Dedication
Epigraph
The Wangs vs The World
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
Thank You . . .
To Marc Gerald, for seeing the future from the very first page.
To Sasha Raskin for sending the Wangs abroad with such aplomb; Kim Koba and Jaime Chu for keeping them brilliantly on track; and Juliet Mushens for saying the words that won me over.
To Helen Atsma, for being such a perfect combination of wise, insightful, funny, understanding, and very, very cool and for making this a much better book. And also to Taryn Roeder, Liz Anderson, and Lori Glazer for your PR and marketing genius; David Hough, for your kind attention; Larry Cooper, for taking this to the finish line; and Naomi Gibbs for all your help along the way. But, really, to everyone at HMH — especially Lauren Wein and Bruce Nichols — for your love of the Wangs.
To Jennifer Lambert and Juliet Annan, for your early enthusiasm, your editing expertise, and for bringing the Wangs to Canada and the UK.
To my first, best readers: Krystal Chang, Keshni Kashyap, Bill Langworthy, Lauren Rubin, Lauren Strasnick, and Margaret Wappler for pointing out my crucial mistakes in the most helpful of ways. I never would have found my way home without the six of you. And also to Akira Bryson, Christy Nichols, Steph Cha, Eric Lin, Charles Yu, and Amanda Yates Garcia for reading later versions and answering my many questions. I am really lucky to be surrounded by so many fellow writers and artists, who do such good and true work.
To my many friends who always believed — with little proof or evidence — that I was working on something worthwhile, for your buoying presence.
To Dave Makharadze for helping me figure out how to bankrupt the Wangs; to my workshop at Squaw Valley in 2010 — especially stalwart leader Geoff Shandler — for being the first to get behind Charles Wang; to the fine people of Writ Large Press for ninety days of insanity and, along with Binders, giving these pages their first stage; to Elizabeth Chandler, for giving me a place to land; and to Jack Erdie for the spark.
To Margaret, again, for so many long days and nights eating bad sandwiches over laptops. There’s just no way I would have written all these pages without you working right across the table. We finished our books!
To my sister, Krystal, for sharing a love of the food parts of books and a very singular childhood.
And always and most of all to my parents, endlessly loving and supportive, who didn’t just come to America for opportunity — they came for adventure, and they found it.
I wish that I’d kept a log of all my book-related Google searches. In some alternate literary universe, the countless online words that I read on everything from the life of Madame Louis Lévêque — a celebrated French writer once engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and now memorialized in the breed of roses that line the Wangs’ Bel-Air driveway — to the destruction of the hutongs in Beijing would become a kind of navigable undercurrent to this book. A sincere thank-you to the many people who contribute to our virtual store of knowledge — the Internet is not just cat videos!
I owe more specific gratitude to the work of John Lanchester, Felix Salmon, and Matt Taibbi, journalists who covered the madness of 2008 with great intelligence, clarity, and depth. Felix Salmon’s February 2009 Wired cover, “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street,” was instrumental in helping me understand the role of David X. Li and the Gaussian copula. The version of the formula Professor Kalchefsky writes on the board comes from this article, but differs from the exact formula used by Wall Street.
The lines that Charles thinks about in chapter 
—“Companies fail the way Ernest Hemingway wrote about going broke. Gradually, and then suddenly”— come from a May 2002 Fortune story by Ram Charan and Jerry Useem, “Why Companies Fail.” That line seemed perfect and true when I read it in the long wake of the first dot-com bubble and bust, and I’ve remembered it ever since.
Finally, the horoscope that opens chapter 
is from an actual horoscope by Holiday Mathis that ran in the Los Angeles Times on July 13, 2007. It was, of course, originally written for my sign.
Charles Wang was mad at America.
Actually, Charles Wang was mad at history.
If the death-bent Japanese had never invaded China, if a million — a billion — misguided students and serfs had never idolized a balding academic who parroted Russian madmen and couldn’t pay for his promises, then Charles wouldn’t be standing here, staring out the window of his beloved Bel-Air home, holding an aspirin in his hand, waiting for those calculating assholes from the bank — the bank that had once gotten down on its Italianate-marble knees and kissed his ass — to come over and repossess his life.
Without history, he wouldn’t be here at all.
He’d be there, living out his unseen birthright on his family’s ancestral acres, a pampered prince in silk robes, writing naughty, brilliant poems, teasing servant girls, collecting tithes from his peasants, and making them thankful by leaving their tattered households with just enough grain to squeeze out more hungry babies.
Instead, the world that should have been his fell apart, and the great belly of Asia tumbled and roiled with a noxious foreign indigestion that spewed him out, bouncing him, hard, on the tropical joke of Taiwan and then, when he popped right back up, belching him all the way across the vast Pacific Ocean and smearing him onto this, this faceless green country full of grasping newcomers, right alongside his unclaimed countrymen: the poor, illiterate, ball-scratching half men from Canton and Fujian, whose highest dreams were a cook’s apron and a back-alley, backdoor fuck.
Oh, he shouldn’t have been vulgar.
