Telling American dream stories, in these times, feels like a fraught endeavor. As our national posture toward immigrants has shifted to snarling animosity, it raises a fundamental question about the centuries-old tale America has told about itself: Can we still talk about this country as a land of untrammeled opportunity, where one can arrive, gradually thrive and hope for an even brighter future for one’s children?

“A River of Stars,” constructed squarely on that narrative frame, says: decidedly yes. In this debut novel by Vanessa Hua, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Scarlett Chen, pregnant with her lover’s (and factory boss’) child, leaves China for the first time on a trip to a maternity center in Los Angeles filled with similarly gravid Chinese women, waiting to give birth there so their children may gain “the most precious gift of all: American citizenship.” Scarlett, ambivalent about her impending delivery, escapes the oppressive place with a Taiwanese American teenager named Daisy and finds a way to San Francisco’s Chinatown.

“A River of Stars’ “ most satisfying moments come as Scarlett and Daisy build a life there from practically nothing, as they navigate the unglamorous logistics of giving birth, caring for newborns, making rent and an income, and attempting to fix Scarlett’s papers after she overstays her visa. It’s a grinding existence, softened by brief, transcendent scenes where the two discover the small wonders of San Francisco through their babies’ eyes. “It was a riddle Scarlett still hadn’t solved: how small her life had become, parenthood confining as a swaddle, everything a blur except for a few meters around her, and yet how infinite, how intense the universe now seemed.”

Hua spends time with many characters, whose dealings lend the novel the spice of family intrigue, a reminder of the inescapability of blood ties, and at least three secret illegitimate children. But her prose plunges us most completely into Scarlett’s mind, a kaleidoscopic, synesthetic experience, relatable and yet remote, as her thoughts flicker over the sights and smells of Chinatown, old memories and astringent remarks on American culture.

“Nothing signified your wealth and refinement more than dining on toy-sized food,” Scarlett notes, before capitalizing on this observation by selling hanbaobao, a sort of Chinese slider, to selfie-snapping San Franciscans.

But the book’s more dramatic touches strain the reader’s suspension of disbelief. “A River of Stars” takes its name and its cues from a well-known Chinese legend: Two lovers, a weaver girl and a lowly cowherd, are tragically separated by the Milky Way, meeting only once a year when a flock of magpies forms a bridge between them. It’s a pretty, sweeping tale, but its elements in the novel are saccharine next to the gritty facts of single, undocumented motherhood in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods (Hua, admirably, interviewed inhabitants of Chinatown and Chinese factory towns for the book). Scarlett’s lover, Boss Yeung, ailing from a rare, debilitating blood disease, spends the novel searching for her in a haze of devotion and self-recrimination for not treating Scarlett with more care while they were together.

A River of Stars By Vanessa Hua (Ballantine; 292 pages; $27)

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By the end, the story’s various threads resolve in a decidedly upbeat celebration of the ingenuity of Chinese immigrants and, by extension, all who come to the States with everything to gain. But its fairy-tale tidiness is also oddly disappointing. It delivers the niggling sense that things don’t quite work out that way in real life, and that the gulf between fantasy and reality is vast indeed.

Chelsea Leu is a researcher and writer at Wired. Email: books@sfchronicle.com