The Wangs vs. the World Read online

  Stupid. How could Charles be so stupid? How could a man who’d made himself so wealthy be so stupid about finances? That was the one thing she’d never suspected of him. Everything else, but not that. She’d known for years that he was unfaithful, but as long as she never betrayed him with her knowledge, that was nothing they’d have to lose a house and a marriage over. She suspected that his factories were not as scrupulously safe as he claimed, but that wasn’t something that concerned her. She knew about his prejudices and knew that they probably extended rather further than he let on—especially about the native Taiwanese, especially about her own parents—but those were easy to indulge. Money made everything easy to indulge.

  “Wang tai-tai, kuai yi dian la! Ni je me hai mei you kai shi shou yi fu? Mei shi jien le!” Ama shout-whispered as she appeared over Barbra’s shoulder in the mirror, a slash of coral lipstick under her beauty parlor perm.

  “Yes, I know,” Barbra replied, staring back. “I’ll be ready in a moment.”

  Ama, who had been Charles’s own wet nurse when he was a child, claimed that Barbra’s perfect Mandarin was too tainted with low-country squawk to understand, so in retaliation, Barbra spoke to her only in English, a language that the older woman barely spoke at all. It worked out perfectly well because Ama never wanted to hear Barbra’s replies to her faux-polite comments and commands anyway.

  “Ah bao.” It was Charles. Talking to her in that vaguely disappointed tone that he’d used ever since he first came home and told her what had happened. As if she had been the one to let him down.

  “I don’t need both of you here telling me what to do. I know, I know, only the important things.”

  “Ah bao, we leaving soon.”

  “Wo nu er zai deng wo men.”

  Barbra burned inside. She didn’t care if Ama’s daughter was waiting for them. Her last moments in her dressing room and they refused to let her have a moment’s peace. She picked up a photo of herself and Charles at the dinner that Hermès sponsored for Saina’s last show in New York, the one with all those refugee women and scarves that had gotten Saina in so much trouble. They were turned towards each other, smiling, Charles’s eyes half hidden behind the giant Porsche Carrera frames that he’d insisted on getting when he started developing cataracts—how unfair that every middle-aged Asian man in glasses now gave the impression of looking vaguely like Kim Jong-il—her own eyes opened wide, still looking at him flirtatiously after all these years. Well. Maybe she’d feel that way again, but she doubted it would happen packed in an aging car with Ama, Grace, and dunce-headed Andrew.

  五

  Bel-Air, CA

  CHARLES’S CONVERSATION with Ama had been humiliating.

  In the Mandarin that they shared:

  “Rong-rong,” she said, calling him by the pet name she’d given him when he was a downy little baby wrapped in a fur blanket, “it is good that we have daughters and that they have homes. I am going to go to my daughter’s house.”

  “Oh, Ama, it’s nothing. We’ll be fine. But perhaps it would be best if you did go stay with Kathy for a little while. Until things blow over.”

  “But I am an old woman, and I cannot get there on my own. I have the car you gave me, but I don’t drive it anymore.”

  “Maybe Kathy can—”

  “No, no, Kathy has too much work. You drive me, and then you are already on your way to your daughter’s house, too.”

  And that was how she gave him the car, the powder-blue Mercedes station wagon he’d bought for his first wife when she’d gotten pregnant with Saina. It was the only car that hadn’t been repossessed because he’d sold it to Ama for a dollar sixteen years ago; she drove it once a fortnight to a mah-jongg game in the San Gabriel Valley.

  And that was how she told him that she knew he’d lost everything and would be running into his own daughter’s reluctant arms. The worst part is that he’d known that she would turn over the old Merc, counted on it.

  Charles couldn’t have been more embarrassed if he’d woken up to find that he’d regressed half a century and was sucking on her nipple again, a grown man in Armani trying to draw milk out of her wizened breast.

  六

  Bel-Air, CA

  SO HERE THEY WERE, the three of them. Barbra, Charles, and his Ama. No longer so young.

