The Wangs vs. the World

by Jade Chang

  “Go gamble like doing drug to him. Every weekend he go with travel group to Macao, some special gambling group to go bet. Bet, bet, bet. All day long bet. He lose all his own money, so he need to go find more money. He look everywhere, xiao zang lang, like little cockroach, and then he get scared. So scared. He owe so much money that he don’t know what will happen.

  “The main person who give him gambling stake is big house builder, and so Wu Jong Fei he think, Okay, what do builder need most? Builder need land! So as soon as he hear about the law that pass last year that say that some private ownership of land is okay, he go to lao Guang and he show a newspaper article about my business to pretend that he have money, that he will build school, build good house, bring job to people in the town. Lao Guang believe him, because lao Guang will believe me. But instead he just give land to developer so he can have no debt and more money to gamble and now they build a whole ugly apartment city over Wang jia de land. Wo men wan le. Mei le.”

  The force of their father’s sorrow and anger flattened the Wang children. They listened to him rage, sinking farther into his pillows with every bitter word.

  “It make you so angry,” said Charles. “Angry to death.”

  A shard of fear pricked at Grace. “Not to death, Dad. But really, really angry.”

  And then the imposter, the man who ruined their father’s hopes and dreams, the gambler and pretender, appeared on their side of the wall in a wheelchair, his foot propped up in a cast and his son, the crazy guy in the red hat, pushing him. The imposter was somewhere around their father’s age, with a remarkably similar pair of aviator-style reading glasses. He looked straight at Grace and smiled.

  “Xiao meimei hao piao liang.”

  Grace looked at her sister, and then at her brother and father. They were all frozen by the strangeness of the situation. What was wrong with that man? He’d stolen all of their land and then ridden out here on a wheelchair to say that she was pretty? Sometimes Grace hated being a girl.

  Her father closed his eyes.

  Andrew looked at the two unfamiliar men who had somehow become so entrenched in their family story. “Uh, shushu, ni ying gai zou le.” But the man didn’t leave. He continued to look at Grace, and then at Saina, and then finally turned his milky eyes towards Andrew. “Wang Da Qian shen le san ge hao hai zi. Ta yi jiao ni men jiou lai.”

  Was this man jealous that he only had one child, and their father had three?

  “Hao le ba,” said the weird man, who Andrew realized was actually not much older than Saina. “O-kay, o-kay,” he added, looking at them. A nurse with a clipboard came into the room and handed the man in the wheelchair a sheaf of papers and a pen. Without a glance, he passed the forms to his son and continued to stare at the three of them.

  They waited there, all six of them, until the last of the forms was filled out.

  “Should we say goodbye?” Grace whispered to Andrew.

  “No!” said their father, opening his eyes. “He does not deserve you to talk to him.”

  Andrew was torn. The man was in a wheelchair, but he was like Professor X or something, just sitting there like a boss when he was the one who had messed everything up to begin with. Andrew felt like he should finish what his father had started and break the man’s other leg, but instead he allowed them to wheel out of the room, that other father and that other son.

  四十七

  Helios, NY

  BARBRA COULD HEAR their voices from the vestibule of the restaurant where a lonely pair of green rain boots sat under a battered painting of sailboats.

  “There’s nothing wrong with calling.”

  “But what do I say? I don’t really have another explanation.” It was Leo.

  “I don’t think you need to explain. I just think you need to tell her that you’re invested in the relationship.”

  “Gay men are very smart about girls,” said Barbra, peeking her head into the main dining room. “Leo, you should listen to your friend.”

  “Oh, I’m not gay,” said Graham.

  “He’s just a hipster,” said Leo.

  What was a hipster? The term was vaguely familiar to her, buried somewhere between beatnik and hippie, but it wasn’t important now. She pulled out the keys to Saina’s house and placed them on the bar. “Here, Graham. Saina said I should leave these for you, and you would go water her garden.”

