“She me boun-cee cah-sul de?”
As soon as Ama started talking, Barbra leaned back. She always did that, thought Grace, just took herself out of the family whenever she wanted to. Of course, when Saina had a big gallery opening or something, Barbra was always ready to get dressed up and be part of the Wangs, but she never stayed on the team for the whole game. So unfair.
“Oh nothing, Ama. It’s just—hot dogs are fine, really,” said Grace.
“See!” said Charles, waving the last hot dog at Kathy. “All good! No worries!”
“Ah bao, I think that’s Kathy’s,” said Barbra. “Kathy, have you had one yet?”
“You want it, you take it,” said Kathy, shrugging again. Her salt-and-pepper hair was all bristled up; with her gray fleece and un-made-up face, she looked like she was all one color.
“Well,” said Barbra, “we should probably be going soon.”
“Ni men bu shi yao zhu yi wan ma?”
“Oh,” said Kathy, in a strange, high voice, “did you drive two cars? Did I miss the other one? Did you drive another car besides my ma’s?”
Grace looked at the three of them. Getting old was horrible.
She watched her father shuffle uncomfortably on the sofa. Grace hadn’t even thought about it, but it was true. This car was supposed to be Ama’s. Were they just going to steal it from her now? Sure, her dad had been the one to give it to Ama, but a gift was a gift, wasn’t it?
“Ama is very kind, too kind,” said Grace’s dad. “She will let us drive the car to Saina’s house. We hope we can give it back soon.”
“Too kind,” said Kathy. “Too kind, too, too kind.”
十五
THE WANGS had fallen so far, so fast.
As a child, Charles never entirely believed his own family’s tales of grandeur: The five-story estate carved into the side of a stone mountain, with a legion of porters ready to carry the mistress of the house up and down on a palanquin. The koi ponds and amusing lap dogs and gold-edged dishes brought out for endless banquets of freshly slain suckling pigs. The hall of treasures, where hunks of amber that contained prehistoric creatures lined the rosewood shelves along with polished nautilus shells and a Fabergé ostrich egg. All of it surrounded by acres upon acres, all green.
He could never parse that mythic life with the spare rooms and quiet meals of his childhood. Over the years, his aunties’ remembrances of their familial past had taken on a faded fairy-tale air, mixing in his young mind with thumbed-through stories of the archer who saved the world from seven suns and the goddess who was exiled to the moon, where her only friend was a rabbit.
And now Charles had managed to lose an entire gilded existence twice as quickly, without the assistance of a world war or a murderous demagogue. Maybe failure was encoded in the DNA, like sickle-cell anemia or Tay-Sachs disease, revisiting generation after generation until some quirk of crossbreeding finally managed to eradicate those traitorous chromosomes. Maybe May Lee’s blithe stupidity would bubble up and lift the stain of failure from his children. Not that it was working yet. Saina was hiding out in the forgotten countryside, Grace was still a child, and Andrew, well, Andrew wanted to be a stand-up comedian, a career choice that might as well be a deliberate rebellion against success.
He’d tainted them all with his own fatal misstep. Charles had always thought of himself as a businessman’s businessman. He was in the makeup game because he had landed on a way to produce popular products cheaply, but it could just as easily have been gourmet peanut butter or building insulation or shoelaces—wherever the opportunity presented itself. He’d trained himself to love the mythos of makeup because of the money to be made, but if he’d come to America with a list of algae-farm contacts, he might even now be extolling the virtues of green juice and branching out into bee pollen.
Everything he did, he did with passion; emotion didn’t enter into it. Women were ruled by emotion; men by passion. That was the truth of it. Forget Mars and Venus, the real secret of the difference between the sexes was right there.
Men: conquerors of lands, seekers of beauty, upholders of truth.
Women: bearers of the children, keepers of the homes, mourners of the slain.