The Wangs vs. the World (2 page)

The knowledge that his father, his tall, proud father with his slight scholar’s squint and firmly buttoned quilted vests, had gone from quietly presiding over acres of fertile Chinese farmland to operating a piss plant on the island of Taiwan—well, it was an indignity so large that no one could ever mention it.

Charles’s father had wanted him to stay at National Taiwan University and become a statesman in the New Taiwan, a young man in a Western suit who would carry out Sun Yat Sen’s legacy, but Charles dropped out because he thought he could earn his family’s old life back. An army of well-wishers—none of whom he’d ever see again—had packed him onto a plane with two good-luck scrolls, a crushed orchid lei, and a list of American fertilizer manufacturers who might be in need of cheap urea.

Charles had spent half the flight locked in the onboard toilet heaving up a farewell banquet of bird’s-nest soup and fatty pork stewed in a writhing mass of sea cucumber. When he couldn’t stomach looking at his own colorless face for another second, he picked up a miniature bar of wax-paper-wrapped soap and read the label, practicing his English. It was a pretty little package, lily scented and printed with purple flowers. “Moisturizing,” promised the front; “Skin so soft, it has to be Glow.” And on the back, there was a crowded list of ingredients that surprised Charles. This was before anything in Taiwan had to be labeled, before there was any sort of unbribable municipal health department that monitored claims that a package of dried dates contained anything more than, say, “The freshest dates dried in the healthy golden sun.”

Charles stood there, heaving, weaving forward and back on his polished custom-made shoes, staring cross-eyed at the bar of soap, trying to make out the tiny type. Sweet almond oil, sodium stearate, simmondsia chinensis, hydrolyzed wheat proteins, and then he saw it:
UREA
. Hydroxyethyl urea, right between shea butter and sodium cocoyl isethionate.

Urea!

Urea on a pretty little American package!

Charles stood up straight, splashed cold water on his face, and strode back to his seat, the miniature soap tucked in his palm. He pulled his gray checked suit jacket down from the overhead bin, took out the list of fertilizer manufacturers, and tucked it into the seat pocket right behind the crinkly airsick bag. When Charles walked off the plane, the scrolls and the pungent lei also stayed behind. He stuck the soap in his shirt pocket, slung his jacket over his shoulder, and swallowed the last trace of bile. Charles Wang was going to come out of America smelling sweet. He was sure of it. “Shit into Shinola,” he said to himself aloud, repeating one of his favorite American movie phrases.

And he’d done it.

Turned shit into two hundred million dollars’ worth of Shinola. Made himself into a cosmetics king with eight factories in Los Angeles, factories that he’d gone from supplying with urea to owning outright—each one turning out a glossy rainbow-scented sea of creams and powders and lipsticks and mascaras.

In the beginning, he’d operated all eight of them separately, sending the clients of one into the disguised folds of another any time they complained about his steadily rising prices. They’d get hooked in again—“Special offer! Just for you my prices go so low!”—and find their invoices once again mysteriously padded, just a little bit, just enough to be uncomfortable. Later, as it became clear that women were willing to pay twenty, twenty-five, thirty dollars for a tube of lipstick, that sort of subterfuge became unnecessary, and there was no end to the number of hotel chains that wanted to brand their shampoos and makeup artists ready to launch their own lines.

One of them, a tiny Japanese girl who stared out at the world through anime eyes, came to him with empty pockets and a list of celebrity clients. He’d fronted her the first set of orders for KoKo, a collection of violently hued shadows that came in round white compacts with her face, framed by its perfect bob cut, embossed on the front, the fuchsia and monarch yellow and electric blue powders glaring out through two translucent holes cut through her printed irises. The line was an immediate smash hit, going from runways and editorial layouts straight to department store makeup counters and into the damp suede reaches of a million teenage purses. And Charles, somehow, got credit for being a visionary, a risk taker, an integral part of a new generation of business talents who made their millions on mass customization, on glamorizing the role of the middleman, on merchandising someone else’s talent.

