The Wangs vs. the World (21 page)

Behind him was Andrew, so much bigger now than when he’d last been in that same seat. He scrubbed at her lovely carpet with his dirty sneakered feet and scattered bits of paper inked all over with nonsensical notes. And every time, as soon as he got inside, he placed his metal-cased phone directly on her seat, not caring that the little devil box got hotter and hotter as he continued to use it.

Next to Andrew, in her right rear seat, was the worst of all—his little sister, Grace. The girl was the one who started the abuse, using some sort of tacky blue substance to stick torn magazine pages onto her pristine doors and mashing the glue right into the holes in her perforated leather upholstery. It would probably never come out, even if by some miracle Jeffie reappeared and took a needle to it, as he once had when a baby Andrew spilled his bottle of formula across her entire rear flank.

She supposed that they had to make a home out of her somehow. That they—

Wait.
She had almost forgotten what was in the front passenger seat clouding her air with some sort of cloying scent: the interloper, the carpetbagger, the stepmother. The one self-named Barbra, who had covered her window with a scarf, though a bit of darkening in the sun could only have improved that ugly face.

This was her lot now. Disgrace, meted out in asphalt miles. Her engine shuddered once, twice, but, ever loyal, she continued eastward, onward, always forward, with Charles’s heavy foot depressing her gas pedal and draining her insides.

二十三
I-10 East

“KAI CHE bu yao ting dian hua,”
said Barbra.

Charles ignored her and stabbed at the voicemail button on his phone. He wasn’t a child. He could hold a phone and drive at the same time. He could eat and drive, read the paper and drive, shave and drive. He could even pat his head and rub his belly at the same time, something that used to send Andrew and Grace into shrieks of laughter when they were little, though he wasn’t sure why the activity was in such high demand.

The first message: “Hello, Charles, hello.” (Pause.) “It’s Lydia. Grant spoke to me, I’m very sorry to hear about your company’s (pause) difficulties. I do hope it hasn’t been too (pause)
difficult
for the family. And I hope that we’ll see you and your wife next week at our fall dinner.” (Pause.) “And I’d like to thank you for your generous support of the Gardens over the years, and your continued generous support. It’s very kind.” (Pause.) “OkaywellIhopethewholefamily’sdoingwellgoodbyenowgoodbye.”

Oh, the anxious, aging wives of his white business associates, fingers weighted down with diamonds, constantly tittering on about how busy they were with this committee meeting and that school event, all the while shedding pretty tears for dark-skinned children in distant countries. Charles loved being around them. They flattered him like concubines, wheedling checks for orphans in Burma or wells in Namibia, angling for ever-larger donations of cosmetics to put on the block at one of the endless silent auctions for their children’s private schools. Nothing made him feel better than tossing off a check that elicited a breathy gasp of pleasure from one of the wives. Charles remembered the one he’d written for Liddy’s dinner. $5,000 a plate. $10,000 for Barbra and him. Well, someone else was going to eat his share of ahi poke or steak roulade or summer trifle or whatever the absurdly fashionable food of the moment happened to be.

Having money made things so
easy.
Ease. That’s what he was born for. By rights, Charles Wang never should have had to doubt the state of his accounts, not for a single moment of his life. By rights, he should have had an ancient kingdom at his feet—if the tide had not been turned by history, who knew how vast his family’s holdings would now be?

Second message. “Wang Gege! You don’t call, you don’t email!”
My email got impounded,
thought Charles,
along with everything else.
“Are you switching sides on me, hmm? I’m still counting on your support this November, Wang, don’t forget it. You promised to show up with those models on your arm, Gege. I’m waiting for them. That’ll spring some wallets open, eh?” Little Mark Shen. The bastard had squirmed his way into Charles Wang’s life by wielding a city council seat in Vernon, that tiny municipal fiefdom where Charles’s largest warehouse and factory was located. Except that it wasn’t his anymore. Someone else could war with that joke of a city, that gutter-and-ash city, about taxes and permissions and inane regulations that were really just bald attempts to rout more cash out of the pockets of honest businessmen. All the campaign contributions that he had given bowlegged Mark Shen were pointless now.