Charles Wang shouldn’t even know about the things that happen on dirt-packed floors and under stained sheets. Centuries of illustrious ancestors, scholars and statesmen and gentlemen farmers all, had bred him for fragrant teas unfurling in fresh springwater, for calligraphy brushes of white wolf hair dipped in black deer-glue ink, for lighthearted games of chance played among true friends.
Not this. No, not this. Not for him bastardized Peking duck eaten next to a tableful of wannabe rappers and their short, chubby, colored-contact-wearing Filipino girlfriends at Mr. Chow. Not for him shoulder-to-shoulder art openings where he sweated through the collar of his paper-thin cashmere sweater and stared at some sawed-in-half animal floating in formaldehyde whose guts didn’t even have the courtesy to leak; not for him white women who wore silver chopsticks in their hair and smiled at him for approval. Nothing, nothing in his long lineage had prepared him for the Western worship of the Dalai Lama and pop stars wearing jade prayer beads and everyone drinking goddamn boba chai.
He shouldn’t be here at all. Never should have set a single unbound foot on the New World. There was no arguing it. History had started fucking Charles Wang, and America had finished the job.
America was the worst part of it because America, that fickle bitch, used to love Charles Wang.
She had given him this house, a beautiful Georgian estate once owned by a minor MGM starlet married to a studio lawyer who made his real money running guns for Mickey Cohen. At least that’s what Charles told his guests whenever he toured them around the place, pointing out the hidden crawl space in the wine cellar and the bullet hole in the living room’s diamond-pane window. “Italians don’t have nothing on gangster Jews!” he’d say, stroking the mezuzah that he’d left up on the doorway. “No hell in the Old Testament!”
Then he’d lead his guests outside, down the symmetrical rows of topiaries, and along the neat swirls of Madame Louis Lévêque roses until he could arrange the group in front of a bowing lawn jockey whose grinning black face had been tactfully painted over in a shiny pink. He’d gesture towards it, one eyebrow arched, as he told them that the man who designed this, this house destined to become the Wang family estate, had been Paul Williams, the first black architect in the city. The guy had built Frank Sinatra’s house, he’d built that ridiculous restaurant at LAX that looked like it came straight out of The Jetsons — stars and spaceships, and a castle for Charles Wang.
Martha Stewart had kvelled over this house. She’d called it a treasure and laid a pale, capable hand on the sleeve of Charles Wang’s navy summer-silk blazer with the burnished brass buttons, a blazer made by his tailor who kept a suite at the Peninsula Hong Kong and whose name was also Wang, though, thank god, no relation. Martha Stewart had clutched his jacket sleeve and looked at him with such sincerity in her eyes as she’d gushed, “It’s so important, Charles, so essential, that we keep the spirit of these houses whole.”
It was America, really, that had given him his three children, infinitely lovable even though they’d never learned to speak an unaccented word of Mandarin and lived under their own roofs, denying him even the bare dignity of being the head of a full house. His first wife had played some part in it, but he was the one who had journeyed to America and claimed her, he was the one who had fallen to his knees at the revelation of each pregnancy, the one who had crouched by the hospital bed urging on the birth of each perfect child who walked out into the world like a warrior.
Yes, America had loved him once. She’d given him the balls to turn his father’s grim little factory, a three-smokestack affair on the outskirts of Taipei that supplied urea to fertilizer manufacturers, into a cosmetics empire. Urea. His father dealt in piss! Not even real honest piss — artificial piss. Faux pee. A nitrogen-carrying ammonia substitute that could be made out of inert materials and given a public relations scrubbing and named carbamide, but that was really nothing more than the thing that made piss less terribly pissy.
The knowledge that his father, his tall, proud father with his slight scholar’s squint and firmly buttoned quilted vests, had gone from quietly presiding over acres of fertile Chinese farmland to operating a piss plant on the island of Taiwan — well, it was an indignity so large that no one could ever mention it.
Charles’s father had wanted him to stay at National Taiwan University and become a statesman in the New Taiwan, a young man in a Western suit who would carry out Sun Yat Sen’s legacy, but Charles dropped out because he thought he could earn his family’s old life back. An army of well-wishers — none of whom he’d ever see again — had packed him onto a plane with two good-luck scrolls, a crushed orchid lei, and a list of American fertilizer manufacturers who might be in need of cheap urea.
Charles had spent half the flight locked in the onboard toilet heaving up a farewell banquet of bird’s-nest soup and fatty pork stewed in a writhing mass of sea cucumber. When he couldn’t stomach looking at his own colorless face for another second, he picked up a miniature bar of wax-paper-wrapped soap and read the label, practicing his English. It was a pretty little package, lily scented and printed with purple flowers. “Moisturizing,” promised the front; “Skin so soft, it has to be Glow.” And on the back, there was a crowded list of ingredients that surprised Charles. This was before anything in Taiwan had to be labeled, before there was any sort of unbribable municipal health department that monitored claims that a package of dried dates contained anything more than, say, “The freshest dates dried in the healthy golden sun.”
