The Wangs were fools, thought Barbra. They had everything, and they understood nothing. Charles was the kind of person who had never in his blessed life thought about where the shit went after he flushed the toilet. It was his privilege to empty his bowels in clean white ceramic bowls, and it was the burden of the world to wash it away.
None of the Wangs appreciated anything. Saina and Grace would never appreciate the pure, thrumming pleasure of carrying a tasteful yet outrageously expensive purse. They had never lived a life without such privileges. The nod of recognition that such a purse elicited from a few equally solvent others was an unimpeachable sort of currency, not subject to market fluctuations or whims of fashion. The thick, buttery leather and polished gold clasp were enough to lend substance to her being, the purse became an axis around which the whole chaotic world would spin. Wealth, Barbra knew, should belong to those who understood its power.
Charles thought of himself as a self-made man. He was stupid enough to think that he’d come to America with nothing—“Just a list of urea in my pocket,” he liked to say—and wrested a fortune from this country through his own brilliance. Barbra had once heard an American saying: “He was born on third and thought he hit a triple.” Baseball was popular in Taiwan and she’d known immediately what it meant. She was the one who had started with two strikes against her and, with nothing more than her own determination, had made it all the way back to home base.
Barbra sat up in bed, furious.
She was the one who had made something out of nothing. She was the one who’d upended generations of poverty in one move. So what if she’d done it with a lucky marriage? Would it be worth any more if she’d won Charles’s hand in a game of poker? Empires rose and fell on luck, and her own was worth as much as any monarch’s.
As for Charles, one stroke of ill fortune and he was broken, turned into a demented old man fantasizing about some forgotten family land that was probably not much to begin with. Barbra looked over at Grace, still asleep. A useless lump. Like all the Wangs.
When the Failure first launched, Charles had surprised her with the full line, eight shades of foundation, thirty-two lipsticks, sixteen eye shadows, all laid out beautifully in her bathroom. Secretly, she’d been a little sad about putting away her Guerlain powder and Dior mascara, but she’d used his products and he’d praised their beauty on her unbeautiful face. After the Failure became the Failure, after he’d made his announcement, she’d gone into her bathroom and found that they were all already gone, swept into an awkward heap in the Lucite trash can next to her vanity. It was such a peevish act, like a child tossing away a broken toy.
That’s it, thought Barbra. Now, finally, that was it. She was going to leave all of them, Charles, Saina, Andrew, and Grace. They were all going to give up, but she wasn’t. She’d made one life on her own, and she could do it again! After all, there was so much she could do now—the world was a whole different place than it had been when she came over to America. She could marry someone else, or she could move back to Taiwan and make her own fortune! That’s what people were doing there now, making fortunes on things like a sandwich cart or a barrette store. Or, better yet, she’d go back to Los Angeles and inform all of their acquaintances that she was actually a feng shui expert. That, in fact, she came from a long line of feng shui gurus. If Saina could sell ridiculous art projects to museum curators, who should presumably know better, then why couldn’t she convince a few rich white people that five thousand years of Chinese wisdom could bring them health and prosperity? Feng shui was easy enough to fake. A few tosses of the joss sticks, a compass printed with Chinese characters, a shirt with an embroidered dragon—maybe something from that old Vivienne Tam collection—and she was as good as a guru.