The Wangs vs. the World (31 page)

Was it true that she had married Charles for his money?

Yes.

And he knew it.

In fact, she was fairly certain that he’d loved her for it.

The question, then, was obvious. Without the money, did she still love him?

In the months before news of May Lee’s death had filtered back to Charles’s old friends in Taiwan, Barbra had been working in a stationery shop downtown. Every day she wore a pink smock and shuffled notebooks into orderly piles while her boss, dirty old Lao, devised reasons to send her up the storeroom ladder. He would watch her climb through his smudged glasses and she would fume inside—it was unfair that she got all the burdens of being a woman with none of the benefits of beauty. Every evening at five o’clock, she would turn down his dinner invitation and head back to the cook’s quarters at the university, where she was still living with her parents.

Dinner was always an assortment of reheated odds and ends from the university kitchen—the gritty last bowl of a bone broth; a splattering of tofu about to turn, the stink of spoilage masked by a coat of garlicky spice; dozens of overboiled dumplings, their pale skin split, their insides spilling out. After eating, Barbra and her mother would push the table and chairs against the wall and swab the floor clean before pulling out their flowered bedrolls and spreading them on either end of the room. Then it was an idle evening hour in the courtyard with a score of children underfoot, her parents chatting with the other university employees as she leafed through movie magazines and waved away the scent of the mosquito coil.

On Friday nights, when she received an envelope with her week’s pay, always less than she thought it might be, she would meet up with friends and walk through the crowded streets, stopping sometimes to buy a cone of roasted peanuts or watch the noodle man kneading and pulling at a mass of dough until it became a cascade of slippery threads that he snipped into a boiling vat of soup. There would be a purse, maybe, that she wanted to buy, or a scarf, and then three weeks of envelopes would be gone in a single sweep.

It was a life, but Barbra could see no end to it. Even if she saved every yuan she earned, it would never accumulate so that it became a sturdy pile upon which a person might stand.

It felt like she would always be sleeping in the same room as her parents, listening as the walls thundered with her father’s snores, rubbing her mother’s back and helping her take the rollers out of her hair. Her two sisters had escaped into unhappy marriages years ago, one in New Zealand and the other in Singapore, and rarely wrote. There was no money to call. Barbra had tried to do the same, but her own marriage had been even unhappier. It had been three long years during which she remembered anew each morning that there was nothing lonelier than spending your days with a man you did not respect. In the end, she’d left carrying her five best dresses in a cardboard box under her arm and moved back in with her uncomplaining parents.

So when she heard about May Lee’s strange fate, it felt like a summons, like an escape. Barbra knew exactly what she had to do.

She opened the cupboard above the heater and took out the small steel lockbox that lived there. It was powder coated in an army green and felt warm and vaguely alive in her hands. She dug its key out of the drawer where it always rattled around with their jumbled collection of chopsticks and spoons—her parents were so trusting!—and popped open the lid.

Even now, she remembered her dismay at how little there was inside that box. Both her mother and father worked, all day, every day. She worked. The three of them lived in a single room, which her parents saw as a vast improvement on the hovels in which they were born, and yet their accumulated life savings weren’t enough to fill a box the size of a brick of radish cake. She could grab up all the money—the loose New Taiwan dollar bills and a few pointless coins—in one try, so she did. She’d taken it, all of it, then locked and replaced the now-cold box, slipped the key under the biggest wooden spatula, and run out to the China Airlines office she passed twice a day on her way to and from the stationery shop. Together with her last week of pay and a loan begged from old Lao by actually kneeling on the ground in front of him and bowing three times at his feet, Barbra had purchased a ticket and, three days later, taken leave of her parents with nothing more than a note.

Months later, after she’d done what she came to America to do, Barbra had wired fifty times the money back to her parents, along with another note saying that they should invite a table full of friends to a banquet in celebration of her marriage. They didn’t respond. She tried again and again, seven attempts in all, until she received an undersize envelope addressed only to Mrs. Wang that contained a scrap of paper on which was written
“Wo mei yo nu er.”
I have no daughter.

That was that, then.