Charles stood there, heaving, weaving forward and back on his polished custom-made shoes, staring cross-eyed at the bar of soap, trying to make out the tiny type. Sweet almond oil, sodium stearate, simmondsia chinensis, hydrolyzed wheat proteins, and then he saw it: UREA. Hydroxyethyl urea, right between shea butter and sodium cocoyl isethionate.
Urea!
Urea on a pretty little American package!
Charles stood up straight, splashed cold water on his face, and strode back to his seat, the miniature soap tucked in his palm. He pulled his gray checked suit jacket down from the overhead bin, took out the list of fertilizer manufacturers, and tucked it into the seat pocket right behind the crinkly airsick bag. When Charles walked off the plane, the scrolls and the pungent lei also stayed behind. He stuck the soap in his shirt pocket, slung his jacket over his shoulder, and swallowed the last trace of bile. Charles Wang was going to come out of America smelling sweet. He was sure of it. “Shit into Shinola,” he said to himself aloud, repeating one of his favorite American movie phrases.
And he’d done it.
Turned shit into two hundred million dollars’ worth of Shinola. Made himself into a cosmetics king with eight factories in Los Angeles, factories that he’d gone from supplying with urea to owning outright — each one turning out a glossy rainbow-scented sea of creams and powders and lipsticks and mascaras.
In the beginning, he’d operated all eight of them separately, sending the clients of one into the disguised folds of another any time they complained about his steadily rising prices. They’d get hooked in again —“Special offer! Just for you my prices go so low!”— and find their invoices once again mysteriously padded, just a little bit, just enough to be uncomfortable. Later, as it became clear that women were willing to pay twenty, twenty-five, thirty dollars for a tube of lipstick, that sort of subterfuge became unnecessary, and there was no end to the number of hotel chains that wanted to brand their shampoos and makeup artists ready to launch their own lines.
One of them, a tiny Japanese girl who stared out at the world through anime eyes, came to him with empty pockets and a list of celebrity clients. He’d fronted her the first set of orders for KoKo, a collection of violently hued shadows that came in round white compacts with her face, framed by its perfect bob cut, embossed on the front, the fuchsia and monarch yellow and electric blue powders glaring out through two translucent holes cut through her printed irises. The line was an immediate smash hit, going from runways and editorial layouts straight to department store makeup counters and into the damp suede reaches of a million teenage purses. And Charles, somehow, got credit for being a visionary, a risk taker, an integral part of a new generation of business talents who made their millions on mass customization, on glamorizing the role of the middleman, on merchandising someone else’s talent.
Yes, America had loved him. America was honest enough with him to include chemical piss in a list of pretty ingredients; America saw that the beautiful was made up of the grotesque.
Makeup was American, and Charles understood makeup. It was artifice, and it was honesty. It was science and it was psychology and it was fashion; but more than that, it was about feeling wealthy. Not money — wealth. The endless possibility of it and the cozy sureness of it. The brilliant Aegean blues and slick wet reds and luscious blacks, the weighty packaging, with its satisfying smooth hinges and sound closures.
Artifice, thought Charles, was the real honesty. Confessing your desire to change, being willing to strive, those were things that made sense. The real fakers were the ones who denied those true impulses. The cat-loving academic who let her hair frizz and made no attempt to cover her acne scars was the most insidious kind of liar, putting on a false face of unconcern when in her heart of hearts she must, must want to be beautiful. Everyone must want to be beautiful. The fat girl who didn’t even bother to pluck her caterpillar eyebrows? If life were a fairy tale, her upturned nose would grow as long as her unchecked middle was wide. And for a time, a long and lucrative time, the good people of America had agreed.
By the turn of the millennium, he was rich already. Rich enough, probably, to buy back all the land in China that had been lost, the land that his father had died without ever touching again. Never mind that the Communists would never have allowed it to be privately owned. The simple fact that he could afford it was enough. He wouldn’t even have done anything with those fallow acres, just slipped the deed in his pocket, received the bows of his peasants, and directed his driver towards Suzhou, where the women were supposed to be so beautiful it didn’t matter that they were also bold and disobedient.
But really, Charles Wang was having too much fun in America to dwell on the China that might have been his.
Just four years ago he’d had the hull of his sexy little cigarette speedboat painted with twenty-seven gallons of Suicide Blonde, his best-selling nail polish color — a perfect blue-toned red that set off the mahogany trim and bright white leather seats. As soon as the paint dried, the boat ripped from Marina del Rey to Costa Careyes with a delectable payload of models for an ad campaign shoot, four morning-to-midnight days that Charles remembered mostly as a parade of young flesh in a range of browns and pinks interrupted only by irrelevant slashes of bright neoprene.
Now the boat was gone. Some small-hearted official with a clipboard and a grudge had probably plastered notices on the entrance to his slip or routed some ugly tugboat into the dock and dragged his poor Dragon Lady away — how Charles had laughed when the registrar at the marina asked if he knew that term was racist — leaving her to shiver in a frigid warehouse.
He never should have fallen for America.
