The Wangs vs. the World(117)
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!