Family Trust

by Kathy Wang

  “For the mad genius,” he said, with a little bow of his head. Just low enough to be polite, but not enough to be mistaken for deference. “Unprecedented quality of video and sound. Set it up in your place; check it out. The total immersive experience.”

  Sonny accepted the offering with a bitter smile. Then, after both Fujihara and Bullis were confirmed as having exited the building, he strolled over to Kate’s desk, where he unceremoniously dumped the opened samples. “Look at this junk,” he complained. “They’re calling it a home AI. Why don’t they just say what it really is: a glorified video camera that plays music? As if anyone would actually think to use these as real assistants, ask these dumb bots any actual questions. . . . And then Fujihara has the nerve to suggest I put it in my own house! So that he can spy, no doubt. Like I wouldn’t be able to find a hidden ‘God mode’ in the software if I spent five minutes searching. . . . This is what they’ve reduced my ideas to. The dream of an omnipresent platform leveraging existing hardware to track changes in breathing, heart rate, blood pressure . . . all of it, vanished. Can you imagine how many more people would have been saved from heart attacks or strokes, had Slippers been allowed to flourish at the Labs? But instead Fujihara gives us a pair of balls.”

  Kate picked up the mandarin-size spheres and rotated them in her hand, enjoying the cool sensation. They reminded her of the medicine balls she used to play with as a kid in Chinatown. Turning them over, she noticed an area of smoother dimpling near the bottom. “What’s this?”

  “Hmm? Oh, the wide-array microphone. And right on top, to the left, you’ll find the camera. They’re using the same so-called proprietary lens as the one that’s on that smartphone. The X Phone. All those marketing people, and we couldn’t think of another name? Another one of Fujihara’s, of course. He’s just like the Japanese, so polite to your face, and then sneaky sneaky behind your back. You ought to know, you’re Chinese. Just remember World War II whenever he tries to make nice with you. I told his team, the whole point of Slippers was that you don’t need to use special hardware, it’s the beauty of the platform, but do these people listen? First they blow $3 billion on those awful self-driving cars that got shut down anyway, and now they’re trying to jam the extra parts from their failure of a phone into whatever slot they can. And they say we’re the wasteful ones!”

  * * *

  At the top of the attic’s staircase was a window that faced the side garden, with a small ledge protruding from its bottom. Due to the steep slope of the ceiling, the window was small, and only during certain afternoon hours did it let in enough sun to illuminate the space. The contractor had argued against it altogether, contending that its expense wasn’t worth its relatively low utility, but Kate had insisted on it, as well as the ledge. She loved windows. When Denny first took over the attic, Kate placed a souvenir from their first trip to Japan—a small lacquered wood vase from Kyoto—on the shelf, along with an expensive blood orange–scented candle, as a sign of goodwill. Welcome to your haven, she’d meant for them to say. I hope you do good work.

  Denny had never mentioned the presence of either, both of which had been favorites of hers, but Kate had always considered it too petty an act to remove the items. Now, she found they served as ample camouflage for Slippers. The bottom of the vase was just large enough to completely obscure one of the black balls, while the bit that peeked out behind the candle appeared congruous with its shadow. Each of the spheres held a full charge and supposedly would only need to be returned to their base stations after a week.

  Seven days, she thought, was plenty of time.

  Chapter 5

  Fred

  When Fred first received the offer to join Lion Capital, he’d been ecstatic.

  He had begun to believe that he might never recover from a crucial miscalculation made upon graduation from business school, of accepting a job at a large multinational conglomerate back in the Bay Area instead of returning to finance. Harvard had done this to him, he realized, by stuffing his head with case studies highlighting seemingly well-worn and accessible paths to the executive office; the featured C-suiters often appearing in person the day of their discussions, to tout the reliable benefits of meritocracy and pay forward their insights. The men (and they were all men, except for the rare human resources case) were uniformly impressive in their executive gravitas, though once they spoke, rarely actually impressive. These titans of industry were just like him, Fred thought, only older. And luckier. And so a conviction was born that he, too, could one day with enough persistence make it atop such venerated ivory towers—not because he, Fred Huang, was particularly special but merely because everyone else was so shitty.