As soon as the happy-clappy guitar-playing Christian missionary who taught him English wrote down Charles’s last name and spelled it W-A-N-G, he should have known.
He should have stayed leagues away from any country that could perpetrate such an injustice, that could spread this glottal miscegenation of a language, with its sloppy vowels and insidious Rs, across the globe.
In Chinese, in any Chinese speaker’s mouth, Wang was a family name to be proud of. It meant king, with a written character that was simple and strong. And it was pronounced with a languid drawn-out diphthong of an o sound that suggested an easy life of summer palaces and fishing for sweet river shrimp off gilded barges. But one move to America and Charles Wang’s proud surname became a nasally joke of a word; one move and he went from king to cock.
No boat. No car. No house. No factories. No models. No lipstick. No KoKo. No country. No kingdom. No past. No prospects. No respect. No land. No land. No land.
Now, now that he had lost the estate in America, all Charles could think of was the land in China.
The life that should have been his.
China, where the Wangs truly belonged.
Not America. Never Taiwan.
If they were in China, his ungrateful children would not be spread out across a continent. If they were in China, his disappointed wife would respond to his every word with nothing but adoration. Angry again, Charles turned away from the window and back to his bare desk. Almost bare. In the center, dwarfed by the expanse of mahogany, was a heavy chop fashioned from a square block of prized mutton-fat jade.
Most chops underlined their authority with excess, an entire flowery honorific crowded on the carved base, but this one, once his grandfather’s, had a single character slashed into its bottom.
Just the family name. Wang.
Over a century ago, when the seal was first made, its underside had started out a creamy white. Now it was stained red from cinnabar paste. His grandfather had used the chop in lieu of a signature on any documents he’d needed to approve, including the land deeds that were once testament to the steady expansion of Wang family holdings. Charles was thankful that his grandfather had died before all the land was lost, before China lost herself entirely to propaganda and lies. The men of the Wang family did not always live long lives, but they lived big.
The land that had anchored the Wangs and exalted them, the land that had given them a place and a purpose, that was gone. But Charles still had the seal and the deeds, everything that proved that the land was rightfully his.
And in a few fevered hours of searching the Internet, he’d uncovered stories, vague stories, of local councils far from central Party circles returning control to former owners, of descendants who, after years in reeducation camps, managed to move back into abandoned family houses that had been left to rot, entire wings taken over by wild pigs because peasants persuaded to deny their history could never appreciate the poetry and grandeur of those homes. He stored each hopeful tale away in a secret chamber of his heart, hoarding them, as he formed a plan. He would make sure that his three children were safe, that his fearsome and beloved second wife was taken care of, that his family was all under one roof, and then, finally, Charles Wang was going to reclaim the land in China.
He popped an aspirin in his mouth, pushing back that new old feeling of a tunnel, a dark and almost inevitable tunnel, closing in on him, and crunched down on the pill as he picked up the phone.
Saina Wang smoothed out the tabloid-size Catskills Chronicler and paged past the op-ed column, skipping the list of new high school seniors, glancing over the photos of the mayor’s Labor Day barbecue and the Pet of the Week, in search of the horoscopes. Usually she read the New York Times — made herself read it, a reminder of the life she could be, maybe should be, living — but that paper would never carry anything as frivolous and as useful as horoscopes.
There. There they were. Squeezed onto the recipe page under a photo of creamed corn succotash with crisped prosciutto.
Libra (Sept. 23–Oct. 22)
You resonate with things and people you love. The more you let yourself love, the better you feel. The better you feel, the healthier you become. Love is a healer, and so are you.
It was exactly what she’d always feared was true.
From the time Saina was very young, she worried that she would always be the lover and never the loved.
And then she grew up and it got more complicated. Now she thought that she would always be the salve to some artist’s eternally wounded soul — an unwilling goddess to be worshipped and adored, but never, ever worried over or taken care of. No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes.
Giant canvases that glorified her naked breasts and half smile, songs rhyming Saina and wanna, unfinished novels about an unknowable girl of dreams — none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favor.
Sometimes, when you’re in love with an artist, it can be hard to see that it’s not about you at all. You get lost in the attention, the deep, soulful gazes and the probing regard. And then, gradually, you come to realize that you’re not so much a woman as you are a statue. A statue on a pedestal that he chiseled and posed, a foreshortened figure that he sees only through a single squinted eye. When you’re in love with an artist, you’re no longer you, exactly, but a loving and generous Everywoman who will weave your life into a crafty plinth for his work.
And it doesn’t even matter if you’re an artist, too. You could have a whole room — a small one, but a whole room nonetheless — at the Whitney Biennial. Your gallery in Berlin could be paranoid enough about your potential defection to a rival that you’d have to fake an eccentric demand for weekly shipments of special-order, octopus-shaped Haribo gummies just so they’d stop asking you what they could do to make you happy; your dealer in New York could be fending off a waiting list filled with scores of discerning millionaires and you could be a permanent fixture on both the Artforum party pages and NewYorkSocialDiary.com, but your beautiful boyfriend with his perpetually dirty fingernails could still be so obsessed with the politics of his own creation that he would take all of that in with an absentminded kiss and ask you again and then again and then a fifteenth time if you heard the difference between nearly identical sound loops on the track accompanying his latest installation.
