The Wangs vs. the World (25 page)

“The tractor?”

“Yeah. It runs on daisies.”

Grace broke in. “I think Daddy’s happy.”

Faintly, she heard their father call back, “Daddy happy if Jiejie is happy.”

“Did you hear that?”

“Yeah, that was nice. Thanks, Gracie.”

“So, are we going to meet him?”

“Of course. Yes. He’s . . . yes.”

A boyfriend,
thought Andrew.
Already.
Saina clearly didn’t have any problems with love. Maybe people just decided they were in love and then—
bam!
—they were. Everyone always said that there was nothing like first love—maybe he just had to stop looking for someone who made him feel the same way that Eunice had. Why hadn’t he stayed at school? Other people went to college without their parents’ money. Other people’s parents didn’t even
have
any money. Why hadn’t he just gotten a job and a loan?

Andrew stared out the window, half listening to Grace quiz Saina on how she and her boyfriend had met. They were winding down the greenest road Andrew had ever seen, verdant swamp on either side of them. Occasionally a sign would appear at the head of a narrow path snaking into the wild:
ATASKA GUN CLUB/KEEP OUT. OLD BOGS GUN AND FISH SOCIETY.
He imagined those secret societies, blood oaths and racist jokes over some delicious barbecue. There were so many worlds he’d never even considered—which one would be his?

二十七
New Orleans, LA

2,123 Miles

THE SOUTH wasn’t how Charles remembered it. Where were all the biscuits and black people? In the twenty-four hours that the Wangs had been on the outskirts of New Orleans with Nash, all they’d seen were various incarnations of exhausted southern gentry, old friends of Nash’s who rotated in and out of his family’s ancient estate as if it were some sort of
Gone with the Wind
commune. All around the edges of his acreage, brand-new “plantation-style” condos crowded in. The last time Charles had been here, some twenty years ago, they’d sat on the porch drinking bourbon doctored with sugar cubes and gazing out at the lazy rows of willows; now a gaudy funfair of banners flapped at the tree line:
THE ORSINI, THE VAN HELM. IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME
.

Tonight, all those cousins and aunties had reassembled in an odd little bayou shack with a corrugated tin roof and rough wooden picnic tables covered with newspaper. When Nash insisted that the Wangs come along to his second cousin’s wedding, Charles had expected white-gloved waiters and polite dancing under moss-draped trees, not the honky-tonk bacchanal unfolding around them.

“Watch yourselves!”

A slick-haired man with arms covered in snake tattoos muscled a steaming colander to their table and spilled out a crimson tide of crawfish, mixed with halved pieces of potatoes, onions, and lemons. The night outside was humid. As a briny fog rose from the piles of boiled shellfish, the windows steamed up and the air inside immediately turned dense and heated. Through that mist, two women followed, one with a pot of melted butter balanced atop a ceramic bowl of steamed corn, the other carrying a tin platter piled high with blackened link sausages that still sizzled from the grill, spitting out their juices in spicy rivulets. The first woman, white-girl dreads held back by a kerchief, plunked down the corn and went around the table ladling a rich splash of butter into the little bowl at each place setting. The second set down the sausages just an inch farther away than Charles would have liked.

He unrolled the plastic lobster bib and tied it around his neck, taking care to cover as much of his shirt as he could. He reached for a pile of thin white paper napkins and unfolded four of the squares, overlapping them on his lap until his pants were completely protected.

Ready.

Barbra had stayed behind at Nash’s house, claiming that she had a headache. Sitting in the roomful of strangers, his back aching from seven straight hours of driving, feeling a creeping numbness that made him grasp at the aspirin folded in a napkin inside his pocket, Charles half wished that he had begged off, too. But Grace was next to him and Andrew sat across the table, a too-skinny Nash cousin on either side.

One of them elbowed his son. “Ever eaten a crawdaddy?”

Andrew looked at him for help, and Charles felt a familiar mix of pride and annoyance. Why was Andrew always so tentative and half formed? It made no sense the way he scuttled sideways through life. Proud! Any child in the Wang family should always be proud, instead of well mannered and unsure.

