The Wangs vs. the World (46 page)

“Everything happen.”

A terrible thought made its way into Grace’s head. “If you grew up in China, would you have been one of them? Would you have been a Little Red Guard?”

“Probably. Later on, no choice. Everyone have to be Communist. Okay, so you know I think maybe we can get back the land, all of Wang
jia de di.
There are some story, sometime, I hear of people who can live again in their old family house, or who can have some of land again, so I hire a lawyer to look, to see who own the land now. And lawyer contact the local council—”

“What’s that?”

“China so big, even government can’t be everywhere. So every town and district have a local council, still Communist, and now they control many thing. So the local council say there is an owner, and the owner is me!”

All three of his children lifted their heads at once and brightened. It broke Charles’s heart to look at them, but he tried to laugh.

“Oh,” said Saina, “it wasn’t really you, right?”

“No. Not really me. I find out that it is him!” Charles pointed towards the divider so fiercely that one of the wires monitoring his vital signs, whatever those might be, came loose. He suctioned it back onto his chest.

When the email came, Saina thought that her father had slipped and fallen on an unfamiliar street or gotten into another car accident, but this was shaping up to be a very different story.

“Him? The weird guy in the red hat?”

“No, that is his son.
Him
is lying down because Daddy beat him up.” They started to question him again, but he silenced them. “Listen. Okay, so I start thinking about the land in China because I know that last year China pass a law, pass in October, saying it okay for some private ownership.”

“So whoever else is behind that curtain, he bought it?”

“No! He steal it and then he lose it. Listen, listen, so my father, your grandfather, have a friend, since they are very small boys—”

“And he’s the guy behind the curtain?”

“No, no, quiet! I already tell you, this is a very long story. So my father have a very old friend, from Guang family, from when they were young. Very old friend. Good friend. The Wang family go to Taiwan, but his friend stay in China, and Communist send him to camp. But very hard camp, a work camp, not a fun camp like Camp Hess Kramer that you go to.”

“Dad! You remember that?”

“Of course. You all so excited to go. So Guang was send to camp for fifteen years, and when he is in camp, he is force to change his mind and become Communist. And finally they let him go, and then he come back to same place where he grow up, and now they make him head of the local council because he is a good Communist. So then worst part happen.
Zwei bu ying gai de.
” Charles had been almost enjoying telling this tale, but the closer he got to the pivotal moment, the less he could pretend to himself that this was just a bit of old-world gossip. To have everything slip away, to have someone step into his story and disrupt it so completely, it was too much. He had weathered too much.
“Gong fei! Tsao ni ma de!”
he shouted. The old curses felt good, so much more satisfying than an insipid
fuck
.

“Qu si!”
was lobbed back over the wall.

“Did you hear what he say? Andrew, you go in there and tell him he can’t talk like that.”

“Dad! I’m not going to go bully some guy who’s in a hospital bed,” said Andrew.

Grace jumped in. “I’ll do it!”

Andrew huffed. “Just ignore him and tell us what happened already.”

“No, no, no, Gracie. You stay. Okay, I tell you. So hear some story, sometimes, about family going back to old house, or maybe share land with
yi qian gen di de ren,
uh, with old peasant, old employee. So Daddy hire a lawyer to see if maybe I can do same thing. But we find out instead that he”—Charles pointed again, violently, at the divider wall—“pretend to be me. And everybody believe.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“He
pretend
to be
me!
Me. He fool Guang, my father’s friend, and make him think that he is me!” When Charles had first understood the full extent of his treacherous cousin’s misdeeds, he’d thought that there would turn out to be some honorable explanation. It was not implausible to hope that the cousin was holding the property in Charles’s name, so that he, the eldest son of the eldest son, could return and assume proper ownership. But as they’d spoken in the dingy, cigarette-smoke-filled office of the travel agency where his cousin, Wu Jong Fei—not even a Wang!—was employed, Charles had felt his anger expand and take shape in his chest until it had become a sentient thing that willed itself into shape with feathers and claws, a ripping, tearing beast no longer under his control. It wasn’t just the betrayal. It was the man himself, who had stolen Charles’s past and his future, who sat there in a thin, cheap shirt and didn’t even attempt to conceal his misdeeds. He’d confessed it all without shame, and now Charles opened his mouth and spewed out the truth.