Yes, America had loved him. America was honest enough with him to include chemical piss in a list of pretty ingredients; America saw that the beautiful was made up of the grotesque.

Makeup was American, and Charles understood makeup. It was artifice, and it was honesty. It was science and it was psychology and it was fashion; but more than that, it was about feeling
wealthy.
Not money—wealth. The endless possibility of it and the cozy sureness of it. The brilliant Aegean blues and slick wet reds and luscious blacks, the weighty packaging, with its satisfying smooth hinges and sound closures.

Artifice,
thought Charles,
was the real honesty
. Confessing your desire to change, being willing to strive, those were things that made sense. The real fakers were the ones who denied those true impulses. The cat-loving academic who let her hair frizz and made no attempt to cover her acne scars was the most insidious kind of liar, putting on a false face of unconcern when in her heart of hearts she must,
must
want to be beautiful. Everyone must want to be beautiful. The fat girl who didn’t even bother to pluck her caterpillar eyebrows? If life were a fairy tale, her upturned nose would grow as long as her unchecked middle was wide. And for a time, a long and lucrative time, the good people of America had agreed.

By the turn of the millennium, he was rich already. Rich enough, probably, to buy back all the land in China that had been lost, the land that his father had died without ever touching again. Never mind that the Communists would never have allowed it to be privately owned. The simple fact that he could afford it was enough. He wouldn’t even have done anything with those fallow acres, just slipped the deed in his pocket, received the bows of his peasants, and directed his driver towards Suzhou, where the women were supposed to be so beautiful it didn’t matter that they were also bold and disobedient.

But really, Charles Wang was having too much fun in America to dwell on the China that might have been his.

Just four years ago he’d had the hull of his sexy little cigarette speedboat painted with twenty-seven gallons of Suicide Blonde, his best-selling nail polish color—a perfect blue-toned red that set off the mahogany trim and bright white leather seats. As soon as the paint dried, the boat ripped from Marina del Rey to Costa Careyes with a delectable payload of models for an ad campaign shoot, four morning-to-midnight days that Charles remembered mostly as a parade of young flesh in a range of browns and pinks interrupted only by irrelevant slashes of bright neoprene.

Now the boat was gone. Some small-hearted official with a clipboard and a grudge had probably plastered notices on the entrance to his slip or routed some ugly tugboat into the dock and dragged his poor
Dragon Lady
away—how Charles had laughed when the registrar at the marina asked if he knew that term was racist—leaving her to shiver in a frigid warehouse.

He never should have fallen for America.

As soon as the happy-clappy guitar-playing Christian missionary who taught him English wrote down Charles’s last name and spelled it
W-A-N-G
, he should have known.

He should have stayed leagues away from any country that could perpetrate such an injustice, that could spread this glottal miscegenation of a language, with its sloppy vowels and insidious
R
s, across the globe.

In Chinese, in any Chinese speaker’s mouth, Wang was a family name to be proud of. It meant
king
, with a written character that was simple and strong. And it was pronounced with a languid drawn-out diphthong of an
o
sound that suggested an easy life of summer palaces and fishing for sweet river shrimp off gilded barges. But one move to America and Charles Wang’s proud surname became a nasally joke of a word; one move and he went from
king
to
cock
.

No boat. No car. No house. No factories. No models. No lipstick. No KoKo. No country. No kingdom. No past. No prospects. No respect. No land. No land. No land.

Now, now that he had lost the estate in America, all Charles could think of was the land in China.

The life that should have been his.

China, where the Wangs truly belonged.

Not America. Never Taiwan.

If they were in China, his ungrateful children would not be spread out across a continent. If they were in China, his disappointed wife would respond to his every word with nothing but adoration. Angry again, Charles turned away from the window and back to his bare desk. Almost bare. In the center, dwarfed by the expanse of mahogany, was a heavy chop fashioned from a square block of prized mutton-fat jade.