  And here was the car, a 1980 model, both bumpers intact, gleaming still from the weekly wash and wax that Jeffie, the gardener’s son, gave all the Wang family cars.

  Cleaned more than she was ever driven, this car was a lady. Her cream-colored seats and sky-blue carpeting made her impractical for anything beyond a polite spin around the block or a tootle over to a neighborhood association meeting four estates down. She might, might consent to a weekend spree down the coast, provided an air-conditioned garage at a La Jolla villa was waiting on the other end. Even after nearly thirty years, her perforated leather interiors remained uncracked and the wood burl along her dash still shone. Her only blemish, really, was one little carpet stain, a resolute Angelyne pink, where Charles’s first wife, May Lee, had once let an open tube of lipstick melt in the bright white L.A. sun.

  Never, not once, had the gears of her clockwork German engine been asked to cogitate on the notion of driving all the way across the country, rear end sagging with baggage, oil lines choked with cheap Valvoline. But, like the family, she suited herself to her circumstances.

  Barbra lugged her own bags down the steps and waited for Charles to come open the back. He was behind her, grunting as he tried to lift the last of Ama’s suitcases—a matched pair of classic Vuitton wheelies that had also once belonged to May Lee—over the threshold. Barbra didn’t want to help. Let him do it. Ama shouldn’t even be here with them. How much was she still being paid, Barbra wondered, and for what?

  It was early still. Seven thirty. The quiet time after the dawn joggers had put in their miles and just before the housekeepers started their long walk from the Sunset and Beverly Glen bus stop. A weathered white pickup full of gardeners and lawnmowers sputtered up the street, spewing exhaust onto the same topiaries that they watered and trimmed daily.

  Housekeepers and gardeners, dog walkers and pool men, they were the front lines, the foot soldiers. Later would come the private Pilates instructors and the personal chefs, the assistants sent from the office to pick up a forgotten cuff link or script. A home theater consultant, a wine cellar specialist, a saltwater fish tank curator—necessities all.

  Charles and Barbra had never understood their neighbors’ obsession with bringing services into the home. Why have some masseuse carry in a table when you could just go to the Four Seasons? Why open your life up to more strangers than you had to? Now, of course, there was no need to think about any of that. Luisa and Big Pano and Gordon and Rainie had all been let go, fired, weeks ago. Barbra hadn’t told them why. Let them think that she had finally turned into a crazy, demanding Westside wife, unsatisfied with Luisa’s immaculately ironed sheets and Gordon’s bright, abundant blooms, maybe even pathetically sure that her husband was eyeing Rainie’s swinging breasts. She was positive that they’d be rehired immediately, even in these unhappy times. She was equally certain that her former household help had already jointly developed some theory of the Wangs’ downfall, something scandalous and unflattering that would doubtless be pried out of them by each of their new employers.

  The worst moment for Barbra and Charles was the reveal. The Reveal. That’s how she thought about it in the days after—like they were on one of those makeover shows, but instead of finding that their house was beautifully revamped, the hosts had removed their blindfolds and made their whole charmed life disappear.

  “Why?” Barbra had asked.

  “What why?”

  “All our everything?”

  At that moment the word our rankled. Charles had never had a problem with generosity—he’d cultivated a casual way of picking up the check before he’d even made his first million—but just then the way that his wife said our brought out
something small and sour that he forced himself to swallow, along with the true word: Mine. Barbra had given nothing but her bullish charm to this family—she hadn’t made the money or borne the children or even decorated the house or cooked the food. He’d done the first, his dead first wife had done the second, and they’d hired people to do the rest. Nothing was our.

  “Yes,” he’d said. “All.”

  “But how? How could you? Don’t we have anything saved? We had so—”

  “So much. And now, not so much.”

  He’d said that, and then he’d spread his arms out in a leaden swoop, like an aging showgirl. It had severed something between them, that gesture. Charles had never done anything awkward or unsure in his life. Not in front of her. Not in her eyes. But now her broken heart saw every wrong-footed step he’d ever taken.

