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The Wangs vs. the World Page 8


  May Lee. It meant beautiful in Chinese, though most immigrants would spell her name Meili. But May’s parents were third-generation Chinatown babies who tried to give their daughter a name that would go both ways, and it did. It spoke to Charles, who was lost in a sea of Jennys and Donnas, and it rolled off the tongues of the photographers and agents who kissed her cheeks and tried to ply her with champagne cocktails.

  Charles had looked at her, the only other Chinese person in the room, and thought he recognized something fundamental in her. A deep kinship. An abiding drive that had landed them both in this strange room, at this strange moment. A willingness to dive into the whole wide world.

  And May Lee looked at him, the only other Chinese person in the room, and thought about how much easier life would be if she was married.

  Charles and May Lee Wang went to the Grand Canyon eight short weeks after the birth of their third child in order to do all the things that white people do with their marriages.

  Try to reconnect! (Hint: Eyes are the windows to the soul—have a sexy staring contest!)

  Have romantic dinners! (Hint: Oysters are aphrodisiacs!)

  Talk about your feelings! (Hint: Men love to solve problems—let them!)

  It was all from a list May Lee kept folded in her purse, torn out of the February 1990 issue of Mademoiselle. Sixteen years later, he could still remember the photo of the laughing blond couple in matching denim shirts at the top of that list, and the careful way she unfolded the tearsheet and smoothed it out every time she referenced one of the hints.

  Item four on the list: Share new experiences! (Hint: Fear is bonding! Why not try a roller coaster?)

  May Lee was scared of heights. Charles was scared of dying in a helicopter crash. So they booked the Lover’s Special, a seventy-five-minute aerial tour of the Grand Canyon departing from Las Vegas that promised majesty, grandeur, and two glasses of champagne apiece. As May Lee stepped into the helicopter, Charles took a picture and then bounded across the tarmac to settle into the bucket seat beside her. In a determined show of affection, he adjusted the straps of his wife’s seat belt and leaned in close to buckle it, but left his own undone so that his shirt wouldn’t rumple. As they flew over the South Rim and caught their first glimpse of the canyon out of the fishbowl windows, Charles took hold of May Lee’s small hand.

  “Wow, it’s so pretty! It’s huge!” she said, squeezing his hand.

  Charles didn’t answer. Instead, he felt the helicopter sway from side to side like an old-fashioned cradle and wondered if this was one of those daredevil pilots who was going to try to get a rise out of them by pretending he was about to crash. Charles felt the sweat prickle under the rough linen of his Rive Gauche safari shirt and was just about to tap their pilot on the shoulder when the man’s voice broke into their prerecorded tour narration.

  “Folks, we seem to be having a problem—”

  And then a wild, sick lurch and a screech from the front seat as the pilot—a former Coast Guard sergeant who completely lost hold of his military demeanor—gave up control of the craft. Their helicopter slammed into one of the 270-million-year-old Kaibab Limestone formations, bounced, once, on a ridge, and exploded as it dropped five thousand feet to the floor of the canyon.

  Still on the ridge: Charles, saved by his sartoriphilia.

  The bounce threw an un-seat-belted Charles against the improperly latched door, flinging him out while slowing his trajectory just enough that he landed with no more force than, say, a fall off a bicycle. Charles experienced the entire event as a flash of heat and steel and noise, accompanied by a gunpowder-and-roses smell so unexpectedly sweet that he was sure he’d open his eyes to find himself in the testing room of one of his factories, a broken vial of rose oil at his feet. Instead, he stood at the edge of death, choking on dust and surprise, wiping mule shit from his shirt, and was instantly flooded with a shameful relief. He wasn’t happy that May Lee was almost certainly gone, but as he looked down on the fireball at the bottom of the grand and glorious canyon, he knew that luck had once again smiled upon Charles Wang.

