The Wangs vs. the World(9)
Barbra had grown up in the college’s employee quarters, a too-smart girl with a too-round face, who cursed under her breath in her parents’ native Hokkien but still learned to trill out the smooth hills and valleys of Mandarin as easily as she’d mastered driving the university’s old Datsun and smiling at the college boys with just enough intention to keep them guessing despite her funny little nose. She could critique Marxism and mock Teresa Teng’s overwrought love songs and do most of Audrey Hepburn’s beatnik dance and ride a bicycle without touching the handlebars and take a puff of a cigarette without coughing—everything that was important for a poor but ambitious high school girl to do in Taipei in 1973. The only thing she hadn’t managed to do was turn the head of Charles Wang.
Barbra had spent the summer working as a secretary at the cannery in Tamsui where her uncle was a supervisor, a summer in which she’d managed to keep her skin pale and lovely by walking to work swathed in a cotton overshirt and hidden under a straw visor. Not once did she venture onto the beach in the bright hot afternoon, even though she’d learned to swim there, where the sands were always crowded with young people. She’d refused any rice at dinner, even though her uncle’s wife urged fluffy spoonfuls of it upon her. Instead, she’d restricted herself to a single egg beaten into a cup of boiling water for breakfast and a tin of the cannery’s sardines for lunch, and she’d worked all summer for enough money to order the sleeveless qipao that she was finally slim enough to slip into.
When the graduate students returned to campus that fall, she walked into the library off of Zhoushan Road, hair a cap of neat waves, proud of her legs in new flared trousers—the qipao was much too formal for someone else’s first day of class—heart pounding at the thought of seeing Wang Da Qian again. Except that she didn’t see him. Not through the window of the economics class that he should have been taking as part of his master’s degree, not in the cafeteria where her father was shouting at his assistants as they rushed to wipe up a pot of sweet mung bean soup that someone had knocked over when she walked in. Nowhere.
Everyone said he’d gone to America—not to study but to work. It made Barbra love him even more, a love that lasted even though he never responded to her too-carefully worded letters, sent care of his mother, that wished him ten thousand years of luck and praised him for his courage while wondering if he’d be back to honor the new year with his revered parents. Not so much as a Golden Gate Bridge postcard.
She heard nothing more about him at all, despite the fact that she dated one of his former best friends for weeks, discreetly probing for news about Wang gege and receiving, instead, long disquisitions on the possibilities of praxis in a democratic society and endless replays of A Hard Day’s Night as they sat side by side on a brown plaid comforter that was all stiff from being dried in the sun.
It wasn’t until the last week of the semester that Barbra’s detested boyfriend showed up one morning holding a light blue airmail envelope plastered with American stamps engraved with a portrait of Einstein. Philately was popular at the time and several of the boys Barbra was sitting with tried to lay claim to the stamps, but he’d shushed them all by unfolding the letter and showing off a photo of a girl ripped out of a magazine. The captions were in English, but the girl was unmistakably Chinese. She was smiling straight out at Barbra, her head turned towards the camera and her hands holding up the collar of her paisley-patterned shirt as her legs splayed out in a leap.
“Wang Da Qian says that he is getting married to her. She’s a model. Wah, just look at her—I should have moved to America, too!”
“I thought you had better taste,” Barbra had said, shoving the page back at him.
“It’s true,” said bookish little Tuan, who later surprised them all by becoming the mayor of Taichung, as he leaned over to pick the page up. “Those long, slanted eyes and those tiny little lips, she’s the kind of girl lao wai likes.”
“Maybe Ming-Ming is like a foreigner now. Milk in his tea and socks to bed.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be the one who knows what he wears to bed,” said Xiao Jong, waggling his eyebrows at her. Jong always had been too stupid with his own intelligence. Just a few months after those boys had all graduated, he was picked up in one of the Kuomintang sweeps of student leaders with suspected Communist sympathies, and not even his meek little wife ever heard from him again. Served him right.
Barbra flipped the light switch outside her closet door and stepped in, letting out her breath as her bare feet, toes freshly painted, sank into the smoke-blue silk rug.
This, this was her favorite room in the house.
Let Charles talk endlessly about the hidden wine cellar that he’d retrofitted for whiskey. Let their friends marvel over Ai Wei Wei smashing a Han dynasty urn in a triptych of photos that hung on the wall behind a considerably less valuable Ming dynasty vase. Let the other rooms of the house be photographed for that new California magazine with its condescending editor who described Charles as a “small but gracious man.” This closet was the only corner that mattered to her.
Having this romantic inner sanctum in a house full of polished glamour gave Barbra the same sensation—something halfway between lust and power—as wearing a red silk peignoir under an austere dress by one of those Japanese minimalists that Charles hated so much.