  “How could it happen?”

  “It happened!”

  “But how did it?”

  “How, how, how! You never ask how it get good, how I make so much money, how I know what everybody want, only how now that it go away! No how!”

  Had they always sounded so stilted and childish? After sixteen years in America, speaking English to the children and her American friends—whose company and mah-jongg rules she preferred to those of the mainlander wives of Charles’s friends—her own speech had attained a smooth perfection, but when she spoke to Charles, she found herself picking up his broken grammar, and the two of them gradually dropped the private Chinese they had once shared.

  “Okay,” she’d said. “No more how.”

  And for then, and for now, that was it. No more how. No more how, and no more house.

  Charles couldn’t. He couldn’t tell Barbra what had happened, how their personal assets—their home!—had gotten wrapped up in the bankruptcy. It was something a true businessman never would have done. That was the worst of it. And now here they were, creeping out of the driveway under cover of dawn with their meager belongings stashed in the back, a troupe of Chinese Okies fleeing a New Age Dust Bowl. He’d always respected this home, kept it sacrosanct. He may have betrayed his wives in body, but he never did so under their shared roof.

  Now Charles wanted to curse the land somehow, to cry bitter salt tears that would curdle the earth and kill the thick wall of bougainvillea that shielded the lawn. Any child conceived in these rooms would be an insult to his children; any love found on these grounds would make his own loves into a lie. When some other family moved in, some family whose dollars flowed greenly from their hands, dark thorny vines should spew out of the ground, twisting through the iron gate and out across the grass, choking the magnolia tree, with its generous branches and sweet-smelling blossoms, snaking around the house until all the windows were blinded and all the doors taken prisoner. Gallons of overturquoised water would roil and churn and splash over the charcoal slate that framed the pool, rotting the impenetrable stone until it crumbled and sank, pulling the foundations right out from under the house.

  Charles closed his eyes and mentally erased the house from top to bottom, scrubbing the whole thing out in wild strokes, leaving a white patch between the Leventhals’ five-bedroom-plus-six-car-garage Spanish Mission and the Okafurs’ seven-bedroom-plus-tennis-court Cape Cod. And in that blank space he pictured instead the mountainside estate in China that he had heard so much about as a child.

  He could feel Barbra sitting next to him in the passenger seat and knew without looking that she was pulling her cashmere wrap tight around her shoulders though the morning was warm even for September in Los Angeles. A door slammed shut and that was Ama, settling into the backseat with a grunt.

  Keeping his eyes closed so the estate stayed in place, Charles turned the key in the ignition and shifted into drive. At the edge of the darkness behind his lids, there was the cliff that had been waiting ever since his doctor warned him about the possibility of his ministrokes presaging something bigger and more devastating. But Charles wasn’t afraid. He could negotiate the driveway by feel—the lazy 180-degree curve around the front lawn, then 900 feet of concrete and a pause at the automatic gates before the tires hit asphalt.

  Lately, the gate had been slow to open. The crank mechanism groaned and he could hear it sticking, bit by bit. Charles sat, eyes still closed, and thought about a time when he might have noticed that and gone for a can of WD-40 himself, made a Sunday project of it instead of waiting for Pano to figure it out.

  Barbra and Ama were both silent. After another moment, Charles lifted his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward. Forty more feet and he’d hit sidewalk, but Charles squeezed his eyelids tighter together. No one ever walked at this time of day. Most of the houses on their block didn’t even have sidewalks in front of them, just dipped from lawn straight into street. The station wagon surged on, lowering itself out of the driveway and wheeling into the road. If he kept his eyes closed for long enough, Charles wouldn’t have to look at the assessor’s hearse of a black car parked hastily at the curb. Maybe he’d even be lucky enough to hit it. At the last minute, though, self-preservation kicked in and his eyes snapped open in time to catch Ama and Barbra looking at each other in the rearview mirror.

