The Wangs vs. the World Page 3

  Grace wheeled a desk chair over to the closet and balanced on it, pulling her luggage down from the top shelf. She jumped off the chair, launching it backwards towards Rachel, who stopped it with her purple ballet flat.

  “Maybe you’ll get to have your own room,” said Grace.

  “I think your roommate has to kill herself before they let you room alone.”

  “Do you think it counts if it happens after they transfer?”

  “Shut up, Grace. You’re not going to kill yourself.”

  “You never know,” said Grace, pulling all her jeans off their hangers. Maybe they’d all commit suicide together. Or maybe her dad would drive them off a cliff. God, maybe she should just leave everything. If they were going to be poor, or dead, what was the point of having the same exact deconstructed rabbit-fur vest that Kate Moss was wearing in last month’s Elle? On the other hand, maybe being poor could be kind of glamorous, with holey old T-shirts and guys who had to work as bartenders and whole meals of just french fries, in which case, maybe it would also be kind of glamorous to have her clothes. She’d be like a Romanov or something, deposed and in hiding from all the worlds that mattered.

  Her father had said, “Just the important things.” What was that supposed to mean? Grace looked at the pile of denim on the floor, then kicked it towards Rachel.

  “Here,” she said. “Take it. I’m sick of them all anyways.”

  “Seriously?”

  Grace didn’t answer, just kicked the pile again as she turned to pull down the cork bulletin board, layered with clippings, over her desk. She laid it across her bed and started picking out the tacks, cupping them in her left hand. As she worked, she thought about Parents’ Weekend last year, when she’d walked up to their room and seen Rachel lying on the bed, her head in her mother’s lap. The door to their room had been ajar, and Grace had stood there for a long moment, watching as Rachel’s mother smoothed her daughter’s hair away from her face and gazed down at her, half smiling, full of love. She’d never felt jealous of Rachel for even a second until that day.

  “Are you really bringing everything on that board? All those pictures and things?” asked Rachel.

  “Of course.”

  “Isn’t it kind of . . . kind of morbid?”

  “What’s morbid about it?”

  “Well, they’re all pictures of dead people.”

  “People die. Deal with it.”

  “Yeah, people die, but that doesn’t mean that you have to plaster them all over our walls.”

  “They’re your walls now, aren’t they.”

  “I’m just saying, I know why you put them up and I think it’s creepy. You can give up pretending that’s not the reason.” Rachel took everything so seriously. That’s what happened when you were a total drama nerd.

  “Why don’t you give it up, Rachel? Rachie Pie? Oh wait, I forgot. You’re saving yourself for, like, Andrew Lloyd Webber or something. You’re too good to just have s-e-x.”

  “That’s not what this is about! Why does everything have to be about sex with you?”

  “I thought that everything was about death with me.”

  They faced off for a moment, then Rachel spoke. “I’m . . . I’m sorry for you. Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do? Like, do you want to borrow some money or something? Or, um, we could . . . steal you some food from the cafeteria? That you could take with you?”

  Grace stared at her roommate, who was kneeling on the ground, greedily feeling up a pair of her jeans. She could kick Rachel in the face right now and never even have to deal with it. A satisfying crunch in her annoying, curly-haired face. She’d aim straight at the zits that always piled onto Rachel’s forehead, a bubbly constellation of them, and Rachel’s head would snap back and she’d have to shut up and Grace wouldn’t even get in trouble. Or maybe she’d have to go to jail, but what would it matter?

  She turned back to the board.

  “Isabella Blow,” said Grace, untacking a photograph of a thin woman quivering in profile, a crazy confection of a hat perched on her dark chignon.

  “Elliot Smith.” She untacked another torn-out photograph, the singer’s Frankenstein face staring straight at the camera, pockmarks unretouched, holding his fist over his heart.

  “Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.” Two photo-booth shots side by side, the woman with half-moon eyes and the man with his sweet, sad mouth, both raising their chins and looking down their noses like rebel bank robbers.

  She looked at Rachel again. “They’re all brilliant.”

