The Wangs vs. the World(50)
The first message: “Hello, Charles, hello.” (Pause.) “It’s Lydia. Grant spoke to me, I’m very sorry to hear about your company’s (pause) difficulties. I do hope it hasn’t been too (pause) difficult for the family. And I hope that we’ll see you and your wife next week at our fall dinner.” (Pause.) “And I’d like to thank you for your generous support of the Gardens over the years, and your continued generous support. It’s very kind.” (Pause.) “OkaywellIhopethewholefamily’sdoingwellgoodbyenowgoodbye.”
Oh, the anxious, aging wives of his white business associates, fingers weighted down with diamonds, constantly tittering on about how busy they were with this committee meeting and that school event, all the while shedding pretty tears for dark-skinned children in distant countries. Charles loved being around them. They flattered him like concubines, wheedling checks for orphans in Burma or wells in Namibia, angling for ever-larger donations of cosmetics to put on the block at one of the endless silent auctions for their children’s private schools. Nothing made him feel better than tossing off a check that elicited a breathy gasp of pleasure from one of the wives. Charles remembered the one he’d written for Liddy’s dinner. $5,000 a plate. $10,000 for Barbra and him. Well, someone else was going to eat his share of ahi poke or steak roulade or summer trifle or whatever the absurdly fashionable food of the moment happened to be.
Having money made things so easy. Ease. That’s what he was born for. By rights, Charles Wang never should have had to doubt the state of his accounts, not for a single moment of his life. By rights, he should have had an ancient kingdom at his feet—if the tide had not been turned by history, who knew how vast his family’s holdings would now be?
Second message. “Wang Gege! You don’t call, you don’t email!” My email got impounded, thought Charles, along with everything else. “Are you switching sides on me, hmm? I’m still counting on your support this November, Wang, don’t forget it. You promised to show up with those models on your arm, Gege. I’m waiting for them. That’ll spring some wallets open, eh?” Little Mark Shen. The bastard had squirmed his way into Charles Wang’s life by wielding a city council seat in Vernon, that tiny municipal fiefdom where Charles’s largest warehouse and factory was located. Except that it wasn’t his anymore. Someone else could war with that joke of a city, that gutter-and-ash city, about taxes and permissions and inane regulations that were really just bald attempts to rout more cash out of the pockets of honest businessmen. All the campaign contributions that he had given bowlegged Mark Shen were pointless now.
Charles tried not to think about it, but there was a relentless adding machine in his mind that refused to stop its guilty tally of all his unnecessary expenses: the campaign contributions—not just to Shen but also to California’s governator and anyone who looked like they might have a chance of becoming mayor of Los Angeles; the donations to charities that meant more to the people running them than to the people they were supposed to help; the tables that he’d taken at dinners; the membership to a country club when he didn’t even want to strike a ball across artificial lawns with a stick; the bottles of wine and whiskey ordered to show that $500, $1,000, $10,000 meant nothing to him. Wasn’t money supposed to beget money? So how did all of his mighty dollars shrink up and cross their legs and refuse to breed anymore? If only he could claw it all back. Rewind to that moment before some fireball of greed and ambition and catastrophic self-confidence made him stray from the sure path that he’d been on for so many years.
Safe and sure.
Bravery was for fools.
Third message. “Hey, Mr. Wang. Just calling to say that we got your email and that’s cool, if you’re fixing to come visit us, we’ll be here. Uh, we definitely weren’t expecting it, but it would be an honor, sir, to have you come in person. We’ll see you all in a few days. Oh, this is Trip. BTW. You know, by the way. Yeah. Okay. Have a good drive.” At least there was that. The cases of product in the bread box of a trailer that bumped along behind them, occasionally threatening to fishtail the car. Maybe they would be the start of something, a huge lifestyle brand that would overtake Martha and magnolia scent the world. And it would all be because he’d rescued their dreams from the detritus of his Failure—it would be the perfect comeback story.
Charles focused on the road in front of him. At some point the landscape had started to shift from the red dirt of New Mexico to the scrub flats of West Texas. Benighted lands, both of them.
His phone rang; his lawyer’s name flashed across the screen. With a sneaky glance at Barbra, who wrinkled her forehead and turned away, he picked it up.
“Hello, I am driving. Is there anything?”
“How’s the road trip?”
This lawyer was always bombarding Charles with pleasantries when he should have been figuring out how to reinstate the Wangs’ lost acres. They continued in Mandarin.
“I pay you six hundred dollars an hour. It would cost me too much to tell you about it. Do you have any news?”
A laugh. “Well, we’re not sure what this means yet, but it looks like you never left.”
“What? Where?”
“Home. China.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, really, but we have obtained a copy of your identification record. Wang Da Qian, age fifty-six, born at 7:35 a.m. on March 14, 1952, parents Wang Wen Xi and Chong Jie—you’re still there.”