Charles tried not to think about it, but there was a relentless adding machine in his mind that refused to stop its guilty tally of all his unnecessary expenses: the campaign contributions—not just to Shen but also to California’s governator and anyone who looked like they might have a chance of becoming mayor of Los Angeles; the donations to charities that meant more to the people running them than to the people they were supposed to help; the tables that he’d taken at dinners; the membership to a country club when he didn’t even want to strike a ball across artificial lawns with a stick; the bottles of wine and whiskey ordered to show that $500, $1,000, $10,000 meant nothing to him. Wasn’t money supposed to beget money? So how did all of his mighty dollars shrink up and cross their legs and refuse to breed anymore? If only he could claw it all back. Rewind to that moment before some fireball of greed and ambition and catastrophic self-confidence made him stray from the sure path that he’d been on for so many years.

Safe and sure.

Bravery was for fools.

Third message. “Hey, Mr. Wang. Just calling to say that we got your email and that’s cool, if you’re fixing to come visit us, we’ll be here. Uh, we definitely weren’t expecting it, but it would be an honor, sir, to have you come in person. We’ll see you all in a few days. Oh, this is Trip. BTW. You know, by the way. Yeah. Okay. Have a good drive.” At least there was that. The cases of product in the bread box of a trailer that bumped along behind them, occasionally threatening to fishtail the car. Maybe they would be the start of something, a huge lifestyle brand that would overtake Martha and magnolia scent the world. And it would all be because he’d rescued their dreams from the detritus of his Failure—it would be the perfect comeback story.

Charles focused on the road in front of him. At some point the landscape had started to shift from the red dirt of New Mexico to the scrub flats of West Texas. Benighted lands, both of them.

His phone rang; his lawyer’s name flashed across the screen. With a sneaky glance at Barbra, who wrinkled her forehead and turned away, he picked it up.

“Hello, I am driving. Is there anything?”

“How’s the road trip?”

This lawyer was always bombarding Charles with pleasantries when he should have been figuring out how to reinstate the Wangs’ lost acres. They continued in Mandarin.

“I pay you six hundred dollars an hour. It would cost me too much to tell you about it. Do you have any news?”

A laugh. “Well, we’re not sure what this means yet, but it looks like you never left.”

“What? Where?”

“Home. China.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, really, but we have obtained a copy of your identification record. Wang Da Qian, age fifty-six, born at 7:35 a.m. on March 14, 1952, parents Wang Wen Xi and Chong Jie—you’re still there.”

“Impossible!”

“You’re a Communist Party member—”

“How can that be?”

“You have three children. And a wife named Mei Li.”

“But I do have those. That is me. Who else could it be?”

“Don’t lose heart; we’ll figure it out. I have a colleague in Beijing looking into it; we’ll surely be able to know if this is just some sort of paperwork issue.”

“But the land?”

“You must have patience, Mr. Wang. China’s not like America. Things take time.”

“It’s been weeks!”

“And we are edging forward. You don’t clap your hands and make things happen over there. We have colleagues who help us, but it—”

“Alright, alright. Enough. I expect more next time we connect. You know, my colleague, he had only good words to say about you.”

“Mr. Wang, this could turn into a long journey. The government won’t be handing land out. There is no set reclamation process. There are no guarantees of any sort. Even with last year’s new property law that you’re so hopeful about, nothing is straightforward. I cannot say what will happen if you insist on going to China.”

“I know all of that. I don’t expect you to be able to figure out how to proceed—I’ll take care of that. Your job is to give me all of the information I need to formulate a plan. Be sure that you know more than I do the next time we talk.”

When Charles hung up the phone, Barbra was staring at him.

“The
land? 
”

He kept his eyes on the road.

All his life, the land in China had been a promise. Starting back before he could even remember, his father’s friends had gathered nightly around the mah-jongg table, cracking melon seeds, drinking tumblers of
gao liang,
and talking about the land in China. Later, through all the long, humid evenings in Taipei, as he did homework in the next room, their big words had floated in and settled all around him: “We’ll get back the land in China,” they reassured each other. “We’ll go back and demand it.”
Qu ba di yao huei lai.
That’s what they told themselves, those displaced men who had once ruled a continent and were now exiled to an island—
the landinChina, the landinChina, the landinChina,
until it became a promise that seeped into little Wang Da Qian’s very bones.

