The Wangs vs. the World(77)
The Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.
The sheets at this motel weren’t as bad as some of the others in the places they’d stayed at. They were faded and nearly threadbare, but at least they’d started out 100 percent cotton, with none of that cheap nylon burr that had made it hard to sleep so many other nights. Grace still hadn’t stirred, but Barbra couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. Petulant little Grace had been barely two months old when her mother died. There was a time, at the very beginning, when Barbra still might have been able to make the baby feel like her own child, but she’d felt no natural swelling of maternal instinct at the sight of the swaddled infant in Ama’s arms. And, too, Charles had proven to be a surprisingly enthusiastic father, who bounced and clicked and cooed over his motherless daughter whenever he was home.
Barbra wondered, not for the first time, if May Lee had also married Charles for his money. Had she taken as easily to luxury as Barbra? She had certainly known how to shop. Barbra didn’t think that May Lee had been the sort of model who received gifts from designers, yet her clothes, put away for Saina and Grace, had colonized nearly an entire room of the house.
During Barbra’s first month in America, when Charles thought that she was just visiting for adventure, a last fling before settling down with her imagined fiancé in Taiwan, she had called him gege, big brother, and never mentioned May Lee. But once her fiancé had been dispatched—with the aid of a concocted revelation—and she’d moved into Charles’s arms, Barbra employed a series of deft questions to help her draw an outline of May Lee’s family history.
There was little about it that seemed auspicious. It was a mongrel history, muddied by generations spent in America. On one side there was a great-grandfather who came to California to perform coolie labor on the railroads, on the other there was a great-grandmother who was imported as a brothel girl, though May Lee’s family swore that she’d never actually turned a trick because she’d already been pregnant by the time she arrived in America, where she sought refuge with a group of understanding Jehovah’s Witnesses and become a proselytizer instead. The only family member May Lee had been ashamed of, according to Charles, was her own grandfather, who, upon his death, was revealed as a Japanese man passing as Chinese in order to avoid the internment camps.
Somehow they’d all managed to find other Chinese people to marry and have children with—the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles were filled with families that had tenuous ties to May Lee’s.
These older Chinese people born in America were very disorienting. May Lee’s mother had visited the children soon after she and Charles married—a large, lumpen woman with a bowl cut, dressed in a hideous wool suit, who nonetheless spoke English with a lilting perfection that made Barbra feel like her own Chanel jacket was far too pink.
May Lee and America overlapped.
Mei Li and Mei Guo.
Beauty and Beautiful Country.
Dead, May Lee was everywhere. Dead, she became the entire country. It wasn’t fair! Barbra turned over so she could open her eyes without looking at Grace. It just wasn’t fair. The children used to say that about everything—Grace still did sometimes. Nothing was fair.
The Wangs were fools, thought Barbra. They had everything, and they understood nothing. Charles was the kind of person who had never in his blessed life thought about where the shit went after he flushed the toilet. It was his privilege to empty his bowels in clean white ceramic bowls, and it was the burden of the world to wash it away.
None of the Wangs appreciated anything. Saina and Grace would never appreciate the pure, thrumming pleasure of carrying a tasteful yet outrageously expensive purse. They had never lived a life without such privileges. The nod of recognition that such a purse elicited from a few equally solvent others was an unimpeachable sort of currency, not subject to market fluctuations or whims of fashion. The thick, buttery leather and polished gold clasp were enough to lend substance to her being, the purse became an axis around which the whole chaotic world would spin. Wealth, Barbra knew, should belong to those who understood its power.
Charles thought of himself as a self-made man. He was stupid enough to think that he’d come to America with nothing—“Just a list of urea in my pocket,” he liked to say—and wrested a fortune from this country through his own brilliance. Barbra had once heard an American saying: “He was born on third and thought he hit a triple.” Baseball was popular in Taiwan and she’d known immediately what it meant. She was the one who had started with two strikes against her and, with nothing more than her own determination, had made it all the way back to home base.
Barbra sat up in bed, furious.
She was the one who had made something out of nothing. She was the one who’d upended generations of poverty in one move. So what if she’d done it with a lucky marriage? Would it be worth any more if she’d won Charles’s hand in a game of poker? Empires rose and fell on luck, and her own was worth as much as any monarch’s.
As for Charles, one stroke of ill fortune and he was broken, turned into a demented old man fantasizing about some forgotten family land that was probably not much to begin with. Barbra looked over at Grace, still asleep. A useless lump. Like all the Wangs.
When the Failure first launched, Charles had surprised her with the full line, eight shades of foundation, thirty-two lipsticks, sixteen eye shadows, all laid out beautifully in her bathroom. Secretly, she’d been a little sad about putting away her Guerlain powder and Dior mascara, but she’d used his products and he’d praised their beauty on her unbeautiful face. After the Failure became the Failure, after he’d made his announcement, she’d gone into her bathroom and found that they were all already gone, swept into an awkward heap in the Lucite trash can next to her vanity. It was such a peevish act, like a child tossing away a broken toy.