The Wangs vs. the World(94)

I go to Dan Colen and Dash Snow’s Deitch Projects show, sure that she’ll be there with Minni Mung or Peonia Vazquez-D’Amico, part of the tight group of artists and fashion folk that she has surrounded herself with since arriving in New York City to earn a BFA at Columbia. There are plenty of girls with dark hair and long legs crowding the gallery, circulating under the wine-and-pee spitballs, but Saina is not among them.



Saina stared at a bruise on her knee, listening as Billy described in detail his strange, obsessive quest. He made her into some sort of Great Hipster Mystery, hitting up any party or opening where she might be, asking her friends to reveal her whereabouts, staking out her studio, finding out, somehow, that she’d taken a $400,000 hit when she sold her loft, stalking her gallerist until, of course, Billy found Grayson and got him drunk.

Her sister looked up from the magazine. “Do you really want me to keep reading this? It’s terrible! Do you think this is how Jennifer Aniston feels?”

They all laughed painfully. Even Barbra. Leo squeezed her hand.

“Yeah,” said Saina. “Keep going.” The next part was less of a surprise. A dramatized overview of the controversy surrounding her last show, complete with a snarky rereading of the catalog copy, where he called her show “a posthumous beauty contest for victims of war.” He wasn’t entirely wrong, but she still didn’t understand why she’d had to bear the collective anger when it was the photojournalists and the editors who had created those images in the first place.

Grace read on.



We love artists because of the lives they lead. They give us raw id, captured in a frame. In many ways, the art world is best at celebrating the controlled, masterful hand or the wild, impetuous heart. Saina’s work, though, is the cynical, observant head, calculating and precise.



“Wait,” said Saina, “do you all think that?” They all looked at one another, her family, and she suddenly realized that they probably wanted to rest after their long drive. They had to be tired and hungry and in no mood to hear a takedown of her, of the first failure that led to every other failure. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. Gracie, let’s just finish it. There’s not a lot more left, is there?”

Grace looked up at her, worried. “Well . . . it’s that old Page Six item. I’m just going to skip it, okay?”

Saina nodded, but it didn’t really matter. She could still recite it word for word, down to the pun that stabbed her in the heart each time she thought about it. Just asking . . . Which socialite artist might find that the uproar over her latest show is nothing compared to the uproar that her fiancé is causing between the sheets with a rival heiress whose name must “ring” a bell?

“Okay, I’ll read this part instead,” said Grace.



Perhaps now is the time to say that every successful artist is the product of mythmaking, and that I, more than anyone else, may have been guilty of constructing the myth of Saina Wang.



Leo wrapped an arm around her. “Who is this guy?”

I made my own myth, thought Saina. I did. She could see her sister’s eyes scanning ahead. Grace looked up at her, worried, and put down the magazine. “Well, um, that’s about it,” she said.

Leo wrapped his fingers around her wrist lightly. “Is it me, or did that article just say a whole lot of nothing?”

“Dwei le! Luo shuo! Why that reporter not mind his own business?”

“Yeah, Mr. Wang!”

Barbra laughed, and it was a genuine laugh. Sitting here around Saina’s Bertoia table, surrounded by the glistening white walls of her dining room, they felt like a family, Leo included. She’d been selfish, hadn’t she? Returning one out of every five of Grace’s phone calls, leaving her father, never allowing Barbra to be anything approaching a mother. She owed them these things. In the end, all we had were the people to whom we were beholden.



Later, as Barbra napped upstairs and Leo and Grace brought in the rest of their luggage, Saina found her father looking at the titles on her bookshelf.

“Ni yao bu yao xian shuei yi ge jiao?” she asked.

“Bu lei.”

But he did look tired. He hadn’t even said anything about Leo being black. She was relieved, but it also worried her—he seemed less present in the world somehow.

It had been more than six months since she’d seen him, and so much had changed. When he’d left New York, she’d been engaged, and her gallerist was playing potential collectors off one another, trying to land her pieces in the right hands so that her future work would rise in value. And now who was she? The subject of one public drubbing after another, and at the hands of someone like Billy Al-Alani, who wasn’t even a real critic, who was just a gossip.

“Baba . . .” But she couldn’t formulate the sentence in Chinese. Her knowledge of the language only extended to daily necessities and small affections. She realized suddenly that this was the first time she’d been alone with her father in more than a year. He picked up a small horned skull resting on her bookshelf.

“Your pet?”

“It’s just for decoration.”

“Why?”

“I liked it.”

He shrugged and put it back on its side, the horns listing over the edge of the shelf. “Have you talk to Didi?”