The Wangs vs. the World (22 page)

America celebrated Christopher Columbus, a thief and a liar, a man who called himself a great sailor but couldn’t even navigate his way past an entire continent. A man who discovered nothing, who explored nothing, yet was made into a hero all the same. Charles was reasonably generous with holidays for his employees: Veterans Day, the day after Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, his factories were shuttered. But Columbus Day would never be a day of rest for him, for any of the hundreds of employees he’d once had. There was nothing patriotic about honoring a man who made a mockery of true pioneers, a man who proved that America couldn’t even take charge of its own discovery myth!

He couldn’t let himself get too excited. That’s what Dr. Kaplan had said. Excitement and exhaustion, any kind of stress, could trigger another tiny stroke like the one he’d had the day he signed the papers turning everything over to the bank. His doctor had wanted him to get an MRI and an entire battery of tests to rule out something more serious, but Charles didn’t want anything to stand in the way of this journey. Now that he’d relinquished everything he’d built in America, all that remained, the only thing that he could focus on, was reuniting the Wangs under his oldest child’s roof and then turning all of his attention to reclaiming China.

When Charles’s father had his first stroke, he’d made it sound like nothing.
“Mei shi, mei shi. Bu yao dan xing,”
he’d insisted on their brief call, and Charles had allowed himself to believe it. After all, there was so much happening in America! The sales numbers had just begun to come in from KoKo’s line, higher than they’d imagined in their margarita-fueled meetings, and, of course, he needed to be on hand in case the production run had to be increased. And then there was another big deal about to close, but it would be bad business to leave the country before all the papers had been signed. Not to mention a new house that he’d just put in an offer on, a house he would buy and his father would never see.

Charles wished his father had held on for longer. Made it to the peak of the success and then had his last stroke right before the Failure. Instead, he’d dropped to the ground in the entryway of a fish market and died with his head propped up on a burlap sack of geoduck clams just as Charles was postponing his trip to Taiwan for a fourth time.

Another billboard loomed up ahead, an image of a giant plate of BBQ ribs. Lunchtime had come and gone. His family must be hungry.

Charles leaned his head back. “Gege, Meimei, are your stomachs hungry?” Barbra twisted awkwardly in her seat and turned her back to him, facing her scarf-covered window. He remembered buying that scarf for her at the Hermès store on Fifth Avenue—a 56 x 56 silk square that he’d blithely plunked down $820 to acquire—right before Saina’s disastrous show. Was it supposed to be a provocation, that scarf? Some sort of message about the Wangs and their failures?

He looked over his shoulder at Andrew and Grace. They hadn’t responded to his question. “We have lunch at that restaurant?” he pointed up, as that billboard flew by. “Texas B-B-Q!”

“Oh Dad, let’s just get something to go, okay? If we stay on track, we should get to Austin in four hours and twenty-three minutes,” said Andrew, looking down at his phone.

“Why you so rush? You have girlfriend in Austin?”

“Baba! You know why! I want to get there in time to sign up for the open mic. It says on their website that sign-ups start at seven, and we’ll probably go to the hotel first, and then I’ll still have to find it, and maybe I can take the car or something?”

Barbra chose that moment to break her angry silence. “It won’t ever happen! You lose the business, okay. Okay. I understand. Sometimes businesses get lost! But now how much do you spend on that lawyer? Maybe he speaks
zhong wen,
but he is not in
zhong guo
! What will he be able to do? Is it so hard for you not to be a big man? You can’t just get that land and be a big man again—it won’t happen. Communist Party never let it happen. Why they want to give it up?”

“Well,” Charles heard Grace say to Andrew, “that might be the most words I’ve ever heard come out of Babs’s mouth.”

Charles bit down gently on his tongue and worried it between his wolf teeth. His wife didn’t deserve a response. She deserved to be put out on the side of the road, left to fend for herself in the desolate fields of West Texas. The scarf could go, too.

“Andrew,” he said instead. “Okay, yes. You take car, go to stand up.”

“
I’m
hungry,” said Grace. “Can we at least get french fries?”

