The Wangs vs. the World (10 page)

Their mother laughing. Their mother braiding hair. Their mother telling stories about
her
mother, who was in a nursing home now, but had owned a Chinese restaurant downtown. Their mother getting mad at Daddy and throwing a bowl of salad against the wall, a clang and then a shower of green.

Their mother stepping into a helicopter.

That last one was the story Grace told herself over and over again. It was based on a photograph she had tacked up in her dorm room, the final image of their mother, the one Rachel had skipped over in her death catalog. The story had only two lines.

“She had me. She got into a helicopter.”

Sometimes there were variations, but it was still always just two lines.

“I was a little baby. She got into a helicopter.”

And: “She had me. They went to the Grand Canyon.”

And once, just once: “She died. Daddy didn’t.”

Grace opened her bag and flipped through the manila folder of images she’d pulled off her wall and slipped out the photo, laying it on her lap so her father wouldn’t be able to see it in the rearview mirror. There was still a little Blu-Tack left on the back of it, just enough to make it stick. Bending down slowly and shaking her hair over her left shoulder so that it made a sort of shield, Grace reached over and stuck the picture onto the bottom edge of the car door. Its ’80s colors faded now, the canyon a sepia wash behind her mother’s buoyant perm and snakeskin cowboy boots, her father behind the camera, clicking her mother into place, making her always thirty-two years old, the pregnant fullness forever just fading from her cheeks.

A hand reached out to tuck Grace’s hair behind her ear. Startled, she moved her leg to hide the photo and glanced up, but it was just Ama, old Ama, who smoothed Grace’s hair down and looked at her with watery eyes, irises faded and pupils yellowed.

十一
Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

MOST PEOPLE THOUGHT May Lee died on a mule. That was the worst part of it. Once they heard that it happened at the Grand Canyon, half of them just assumed that a mule was involved.

Charles Wang hated mules. Ugly, whimpering, misbegotten creatures; infertile beasts of burden. The only people who still used mules for anything other than entertainment were the mujahideen and the Amish, both lost tribes fighting for the useless past. Still, Charles let the misconception stand. After all, he could hardly go around reminding people that the mother of his children had ended her days in a fiery helicopter crash and not stumbling off the edge of a cliff on the back of a dusty gray excuse for a steed.

In truth, May Lee never stumbled. She was light and graceful and sweet, and by the time she died, Charles was thoroughly tired of spending his life with her.

Before that trip to the Grand Canyon, right after little Gracie was born, Charles had visited his lawyer to discuss initiating a divorce, but he hadn’t gone through with it.

He and May Lee had been married for a little more than ten years, without a prenup.

When Charles bundled May Lee off to city hall just three months after they’d met, in a rush of lust and tenderness that he’d mistaken for true love, the word
prenup
wasn’t even in his lexicon. And California, in its infinite wisdom, was a community-property state, which meant that he would lose half of everything he’d made in the years they’d been together because he’d been misled by a lopsided dimple and a well-applied swoop of eyeliner.

Mischief.

That’s what he’d been promised, but instead he received a dim bulb of goodness and passivity; it was a trade that a lesser man might have seen as a victory, but Charles Wang knew that he didn’t want to live out his life with goodness.

But the babies! Oh, the babies!

Charles was a man who loved children. His were small and soft and beautiful—God help the ugly babies!—with chubby little arms that always reached out to him. They were encased in sweet rosy skin that looked so perfect, so smooth and unblemished, that he wanted to roll them up in bales of cotton fluff and stuff them down his shirt like a kangaroo. He wished they could stay hidden away, with their damp, trusting little mouths, until they developed some sort of hard shell impenetrable to drugs or sex or disappointment or any of the thousand poison-tipped arrows the world might aim in their direction.

He could never trust May Lee to take care of them half the time. Or more. Those shortsighted judges would likely have awarded her and her dimple more custody of the children, more money of his, even though she had remained as resolutely empty-headed as she was the day they’d met.

