The Wangs vs. the World (49 page)

To Margaret, again, for so many long days and nights eating bad sandwiches over laptops. There’s just no way I would have written all these pages without you working right across the table. We finished our books!

To my sister, Krystal, for sharing a love of the food parts of books and a very singular childhood.

And always and most of all to my parents, endlessly loving and supportive, who didn’t just come to America for opportunity—they came for adventure, and they found it.

Additional Thanks

I wish that I’d kept a log of all my book-related Google searches. In some alternate literary universe, the countless online words that I read on everything from the life of Madame Louis Lévêque—a celebrated French writer once engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and now memorialized in the breed of roses that line the Wangs’ Bel-Air driveway—to the destruction of the hutongs in Beijing would become a kind of navigable undercurrent to this book. A sincere thank-you to the many people who contribute to our virtual store of knowledge—the Internet is not just cat videos!

I owe more specific gratitude to the work of John Lanchester, Felix Salmon, and Matt Taibbi, journalists who covered the madness of 2008 with great intelligence, clarity, and depth. Felix Salmon’s February 2009
Wired
cover, “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street,” was instrumental in helping me understand the role of David X. Li and the Gaussian copula. The version of the formula Professor Kalchefsky writes on the board comes from this article, but differs from the exact formula used by Wall Street.

The lines that Charles thinks about in
chapter 十五
—“Companies fail the way Ernest Hemingway wrote about going broke. Gradually, and then suddenly”—come from a May 2002
Fortune
story by Ram Charan and Jerry Useem, “Why Companies Fail.” That line seemed perfect and true when I read it in the long wake of the first dot-com bubble and bust, and I’ve remembered it ever since.

Finally, the horoscope that opens
chapter 二
is from an actual horoscope by Holiday Mathis that ran in the
Los Angeles Times
on July 13, 2007. It was, of course, originally written for my sign.

About the Author

J
ADE
C
HANG
has covered arts and culture as a journalist and editor. She is the recipient of a Sundance fellowship for arts journalism and the AIGA Winterhouse Award for design criticism.
The Wangs vs. the World
is her debut novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

Learn more at www.thewangs.com