  十二

  Vernon, CA

  186 Miles

  DRIVING SOUTHEAST on two and a half hours of freeways, plus an hour at a U-Haul rental place on Western and Venice, landed the Wangs behind a building in Vernon close to sunset. Covered with a faded mural of giant Aztec women grinding maize under gargantuan stalks of corn, the former tortilla plant was now—or was until last week, at least—one of the three buildings that warehoused the output of Charles’s factories.

  He still had the key. In fact, he still had all of his keys, encircling a wide brass ring, each bearing a piece of dark green label tape embossed with a number and a letter. This was the fifth property that he had acquired, after the vast mixing plant in Garden Grove and before the former aircraft hangar next to a thread manufacturer downtown, so he located key 5a (the front door) and 5d (the back door). 5b was for the bathroom and 5c opened the small office inside the warehouse. The letters were assigned depending on Charles’s own migratory patterns: whichever door he opened first received an a, and then onwards through the alphabet, so that each time he revisited a place it also meant retracing that first heady rush of acquisition.

  “Dad, what are we doing here?”

  “Daddy just getting some things to put in the U-Haul. No problem.”

  Charles slammed the car door shut. Let them puzzle over what he was doing; better that than to explain or ask permission. Anything stealthy was always best done out in the open; confidence was the truest disguise. Not that there would be anyone else watching in this strange little city where only factories and warehouses lived. He and KoKo had once explored their way through Vernon after her first big order went into production—she in a violet-and-canary-patterned kimono minidress and platform sneakers, he in a crisp, banded straw fedora, walking arm in arm through the dusty streets littered with salsa-smeared balls of foil and other taco-truck detritus. Now KoKo wouldn’t even speak to him and that fedora was still hanging on a peg in his closet, waiting to be sold off.

  Charles rounded the corner. When the bank took possession of his properties, he’d been required to sign a stack of contracts, one of which ensured that he would no longer approach or access any of them. The surveillance cams weren’t mentioned in the endless triplicates that he signed, each with a flourish bigger than the last, so Charles had asked Manny, the manager—so satisfying that match between name and occupation!—to switch them all off. He’d never bothered to contract with an outside security firm; pricey as it was, there wasn’t much of a black market in argan oil.

  This should be simple. Go in the front door, grab a dolly from the office, locate the fifteen boxes that were marked for Ellie and Trip Yates in Opelika, Alabama, go out through the back door, load up the U-Haul, maybe slip the dolly in with the boxes, and speed back onto the 10 freeway.

  And then he saw it. Glinting betrayal in the form of a new doorknob, gaudy gilt where the old brass one, worn smooth by years of maize-powdered hands, had once been.

  Now the sun felt almost unbearably hot and Charles backtracked around the corner only to spot the same Home Depot special on the rear door. Alright. There was one more solution left.

  “Gracie . . . ,” said Charles, leaning in through the driver’s side window. “You want to help Daddy?”

  She looked up, frowning at him. “With what?”

  Charles paused. It was hard to predict what would launch Grace into a wounded fury. She never used to be like that, his Gracie. It was his fault. He never should have sent her away. Charles could feel himself sagging with middle-aged defeat, a loser who lacked the hot-blooded need to wrestle America to the ground and take her milk money, who never had the balls to flip his father’s shame into a triumphant empire, who marched obediently towards death and hid from life and always chose the wrong path. No. Not yet. He was still Charles Fucking Wang and he would lead the way out of the wilderness. Straightening to his full five feet ei
ght inches and sucking in his stomach so that his shirt rode smoothly into the waistband of his trousers, Charles cocked his head at Grace and gestured for her to get out of the car.

  “Sorry, Daddy, yes—I’ll help you. What do you want me to do?”

  Charles looked down the alley. It was past sunset and all the workers at the factories on either side of his had long since gone home.

  “Daddy’s key not working. You just climb in the open window up there and open door from inside, okay?”

  One long look from Grace, and then a smile that he wasn’t expecting. “Good one, Dad.”

  “Not a joke, okay? Daddy too old to climb things, right?”

  “Oh, no, I know, I don’t think it’s a joke. Just a good one,” she said, winking.

