The Wangs vs. the World (26 page)

Nash followed Charles’s gaze. “Dorrie Van Sleyd. She’s still living in her family’s old plantation house as well, though half of hers is open to snap-happy tourists at the weekend. Maybe that’s what I should be considering.”

Charles turned his attention back to Nash. His friend. His compatriot. Proud member of a dwindling southern aristocracy made up of Anglophiles and drunks. If the world had continued the way it should have, if Charles had stayed in the China he was meant for, he never would have met Nash almost thirty years ago, when this brother in arms was one of the only white men living on a tree-lined block of Monterey Park in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley.

Charles and May Lee had moved to the San Gabriel Valley because, to Charles’s great surprise, they were about to have a baby. No question, that baby had to speak Chinese as well as she ever spoke the bastard English, so the Wangs, back when there were just three of them, made their first home in a sunburned suburb that had the advantage of being close to both Charles’s first factory and an ever-growing spread of dim sum emporiums and noodle houses brought in by a new influx of immigrants.

As for Nash, Nash was a budding China scholar in the midst of his PhD slog at USC, hoping to pick up the language by immersion and looking forward to the day that he would get a China studies professorship and a lovely Asian wife—he wasn’t picky about nationality, any part of East Asia would do. Charles knew that his friend was half in love with May Lee, and sometimes on those crisp California nights, when they were down to the last inch of liquor and it was so late that even the mosquitoes had gone to bed, he wished that the two of them could just swap houses. Baby Saina would sleep at the foot of his bed in one—he could stow her in the closet whenever a girlfriend stopped by—and May Lee could perch on Nash’s lap in the other, giggling and feeding him delicacies with chopsticks instead of getting into a helicopter with Charles Wang.

When that convenient vision failed to manifest—May Lee didn’t have enough imagination to leave an increasingly wealthy manufacturer for a poor scholar, even if that scholar had been raised on five thousand acres of cotton; she didn’t have enough second sight to know that it might have saved her life—all parties moved west instead. The Wangs took up residence in Bel-Air, and Nash landed first in a Marina del Rey bachelor pad of the wet-bar-and-whirlpool-tub variety, then, as his professorial duties increased, in an unlikely Victorian on the outskirts of L.A.’s depressed downtown, and finally here, scrambling to hold on to his family’s ancestral home. When they first met, all their talk had been about the glorious futures that surely awaited them; with age, and distance, and a widening and calcifying of their own worldviews, these discussions became more and more like jousts where they lanced at each other with their shifting opinions and left bloody and sated.

In the end, he and Nash agreed on only two things: History had failed them both, and the only solace left was that China, their China, remained the greatest civilization in the world.

“Wang xian shen!”
Nash, at least, pronounced Charles’s last name the way it was meant to be said, long and rounded, not flat and nasal. “You’ve been fingering that phone all night.”

“Sorry, sorry.” He slipped the cell phone back into his jacket pocket, embarrassed. The lawyer wasn’t going to call now; he’d probably been out of the office since lunch, spending Charles’s six hundred dollars an hour on golf course fees and showy watches. Charles looked at Nash and hoped his friend wouldn’t ask. Anything.

Another hour. More whiskey. The night was almost over. Drink made the world thrum with possibility. When sober morning came, Charles always realized that he’d spent the previous evening talking too loudly and with too much conviction about things that he would never do and could never change, but in the moment, it all seemed endlessly possible.

Sometimes Charles thought that conversation must be the truest art form. In a good back-and-forth, you’re continually creating something new, something that only exists in a single present moment. Whole universes were built and destroyed in the course of a good conversation.

“Some of my students haven’t even read Plato. They barely deserve to be enrolled in a university!” said Nash.

“Aha! You say all should be love and equality, but now you want exclude people depending on what they read. What if someone grow up in house with no books? Not everyone have grand library like you!”

“No, that’s precisely what I do not want to do! Books are the simplest gateways through which to pass. There are public libraries! Anyone can pick up a book! There are compendiums of the classics that a lazy person can read through in a week!”

