The Wangs vs. the World(52)
His parents and their friends had created an island within an island, a mini-China in Taiwan, but that wasn’t enough. They were a colony of escaped mainlanders who never accepted their lives among the people who had no choice but to give them refuge; they spoke their home dialects and taught their children the geography of an unseen motherland, taught it so well that Charles knew he could have driven from the wilds of Xinjiang to the docks of Shanghai without so much as glancing at a map.
In the rearview mirror, both of his children sat staring at the windows, pretending not to listen.
Outside, the alien desert unfurled itself in all directions. Punctuating the endless interstate were fading billboards for strip clubs and churches. As they passed the city limits of Van Horn, Texas, a brand-new billboard lit by a row of spotlights that managed to shine even in the midday sun screamed PATRIOTS UNITE! SECURE OUR BORDERS!, black block letters on a billowing flag.
America was a great deceptor. Land of Opportunity. Golden Mountain. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But inside those pretty words, between the pretty coasts, was this: Miles and miles of narrow-minded know-nothings who wanted no more out of life than an excuse to cock their AK-47s and take arms against a sea of troubles. A Great Wall? Ha! This country could never build itself anything as epic as that. America wanted to think of itself as a creator, but all it could do was destroy—fortunes, families, lives. Even the railroads needed the Chinese to come and build them.
America celebrated Christopher Columbus, a thief and a liar, a man who called himself a great sailor but couldn’t even navigate his way past an entire continent. A man who discovered nothing, who explored nothing, yet was made into a hero all the same. Charles was reasonably generous with holidays for his employees: Veterans Day, the day after Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, his factories were shuttered. But Columbus Day would never be a day of rest for him, for any of the hundreds of employees he’d once had. There was nothing patriotic about honoring a man who made a mockery of true pioneers, a man who proved that America couldn’t even take charge of its own discovery myth!
He couldn’t let himself get too excited. That’s what Dr. Kaplan had said. Excitement and exhaustion, any kind of stress, could trigger another tiny stroke like the one he’d had the day he signed the papers turning everything over to the bank. His doctor had wanted him to get an MRI and an entire battery of tests to rule out something more serious, but Charles didn’t want anything to stand in the way of this journey. Now that he’d relinquished everything he’d built in America, all that remained, the only thing that he could focus on, was reuniting the Wangs under his oldest child’s roof and then turning all of his attention to reclaiming China.
When Charles’s father had his first stroke, he’d made it sound like nothing. “Mei shi, mei shi. Bu yao dan xing,” he’d insisted on their brief call, and Charles had allowed himself to believe it. After all, there was so much happening in America! The sales numbers had just begun to come in from KoKo’s line, higher than they’d imagined in their margarita-fueled meetings, and, of course, he needed to be on hand in case the production run had to be increased. And then there was another big deal about to close, but it would be bad business to leave the country before all the papers had been signed. Not to mention a new house that he’d just put in an offer on, a house he would buy and his father would never see.
Charles wished his father had held on for longer. Made it to the peak of the success and then had his last stroke right before the Failure. Instead, he’d dropped to the ground in the entryway of a fish market and died with his head propped up on a burlap sack of geoduck clams just as Charles was postponing his trip to Taiwan for a fourth time.
Another billboard loomed up ahead, an image of a giant plate of BBQ ribs. Lunchtime had come and gone. His family must be hungry.
Charles leaned his head back. “Gege, Meimei, are your stomachs hungry?” Barbra twisted awkwardly in her seat and turned her back to him, facing her scarf-covered window. He remembered buying that scarf for her at the Hermès store on Fifth Avenue—a 56 x 56 silk square that he’d blithely plunked down $820 to acquire—right before Saina’s disastrous show. Was it supposed to be a provocation, that scarf? Some sort of message about the Wangs and their failures?
He looked over his shoulder at Andrew and Grace. They hadn’t responded to his question. “We have lunch at that restaurant?” he pointed up, as that billboard flew by. “Texas B-B-Q!”
“Oh Dad, let’s just get something to go, okay? If we stay on track, we should get to Austin in four hours and twenty-three minutes,” said Andrew, looking down at his phone.
“Why you so rush? You have girlfriend in Austin?”
“Baba! You know why! I want to get there in time to sign up for the open mic. It says on their website that sign-ups start at seven, and we’ll probably go to the hotel first, and then I’ll still have to find it, and maybe I can take the car or something?”
Barbra chose that moment to break her angry silence. “It won’t ever happen! You lose the business, okay. Okay. I understand. Sometimes businesses get lost! But now how much do you spend on that lawyer? Maybe he speaks zhong wen, but he is not in zhong guo! What will he be able to do? Is it so hard for you not to be a big man? You can’t just get that land and be a big man again—it won’t happen. Communist Party never let it happen. Why they want to give it up?”