The Wangs vs. the World Read online

  “Here’s what I don’t understand: British people do not say the letter h. They just drop it entirely. Like, don’t even try it, but we don’t laugh at that. French people are not on speaking terms with zee ths, isn’t zat true? But none of that turns y’all on like an Asian person messing up the letter r. The only thing that comes vaguely close is a Canadian oo: aboot, hoose. Just close your eyes for a minute and imagine an Asian immigrant who learned to speak English in Canada saying the word roustabout—oh, what does that mean? It’s an unskilled laborer, you roustabouts! Seriously, though, what does that even sound like? Here, let’s try it, let’s say it out loud. You know you want to. It’s okay. I’m telling you, on behalf of Asians everywhere, it’s okay. Here, I’ll say it with you, we can do it together, okay? On three. One, two, three—loostaboot!”

  Only a couple of game audience members played along, dutiful. Someone else said something that sounded like “Loser dude,” and several people headed towards the bathroom, but Andrew went on, his good cheer starting to sound a little desperate.

  “You racist motherfuckers! No, no, I’m just kidding. Really, I’m kidding, I know all of your best friends are colored. Ha! Aw, I feel kinda guilty. I tricked you into it, and now you feel like douchebags.” Andrew flapped his hands in a gesture that would have been meant to quiet down the crowd if they’d been making any noise at all. “Okay, okay, to make up for it I’ll give you what you really want, okay?” He stood up straight and looked off into the distance. Raising an arm, he said, in a Laurence Olivier voice, “An elderly Chinese man, perhaps my father, perhaps not, just saying words. Words with the letter r.” And then, again, that embarrassing accent. “Lobots. Logaine. Lome. Lotaly Crub—good one, right? Corrabolate. Collobolate—that was two different words, by the way. Well, thanks for helping me undo the last fifty years of the Civil Rights Movement. Y’all are assholes. Good night!”

  Barbra realized that she’d managed to drink the entire gin and tonic, and was now clenching the small red straw between her teeth. She let it drop, the plastic shredded and wet, onto her lap.

  In Chinese, the word for ugly was chou—it was the same as the word for shameful. Ugly and shameful, both chou. And the slang for shameful was diou lian, which was usually translated to English as “lose face” but more literally meant “throw face.” As if the bereft had willfully tossed away anything worth finding and keeping. Thrown away the pretty face on top, leaving only the ugly, embarrassed face underneath.

  Andrew stood in front of her, dripping sweat.

  “Can we go?” he asked. She looked up, trying to pull together some words of congratulation or encouragement, but she had none.

  “Now?” he added.

  Andrew was too soft, thought Barbra. It made sense that you had to make people laugh. Comedy was an act of aggression, and Andrew was not a fighter.

  “Please?”

  For a brief moment, Barbra felt the urge to refuse, to make him stay and watch the other comedians, to point out the moments where he’d fallen short. She could coach him into being a better comedian. Force him into it.

  But Andrew continued to stand, not taking his hurt eyes off her, and Barbra realized that it was a decade or two too late to be a mother, so instead she gathered her things and led Andrew out of the bar.

  二十五

  Helios, NY

  IT WAS STRANGE that nothing calamitous happened when Saina and Grayson first broke up.

  She’d expected the Los Angeles basin to split apart like a giant glacier, calving pink stucco islands studded with palm trees that would float off across the Pacific. She’d expected an epic fire in New York City. A crosstown conflagration that would swallow entire neighborhoods, leaving behind a crisped and broken Manhattan. An earthquake, a tsunami, another flood or terrorist attack—something, anything, to commemorate their cleaving. But instead, nothing. Just a mild winter and a glorious spring and fewer murders in the five boroughs.

  It wasn’t vanity.

  Everyone thought that their breakups should cause time to stop and birds to drop out of the sky. It’s just that with Saina’s, it actually happened.

  In first grade she’d spent an entire art period building a papier-mâché rocketship for Adam Garcia, who told Kelly Park that he liked Saina. But when she tried to present her handiwork to him, he laughed and said that it was a joke. As her heart broke, the Challenger exploded right in front of them on the classroom television screen.