Charles tried to edge in with an excellent point, but Nash talked right over him.

“Look, I don’t expect everyone to be well versed in Sino-American relations or the history of the Great Leap Forward. I recognize that those are specialized areas of interest, but whatever happened to our shared references and understandings? How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own? When I go to a failing strip club in New Orleans and say that I’m at Ozymandias’s pleasure palace, I want everyone to laugh and get depressed.”

He paused for a moment and stared at Charles. Laugh and get depressed. Get depressed and laugh. What else was there to do?

“Why is that too much to ask? I don’t want slaves; I don’t even need servants. By the end of this year, I will have to sell my monster of an estate for taxes, and I’ll do it gladly—the state can have it! My great-great-grandfather built that place to house the Nashes for a thousand years. How could he have known that some cards and ponies would get in the way of our fortune? I don’t even care! I don’t begrudge the material loss of my birthright, but I don’t think a life of intellectual riches is too much to ask of the world! I give the world thoughtful observations and considered theses, and it gives me back a dozen Kardashians. You know what’s going to happen to my library when I sell it? Nothing. Flat nothing. It will probably go to some interior designer who will tell her client how authentic it is, but I’ll be damned if a single one of the books are cracked open by their video-game-playing fucktard children!”

Charles looked sideways at Nash. The key right now was to say something, but not too much of something. Enough for his friend to know that he heard him, but not enough to open up the vast floodgates of their twin losses. If the breaking down began, it might never end.

二十八
New Orleans, LA

SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED. Ever since the cake was served, his father and Uncle Nash had been talking, talking, talking at each other nonstop, but now, suddenly, they weren’t. Andrew could see the two of them through the window, sitting in the empty room, staring past each other. Merrily and Glenn’s friends had all headed down to the bonfire by the creek; Grace was out there with them.

That silence was weird. It scared Andrew a little. The two of them looked tired. Two worn-out men, deliberately quiet. Sad. They looked sad. When had his dad gotten so gray? Andrew wondered what they were not talking about. Actually, he didn’t have to wonder, because he knew—what else could it be? If getting money had once been the thing that occupied all of his father’s thoughts, losing it must be even more engrossing.

It smelled piney out here on the porch. Beyond it, everything was vast and dark. He heard a faint splash and a yell from the creek, voices that bounced off of the unseen rocks on the other side.

And then Dorrie was standing next to him.

Her sharp, bony fingers gripped his arm. She leaned in, close. He had drifted apart from the rest of the guests to get away from her, but now he didn’t half mind that she’d searched him out.

“You’re a beautiful thing,” she said, grabbing him tight.

“Um, you’re kind of freaking me out.” But even as he said it, Andrew knew that he liked her intensity. No one at school was like that. Especially not girls. She had these crazy blue diamond eyes with light eyelashes that were a very pale pink and amazing masses of goldish red hair like some sort of fairy queen.

“Do you think I’ll hurt you?”

Andrew laughed and flexed the arm under her fingers. “Never.”

“Never,” she repeated.

And then they were in her car together, headed towards the city. Dorrie drove a long, sleek Jaguar from the ’80s, still in good enough shape that it suggested the smell of fresh leather. Andrew’s father hadn’t said a word when he interrupted and said that he was leaving with someone else, just looked at him with eyes so strange and open that he grabbed Dorrie’s hand and rushed out the door.

“You’re a really good driver,” said Andrew, nervous, as she shifted gears and veered into the oncoming lane to pass a slow big rig.

“Are you unaccustomed to women who can drive?”

“No! Women can do anything! I just don’t usually see girls drive stick.” Dorrie turned and raised an eyebrow at him. Andrew shrugged. “I don’t,” he insisted. “
I
don’t even drive stick.”

“And you’re a
man.
”

Was that sarcasm?
Andrew found that it was always best to ignore sarcasm. It was much easier to defuse that way instead of taking it on directly.

“So where are we going?”

“You said you were a comedian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How funny are you?”

“I’m funny! I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I’m pretty fucking funny.” Just outside the blurred edges came the thought of Barbra watching him bomb in Austin, but he pushed it down.

