The Wangs vs. the World (3 page)

And then he could leave you. After making you his art object, making your love for him his symbol and subject, after presenting you with a heavy, hand-hammered gold band set on the inside with an uncut black diamond so that only the lump of it, sheathed in gold, could be seen when you wore it—a ring that got its own miniprofile in
Vogue
—after all that, he could still make your life into a Page Six blind item by leaving you for a jewelry-designing mattress heiress named Sabrina, with unattractive knees and a maddening sheaf of corn-silk hair. And yes, yes, it could be the same jewelry-designing mattress heiress who made your gorgeous, heartbreaking, stupid, human rights disaster of a ring.

None of it surprised Saina anymore. She was twenty-eight and she had turned unshockable. So when the phone rang and she picked it up and found her father in tears, her heart stayed put.

“It is over,” choked her father, coughing to cover the angry wobble in his voice.

“What’s over?” she asked.

“Our whole life.”

Saina looked around the room.
My life was already over,
she thought. She was washed up, tossed out, ruined and ridiculed and exiled from the magic island of Manhattan. What could be more over than that?

“Baba, don’t be so dramatic. What’s going on?”

“We are leaving.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is over. I lost it. Oh Jiejie, I lost it.”

“What?” asked Saina, her heart now quickening. “What did you lose? Tell me. You have to tell me. You can’t just not talk about it like . . . like everything.”

Saina’s father’s words came out in a rush, the breaking of a giant dam.

“All. Baba lost all.
Wan le.
You understand what that mean? Everything over.”

“The stores. You just mean the stores, right? That’s what you lost? We talked about that already.” Was he starting to forget things? He was too young for Alzheimer’s.

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Now we come to New York.”

Her father’s English sounded more broken than usual. Not that he’d ever bothered to perfect it in the first place—the rules of grammar were beneath him, bylaws for a silly club that he had no intention of joining. Why should he spend any energy on English, he’d explained once, when soon the whole world would be speaking Chinese? Now, though, he sounded like a sweet-’n’-sour-chicken delivery boy who’d missed out on America and instead taken up residence in a new country called Chinatown.

“What do you mean you’re coming to New York?”

“We have no home, Jiejie. We come live with you now.”

“The house? But why was that tied up with everything else? I just . . . Baba, I don’t understand. How could there be nothing left? What about your savings? What about your other clients?”

There was a long, humid silence. Finally, he spoke again. “Daddy make a mistake. I think that if I can just hold on for long enough, then everything is okay again. So I just throw it all in, like throwing in a hole.”

“Oh. Daddy. I’m sorry.”

“No point in sorry now.”

“Okay.” What should she do? What could she do?

“How long it take to drive across country? Maybe eight day? Ten day?” He sounded small. Wounded.

Saina looked around her house, panic creeping in. It wasn’t even a house, really. Not in any way that her father would understand or approve of. Not a Bel-Air Georgian or a rehabbed modernist gem—not even a downtown New York loft. It was a Catskills farmhouse three generations away from any kind of respectability perched on the edge of a town abandoned by Lubavitchers and just beginning to be occupied by weekending gay couples and Third Wave farmers carrying blue-eyed babies in batik slings.

When Saina sold her New York apartment out from under her cheating boyfriend, all she could think of was retreat. Their entire bright white loft had been arranged around a slightly hysterical pair of Biedermeier chairs that they bought at an auction back when he still thought it was important to suggest that his family had as much ready cash as hers. The pair, scallop edged and velvet upholstered, held court in front of a twenty-two-foot-high blank wall that backdropped his confession about Sabrina. Lovely, pregnant Sabrina. He’d whispered it to Saina,
whispered
it, and then tiptoed out the door like a thief.

Her first thought was that she’d always hated those chairs. Her second thought was that all the letters of her name were contained in Sabrina’s, as if Sabrina encompassed everything that she herself was and then, in all her goldness, offered up even more.

