The Wangs vs. the World Page 2

  Most chops underlined their authority with excess, an entire flowery honorific crowded on the carved base, but this one, once his grandfather’s, had a single character slashed into its bottom.

  王

  Just the family name. Wang.

  Over a century ago, when the seal was first made, its underside had started out a creamy white. Now it was stained red from cinnabar paste. His grandfather had used the chop in lieu of a signature on any documents he’d needed to approve, including the land deeds that were once testament to the steady expansion of Wang family holdings. Charles was thankful that his grandfather had died before all the land was lost, before China lost herself entirely to propaganda and lies. The men of the Wang family did not always live long lives, but they lived big.

  The land that had anchored the Wangs and exalted them, the land that had given them a place and a purpose, that was gone. But Charles still had the seal and the deeds, everything that proved that the land was rightfully his.

  And in a few fevered hours of searching the Internet, he’d uncovered stories, vague stories, of local councils far from central Party circles returning control to former owners, of descendants who, after years in reeducation camps, managed to move back into abandoned family houses that had been left to rot, entire wings taken over by wild pigs because peasants persuaded to deny their history could never appreciate the poetry and grandeur of those homes. He stored each hopeful tale away in a secret chamber of his heart, hoarding them, as he formed a plan. He would make sure that his three children were safe, that his fearsome and beloved second wife was taken care of, that his family was all under one roof, and then, finally, Charles Wang was going to reclaim the land in China.

  He popped an aspirin in his mouth, pushing back that new old feeling of a tunnel, a dark and almost inevitable tunnel, closing in on him, and crunched down on the pill as he picked up the phone.

  二

  Helios, NY

  SAINA WANG smoothed out the tabloid-size Catskills Chronicler and paged past the op-ed column, skipping the list of new high school seniors, glancing over the photos of the mayor’s Labor Day barbecue and the Pet of the Week, in search of the horoscopes. Usually she read the New York Times—made herself read it, a reminder of the life she could be, maybe should be, living—but that paper would never carry anything as frivolous and as useful as horoscopes.

  There. There they were. Squeezed onto the recipe page under a photo of creamed corn succotash with crisped prosciutto.

  Libra (Sept. 23–Oct. 22)

  You resonate with things and people you love. The more you let yourself love, the better you feel. The better you feel, the healthier you become. Love is a healer, and so are you.

  It was exactly what she’d always feared was true.

  From the time Saina was very young, she worried that she would always be the lover and never the loved.

  And then she grew up and it got more complicated. Now she thought that she would always be the salve to some artist’s eternally wounded soul—an unwilling goddess to be worshipped and adored, but never, ever worried over or taken care of. No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes.

  Giant canvases that glorified her naked breasts and half smile, songs rhyming Saina and wanna, unfinished novels about an unknowable girl of dreams—none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favor.

  Sometimes, when you’re in love with an artist, it can be hard to see that it’s not about you at all. You get lost in the attention, the deep, soulful gazes and the probing regard. And then, gradually, you come to realize that you’re not so much a woman as you are a statue. A statue on a pedestal that he chiseled and posed, a foreshortened figure that he sees only through a single squinted eye. When you’re in love with an artist, you’re no longer you, exactly, but a loving and generous Everywoman who will weave your life into a crafty plinth for his work.

  And it doesn’t even matter if you’re an artist, too. You could have a whole room—a small one, but a whole room nonetheless—at the Whitney Biennial. Your gallery in Berlin could be paranoid enough about your potential defection to a rival that you’d have to fake an eccentric demand for weekly shipments of special-order, octopus-shaped Haribo gummies just so they’d stop asking you what they could do to make you happy; your dealer in New York could be fending off a waiting list filled with scores of discerning millionaires and you could be a permanent fixture on both the Artforum party pages and NewYorkSocialDiary.com, but your beautiful boyfriend with his perpetually dirty fingernails could still be so obsessed with the politics of his own creation that he would take all of that in with an absentminded kiss and ask you again and then again and then a fifteenth time if you heard the difference between nearly identical sound loops on the track accompanying his latest installation.

  And then he could leave you. After making you his art object, making your love for him his symbol and subject, after presenting you with a heavy, hand-hammered gold band set on the inside with an uncut black diamond so that only the lump of it, sheathed in gold, could be seen when you wore it—a ring that got its own miniprofile in Vogue—after all that, he could still make your life into a Page Six blind item by leaving you for a jewelry-designing mattress heiress named Sabrina, with unattractive knees and a maddening sheaf of corn-silk hair. And yes, yes, it could be the same jewelry-designing mattress heiress who made your gorgeous, heartbreaking, stupid, human rights disaster of a ring.

  None of it surprised Saina anymore. She was twenty-eight and she had turned unshockable. So when the phone rang and she picked it up and found her father in tears, her heart stayed put.

  “It is over,” choked her father, coughing to cover the angry wobble in his voice.

  “What’s over?” she asked.

  “Our whole life.”

  Saina looked around the room. My life was already over, she thought. She was washed up, tossed out, ruined and ridiculed and exiled from the magic island of Manhattan. What could be more over than that?

