“And yet he thrives, James. He becomes an achiever. You may be wondering how he manages to thrive while burdened by so much self-hatred. How can he succeed, how can he make it, if he fundamentally doesn’t think he should exist?
“It’s because he manages to see above the wall of this disadvantage. Because self-hatred is as galvanizing as ambition. He develops the ability to see above his deprivation and to realize that, in reality, he’s lucky. Because he isn’t cherished, he’s allowed to aim beyond his parents’ petty goals. He can leave all of them behind.
“He earns a scholarship to an elite university on the East Coast, where, because of assumptions about his name, some believe he’s the descendant, many times removed, of a foundational historical figure in his father’s native country. Because of this misunderstanding, a lie of omission—for it can’t be for any other reason, although they say it’s for his wit and his sangfroid—he gets chosen to be a member of a finals club in his senior year. There he plays squash in their secret squash court and wears their not-so-secret tie. He eats the food cooked by their chef, a Chinese chef, “Mr. Louie,” a man actually from Vietnam who has trained as a pastry chef in France, and he adopts his club mates’ condescending gratitude for Mr. Louie’s labor. While eating the meals of Mr. Louie’s, he makes a number of friends whose connections enable him to find a job in ‘the City,’ where he goes with no illusions about owning it or being it. He knows ‘the City’ seduces people, dazzles them, and burns them up, but he knows not to believe and not to be betrayed. Every week he puts a sum of money away where nothing can touch it.
“The second son pays very careful attention to appearances. Because he knows that in our outer lives lie success. Because the balance sheet is a fingerprint of fortune’s favor. Because only in the numerable, the countable, can you find certainty, and only in certainty can you find truth.”
“That’s not true at all,” James hears his own voice butt in stubbornly. “Our inner selves exist. They’re unique, and they’re meaningful and mysterious, even if they are secret sometimes even from ourselves.”
Ming nods. “You’re thinking the second son is mistaken,” he says. “You may believe he has a special malady, a peculiar and uniquely individual malady of the soul. Certainly he thinks it’s possible he doesn’t have a soul. Although he doesn’t think it makes sense to believe in such a thing. He’s living in the twenty-first century.”
“He has a soul,” says James firmly.
“It’s possible.” Ming frowns. “And yet, who can be sure? He suspects—not believing, only suspecting—that that which feeds something like the soul—the vestigial soul—is missing, and perhaps as a result of this, he is inconsolable. Life, any kind of life, any small portion of any day in life, is unbearable for him. The little things of life others enjoy—choosing a new pair of sneakers, eating fancy donuts, going to see the opening of a superhero movie—are so baldly insignificant he can’t find pleasure in them. The more annoying details of living—getting stuck in traffic, making conversation with some stranger on the plane—are intolerable. Ordinary life or extraordinary life, neither holds meaning; he’s tried them both.
“Yes, there’s still something missing. He isn’t certain of this, because he knows that he’s dealing with the invisible realm, but he believes something is missing, and it can’t be found through ordinary means. He’s tried sex. He’s tried relationships. He steels himself against the rejection of his Asian features, makes repeated efforts until he finds white women open to dating him. And he’s come to dread the moment when a woman says to him, ‘We have so much in common.’ Are her parents laborers? Do they spend their days working with their hands, physically carrying and slicing and arranging and transforming food, no less, at the order of others? Do her parents make a hundred meals a day for people who think of them as semi-human, a smiling Asian couple like a pair of garden gnomes?
“Were either of her parents, for as little as a year, a month, ten days, five minutes, ever in such straits—such financial and situational and familial arrears—that they decided to throw it all in, trade in what assets they had, and their identities as citizens in another world, to become aliens in this one?
“Has she grown up keenly observing, scrutinizing the children around her as if she were researching the most intricate sociology report: their clothes, their games, their television shows, their preferred methods of cruelty, their figures of speech? Has she sought invisibility among them, hoped they would not notice her, because the least bit of attention could transform into physical cruelty?
“He has had these parents. He has done these things. How else could he have become such a success at finding cover, speaking in code? The fact is, she’s nothing like him. And if she thinks she is like him, then she doesn’t know him at all. And if she doesn’t know him, it follows that her proclamations of love are meaningless. It’s almost with relief that he understands he can be alone again, can be desolate again. He breaks up with her, remembering that, for him, none of this has ever been feasible because his heart, such as it is, is inconsolable!”
Ming raises his hand, signaling the server.
“Ming,” James says again. He has never known what his brother’s relationships were like, and now that Ming is telling him, he can hardly bear to listen.
“I want a cup of a coffee! Did you hear me?” Ming shouts. “A cup of coffee!” When he turns to James, he is wearing their father’s furious, starving stare.
James winces at his brother’s expression. And yet, hasn’t he always known this about Ming? That beneath his superiority and charisma, his hyper-competence, his high achievements, there existed this inconsolable self-hatred?
“He understands,” says Ming, “that through all of this, he’s been seeking solace from a source where it can’t be found.
“He searches for a new answer to his questions. And he discovers it. It’s hiding in plain sight; it’s something he has known since childhood: that all of the stress and discomfort, the dullness and insignificance of his daily life, the only life he has—can all be undone by money. The more money he has, the more his troubles can be undone. Why has it never occurred to him before, despite his immersion in spreadsheets, in other peoples’ monetary deals? Why has it not occurred to him that with a large sum of money, all of the problems in his life can be transformed into tiny, insignificant data points, and he can forever be free of them?”
“Really?” Is it possible? “How much money?”