  Teenagers were such a mystery. Parts of Saina and Andrew had turned unknowable in those years, too. There was a time when he thought that Saina might be someone else forever, back when she was entangled with that fiancé of hers. Grayson.

  Charles shook his head. A terrible name. Cold and limp, followed by a diminutive. The son of something boring and colorless could only be even more boring and colorless, yet somehow his brilliant daughter had been taken in by him. It was true that the boy had been good-looking. Charles suspected sex was the lure, though he didn’t quite want to admit that to himself.

  “Okay, I’m ready.” Grace had taken off her ridiculous fur vest and little boots, and slipped on a pair of those fabric shoes that Charles had noticed on the feet of more and more of his friends’ children recently. Ugly shoes, like the ones that poor people in China wore. “What if we pull the car over and I stand on the hood? I think I can boost myself up from there.”

  She could, and now her head poked out the back door.

  He’d never seen the warehouse so empty before. It was infuriating that someone would take hold of his business and sell it off in pieces instead of letting Charles turn it back around. Because he could. Even though Lehman Brothers filed Chapter 11 yesterday and interest rates were down to 2 percent, he could have turned it all back around because America still needed makeup. He knew, with the certitude of someone who had grown up calling this land across the Pacific Mei Guo—Beautiful Country—that, more than any other country, this was one that would never reject improvement. Even those signs along the freeway said it: KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL. But the bank with its unimaginative managers had refused to see things his way. They’d rather pull down the entire country than believe in Charles Wang.

  Shafts of streetlight filtered into the building through the dusty windows, giving off just enough of a glow for Charles to find the pile of boxes destined for Opelika.

  “So why do we need these?”

  “We make personal delivery.”

  “Okay, but why these?”

  Why these? Because it was one of the few orders he’d personally sold since his business had grown. Ellie and Trip were a glowing young couple that he’d met on a flight to New York. They’d been bumped up to business class and refused his offer to switch seats, instead including him in their enthusiasm over the warm mixed nuts and free mimosas. The pair were en route from one friend’s wedding in Malibu to another’s on Cape Cod. Afterwards, they were moving back to her Alabama hometown to open a new-school take on a traditional general store. Handmade clothes, vintage hoes, and whole grains. Enchanted by their entrepreneurial drive and soft southern accents, Charles found himself recounting his first flight to America—the nausea, the revelation in the bathroom, all of it.

  “I come to America to get rich, and now I am!” he’d finished.

  “So you came here for the American Dream!” said Ellie, pleased.

  Charles had laughed. “Not only American Dream! Everybody, every country, have same dream! Al Gore think he invent Internet, America think they invent American Dream!” And then he found himself convincing them to develop a line of magnolia-scented lotions and candles. “Magnolia oil you get local, send to me, I do everything else, you sell and say ‘local magnolia’ and everybody will buy!” he’d enthused, imagining it as the beginning of a southern beauty empire for them, a surefire melding of gracious tradition and modern style. Pooh-poohing their lack of capital, Charles waived his minimums and promised that they could spread out their payments, that their orders could grow as their business grew.

  He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else’s new life, someone else’s realized potential.

  Vampires must feel like that.

  “Because I sell to them personally, and I make them spend all their money, so Daddy feel bad if they lose. Besides, we never go to Alabama before.”

  “But couldn’t you just mail it?”

  “Business is all about the personal.”

  She looked at him, considering. “Okay, that’s a good lesson. I’ll remember it. Business is all about the personal.”

  Love surged in Charles. Gracie wasn’t lost. Living away from home those two years hadn’t ruined her. Family was still family. “Good girl, xiao bao,” he said, reaching out to pat her on the head as she loaded the dolly with boxes.

