The Wangs vs. the World (30 page)

A nasal twang rang through the speakers. “Well, there are people in my town, I’m not saying who they are, but
they
know who they are, and I’m not saying I’m one of them, not that I’d say it if I
were
one of them, but sure, there are people here who wouldn’t vote for a man because of his skin color, sure. Not me, I treat every man the same, white, black, or purple, but there’s a lot of narrow minds.”

And then the interviewer. “A Gallup poll of Alabama residents shows that most respondents would consider voting for a black president but didn’t think that others in their state would do the same.”

Grace’s head popped up between the front seats. “I have to pee.”

The first words from her mouth since they’d left New Orleans without Andrew. Charles patted his daughter’s head.

“I think we almost there, okay? You go at the store.”

“How do you even know that they’ll be there?” she asked.

He didn’t. And, if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t even sure that they’d be able to pay him immediately, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do if they couldn’t.

“No worrying, Gracie.
Ren je, hao? 
”

Ignoring her harrumphs of protest, Charles turned up the sound.

“And now we turn it over to Money Mike who’s in Auburn where the Tigers are getting ready to take on the LSU Tigers this weekend. Mike, who will win the battle of the big cats?”

Grace’s arm appeared to the left of his head, pointing. “There! It’s there! I can’t wait for you to park—just let me out!” He slowed the car down and his daughter jumped out the back, slamming the door with so much force that the whole rig shuddered.

“We meet at the store, Gracie!” he shouted out the window, but she didn’t turn back or respond.

Parking in Opelika was easy. The streets were half empty and Charles felt a sense of accomplishment as he pulled the wagon, shocks creaking, into place along the curb, cutting the wheel at exactly the right moment so that the U-Haul in back would line up easily. It took only a few long, focused minutes now, instead of the cursing, sweating, quarter of an hour that docking the giant metal fishtail used to take.

He turned to Barbra. “Will you come in?”

She shook her head.

Charles was glad. It seemed less pathetic, somehow, if they just saw him and Grace. He could pretend that they were in the middle of a carefree, father-daughter cross-country jaunt and had decided on a whim to make a personal delivery. There. Life wasn’t so bad after all. Smooth down the shirt. Fix the collar. Adjust the pants. Tidy the hair. Too bad men couldn’t wear makeup—he could probably use a little lip gloss and rouge, a touch of blue liner to make the whites of his eyes whiter.

Half a minute later Charles was pushing open the weathered wood door of the Magnolia General Store. He could see Grace inside, talking to Ellie Yates, who still looked exactly as he’d remembered her from the plane—tiny and golden.

“Yes. Totally. That’s what I want to do.” Grace nodded at Ellie enthusiastically as the two of them looked at something on the computer.

For a minute, Charles wanted to turn around and leave. Dump the trailer full of lotions and balms into a river somewhere so that he wouldn’t have to break in on Grace’s small happy moment. But there was no land in China without the money to find it and, most likely, to bribe some corrupt Communist official into handing it over, so he pressed forward.

“I have a special delivery!”

Ellie turned. “Mr. Wang!” As he crossed the room to embrace her, he noticed Grace clicking something shut on the screen.

“Mr. Wang, your daughter here was just showing me her style blog—she’s got herself some serious taste.”

Grace smiled.

“Ah, I think
you
have serious taste,” said Charles, looking around the shop. It was expertly done, at once the kind of general store that might have existed in an old American mill town a hundred years ago and a modern art gallery. Every gardening implement looked like a finely wrought weapon, the jars of penny candy were piles of gems, the few articles of clothing equally appropriate for a field hand or a gallery owner. “Everything is even better than you describe!”

Ellie beamed; Charles beamed back. Grace, caught up in the goodwill, opened her blog back up. “Here, Dad, do you want to see it?”

Charles nodded. This was a rare gift, he knew. Grace made space for him in front of the screen and handed him the mouse. He peered down. At first glance, it appeared to be a web page made entirely of pictures of Grace in different outfits. Subsequent glances confirmed it. Grace in her dorm room. Grace lying on a bench. Grace in the woods. Grace in an empty swimming pool. Even though she was all covered up, it felt vaguely pornographic. The whole thing made Charles uncomfortable. His daughter and Ellie were chatting, something about shooting a picture here at the store, but he could feel Grace watching him.

