The Wangs vs. the World (41 page)

Desperate now, he repeated himself.
“Qing wen je fu jing you mei you yie shi?”

The young man took a step back and waved his hands apologetically. “Oh, I don’t really speak Chinese, sorry. Um,
bu shuo zhong wen.
No speak.”

“
Yie shi!
Night market! Street food!” shouted Charles at the person who was not a Beijinger after all, but some sort of interloper, dressed like all of Andrew’s absurd friends in a pair of jeans far too tight for a man.

“Ah! Okay, you speak English! Tang Hua market is actually right nearby.” Whipping out his phone, he pulled up a map as Charles began to sway on his feet. “Here, look. Just out the east entrance and a few blocks down Taipingqiao Road.”

The map blurred behind the cracked screen as Charles struggled to remember the red-lined route. “Okay,” he nodded. “Okay. Thank you.
Xie-xie.
”

“Are you sure you’re okay, Uncle? Maybe you should sit down.”

He waved off the concern and headed away from this globalized bustle. Charles Wang didn’t need a man-child in girlish pants telling him what he should do!

Twenty minutes later he was seated on a plastic stool, a sagging string of naked lightbulbs dipped dangerously close to his head. In front of him, a split metal bowl with chicken stewed in medicinal herbs on one side and a fiery red fish stew on the other, along with a tin cup of tea. Craning his neck over the bowl so that none of the liquid would splash onto his shirt, he tipped hot spoonfuls of it down his throat.

Moths and mosquitoes fluttered around the bug zapper, too smart to get caught. Two women in flowered dresses sat on stools to his right, their wrists piled with gold bracelets. He’d never liked the platinum trend in America—what was the point of an expensive material that looked exactly like a cheap one? Much better the deep, unmistakable yellow of twenty-four-karat gold. The Chinese and the Indians had it figured out when it came to jewelry.

The Tang Hua night market was sandwiched between two high-rise office buildings, the sizzling from the grills and the hum of the generators competing with the constant chug of the air-conditioning units that lined one wall. Charles motioned to the proprietor, who turned towards him, wiping sweat from his buzz cut with his shirtsleeve as Charles addressed him in Mandarin.

“Boss, anyone around here bet on sausages?”

“Eh? Bet on sausages?”

“Bet! Bet on sausages! When I was a little punk, we used to do it on the streets. There was a stand with a wheel. A spin for a fen. Most of the punters lost, but you could win half a dozen for the price of one!”

“No, nothing like that around here. Bet on lotto, bet on Olympics, bet on who else is betting, but no betting on sausages.”

The man turned abruptly, not interested in conversation, and went back to mincing the chilies that were making Charles sweat. He slurped another fiery mouthful and chewed. It was amazing. Food could make a person feel like all was right in the world even if he was sitting in his abandoned country with the last of his dwindling fortune strapped to his chest and a sinking feeling that he would never solve the mystery of his family’s lost land.

Last chance, best chance.

The truth was, Charles didn’t know—at least not exactly—where the land was. He knew the name of the village, he had photographs of the old family house, and he had pieces of the 1947 surveyor’s measurements and a receipt from a tax assessment, but he didn’t have an
address.
That was why he’d needed the lawyer. Someone who could make his pile of stories and documents into something tangible. His piss-poor excuse for a lawyer had at least done that, but he’d also dropped an unbelievable story on top of it, which Charles was here to investigate. But before he could do that, he wanted to see his land.

It had been years since Charles had ridden any kind of public transportation. Growing up in Taiwan, he had hung off the sides of buses with his friends, but the train system in China was a different matter altogether. A mass of Beijing residents poured out of the station, engulfing him, though when he turned in the other direction, there seemed to be just as many rushing in. The two opposing tides lapped up against each other, unceasing, merging without incident.

