Charles and May Lee had moved to the San Gabriel Valley because, to Charles’s great surprise, they were about to have a baby. No question, that baby had to speak Chinese as well as she ever spoke the bastard English, so the Wangs, back when there were just three of them, made their first home in a sunburned suburb that had the advantage of being close to both Charles’s first factory and an ever-growing spread of dim sum emporiums and noodle houses brought in by a new influx of immigrants.
As for Nash, Nash was a budding China scholar in the midst of his PhD slog at USC, hoping to pick up the language by immersion and looking forward to the day that he would get a China studies professorship and a lovely Asian wife—he wasn’t picky about nationality, any part of East Asia would do. Charles knew that his friend was half in love with May Lee, and sometimes on those crisp California nights, when they were down to the last inch of liquor and it was so late that even the mosquitoes had gone to bed, he wished that the two of them could just swap houses. Baby Saina would sleep at the foot of his bed in one—he could stow her in the closet whenever a girlfriend stopped by—and May Lee could perch on Nash’s lap in the other, giggling and feeding him delicacies with chopsticks instead of getting into a helicopter with Charles Wang.
When that convenient vision failed to manifest—May Lee didn’t have enough imagination to leave an increasingly wealthy manufacturer for a poor scholar, even if that scholar had been raised on five thousand acres of cotton; she didn’t have enough second sight to know that it might have saved her life—all parties moved west instead. The Wangs took up residence in Bel-Air, and Nash landed first in a Marina del Rey bachelor pad of the wet-bar-and-whirlpool-tub variety, then, as his professorial duties increased, in an unlikely Victorian on the outskirts of L.A.’s depressed downtown, and finally here, scrambling to hold on to his family’s ancestral home. When they first met, all their talk had been about the glorious futures that surely awaited them; with age, and distance, and a widening and calcifying of their own worldviews, these discussions became more and more like jousts where they lanced at each other with their shifting opinions and left bloody and sated.
In the end, he and Nash agreed on only two things: History had failed them both, and the only solace left was that China, their China, remained the greatest civilization in the world.
“Wang xian shen!” Nash, at least, pronounced Charles’s last name the way it was meant to be said, long and rounded, not flat and nasal. “You’ve been fingering that phone all night.”
“Sorry, sorry.” He slipped the cell phone back into his jacket pocket, embarrassed. The lawyer wasn’t going to call now; he’d probably been out of the office since lunch, spending Charles’s six hundred dollars an hour on golf course fees and showy watches. Charles looked at Nash and hoped his friend wouldn’t ask. Anything.
Another hour. More whiskey. The night was almost over. Drink made the world thrum with possibility. When sober morning came, Charles always realized that he’d spent the previous evening talking too loudly and with too much conviction about things that he would never do and could never change, but in the moment, it all seemed endlessly possible.
Sometimes Charles thought that conversation must be the truest art form. In a good back-and-forth, you’re continually creating something new, something that only exists in a single present moment. Whole universes were built and destroyed in the course of a good conversation.
“Some of my students haven’t even read Plato. They barely deserve to be enrolled in a university!” said Nash.
“Aha! You say all should be love and equality, but now you want exclude people depending on what they read. What if someone grow up in house with no books? Not everyone have grand library like you!”
“No, that’s precisely what I do not want to do! Books are the simplest gateways through which to pass. There are public libraries! Anyone can pick up a book! There are compendiums of the classics that a lazy person can read through in a week!”
Charles tried to edge in with an excellent point, but Nash talked right over him.
“Look, I don’t expect everyone to be well versed in Sino-American relations or the history of the Great Leap Forward. I recognize that those are specialized areas of interest, but whatever happened to our shared references and understandings? How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own? When I go to a failing strip club in New Orleans and say that I’m at Ozymandias’s pleasure palace, I want everyone to laugh and get depressed.”