Page 7 of Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)

“Oh, Yunnan!” Vera switches to Mandarin. “My dear, I’m from China too. I had some relatives in Yunnan, we used to visit in the springtime. The fruits there are beautiful. The soil is so rich there. I can still smell the fragrance of the mushrooms we went picking this one morning…”

Millie is swept away by Vera’s words. She knows exactly what Vera is talking about. Yunnan is indeed blessed with rich, fertile land that rewards its people with an abundance of glorious fruits and vegetables. Grapes so sweet they taste like candy, and green beans that are tight and bursting with flavor. Mushrooms that are fat and tender and smell like rich broth. Tears fill her eyes once more. God, how she misses home.

“What brings you here, child?”

“Work,” Millie says, and she’s so glad to be speaking Mandarin once again. It’s been so long since she’s been able to speak her mother tongue. “My family has a farm back home, but it’s been given to my brothers. I have nothing to my name, and my parents wanted me to get married, but I was scared, so I chose to come here. They said there would be good work to be found here.”

“Oh, good for you,” Vera says. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, I can see that. You shouldn’t have to get married just because your parents were too shortsighted to let you take care of part of the family farm.”

I don’t have a good head on my shoulders, Millie wants to say,but the lump in her throat is once again too large, and anyway, she isn’t here to talk about her head or her shoulders.

“And why were you standing outside of the police station?” Vera says, her voice gentle. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Me? No. Of course not.” Has she said that too quickly? Does she look guilty now? And anyway, she has no idea what she should tell Vera. She’d been at the police station because—well, she’s not sure why she was there in the first place. Maybe because she’d just felt so lost, so devoid of hope. But now that she’s here in this teahouse with this strange woman, Millie is at a loss. She can’t just come out and tell Vera the truth. Or can she? No, definitely not. Oh god, she’s hesitated for too long now. Vera is looking shrewdly at her like she knows exactly what’s going through Millie’s head, and she’s been silent for too long. She needs to say something, anything. Millie swallows, then says, “It’s my friend. He’s missing, and I think something bad has happened to him.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Millie wishes she could kick herself. That was quite possibly the worst thing she could have told Vera.

Vera’s entire body perks up like a meerkat. “Tell me everything.”

Even though this is the first time Millie has met Vera, she somehow knows that there is very little point in trying to hide things from her. She can’t possibly tell Vera the truth, so she’s just going to have to make it up as she goes along.

•••

Thomas was one of the first people Millie had met when she arrived in America. They’d been shuffled into one large group of extremely exhausted, bedraggled people, and Millie was soscared. She’d been convinced that she’d made a grave mistake, and she was shivering with fear and tiredness. Then something warm was draped across her shoulders, and when she looked up, there he was. He said something in a language she didn’t recognize, and at her look of confusion, he switched to English.

“You look cold. You take jacket.”

She tried to take it off—she knew the dangers of owing strangers a debt—but Thomas placed his hand over her arm, just for a second, and said, “You take jacket.”

“Thank you,” she said. Her English was terrible, but so was his, and she felt an immediate kinship between them. “I am Millie.”

“I am Thomas.”

What a nice name. It suited him though, this kind-looking stranger with a thick foreign accent. “I am from China,” Millie said.

“China, I have always want to go. I am from Indonesia.”

“Oh, I have always want to go there too.”

They smiled at each other, smiles that were weighed down because they both knew they would never have a chance to visit each other’s countries.

Their rooms ended up being on the same floor, and though their work didn’t much overlap, they always found pockets of time to spend with each other. Millie would often come back to her room to find a small plastic bag hanging from her doorknob. The bag would contain little treasures, like a Hershey’s chocolate bar (her favorite was cookies ‘n’ creme) or a keychain that spelled out her name or a mug with a teddy bear resting on top of its handle.

“So, he was your boyfriend?” Vera says.

“No!” Millie says, again too quickly. She was in love with him, but she knew they would never work for a million reasons.

“Tch,” Vera tuts. “I don’t know why you young people always overthink these things. If you find a boy sexy, just tell him!”

Anyway…

She was in love with him, but there were many reasons why they couldn’t be together, and she knew that, which was why she never told him how she truly felt. All she did was return the kind gestures with little offerings of her own. And they were always finding ways of hanging out with each other, mostly on the roof of their building. They’d sit there and watch the glimmering lights of the city and come up with impossible dreams.

“I want to bring you to Fisherman’s Wharf one day,” Thomas had said at one point.

“I don’t see what so special about wharf.” Millie had had enough of wharfs and piers and all that. She’d seen plenty of them on her way here, and they had all been highly unpleasant experiences.

“Ah, but this is a tourist place. Tourists come from all over the world to see it.” They’d been getting English lessons every day, and Thomas was improving a lot faster than she was. His Indonesian accent had gone from a thick one to a mere musical lilt. She missed it. She missed everything about the boy she’d met her first day here. Sometimes, Millie felt like she was watching Thomas slip right through her fingers. He was getting to be so good at what he did. Much better than her, anyway. Soon, he would be promoted, or maybe he’d have saved enough money to get his own place. The dream.

Millie shook off the lonely, awful thought and fixed her eyes to an awe-inspiring structure in the distance. “I rather see Golden Gate Bridge.” Everything in San Francisco promised wealth. InMandarin, San Francisco is called Jin Shan, which translates to Gold Mountain, named during the Gold Rush, when so many Chinese immigrants had been drafted into mining for gold. No doubt a few of Millie’s ancestors had come too. She wondered what their lives had been like, if they’d had it as rough as—no. Stupid girl. How could she even compare their hardships to hers? Hers was nothing compared to theirs, to the horrors that they had to go through. “Tell me about Indonesia,” she’d ask Thomas.

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