The Wangs vs. the World(102)
Out the window, the horror of the postindustrial landscape was obscured by its own waste, a thick brown mist that hung heavy in the sky. The train windows were filmed over with it. Charles peered at the grimy windowsill. Putrid neon gum had hardened in one corner and a fluff of gray down, the vestige of some long-ago disease-ridden bird, mixed with curls of dust. Charles lifted his sleeve from the armrest and moved away from the window. Would it all be like this? Would the longitude and latitude on his deed point towards rows of tenements and factories where children worked for slave wages? A settled town of cheap shops and pasteboard houses that would collapse like they had just months ago in Sichuan after that unimaginable earthquake?
Disappointment crowded in. What would Barbra say if he had come all this way for nothing, for a place that didn’t even exist anymore? Charles closed his eyes and sank into his seat, wishing that he had something to place between his head and the dingy white cover that was meant to protect the top of the train seat from the passengers’ greasy scalps.
Before he even realized that he was asleep, the train screeched to a stop. What is that strange skill that allows us to doze through an unknown route and wake up at the correct station? He rushed to pick up his jacket and bag, glad to leave the train behind.
At the station, Charles waited for nearly an hour before a suspiciously new taxi finally deigned to pull up. It bumped him over a series of rural roads, the driver speaking at first in some sort of dialect that Charles could barely understand before he switched to a flawless Mandarin. On the outskirts of town, they saw a benighted huddle of mud-and-straw huts, shocking in their crudity. Next to them, children rolled an oil drum in a field, but they paused and looked up as the taxi passed. One small girl on the end waved, and Charles waved back, wishing that he could take her with him and put some new, clean clothes on her. A little girl should have a pretty dress. As they got closer to town, the road smoothed out and the houses began to look less haphazard. Charles looked down at the map. The mountains rose in the distance, just as they did on the map, and the road began to curve in a recognizable way towards a body of water in the distance. This was it. Charles felt sick. He couldn’t wait to see it and he didn’t want to look at it at all.
Desire, as always, outweighed fear.
An open ditch ran along the side of the road. Charles directed the driver to park next to it. “This is my family’s old estate,” he explained, proud. “I’m going to have a look at it. Wait here, please, until I return.”
Tapping a cigarette out of a packet marked with a warning label and a photo of a shriveled fetus, the driver spit into the ditch. “How do I know you’ll come back?”
“I’ll leave my bag here with you.”
The driver flicked his plastic green lighter and leaned into the flame. “What do I want with your old clothes? I don’t even know if you can afford to pay me for waiting.”
Charles was offended. His ability to pay for something like a taxi ride had never been called into question. “I can pay. There’s no reason to doubt me.”
Their eyes met in the rearview mirror, and Charles saw himself the way the other man saw him. Not as the prosperous businessman he so recently was, or as the scion of a landed family that he always would be, but as a foreigner wearing the same clothes he’d worn yesterday and the day before. He wanted to flash what remained of the bills, which he’d changed into yuan at the airport—that, at least, had made them multiply in a satisfying way—but Charles was now keenly aware of being in a deserted stretch of country where the driver might have compatriots without such law-abiding jobs. He left his money pouch strapped securely to his chest and instead opened his wallet to show the smaller stash of money that he’d placed there for incidentals.
The driver nodded, satisfied. “Leave your bag, and give me half now,” he said.
The land in China. The landinChina. ThelandinChina.
Charles got out of the cab, hopped over the ditch, and walked straight into the field. He had drawn a painstaking outline of the land on Xeroxed pages of a topographical map and now he held them up, trying to get his bearings. In Los Angeles, real estate had never interested Charles. He had made sure to own his factories and his home—useless ambitions, in the end—but he had never been like some of his friends who snapped up sixteenplex apartments in Koreatown and minimalls in Studio City as quickly as they became available. As a result, he’d neglected to develop a talent for estimating acres or square footage at a glance, but if he had translated the old surveyor measurements on the land correctly, his family’s holdings stretched out all the way to the mountains up ahead, acres and acres of it. More than hundreds, for sure. Thousands? Tens of thousands? The thought of it dizzied him. To the left and right, at the far edges of his vision, the horizon shimmered and the land seemed infinite. It was like owning all of Bel-Air and most of Westwood, too.
He peered out at the mountain. Was the family house still extant? It was hard to tell. Clusters of crumbling buildings dotted the mountainside and from a distance it was impossible to tell whether they were newer or older. The outline of the mountain ridge, though, felt familiar to Charles. I know this place, he thought. It was a comforting thought.
I know this place. This place is mine.
The soft curve of these mountains, interrupted by a tall jagged peak, was a part of his blood and his birthright. His father may not have managed to pass on the land itself, but this knowing was nearly as powerful an inheritance.