The Wangs vs. the World (29 page)

“This is.”

“Saina, it’s Bryan Leffert. I’m sorry it took us some time to get back to you.”

“That’s okay.”

A week ago, once it became clear that the bankruptcy wasn’t just some dramatic misinterpretation of her father’s, Saina had called her accountant and asked him about the situation. She’d thought of it as more of a precaution—the money was hers, she could give it to her family, everything would be fine.

“Look, I’m just going to get straight to it. We weren’t sure whether this was going to happen, so we didn’t want to worry you needlessly, but it looks like First Federal is attempting to place what is essentially a lien against your trust.”

Except that now it wasn’t.

“I don’t understand. I thought that once I passed twenty-five that was it. That it was just mine.”

“That’s not quite the case. Because of a little creative accounting, your father’s business was shielding the interest on your accounts from the IRS, which now leaves them susceptible to being treated like they’re part of his assets.”

Saina remembered, suddenly, the day Ama told her that her mother was dead. A cold, sunny February afternoon. Slamming the door of her friend Hilly’s mom’s car, looking up and seeing Ama in the driveway, and knowing that something was over.

“So what happens now?”

“It may be that nothing will change. We essentially have to wait and see. If, after all of your father’s assets are sold, nothing remains owing, you’ll be able to hold on to everything in your accounts.”

She’d stood there, close enough to Hilly’s mom’s car that she couldn’t drive off, and thought about getting back in. They had invited her out for dinner. They were going to get Hunan Palace, and she could pretend that she changed her mind and was in the mood for gloppy kung pao chicken after all, but in the end, she’d stepped away, Hilly’s mom had zoomed off, and Ama had reached out and picked her up, even though she was taller and no matter how hard Ama squeezed and lifted, Saina’s Keds still swept the driveway.

“So I can’t draw from it now?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Two minutes ago she was sitting on a bench with her boyfriend and his best friend, and nothing in the world was wrong. Nothing in her world, at least. She looked over at them. Leo was listening to Graham, who was doing an imitation of Sloppy-Joe Man, one of his favorite daily customers who ran a goat farm and never ate a vegetable.

“Saina?”

“Yes? Sorry, it’s just a lot to take in.”

“I know. It, well, it gets a little worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your investment account is tied up with your trust, so all of those assets are frozen as well. But look, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that everything that you brought in is treated separately.”

By the time she finished the conversation, Leo and Graham were looking up at her, quiet. She put the phone back in her pocket as Leo stood and gripped her arms.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Sometimes Saina wished that she had more friends with trust funds. It would just make things easier. Life wouldn’t be as hard to explain. She could complain about losing millions of dollars she’d never earned in the first place without feeling like she didn’t deserve to be upset about it.

“Nothing, it’s okay, let’s go.”

He held on to her. “Hey. Tell me.”

“You’re going to think it’s crazy.”

“I’m okay with crazy.”

“It wasn’t Grayson or anything.”

“I know that. I’m not worried about that.”

And she saw that he wasn’t. She was wrong. He had more faith in her sureness than she did. He was just worried because she was worried. It was a novel thing. A nice thing. A good thing.

“It was my accountant.” She glanced over at Graham.

“Is this a private couple talk?”

“No. It’s just, stuff . . . that I don’t know if I want to be unprivate about.” She had seen people change around her when they found out the selling price of her work or the contents of her bank account. She had seen Grayson change, and in her starry-eyed lust she had just decided that it was him, falling more in love with her. It felt like that sometimes—people would get brighter, louder, quicker to laugh, and more eager—as if the very existence of those dollars were an electric conduit.

Saina shrugged. What did it matter? The money was all gone anyway. She was sure of it. She should be devastated, but instead she just felt numb.

She looked at Leo. “You know how my dad’s going through the bankruptcy?” He nodded. She turned to Graham. “Did Leo tell you?”

Graham swatted the air in front of him. “No way. You think this guy would ever tell me about anything that you might want to keep to yourself? Unh-unh. He’s like a vault.”