  Three months later, Adam saw a corner of her notebook where she’d written SW + AG. He said he thought she was gross. She cried.

  Then Chernobyl.

  Saina had sworn off boys after that, avoiding the potential nuclear disaster of spin the bottle and ignoring the famine that was sure to come if she confessed her crush on her best friend’s older brother. In tenth grade she’d developed a giant, embarrassing crush on her art teacher, who had praised her teenage insights and given her his favorite art books and stared a beat too long at her cutoffs. She imagined a bohemian life for the two of them that was interrupted by heartbreak when she saw him kissing the Spanish teacher in the school parking lot. That night, as she lay awake into morning, the walls of the house jumped up and slammed down into the earth with a crack and roar. It was heartbreak that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale and felled an entire apartment building in the San Fernando Valley. She limited herself to a string of amusing dalliances for the rest of high school, but after the first breakup with a college boyfriend who went on to launch an empire of pinup porn stars, September 11. After the second, with a sweet and lovely Canadian who studied the structure of snowflakes, Hurricane Katrina.

  Saina knew it was gross. She felt guilty for ever having made that first connection, for thinking that her minuscule personal heartbreak had anything to do with the Challenger or Chernobyl. But we can only ever see the world through our own half-blind eyes, set in our own stupid heads, backed by our own self-obsessed brains, and from that vantage point, it just didn’t make any sense that nothing fell apart after Grayson left. If Saina was being completely honest with herself, half the motivation for her retreat to the country was a fear of some calamitous terror strike that was sure to follow that first, worst breakup with the man she thought she was going to marry.

  Instead, she’d walked into the Catskills and met Leo.

  It was the first warm day of spring. She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd. Except that there were no crowds in Helios. At four o’clock its only street was nearly deserted and the shopkeepers were occupying themselves by sweeping sidewalks and gossiping in doorways. Neither of the street’s restaurants was scheduled to open for another couple of hours, but the door of one swung open on a lazy hinge. Taking a chance, Saina pushed in, tiptoeing through the wood-paneled vestibule. All of the chairs were stacked on top of the tables, and a mop and bucket sat abandoned in the middle of the ceramic-tile floor. The lamps were switched off, but the late afternoon sun sent a hazy, dust-filled shaft of light across the men on either side of the copper bar, making the two of them look like a Caravaggio.

  Behind the bar, a dirty blond with a red beard held a glass up to her. “Afternoon drinking. Nothing like it.” His voice echoed across the empty room.

  She grinned. “Morning drinking. Even better.”

  And then the other guy, the one who would turn out to be Leo, leaned back and laughed, parting his pink lips, showing every single one of his pretty teeth, leaving his smooth throat open and vulnerable.

  That, she thought, looks like a healthy diversion.

  Saina had chosen a house on the outskirts of Helios because the town was small (population: 1,214) and isolated (three miles off of County Road 19) and she thought that she didn’t want to see or talk to anyone ever again.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite right.

  It was more like she’d seen it all as bucolic set dressing for her inevitable comeback. This was the magazine story she r
eally wanted—not some exegesis on failure penned by Billy, but a tribute to her rebirth.

  Depressed and disgraced, artist Saina Wang traded her Meatpacking District loft for a ramshackle Catskills farmhouse only to undergo a creative and personal renaissance.

  “I’m thrilled,” says the stunning twenty-eight-year-old, grinning as she holds an Araucana—the artisanal hens lay bright blue eggs that match the shutters on the eighteenth-century barn she converted to a studio. Wang talks to us about chickens and eggs, the birds and the bees (wink, wink!), and doing her best work yet.

  Some parts of it were true. She was twenty-eight, and she had painted the shutters on the barn bright blue, but she’d never know for sure if they matched the tufted bird’s eggs because it turned out that baby chicks, no matter how heritage, can freeze to death even in sixty-degree weather. It also turned out that chopping wood was impossibly hard. On the first attempt the ax slipped from her hands and went flying, the second time she kept a vise grip on the ax and it was the wood that flipped off the stump. Convinced that the third try would cost her a toe, Saina draped a tarp back over the woodpile and hid the ax in the broom closet.

