The Wangs vs. the World (47 page)

After the imposter and his son had left, the three of them spent the rest of the afternoon napping in turns on the vacated bed while nurses came in and out with pills and charts. Whoever woke up was immediately dealt into a never-ending game of hearts that their father, despite his grogginess, was winning.

Even though he had gotten into a fight, it wasn’t a punch that put their father in the hospital. He insisted that the other man had barely managed to touch him. He swore that he’d been standing when the imposter’s coworker had called the ambulance, but when the ambulance left, he’d somehow found himself on it, regaining consciousness on a gurney next to his sworn enemy. It turned out that he’d had a stroke, and when Saina spoke to the doctors, they said that he’d been having small strokes for months and that he needed to rest before he could be sent back to America.

They had tried to be angry that he never mentioned any health issues, but he’d refused to respond to their scolding, so instead they all rested together and had long, elliptical conversations with no beginning or end and watched the sun rise and fall over the elementary school next door, still deserted for summer vacation. Andrew thought that he’d finally tell his family about what happened with Dorrie, but no one asked. Instead, they’d dealt hand after hand and talked about lost nuclear warheads, their score sheet growing longer as they considered various claims on the New World—everyone knew that Columbus wasn’t the first, but maybe Leif Eriksson wasn’t either. It could have been an Irish monk named St. Brendan, and now there was a Chinese map that had emerged, a map Columbus might have used to navigate the globe. It could prove that the Chinese really were the first to explore every corner of the globe, or it could show that they’d gotten the world all wrong, leading that idiot Columbus to mistake his destination completely.

Charles talked about the land. How vast it was, and how green. He tried to explain what it had felt like before he knew anything, when, for a brief and glorious moment, the land belonged to him again. He showed them the old land deeds and explained the map; he pointed to the spots where their grandfather had laid his seal, and then he asked Grace to get his jacket from the closet, and he pulled out the jade chop, matching the underside to its imprint on the deed. None of them had ever seen it before, this relic from another life, and none of them would ever forget it. It was a block of carved jade as big as a pepper grinder; the top had a house on a mountain with soft sloping sides and a jagged peak and the bottom was slashed with their last name: 王.

Through it all, they listened as their father’s heart propelled the jump-roping line, sending out a rhythmic
beep, ba-beep, beep, ba-beep, beep
.

And then it was almost evening, and their father declared, completely out of nowhere, that it was time for them to get ready because they had to represent him at a big dinner. “Listen, don’t worry about eating, but don’t eat any dehydrated mushroom, okay? Things from Chinese factories no good. So many chemical. Make sure you only eat fresh one!”

So now here they were, still in their grubby travel clothes, on their way to dinner with relatives that they’d never met. In the jangle of this unfamiliar homeland, with her father lying in a hospital bed, Grace felt raw and open again, the way she had right after the accident. She wanted to get back to that without anything horrible happening. She wanted to be a transparent eyeball like that Emerson poem, bright and full and receptive to everything.

“Gan bei! Da jia gan bei!”
A man with an old-fashioned pompadour aimed a small porcelain teacup full of spirits down Andrew’s throat and then clapped him on the back as he coughed. He’d had an infinite number of shots forced upon him since they’d walked through the bustling restaurant into this aggressively air-conditioned private banquet room. Now he and Grace were seated together, and Saina was sitting all the way across the room at another table full of red-faced men in business suits.
This was probably what it was like to be a celebrity,
Andrew thought, as the room swayed around him.

“I think I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered to Grace.

When Andrew rose, a doughy young man around his own age immediately popped up and followed him out. Silently, he pointed down a hallway to the bathrooms, and when Andrew emerged, he was waiting there with a warm towel, which he urged into Andrew’s hands. There was an awkward moment when Andrew stood there with the used towel, but luckily a waiter swooped by just then and lobbed it onto his tray of dirty dishes.

“That was bananas,” said Grace, when Andrew slid back into his seat. “It was like you had a servant. I thought they were all supposed to be Communists.”