In the end, nobody but a clerk at city hall had ever congratulated her and Charles on their nuptials. No banquets had been thrown, no special qipao made, no pieces of motherly advice given.

Not much later, Tie Shan, the university’s head groundskeeper and their longtime neighbor, wrote to say that both of her parents had died, one right after the other, of swift and merciless cancers—her mother of the lung, her father, somewhat embarrassingly, of the breast. When Barbra got the letter, she had a terrible thought. It was right that she took the money. Better. Her parents would have died anyway. Even if their metal box had remained inviolate, they would not have lived long enough to touch the savings inside. If Barbra had allowed some misplaced morality to keep her in Taiwan, her parents would have died just in time for Charles to marry someone else. And even if they had lived, they wouldn’t have possessed the imagination to spend their savings on anything beyond a trip to their own parents’ graves.

Spending money was easy. Being a rich man’s wife was easy. From the moment she’d walked into Charles’s Bel-Air house, so recently emptied of May Lee, Barbra felt like she was finally where she belonged. Even though she’d never had much exposure to the moneyed classes of Taiwan, she knew instinctively how to behave among the rich.

The key, Barbra decided, was to be unbothered by the opinions of others and be always certain that your own choices were correct. Of course, it was a mental state that required some degree of material support. A new Hermès belt. A diamond-studded Cartier watch. These nonnegotiable luxuries were like armor that only retained its efficacy if it was repolished every season.

Barbra had been raised in a world of prized possessions. Small, inconsequential treasures given outsize significance. Her own mother possessed what Barbra now realized was a sample-size bottle of Chanel No. 5, gifted by an employer. For a decade, it sat on the only windowsill in their shared single room, the scent inside turned from age, spritzed by her mother only on special occasions. Next door, the two little Fong girls had a yellow shoebox where they kept their only doll, a broken thing with two dresses. They would change those dresses reverently, once in the morning and once at night, and lay the doll back in its sunny coffin with as much care as a surgeon doing a heart transplant. Little Xu Mei, who worked in the university president’s office, had a single pearl-headed pin that she wore on the lapel of every shirt and dress. Barbra had been passing by the office when the pin broke loose and the pearl rolled into some unseen crack, never to be found again. She still remembered the tears and the consolation, the way that Xu Mei never stopped searching for that one tiny pearl.

The Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.

The sheets at this motel weren’t as bad as some of the others in the places they’d stayed at. They were faded and nearly threadbare, but at least they’d started out 100 percent cotton, with none of that cheap nylon burr that had made it hard to sleep so many other nights. Grace still hadn’t stirred, but Barbra couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. Petulant little Grace had been barely two months old when her mother died. There was a time, at the very beginning, when Barbra still might have been able to make the baby feel like her own child, but she’d felt no natural swelling of maternal instinct at the sight of the swaddled infant in Ama’s arms. And, too, Charles had proven to be a surprisingly enthusiastic father, who bounced and clicked and cooed over his motherless daughter whenever he was home.

Barbra wondered, not for the first time, if May Lee had also married Charles for his money. Had she taken as easily to luxury as Barbra? She had certainly known how to shop. Barbra didn’t think that May Lee had been the sort of model who received gifts from designers, yet her clothes, put away for Saina and Grace, had colonized nearly an entire room of the house.

During Barbra’s first month in America, when Charles thought that she was just visiting for adventure, a last fling before settling down with her imagined fiancé in Taiwan, she had called him
gege,
big brother, and never mentioned May Lee. But once her fiancé had been dispatched—with the aid of a concocted revelation—and she’d moved into Charles’s arms, Barbra employed a series of deft questions to help her draw an outline of May Lee’s family history.

There was little about it that seemed auspicious. It was a mongrel history, muddied by generations spent in America. On one side there was a great-grandfather who came to California to perform coolie labor on the railroads, on the other there was a great-grandmother who was imported as a brothel girl, though May Lee’s family swore that she’d never actually turned a trick because she’d already been pregnant by the time she arrived in America, where she sought refuge with a group of understanding Jehovah’s Witnesses and become a proselytizer instead. The only family member May Lee had been ashamed of, according to Charles, was her own grandfather, who, upon his death, was revealed as a Japanese man passing as Chinese in order to avoid the internment camps.

