in Mandarin, "Do you know William Wan?" He clutched the strap of his backpack, slung over his shoulder, and replied hesitantly in the same dialect. "Excuse me?" Scarlett was relieved. She'd taken English classes off and on for years, nights and weekends, methods that ranged from yelling vocabulary at the top of her lungs to falling asleep listening to cassette tapes. After she met Boss Yeung and her diligence wavered, much of her English had faded into static. If Daisy had switched into English, Scarlett would have been left in the dark. "William Wan. He's Chinese. About your height," Daisy said. He laughed. "That describes most of us." She narrowed her eyes. "You can't tell the difference between us?" She and Scarlett were about the same height. She had a point, but Scarlett wanted to pull her aside and advise her that the biting tone did her no favors. Then again, with her spirit, Daisy swayed men as Scarlett never could. "Do you have a picture? Maybe I'd recognize him," he asked. "He has a mole under his right eye. His hair is short and spiky." He eyed Daisy's belly and asked for a flyer. "If I meet someone by that name, I'll give this to him." After he left, Daisy sagged, feisty when granted an opponent, lost without one. In the lobby of the building, they discovered that the flyers had been torn down. She poked her head into the nearest office. The receptionist glared at Daisy, they argued, and as the woman reached for the phone, Daisy slunk out. "Flyers need a stamp from the Student Affairs Office—no exceptions," Daisy fumed to Scarlett. They stopped in the restroom, where their reflections startled Scarlett. She was still getting used to her shaggy bob streaked auburn. She sat on the toilet and sighed, resting her swollen feet squeezed into cheap canvas sneakers. She studied the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom door, the phone numbers and names and words whose letters she could identify and sound out but whose meaning she couldn't decipher. Short of standing in the school plaza with a sandwich board and a bullhorn, Daisy couldn't get a message to her boyfriend. Unless—the graffiti. Here she could add her plea to a captive audience. In block letters, at eye level, where dozens of students would see it each day. No—not here—not in the women's bathroom. The men's. Above the urinals and in the stalls. A slim chance, but the only chance Daisy might have to get past the school's censors. In the men's room across the hall, they shouted hello, hello before pushing open the door—empty. While Scarlett stood guard, Daisy left her mark with a Sharpie that squeaked on the metal and tile, her desperation beating out little staccato thumps. Daisy burst through the door with a kung fu kick. She was beaming. Petty vandalism revived her as no prenatal vitamin ever could. Beautiful and fiery as she must have been the night she met her boyfriend. She raised her leg again, poised to kick in every door in the hallway, thunderbolts thrown by a goddess giving birth to the world.