“Dude waited outside the bathroom while I peed. It was
so
bananas. Wait, are Communists really not into servants? Someone must have driven Mao around.”

“You’re the one who’s in college—you should know.”

“Oh, yeah, well, I just wear a Che Guevara T-shirt. It doesn’t mean that I know anything about actual Communists.”

Someone dinged on a glass, and a man at the table next to theirs rose as waiters came in with yet another course.

Andrew leaned over. “Let’s bet. Do you think he’s going to lead with how hardworking and decent the farmers or fishermen or whatever are, or do you think he’s going to go with how he’s pioneering an untapped commodities market?”

“Neither. I think it’s going to be more of a, like, ‘I’m so flattered you’re all here to taste the humble foods of my region,’” said Grace. Could she find something beautiful about these men who seemed so obsessed with the things they could grow or kill? She would try.

“I don’t know, that guy doesn’t look too humble to me.”

It had gradually dawned on Andrew and Grace that this wasn’t some sort of family reunion after all—in fact, it seemed to be a banquet for the local agricultural bureau, which was headed up by some distant relative of theirs who had caught wind of their father’s arrival and insisted that his children represent him at this dinner. At least that meant their Chinese family wasn’t made up entirely of middle-aged guys in business suits with big shoulder pads, and it made a little more sense that their father had called out as they’d left his hospital room: “You take Daddy’s place, you are the Papa Wang!”

Across the hall, Grace laughed as Andrew whispered something to her. It looked to Saina like they’d both stopped eating somewhere around the seventh course, which turned out to be a platter full of stewed chicken testicles. Their plates were piled with tidbits from all the subsequent dishes, which their tablemates insisted on serving them—the overflow was ignored, somehow, by the servers who whisked in with a score of new plates between every course, picking up the old ones and depositing them on a waiting tray. By the time the meal reached its halfway point, the tablecloth beneath Saina was smeared with the remains of a dozen courses that she’d dutifully consumed, but the plate in front of her was once again brand-new.

The unrelenting backslapping and good cheer in the room made it hard to concentrate on the man next to her as he bragged about his daughter, who was a brilliant pianist and wanted to go to Juilliard, and maybe Saina, whom he’d heard was an artist of some renown, might be able to make the necessary introductions? She should come to his house and listen to his daughter play for herself! And when she was there, maybe she could make them a painting, ha ha ha, that they would hang in their offices? She could paint all the beautiful things that this land produced! And maybe she knew people in America, she must know so many people in America since she was such an accomplished and respected young woman, maybe she knew someone in America who would want to open up a new market for sea urchin or small turtles, such delicacies, if only they were aware! Or did she instead have things that she could sell? Real estate in America was so cheap now, they’d all heard, and maybe she knew a reputable real estate agent, someone who wouldn’t cheat him—Not a Jew, ha ha ha, or maybe a Jew was better! Ha ha ha—who would point him towards a good investment property because he knew somebody who had tripled his cash on a condo in Las Vegas in just nine months!

These men wanted to consume everything. By the time they’d reached the fourteenth course, turtle soup, Saina wouldn’t have been shocked if they’d seasoned her with a dash of white pepper and eaten her. These men didn’t pluck politely from the small dishes set out before them—they picked up those dishes and shoveled the contents into their mouths, never able to get enough in a single bite. They gulped up each other’s talk in the same way, loud and eager, quick to rage and quicker to laugh. They wanted to dig into the ground and pull out all the roots, trawl the seas and scoop up anything formed of flesh, search the forests and the fields, and snatch creatures out of their burrows and knock birds down from their perches so that they could be plucked and skinned and seasoned and diced and trussed and steamed and broiled and roasted and stir-fried and served up at banquets designed to demonstrate the abundance of the land and their dominance over it.

Bizz-buzz. Bizz-buzz. Bizz-buzz.
It took several rings before Saina realized that the odd noise breaking through the hum of Communist bonhomie was her own phone, which had somehow acquired a foreign accent. Heart slamming against her chest, she pulled it out, looked at the caller ID, and without letting herself think, stabbed at the green button.