Most chops underlined their authority with excess, an entire flowery honorific crowded on the carved base, but this one, once his grandfather’s, had a single character slashed into its bottom.

王

Just the family name. Wang.

Over a century ago, when the seal was first made, its underside had started out a creamy white. Now it was stained red from cinnabar paste. His grandfather had used the chop in lieu of a signature on any documents he’d needed to approve, including the land deeds that were once testament to the steady expansion of Wang family holdings. Charles was thankful that his grandfather had died before all the land was lost, before China lost herself entirely to propaganda and lies. The men of the Wang family did not always live long lives, but they lived big.

The land that had anchored the Wangs and exalted them, the land that had given them a place and a purpose, that was gone. But Charles still had the seal and the deeds, everything that proved that the land was rightfully his.

And in a few fevered hours of searching the Internet, he’d uncovered stories, vague stories, of local councils far from central Party circles returning control to former owners, of descendants who, after years in reeducation camps, managed to move back into abandoned family houses that had been left to rot, entire wings taken over by wild pigs because peasants persuaded to deny their history could never appreciate the poetry and grandeur of those homes. He stored each hopeful tale away in a secret chamber of his heart, hoarding them, as he formed a plan. He would make sure that his three children were safe, that his fearsome and beloved second wife was taken care of, that his family was all under one roof, and then, finally, Charles Wang was going to reclaim the land in China.

He popped an aspirin in his mouth, pushing back that new old feeling of a tunnel, a dark and almost inevitable tunnel, closing in on him, and crunched down on the pill as he picked up the phone.

二
Helios, NY

SAINA WANG smoothed out the tabloid-size
Catskills Chronicler
and paged past the op-ed column, skipping the list of new high school seniors, glancing over the photos of the mayor’s Labor Day barbecue and the Pet of the Week, in search of the horoscopes. Usually she read the
New York Times
—made herself read it, a reminder of the life she could be, maybe should be, living—but that paper would never carry anything as frivolous and as
useful
as horoscopes.

There. There they were. Squeezed onto the recipe page under a photo of creamed corn succotash with crisped prosciutto.

Libra (Sept. 23–Oct. 22)

You resonate with things and people you love. The more you let yourself love, the better you feel. The better you feel, the healthier you become. Love is a healer, and so are you.

It was exactly what she’d always feared was true.

From the time Saina was very young, she worried that she would always be the lover and never the loved.

And then she grew up and it got more complicated. Now she thought that she would always be the salve to some artist’s eternally wounded soul—an unwilling goddess to be worshipped and adored, but never, ever worried over or taken care of. No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes.

Giant canvases that glorified her naked breasts and half smile, songs rhyming
Saina
and
wanna,
unfinished novels about an unknowable girl of dreams—none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favor.

Sometimes, when you’re in love with an artist, it can be hard to see that it’s not about you at all. You get lost in the attention, the deep, soulful gazes and the probing regard. And then, gradually, you come to realize that you’re not so much a woman as you are a statue. A statue on a pedestal that he chiseled and posed, a foreshortened figure that he sees only through a single squinted eye. When you’re in love with an artist, you’re no longer
you,
exactly, but a loving and generous Everywoman who will weave your life into a crafty plinth for his work.

And it doesn’t even matter if you’re an artist, too. You could have a whole room—a small one, but a whole room nonetheless—at the Whitney Biennial. Your gallery in Berlin could be paranoid enough about your potential defection to a rival that you’d have to fake an eccentric demand for weekly shipments of special-order, octopus-shaped Haribo gummies just so they’d stop asking you what they could do to make you happy; your dealer in New York could be fending off a waiting list filled with scores of discerning millionaires and you could be a permanent fixture on both the
Artforum
party pages
and
NewYorkSocialDiary.com, but your beautiful boyfriend with his perpetually dirty fingernails could still be so obsessed with the politics of his own creation that he would take all of that in with an absentminded kiss and ask you again and then again and then a fifteenth time if you heard the difference between nearly identical sound loops on the track accompanying his latest installation.