“Well, basically, it turns out that my accounts are still completely tied up with my dad’s company, so everything’s frozen right now. And I might lose it all.” Saying it out loud made her heart bottom out a bit.

“So, give us a little context here,” said Graham. “Just how shitty is this? If my accounts were frozen, it would probably be a good thing because then they’d have to stop charging me for dropping under two thousand dollars.”

“It’s a little more than that.”

They waited.

“More like a few million.”

Graham fell off the seat. Leo let go of her arms.

“You ate here when you were a millionaire and you never demanded my best bottle? Not once? What’s the point of rich friends if they don’t buy out your wine list?”

Underneath Graham’s antic tirade, Leo said, “You never told me that.”

“I sort of told you.”

Leo shook his head.

“I told you about my dad, and how the business went under, and how he was losing the house.”

“But you didn’t tell me about you.”

“I guess I just thought that you assumed.”

“That you had a trust fund?”

“Well, yeah.”

“What did you mean by accounts, plural?”

“I had a career, Leo. Have. I
have
a career. I did well.”

“I knew that. I guess I just didn’t think about the money part—”

“How did you think I bought the house?”

“It’s upstate New York. I just figured that a down payment out here was like rent in New York.”

“I don’t have a mortgage.”

“Whoa.” That was Graham again. “Okay, that’s probably like the most baller thing you can say as an adult. From now on, my goal in life is going to be to say that someday. Mortgage? I don’t got no fucking
mortgage!
”

Saina laughed and turned back to Leo. “Are you mad?”

His hands returned finally, one spanning her waist, the other back on her arm. She felt instantly warmed and leaned against him. This was what she’d missed, what had made her seek out Leo as soon as Grayson had packed up his pile of T-shirts: Their shared physical shorthand, the way they responded perfectly to each other’s bodily cues so that they knew when to entwine and when to separate without a word of discussion.

“No, Saina. No.” He kissed her, inhaling slowly as his lips pressed against her cheek. “I’m just surprised. And I like us to tell each other things.”

Saina turned to face him, pressing her body against his. “I know, but this was a hard thing to tell. I guess, in a way, it’s easier to say it to you now that the money’s all gone.”
Gone.
The word echoed in her head and she repeated it. “Gone.” It echoed again, making her feel hollow inside, her brain tumbling down her throat and pounding against her heart, as if the money were the only thing that had filled her up and kept everything in its proper place.

“Hey, you don’t know that, right? You said
might
.”

“It’s just . . . nothing’s worth as much anymore, but the loan is still for the same amount, you know? So they’re going to sell off the house where I grew up and pretty much everything in it, and all of the factories and stock, but I don’t think that will cover the original loan, and that’s when the bank will go after what I have. Not this house, I don’t think, because the title’s under my name, but everything that’s still tied to my dad in name, probably.” She leaned closer to Leo, pressing her forehead into his chest.

“What’s your dad going to do?”

“Oh god. He has this crazy plan where he thinks that he’s going to roll up to the old village in China and somehow be able to reclaim the land that
his
father lost.”

“Wait,” said Graham, “are you a princess or something? Or, like, the Last Empress? Who just has land to reclaim?”

“And what would he do with it?” asked Leo.

“Become a farmer? You can give him tips. I don’t know. I don’t think he’s thought that far. To be honest, I think he’s lost his mind a little bit.” She paused, picturing them. Generations of Wangs that had things, and then three that lost things. “It’s just old family land. I don’t even know if it’s real. He says it is, but he’s never even been back to China.”

“Why not?”

Why not?
Saina wasn’t really sure. When he was living in Taiwan, travel between the two places was restricted, but America had lifted its ban before he’d immigrated. “He probably didn’t want to go unless he could own the whole country.”

“But he’s coming here now?” asked Graham.

“Yep. Plus my stepmother and my brother and sister. They stopped off at my uncle Nash’s house in New Orleans, but I think they’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”

Graham nudged Leo. “Ready to meet the in-laws?”

Leo looked at her. “Are they ready to meet me?”

“I think so. They’ll just be glad that you’re not, well, that you’re not Grayson.”