Saina couldn’t do anything to Sabrina and her maybe baby, so she’d gotten rid of the chairs instead. Just picked them up and placed them on the curb, where they’d at least have the chance to become part of someone else’s good-luck story. Soon, though, she couldn’t even stand looking at the empty wall where they once were; she started to wish them back, to wish him back. It hadn’t been enough to cast out the only piece of furniture they’d ever bought together, she had to strike the entire set on which they’d acted out their lives. So Saina had sold the whole damn thing and now here she was, manufacturing domestic bliss all by herself. Except. Well, except.

“Baba, really? All of you? What about Meimei
gen
Didi?”

“Daddy will go pick them up.”

“You’re going to make them drop out of school? You can’t do that!”

“What are they learning in those schools anyway? Arizona State. Not even a school—party school only. And Gracie, she can go to high school in your town. They have high school there?”

“But what about their tuitions? They should be okay for at least the semester, right?”

He was quiet.

Saina had a terrible thought. “Is everyone’s money lost?”

“Not you,” said her father. “You are old enough to be separate.”

At least there was that. But with it came an unexpected sensation: Responsibility. Saina’s instinct was to abdicate it.

“I’ll give the money all to you! It’s not mine anyways, it’s yours, you made it! Take it and buy another house.”

Her father laughed.

“You old enough to be separate, but it is all Wang 
jia de
already. All of ours. Family, Jiejie.”

Saina pictured her father, near dead from a million tiny cuts, oozing a glistening mercury blood. She didn’t want them to come, but there was no question as to whether or not she would receive them, find space for their things, buy enough food for five, and put fresh flowers in all the guest bathrooms. There were four bedrooms in this house. Exactly enough for her father, her stepmother, her brother, her sister, and herself. As if she had always known that it would be a refuge for the entire Wang family.

三
Santa Barbara, CA

“SERIOUSLY, DAD?”

“You can’t talk to Baba that way, Grace.”

“But they’re kicking me out of school!” she hissed into the phone, embarrassed. “I
told
you you should have gotten me a car!”

“Gracie, we coming to pick you up tonight, okay?”

“Who’s
we?
”

“With your
ah yi.
”

“Oh her. Okay. But what happened? Dad, I’m being kicked out of school! It’s like they think I’m a criminal or something.”

“Grace, we certainly don’t think you’re a criminal,” said Brownie, the headmistress, who wasn’t even pretending not to eavesdrop. “In fact, I told your father that we would likely be able to work something out. Perhaps—”

“You are
not
going to make me work in the cafeteria,” said Grace, horrified. “There’s no way. I’d rather go to public school, Dad. Daddy!” Grace could swear that she heard her father crying on the other end of the line, but she didn’t want to say anything in case it turned out to be true.

“Okay,
xiao
Meimei, don’t worry, okay? It’s okay. We come pick you up and then we go get Andrew, and then we go to Jiejie
jia.
”

“Dad. Baba.” Grace felt very reasonable now; she could see that she was going to have to be the adult here. “What are you talking about? I am not driving cross-country with you guys. Who goes on a cross-country family trip? Anyways, I have to take my SATs. I’ll just stay at home, okay?”

Ugh
. The headmistress would
not
stop looking at her. The last time Grace had been in this office was two semesters ago when her art teacher had narced on her. The art teacher, who made all the students call her Julie. It was embarrassing when adults tried to act like
people.

The problem hadn’t been the dwindling supply of muscle relaxers hidden in the lining of her Louis Vuitton change purse or the bottle of Belvedere stashed under her rainbow of cashmere sweaters. No, the bitchy art teacher, who was so
nineties
with her ugly dark lipstick and riot grrrl bumper stickers, had walked into the computer lab and caught Grace uploading a photo of herself. She’d been in one of her best morning outfits ever: black lace Wolford tights, navy blue school uniform skirt (hemmed way up), Saina’s beat-up old cowboy boots, a new Surface to Air button-down topped with one of her dad’s old paisley Hermès bow ties from the eighties, a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses with fake lenses—which no one had to know about—and, holding together her deliberately messy hair, a bright yellow silk sash tied in a knot.
So
much cooler than that poseur VainJane.com’s outfits—Jane lived in
Florida.
How could anything really stylish ever happen there? How did every single outfit of Jane’s get so many comments, anyway? That girl thought that Louboutins were enough to make any outfit—so
boring.
Grace couldn’t understand it.

