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.