Light-headed now from hunger, he crossed the plaza, shoving past a pretty girl in a brown uniform passing out packs of tissues with something advertised on them and pulled on the heavy door, wincing as a blast of cold air smacked him in the face.
Where was it? Where was their own line? Charles stalked into the makeup area, enraged by its prettiness, breathing in the perfumed department store scent that was the same in Beijing as it was in Cairo or Beverly Hills. There was nothing with the department store’s old-fashioned logo on it, not a pot of blush or a stick of eyeliner. No house brand, but everywhere there were women with carefully styled hair and expensive clothes that hung just so on their shoulders. Even the chubby ones were well dressed, everything tailored so that no rice-pot binges were betrayed by a lumpy sheath.
Hunger and disappointment, rage and a furious sort of envy for the things that were once his and now were not pulsed through Charles. At the end of the cosmetics section, the glowing glass cases of jewelry began. A woman his age stood at one of the counters with an older man who could be her father but was probably her husband. In front of them sat a velvet-lined box with three massive watches that dwarfed even his beloved Audemars Piguet, surrendered along with the rest of his timepieces.
Who were these people who had stayed in China? That gray-haired man strapping on an ostentatious F. P. Journe and asking whether it was waterproof, was he one of the university students who had fallen under the sway of Mao and overrun the Wang family land?
Nearby, an elderly woman watched her friend exclaim as a salesgirl fastened a strand of fat, lustrous pearls around her neck. Those tai-tais tittering over baubles, were they the same vicious Little Red Guard schoolgirls who had pulled his elderly aunts out of bed and paraded them through the streets, stringing their arms through a wooden yoke and forcing dunce caps on their snowy heads?
Across the floor, a kid with the tips of his hair bleached an ugly blond rang up a tower of shoeboxes as his manager fussed right and left, fawning over a girl tapping on her cell phone, who barely noticed his ministrations. That slavish manager who now spent his days fitting six-hundred-dollar high heels on privileged young feet might have been one of the toughs in tattered uniforms who had taken his left-behind family heirlooms—the centuries-old book of Wang family genealogy, the scrolls written by Zheng Xie that his father had still missed, quietly and desperately, a decade later—and burned them all to ash.
How had all these peasants transformed themselves?
And why hadn’t his family stayed and done the same?
A man in a suit and a silver name tag touched his arm and asked, in a provincial Chinese that sounded slurring and soft, “Is there a problem?” Charles realized that he’d been hunched over, gripping the edge of a glass case full of Smythson notebooks bound in leather, their covers printed with simple slogans: JUMP FOR JOY, GAME ON, TOP SECRET. He had one of his own that said CHAMPION, a just-because gift from Barbra. Objects that mere months ago had seemed casual and, if not necessary, at least deserved, now felt outlandish to Charles. Had she really spent 460 yuan—What was that? Seventy-five dollars!—on a notebook that he had used twice?
Oh, the man was still there, waiting for his response. Charles’s sweaty fingertips squeaked on the glass as he shook his head. “No, no. Just looking at these books, so beautiful!” The store official frowned down at his flashing cell phone and moved past Charles, barely pausing to nod.
For a second, he let himself close his eyes. Charles felt faint and a little numb. Concentrate, he commanded himself. Concentrate on the smoothness of the countertop, on the soft music that snuck in through the hidden speakers. Stay present. Breathe. He couldn’t have a stroke, here, now. He was too close to the land. He had to push through. Charles breathed in deeply, but the guff of perfumes came at him in a nauseating rush and he struggled towards the exit, wondering if he had remembered to take an aspirin that morning.