The mother of his children was a beautiful woman who took her beauty for granted, who modeled only because a photographer had walked into Joy Loy, her parents’ Little Tokyo chop suey joint, and seen her standing there behind the counter, ready.

And why did she marry him?

Because he’d walked up to her at a party full of surfer-blond waiters in tuxedo shirts and stonewashed jeans passing trays of Wolfgang Puck’s first attempt at smoked salmon pizza to beturbaned Grace Jones wannabes and held his hand out to her, May Lee Lu.

May Lee. It meant
beautiful
in Chinese, though most immigrants would spell her name Meili. But May’s parents were third-generation Chinatown babies who tried to give their daughter a name that would go both ways, and it did. It spoke to Charles, who was lost in a sea of Jennys and Donnas, and it rolled off the tongues of the photographers and agents who kissed her cheeks and tried to ply her with champagne cocktails.

Charles had looked at her, the only other Chinese person in the room, and thought he recognized something fundamental in her. A deep kinship. An abiding drive that had landed them both in this strange room, at this strange moment. A willingness to dive into the whole wide world.

And May Lee looked at him, the only other Chinese person in the room, and thought about how much easier life would be if she was married.

Charles and May Lee Wang went to the Grand Canyon eight short weeks after the birth of their third child in order to do all the things that white people do with their marriages.

Try to reconnect!
(Hint: Eyes are the windows to the soul—have a sexy staring contest!)

Have romantic dinners!
(Hint: Oysters are aphrodisiacs!)

Talk about your feelings!
(Hint: Men love to solve problems—let them!)

It was all from a list May Lee kept folded in her purse, torn out of the February 1990 issue of
Mademoiselle.
Sixteen years later, he could still remember the photo of the laughing blond couple in matching denim shirts at the top of that list, and the careful way she unfolded the tearsheet and smoothed it out every time she referenced one of the hints.

Item four on the list: Share new experiences!
(Hint: Fear is bonding! Why not try a roller coaster?)

May Lee was scared of heights. Charles was scared of dying in a helicopter crash. So they booked the Lover’s Special, a seventy-five-minute aerial tour of the Grand Canyon departing from Las Vegas that promised majesty, grandeur, and two glasses of champagne apiece. As May Lee stepped into the helicopter, Charles took a picture and then bounded across the tarmac to settle into the bucket seat beside her. In a determined show of affection, he adjusted the straps of his wife’s seat belt and leaned in close to buckle it, but left his own undone so that his shirt wouldn’t rumple. As they flew over the South Rim and caught their first glimpse of the canyon out of the fishbowl windows, Charles took hold of May Lee’s small hand.

“Wow, it’s so pretty! It’s huge!” she said, squeezing his hand.

Charles didn’t answer. Instead, he felt the helicopter sway from side to side like an old-fashioned cradle and wondered if this was one of those daredevil pilots who was going to try to get a rise out of them by pretending he was about to crash. Charles felt the sweat prickle under the rough linen of his Rive Gauche safari shirt and was just about to tap their pilot on the shoulder when the man’s voice broke into their prerecorded tour narration.

“Folks, we seem to be having a problem—”

And then a wild, sick lurch and a screech from the front seat as the pilot—a former Coast Guard sergeant who completely lost hold of his military demeanor—gave up control of the craft. Their helicopter slammed into one of the 270-million-year-old Kaibab Limestone formations, bounced, once, on a ridge, and exploded as it dropped five thousand feet to the floor of the canyon.

Still on the ridge: Charles, saved by his sartoriphilia.

The bounce threw an un-seat-belted Charles against the improperly latched door, flinging him out while slowing his trajectory just enough that he landed with no more force than, say, a fall off a bicycle. Charles experienced the entire event as a flash of heat and steel and noise, accompanied by a gunpowder-and-roses smell so unexpectedly sweet that he was sure he’d open his eyes to find himself in the testing room of one of his factories, a broken vial of rose oil at his feet. Instead, he stood at the edge of death, choking on dust and surprise, wiping mule shit from his shirt, and was instantly flooded with a shameful relief. He wasn’t
happy
that May Lee was almost certainly gone, but as he looked down on the fireball at the bottom of the grand and glorious canyon, he knew that luck had once again smiled upon Charles Wang.