“Good.”

“So where are we going?”

“You’ll like it.”

Too much bourbon. Who knew that wedding punch was so strong? It had tasted like kid birthdays, like Kool-Aid and 7-Up and rainbow sherbet, but those Nash cousins kept tipping their flasks into Andrew’s cup, and when they let up, Dorrie had procured a bottle from somewhere. Really, just too much bourbon.

Andrew wasn’t sure what happened during the rest of the car ride, if he didn’t speak a word or if he couldn’t shut up. He tried to kiss Dorrie at a stoplight but only managed to put his hand in her lap before the light turned green. The streets outside felt dark, dark, dark, and everywhere there remained the detritus of Hurricane Katrina. Monster piles of broken-down buildings that were still empty three years on, bracketed by tipsy telephone poles. The whole world felt abandoned. Andrew remembered Kanye’s rant on the telecast, that whole “Bush doesn’t care about black people” thing. He was probably right. Andrew didn’t realize that his head was nodding towards the cool windowpane until Dorrie patted his knee.

“Ready?”

He sat up and looked around. She had parked in an alleyway behind a set of row houses. On their left was a trash bin piled high with plastic bags. On their right was a Maybach.

“Are you selling me into slavery?”

“Something like that.”

Sometimes, life is like a movie. Andrew had always believed that. And now, spread out all around him, it was turning out to be true. He was caught somewhere between the gangsters at the Feast of San Gennaro in
Mean Streets
and the bikers tripping through the Mardi Gras streets in
Easy Rider.
It was awesome.

New Orleans. N’awlins. Wasn’t that how they said it? N’awlins. That’s what Dorrie’s friends kept saying to him in their velvet voices. She would introduce him with words that were swallowed up in the din of acid jazz and clinking glasses, introduce him to tall glittering figures he could barely see, to older women whose dyed-blonde curls and spackled makeup glared out of the crowd, to boys with pouty lips who were gay in a way that made him uncomfortable, boys who held themselves so that they were sexy like girls, without putting on eyelashes or a dress. Each one of them would lean towards him and whisper, “How are you finding N’awlins?” And he’d say something back, too loud, that would make them nod politely and turn their attention back to Dorrie, a star in the murky firmament. He’d read that somewhere, and it was true. That’s what she was. This whole place was a murky firmament, a haze that swallowed up all the other stars besides her.

Actually, no, it was a cabaret. A cabaret! There were real cabarets in the world, and they were
sexy.
Andrew hadn’t realized that some places could be sexier than others. Nothing made sense here, including all of the rules he had made for himself. After the smiles and the whispers and more shouting and more drinks, they all sat down on folding chairs and shushed each other, and a beautiful man wearing an enormous ball gown made entirely of brown paper—the kind that delis used to wrap sandwiches—swept into the room, his brown-paper train trailing down the aisle, and Andrew decided that it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen. And then the lights went up on the stage, and he realized that
that
was actually the most amazing thing he’d ever seen. Someone had made curtains out of giant swaths of the same paper, manipulated so that they hung in folds and swayed like real curtains. A riot of brown-paper flowers and foliage grew across them, curling and spreading out across the stage.

The man in the ball gown sang a sad ballad in a bad French accent as powder rose up from his wig and swirled around in the spotlight. A girl covered in whipped cream came out pushing an ice cream cart and did a burlesque number where she wiped off the whipped cream with Popsicles that she handed out to the audience. Andrew got a grape one, which he crunched down in three bites.

“I like to bite,” he whispered to Dorrie.

“Your tongue is purple,” she whispered back.

A white man in blackface and a black man in paleface did a very serious, very silent magic act together, facing each other instead of the audience and mirroring each other’s tricks. A woman dressed like a champagne bottle—if a champagne bottle was also a man who was going to be presented to Louis XIV in court—tap-danced. An old cabaret star who had once had a top-ten disco album shook her sagging breasts at the audience, and they clapped and cheered with such genuine appreciation that Andrew started to think that maybe he had misunderstood what it meant to be hot.