The Wangs vs. the World(72)
“Hey, you don’t know that, right? You said might.”
“It’s just . . . nothing’s worth as much anymore, but the loan is still for the same amount, you know? So they’re going to sell off the house where I grew up and pretty much everything in it, and all of the factories and stock, but I don’t think that will cover the original loan, and that’s when the bank will go after what I have. Not this house, I don’t think, because the title’s under my name, but everything that’s still tied to my dad in name, probably.” She leaned closer to Leo, pressing her forehead into his chest.
“What’s your dad going to do?”
“Oh god. He has this crazy plan where he thinks that he’s going to roll up to the old village in China and somehow be able to reclaim the land that his father lost.”
“Wait,” said Graham, “are you a princess or something? Or, like, the Last Empress? Who just has land to reclaim?”
“And what would he do with it?” asked Leo.
“Become a farmer? You can give him tips. I don’t know. I don’t think he’s thought that far. To be honest, I think he’s lost his mind a little bit.” She paused, picturing them. Generations of Wangs that had things, and then three that lost things. “It’s just old family land. I don’t even know if it’s real. He says it is, but he’s never even been back to China.”
“Why not?”
Why not? Saina wasn’t really sure. When he was living in Taiwan, travel between the two places was restricted, but America had lifted its ban before he’d immigrated. “He probably didn’t want to go unless he could own the whole country.”
“But he’s coming here now?” asked Graham.
“Yep. Plus my stepmother and my brother and sister. They stopped off at my uncle Nash’s house in New Orleans, but I think they’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”
Graham nudged Leo. “Ready to meet the in-laws?”
Leo looked at her. “Are they ready to meet me?”
“I think so. They’ll just be glad that you’re not, well, that you’re not Grayson.”
“See,” said Graham, “one step up already!”
Saina looked at them and for a moment she was bitterly, intensely jealous. Life was so weightless for some people. She wanted to call her father right now and tell him not to come. Just wash her hands of the Wangs altogether, never mind that family was family and she should be glad that she was going to give hers a home. A homeland.
Should she even tell her father about this latest setback? He was probably counting on her reserves to finance the pursuit of the land in China, but what was that going to get them? Leo was right, what could her citified father possibly do with it? Even if he got it, which seemed impossible, it would probably be farmland out in the middle of nowhere. Saina tried to picture him out there, far from the modern towers of Beijing or Shanghai, demanding that some poor peasant boy make his cappuccino bone-dry, asking villagers if there was a better restaurant in town, realizing that he couldn’t gossip about the man next to him in Chinese—which sometimes seemed to be his and Barbra’s sole pastime—because everyone around him would be Chinese.
Her father, sweating through a custom-tailored suit, armed with a bespoke hoe, trying to raise ghosts on that long-lost land.
The price of a single plane ticket to China could probably buy a few acres out here in Helios, thought Saina, looking out at the empty fields behind the restaurant. “At some point every old family’s home had to be a new home.”
Graham shook his head. “My family’s never had an old home. Sharecropper’s cabins to boarding houses to rented rooms to me, here, living the dream. And look at Leo—just a little orphan boy.”
Saina smiled at them vaguely. How many generations would it take the Wangs to feel like upstate New York was their ancestral seat? One generation? Maybe two at the most? Saina thought about how a child, a son or daughter of hers, might romanticize their upbringing, spinning a narrative out of the way their people started out in the Old East and continued here in the New.
Who were the Native Americans, really, but a band of Chinese people who had set their sights east and walked for millennia?
三十一
Opelika, AL
2,493 Miles
AMERICA WASN’T DONE with Charles Wang. He gave her his best ideas and basest impulses—the most vital parts of a man—and in return she snatched away his son. Andrew didn’t leave; he was stolen. By a smug porcelain statue with an inkwell for a heart who only wanted to feed off of his youth and beauty. Charles cursed every tenth of a mile that ticked over on the odometer, each click placing another impassable length between the remaining Wangs and their only son.
No. His only son. And only his son. Without May Lee in the world, Andrew belonged only to him. Barbra had no grounds to lay any claim. Charles’s own parents were dead, dropping away, one after the other, soon after he arrived in America. All that remained of them was the shard of bone in his suitcase. May Lee’s father was long gone but her forgetful mother still languished in some San Gabriel Valley nursing home that would not be receiving any more monthly checks signed by Charles Wang. May Lee’s worthless, passive siblings would have to figure out a way to pay for it now.