“Very pretty pictures,” he said, finally. “Very creative. Nice name, Style and Grace.”

“Don’t lie. Just say you hate it.”

“No, no, no! I don’t hate anything you do! Daddy just don’t understand blog—it is new thing for me!”

“Well, look.” She reached over and typed “makeup” into the search bar. “I did a tutorial with, you know, your stuff.”

Charles watched, surprised, as a photo of the Failure’s whole line slowly revealed itself on the screen. It was a lovely shot. As good as, or better than, the professional product shots they’d used. He scrolled through the post. There was Grace, putting on the eyeliner that was fine and true, swiping on the richly hued lipstick, atop a caption that read, “OMG Loves It!” Charles wanted to cry. Instead, he patted her hand, and said, “Good girl, Gracie,” and then turned to Ellie. “Speaking of makeup, we have special delivery!”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Dad, you made that joke already!”

But she came outside with Charles and Ellie, and smiled as Ellie exclaimed over the pile of boxes stacked in the U-Haul.

“We bring these all the way from California for you—I tell Gracie that the personal is the most important for business.”

“Well, I just think that is so sweet, I really do. Trip is going to flip when he sees all this—he built a special shelf and rigged up lighting and everything.” Ellie tore into a box right there on the street, using her keys to rip apart the packing tape and scattering the Styrofoam shells out onto the street. Inside, row upon gleaming row of boxes made of the palest, blush-colored paper stock,
MAGNOLIA GENERAL STORE
printed in gold using a typeface that Ellie herself had designed. She pulled one out reverently.

“I can’t believe we did it. Mr. Wang—”

He broke in. “No, no Mr. Wang, please call me Charles.”

She smiled. “Charles, we never would have thought this big if it hadn’t been for you. Thank you.” She held the box up to her nose. “Oh it smells good!”

His heart swelled. It was his factory and his ingenuity, his powers of persuasion, that allowed this southern girl to dream of more than a lovely store in a dying town.

And then they all saw it. Oil had soaked through the bottom of the box, mottling its perfect blush. “Uh oh,” said Ellie, joking, nervous. She opened it up and pulled out a glass jar of bath scrub. The label was beautiful. The crystals twinkled in the sun. And the whole thing was covered with a slick, sick sheen. Ellie wiped her hand on the leg of her jeans and looked up at him.

America was ruining everything. Ruining it with her embarrassing heat, with the sticky swelter between her fat white legs. They opened box after box, and each one was the same—a brief, optimistic moment when the contents shimmered in neat, packaged rows, and then the inevitable crash of disappointment as the leaky interiors made themselves known.

The old-towel smell of his own sweat mixed with the sweet magnolia perfume made Charles nauseous. His heart hammered inside his chest with an alarming insistence. It would be incredibly embarrassing to die right now; Grace would never forgive him for it. His head buzzed. He couldn’t look at Ellie. With each failed box, the numbers ticked higher in his mind, the tally of money he’d never be able to claim.

“I’m so sorry,” said Charles, finally.

The two of them sat on the back of the U-Haul surrounded by a spent pile of cardboard. Styrofoam peanuts swirled along the street. Grace had retreated to the backseat of the car with an excuse about the sun.

“Of course I will refund your deposit.”

She nodded. Of course. She would expect nothing less from the accomplished, wealthy businessman in the bespoke suit she and her husband had met sitting in first class, the man who had name-dropped a list of his clients and been so generous about their ambition.

Ellie got up.

“Or maybe we try again? And you can just, you know, ship everything the way you normally do? September in Alabama is hot as hell—it must have been a surprise coming from L.A.”

Charles jumped up onto the sidewalk next to her, and before he could stop himself, the words piled out of his mouth.

“There is no try again. When we meet, I have very successful business. Now it is gone. It didn’t have to be, but it is. Not my fault, but all my fault. You are young. You don’t know the things that can happen in a life.”

