Three
MILLIE
Millie’s mind is a mess. Granted, it’s been this way for a while now. Ever since she came to this place. Everything feels a bit like a dream. No, a nightmare. There’s such a sense of surrealness about life, as though she were standing behind herself, watching herself going through the motions every day. Sometimes, Millie can barely remember her own name. Millie , she reminds herself every morning, as she gazes into her cracked mirror. I am Millie. Just go through the motions, and you’ll be okay.
Except now she’s not going through the motions. She’s going through something else. Something entirely unexpected, and Millie doesn’t know what to do. Mother and Father don’t like unexpected. They’ve explained to her many times that unexpected is bad. She watched in the past week as they explained this to her little sister Mina. She’d nodded and agreed with them about the dangers of the unknown and how they should always, always play it safe.
But this strange old lady has taken Millie by the hand, and Millie could probably yank her hand out of her grasp and run away, if Millie wanted to. And she should, really. But there’s something about this old lady that reminds Millie of her grandmother, her nainai back home, and Millie can’t imagine doing anything as horrible as pulling her hand away from her grandmother. And anyway, the old lady promised her tea, and Millie really wants tea. And maybe unexpected is bad, but how bad can it be when it includes a little old lady? Little old ladies are known for being harmless.
And so Millie lets the strange old lady lead her down the streets of San Francisco to Chinatown, past numerous grocery shops and cake shops, where everyone calls out to the old lady and she waves back at them. It’s clear that whoever she is, the woman is a beloved part of the community, and again, Millie gets the sensation that she’s outside of her own body, watching this scene play out before her. She can almost hear background music, something light and playful to serenade this scene. In a past life, Millie used to be a beloved part of a neighborhood. She thinks. She can’t be sure. Everything is such a blur these days.
The woman stops suddenly, and Millie almost bumps into her. She looks up at the huge sign above the door as the woman takes out her keys. Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse . Millie’s eyes widen and she stares at the woman. To think, she is with the famous dress designer herself. Her mouth goes dry. Should she curtsy? She should definitely curtsy.
Vera opens the door and glances over her shoulder at Millie, then frowns. “What you doing?”
“Miss Wang, it is such an honor to meet you.”
Vera looks confused for a second, then she laughs. “Oh! No, no, I’m not that fashion lady. I’m just Vera Wong, tea expert and crime solver.”
Millie straightens up. Now she feels stupid. Of course it wouldn’t have been Vera Wang the dress designer. Why would Vera Wang own a teahouse in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown? Stupid, stupid. This is why they get angry with Millie so often. Why she gets punished so much. And why, after so many years of working for them, she still owes them so much.
“Come, come. Why you stand outside?” Vera calls out.
Millie blinks, gives herself a little shake, and steps inside the shop gingerly. Her breath catches in her throat as she takes in her surroundings. Has she stepped into a magical place? The walls are painted in colors so rich and vivid that she can practically smell them. She’s transported into a starry night in Shanghai—she’s only ever been to Shanghai once, but she was kept in the dark for most of that day, and then she’d left the country altogether, so she doesn’t think it counts, not really, and anyway, this is a very different Shanghai. There is a boathouse and people spilling out of it, laughing, drinks in hand. Red lanterns adorn the boat and the waters around it, and the scene is so beautiful Millie can only stop and stare.
“Very good, isn’t it?” Vera says from behind the counter. “My niece draw it, you know. Very talented artist. She is in such high demand now, I tell her, Sana, don’t keep coming to visit me, you must be so busy. But she says, Auntie Vera, you are most important person in my life, of course I must come visit you always.” She laughs to herself as she measures out some ingredients into a teapot. “Oh, that Sana.”
Millie feels an inexplicable surge of envy toward this Sana, a complete stranger she’s never met, and yet already, she knows Sana must be everything she’s not. Sana is ultra-confident and has never known what it is like to hate herself with so much passion that she wants to peel her skin off. She also feels jealous because Sana has an aunt like Vera. Millie has the feeling that if she had an aunt like Vera, she wouldn’t be in the mess she’s currently in.
“Sit,” Vera commands, and Millie’s body listens without consulting her brain. Vera then bustles out from behind the counter with a tray of accoutrements. As Millie watches in wonderment, Vera brews her tea just like her nainai used to, pouring scalding hot water all over the teacups and then throwing out the water. She smiles at Millie as the tea steeps, then lifts the tiny teapot daintily and pours it into four teacups. “Two each,” Vera says. “Come, you drink while is hot.”
Millie does so and then has to stop because tears have filled her eyes. She sits there, blinking rapidly, begging her tear ducts to quit doing whatever they’re doing. Vera pretends not to notice, sipping her tea with exaggerated enjoyment.
“Dried candied winter melon peel with goji berries and rose petals. I make the candied winter melon peel myself, you know,” Vera says. “With my granddaughter Emma. Oh, she eat half of it before I manage to stop her.”