Somehow they’d all managed to find other Chinese people to marry and have children with—the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles were filled with families that had tenuous ties to May Lee’s.

These older Chinese people born in America were very disorienting. May Lee’s mother had visited the children soon after she and Charles married—a large, lumpen woman with a bowl cut, dressed in a hideous wool suit, who nonetheless spoke English with a lilting perfection that made Barbra feel like her own Chanel jacket was far too pink.

May Lee and America overlapped.

Mei Li and Mei Guo.

Beauty and Beautiful Country.

Dead, May Lee was everywhere. Dead, she became the entire country. It wasn’t fair! Barbra turned over so she could open her eyes without looking at Grace. It just wasn’t fair. The children used to say that about everything—Grace still did sometimes. Nothing was fair.

The Wangs were fools,
thought Barbra. They had everything, and they understood nothing. Charles was the kind of person who had never in his blessed life thought about where the shit went after he flushed the toilet. It was his privilege to empty his bowels in clean white ceramic bowls, and it was the burden of the world to wash it away.

None of the Wangs appreciated anything. Saina and Grace would never appreciate the pure, thrumming pleasure of carrying a tasteful yet outrageously expensive purse. They had never lived a life without such privileges. The nod of recognition that such a purse elicited from a few equally solvent others was an unimpeachable sort of currency, not subject to market fluctuations or whims of fashion. The thick, buttery leather and polished gold clasp were enough to lend substance to her being, the purse became an axis around which the whole chaotic world would spin. Wealth, Barbra knew, should belong to those who understood its power.

Charles thought of himself as a self-made man. He was stupid enough to think that he’d come to America with nothing—“Just a list of urea in my pocket,” he liked to say—and wrested a fortune from this country through his own brilliance. Barbra had once heard an American saying: “He was born on third and thought he hit a triple.” Baseball was popular in Taiwan and she’d known immediately what it meant.
She
was the one who had started with two strikes against her and, with nothing more than her own determination, had made it all the way back to home base.

Barbra sat up in bed, furious.

She
was the one who had made something out of nothing.
She
was the one who’d upended generations of poverty in one move. So what if she’d done it with a lucky marriage? Would it be worth any more if she’d won Charles’s hand in a game of poker? Empires rose and fell on luck, and her own was worth as much as any monarch’s.

As for Charles, one stroke of ill fortune and he was broken, turned into a demented old man fantasizing about some forgotten family land that was probably not much to begin with. Barbra looked over at Grace, still asleep.
A useless lump. Like all the Wangs.

When the Failure first launched, Charles had surprised her with the full line, eight shades of foundation, thirty-two lipsticks, sixteen eye shadows, all laid out beautifully in her bathroom. Secretly, she’d been a little sad about putting away her Guerlain powder and Dior mascara, but she’d used his products and he’d praised their beauty on her unbeautiful face. After the Failure became the Failure, after he’d made his announcement, she’d gone into her bathroom and found that they were all already gone, swept into an awkward heap in the Lucite trash can next to her vanity. It was such a peevish act, like a child tossing away a broken toy.

That’s it,
thought Barbra.
Now, finally, that was it.
She was going to leave all of them, Charles, Saina, Andrew, and Grace. They were all going to give up, but she wasn’t. She’d made one life on her own, and she could do it again! After all, there was so much she could do now—the world was a whole different place than it had been when she came over to America. She could marry someone else, or she could move back to Taiwan and make her own fortune! That’s what people were doing there now, making fortunes on things like a sandwich cart or a barrette store. Or, better yet, she’d go back to Los Angeles and inform all of their acquaintances that she was actually a feng shui expert. That, in fact, she came from a long line of feng shui gurus. If Saina could sell ridiculous art projects to museum curators, who should presumably know better, then why couldn’t she convince a few rich white people that five thousand years of Chinese wisdom could bring them health and prosperity? Feng shui was easy enough to fake. A few tosses of the joss sticks, a compass printed with Chinese characters, a shirt with an embroidered dragon—maybe something from that old Vivienne Tam collection—and she was as good as a guru.