  Rachel walked over to the board bowlegged, struggling to button up a pair of Grace’s jeans. “The cover of The Bell Jar. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love on Sassy. And this? Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. 1963,” she said, tearing the Diane Arbus photograph off of its tack and reading the caption. “Dead, dead, dead. How? Oh yeah, that’s right, suicide, suicide, suicide.”

  Grace shrugged. “God, Rachel, you’re boring.”

  Grace reached over and plucked a faded pair of jeans out of the pile—they were ’70s-style and high waisted, with a rope of braided denim looped through the belt holes. “You can’t have these.”

  Grace pulled them on, along with an old T-shirt that she’d cut into a tank top and shoved her feet into a pair of lace-up prairie boots with just a little bit of a heel. And the vest. Her rabbit-fur vest.

  Grace was raised to know that appearances mattered. If you put your Xanax in a Tylenol PM bottle, no one would care if you took four of them, and no one would judge you if, a little bit later on, you fell asleep with your head on your boyfriend’s shoulder after just two vodka Red Bulls. Not that she’d ever commit suicide like that.

  Pills were a coward’s way out. You weren’t really doing anything; there was nothing decisive about them; one call from a dorm monitor and you’d be halfway to the hospital with a tube down your throat, getting your stomach pumped out.

  Slitting your wrists was a good method, along the vein instead of across it, the steely knife following the blue-purple terrain of your upturned arm. If Grace slit her wrists, she’d use a long, thin blade, freshly sharpened, and trace a delicate V on her left wrist—but that would only work at home because there were no bathtubs at school. Bleeding out on a dorm room bed was way too depressing. She’d rather be in a milky bath with a flickering candle and a pile of books. The blooms of blood would turn the water pink, and she’d drape herself across the edge so she looked like that painting they’d just learned about, The Death of Marat.

  Hanging was ugly. By the time anyone found you, your face would be a purple bloat and your eyes would be bulging out of their sockets. A gunshot depended too much on aim, jumping in front of a train would make the conductor feel guilty, and self-disembowelment was just medieval. Swimming out to sea sounded nice if your brain would let you give in instead of fighting the ocean for air; freezing to death would be even better, you could just close your eyes and succumb to a sleep where everything felt warm. And your corpse would be perfectly preserved even if no one would ever find it because you’d have to be all the way out in the Arctic or something for it to be cold enough to kill you.

  She’d run through all the different methods to Rachel when they’d first met. Rachel had still seemed cool then, like she might be someone to stay up late and get in some good trouble with, but Grace had figured out pretty quickly that first impressions were always a lie.

  “You might look gorgeous if you froze to death, but you’d still end up in the guts of a beggar,” Rachel had said, staring up at Grace with round little eyes like an awestruck rabbit. An awestruck rabbit who wanted desperately to prove that it was faster and smarter than the tiger that was about to eat it, kind of like a girl version of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Maybe with the same waistcoat. God, Rachel wore such stupid things.

  “Guts of a beggar?”

  “Shakespeare. ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’”
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  “The worms would all be frozen, too,” said Grace. And then she realized that she’d forgotten about poison. Maybe OD’ing on heroin or something would be the best way of all. Then at least she would have gotten to try it out before she died.

  As wrong as Rachel proved to be about boys and music and understanding anything beyond how to kiss Mr. Taylor’s ass so that she was cast in every single play, she was right about the suicide thing.

  It’s not that Grace actually wanted to flail around and lose control of her bowels and lie there with her eyes cranked open until she was carted away and incinerated—actually, that was exactly what she didn’t want to do. She wanted to die young and beautiful, not all messed-up looking. It’s just that, well, with suicide you got to choose—what you were wearing, what kind of note you left, how the whole thing actually went down when you slept that sleep of death. If life was all about making choices and taking responsibility for them, like adults were always saying, then why did death get to be something that just happened to you?

  四

  Bel-Air, CA

  YEARS AGO, Barbra had picked Charles out as the one among all the young men in his class who would make the most of himself. That was before she’d picked out her English name, before she’d learned to pluck her eyebrows and smooth her hair, before she’d yanked herself out of Taiwan and set out for America.