  “Oh yeah, okay. So are you off to China now? Did your passport get renewed?”

  “Yes, I’m going to pick it up, and then I will fly to China.” What was it that Saina had said? How strange it was that she’d ended up here, in a farmhouse in upstate New York? “You know, I never thought I would go there.”

  “Aren’t you from there?”

  “No, no, I grew up in Taiwan. Very different.” She studied the restaurateur, who didn’t seem at all offended that she’d thought he was a homosexual. “Why didn’t you tell Saina?”

  He blushed suddenly and raised his hands. “You gotta choose some loyalties in life, I guess.” That was true, though she’d never thought that it was the sort of truth this ready-to-laugh young man would know. “Anyways,” he said, “I think intent matters with lies, and I knew Leo wasn’t trying to screw her over, he was just trying to keep it real.”

  “A lie does not sound very real.”

  “Yeah, okay, well, he was just trying not to get dumped.”

  Barbra had seen young people in L.A. with tattoos like this, their whole body covered like Saina’s notebooks in high school, but she’d never had the chance to speak to one of them before. She tapped his forearm. “Is this pig your friend?”

  Graham looked down and laughed. “They’re all my friends,” he said, pointing at the row of dancing vegetables on his other arm and the knife that loomed above them.

  Saina’s boyfriend had built a tiny bridge out of the discarded straw wrappers on the table, twisting them together until they had enough integrity to stand. “Leo,” said Barbra, “I know what you should do.”

  He looked up. “What?”

  “Go with me.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “To China?”

  “Why not? I’ve done the same thing.”

  “You mean if you were in this situation?”

  “No, no, I already did the same thing. I came to America when Saina’s mother died. I heard about it, and I knew I wanted to marry Charles, so I came. If I don’t come, I don’t have my life.”

  He looked lost. “I don’t know, this really isn’t the same thing, is it? She was . . . she was so done with me.”

  Barbra glanced down at her watch. If this boy couldn’t recognize that you had to grab at life, there was nothing she could do about it. “Okay.” She shrugged. “Then you stay here. But I think at least you should try.”

  “I don’t know if I can intrude right now. It feels like a family thing.”

  She looked him straight in the eye. He wasn’t as alluring as Grayson—he didn’t have that elusive thing that would make a girl disregard any failing—but he seemed like the kind of man that Charles would want his daughter to be with, someone kind and joyous, even if he was black. “A family thing. And you want to be like her family.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I have a taxi outside.”

  “I might see you there.”

  He wasn’t going to come, she knew. The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.

  四十八

  Gaofu, China

  “GYM. NAS. TIC,” said Bing Bing, returning to the car. “Like O. Lym. Pic.”

  They had been stopped on the wrong side of a blockade for ten minutes before she decided to get out and investigate. “There. Is. A show. Happening. Right. Now. It will take. A long. Time. For us. To go past. It.” She passed back a crinkly plastic bag of candied winter melon, and they
each took a stick of the pale-green sweet even though they were headed to a dinner of some sort.

  A few years out of college, a friend of Saina’s got a job teaching English in a small prefecture in Northern Japan. Her arrival had triggered an avalanche of invitations to official dinners and gatherings—she’d even been invited to a wedding. Other friends had told her about visits to their homelands and how they were always crowded with command performances, the immigrants expected to show up whenever they were summoned. And now here they were, going to some sort of a family dinner with family they had never met.

  Andrew leaned his head against the window. He had always been aware, vaguely, that there were relatives in China, though he didn’t know their ages and couldn’t keep track of their names. If he’d known that he was going to meet them, he would have packed a little more carefully.

  After the imposter and his son had left, the three of them spent the rest of the afternoon napping in turns on the vacated bed while nurses came in and out with pills and charts. Whoever woke up was immediately dealt into a never-ending game of hearts that their father, despite his grogginess, was winning.