“Hold on,” she said into the receiver, as she rose and walked double-time along the perimeter of the room, thankful that enough rounds of toasts had been drunk that her hosts were more focused on each other than on the Wangs. Dodging a waiter carrying yet another bottle of
gao liang,
she slipped out the door and leaned against a wall papered in a pink moiré.

“Hi.”

On the other side, Leo was silent.

“Um, hello?”

“Saina. Saina! I can’t believe you picked up. I rehearsed a message, but I didn’t really think about what to say if you actually picked up.”

“Well, you’d better say something.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Tell me about your dad first. Is he okay? Did he tell you what was going on?”

“Yeah—it’s too long to get into right now. He seems a little wrecked, but physically, at least, I think he’s okay. Or he’ll be okay.”

“Oh, that’s a relief. I’m glad. I’m really glad. Saina . . . ”

“Yes?”

“I want to make this right with you.”

“I . . . how?”

For a long minute, Leo was silent.

“You know, that first day we met, at Graham’s place, initially I thought you were just some pretty girl.”

She laughed. “This is a weird way to apologize to someone.”

“Listen, okay, and then we hung out there that whole afternoon, and after a while, you just, you started to feel so
familiar
to me. So often you meet people and they’re just cartoons. They might be entertaining or attractive, they might even be brilliant, but they don’t feel fully
human.
And that’s the only way I can explain it. From the very beginning, you just felt familiar. Like home.”

Waiters in colored vests whizzed past, balancing trays crowded with heavy white platters. A lobster, shell cracked open, meat chopped and sautéed, then reassembled so that it waved two crimson claws in the air; a mound of some fowl shingled with carrot slices carved like feathers; a parade of beasts she’d never dreamed of consuming. The whole menagerie of them now swam uneasily in her stomach.

She felt a soft, damp spot in her heart begin to open up. “Oh Leo. I know.”

“Like we were both people trying to figure out how to really
be
in the world.”

“Yeah. Yeah. We are that. We are people like that.”

“We’re the same kind of animal.”

They were quiet for a moment, and then Leo asked, “Do you think you’re going to come back to Helios?”

“Well, I kind of live there now.”

“Do you . . . well . . . what if we lived together?”

“Oh. What? No. I don’t know if that’s a very good idea.”
Was Leo actually crazy?

“Look, I know what I did was a real betrayal, and I am really, deeply sorry. And I, Saina, I’m not just sorry to you, I’m also sorry to Kaya, you know. She deserves so much more than that. It was wrong of me not to hold her out as the most important thing. Look, I’m a beginner soul still. I get a lot of stuff wrong, but I care about getting it right. With you.”

Saina closed her eyes and knocked her head back against the wall. She could hear the sizzle and clang of the kitchen, the cooks shouting at each other as they sped through the dinner service, could smell the garlic and oil coming together.

A heat traveled through her hand from the back of her phone, probably irradiating her bones.

She sensed the desperation in his voice, and it scared her.

“Leo, I feel like I should break up with you, but I don’t want to.”

“Then don’t! Baby, that’s crazy. Don’t. Just come back, and I’ll show you how much I mean it, okay? I can . . . oh, I want to. I’ll show you.” They were quiet for a moment. “Is it . . . are you offended that I said that we should live together instead of asking you to marry me?”

“No! No. No, no, no. That’s not what I want right now. Everything’s crazy with my family, I have to figure out if I even have a career anymore. I just don’t know if I want to be that for anybody. I don’t want to have the kind of insane relationship where you would not see your daughter because of me.”

“Saina! Is that what you think?”

“That’s what I’m scared of.”

“No. I can’t stress that enough. It is amazing how much I would do for you, considering how briefly we’ve known each other, but you are not the reason why I haven’t seen her. I would never do that. You’re the reason I haven’t talked about her, at least to you, but I haven’t seen her because Leah really is a difficult person.”

“Leah and Leo?”

“I know.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me.”