  Grace straightened up and smiled at him, then skipped ahead. She was taller, and she’d loosened up the prim, baby-doll manner she’d had as a girl, all quiet voice and shy eyes. It had been such a shock when Grace, at fourteen, ran away with a boy who flattered her into thinking he was in love with her, who tricked himself into thinking the same thing. A Japanese boy, no less, a fact that Charles felt was a betrayal of the entire nation of China and everything she had suffered at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. He would have expected that kind of treachery from Saina, maybe, but not of his youngest, a girl who had never so much as ordered a pizza on her own and still liked to be tucked in bed each night by Ama. She was fourteen and the boy was fifteen, so they didn’t get far; Saina had come home and tracked the wayward lovers to a family friend’s empty beach house in La Jolla. A new Gracie had ranted and raved and called it a Shakespearean tragedy; Saina had insisted that she was being more like silly Lydia Bennet, the runaway youngest daughter in Pride and Prejudice, than a Bel-Air Juliet; and Charles had privately lamented and rejoiced at the irresistible beauty of his daughters. But when Grace responded to his order that she never speak to the boy again by wailing at the dinner table every night and trying, again, to run away with him, Charles had packed her off to Cate, which, besides being the only boarding school he’d heard of in California, also used its feminine name to make him think at first that it was an all-girls school. A week into the semester, he missed Grace terribly and was increasingly upset that the school was coed, but by then it was too late to go back on his declarations.

  But now here they all were again. Almost all. Charles pushed the last of the magnolia-scented lotion out through the back door and slammed it shut, testing the knob to make sure that the warehouse was locked against any other interlopers.

  十三

  I-10 East

  EVERYBODY BUT BARBRA was on the phone. She alone had no one to notify, no one with whom to plot or commiserate. Her everyone was in the seat right next to her, driving with both hands on the wheel and a phone wedged to his ear, edging his shoulder away from her as if that would be enough to keep her from overhearing. Grace chattered to Andrew. Even Ama talked—shouted, actually, voice sharp, face animated—to a someone.

  Barbra nudged her husband. “How are all the phones still on?”

  He took a hand off the wheel to cover the mouthpiece, and whispered to her, “Not end of month yet.”

  And once it was, what then? Would they just be cut off from civilization, left to languish in Saina’s house, relegated to the role of poor relations? Barbra closed her eyes and leaned her head against the cool pane of the window, letting the family’s conversations wash together. They alternately spoke and were quiet, listening to the people on the other end of their lines with an intensity that exhausted her, ratcheting up their voices with each response.

  CHARLE
S: That is all the names I have. What did they say?

  AMA: Yi ding yao zuo fan la!

  GRACE: Yeah, I thought tonight too, but they think it’ll be too late—

  AMA: Shei ne me xiao qi? Qian, wo gei qian!

  GRACE: Something Palms? Thirty-four Palms? Ninety-nine Palms?

  CHARLES: Of course. Everything good also is difficult. No, no matter—

  GRACE: Oh yeah, that’s it, Twenty-nine. So just tonight.

  AMA: Hao le la, bu yao zai chao . . .

  CHARLES: The money, don’t worry about.

  GRACE: Seriously? Who, like a bounty hunter?

  CHARLES: Enough for this.

  GRACE: And they just showed up?

  CHARLES: Okay, okay, I wait.

  GRACE: Oh my god, Andrew, really? They just took it?

  AMA: Hao, wo men bu jiou jiou dao le. Xiao Danzi zen yang ah?

  CHARLES: Yes, I wait. You call me again when you have anything. Thank you.

  GRACE: Are you okay? Did they do anything to you?

  AMA: Ne jiou hao le. Hao, bye-bye.

  GRACE: What did you do?

  GRACE: (Laughing.)

  GRACE: But seriously, I can’t believe it happened like that. Dad said something about giving it back, but I thought it would be something . . . civilized, at least.

  GRACE: Yeah, okay. So we’ll see you tomorrow. God, lock your doors! Do you think they’re going to try to repossess your iPod or something?

  GRACE: (Laughing.)

  GRACE: Okay. Bye.

  Barbra heard her stepdaughter sigh and, despite herself, felt a prick of worry for Andrew. “Grace? What happen to your brother? What are you talking about?”

  Grace was quiet for a moment, then she searched out her father in the rearview mirror.