  Even though he had gotten into a fight, it wasn’t a punch that put their father in the hospital. He insisted that the other man had barely managed to touch him. He swore that he’d been standing when the imposter’s coworker had called the ambulance, but when the ambulance left, he’d somehow found himself on it, regaining consciousness on a gurney next to his sworn enemy. It turned out that he’d had a stroke, and when Saina spoke to the doctors, they said that he’d been having small strokes for months and that he needed to rest before he could be sent back to America.

  They had tried to be angry that he never mentioned any health issues, but he’d refused to respond to their scolding, so instead they all rested together and had long, elliptical conversations with no beginning or end and watched the sun rise and fall over the elementary school next door, still deserted for summer vacation. Andrew thought that he’d finally tell his family about what happened with Dorrie, but no one asked. Instead, they’d dealt hand after hand and talked about lost nuclear warheads, their score sheet growing longer as they considered various claims on the New World—everyone knew that Columbus wasn’t the first, but maybe Leif Eriksson wasn’t either. It could have been an Irish monk named St. Brendan, and now there was a Chinese map that had emerged, a map Columbus might have used to navigate the globe. It could prove that the Chinese really were the first to explore every corner of the globe, or it could show that they’d gotten the world all wrong, leading that idiot Columbus to mistake his destination completely.

  Charles talked about the land. How vast it was, and how green. He tried to explain what it had felt like before he knew anything, when, for a brief and glorious moment, the land belonged to him again. He showed them the old land deeds and explained the map; he pointed to the spots where their grandfather had laid his seal, and then he asked Grace to get his jacket from the closet, and he pulled out the jade chop, matching the underside to its imprint on the deed. None of them had ever seen it before, this relic from another life, and none of them would ever forget it. It was a block of carved jade as big as a pepper grinder; the top had a house on a mountain with soft sloping sides and a jagged peak and the bottom was slashed with their last name: 王.

  Through it all, they listened as their father’s heart propelled the jump-roping line, sending out a rhythmic beep, ba-beep, beep, ba-beep, beep.

  And then it was almost evening, and their father declared, completely out of nowhere, that it was time for them to get ready because they had to represent him at a big dinner. “Listen, don’t worry about eating, but don’t eat any dehydrated mushroom, okay? Things from Chinese factories no good. So many chemical. Make sure you only eat fresh one!”

  So now here they were, still in their grubby travel clothes, on their way to dinner with relatives that they’d never met. In the jangle of this unfamiliar homeland, with her father lying in a hospital bed, Grace felt raw and open again, the way she had right after the accident. She wanted to get back to that without anything horrible happening. She wanted to be a transparent eyeball like that Emerson poem, bright and full and receptive to everything.

  “Gan bei! Da jia gan bei!” A man with an old-fashioned pompadour aimed a small porcelain teacup full of spirits down Andrew’s throat and then clapped him on the back as he coughed. He’d had an infinite number of shots forced upon him since they’d walked through the bustling restaurant into this aggressively air-conditioned private banquet room. Now he and Grace were seated together, and Saina was sitting all the way across the room at another table full of red-faced men in business suits. This was probably what it was like to be a celebrity, Andrew thought, as the room swayed around him.

  “I think I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered to Grace.

  When Andrew rose, a doughy young man around his own age immediately popped up and followed him out. Silently, he pointed down a hallway to the bathrooms, and when Andrew emerged, he was waiting there with a warm towel, which he urged into Andrew’s hands. There was an awkward moment when Andrew stood there with the used towel, but luckily a waiter swooped by just then and lobbed it onto his tray of dirty dishes.

  “That was bananas,” said Grace, when Andrew slid back into his seat. “It was like you had a servant. I thought they were all supposed to be Communists.”

  “Dude waited outside the bathroom while I peed. It was so bananas. Wait, are Communists really not into servants? Someone must have driven Mao around.”

  “You’re the one who’s in college—you should know.”

