The Wangs vs. the World(122)

The lines that Charles thinks about in chapter 十五—“Companies fail the way Ernest Hemingway wrote about going broke. Gradually, and then suddenly”—come from a May 2002 Fortune story by Ram Charan and Jerry Useem, “Why Companies Fail.” That line seemed perfect and true when I read it in the long wake of the first dot-com bubble and bust, and I’ve remembered it ever since.

Finally, the horoscope that opens chapter 二 is from an actual horoscope by Holiday Mathis that ran in the Los Angeles Times on July 13, 2007. It was, of course, originally written for my sign.