十二
Vernon, CA

186 Miles

DRIVING SOUTHEAST on two and a half hours of freeways, plus an hour at a U-Haul rental place on Western and Venice, landed the Wangs behind a building in Vernon close to sunset. Covered with a faded mural of giant Aztec women grinding maize under gargantuan stalks of corn, the former tortilla plant was now—or was until last week, at least—one of the three buildings that warehoused the output of Charles’s factories.

He still had the key. In fact, he still had all of his keys, encircling a wide brass ring, each bearing a piece of dark green label tape embossed with a number and a letter. This was the fifth property that he had acquired, after the vast mixing plant in Garden Grove and before the former aircraft hangar next to a thread manufacturer downtown, so he located key 5a (the front door) and 5d (the back door). 5b was for the bathroom and 5c opened the small office inside the warehouse. The letters were assigned depending on Charles’s own migratory patterns: whichever door he opened first received an
a
, and then onwards through the alphabet, so that each time he revisited a place it also meant retracing that first heady rush of acquisition.

“Dad, what are we doing here?”

“Daddy just getting some things to put in the U-Haul. No problem.”

Charles slammed the car door shut. Let them puzzle over what he was doing; better that than to explain or ask permission. Anything stealthy was always best done out in the open; confidence was the truest disguise. Not that there would be anyone else watching in this strange little city where only factories and warehouses lived. He and KoKo had once explored their way through Vernon after her first big order went into production—she in a violet-and-canary-patterned kimono minidress and platform sneakers, he in a crisp, banded straw fedora, walking arm in arm through the dusty streets littered with salsa-smeared balls of foil and other taco-truck detritus. Now KoKo wouldn’t even speak to him and that fedora was still hanging on a peg in his closet, waiting to be sold off.

Charles rounded the corner. When the bank took possession of his properties, he’d been required to sign a stack of contracts, one of which ensured that he would no longer approach or access any of them. The surveillance cams weren’t mentioned in the endless triplicates that he signed, each with a flourish bigger than the last, so Charles had asked Manny, the manager—so satisfying that match between name and occupation!—to switch them all off. He’d never bothered to contract with an outside security firm; pricey as it was, there wasn’t much of a black market in argan oil.

This should be simple. Go in the front door, grab a dolly from the office, locate the fifteen boxes that were marked for Ellie and Trip Yates in Opelika, Alabama, go out through the back door, load up the U-Haul, maybe slip the dolly in with the boxes, and speed back onto the 10 freeway.

And then he saw it. Glinting betrayal in the form of a new doorknob, gaudy gilt where the old brass one, worn smooth by years of maize-powdered hands, had once been.

Now the sun felt almost unbearably hot and Charles backtracked around the corner only to spot the same Home Depot special on the rear door. Alright. There was one more solution left.

“Gracie . . . ,” said Charles, leaning in through the driver’s side window. “You want to help Daddy?”

She looked up, frowning at him. “With what?”

Charles paused. It was hard to predict what would launch Grace into a wounded fury. She never used to be like that, his Gracie. It was his fault. He never should have sent her away. Charles could feel himself sagging with middle-aged defeat, a loser who lacked the hot-blooded need to wrestle America to the ground and take her milk money, who never had the balls to flip his father’s shame into a triumphant empire, who marched obediently towards death and hid from life and always chose the wrong path.
No. Not yet
. He was still Charles Fucking Wang and he would lead the way out of the wilderness. Straightening to his full five feet eight inches and sucking in his stomach so that his shirt rode smoothly into the waistband of his trousers, Charles cocked his head at Grace and gestured for her to get out of the car.

“Sorry, Daddy, yes—I’ll help you. What do you want me to do?”

Charles looked down the alley. It was past sunset and all the workers at the factories on either side of his had long since gone home.