  “Baba, don’t be so dramatic. What’s going on?”

  “We are leaving.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is over. I lost it. Oh Jiejie, I lost it.”

  “What?” asked Saina, her heart now quickening. “What did you lose? Tell me. You have to tell me. You can’t just not talk about it like . . . like everything.”

  Saina’s father’s words came out in a rush, the breaking of a giant dam.

  “All. Baba lost all. Wan le. You understand what that mean? Everything over.”

  “The stores. You just mean the stores, right? That’s what you lost? We talked about that already.” Was he starting to forget things? He was too young for Alzheimer’s.

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. Now we come to New York.”

  Her father’s English sounded more broken than usual. Not that he’d ever bothered to perfect it in the first place—the rules of grammar were beneath him, bylaws for a silly club that he had no intention of joining. Why should he spend any energy on English, he’d explained once, when soon the whole world would be speaking Chinese? Now, though, he sounded like a sweet-’n’-sour-chicken delivery boy who’d missed out on America and instead taken up residence in a new country called Chinatown.

  “What do you mean you’re coming to New York?”

  “We have no home, Jiejie. We come live with you now.”

  “The house? But why was that tied up with everything else? I just . . . Baba, I don’t understand. How could there be nothing left? What about your savings? What about your other clients?”

  There was a long, humid silence. Finally, he spoke again. “Daddy make a mistake. I think that if I can just hold on for long enough, then everything is okay again. So I just throw it all in, like throwin
g in a hole.”

  “Oh. Daddy. I’m sorry.”

  “No point in sorry now.”

  “Okay.” What should she do? What could she do?

  “How long it take to drive across country? Maybe eight day? Ten day?” He sounded small. Wounded.

  Saina looked around her house, panic creeping in. It wasn’t even a house, really. Not in any way that her father would understand or approve of. Not a Bel-Air Georgian or a rehabbed modernist gem—not even a downtown New York loft. It was a Catskills farmhouse three generations away from any kind of respectability perched on the edge of a town abandoned by Lubavitchers and just beginning to be occupied by weekending gay couples and Third Wave farmers carrying blue-eyed babies in batik slings.

  When Saina sold her New York apartment out from under her cheating boyfriend, all she could think of was retreat. Their entire bright white loft had been arranged around a slightly hysterical pair of Biedermeier chairs that they bought at an auction back when he still thought it was important to suggest that his family had as much ready cash as hers. The pair, scallop edged and velvet upholstered, held court in front of a twenty-two-foot-high blank wall that backdropped his confession about Sabrina. Lovely, pregnant Sabrina. He’d whispered it to Saina, whispered it, and then tiptoed out the door like a thief.

  Her first thought was that she’d always hated those chairs. Her second thought was that all the letters of her name were contained in Sabrina’s, as if Sabrina encompassed everything that she herself was and then, in all her goldness, offered up even more.

  Saina couldn’t do anything to Sabrina and her maybe baby, so she’d gotten rid of the chairs instead. Just picked them up and placed them on the curb, where they’d at least have the chance to become part of someone else’s good-luck story. Soon, though, she couldn’t even stand looking at the empty wall where they once were; she started to wish them back, to wish him back. It hadn’t been enough to cast out the only piece of furniture they’d ever bought together, she had to strike the entire set on which they’d acted out their lives. So Saina had sold the whole damn thing and now here she was, manufacturing domestic bliss all by herself. Except. Well, except.

  “Baba, really? All of you? What about Meimei gen Didi?”

  “Daddy will go pick them up.”

  “You’re going to make them drop out of school? You can’t do that!”

  “What are they learning in those schools anyway? Arizona State. Not even a school—party school only. And Gracie, she can go to high school in your town. They have high school there?”

  “But what about their tuitions? They should be okay for at least the semester, right?”

  He was quiet.

  Saina had a terrible thought. “Is everyone’s money lost?”

  “Not you,” said her father. “You are old enough to be separate.”

  At least there was that. But with it came an unexpected sensation: Responsibility. Saina’s instinct was to abdicate it.

  “I’ll give the money all to you! It’s not mine anyways, it’s yours, you made it! Take it and buy another house.”

  Her father laughed.

  “You old enough to be separate, but it is all Wang jia de already. All of ours. Family, Jiejie.”

  Saina pictured her father, near dead from a million tiny cuts, oozing a glistening mercury blood. She didn’t want them to come, but there was no question as to whether or not she would receive them, find space for their things, buy enough food for five, and put fresh flowers in all the guest bathrooms. There were four bedrooms in this house. Exactly enough for her father, her stepmother, her brother, her sister, and herself. As if she had always known that it would be a refuge for the entire Wang family.

  三

  Santa Barbara, CA

  “SERIOUSLY, DAD?”

  “You can’t talk to Baba that way, Grace.”

  “But they’re kicking me out of school!” she hissed into the phone, embarrassed. “I told you you should have gotten me a car!”

  “Gracie, we coming to pick you up tonight, okay?”

  “Who’s we?”