  They were still Wang Da Qian and Hu Yue Ling then, just two on a campus of two thousand. Half of Charles’s classmates had been born in China, sons and daughters of tea merchants from Guangdong and government officials from Beijing. And the other half? Mostly children of mainlanders, too, but deposited headfirst, scrunch faced, and squalling, covered in a sticky film of blood and viscera, into the waiting arms of Taiwanese midwives who cooed over them all the same.

  Not Barbra. There was no China in her blood. Her mother came from Taiwanese hill people who rode to town on an ox-drawn wagon loaded down with the daikon radishes that the Japanese occupiers pickled and grated and boiled in nearly every dish. She met Barbra’s father when he was a delivery boy, picking up produce and freshly plucked chickens for the kitchens of National Taiwan University. He went from pedaling around the markets on a rickety bicycle to keeping watch at the foot of a perpetually bubbling stockpot to presiding over the students’ communal lunches, which eventually underwent their own change, going from noxious oden stews to hearty rice porridges when the Japanese were defeated and a new Republic of China government took over.

  Barbra had grown up in the college’s employee quarters, a too-smart girl with a too-round face, who cursed under her breath in her parents’ native Hokkien but still learned to trill out the smooth hills and valleys of Mandarin as easily as she’d mastered driving the university’s old Datsun and smiling at the college boys with just enough intention to keep them guessing despite her funny little nose. She could critique Marxism and mock Teresa Teng’s overwrought love songs and do most of Audrey Hepburn’s beatnik dance and ride a bicycle without touching the handlebars and take a puff of a cigarette without coughing—everything that was important for a poor but ambitious high school girl to do in Taipei in 1973. The only thing she hadn’t managed to do was turn the head of Charles Wang.

  Barbra had spent the summer working as a secretary at the cannery in Tamsui where her uncle was a supervisor, a summer in which she’d managed to keep her skin pale and lovely by walking to work swathed in a cotton overshirt and hidden under a straw visor. Not once did she venture onto the beach in the bright hot afternoon, even though she’d learned to swim there, where the sands were always crowded with young people. She’d refused any rice at dinner, even though her uncle’s wife urged fluffy spoonfuls of it upon her. Instead, she’d restricted herself to a single egg beaten into a cup of boiling water for breakfast and a tin of the cannery’s sardines for lunch, and she’d worked all summer for enough money to order the sleeveless qipao that she was finally slim enough to slip into.

  When the graduate students returned to campus that fall, she walked into the library off of Zhoushan Road, hair a cap of neat waves, proud of her legs in new flared trousers—the qipao was much too formal for someone else’s first day of class—heart pounding at the thought of seeing Wang Da Qian again. Except that she didn’t see him. Not through the window of the economics class that he should have been taking as part of his master’s degree, not in the cafeteria where her father was shouting at his assistants as they rushed to wipe up a pot of sweet mung bean soup that someone had knocked over when she walked in. Nowhere.

  Everyone said he’d gone to America—not to study but to work. It made Barbra love him even more, a love that lasted even though he never responded to her too-carefully worded letters, sent care of his mother, that wished him ten thousand years of luck and praised him for his courage while wondering if he’d be back to honor the new year with his revered parents. Not so much as a Golden Gate Bridge postcard.

  She heard nothing more about him at all, despite the fact that she dated one of his former best friends for weeks, discreetly probing for news about Wang gege and receiving, instead, long disquisitions on the possibilities of praxis in a democratic society and endless replays of A Hard Day’s Night as they sat side by side on a brown plaid comforter that was all stiff from being dried in the sun.

  It wasn’t until the last week of the semester that Barbra’s detested boyfriend showed up one morning holding a light blue airmail envelope plastered with American stamps engraved with a portrait of Einstein. Philately was popular at the time and several of the boys Barbra was sitting with tried to lay claim to the stamps, but he’d shushed them all by unfolding the letter and showing off a photo of a girl ripped out of a magazine. The captions were in English, but the girl was unmistakably Chinese. She was smiling straight out at Barbra, her head turned towards the camera and her hands holding up the collar of her paisley-patterned shirt as her legs splayed out in a leap.

