The Wangs vs. the World (40 page)

China was
his
old country, so despite all he’d seen of the world, part of him had still expected it to be
old.
A larger, more glorious version of the Taiwan he’d left as a young man. Despite everything he knew about the roaring tiger economy, all the photos he’d seen of this whiz-bang new airport—the sixth-largest building in the world!—which was probably run by a cadre of hyperintelligent robots, part of him still thought that he’d land at a provincial airport, long linoleum hallways half in shadow thanks to rows of blown-out fluorescent bulbs, groups of surly porters impressed by the fact that he’d come from America.

How could he have been so wrong? From the moment he deplaned, it was clear that China had leapt past him and the America he’d so naïvely thought was the Wang family’s future. Charles knew that the symbols at this airport were almost too easy to see—the red and gold of ancient China made modern, the skylights shaped like dragon scales—but they still worked on him, immediately recalibrating his impression of the China to come. The surprise continued in the cab, where a screen implanted in the seat in front of him blared advertisements for restaurants and beauty creams as the driver, so small that he sat on a pile of phone books, steered them through a glittering city to the nondescript tourist hotel he’d booked on Priceline, of all places. It was Saturday, and the only information that his lawyer had been able to retrieve about the man who presumed to take ownership of his birthright was his place of employment—a midsize travel agency—so for the moment, Charles would allow himself to play tourist in Beijing. Confronted with the drab cell of a room, twenty-five floors aboveground, Charles disregarded the fact that he had barely slept since New Orleans and dropped his satchel on the bed.

After waiting almost ten minutes for the elevator, which seemed only to go up, Charles found a glass-enclosed staircase that ran along the exterior of the hotel. He descended two dozen floors by foot until, nearly at ground level, he reached an elevated walkway connecting the building to one across the street. Eager to get out into the city, he pushed open the heavy glass door and walked into the smoggy heat of late afternoon.

On the street below, a dark brown ox hitched to a wooden cart stood calmly at a seven-way stoplight. The leather braces around its neck were broken and held together with a length of soiled rope; its horns swung up on either side of its head, an ineffectual crown. To the animal’s left, there was a gold Lexus, one blacked-out window rolled down. From a floor above, Charles tracked a plume of smoke from the driver’s cigarette as it floated up towards the beast and into its giant eye. The ox blinked but didn’t move, just switched its muddy tail from side to side as scooters and bicycles—so many bicycles—pooled all around.

Plunging down the last flight of stairs, Charles finally stepped foot on a real Beijing street. He wanted to lose himself in the city. At random, he chose a direction—East. East was best—and began to walk as quickly as he could on leather soles and three airplane meals. A group of schoolchildren in uniform ran ahead of him—little girls in braids, little boys with their downy heads shaved—and crowded into a shop whose walls were lined with clear bins full of snacks. In the grassy median of Wang Fu Jing Street, men lounged around a metal trash can that they’d turned into a makeshift barbecue, flames licking the juicy, dripping skewers of meat. One man turned the kebabs as the others squatted on the ground playing a game of liar’s dice. Next to them, a woman peered into the ear of a white-haired grandfather who sat splayed on a stool, his shirt open and belly hanging out. Charles hadn’t seen a long-handled ear pick in decades, but now he remembered his aunt and uncle taking those same positions in the shaded courtyard of their Taipei home, digging out each other’s ear wax.

Charles’s right pants pocket sagged. After going through security, he had taken the jade seal out of his carry-on bag and put it in one pocket, then taken the small piece of bone and tucked it in the other. He curled his fingers around the bone, that last vestige of his father.

Charles had missed seeing his father alive one final time. When he finally made it back to Taiwan, it was only for the funeral and cremation, both of which took place on the day he arrived atop a burial mountain on the outskirts of Taipei. Jet-lagged and weeping, he had bid the other mourners farewell one by one until he was the only one left, waiting as his father’s body was reduced to ash. As the dark crept into the empty hall, he sat in a plastic chair cursing himself for having been a neglectful son while the crematorium manager—a menacing joke of a man in a Hawaiian shirt with a perm and a pinky ring—ate a fried pork chop and watched a variety show on his boxy television.