“Okay, I tell you the worst part. So he trick my father’s friend and he pretend to be me. But why do you think he does this? Because he have some big plan for land? No!
This
is the very worst part. It is because he love to go gamble.

“Go gamble like doing drug to him. Every weekend he go with travel group to Macao, some special gambling group to go bet. Bet, bet, bet. All day long bet. He lose all his own money, so he need to go find more money. He look everywhere,
xiao zang lang,
like little cockroach, and then he get scared. So scared. He owe so much money that he don’t know what will happen.

“The main person who give him gambling stake is big house builder, and so Wu Jong Fei he think, Okay, what do builder need most? Builder need land! So as soon as he hear about the law that pass last year that say that some private ownership of land is okay, he go to
lao
Guang and he show a newspaper article about my business to pretend that he have money, that he will build school, build good house, bring job to people in the town.
Lao
Guang believe him, because
lao
Guang will believe me. But instead he just give land to developer so he can have no debt and more money to gamble and now they build a whole ugly apartment city over Wang 
jia de
land.
Wo men wan le. Mei le.
”

The force of their father’s sorrow and anger flattened the Wang children. They listened to him rage, sinking farther into his pillows with every bitter word.

“It make you so angry,” said Charles. “Angry to death.”

A shard of fear pricked at Grace. “Not to
death,
Dad. But really, really angry.”

And then the imposter, the man who ruined their father’s hopes and dreams, the gambler and pretender, appeared on their side of the wall in a wheelchair, his foot propped up in a cast and his son, the crazy guy in the red hat, pushing him. The imposter was somewhere around their father’s age, with a remarkably similar pair of aviator-style reading glasses. He looked straight at Grace and smiled.

“Xiao meimei hao piao liang.”

Grace looked at her sister, and then at her brother and father. They were all frozen by the strangeness of the situation. What was wrong with that man? He’d stolen all of their land and then ridden out here on a wheelchair to say that she was pretty? Sometimes Grace hated being a girl.

Her father closed his eyes.

Andrew looked at the two unfamiliar men who had somehow become so entrenched in their family story. “Uh,
shushu, ni ying gai zou le.
” But the man didn’t leave. He continued to look at Grace, and then at Saina, and then finally turned his milky eyes towards Andrew.
“Wang Da Qian shen le san ge hao hai zi. Ta yi jiao ni men jiou lai.”

Was this man jealous that he only had one child, and their father had three?

“Hao le ba,”
said the weird man, who Andrew realized was actually not much older than Saina. “O-kay, o-kay,” he added, looking at them. A nurse with a clipboard came into the room and handed the man in the wheelchair a sheaf of papers and a pen. Without a glance, he passed the forms to his son and continued to stare at the three of them.

They waited there, all six of them, until the last of the forms was filled out.

“Should we say goodbye?” Grace whispered to Andrew.

“No!” said their father, opening his eyes. “He does not deserve you to talk to him.”

Andrew was torn. The man was in a wheelchair, but he was like Professor X or something, just sitting there like a boss when he was the one who had messed everything up to begin with. Andrew felt like he should finish what his father had started and break the man’s other leg, but instead he allowed them to wheel out of the room, that other father and that other son.

四十七
Helios, NY

BARBRA COULD HEAR their voices from the vestibule of the restaurant where a lonely pair of green rain boots sat under a battered painting of sailboats.

“There’s nothing wrong with calling.”

“But what do I say? I don’t really have another explanation.” It was Leo.

“I don’t think you need to explain. I just think you need to tell her that you’re invested in the relationship.”

“Gay men are very smart about girls,” said Barbra, peeking her head into the main dining room. “Leo, you should listen to your friend.”