  “Wang Da Qian says that he is getting married to her. She’s a model. Wah, just look at her—I should have moved to America, too!”

  “I thought you had better taste,” Barbra had said, shoving the page back at him.

  “It’s true,” said bookish little Tuan, who later surprised them all by becoming the mayor of Taichung, as he leaned over to pick the page up. “Those long, slanted eyes and those tiny little lips, she’s the kind of girl lao wai likes.”

  “Maybe Ming-Ming is like a foreigner now. Milk in his tea and socks to bed.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to be the one who knows what he wears to bed,” said Xiao Jong, waggling his eyebrows at her. Jong always had been too stupid with his own intelligence. Just a few months after those boys had all graduated, he was picked up in one of the Kuomintang sweeps of student leaders with suspected Communist sympathies, and not even his meek little wife ever heard from him again. Served him right.

  Barbra flipped the light switch outside her closet door and stepped in, letting out her breath as her bare feet, toes freshly painted, sank into the smoke-blue silk rug.

  This, this was her favorite room in the house.

  Let Charles talk endlessly about the hidden wine cellar that he’d retrofitted for whiskey. Let their friends marvel over Ai Wei Wei smashing a Han dynasty urn in a triptych of photos that hung on the wall behind a considerably less valuable Ming dynasty vase. Let the other rooms of the house be photographed for that new California magazine with its condescending editor who described Charles as a “small but gracious man.” This closet was the only corner that mattered to her.

  Having this romantic inner sanctum in a house full of polished glamour gave Barbra the same sensation—something halfway between lust and power—as wearing a red silk peignoir under an austere dress by one of those Japanese minimalists that Charles hated so much.

  She was supposed to be packing—“Quickly!” Charles had said, clapping his stubby hands together. “Quickly!”​—but she didn’t feel like it. Barbra pulled out the little upholstered stool she’d alwa
ys loved for its brass claw feet and sat down in front of the mirror. She closed her eyes and let the crisp 68° air settle into her skin, then raised her eyelids and held her own gaze for a long moment.

  First, the forehead.

  Good, still good. One thin line just barely etched across, just enough to show that she wasn’t using Botox.

  The eyes. They’d always been too round, but now she skipped over that thought. The eyelids were beginning to look loose, but not so much that eye shadow disappeared in the folds. A few wrinkles on the edges and one curved line under her right eye because, though she had been trying for years, Barbra simply could not fall asleep unless she was lying on her right side. Cheekbones still high. Nose, same as always. Small and upturned. All those white women a generation older who went and got nose jobs that ended up looking like her own lamented-over nose made her laugh. How had that become their chosen shape? Her tiny little skull nose?

  Her lips were undeniably starting to thin, and lipstick had started bleeding into the fine wrinkles that edged out from them on all sides like tiny tributaries of age, sapping her of the best semblance of youth.

  And those naso-labial lines that dropped down either side of her nose and skipped a beat before continuing along the sides of her mouth, dragging it down into a disapproving bulldog frown. “What are you doing on my face?” she whispered at them.

  Barbra placed her fingers gently on her hairline, encircling her forehead, and tugged up. Then she reached her thumbs down onto either side of her cheeks, softly, slowly, and pulled the skin back, stopping just before her nose began to splay out. There. This was the face she should be looking at. Like this, she looked better than young—she looked ageless.

  “Ah bao! Are you almost done?” Charles called from the bedroom door. Barbra dropped her hands and the years came rushing back—five, ten, fifteen, twenty, until here she was again, a fifty-year-old woman married to a ruined man, sitting in a world that she had built up only to toss away again. Seeing her rumpled jawline reemerge, losing the image of her real, ageless self, was almost worse than knowing that she was going to lose the world she had put together so carefully. The venal optimism that had enabled her to immigrate to America and scoop up Charles and his almost empire as soon as she heard about the helicopter crash that killed his first wife was limited to desperate island girls with no fear or knowledge of the world.