The price of a single plane ticket to China could probably buy a few acres out here in Helios, thought Saina, looking out at the empty fields behind the restaurant. “At some point every old family’s home had to be a new home.”
Graham shook his head. “My family’s never had an old home. Sharecropper’s cabins to boarding houses to rented rooms to me, here, living the dream. And look at Leo—just a little orphan boy.”
Saina smiled at them vaguely. How many generations would it take the Wangs to feel like upstate New York was their ancestral seat? One generation? Maybe two at the most? Saina thought about how a child, a son or daughter of hers, might romanticize their upbringing, spinning a narrative out of the way their people started out in the Old East and continued here in the New.
Who were the Native Americans, really, but a band of Chinese people who had set their sights east and walked for millennia?
三十一
Opelika, AL
2,493 Miles
AMERICA WASN’T DONE with Charles Wang. He gave her his best ideas and basest impulses—the most vital parts of a man—and in return she snatched away his son. Andrew didn’t leave; he was stolen. By a smug porcelain statue with an inkwell for a heart who only wanted to feed off of his youth and beauty. Charles cursed every tenth of a mile that ticked over on the odometer, each click placing another impassable length between the remaining Wangs and their only son.
No. His only son. And only his son. Without May Lee in the world, Andrew belonged only to him. Barbra had no grounds to lay any claim. Charles’s own parents were dead, dropping away, one after the other, soon after he arrived in America. All that remained of them was the shard of bone in his suitcase. May Lee’s father was long gone but her forgetful mother still languished in some San Gabriel Valley nursing home that would not be receiving any more monthly checks signed by Charles Wang. May Lee’s worthless, passive siblings would have to figure out a way to pay for it now.
What was the point of having children? All they did was leave you. He’d left his parents. May Lee had tossed money at hers and fled. Barbra had slipped away from hers without even telling them that she was going. At the very moment when children might emerge from the uselessness of adolescence and finally take on some of the burden of being alive, that was when they blithely severed themselves at the root with one cruel, unthinking cut. Little assholes.
He left too soon. He left and let that woman have his son. Of all the things that he had lost, this was the very worst.
The air-conditioning broke down somewhere between Biloxi and Mobile. There was a smell, like every frozen thing in the world had just died, and then nothing. No matter how many times they toggled the air on and off, nothing stirred in the bowels of the car.
Despite the heat, Barbra kept her window closed, the scarf still wedged between the glass and the frame. She might choose to melt rather than sacrifice the pallor that she thought was aristocratic, but he and Grace had rolled down the rest of the windows.
By the time he pulled into Opelika, all three of them were sweating, shirts soaked through. A quartet of Obama posters—the one that looked like a piece of Communist propaganda—peeled in the window of a boutique while a McCain poster was taped to the door of a neighboring furnace-supply store. This place looked like the model for Main Street, U.S.A., each store an orderly two stories with shingled fa?ades and colored awnings. As he slowed to the town’s speed limit, Charles flipped through the radio dial until he landed on a talk station.
A nasal twang rang through the speakers. “Well, there are people in my town, I’m not saying who they are, but they know who they are, and I’m not saying I’m one of them, not that I’d say it if I were one of them, but sure, there are people here who wouldn’t vote for a man because of his skin color, sure. Not me, I treat every man the same, white, black, or purple, but there’s a lot of narrow minds.”
And then the interviewer. “A Gallup poll of Alabama residents shows that most respondents would consider voting for a black president but didn’t think that others in their state would do the same.”
Grace’s head popped up between the front seats. “I have to pee.”
The first words from her mouth since they’d left New Orleans without Andrew. Charles patted his daughter’s head.
“I think we almost there, okay? You go at the store.”
“How do you even know that they’ll be there?” she asked.
He didn’t. And, if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t even sure that they’d be able to pay him immediately, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do if they couldn’t.
“No worrying, Gracie. Ren je, hao??”
Ignoring her harrumphs of protest, Charles turned up the sound.