“Hello? Um, hello?” Someone tapped on a microphone. It was the bride, a pale, creamy little thing with a sweet, limp face who had been squeezed into a lace shift. Her cheeks could have benefited from some blush stick—the Failure might not have made any money, but Charles had manufactured some very effective makeup. “Glenn and I just want to thank everyone for coming tonight, for helping us celebrate our wedding. Um, that’s it, I think. Honey?” She cradled the microphone like an offering and passed it to her brand-new husband, who had short legs and too much muscle, like one of those ugly dogs that gay men were always leading around on studded leashes. Weren’t gay men supposed to like beautiful things? It pained Charles to imagine their matrimonial bed; the groom would probably squeeze his bride into a doughy, complicit ball and just gnaw at her, grunting and drooling all the while.

“Family and friends, we welcome you to our blissful evening.” The dog-groom had worked hard to memorize his human speech. “It means the world to me and Merrily that you were able to travel from near and far to join us in our joy. As you may know, it is a blessing upon your union if strangers are made welcome at your wedding, so we’d like to welcome Uncle Nash’s friend Charles Wang, as well as his wife and children, who are here all the way from California. Thank you, Wangs.”

Charles quickly tucked his cell phone back in his coat pocket—still no call from the bastard lawyer—and raised the frosty glass of champagne that had appeared at his place. Maybe this wedding wasn’t quite as hopeless as it seemed. He stood and bowed slightly, which unleashed a wave of delighted bows from the rest of the guests.

The young bride swigged at her champagne, then surprised everyone by grabbing the microphone again and shouting into it: “Now dig in, y’all!”

Finally.
Charles zeroed in on a fat little creature hiding under a bay leaf and plucked it up, cracking the shell in half and sucking out its delicious swill of rich yellow brain mixed with the smoky boiling liquid. Already the red juice from the shell dripped down his hands, but it was worth it—he’d just have to find someone to bleach it out of his cuffs later.

Food should be like this—elemental, honest, a little cruel. It should make no apologies for what it was, and it shouldn’t allow the eater to lie to himself about what he was doing. Charles would rather bite into a pig trotter than a ground-up, unrecognizable hamburger any day. Shellfish were the best. With crabs, you could break off the pointed tips of their tiny legs and use them as tools to dig out the stubborn white meat in the other half of the appendage. Oysters provided their own serving platter. Snails, too. Tiny lamb chops, which had enjoyed a brief vogue at cocktail parties, came with a built-in handle. And terrines, which the Chinese made and ate as enthusiastically as the French, were always satisfying—the meat gelled and held in place by the essence of its own traitorous marrow. In Chinese, there were no separate words for animal meat and human flesh. It was all just
rou.
Muscle was
ji rou,
fat was
fei rou.
Beef and pork?
Niou rou
and
ju rou.
Forget about special words like
poultry,
designed to coddle and protect. Chicken was chicken, and it was all meant to be eaten.

Bodie, one of the skeletal Nash cousins, leaned across the table and gestured in Charles’s face with a sweating bottle of beer. “I can’t believe it—y’all know how to eat crawfish?”

Midsuck, Charles grinned at him. He removed the creature from his mouth and waved it in the air, arms flailing, to make his point. “The only thing with legs Chinese people don’t eat is table and chair!”

That sent Bodie into the sort of belly laugh that would have been more believable on a fat man. “That’s good, man, that’s good. I like it. I like it. Table and chair.” He straightened up. “But I meant West Coasters, man, I’m not a racist.”

“Wait a minute,” said Artie, the one who wasn’t Bodie. “Here’s what I want to know. What about man’s best friend, then?”

“True!” shouted Charles, gleeful. It was one of his favorite topics. Americans and their endless capacity for offense had always perplexed him. “Some Chinese do eat dog! So what? American all eat pig, and pig just as smart as dog! If something is good to eat, why not eat it?” He turned back to Bodie. “Anyways, my kids always say I am racist when I am surprised American people so good at chopsticks, but you say you are surprised I am good at crawdads. You see, Meimei, Didi, Daddy not racist!”

Grace glared at him. “He meant the opposite of that, Dad.”

She had a growing pile of crawdads in front her, his little girl. Andrew, meanwhile, was poking through the pile in search of more potatoes. He watched his son spear a white, mealy chunk of tuber and eat it daintily.

What if Andrew was gay? That was impossible. He was too handsome. Girls had always liked Andrew—even when he was a teenager with braces and a pimple or two, they had called the house at all hours and gathered in eager bunches around the pool during the kids’ birthday parties, their smooth young bodies in bikinis that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago in Taiwan. But there were men like that, Charles knew, gay men whose friends were all beautiful women who were half in love with them.