When had the children of China gotten so tall? They towered over him, these little treasures, six feet high and rising. Except for the tiny ones, so skinny that their skin stretched translucent over their toothpick bones; and the broad ones, with their farmboy shoulders and wide, flat faces. Charles felt comforted in this swirl of humanity, in this sea of black hair. If the billion people of China ever chose to march en masse, they would be overwhelming in their similarity and horrific in their differences. There would be so many variations on the theme of human that all typologies would be completely bulldozed. This was why he had never worried himself about how America viewed his children, never bothered himself over unflattering stereotypes and prejudices. What did it matter how a country full of white people saw them when the whole world was theirs?

Out the window, the horror of the postindustrial landscape was obscured by its own waste, a thick brown mist that hung heavy in the sky. The train windows were filmed over with it. Charles peered at the grimy windowsill. Putrid neon gum had hardened in one corner and a fluff of gray down, the vestige of some long-ago disease-ridden bird, mixed with curls of dust. Charles lifted his sleeve from the armrest and moved away from the window. Would it all be like this? Would the longitude and latitude on his deed point towards rows of tenements and factories where children worked for slave wages? A settled town of cheap shops and pasteboard houses that would collapse like they had just months ago in Sichuan after that unimaginable earthquake?

Disappointment crowded in. What would Barbra say if he had come all this way for nothing, for a place that didn’t even exist anymore? Charles closed his eyes and sank into his seat, wishing that he had something to place between his head and the dingy white cover that was meant to protect the top of the train seat from the passengers’ greasy scalps.

Before he even realized that he was asleep, the train screeched to a stop. What is that strange skill that allows us to doze through an unknown route and wake up at the correct station? He rushed to pick up his jacket and bag, glad to leave the train behind.

At the station, Charles waited for nearly an hour before a suspiciously new taxi finally deigned to pull up. It bumped him over a series of rural roads, the driver speaking at first in some sort of dialect that Charles could barely understand before he switched to a flawless Mandarin. On the outskirts of town, they saw a benighted huddle of mud-and-straw huts, shocking in their crudity. Next to them, children rolled an oil drum in a field, but they paused and looked up as the taxi passed. One small girl on the end waved, and Charles waved back, wishing that he could take her with him and put some new, clean clothes on her. A little girl should have a pretty dress. As they got closer to town, the road smoothed out and the houses began to look less haphazard. Charles looked down at the map. The mountains rose in the distance, just as they did on the map, and the road began to curve in a recognizable way towards a body of water in the distance. This was it. Charles felt sick. He couldn’t wait to see it and he didn’t want to look at it at all.

Desire, as always, outweighed fear.

An open ditch ran along the side of the road. Charles directed the driver to park next to it. “This is my family’s old estate,” he explained, proud. “I’m going to have a look at it. Wait here, please, until I return.”

Tapping a cigarette out of a packet marked with a warning label and a photo of a shriveled fetus, the driver spit into the ditch. “How do I know you’ll come back?”

“I’ll leave my bag here with you.”

The driver flicked his plastic green lighter and leaned into the flame. “What do I want with your old clothes? I don’t even know if you can afford to pay me for waiting.”

Charles was offended. His ability to pay for something like a taxi ride had never been called into question. “I can pay. There’s no reason to doubt me.”

Their eyes met in the rearview mirror, and Charles saw himself the way the other man saw him. Not as the prosperous businessman he so recently was, or as the scion of a landed family that he always would be, but as a foreigner wearing the same clothes he’d worn yesterday and the day before. He wanted to flash what remained of the bills, which he’d changed into yuan at the airport—that, at least, had made them multiply in a satisfying way—but Charles was now keenly aware of being in a deserted stretch of country where the driver might have compatriots without such law-abiding jobs. He left his money pouch strapped securely to his chest and instead opened his wallet to show the smaller stash of money that he’d placed there for incidentals.

The driver nodded, satisfied. “Leave your bag, and give me half now,” he said.

The land in China. The landinChina.
ThelandinChina.