When Charles startled awake, he had slid half off the seat, and the man was nudging him towards a still-warm metal box filled with ash and bone. Next to it lay a pair of silver chopsticks. Charles knew what he had to do. He picked up the chopsticks and reached into the pile, picking up the pieces of bone and placing them in an urn and then pouring the ash on top. When the man turned away, Charles had reached in and pulled out one of the pieces, light as driftwood, slipping it into his pocket. And now here it was again, back in his pocket, back in China.

He walked by the entrance of what looked like an old hutong neighborhood, its narrow alleyways and crumbling stone walls promising a glimpse of his father’s dream of a lost China. It turned out to be a warren of small boutiques selling remarkably avant-garde clothing, each occupying a rammed-earth-and-sun-dried-brick building that would have been home to a branch of a family. Lesser relatives of the Wangs might have lived in a place like this three generations ago. Picking up a thin white shirt with one arm sewn across the front like a straitjacket and the other missing entirely, Charles boggled at the price. Was it really 2,150 yuan? He calculated quickly. Could this student art project of a shirt possibly be selling for $350? And here, in this nondescript area of town? Just outside, a makeshift noodle stand straddled a narrow alleyway, and the proprietor, a teenager in a dirty apron, stirred a steaming pot of stock as his minispeakers blared out Britney Spears.

Charles was hungry now. Something deep in his belly growled and rolled, and he felt empty enough to consume the entire country.

He’d been following the tourist signs to Tiananmen, but as he crossed a wide plaza, he spotted a giant topiary display three times the size of a Rose Parade float, a leftover from the recent Olympics. A rose-studded banner spelled out
LANE CRAWFORD: FASHION IN MOTION
. Lane Crawford. The logo made him feel light-headed. It stoked the anger that had not dissipated since the day he and Barbra had left their beautiful home.

Six months ago, in the last flat-footed attempt to bring some money into his coffers, Charles had contacted the luxury retailer, sure that they would be interested in investing in an American brand formulated for Asian faces. He’d been to the Hong Kong branch as a teenager and still remembered marveling over the glamour of the foreign brands as he tried out every settee and love seat in the tea shop and munched on cream cakes. But that was then. The Lane Crawford of 2008, in all their shortsighted ignorance, didn’t even consider his proposal for a full twenty-four hours before issuing a categorical no, claiming that they were developing their own makeup line.

Light-headed now from hunger, he crossed the plaza, shoving past a pretty girl in a brown uniform passing out packs of tissues with something advertised on them and pulled on the heavy door, wincing as a blast of cold air smacked him in the face.

Where was it? Where was their own line? Charles stalked into the makeup area, enraged by its prettiness, breathing in the perfumed department store scent that was the same in Beijing as it was in Cairo or Beverly Hills. There was nothing with the department store’s old-fashioned logo on it, not a pot of blush or a stick of eyeliner. No house brand, but everywhere there were women with carefully styled hair and expensive clothes that hung just so on their shoulders. Even the chubby ones were well dressed, everything tailored so that no rice-pot binges were betrayed by a lumpy sheath.

Hunger and disappointment, rage and a furious sort of envy for the things that were once his and now were not pulsed through Charles. At the end of the cosmetics section, the glowing glass cases of jewelry began. A woman his age stood at one of the counters with an older man who could be her father but was probably her husband. In front of them sat a velvet-lined box with three massive watches that dwarfed even his beloved Audemars Piguet, surrendered along with the rest of his timepieces.

Who were these people who had stayed in China? That gray-haired man strapping on an ostentatious F. P. Journe and asking whether it was waterproof, was he one of the university students who had fallen under the sway of Mao and overrun the Wang family land?

Nearby, an elderly woman watched her friend exclaim as a salesgirl fastened a strand of fat, lustrous pearls around her neck. Those
tai-tai
s tittering over baubles, were they the same vicious Little Red Guard schoolgirls who had pulled his elderly aunts out of bed and paraded them through the streets, stringing their arms through a wooden yoke and forcing dunce caps on their snowy heads?