And then he could leave you. After making you his art object, making your love for him his symbol and subject, after presenting you with a heavy, hand-hammered gold band set on the inside with an uncut black diamond so that only the lump of it, sheathed in gold, could be seen when you wore it — a ring that got its own miniprofile in Vogue — after all that, he could still make your life into a Page Six blind item by leaving you for a jewelry-designing mattress heiress named Sabrina, with unattractive knees and a maddening sheaf of corn-silk hair. And yes, yes, it could be the same jewelry-designing mattress heiress who made your gorgeous, heartbreaking, stupid, human rights disaster of a ring.
None of it surprised Saina anymore. She was twenty-eight and she had turned unshockable. So when the phone rang and she picked it up and found her father in tears, her heart stayed put.
“It is over,” choked her father, coughing to cover the angry wobble in his voice.
“What’s over?” she asked.
“Our whole life.”
Saina looked around the room. My life was already over, she thought. She was washed up, tossed out, ruined and ridiculed and exiled from the magic island of Manhattan. What could be more over than that?
“Baba, don’t be so dramatic. What’s going on?”
“We are leaving.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is over. I lost it. Oh Jiejie, I lost it.”
“What?” asked Saina, her heart now quickening. “What did you lose? Tell me. You have to tell me. You can’t just not talk about it like . . . like everything.”
Saina’s father’s words came out in a rush, the breaking of a giant dam.
“All. Baba lost all. Wan le. You understand what that mean? Everything over.”
“The stores. You just mean the stores, right? That’s what you lost? We talked about that already.” Was he starting to forget things? He was too young for Alzheimer’s.
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. Now we come to New York.”
Her father’s English sounded more broken than usual. Not that he’d ever bothered to perfect it in the first place — the rules of grammar were beneath him, bylaws for a silly club that he had no intention of joining. Why should he spend any energy on English, he’d explained once, when soon the whole world would be speaking Chinese? Now, though, he sounded like a sweet-’n’-sour-chicken delivery boy who’d missed out on America and instead taken up residence in a new country called Chinatown.
“What do you mean you’re coming to New York?”
“We have no home, Jiejie. We come live with you now.”
“The house? But why was that tied up with everything else? I just . . . Baba, I don’t understand. How could there be nothing left? What about your savings? What about your other clients?”
There was a long, humid silence. Finally, he spoke again. “Daddy make a mistake. I think that if I can just hold on for long enough, then everything is okay again. So I just throw it all in, like throwing in a hole.”
“Oh. Daddy. I’m sorry.”
“No point in sorry now.”
“Okay.” What should she do? What could she do?
“How long it take to drive across country? Maybe eight day? Ten day?” He sounded small. Wounded.
Saina looked around her house, panic creeping in. It wasn’t even a house, really. Not in any way that her father would understand or approve of. Not a Bel-Air Georgian or a rehabbed modernist gem — not even a downtown New York loft. It was a Catskills farmhouse three generations away from any kind of respectability perched on the edge of a town abandoned by Lubavitchers and just beginning to be occupied by weekending gay couples and Third Wave farmers carrying blue-eyed babies in batik slings.
When Saina sold her New York apartment out from under her cheating boyfriend, all she could think of was retreat. Their entire bright white loft had been arranged around a slightly hysterical pair of Biedermeier chairs that they bought at an auction back when he still thought it was important to suggest that his family had as much ready cash as hers. The pair, scallop edged and velvet upholstered, held court in front of a twenty-two-foot-high blank wall that backdropped his confession about Sabrina. Lovely, pregnant Sabrina. He’d whispered it to Saina, whispered it, and then tiptoed out the door like a thief.
Her first thought was that she’d always hated those chairs. Her second thought was that all the letters of her name were contained in Sabrina’s, as if Sabrina encompassed everything that she herself was and then, in all her goldness, offered up even more.
Saina couldn’t do anything to Sabrina and her maybe baby, so she’d gotten rid of the chairs instead. Just picked them up and placed them on the curb, where they’d at least have the chance to become part of someone else’s good-luck story. Soon, though, she couldn’t even stand looking at the empty wall where they once were; she started to wish them back, to wish him back. It hadn’t been enough to cast out the only piece of furniture they’d ever bought together, she had to strike the entire set on which they’d acted out their lives. So Saina had sold the whole damn thing and now here she was, manufacturing domestic bliss all by herself. Except. Well, except.
“Baba, really? All of you? What about Meimei gen Didi?”
“Daddy will go pick them up.”
“You’re going to make them drop out of school? You can’t do that!”
“What are they learning in those schools anyway? Arizona State. Not even a school — party school only. And Gracie, she can go to high school in your town. They have high school there?”
“But what about their tuitions? They should be okay for at least the semester, right?”
He was quiet.
