The Wangs vs. the World(101)
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.
Desperate now, he repeated himself. “Qing wen je fu jing you mei you yie shi?”
The young man took a step back and waved his hands apologetically. “Oh, I don’t really speak Chinese, sorry. Um, bu shuo zhong wen. No speak.”
“Yie shi! Night market! Street food!” shouted Charles at the person who was not a Beijinger after all, but some sort of interloper, dressed like all of Andrew’s absurd friends in a pair of jeans far too tight for a man.
“Ah! Okay, you speak English! Tang Hua market is actually right nearby.” Whipping out his phone, he pulled up a map as Charles began to sway on his feet. “Here, look. Just out the east entrance and a few blocks down Taipingqiao Road.”
The map blurred behind the cracked screen as Charles struggled to remember the red-lined route. “Okay,” he nodded. “Okay. Thank you. Xie-xie.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Uncle? Maybe you should sit down.”
He waved off the concern and headed away from this globalized bustle. Charles Wang didn’t need a man-child in girlish pants telling him what he should do!
Twenty minutes later he was seated on a plastic stool, a sagging string of naked lightbulbs dipped dangerously close to his head. In front of him, a split metal bowl with chicken stewed in medicinal herbs on one side and a fiery red fish stew on the other, along with a tin cup of tea. Craning his neck over the bowl so that none of the liquid would splash onto his shirt, he tipped hot spoonfuls of it down his throat.
Moths and mosquitoes fluttered around the bug zapper, too smart to get caught. Two women in flowered dresses sat on stools to his right, their wrists piled with gold bracelets. He’d never liked the platinum trend in America—what was the point of an expensive material that looked exactly like a cheap one? Much better the deep, unmistakable yellow of twenty-four-karat gold. The Chinese and the Indians had it figured out when it came to jewelry.
The Tang Hua night market was sandwiched between two high-rise office buildings, the sizzling from the grills and the hum of the generators competing with the constant chug of the air-conditioning units that lined one wall. Charles motioned to the proprietor, who turned towards him, wiping sweat from his buzz cut with his shirtsleeve as Charles addressed him in Mandarin.
“Boss, anyone around here bet on sausages?”
“Eh? Bet on sausages?”
“Bet! Bet on sausages! When I was a little punk, we used to do it on the streets. There was a stand with a wheel. A spin for a fen. Most of the punters lost, but you could win half a dozen for the price of one!”
“No, nothing like that around here. Bet on lotto, bet on Olympics, bet on who else is betting, but no betting on sausages.”
The man turned abruptly, not interested in conversation, and went back to mincing the chilies that were making Charles sweat. He slurped another fiery mouthful and chewed. It was amazing. Food could make a person feel like all was right in the world even if he was sitting in his abandoned country with the last of his dwindling fortune strapped to his chest and a sinking feeling that he would never solve the mystery of his family’s lost land.
Last chance, best chance.
The truth was, Charles didn’t know—at least not exactly—where the land was. He knew the name of the village, he had photographs of the old family house, and he had pieces of the 1947 surveyor’s measurements and a receipt from a tax assessment, but he didn’t have an address. That was why he’d needed the lawyer. Someone who could make his pile of stories and documents into something tangible. His piss-poor excuse for a lawyer had at least done that, but he’d also dropped an unbelievable story on top of it, which Charles was here to investigate. But before he could do that, he wanted to see his land.
It had been years since Charles had ridden any kind of public transportation. Growing up in Taiwan, he had hung off the sides of buses with his friends, but the train system in China was a different matter altogether. A mass of Beijing residents poured out of the station, engulfing him, though when he turned in the other direction, there seemed to be just as many rushing in. The two opposing tides lapped up against each other, unceasing, merging without incident.
When had the children of China gotten so tall? They towered over him, these little treasures, six feet high and rising. Except for the tiny ones, so skinny that their skin stretched translucent over their toothpick bones; and the broad ones, with their farmboy shoulders and wide, flat faces. Charles felt comforted in this swirl of humanity, in this sea of black hair. If the billion people of China ever chose to march en masse, they would be overwhelming in their similarity and horrific in their differences. There would be so many variations on the theme of human that all typologies would be completely bulldozed. This was why he had never worried himself about how America viewed his children, never bothered himself over unflattering stereotypes and prejudices. What did it matter how a country full of white people saw them when the whole world was theirs?