  It wasn’t just the buried chicks and the pile of unchopped wood. It was the vegetable garden that wouldn’t grow despite the manure she heaped over the soil, the flowers that budded but never blossomed, the neighbor who inched his fence over her property line, the gang of neighboring goats that made a daily escape from their enclosure and pillaged her stunted garden. The countryside was refusing to live up to her pastoral fantasy, just like the rest of her life. Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture.

  When she interrupted them, Leo and his friend Graham, the owner-bartender-chef-occasional-butcher, were putting together a new cocktail menu for G Street, Graham’s restaurant-bar-occasional-town-hall.

  Herbs from Leo’s farm were piled all around them, spilling out of torn-open paper bags with the Fatboy Farms logo. Leo was pounding sprigs of rosemary in an oversize mortar and pestle. Graham was sifting freshly ground nutmeg together with turbinado sugar and white pepper. The smells came at her like Christmas and Thanksgiving over the chemical lemon of the floor cleaner. The men had invited her to join in—“We need to temper the testosterone a little”​—and the three of them spent the next hour infusing simple syrups over a portable burner and trying to put together the most herb-intensive cocktails they could think of.

  “I want something burly. Bitter. Pungent. A gut punch. But, you know, suave,” said Graham.

  “A man’s drink,” said Saina.

  “Mixology: The New Bespoke Tailoring.” Leo, it turned out, sometimes spoke in pronouncements.

  As the sunlight faded, Leo edged closer to Saina, balancing a foot against her stool, placing his lips precisely over the spot where she’d sipped from a glass of basil-cucumber-cayenne-gin-and-ginger. Soon it was just the two of them sitting and drinking in the half dark. The restaurant was officially open, but no one had ventured in. Graham was in the kitchen, drunkenly calling out instructions to his prep-cook-waiter-accountant and Leo leaned towards her, conspiratorial.

  “Let’s surprise Graham.”

  “By raiding his cash register?”

  “I have a better idea.” He stepped off the stool and picked up the discarded mop. “Do you know how to do a three-corner fold?”

  Saina shook her head. “But I can make it up.”

  He tossed her the package of freshly laundered napkins. She tore open the plastic and pulled out a bright white cloth. As she folded, she watched him swab the tiles until they were shiny, and then they put the chairs in place and ripped long sheets of butcher paper to drape over the tabletops.

  Leo held up a napkin, inspecting the fold. “Very impressive. Precision and beauty.”

  Saina felt her cheeks get hot. Who was this guy? This greens-growing, Catskills-living, yeshiva-named black man whose first drunken instinct was to do sweet favors for his friends? Who wielded a mop with balletic swoops and wore his T-shirt tight and loose in all the right places?

  The kitchen door swung open to reveal Graham, a chef’s hat on his head and a giant zucchini in his hand. “Dudes! You’re my magic mice! Cinderelly! Cinder—ouch!” Before the second “elly,” the door swung back and smacked him in the nose, then opened again. “Where’s my prince?”

  Saina and Leo smiled at each other. They smiled and smiled and didn’t stop until a couple walked in and asked to be seated. As Leo settled them at a table and brought over glasses of water, she stayed in place, watching him.

  Her just-wounded heart might have been on hiatus, but it turned out that the rest of her was still alert, ready to bloom in the direction of any new sun.

  That was six months ago. Enough time to fall halfway in love, once. To betray someone, once. To be betrayed, once. And, maybe, to win someone back, once.

  二十六

  I-10 East

  BY THE TIME they crossed the border into Louisiana, Andrew started to feel like they’d live out the rest of their lives in the backseat of this car. There was no way to really get comfortable. He and Grace tried opening the windows and sticking their feet out in the open air, tried taking turns lying down, but no matter what, every position felt awkward.