“See,” said Graham, “one step up already!”

Saina looked at them and for a moment she was bitterly, intensely jealous. Life was so weightless for some people. She wanted to call her father right now and tell him not to come. Just wash her hands of the Wangs altogether, never mind that family was family and she should be glad that she was going to give hers a home. A homeland.

Should she even tell her father about this latest setback? He was probably counting on her reserves to finance the pursuit of the land in China, but what was that going to get them? Leo was right, what could her citified father possibly do with it? Even if he got it, which seemed impossible, it would probably be farmland out in the middle of nowhere. Saina tried to picture him out there, far from the modern towers of Beijing or Shanghai, demanding that some poor peasant boy make his cappuccino bone-dry, asking villagers if there was a better restaurant in town, realizing that he couldn’t gossip about the man next to him in Chinese—which sometimes seemed to be his and Barbra’s sole pastime—because everyone around him would
be
Chinese.

Her father, sweating through a custom-tailored suit, armed with a bespoke hoe, trying to raise ghosts on that long-lost land.

The price of a single plane ticket to China could probably buy a few acres out here in Helios, thought Saina, looking out at the empty fields behind the restaurant. “At some point every old family’s home had to be a new home.”

Graham shook his head. “My family’s never had an old home. Sharecropper’s cabins to boarding houses to rented rooms to me, here, living the dream. And look at Leo—just a little orphan boy.”

Saina smiled at them vaguely. How many generations would it take the Wangs to feel like upstate New York was their ancestral seat? One generation? Maybe two at the most? Saina thought about how a child, a son or daughter of hers, might romanticize their upbringing, spinning a narrative out of the way their people started out in the Old East and continued here in the New.

Who were the Native Americans, really, but a band of Chinese people who had set their sights east and walked for millennia?

三十一
Opelika, AL

2,493 Miles

AMERICA WASN’T DONE with Charles Wang. He gave her his best ideas and basest impulses—the most vital parts of a man—and in return she snatched away his son. Andrew didn’t leave; he was stolen. By a smug porcelain statue with an inkwell for a heart who only wanted to feed off of his youth and beauty. Charles cursed every tenth of a mile that ticked over on the odometer, each click placing another impassable length between the remaining Wangs and their only son.

No.
His
only son. And only his son. Without May Lee in the world, Andrew belonged only to him. Barbra had no grounds to lay any claim. Charles’s own parents were dead, dropping away, one after the other, soon after he arrived in America. All that remained of them was the shard of bone in his suitcase. May Lee’s father was long gone but her forgetful mother still languished in some San Gabriel Valley nursing home that would not be receiving any more monthly checks signed by Charles Wang. May Lee’s worthless, passive siblings would have to figure out a way to pay for it now.

What was the point of having children? All they did was leave you. He’d left his parents. May Lee had tossed money at hers and fled. Barbra had slipped away from hers without even telling them that she was going. At the very moment when children might emerge from the uselessness of adolescence and finally take on some of the burden of being alive, that was when they blithely severed themselves at the root with one cruel, unthinking cut.
Little assholes.

He left too soon. He left and let that woman have his son. Of all the things that he had lost, this was the very worst.

The air-conditioning broke down somewhere between Biloxi and Mobile. There was a smell, like every frozen thing in the world had just died, and then nothing. No matter how many times they toggled the air on and off, nothing stirred in the bowels of the car.

Despite the heat, Barbra kept her window closed, the scarf still wedged between the glass and the frame. She might choose to melt rather than sacrifice the pallor that she thought was aristocratic, but he and Grace had rolled down the rest of the windows.

By the time he pulled into Opelika, all three of them were sweating, shirts soaked through. A quartet of Obama posters—the one that looked like a piece of Communist propaganda—peeled in the window of a boutique while a McCain poster was taped to the door of a neighboring furnace-supply store. This place looked like the model for Main Street, U.S.A., each store an orderly two stories with shingled façades and colored awnings. As he slowed to the town’s speed limit, Charles flipped through the radio dial until he landed on a talk station.