Saina had a terrible thought. “Is everyone’s money lost?”
“Not you,” said her father. “You are old enough to be separate.”
At least there was that. But with it came an unexpected sensation: Responsibility. Saina’s instinct was to abdicate it.
“I’ll give the money all to you! It’s not mine anyways, it’s yours, you made it! Take it and buy another house.”
Her father laughed.
“You old enough to be separate, but it is all Wang jia de already. All of ours. Family, Jiejie.”
Saina pictured her father, near dead from a million tiny cuts, oozing a glistening mercury blood. She didn’t want them to come, but there was no question as to whether or not she would receive them, find space for their things, buy enough food for five, and put fresh flowers in all the guest bathrooms. There were four bedrooms in this house. Exactly enough for her father, her stepmother, her brother, her sister, and herself. As if she had always known that it would be a refuge for the entire Wang family.
“Seriously, Dad?”
“You can’t talk to Baba that way, Grace.”
“But they’re kicking me out of school!” she hissed into the phone, embarrassed. “I told you you should have gotten me a car!”
“Gracie, we coming to pick you up tonight, okay?”
“Who’s we?”
“With your ah yi.”
“Oh her. Okay. But what happened? Dad, I’m being kicked out of school! It’s like they think I’m a criminal or something.”
“Grace, we certainly don’t think you’re a criminal,” said Brownie, the headmistress, who wasn’t even pretending not to eavesdrop. “In fact, I told your father that we would likely be able to work something out. Perhaps —”
“You are not going to make me work in the cafeteria,” said Grace, horrified. “There’s no way. I’d rather go to public school, Dad. Daddy!” Grace could swear that she heard her father crying on the other end of the line, but she didn’t want to say anything in case it turned out to be true.
“Okay, xiao Meimei, don’t worry, okay? It’s okay. We come pick you up and then we go get Andrew, and then we go to Jiejie jia.”
“Dad. Baba.” Grace felt very reasonable now; she could see that she was going to have to be the adult here. “What are you talking about? I am not driving cross-country with you guys. Who goes on a cross-country family trip? Anyways, I have to take my SATs. I’ll just stay at home, okay?”
Ugh. The headmistress would not stop looking at her. The last time Grace had been in this office was two semesters ago when her art teacher had narced on her. The art teacher, who made all the students call her Julie. It was embarrassing when adults tried to act like people.
The problem hadn’t been the dwindling supply of muscle relaxers hidden in the lining of her Louis Vuitton change purse or the bottle of Belvedere stashed under her rainbow of cashmere sweaters. No, the bitchy art teacher, who was so nineties with her ugly dark lipstick and riot grrrl bumper stickers, had walked into the computer lab and caught Grace uploading a photo of herself. She’d been in one of her best morning outfits ever: black lace Wolford tights, navy blue school uniform skirt (hemmed way up), Saina’s beat-up old cowboy boots, a new Surface to Air button-down topped with one of her dad’s old paisley Hermès bow ties from the eighties, a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses with fake lenses — which no one had to know about — and, holding together her deliberately messy hair, a bright yellow silk sash tied in a knot. So much cooler than that poseur VainJane.com’s outfits — Jane lived in Florida. How could anything really stylish ever happen there? How did every single outfit of Jane’s get so many comments, anyway? That girl thought that Louboutins were enough to make any outfit — so boring. Grace couldn’t understand it.
Anyway, Grace was sure that this outfit would be a hit, and she was about to post it to her blog, already anticipating the responses from her followers, when Julie had crept right up behind her, trying to be quiet. The teacher wasn’t even smart enough to realize that you couldn’t sneak up on someone who was using one of those computers because they’d be able to see the reflection of your stupid face on the screen.
As she’d reached out to tap Grace with one burgundy polished nail, Grace had turned and smiled.
And that was what she’d gotten a demerit for: Insubordination.
The ethics committee had decided that Grace’s blog was fashion focused and not about “exploiting herself and undermining her power as a young woman”— in other words, not about sex — but that she’d shown an unwillingness to accept guidance. It was a totally ridiculous thing to get in trouble for, but whatever. It didn’t matter anymore.
“Gracie, you pack your things up — but just the important things, okay? We be there in a few hours,” said her father
The headmistress cut in. “Grace, if you’d like someone to help you clear out your room, just ask. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help, alright, darling?”
Grace pressed the off button on her cell.
“Don’t call me darling,” she said. At least no one could give her demerits anymore. Ugh.
Sometimes she hated talking to her father. Was it possible to love someone and hate them at the same time? Or to love someone even if you didn’t actually like them? If her mother were alive, things would be different. Everyone she knew got along with their mothers and hated their fathers, but she didn’t have the luxury of a spare parent.
“So . . . we’re poor now.”
Grace’s roommate stared at her.
“It’s true, Rachel. We don’t have any money left. Nothing. I have to drop out of school, and my dad and stepmom are coming to pick me up, and we have to drive all the way to my sister’s house in some weird little country town in New York. Drive! I don’t know if we even have any stuff left. Don’t they take all of that when you’re bankrupt?”