Charles got out of the cab, hopped over the ditch, and walked straight into the field. He had drawn a painstaking outline of the land on Xeroxed pages of a topographical map and now he held them up, trying to get his bearings. In Los Angeles, real estate had never interested Charles. He had made sure to own his factories and his home—useless ambitions, in the end—but he had never been like some of his friends who snapped up sixteenplex apartments in Koreatown and minimalls in Studio City as quickly as they became available. As a result, he’d neglected to develop a talent for estimating acres or square footage at a glance, but if he had translated the old surveyor measurements on the land correctly, his family’s holdings stretched out all the way to the mountains up ahead, acres and acres of it. More than hundreds, for sure. Thousands? Tens of thousands? The thought of it dizzied him. To the left and right, at the far edges of his vision, the horizon shimmered and the land seemed infinite. It was like owning all of Bel-Air and most of Westwood, too.

He peered out at the mountain. Was the family house still extant? It was hard to tell. Clusters of crumbling buildings dotted the mountainside and from a distance it was impossible to tell whether they were newer or older. The outline of the mountain ridge, though, felt familiar to Charles.
I know this place,
he thought. It was a comforting thought.

I know this place. This place is mine.

The soft curve of these mountains, interrupted by a tall jagged peak, was a part of his blood and his birthright. His father may not have managed to pass on the land itself, but this knowing was nearly as powerful an inheritance.

Only the land bordering the road appeared to be tilled. Charles kept walking until he reached a verdant open field dotted with tiny white flowers and climbed up a small rise. From there, he could see another rise in front of him, taller and a good bit farther away. Although each minute was costing him as much as that cheating cabbie wanted to charge, now that Charles was here, he had to see every inch that might have once belonged to the Wang family.

He plunged ahead.

The ground under him was damp, patches of mud hidden by the long grasses. One shoe got mired down, staying stubbornly behind when he pulled his foot up, so he took them both off, and his socks as well, and rolled up his pant legs. He marched forward, not minding that the mud was oozing over his feet. When he reached the next patch of dry grass, he wiped them off, liking the feeling of nature on his bare skin. Out of breath, sweat pooling under his armpits, he labored upward, scrunching his toes to get purchase on the slope.

By the time he got to the top, he was light-headed. He leaned over to take a full breath, and when he straightened, everything went white for a moment. Eyes closed, Charles let the blood drain downwards from his head and took several deep breaths. He opened his eyes. Everything was still a pulsing white.
Was this it?
The big stroke that he feared? He blinked. Shook his head. Bit down on his tongue to make sure that he could still feel things. And then he realized that it was the land itself.

Everything glowed. The fields were incandescent. The last of the morning dew caught the rising sun and sparkled, a tiny drop on the tip of each blade of grass, each drop a world in miniature. A slow breeze kicked up, rustling the leaves on the trees with their dark, elegant trunks that stood nearby. Pure beauty had never really moved Charles. He liked drama, he liked mischief, he liked luxury that bred desire.

But this, this was beauty.

Beauty.

Charles sank to his knees, then put his hands on the earth, not caring if the insolent driver saw him. He wanted to kiss the ground, to eat it.

Wiggling his fingers deeper into the dirt, he remembered a discussion he’d had with Nash once, soon after his friend had taken on a senior seminar populated mostly by second-generation Chinese immigrants. Nash had explained his students’ complicated relationship to the country their parents had left behind, finally convincing Charles that not everyone saw the world as simply and clearly as he did. For Nash’s students, there were many Chinas. There was the China that was against the world, the China that was the Communist government. The China that existed briefly in Taiwan. There was the China that covered things up and the China that was gradually making things free. And as many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.

All of that was academic bullshit.

This,
this
was the only China.

This incandescent land that glowed all around him.

The mud caked on his soles and the flies that buzzed against his bare toes.

The mountains that rose like they did in ink-brush paintings by the old masters, rows of smoky gray ranges getting darker as they retreated. Charles plunged his fingers into the soil and wiggled them back and forth until he’d made a hole. He took out his father’s bone, porous and gray, and dropped it in, covering it back up with the displaced earth. This, this must be what he’d meant to do with it all along.