Could they have been wrong?

Or were they so right that he was there already, living out another temblor of his fault-lined life?

“
Ah bao,
what is ‘the land’?”

He didn’t want to tell her. Barbra knew, of course. He’d talked about it before often enough, but he didn’t want to tell her now that the last of their money, his money, had gone to hire this lawyer who might prove, somehow, that the land was still part of the Wangs. The Nazis had to return looted artworks—why shouldn’t the Communist Party return looted birthrights?

“Is this about your such-a-big-deal family, hmm? I tell you before, there is no way you get anything back from the government!”

His wife was never easy to ignore, but Charles kept his lips pressed shut and his eyes on the road. Barbra couldn’t understand because she had never had anything. Not really. She grew up in school housing—a single shared room with bedrolls spread every night, showering next to the janitor’s kids—and had barely left that meager house before she slipped right into his bed.

If you never have anything, you can never lose anything.

Charles tried to think of an analogy Barbra would understand. What if, he imagined telling her, what if all the Persian kids in Beverly Hills torched their Ferraris and smashed their bottles of Dior Homme before joining the Taliban? What if they marched through the city and snatched up properties, pulling you onto the street and calling you a godless capitalist pig, kicking you with feet still clad in the tasseled Prada loafers they couldn’t bear to relinquish? Wasn’t your house still rightfully yours? Wouldn’t you want it back after they were inevitably vanquished by some makeshift Arizona militia? And wouldn’t you just burn with anger at the thought of the state taking ownership of your property after the rebels had been routed? At a ragtag bunch of false politicians trying to build a new America on your hard-won acres?

Of course. And you would be right to feel that way. Everyone would think so. Your wife would support your every effort to regain that home instead of insulting your family and turning up an unappreciative little nose at your goals.

“Big deal, small deal. You would not know the difference,” he said, defiant.

“What do you mean?”

Charles shrugged his lip.

He wanted to say it.

He didn’t want to say it.

He said it: “You can’t understand this! I give you everything you have! You never have to worry about anything!”

Barbra stared at him, eyes big. Her nostrils widened as she breathed in.

Now he couldn’t stop, didn’t even want to. “You think all I want is the land, the land,
the land?
No! The land is important because it is Wang
jia de!
Part of the family—”

“And because my family is poor we—”

“You don’t know what it is like.”

They stared at each other until Charles had to turn his eyes back to the road. It wasn’t just the Wangs’ land that mattered, it was all of China, every road he’d never trod, every mountain he’d never climbed, every monument he’d never beheld, every bush he’d never pissed behind—it all should have been his.

His parents and their friends had created an island within an island, a mini-China in Taiwan, but that wasn’t enough. They were a colony of escaped mainlanders who never accepted their lives among the people who had no choice but to give them refuge; they spoke their home dialects and taught their children the geography of an unseen motherland, taught it so well that Charles knew he could have driven from the wilds of Xinjiang to the docks of Shanghai without so much as glancing at a map.

In the rearview mirror, both of his children sat staring at the windows, pretending not to listen.

Outside, the alien desert unfurled itself in all directions. Punctuating the endless interstate were fading billboards for strip clubs and churches. As they passed the city limits of Van Horn, Texas, a brand-new billboard lit by a row of spotlights that managed to shine even in the midday sun screamed
PATRIOTS UNITE! SECURE OUR BORDERS!
, black block letters on a billowing flag.

America was a great deceptor. Land of Opportunity. Golden Mountain. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But inside those pretty words, between the pretty coasts, was this: Miles and miles of narrow-minded know-nothings who wanted no more out of life than an excuse to cock their AK-47s and take arms against a sea of troubles. A Great Wall? Ha! This country could never build itself anything as epic as that. America wanted to think of itself as a creator, but all it could do was destroy—fortunes, families, lives. Even the railroads needed the Chinese to come and build them.