Charles swerved to the right, just making it onto the off-ramp before it, too, flashed by, lost forever. As he coasted down towards the golden arches, he stretched a hand out towards his wife, reaching for something to pat, to reassure. Her hand, a delicate little bag of bones, found its way into his. Her body still faced the window, but she let him take her hand in his and squeeze it, tight.

二十四
Austin, TX

1,612 Miles

MAY LEE and Barbra had the same birthday, and it was today.

Barbra hadn’t even known that they shared a birthday until six months into her marriage, when Charles came home and told her to get dressed for a special dinner. Pleased, thinking that he’d forgotten, she hurried into her closet and was happily laying out jewelry when she heard him down the hall telling Saina and Andrew that they would all be celebrating tonight. She remembered feeling a pang of disappointment at the thought of sharing the evening with the children, but that was nothing compared to Saina’s wail when she saw Barbra descending the stairs in a new dress.

“Why is
she
coming?” Saina cried, pointing up at Barbra as if she were a murderess. There had been very few such accusatory moments. From the start, Barbra had kept her interactions with Charles and May Lee’s children cordial but distant, always allowing them their way, rarely displaying any sort of softness, never encouraging any kind of reliance. It was a very satisfactory arrangement. She did not trouble herself over her relationship with her husband’s children and they, in turn, barely paid any attention to her. This, though, had seemed beyond the pale, and Barbra let the anger show in her voice when she’d responded, “Well, it’s
my
birthday.”

“Daddy! She can’t take Mommy’s birthday! That’s not fair!”

Ama stood in the doorway with baby Gracie in her arms, smiling, pleased, no doubt, that Barbra was being embarrassed. And Charles? Charles was trapped in the middle of the foyer, the enormous chandelier casting a prism of shadows over his face as he looked at each of the women left in his life, utterly bewildered.

It had felt like a nightmare, but now Barbra thought that it was more like a fairy tale. One of those American Disney stories where malevolent spirits switch two babies born on the same day—in those tales, one child is always beautiful and good, and the other, the Barbra, is ugly and wicked. She was the Evil Queen, usurping Snow White’s place next to the prince.

Except that these days, Charles was more like the frog. When had he become this scared and secretive man, hunched down in some swampy deep? Barbra leaned her head against the lush silk of her scarf, bumping against the hot glass that it covered, and let the moment he first told her replay in her mind.

There it was, over and over again—that awkward swoop of his arm, like a magician whose cape had gone missing.

And now here was the man left behind, still holding her hand. Her husband, who shrank a bit each day in the ceaseless desert sun, diminished by his lack of surety and, more than anything else, by his strange new secrecy. Barbra had loved Charles for his brashness; she loved him for the forthrightness of his desires, the way he took what he wanted and never lied about wanting it. What right did he have to change those things? Fortunes might shift, but character, at least, was supposed to be constant.

She took her hand back and folded it neatly in her lap. With any luck, Charles would forget this birthday. Barbra couldn’t bear the thought of a makeshift celebration, cheeseburgers and a bottle of cheap champagne. The children probably remembered, but neither of them had said a word; it was unlikely that they would do any more than whisper about it to each other. Besides, tonight there was witless Andrew’s comedy performance. Barbra wondered if she could claim a headache and stay in the hotel room, which would, at the very least, be air-conditioned. And quiet.

“How come ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,’” she heard Andrew say to Grace in the backseat, quiet.

Barbra suppressed a sigh.

After a moment, Grace gave in, and replied, “Because ‘A House Is Not a Home.’”

“Oh! You know what we’re heading towards? A ‘New York State of Mind.’”

A pause from Grace. “But what about ‘The Way We Were’?”

“‘Send in the Clowns,’” whispered Andrew, hushing Grace when she giggled.

This juvenile game. They thought she didn’t understand it, that after all this time she was still too fresh off the boat to know that they were mocking her, but they were wrong. Saina, of course, had been the one to start it.

“You spell it B-A-R-B-R-A?” she’d asked, surprised. “Like Barbra Streisand?”

