The Wangs vs. the World(121)
His heart was in his skull now. Somehow the hospital had switched the two organs, so that his brain pulsed in his chest and his heart beamed in his head, controlling everything, sending signals out to the rest of his earthbound self. All his life his heart had been trying to get up there, to take its true place at the top of his body, and now it was to have only the briefest of reigns.
The only logical solution was just to do everything while you were alive. He had done so much. Yes! He had discovered an entire land. Yes! America was his. Yes! The whole green land! Yes! China had always been his, and now he had America, too!
The heart thought and the head beat. Boom, boom! Yes, yes!
Charles Wang feels something brush against his face.
Something hard and bright.
The same brightness that started in his heart and traveled down to his brain. He’s about to let it overtake him when he thinks the best thought again: He has discovered an entire land! He can knock down the world and discover it anew!
Charles’s eyes fly open and he sees his children and his love, the entire spectrum of light, arrayed in front of him. They peer down at him and he sees nothing but love love love in their eyes, love that pings out to the heart in his head. Their eyes widen and all his infinite selves are contained within those glistening dark globes.
A doctor in a white coat appears now behind them.
Now, he has to speak now, before there are machines and medicines that put everything back in its place. He has to rebuild himself before the doctor does it for him.
His thoughts are lucid, but it is a struggle to form the words and force them out. They push against each other, each word a fat and slippery thing, until only the important ones remain. And then, finally, the three words he most wants to say wriggle their way through the net and land at the feet of his waiting family.
As Grace and Barbra weep and Andrew clutches his hand and Saina gestures at the doctor to hurry, he smiles at them and watches their faces bloom with relief. He smiles again and pings back their love as hard as he can while also focusing on speaking the truth that he has known for so long, the truth that will make the whole world theirs.
“Daddy discovered America!”
He leans back, triumphant, exhausted. Later, they will learn how to rule the New World but for now, this is enough. This is everything.
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU . . .
To Marc Gerald, for seeing the future from the very first page.
To Sasha Raskin for sending the Wangs abroad with such aplomb; Kim Koba and Jaime Chu for keeping them brilliantly on track; and Juliet Mushens for saying the words that won me over.
To Helen Atsma, for being such a perfect combination of wise, insightful, funny, understanding, and very, very cool and for making this a much better book. And also to Taryn Roeder, Liz Anderson, and Lori Glazer for your PR and marketing genius; David Hough, for your kind attention; Larry Cooper, for taking this to the finish line; and Naomi Gibbs for all your help along the way. But, really, to everyone at HMH—especially Lauren Wein and Bruce Nichols—for your love of the Wangs.
To Jennifer Lambert and Juliet Annan, for your early enthusiasm, your editing expertise, and for bringing the Wangs to Canada and the UK.
To my first, best readers: Krystal Chang, Keshni Kashyap, Bill Langworthy, Lauren Rubin, Lauren Strasnick, and Margaret Wappler for pointing out my crucial mistakes in the most helpful of ways. I never would have found my way home without the six of you. And also to Akira Bryson, Christy Nichols, Steph Cha, Eric Lin, Charles Yu, and Amanda Yates Garcia for reading later versions and answering my many questions. I am really lucky to be surrounded by so many fellow writers and artists, who do such good and true work.
To my many friends who always believed—with little proof or evidence—that I was working on something worthwhile, for your buoying presence.
To Dave Makharadze for helping me figure out how to bankrupt the Wangs; to my workshop at Squaw Valley in 2010—especially stalwart leader Geoff Shandler—for being the first to get behind Charles Wang; to the fine people of Writ Large Press for ninety days of insanity and, along with Binders, giving these pages their first stage; to Elizabeth Chandler, for giving me a place to land; and to Jack Erdie for the spark.
To Margaret, again, for so many long days and nights eating bad sandwiches over laptops. There’s just no way I would have written all these pages without you working right across the table. We finished our books!
To my sister, Krystal, for sharing a love of the food parts of books and a very singular childhood.
And always and most of all to my parents, endlessly loving and supportive, who didn’t just come to America for opportunity—they came for adventure, and they found it.
Additional Thanks
I wish that I’d kept a log of all my book-related Google searches. In some alternate literary universe, the countless online words that I read on everything from the life of Madame Louis Lévêque—a celebrated French writer once engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and now memorialized in the breed of roses that line the Wangs’ Bel-Air driveway—to the destruction of the hutongs in Beijing would become a kind of navigable undercurrent to this book. A sincere thank-you to the many people who contribute to our virtual store of knowledge—the Internet is not just cat videos!
I owe more specific gratitude to the work of John Lanchester, Felix Salmon, and Matt Taibbi, journalists who covered the madness of 2008 with great intelligence, clarity, and depth. Felix Salmon’s February 2009 Wired cover, “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street,” was instrumental in helping me understand the role of David X. Li and the Gaussian copula. The version of the formula Professor Kalchefsky writes on the board comes from this article, but differs from the exact formula used by Wall Street.