  It was only after Fred had been at the conglomerate for a full two years, and wound his way through a variety of positions, that he understood the extent of his folly. The rotational program he’d been hired into—in which new graduates were cycled through a series of four-month stints throughout the company for three years—had been pitched as a feeding tube to corporate leadership, a high-velocity shortcut to upper management. Only twenty of the nation’s top MBA graduates were hired into the program each year; given enough time, they’d all eventually feast on the mighty carcass of executive perks.

  The awful secret Fred and his cohorts soon discovered, however, was that even twenty was far too high a number when considered against the fact that each year, on average, only two members of senior leadership departed the company; there weren’t enough strokes or intern pregnancy scares to healthily trim the existing management ranks to even a fraction of the desired numbers. And so a truth quickly emerged that even at the very top—as constituents of the so-called cream of the crop, selectively hired by one of the most celebrated names of American industry—most of them would need to be left behind.

  At first, Fred hadn’t accepted his fate. He was from Harvard Business School, after all, the only graduate his rotational year. The CEO had gone to HBS, as had the CEO before him, the chairman of the board, and the CFO. Surely that held some weight against, say, the two floozies from Kellogg, not to mention the smattering of associates who’d attended even worse institutions. He’d scored a perfect 800 on the GMAT and been one of the key analysts at Morgan Stanley when the conglomerate had hired the bank to spin off its appliance business. In terms of pure statistics, Fred was far above most of his peers, though he was careful to appear humble. In his mind, his superior qualifications stood out as clearly as a pair of perfect breasts in a swimsuit contest: encased in a flimsy outfit but best worn with a modest smile.

  Over time, however, Fred came to understand that he wasn’t so special. Not when measured against competition like Marsha Epler, one of the Kellogg floozies who, as it turned out, possessed an undergraduate degree in civil engineering. Female engineers were considered the rarest of breeds within the conglomerate and were accordingly tracked by human resources like coveted prey. So Fred shouldn’t have been surprised by Marsha’s selection over him for a choice expatriate rotation in Shanghai, despite his own spoken fluency and aggressive lobbying with the general manager, a fellow HBS alum. But Fred was surprised, and then even more so when Marsha returned from the assignment four months later with universal accolades, having exceeded her basic duties as acting deputy by opening a yoga studio in the Shanghai office. The initiative, called Sino Stretches!, was heavily publicized on the corporate intranet, with a dedicated article and photo: Marsha front and center as conqueress, looking ecstatically limber in a crescent lunge, a group of joyful Asians posed behind her.

  “We can all learn so much from different cultures,” her pull quote pronounced, “as we live in an increasingly global world.”

  The pleasant faces were later revealed to have been a sham—like any typical Chinese, the Shanghai team had waited until Marsha was safely settled back at headquarters in Mountain View before they unleashed their full ire, and the feedback on her rotation was brutal. Marsha was unbearably rude, the employees complained, and demonstrated little
cultural sensitivity. She frequently lost her shit in meetings, berating partners in a manner that made it impossible for them to save face, and accepted an important customer’s feigned attempt to pay the bill at a dinner where it had been entirely assumed Marsha would be picking up the check. The rotation was widely considered a disaster; it was the worst recorded feedback in the history of the Asia region.

  The next promotion round, Marsha was elevated to director while Fred received a lateral shuffle to the dying printer division.

  A week later, at a Q&A panel for the MBA program with the conglomerate’s executives, a top-ranked Indian Institute of Technology graduate raised his hand.

  “Can the company definitively state it is not deliberately limiting Asian and Indian hires in order to meet certain diversity standards?” he asked. A little thrill went up Fred’s spine. The head of human resources, a nervous woman named Joy with a drab face, paled.