“You’re bankrupt? Like, completely?”
“Well, my dad said he was, so I guess that means that I am, too.”
“Um, are you okay?”
“Do I seem okay?”
“I guess so . . . I mean, no one’s dead, right?”
“Except for my house. I was practically born in that house, and I didn’t even get to live there for long — I had to come live here. And now I’ll never even see it again.”
Rachel had heard about Grace’s family’s house even though she’d never once been invited over for break. There were secret passageways, and modern art, and once Johnny Delahari had taken a weird combo of E and H (everyone at school called it the Canadian Special, but no one else was crazy enough to actually do it) and passed out in Grace’s stepmother’s walk-in closet for hours with a silk camisole wrapped around his face.
“It smelled like lady pussy,” he’d told Rachel.
“But you said it was a camisole,” she’d said. “That’s like a tank top.”
“Okay, it smelled like lady boobs,” he’d replied, grinning, and then tried to reach up her shirt.
Now she wished that she had let him, because with Grace gone, he’d probably never come around to her room again.
Grace wheeled a desk chair over to the closet and balanced on it, pulling her luggage down from the top shelf. She jumped off the chair, launching it backwards towards Rachel, who stopped it with her purple ballet flat.
“Maybe you’ll get to have your own room,” said Grace.
“I think your roommate has to kill herself before they let you room alone.”
“Do you think it counts if it happens after they transfer?”
“Shut up, Grace. You’re not going to kill yourself.”
“You never know,” said Grace, pulling all her jeans off their hangers. Maybe they’d all commit suicide together. Or maybe her dad would drive them off a cliff. God, maybe she should just leave everything. If they were going to be poor, or dead, what was the point of having the same exact deconstructed rabbit-fur vest that Kate Moss was wearing in last month’s Elle? On the other hand, maybe being poor could be kind of glamorous, with holey old T-shirts and guys who had to work as bartenders and whole meals of just french fries, in which case, maybe it would also be kind of glamorous to have her clothes. She’d be like a Romanov or something, deposed and in hiding from all the worlds that mattered.
Her father had said, “Just the important things.” What was that supposed to mean? Grace looked at the pile of denim on the floor, then kicked it towards Rachel.
“Here,” she said. “Take it. I’m sick of them all anyways.”
“Seriously?”
Grace didn’t answer, just kicked the pile again as she turned to pull down the cork bulletin board, layered with clippings, over her desk. She laid it across her bed and started picking out the tacks, cupping them in her left hand. As she worked, she thought about Parents’ Weekend last year, when she’d walked up to their room and seen Rachel lying on the bed, her head in her mother’s lap. The door to their room had been ajar, and Grace had stood there for a long moment, watching as Rachel’s mother smoothed her daughter’s hair away from her face and gazed down at her, half smiling, full of love. She’d never felt jealous of Rachel for even a second until that day.
“Are you really bringing everything on that board? All those pictures and things?” asked Rachel.
“Of course.”
“Isn’t it kind of . . . kind of morbid? ”
“What’s morbid about it?”
“Well, they’re all pictures of dead people.”
“People die. Deal with it.”
“Yeah, people die, but that doesn’t mean that you have to plaster them all over our walls.”
“They’re your walls now, aren’t they.”
“I’m just saying, I know why you put them up and I think it’s creepy. You can give up pretending that’s not the reason.” Rachel took everything so seriously. That’s what happened when you were a total drama nerd.
“Why don’t you give it up, Rachel? Rachie Pie? Oh wait, I forgot. You’re saving yourself for, like, Andrew Lloyd Webber or something. You’re too good to just have s-e-x.”
“That’s not what this is about! Why does everything have to be about sex with you?”
“I thought that everything was about death with me.”
They faced off for a moment, then Rachel spoke. “I’m . . . I’m sorry for you. Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do? Like, do you want to borrow some money or something? Or, um, we could . . . steal you some food from the cafeteria? That you could take with you?”
Grace stared at her roommate, who was kneeling on the ground, greedily feeling up a pair of her jeans. She could kick Rachel in the face right now and never even have to deal with it. A satisfying crunch in her annoying, curly-haired face. She’d aim straight at the zits that always piled onto Rachel’s forehead, a bubbly constellation of them, and Rachel’s head would snap back and she’d have to shut up and Grace wouldn’t even get in trouble. Or maybe she’d have to go to jail, but what would it matter?
She turned back to the board.
“Isabella Blow,” said Grace, untacking a photograph of a thin woman quivering in profile, a crazy confection of a hat perched on her dark chignon.
“Elliot Smith.” She untacked another torn-out photograph, the singer’s Frankenstein face staring straight at the camera, pockmarks unretouched, holding his fist over his heart.
“Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.” Two photo-booth shots side by side, the woman with half-moon eyes and the man with his sweet, sad mouth, both raising their chins and looking down their noses like rebel bank robbers.
She looked at Rachel again. “They’re all brilliant.”