Across the floor, a kid with the tips of his hair bleached an ugly blond rang up a tower of shoeboxes as his manager fussed right and left, fawning over a girl tapping on her cell phone, who barely noticed his ministrations. That slavish manager who now spent his days fitting six-hundred-dollar high heels on privileged young feet might have been one of the toughs in tattered uniforms who had taken his left-behind family heirlooms—the centuries-old book of Wang family genealogy, the scrolls written by Zheng Xie that his father had still missed, quietly and desperately, a decade later—and burned them all to ash.

How had all these peasants transformed themselves?

And why hadn’t his family stayed and done the same?

A man in a suit and a silver name tag touched his arm and asked, in a provincial Chinese that sounded slurring and soft, “Is there a problem?” Charles realized that he’d been hunched over, gripping the edge of a glass case full of Smythson notebooks bound in leather, their covers printed with simple slogans:
JUMP FOR JOY
,
GAME ON
,
TOP SECRET
. He had one of his own that said
CHAMPION
, a just-because gift from Barbra. Objects that mere months ago had seemed casual and, if not necessary, at least deserved, now felt outlandish to Charles. Had she really spent 460 yuan—What was that? Seventy-five dollars!—on a notebook that he had used twice?

Oh, the man was still there, waiting for his response. Charles’s sweaty fingertips squeaked on the glass as he shook his head. “No, no. Just looking at these books, so beautiful!” The store official frowned down at his flashing cell phone and moved past Charles, barely pausing to nod.

For a second, he let himself close his eyes. Charles felt faint and a little numb.
Concentrate,
he commanded himself. Concentrate on the smoothness of the countertop, on the soft music that snuck in through the hidden speakers. Stay present. Breathe. He couldn’t have a stroke, here, now. He was too close to the land. He had to push through. Charles breathed in deeply, but the guff of perfumes came at him in a nauseating rush and he struggled towards the exit, wondering if he had remembered to take an aspirin that morning.

Instead of stumbling out into the polluted Beijing air, Charles found himself deeper in the shopping center, crowded by people on all sides. A quick, blank blackness, just longer than a blink, fizzed dangerously behind his eyes and he could feel his blood sugar plummet. In the middle of the mall, there was another topiary, this one of baby pandas frolicking on a dragon—when had the Chinese become so obsessed with these tortured lumps of greenery? On the other side of it lay something that looked like a restaurant, its trendy white gloss of a façade reflecting the dragon’s unnatural smile. Breathing heavily now, Charles walked, one unsteady foot in front of another, towards the restaurant and peered at the menu perched on a titanium stand. His stomach poked at him, displeased. The restaurant offered a mishmash of international cuisines, food to make foreigners feel at home and local Chinese feel like citizens of the world: spag bol, wasabi french fries, pizzettas topped with sweet corn and octopus.

As much as he’d left Taiwan because it was not China, would never be China, he’d come to China expecting to find the Taiwan of his youth. Home was home, and what he wanted from home was sausages. Charles remembered when he was a skinny boy, the shortest one in his gang of friends. He and Little Fats and Nutsy and Wen-Wen would tear out of school and hit the streets of Taipei running just for the pleasure of propelling their bodies forward, their schoolbags bouncing along behind them. They ran, and they ate. Sometimes it was a crinkled wax-paper packet of chili-pickled radishes, all of them snatching the bright yellow strips out of a single bag. Other times, they bought a quartet of little batter cakes filled with red bean paste, one for each of them.

The best, though, were the sausages, because these were won, not bought. Yes, you could buy them skewered on thin wooden sticks, but you could also gamble for them. There was never a question what Charles and his friends would do. Someone would dig out a fen and they would all crowd around, breathless, as Charles stood on his tiptoes to spin the wheel—and he was always the one who spun, no matter whose pockets funded the venture, because he was the lucky one. Even then, he was the lucky one. He always spun, and he always won, a brace of six thin, crackling sausages, each bite full of a fragrant funk that he’d never tasted anywhere else, all for a single spin. That’s what he wanted. The sausages, and the victory.

He turned to the closest person, and said urgently,
“Yie shi.”
It was a young man in thick black glasses, who furrowed his brow at Charles.