“Yes, from Strei-sand-u,” Barbra had replied, hoping that Saina wouldn’t ask any other questions. In truth, it was the first American name that had sprung to mind when she’d purchased her one-way ticket to Los Angeles from a uniformed girl her own age at the China Airlines office jammed between the noodle shops on Zhongshan Road in Taipei. The night before, when she was still Hu Yue Ling, she’d attended a university showing of
The Way We Were
and dreamed of Charles as Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford fell in and out of love on-screen. As she shuffled out with the crowd, crumpling up her package of shrimp chips, the boy in front of her said to his friend, “Well, Strei-sand-u is definitely ugly enough.” It had surprised her. Somehow you didn’t notice that she was ugly unless it was pointed out to you, ugly and determined, which Barbra herself found infinitely reassuring. Ugly, determined, and rich. A worthy namesake.

But Saina, of course, hadn’t seen it that way. “You named yourself after
Barbra Streisand? 
” she’d asked, incredulous. “But can you sing? Or are you just a total fan or something? I mean,
Barbra Streisand?
That is so weird.” Barbra had watched the words come out of her stepdaughter’s perfectly glossed young lips, which rested underneath an aquiline nose that gave her a faintly Native American air, as if Saina were descended from some noble, nearly extinct tribe rather than two crooked branches of a billion-person Chinese tree. It would have been unthinkable to tell that hateful little beauty that she had chosen the name because she admired the singer’s apparent disregard of her own odd looks, so in the end, Barbra had merely shrugged, and said, “Good English practice.” Except at the time it had probably sounded more like “Good-u Eng-u-reesh pu-lac-u-tis-u.” And now it seemed like the sum of her sixteen years in America was her hard-won ability to say that sentence flawlessly. Nothing more. And sometimes not even that.

For a minute, Barbra was deaf to Andrew and Grace’s backseat mockery as her own anger pulsed and swelled, threatening to blow out the windows of the ancient car.

One must do something with one’s life, so she had done this, and now, even though it was all falling apart, it could not be undone. Charles. She couldn’t take another minute of Charles. Barbra sat like this, in a private stew of rage and regret, frozen in place by blasts of air-conditioning and her own lying face until they pulled up to a W hotel.

“What are we doing here?” asked Grace. “Aren’t we supposed to be poor?”

Charles laughed, uncomfortable. “I figure out that I still have some hotel point left that not part of credit card, so we come here for special occasion.” He said all of this towards Barbra, voice hopeful, but didn’t have the courage to look into her eyes or touch her shoulder.

“Guys! Can we get a move on? Um, does anyone want to come with me?” said Andrew.

“I’m coming!”

“Oh, Grace. I’m sorry, I just checked, it’s twenty-one and over. You can’t come.”

“That’s so unfair! What if you were headlining? You wouldn’t be able to bring your kids?”

“I don’t know,” said Andrew, who never knew anything. “I guess not. But I really have to go, like right now.”

Barbra finally turned to Charles.
“Wo qu. Ni ying gai pei
Grace
zai lu guan.”

Not what he was expecting,
she thought triumphantly. He tried to look mischievous as he said,
“Ke shi wo shi xiang wo men ke yi . . .”

Barbra shook her head, an emphatic no. As if she would even consider having sex with him at this moment. It would have been pathetic, sprawled on the coverlet of this midrange hotel, clothes tossed atop the children’s luggage, groping at each other’s flaccid bodies as some sort of nod to her birthday. Absolutely not.

“I will go with Andrew,” she said again, this time for the children’s benefit. “You stay, keep Grace company.”

“I don’t need a
babysitter,
” said Grace, as Barbra had known she would.

“I’m not babysitter; I am Daddy!” said Charles, as Barbra had known he would.

And Andrew, of course, had no choice but to acquiesce and they drove off, leaving Charles and Grace in the lobby on either side of a giant white chair.

The comedy club smelled like all bars did—cold and sticky. Andrew was likely embarrassed to have her here with him, a silent mother figure hovering as he worshipped the black-and-white headshots that lined the hallway. Barbra recognized some of them, the lumpy ha-ha faces staring out of ugly oak frames.

“Steven Wright,” whispered Andrew, touching the scarred glass as if it were a reliquary. He was wishing himself onto the wall, it was clear. Barbra had never seen her stepson look at anything like that before. The Wang children were so used to getting things that it rarely occurred to them to want anything. But was this what Andrew really wanted? A life of lonely motel rooms, performing for white people who probably wouldn’t think that he was funny?