Ellie’s eyes opened wide. “I had no idea, Mr. Wang! Are you, is your family alright?” She looked over at the car where Grace and Barbra were sitting. Charles could see her taking in the age of the car, making some allowance, perhaps, for the fact that it was at least still a Mercedes; scanning the backseat, which was completely covered with Grace’s torn-out magazine pages, making it look like a set for some puppet minstrel show. Bird shit was splattered on the roof, and dead bugs were smeared across the windshield. He cringed as his daughter rummaged through an open suitcase. Was that underwear hanging out the side? The Wangs were less than a week out of Bel-Air and already they looked like they’d come from a trailer park.

“We are always alright! We just think of this as a vacation. Look, I will write you a check for your deposit now.”

Charles pulled the business checkbook out of his pocket. In some small way, he must have known that this might happen. As he signed his name, he thought about a line from an old gangster movie he remembered seeing as a teenager in Taiwan. “His mouth keeps writing checks that his fists can’t cash.” No one’s fists were going to be able to cash this check because the account was locked, no matter how many gangsters wanted to threaten it.

She accepted the check and folded it in half without looking at the amount. In fact, the bright and lovely Ellie was so well-bred that she helped pack the boxes back into the U-Haul and sent them on their way with a bag of spiced nuts made by a local baker and a giant hug for Grace.

“You all come back whenever you like, alright? I do mean that. And take care of each other on the road.” Charles tossed back a fistful of nuts, marveling at their cardamom scent and meaty crunch. Mouth full, he nodded at Ellie, chewing at attention as she walked back to the store.

As soon as she was out of sight, Charles shoved another few nuts in his mouth and knelt down next to the hitch. He was jiggling it, trying to figure out how to undo the thing without tools or assistance when Barbra stuck her head out of the car.

“What are you doing?”

He looked up at her.

She had gotten tiny. Somewhere between California and Alabama, Barbra had lost the fullness that she carried and become skeletal.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

“You are going to just leave this here? Throw away more money?”

Charles shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. By now nobody pay that card. I go return it, they ask for money. I never return, they never find.” He felt almost giddy until he looked up and met Barbra’s eyes. Contempt. The way that she’d looked at the boys who worked in the kitchen under her father. Yes, he remembered her from the beginning, had admired her naked teenage determination even though he liked to tease her and say that he barely knew who she was when she arrived in America so soon after May Lee’s crash.

“Why didn’t you know?”

“Know what?” Even though, of course, he knew what.

“That all their things would ruin!
Wo men lai je me yuan, you she me yong?
”

Charles turned his head away, trying to shield himself from her anger.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, okay, okay.
Bu yao zai shuo le.
” He hoisted himself up and walked the long way around to the front seat. Tonight, after dark, he would pull up to the back of a Walmart or a McDonald’s and throw away these boxes full of wasted effort, and then the next morning, before Barbra and Grace woke up, he would drive to the closest U-Haul office, fifteen miles outside of Opelika, and return this trailer, feign surprise when the card on record didn’t go through, and pay with two of the hundred small-faced Benjamin Franklins that were stacked in a manila envelope in the bottom of his suitcase. But he wouldn’t tell Barbra that yet. She shouldn’t think that her anger could make him do things.

Charles thought about that meager emergency stash he had stowed away so many years ago, back when ten thousand dollars seemed like an impressive sum to have on hand. Now it had to get them to Saina’s house and then wing him all the way to China. But once it did, once he got there, he’d fix everything.

三十二
Atlanta, GA

2,594 Miles

GRACE MADE small noises from the other bed. They could be snores or sighs. Since Barbra had left Taiwan, she hadn’t spent a single night sleeping in the same room with anyone other than Charles. She didn’t know how to decipher anyone’s noises of sleep but his. Until now, of course.

She could hear the clatter of silverware on ceramic outside, the smell of cheap bacon and sweet buns, the wail of an angry infant—all unmistakable signs of a free breakfast buffet, which every fat family in this motel would be lined up for. Barbra thought about the way that the pulpy, from-concentrate orange juice always glugged out of big plastic jars at the far ends of those buffet lines and felt vaguely nauseous.