Anyway, Grace was sure that this outfit would be a hit, and she was about to post it to her blog, already anticipating the responses from her followers, when Julie had crept right up behind her, trying to be quiet. The teacher wasn’t even smart enough to realize that you couldn’t sneak up on someone who was using one of those computers because they’d be able to see the reflection of your stupid face on the screen.

As she’d reached out to tap Grace with one burgundy polished nail, Grace had turned and smiled.

And that was what she’d gotten a demerit for: Insubordination.

The ethics committee had decided that Grace’s blog was fashion focused and not about “exploiting herself and undermining her power as a young woman”—in other words, not about sex—but that she’d shown an unwillingness to accept guidance. It was a totally ridiculous thing to get in trouble for, but whatever. It didn’t matter anymore.

“Gracie, you pack your things up—but just the important things, okay? We be there in a few hours,” said her father

The headmistress cut in. “Grace, if you’d like someone to help you clear out your room, just ask. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help, alright, darling?”

Grace pressed the off button on her cell.

“Don’t call me
darling,
” she said. At least no one could give her demerits anymore.
Ugh
.

Sometimes she hated talking to her father. Was it possible to love someone and hate them at the same time? Or to love someone even if you didn’t actually like them? If her mother were alive, things would be different. Everyone she knew got along with their mothers and hated their fathers, but she didn’t have the luxury of a spare parent.

“So . . . we’re poor now.”

Grace’s roommate stared at her.

“It’s true, Rachel. We don’t have any money left. Nothing. I have to drop out of school, and my dad and stepmom are coming to pick me up, and we have to drive all the way to my sister’s house in some weird little country town in New York. Drive! I don’t know if we even have any stuff left. Don’t they take all of that when you’re bankrupt?”

“You’re bankrupt? Like, completely?”

“Well, my dad said he was, so I guess that means that I am, too.”

“Um, are you okay?”

“Do I
seem
okay?”

“I guess so . . . I mean, no one’s dead, right?”

“Except for my
house.
I was practically born in that house, and I didn’t even get to live there for long—I had to come live
here.
And now I’ll never even
see
it again.”

Rachel had heard about Grace’s family’s house even though she’d never once been invited over for break. There were secret passageways, and modern art, and once Johnny Delahari had taken a weird combo of E and H (everyone at school called it the Canadian Special, but no one else was crazy enough to actually do it) and passed out in Grace’s stepmother’s walk-in closet for hours with a silk camisole wrapped around his face.

“It smelled like lady pussy,” he’d told Rachel.

“But you said it was a camisole,” she’d said. “That’s like a tank top.”

“Okay, it smelled like lady
boobs,
” he’d replied, grinning, and then tried to reach up her shirt.

Now she wished that she had let him, because with Grace gone, he’d probably never come around to her room again.

Grace wheeled a desk chair over to the closet and balanced on it, pulling her luggage down from the top shelf. She jumped off the chair, launching it backwards towards Rachel, who stopped it with her purple ballet flat.

“Maybe you’ll get to have your own room,” said Grace.

“I think your roommate has to kill herself before they let you room alone.”

“Do you think it counts if it happens after they transfer?”

“Shut up, Grace. You’re not going to kill yourself.”

“You never know,” said Grace, pulling all her jeans off their hangers. Maybe they’d all commit suicide together. Or maybe her dad would drive them off a cliff. God, maybe she should just leave everything. If they were going to be poor, or dead, what was the point of having the same exact deconstructed rabbit-fur vest that Kate Moss was wearing in last month’s
Elle
? On the other hand, maybe being poor could be kind of glamorous, with holey old T-shirts and guys who had to work as bartenders and whole meals of just french fries, in which case, maybe it would also be kind of glamorous to have her clothes. She’d be like a Romanov or something, deposed and in hiding from all the worlds that mattered.