Spending money was easy. Being a rich man’s wife was easy. From the moment she’d walked into Charles’s Bel-Air house, so recently emptied of May Lee, Barbra felt like she was finally where she belonged. Even though she’d never had much exposure to the moneyed classes of Taiwan, she knew instinctively how to behave among the rich.
The key, Barbra decided, was to be unbothered by the opinions of others and be always certain that your own choices were correct. Of course, it was a mental state that required some degree of material support. A new Hermès belt. A diamond-studded Cartier watch. These nonnegotiable luxuries were like armor that only retained its efficacy if it was repolished every season.
Barbra had been raised in a world of prized possessions. Small, inconsequential treasures given outsize significance. Her own mother possessed what Barbra now realized was a sample-size bottle of Chanel No. 5, gifted by an employer. For a decade, it sat on the only windowsill in their shared single room, the scent inside turned from age, spritzed by her mother only on special occasions. Next door, the two little Fong girls had a yellow shoebox where they kept their only doll, a broken thing with two dresses. They would change those dresses reverently, once in the morning and once at night, and lay the doll back in its sunny coffin with as much care as a surgeon doing a heart transplant. Little Xu Mei, who worked in the university president’s office, had a single pearl-headed pin that she wore on the lapel of every shirt and dress. Barbra had been passing by the office when the pin broke loose and the pearl rolled into some unseen crack, never to be found again. She still remembered the tears and the consolation, the way that Xu Mei never stopped searching for that one tiny pearl.
The Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.
The sheets at this motel weren’t as bad as some of the others in the places they’d stayed at. They were faded and nearly threadbare, but at least they’d started out 100 percent cotton, with none of that cheap nylon burr that had made it hard to sleep so many other nights. Grace still hadn’t stirred, but Barbra couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. Petulant little Grace had been barely two months old when her mother died. There was a time, at the very beginning, when Barbra still might have been able to make the baby feel like her own child, but she’d felt no natural swelling of maternal instinct at the sight of the swaddled infant in Ama’s arms. And, too, Charles had proven to be a surprisingly enthusiastic father, who bounced and clicked and cooed over his motherless daughter whenever he was home.
Barbra wondered, not for the first time, if May Lee had also married Charles for his money. Had she taken as easily to luxury as Barbra? She had certainly known how to shop. Barbra didn’t think that May Lee had been the sort of model who received gifts from designers, yet her clothes, put away for Saina and Grace, had colonized nearly an entire room of the house.
During Barbra’s first month in America, when Charles thought that she was just visiting for adventure, a last fling before settling down with her imagined fiancé in Taiwan, she had called him gege, big brother, and never mentioned May Lee. But once her fiancé had been dispatched—with the aid of a concocted revelation—and she’d moved into Charles’s arms, Barbra employed a series of deft questions to help her draw an outline of May Lee’s family history.
There was little about it that seemed auspicious. It was a mongrel history, muddied by generations spent in America. On one side there was a great-grandfather who came to California to perform coolie labor on the railroads, on the other there was a great-grandmother who was imported as a brothel girl, though May Lee’s family swore that she’d never actually turned a trick because she’d already been pregnant by the time she arrived in America, where she sought refuge with a group of understanding Jehovah’s Witnesses and become a proselytizer instead. The only family member May Lee had been ashamed of, according to Charles, was her own grandfather, who, upon his death, was revealed as a Japanese man passing as Chinese in order to avoid the internment camps.
Somehow they’d all managed to find other Chinese people to marry and have children with—the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles were filled with families that had tenuous ties to May Lee’s.
These older Chinese people born in America were very disorienting. May Lee’s mother had visited the children soon after she and Charles married—a large, lumpen woman with a bowl cut, dressed in a hideous wool suit, who nonetheless spoke English with a lilting perfection that made Barbra feel like her own Chanel jacket was far too pink.
May Lee and America overlapped.
Mei Li and Mei Guo.
Beauty and Beautiful Country.
Dead, May Lee was everywhere. Dead, she became the entire country. It wasn’t fair! Barbra turned over so she could open her eyes without looking at Grace. It just wasn’t fair. The children used to say that about everything—Grace still did sometimes. Nothing was fair.