  “Oh, yeah, well, I just wear a Che Guevara T-shirt. It doesn’t mean that I know anything about actual Communists.”

  Someone dinged on a glass, and a man at the table next to theirs rose as waiters came in with yet another course.

  Andrew leaned over. “Let’s bet. Do you think he’s going to lead with how hardworking and decent the farmers or fishermen or whatever are, or do you think he’s going to go with how he’s pioneering an untapped commodities market?”

  “Neither. I think it’s going to be more of a, like, ‘I’m so flattered you’re all here to taste the humble foods of my region,’” said Grace. Could she find something beautiful about these men who seemed so obsessed with the things they could grow or kill? She would try.

  “I don’t know, that guy doesn’t look too humble to me.”

  It had gradually dawned on Andrew and Grace that this wasn’t some sort of family reunion after all—in fact, it seemed to be a banquet for the local agricultural bureau, which was headed up by some distant relative of theirs who had caught wind of their father’s arrival and insisted that his children represent him at this dinner. At least that meant their Chinese family wasn’t made up entirely of middle-aged guys in business suits with big shoulder pads, and it made a little more sense that their father had called out as they’d left his hospital room: “You take Daddy’s place, you are the Papa Wang!”

  Across the hall, Grace laughed as Andrew whispered something to her. It looked to Saina like they’d both stopped eating somewhere around the seventh course, which turned out to be a platter full of stewed chicken testicles. Their plates were piled with tidbits from all the subsequent dishes, which their tablemates insisted on serving them—the overflow was ignored, somehow, by the servers who whisked in with a score of new plates between every course, picking up the old ones and depositing them on a waiting tray. By the time the meal reached its halfway point, the tablecloth beneath Saina was smeared with the remains of a dozen courses that she’d dutifully consumed, but the plate in front of her was once again brand-new.

  The unrelenting backslapping and good cheer in the room made it hard to concentrate on the man next to her as he bragged about his daughter, who was a brilliant pianist and wanted to go to Juilliard, and maybe Saina, whom he’d heard was an artist of some renown, might be able to make the necessary introductions? She should come
to his house and listen to his daughter play for herself! And when she was there, maybe she could make them a painting, ha ha ha, that they would hang in their offices? She could paint all the beautiful things that this land produced! And maybe she knew people in America, she must know so many people in America since she was such an accomplished and respected young woman, maybe she knew someone in America who would want to open up a new market for sea urchin or small turtles, such delicacies, if only they were aware! Or did she instead have things that she could sell? Real estate in America was so cheap now, they’d all heard, and maybe she knew a reputable real estate agent, someone who wouldn’t cheat him—Not a Jew, ha ha ha, or maybe a Jew was better! Ha ha ha—who would point him towards a good investment property because he knew somebody who had tripled his cash on a condo in Las Vegas in just nine months!

  These men wanted to consume everything. By the time they’d reached the fourteenth course, turtle soup, Saina wouldn’t have been shocked if they’d seasoned her with a dash of white pepper and eaten her. These men didn’t pluck politely from the small dishes set out before them—they picked up those dishes and shoveled the contents into their mouths, never able to get enough in a single bite. They gulped up each other’s talk in the same way, loud and eager, quick to rage and quicker to laugh. They wanted to dig into the ground and pull out all the roots, trawl the seas and scoop up anything formed of flesh, search the forests and the fields, and snatch creatures out of their burrows and knock birds down from their perches so that they could be plucked and skinned and seasoned and diced and trussed and steamed and broiled and roasted and stir-fried and served up at banquets designed to demonstrate the abundance of the land and their dominance over it.

  Bizz-buzz. Bizz-buzz. Bizz-buzz. It took several rings before Saina realized that the odd noise breaking through the hum of Communist bonhomie was her own phone, which had somehow acquired a foreign accent. Heart slamming against her chest, she pulled it out, looked at the caller ID, and without letting herself think, stabbed at the green button.