“Andrew,” said Charles, “did you have girlfriend at school?”

He caught Grace smirking up at her brother. What did that mean? Was his son going to tell him here, over this stinking pile of mudbugs, that he was a gay?

The boy blushed. “Um, sort of . . .”

“How could this kid not have a girlfriend?” asked Bodie. “Look at him! He’s a stud! I bet the ladies are throwing themselves at his feet!”

Charles ignored him. “What do you mean, ‘sort of’? You have
boy
friend?”

“No! Dad, no! What do you mean?” Andrew dropped his voice to a whisper. “Do you think I’m gay or something?”

“You might as well be,” said Grace.

On either side of him, the southern goons mirrored Grace’s smirk.
What was this?

“Well?” Charles asked.

“No!” Andrew repeated. “Why are we talking about this here?”

“Hey, hey,” Artie interrupted. “There’s nothing wrong with that if that’s the way you are. Nothing to be ashamed of, right, Dad?”

Charles didn’t reply, just kept his eyes on Andrew.

“I had a girlfriend, her name is Emma, she’s really pretty.”

Okay.
Charles relaxed.
Okay.
Andrew didn’t know how to lie to him.

“Why did you say that, Gracie?” Charles asked.

“Yeah,
Gracie? 
” asked Andrew.

She opened her eyes wide. “Oh, I don’t know. I just meant that Andrew was very . . . gentlemanly.”

Ah.
Charles had never set out to be secretive about sex with his children, but over the years, that was what happened. It always seemed like something that should have been the mother’s job, but he couldn’t expect Barbra to bear the responsibility for explaining things, so it somehow became the subject that wasn’t raised. They had never come to him with any questions, so he had never given them any answers.

Maybe he had failed his son. Charles himself had never needed any instruction on that front—even without movie-star looks, even before he had any real money, Charles had wanted things, and women had responded to that—but maybe, put in vulgar American terms, Andrew simply didn’t know how to close the deal.

He looked at his son. “Andrew. Girls very easy. Listen. You always tell smart girls that they pretty and pretty girls that they smart.”

“Dad. I don’t . . . it’s not . . .”

“Hey, Mr. Wang, what do you do if a girl’s pretty
and
smart?”

Charles smiled at Bodie. That skeletal southerner probably needed all the lady advice he could get. “Easy. You just tell them you think they are a
very good person.
”

Andrew laughed at that, at least. “I don’t have a problem with girls, it’s just, I want to find the right one, you know?”

“You don’t have a problem with girls not want to go out with you because you are Chinese?” he asked.

“God, no! Dad, it’s not like that anymore. Or it is, but it’s not like that for me.”

Charles nodded, proud. Of course it wasn’t like that for his son, his handsome son. Sometimes it was hard to understand this generation of boys—they had so little to rebel against that it made them soft. No wonder they had sold out of the special-edition guyliner that Andrew had convinced him to market.

Bodie nudged him. “The boy is holding out for
love!
Your son ain’t gay, Mr. Wang. It’s worse—he’s a
romantic.
” Bodie and Artie caught each other’s eyes over Andrew’s head. “And probably a virgin.”

Andrew blushed immediately. “Why is it such a big deal to everyone? I don’t see why this is even something to discuss! And, anyways, what’s wrong with wanting to fall in love? Don’t you all want that?”

Charles shrugged. “Love is easy. Daddy in love with every woman!”

“Dad! Why do you always have to say that? Why can’t you just love one woman? You’re married!”

“I say love any that’ll have you, right, Mr. Wang?” Charles laughed along with Bodie as he watched Andrew cringe.

“Okay, I’m going to go to the bathroom. And when I come back, maybe we’ll talk about something else.” Andrew twisted his way out of the bench.

Always so sensitive, his son.

Andrew stayed away. Hours later, when even his little Gracie was probably drunk, Charles and Nash ended up side by side with a bottle of whiskey between them, their feet kicked up on the edge of the table. He spotted Andrew across the room talking to a woman, thank god, though probably not one the boy would ever fall in love with. Tall and dead pale, like the deracinated endgame of generations of milk drinkers, with a battlefield of frizzy red hair stuck out all around her, she was at least a decade older than Andrew.