  “We are committed as a company to the concept—the concept of equality,” she stammered.

  “Right,” Rajesh said. “But some are more equal than others.” He squared his shoulders and gazed about the silent room, but Fred had been unable to meet his eyes. That night, however, he began to format his résumé.

  The weekend before his first day at Lion, Charlene arranged a dinner at a well-reviewed Asian fusion restaurant in North Beach. Though the evening was technically for Fred, the attendance mostly reflected her friends; he himself didn’t have many at that point, the by-product of an extended career depression. When they arrived, he was quickly paired off with another husband, a freckled redhead named Simon Barnes with a month-old haircut. Simon was married to Sonya Kim, a former BCG consultant who’d gone to Stanford with Charlene and now hosted a regional morning cooking show; due to her minor celebrity and status as the group’s first young mother, Sonya was considered by Charlene to be both her closest confidante and most formidable frenemy.

  “Sonya only dates white guys,” Charlene commented once, with a touch of distaste. “But they don’t need to have anything else special about them. Her boyfriend right after college was a DJ, and the dude right after that, the one she thought she’d actually get married to, was an insurance agent.”

  As Fred sat, Simon clapped his back and asked what he knew of Lion.

  “Not much,” Fred confessed. “Just that they’re big in technology manufacturing in Taiwan. I think my parents actually know more about the company than I do.”

  Simon snorted good-naturedly. “That Wang dude sounds like a character.”

  Wang as in Lion’s chairman and founder, Leland Wang—the rags-to-riches icon who’d built up the tech behemoth from the initial $24,000 he’d managed to save from the toy factory at which he’d worked twelve-hour days for nearly a decade. The company’s culture was peppered with lore regarding Leland and his frugality: how he preferred to fly economy (substantiated with a vintage photograph of Leland flashing the thumbs-up sign on China Airlines); how he still pilfered extra packets of soy sauce and plastic utensils at restaurants; his commitment to walking the factory floors once a week at a minimum, often disguised, to spot pockets of waste and abuse. That Wang continued to engage in such behavior as regifting to colleagues complimentary packets of Tsingtao Beer playing cards during the holidays, all while simultaneously accepting a seat on Sotheby’s Asia Advisory Board—an honor granted to only the most prodigiously spendy of collectors—was spun as a matter of principle and dedication.

  “He as cheap as they say?” Simon asked.

  “I’ve never met him.”

  “Ah!” Simon nodded eagerly, as if Fred had stated that he and Leland were, in fact, the closest of friends. “And you’re going to be doing corporate venture, is that right? Lion Capital? Hot space. Rumor is X Corp’s doubling their own fund size.”

  Fred was surprised at Simon’s knowledge of the finance world. He had never spoken with him about work, assuming from Charlene’s commentary the man’s employment in some low remuneration industry—the sort where job-related chatter would only serve to highlight the disparity between their positions, embarrassing them both.

  “Where you at these days?” Fred asked.

  “Work wise? Still Warburg. Nothing changes for me but my age.”

  Warburg Pincus? Charlene, normally meticulous about documenting the follies and achievements of friends and acquaintances, hadn’t mentioned he worked in private equity. Fred eyed Simon’s clothing, starting with the black North Face jacket. There was no company or school affiliation printed on the sleeve or chest, and it was so old the fleece was gathered in mottled balls. “I didn’t know Warburg had an office in San Francisco.”

  “Oh, it’s minuscule. Where they shove all the undesirables.” Simon helped himself to another portion of steamed cod, spilling a bit of sauce on his unremarkable sneakers (Nike Air Pegasus). “This fish is good, huh? Now I see why Sonya always makes us order it. I usually never get to try it because she bogarts it all.”

  He must be in investor relations, Fred thought. Or the less prestigious operations side. “What do you work on?”

  “Investments,” Simon said. A few seconds passed. “Same boring shit. So Lion, huh? You must be excited.”

