When A-Yip first hires Jenny, the cart-pushers pitch a fit. She better not get my cart, A-Mui says, and the other cart-pushers nod along because A-Mui pushes the best cart, the one with the har gao and the siu mai and the cheong fun. A-Mui has worked at Dim Sum Palace for years, and she has the gnarled hands to prove it. Sometimes when service is slow, she’ll walk over to the podium where I’m playing hostess and point out the freckles and liver spots staining the backs of her hands. Here’s where A-Yip splashed me with hot oil back when he was just a cook. Doesn’t the shape look like a dancing bunny? She’ll say this with a crackly laugh, and it’ll make me feel as if I’m nine years old and listening to Po-Po warn me about the wu lei zing and what foxes can do to soft things, rather than nineteen years old and ferrying diners to their tables. I’m here to save up for a car. Vehicular freedom, I tell Jenny when I learn she’s actually being brought on as a bartender. She winks at me when I say this, her mascara flaking along the swell of her under-eye fat, and I have to stop myself from reaching out to smudge away the spots of darkness.
It’s easy becoming Jenny’s friend. After her first week, we exchange nods after our shifts. Sometimes, men will wait outside and ask for her number. She never gives it away, not even to the handsome ones, and I begin to wonder. One night, we share a cigarette, and I spend the entire walk home with my fingers plugged into my nostrils, inhaling the image of our hands tangled around a winking flame.
Still, A-Mui and the other cart-pushers continue to avoid Jenny, and the reason for this is simple: she looks exactly like Fan Bingbing, and no one at Dim Sum Palace is even allowed to mention Fan Bingbing’s name. Last year, A-Mui’s husband left America to avoid being jailed for tax evasion. According to the rumors, he’s now in Guangzhou, happily living with a woman who could also pass for Fan Bingbing. When news broke that the real Fan Bingbing evaded taxes too, A-Mui sobbed so loudly her voice cracked around Fan Bingbing’s name. Like dinner plates underneath heavy boots, one of the cart-pushers said, and I agreed with my entire chest. Since then, A-Yip hasn’t projected a single Fan Bingbing movie onto the dining-area screen.
Today I’m explaining this to Jenny because we’re early for our shifts. Don’t take it personally, I’m saying, and A-Mui must hear us, because she comes out of nowhere. New girl thinks she can work here without knowing Cantonese, she says loudly in bent Mandarin. Her tongue is trouble.
The thing is Jenny’s tongue can curl itself around Cantonese just fine. She just hasn’t used it behind the bar yet, but I can tell she’s about to use it now. She gives me a sticky look, then begins to say my name: Bunny, she says, her lips folding over the syllables. A-Mui glares at her, but Jenny pretends not to notice, only pitches her voice louder: Tou zai, she says, and Little Rabbit has never sounded so good, so clipped. Hong Kong Cantonese is like that; it hits you in the throat. Makes you shift the vowels around in your mouth. Finally, Jenny says it sideways: 討債. She laughs loud like a mainlander, and just like that, my name transforms into a debt that demands to be paid.
A-Mui is furious for the rest of the day. That girl, she whispers to the cart-pushers. She’s trouble. I try to ignore the chatter, but Jenny does a better job. She doesn’t leave her spot from behind the bar throughout her entire shift, not even to pee.
Jenny finds me once I’m closing up. She has a stick of gum in her mouth, and I can hear her tonguing it as I check the locks. I’m thinking about whether she still has to go, whether she’s relieved herself yet, when suddenly she tugs on my wrist and twists me around.
Up close, all I know is her mouth, the way it looks and smells: watermelon and pink and wide, as if she’s been slivering through slices. When I was young, I used to swallow watermelon seeds whole. I’m swallowing your moles! I’d tell Po-Po, and she’d laugh and place my fingers along her neck, still beaded black and flecked with skin tags. An old person’s necklace, she’d say, and I want to tell Jenny this—Jenny with her half-open mouth, the inside of it darker than any watermelon seed I’ve ever swallowed, all lined with gravestone teeth—I want to tell her that I want her the way the men waiting outside want her; I want to ask her if she wants to make out behind the parking lot; I want to press my face against the thick brocade of her cocktail vest and pretend I can lick my way through the fabric to find a nipple, yet another dark and hard thing that I’m not supposed to swallow.
Is this what A-Mui feared? The part where Jenny takes my hand. The part where I stare into her mouth. The part where I want to run away inside her. A fox’s mouth fits perfectly around soft things, Po-Po used to say.
Bunny, Jenny says. The darkness jellies her eyes, and she presses our bellies together until they kiss. Let’s watch a Fan Bingbing movie.
What else can I say other than sure? I nuzzle into Jenny’s armpit and smell summer’s heat. When she laughs, the sound freckles the air like hot oil dancing along my skin, and I wonder what shapes Jenny will make on me tonight. I wonder if, one day, I can point out the spots where she’ll stain.
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