Millie swallows the knot in her throat and takes another sip. “You have such a big family here,” she says finally.
Instead of agreeing, Vera gives her a strange look before smiling. “Yes, I do, don’t I? Now, you tell me what is your name and why you act so strangely.”
She really shouldn’t be here. She should run. Drop this teacup and just bolt out of here. But there’s something about Vera that makes going against her not just hard but nearly impossible. “My name is Millie,” Millie says.
“Millie,” Vera says, nodding with approval. “Where are you from, Millie?”
“Yunnan,” Millie says.
“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 so scared. 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. In Mandarin, 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.
“You know how you have siu mai?” Thomas would say.
Yes, of course she did.
“Well, we have it too. We call it siomay Bandung, but ours is flat and made of shrimp and fish paste. No pork, because most of the country is Muslim. And we serve it with spicy peanut sauce. Like satay sauce.”
It sounded delicious. She’d lose herself in his words, wondering if there would come a day when he’d be able to take her to his hometown, where she’d eat Indonesian food and marvel at how similar and yet different it was to Chinese food. Everything about Thomas was like that—similar but different.
···
“Wah, this sounds very delicious,” Vera says. “Wait, what are they called again? Siomay Bandung? I must ask Riki why he’s never mentioned them to me, that silly boy.”
Millie doesn’t have the heart to tell Vera she’s kind of interrupting her story. She watches obediently as Vera taps a message into her phone. It’s a painstaking process; Vera types with just her index finger, muttering the words as she does so.
“Riki—why you—don’t—tell me—about—Siomay—Bandung? Silly—boy. There.” Vera puts down her phone and looks up at Millie. “Sorry, where were we? Oh my, look at the time. You better hurry and tell me the juicy details before the shop is crowded with customers. It’s a very happening place these days, you know. Now, tell me, what happened to this Thomas?”
“Well I—that’s just it. I don’t know,” Millie cries. Her entire face feels like it’s burning. “The last few months or so, Thomas has been so different. Glued to his phone. Even when we spent time with each other, he’d be checking his phone most of the time and smiling to himself. I think maybe he met someone.” Her voice almost breaks then. “But he wouldn’t tell me who. He didn’t tell me anything. He just said, ‘Millie, it’s all about building the life you want for yourself. Fake it till you make it.’?”
“This is actually not bad advice,” Vera says. “Okay, so you said he went missing? When was this?”
Millie kicks herself inwardly for the millionth time. Why had she said that to Vera? “Um. Well, I don’t know, he might’ve just left…”
“Okay, when was the last time you saw him?”
“Three nights ago.”
“And he didn’t say anything to you?”
Millie shakes her head.
“How about his apartment? Have you checked where he lives?”
“Oh, um…” Millie thinks hard. “Sure. Yeah, um, there’s someone else living there.”
“You mean there’s a squatter in his apartment?”
Millie shakes her head. “Someone else has moved in.”
“Just one day after your friend went missing?” Vera says. “Even for the Bay Area, that’s pretty fast. Did you ask your landlord about it?”
Millie’s insides clam up. “Um, sort of. They said he told them he wouldn’t be back.”
Vera narrows her eyes in that way of hers that’s starting to become familiar to Millie. Behind her glasses, her eyes are sharp and shrewd. “Why didn’t you report it to the police? I was just there reporting this scam that I—well, I wouldn’t say I fell for it, but I became involved in a phone scam—well, not involved as a guilty party. Okay, I fell for a phone scam, and that was why I was at the police station, and they were very helpful.”
Oh god. She knew it. She knew she’d made a mistake coming here. “I—I can’t. I tried, but I—there are things that I can’t…”
“Hmm.” Vera regards her for a moment, watching as she flails. Then she says, “You know, Millie, over the past year, I got to know a bunch of people. Young people, like you. And, oh my, the things they were hiding. Well, they thought they were very bad things, things worth keeping secret until their hearts festered with it. To be honest with you, their secrets were really quite tame. So, whatever it is you’re hiding, I’m sure it’s not that bad. Can’t be as bad as murder, eh?”
Millie’s mouth opens and closes like a fish on land. She certainly feels like a beached fish. “It’s not murder,” she manages to say.
“Of course not. What does this Thomas look like?”
Millie finds a photo of him on her phone and shows it to Vera. It is of her and Thomas, hanging out in his room. She’s sitting on his bed and he’s sitting on the floor, and they both look so young and so happy.
“What a handsome boy. You don’t often see such K-pop good looks,” Vera says. “All right, don’t you worry, child. I’ll take care of this. I solved a murder case last year, you know. I’m practically a detective by now. And I have access to information most people don’t.”
Millie doesn’t dare ask how an old teahouse owner like Vera has access to any sort of sensitive information, unless said information has to do with tea. All she does is give a weak nod and hope that she hasn’t just spilled the tea to the wrong person.