“Oh, I’m not gay,” said Graham.

“He’s just a hipster,” said Leo.

What was a hipster? The term was vaguely familiar to her, buried somewhere between
beatnik
and
hippie,
but it wasn’t important now. She pulled out the keys to Saina’s house and placed them on the bar. “Here, Graham. Saina said I should leave these for you, and you would go water her garden.”

“Oh yeah, okay. So are you off to China now? Did your passport get renewed?”

“Yes, I’m going to pick it up, and then I will fly to China.” What was it that Saina had said? How strange it was that she’d ended up here, in a farmhouse in upstate New York? “You know, I never thought I would go there.”

“Aren’t you from there?”

“No, no, I grew up in Taiwan. Very different.” She studied the restaurateur, who didn’t seem at all offended that she’d thought he was a homosexual. “Why didn’t
you
tell Saina?”

He blushed suddenly and raised his hands. “You gotta choose some loyalties in life, I guess.” That was true, though she’d never thought that it was the sort of truth this ready-to-laugh young man would know. “Anyways,” he said, “I think intent matters with lies, and I knew Leo wasn’t trying to screw her over, he was just trying to keep it real.”

“A lie does not sound very real.”

“Yeah, okay, well, he was just trying not to get dumped.”

Barbra had seen young people in L.A. with tattoos like this, their whole body covered like Saina’s notebooks in high school, but she’d never had the chance to speak to one of them before. She tapped his forearm. “Is this pig your friend?”

Graham looked down and laughed. “They’re all my friends,” he said, pointing at the row of dancing vegetables on his other arm and the knife that loomed above them.

Saina’s boyfriend had built a tiny bridge out of the discarded straw wrappers on the table, twisting them together until they had enough integrity to stand. “Leo,” said Barbra, “I know what you should do.”

He looked up. “What?”

“Go with me.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“To China?”

“Why not? I’ve done the same thing.”

“You mean if you were in this situation?”

“No, no, I already did the same thing. I came to America when Saina’s mother died. I heard about it, and I knew I wanted to marry Charles, so I came. If I don’t come, I don’t have my life.”

He looked lost. “I don’t know, this really isn’t the same thing, is it? She was . . . she was so
done
with me.”

Barbra glanced down at her watch. If this boy couldn’t recognize that you had to grab at life, there was nothing she could do about it. “Okay.” She shrugged. “Then you stay here. But I think at least you should try.”

“I don’t know if I can intrude right now. It feels like a family thing.”

She looked him straight in the eye. He wasn’t as alluring as Grayson—he didn’t have that elusive thing that would make a girl disregard any failing—but he seemed like the kind of man that Charles would want his daughter to be with, someone kind and joyous, even if he was black. “A family thing. And you want to be like her family.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I have a taxi outside.”

“I might see you there.”

He wasn’t going to come, she knew. The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.

四十八
Gaofu, China

“GYM. NAS. TIC,” said Bing Bing, returning to the car. “Like O. Lym. Pic.”

They had been stopped on the wrong side of a blockade for ten minutes before she decided to get out and investigate. “There. Is. A show. Happening. Right. Now. It will take. A long. Time. For us. To go past. It.” She passed back a crinkly plastic bag of candied winter melon, and they each took a stick of the pale-green sweet even though they were headed to a dinner of some sort.

A few years out of college, a friend of Saina’s got a job teaching English in a small prefecture in Northern Japan. Her arrival had triggered an avalanche of invitations to official dinners and gatherings—she’d even been invited to a wedding. Other friends had told her about visits to their homelands and how they were always crowded with command performances, the immigrants expected to show up whenever they were summoned. And now here they were, going to some sort of a family dinner with family they had never met.

Andrew leaned his head against the window. He had always been aware, vaguely, that there were relatives in China, though he didn’t know their ages and couldn’t keep track of their names. If he’d known that he was going to meet them, he would have packed a little more carefully.