  七

  Santa Barbara, CA

  FINALLY, SHE WAS ALONE. Rachel had folded up six pairs of Grace’s jeans and skipped down to lunch, where she’d probably tell everybody that the Wangs were headed to the poorhouse and were going to start collecting food stamps and stuff. It didn’t make any sense. Half the girls at school probably had at least one KoKo lip gloss or eye shadow—some of the guys probably even had the special-edition guyliner that they’d put out. Emo fucks. And now they’d all be talking about her as they chewed their disgusting giant mouthfuls of disgusting chicken fingers.

  Grace flipped open her phone and hit the call button. This was the fifth time she’d called Saina today, and her sister still wasn’t picking up.

  “Hey, this is Saina. I miss you, too. Leave a message.”

  Beep.

  “Jiejie! Where are you? Do you realize that we’re coming to your house, like, today? God, I wish that you were still living in New York. I mean, I know you’re still living in New York, but I’m talking about the city. Listen, you have to call me back, okay? I need, need, need to talk to you before Dad and Babs get here. Okay, bye.”

  God. How could Saina ignore her calls like that? Especially today?

  It was Tuesday, so Andrew was probably still in his Bio lab. Grace texted him.

  Have u talked to Dad yet? Call me asap after Bio.

  Okay. Fine. She’d pack. But she was just going to bring the stuff she actually wanted to bring. Forget about being practical—they couldn’t be so poor that they didn’t have money to buy underwear, right? She could sell ads on her blog or something.

  Grace’s phone started buzzing as soon as she set it down, inching its way across her bedspread.

  “Andrew!”

  “Hey, Gracie.” Oh Andrew. He didn’t even sound upset. Grace wasn’t sure whether that should make her more or less worried.

  “Did you talk to Dad?”

  “Nah, I was in class, but he left a message. Sucks, huh?”

  “Sucks? Uh, yeah, it does. Andrew, the house.”

  “I know. Hey, Gracie, I can’t talk right now, okay?”

  “What? Why not? But you called me! How can you not talk to me right now?”

  “I just, I wanted to make sure you were okay, but I’ve got to finish something right now. But you guys are getting here tomorrow, right? So I’ll see you soon, okay?”

  八

  Phoenix, AZ

  ANDREW PRESSED the end call button on his iPhone and looked at it again to make sure that he wasn’t somehow still connected. He dropped the phone on top of his jeans, which were puddled on the floor of his dorm room, then picked it up and placed it on his desk, where no one could step on it accidentally. A second later he reached over and checked again, just in case he’d pocket-dialed someone when the phone landed on the floor.


  He had to do all of that with just one arm because the other arm was trapped under Emma Lerner’s breasts. They were great breasts. “A great rack,” Howard Stern would have called it. Yes, Howard would definitely think that Emma had a great rack, and he’d be even more impressed because they were 100 percent real. Why was Howard always talking about boobs on the radio where no one could see them? He should have gotten himself a TV show instead of that satellite gig, although he probably wouldn’t have been able to show naked racks on TV either. Unless he was on cable.

  Emma wiggled in place next to him, face hidden in the pillow, and pretended to snore, then raised herself up slightly and brushed her nipples along his arm. Phone forgotten, Andrew flung his free arm and leg over her and pulled her in tight, burrowing through a mess of blonde hair to kiss her perfect pink cheeks.

  “Hair in my mouth again!” he teased.

  “Better than a hair up your butt.”

  “You’re going to get something else up your butt!”

  Emma flipped over to face him, grinning. “Really? And what’s that, hmm? Look at you, you’re blushing already!”

  Andrew rolled his eyes at her. Sex talk plus beers before noon equaled red cheeks for him and Emma knew it. She loved teasing him about his Asian flush even though he tried to make it clear to her that his family was actually descended from ancient Manchurians who rode wild horses and were nothing like the engineering geeks on campus. Unable to think of a comeback, he pounced on her instead, catching her wrists in his hands and attacking her neck with half bites.