  Thanks to some unspoken mutual agreement, they didn’t talk about the pictures Grace had taped up around her seat—especially not the picture of their mother that Andrew didn’t remember ever having seen before. Instead, he let Grace lay her head in his lap and told her what was going on outside the window.

  “This is so weird. There’s a guy on a skateboard pushing a guy in a wheelchair right now, and they’re, like, flying down the street.”

  “Mmm . . . what’s the guy in the wheelchair like?”

  “White guy, scraggly beard, Hawaiian shirt.”

  Ama had been in a wheelchair once, back when she’d sprained her ankle chasing their dog Lady down the stairs. Would he ever see her again?

  Andrew turned to Grace. “What’s Ama’s name?”

  “Isn’t it Ama?”

  “No, that’s what she is, an ama. It’s like a nanny.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. You’ve basically been calling her ‘caretaker’ all your life.”

  “Well, you have, too!”

  “I know. It’s terrible. We’re terrible people. Dad—what’s Ama’s name?”

  Their father looked at them in the rearview mirror. “Why do you wonder?”

  “Because she’s a person, Dad!”

  “Okay, Gracie, okay . . .” Charles thought hard. What was Ama’s name? It was lost somewhere in the past, when Ama was pretty and young and she carried him everywhere on her back. “I think she was from Lu family, and then she have to come live with us, come take care of your baba. Maybe she tell Jiejie?”

  Grace was doubtful. “Why would Saina know if we don’t?”

  “Let’s call,” said Andrew.

  “I want to call.”

  “We’ll conference. If she picks up.”

  Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

  “I was just about to call you guys,” said Saina.

  “We have a family dispute to resolve.”

  Grace kicked him and waved her cell phone in his face. “Wait, I’m being abused. What are you supposed to do when you’re in an abusive relationship?”

  “Rehabilitate them with love.”

  “Kill them with kindness?”

  “Kill’s a little extreme. Maybe just maim.”

  “Hold on.” Andrew dialed Grace’s number.

  “Finally! Saina, this is important. Do you know Ama’s name?” She kicked against Barbra’s seat, dislodging the Diane Arbus photograph.

  “Doesn’t Dad know it?”

  “No.” Grace glared at her father, but his eyes were on the road. “All he knows is her last name even though he’s known her all his life.”

  “You’ve known her all your
life, too,” said Saina.

  “Yeah, but I’ve known her for the shortest amount of time compared to everyone else, so you guys have been assholes for longer.”

  “What made you think of it?” Saina asked.

  “Andrew did. I don’t know.”

  He felt silly, suddenly, for insisting on this piece of knowledge. Of course they’d be able to find her. “Dad! Do you know Ama’s daughter’s phone number? Kathy’s number?”

  Charles, busy unfolding a map, shook his head.

  “But then how do we call Ama if we need to? I didn’t say goodbye to her!” said Andrew.

  “You mean we won’t see her again?” Grace thought back to their escape from Kathy’s house. It had been a hurried, uncomfortable exit, and she’d only given Ama a quick hug. They’d abandoned Ama as if she were a puppy, an off-season sweater, this woman who had changed their shitty diapers and bandaged their skinned knees and spooned porridge into their baby-bird mouths. She would never have done it if she’d known. Never. This was her father’s fault, and Barbra’s. Grace kicked Barbra’s seat again, but still her stepmother did nothing. Nothing. What did she ever do besides get her nails done and organize her closet and buy sunglasses? Babs had so many pairs of sunglasses. The only worthwhile thing she’d ever taught Grace was how to apply lipstick without looking in a mirror.

  “Hold on, I’m checking Facebook,” said Saina over the phone. “Where are you guys stopping next?”

  “Remember Uncle Nash? We’re going to stay with him in New Orleans.”

  “That guy? He always had such a crush on Mom. Oh wait, here, Kathy’s on Facebook!”

  Andrew reached over and touched his little sister’s leg. “See, we found her. It’s okay.”

  Suddenly, finding Ama didn’t matter as much to Grace. “Hold up, Uncle Nash had a crush on Mom? How did you know?” Worried, she looked at her father in the rearview mirror, and whispered, “Does Dad know?”