  “With your ah yi.”

  “Oh her. Okay. But what happened? Dad, I’m being kicked out of school! It’s like they think I’m a criminal or something.”

  “Grace, we certainly don’t think you’re a criminal,” said Brownie, the headmistress, who wasn’t even pretending not to eavesdrop. “In fact, I told your father that we would likely be able to work something out. Perhaps—”

  “You are not going to make me work in the cafeteria,” said Grace, horrified. “There’s no way. I’d rather go to public school, Dad. Daddy!” Grace could swear that she heard her father crying on the other end of the line, but she didn’t want to say anything in case it turned out to be true.

  “Okay, xiao Meimei, don’t worry, okay? It’s okay. We come pick you up and then we go get Andrew, and then we go to Jiejie jia.”

  “Dad. Baba.” Grace felt very reasonable now; she could see that she was going to have to be the adult here. “What are you talking about? I am not driving cross-country with you guys. Who goes on a cross-country family trip? Anyways, I have to take my SATs. I’ll just stay at home, okay?”

  Ugh. The headmistress would not stop looking at her. The last time Grace had been in this office was two semesters ago when her art teacher had narced on her. The art teacher, who made all the students call her Julie. It was embarrassing when adults tried to act like people.

  The problem hadn’t been the dwindling supply of muscle relaxers hidden in the lining of her Louis Vuitton change purse or the bottle of Belvedere stashed under her rainbow of cashmere sweaters. No, the bitchy art teacher, who was so nineties with her ugly dark lipstick and riot grrrl bumper stickers, had walked into the computer lab and caught Grace uploading a photo of herself. She’d been in one of her best morning outfits ever: black lace Wolford tights, navy blue school uniform skirt (hemmed way up), Saina’s beat-up old cowboy boots, a new Surface to Air button-down topped with one of her dad’s old paisley Hermès bow ties from the eighties, a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses with fake lenses—which no one had to know about—and, holding together her deliberately messy hair, a bright yellow silk sash tied in a knot. So much cooler than that poseur VainJane.com’s outfits—Jane lived in Florida. How could anything really stylish ever happen there? How did every single outfit of Jane’s get so many comments, anyway? That girl thought that Louboutins were enough to make any outfit—so boring. Grace couldn’t understand it.

  Anyway, Grace was sure that this outfit would be a hit, and she was about to post it to her blog, already anticipating the responses from her followers, when Julie had crept right up behind her, trying to be quiet. The teacher wasn’t even smart enough to realize that you couldn’t sneak up on someone who was using one of those computers because they’d be able to see the reflection of your stupid face on the screen.

  As she’d reached out to tap Grace with one burgundy polished nail, Grace had turned and smiled.

  And that was what she’d gotten a demerit for: Insubordination.

  The ethics committee had decided that Grace’s blog was fashion focused and not about “exploiting herself and undermining her power as a young woman”​—in other words, not about sex—but that she’d shown an unwillingness to accept guidance. It was a totally ridiculous thing to get in trouble for, but whatever. It didn’t matter anymore.

  “Gracie, you pack your things up—but just the important things, okay? We be there in a few hours,” said her father

  The headmistress cut in. “Grace, if you’d like someone to help you clear out your room, just ask. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help, alright, darling?”

  Grace pressed the off button on her cell.

  “Don’t call me darling,” she said. At least no one could give her demerits anymore. Ugh.

  Sometimes she hated talking to her father. Was it possible to love someone and hate them at the same time? Or to love someone even if you didn’t actu
ally like them? If her mother were alive, things would be different. Everyone she knew got along with their mothers and hated their fathers, but she didn’t have the luxury of a spare parent.

  “So . . . we’re poor now.”

  Grace’s roommate stared at her.

  “It’s true, Rachel. We don’t have any money left. Nothing. I have to drop out of school, and my dad and stepmom are coming to pick me up, and we have to drive all the way to my sister’s house in some weird little country town in New York. Drive! I don’t know if we even have any stuff left. Don’t they take all of that when you’re bankrupt?”

  “You’re bankrupt? Like, completely?”

  “Well, my dad said he was, so I guess that means that I am, too.”

  “Um, are you okay?”

  “Do I seem okay?”

  “I guess so . . . I mean, no one’s dead, right?”

  “Except for my house. I was practically born in that house, and I didn’t even get to live there for long—I had to come live here. And now I’ll never even see it again.”

  Rachel had heard about Grace’s family’s house even though she’d never once been invited over for break. There were secret passageways, and modern art, and once Johnny Delahari had taken a weird combo of E and H (everyone at school called it the Canadian Special, but no one else was crazy enough to actually do it) and passed out in Grace’s stepmother’s walk-in closet for hours with a silk camisole wrapped around his face.

  “It smelled like lady pussy,” he’d told Rachel.

  “But you said it was a camisole,” she’d said. “That’s like a tank top.”

  “Okay, it smelled like lady boobs,” he’d replied, grinning, and then tried to reach up her shirt.

  Now she wished that she had let him, because with Grace gone, he’d probably never come around to her room again.