  “What sector at Warburg? Do you have a card?” Fred knew he was coming off as unbearably nosy, but he was overwhelmed by curiosity.

  Simon continued to ladle fish. “Healthcare.” When Fred didn’t respond, he burped and set down his utensils. He dug into his pocket and brought out a wallet (old, beat-up Tumi), and passed over a card, from which the two words leaped into Fred’s vision as if emblazoned in bright red capital letters. Managing Director. “I split between the New York office and here,” Simon said, anticipating the next question.

  Later that night, in bed with Charlene asleep next to him, Fred realized Simon had been assuming the role he himself had presumed to be playing, that of the More Successful and Magnanimous Party, and was bathed in chagrin. After everything he had been through in his career—the punishing hours of investment banking, the detailed strategizing to gain acceptance to HBS, the intricate plotting to escape the conglomerate—that it all should come to this, to serve as a receptacle for such piteous compassion! He concentrated on deleting all traces of the interaction, and by the next morning he had successfully swept it from memory. He would see Sonya Kim only twice more before his divorce; he never saw her husband again.

  Yet it was Simon Barnes who now floated back into his consciousness—his ruddy face and that shocker of a business card—as Fred sat facing his boss and the senior managing director of Lion Capital, Griffin Keeles, and informed him of his invitation to the Founders’ Retreat.

  “The Founders’ Retreat,” Griffin repeated, in the Geordie accent Fred theorized was the reason his boss had originally been hired. It was Leland Wang’s greatest regret that he’d achieved wealth too late in life for his progeny to attend Harrow or Cheltenham and thus possess that greatest of status markers, a European accent; though desperate measures had since been taken to rectify the situation, with multiple semesters at a Swiss finishing institute, it was rumored that the two Wang siblings were still unable to wield a knife and fork simultaneously.

  Griffin reclined in his white Aeron; Leland believed in a moderate relaxation of the purse when it came to office furniture, since employees were expected to keep long and efficient hours. “I went once, as you may recall. Before the DataMinx IPO. It was in Maui that year.”

  “Right.” As if Fred would ever forget. DataMinx had been his deal, his board seat, but Griffin had pulled rank when the miraculous request arrived that year, descending in Fred’s email inbox like manna from heaven, inviting precisely one Lion representative into attendance at the vaunted retreat. Fred had spent the entire week Griffin was gone working from home in a furious sulk, still in shock over the shamelessness of the coup.

  Now, he could read Griffin’s expression perfectly. The twist of the dry thin lips as the Brit attempted to hide his surprise while his brain chugge
d through a series of calculations; the struggle to avoid what was ultimately the unavoidable question. “How did you get invited?”

  It was a well-publicized fact that the Founders’ Retreat—the week-long bacchanal held each year in a rotating tropical destination by the venture firm Motley Capital—was notoriously stingy with its invites. For weeks after Jack’s email, Fred had agonized over this precise complication; there was no way he could compel an invitation with just a simple email to Motley, even one summoning all the political goodwill of Lion Capital. The only Lion employee who could conceivably pull that off was Leland himself, but Leland had a son—a buck-toothed imbecile he was actively grooming for future leadership—and Fred didn’t want to risk planting that idea in his liver-spotted head.

  Don Wilkes, the founder and chairman of the venerated Motley, was a fellow business school alum, though it would only be an exercise in embarrassment to attempt to use this tenuous connection. There were thousands of HBS grads in the Bay Area but only one Wilkes, who had managed to sell his online-gaming start-up, MirrorStream, to Intel for $7 billion at the peak of the first dot-com bubble; it was unlikely that dropping the HBS name would serve to land Fred even a coffee meeting, much less an invite to what was called the “Sun Valley of Tech,” where corporate chieftains and officials from fiefdoms with high Gini coefficients talked shop and made merry. In the last stages of desperation Fred had emailed Jack, baldly stating his predicament; Jack had followed up less than a day later with the coveted invitation.