Rachel walked over to the board bowlegged, struggling to button up a pair of Grace’s jeans. “The cover of The Bell Jar. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love on Sassy. And this? Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. 1963,” she said, tearing the Diane Arbus photograph off of its tack and reading the caption. “Dead, dead, dead. How? Oh yeah, that’s right, suicide, suicide, suicide.”
Grace shrugged. “God, Rachel, you’re boring.”
Grace reached over and plucked a faded pair of jeans out of the pile — they were ’70s-style and high waisted, with a rope of braided denim looped through the belt holes. “You can’t have these.”
Grace pulled them on, along with an old T-shirt that she’d cut into a tank top and shoved her feet into a pair of lace-up prairie boots with just a little bit of a heel. And the vest. Her rabbit-fur vest.
Grace was raised to know that appearances mattered. If you put your Xanax in a Tylenol PM bottle, no one would care if you took four of them, and no one would judge you if, a little bit later on, you fell asleep with your head on your boyfriend’s shoulder after just two vodka Red Bulls. Not that she’d ever commit suicide like that.
Pills were a coward’s way out. You weren’t really doing anything; there was nothing decisive about them; one call from a dorm monitor and you’d be halfway to the hospital with a tube down your throat, getting your stomach pumped out.
Slitting your wrists was a good method, along the vein instead of across it, the steely knife following the blue-purple terrain of your upturned arm. If Grace slit her wrists, she’d use a long, thin blade, freshly sharpened, and trace a delicate V on her left wrist — but that would only work at home because there were no bathtubs at school. Bleeding out on a dorm room bed was way too depressing. She’d rather be in a milky bath with a flickering candle and a pile of books. The blooms of blood would turn the water pink, and she’d drape herself across the edge so she looked like that painting they’d just learned about, The Death of Marat.
Hanging was ugly. By the time anyone found you, your face would be a purple bloat and your eyes would be bulging out of their sockets. A gunshot depended too much on aim, jumping in front of a train would make the conductor feel guilty, and self-disembowelment was just medieval. Swimming out to sea sounded nice if your brain would let you give in instead of fighting the ocean for air; freezing to death would be even better, you could just close your eyes and succumb to a sleep where everything felt warm. And your corpse would be perfectly preserved even if no one would ever find it because you’d have to be all the way out in the Arctic or something for it to be cold enough to kill you.
She’d run through all the different methods to Rachel when they’d first met. Rachel had still seemed cool then, like she might be someone to stay up late and get in some good trouble with, but Grace had figured out pretty quickly that first impressions were always a lie.
“You might look gorgeous if you froze to death, but you’d still end up in the guts of a beggar,” Rachel had said, staring up at Grace with round little eyes like an awestruck rabbit. An awestruck rabbit who wanted desperately to prove that it was faster and smarter than the tiger that was about to eat it, kind of like a girl version of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Maybe with the same waistcoat. God, Rachel wore such stupid things.
“Guts of a beggar?”
“Shakespeare. ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’”
“The worms would all be frozen, too,” said Grace. And then she realized that she’d forgotten about poison. Maybe OD’ing on heroin or something would be the best way of all. Then at least she would have gotten to try it out before she died.
As wrong as Rachel proved to be about boys and music and understanding anything beyond how to kiss Mr. Taylor’s ass so that she was cast in every single play, she was right about the suicide thing.
It’s not that Grace actually wanted to flail around and lose control of her bowels and lie there with her eyes cranked open until she was carted away and incinerated — actually, that was exactly what she didn’t want to do. She wanted to die young and beautiful, not all messed-up looking. It’s just that, well, with suicide you got to choose — what you were wearing, what kind of note you left, how the whole thing actually went down when you slept that sleep of death. If life was all about making choices and taking responsibility for them, like adults were always saying, then why did death get to be something that just happened to you?
Years ago, Barbra had picked Charles out as the one among all the young men in his class who would make the most of himself. That was before she’d picked out her English name, before she’d learned to pluck her eyebrows and smooth her hair, before she’d yanked herself out of Taiwan and set out for America.
They were still Wang Da Qian and Hu Yue Ling then, just two on a campus of two thousand. Half of Charles’s classmates had been born in China, sons and daughters of tea merchants from Guangdong and government officials from Beijing. And the other half? Mostly children of mainlanders, too, but deposited headfirst, scrunch faced, and squalling, covered in a sticky film of blood and viscera, into the waiting arms of Taiwanese midwives who cooed over them all the same.
Not Barbra. There was no China in her blood. Her mother came from Taiwanese hill people who rode to town on an ox-drawn wagon loaded down with the daikon radishes that the Japanese occupiers pickled and grated and boiled in nearly every dish. She met Barbra’s father when he was a delivery boy, picking up produce and freshly plucked chickens for the kitchens of National Taiwan University. He went from pedaling around the markets on a rickety bicycle to keeping watch at the foot of a perpetually bubbling stockpot to presiding over the students’ communal lunches, which eventually underwent their own change, going from noxious oden stews to hearty rice porridges when the Japanese were defeated and a new Republic of China government took over.
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.