Now, now that he had lost the estate in America, all Charles could think of was the land in China.
The life that should have been his.
China, where the Wangs truly belonged.
Not America. Never Taiwan.
If they were in China, his ungrateful children would not be spread out across a continent. If they were in China, his disappointed wife would respond to his every word with nothing but adoration. Angry again, Charles turned away from the window and back to his bare desk. Almost bare. In the center, dwarfed by the expanse of mahogany, was a heavy chop fashioned from a square block of prized mutton-fat jade.
Most chops underlined their authority with excess, an entire flowery honorific crowded on the carved base, but this one, once his grandfather’s, had a single character slashed into its bottom.
王
Just the family name. Wang.
Over a century ago, when the seal was first made, its underside had started out a creamy white. Now it was stained red from cinnabar paste. His grandfather had used the chop in lieu of a signature on any documents he’d needed to approve, including the land deeds that were once testament to the steady expansion of Wang family holdings. Charles was thankful that his grandfather had died before all the land was lost, before China lost herself entirely to propaganda and lies. The men of the Wang family did not always live long lives, but they lived big.
The land that had anchored the Wangs and exalted them, the land that had given them a place and a purpose, that was gone. But Charles still had the seal and the deeds, everything that proved that the land was rightfully his.
And in a few fevered hours of searching the Internet, he’d uncovered stories, vague stories, of local councils far from central Party circles returning control to former owners, of descendants who, after years in reeducation camps, managed to move back into abandoned family houses that had been left to rot, entire wings taken over by wild pigs because peasants persuaded to deny their history could never appreciate the poetry and grandeur of those homes. He stored each hopeful tale away in a secret chamber of his heart, hoarding them, as he formed a plan. He would make sure that his three children were safe, that his fearsome and beloved second wife was taken care of, that his family was all under one roof, and then, finally, Charles Wang was going to reclaim the land in China.
He popped an aspirin in his mouth, pushing back that new old feeling of a tunnel, a dark and almost inevitable tunnel, closing in on him, and crunched down on the pill as he picked up the phone.
二
Helios, NY
SAINA WANG smoothed out the tabloid-size Catskills Chronicler and paged past the op-ed column, skipping the list of new high school seniors, glancing over the photos of the mayor’s Labor Day barbecue and the Pet of the Week, in search of the horoscopes. Usually she read the New York Times—made herself read it, a reminder of the life she could be, maybe should be, living—but that paper would never carry anything as frivolous and as useful as horoscopes.
There. There they were. Squeezed onto the recipe page under a photo of creamed corn succotash with crisped prosciutto.
Libra (Sept. 23–Oct. 22)
You resonate with things and people you love. The more you let yourself love, the better you feel. The better you feel, the healthier you become. Love is a healer, and so are you.
It was exactly what she’d always feared was true.
From the time Saina was very young, she worried that she would always be the lover and never the loved.
And then she grew up and it got more complicated. Now she thought that she would always be the salve to some artist’s eternally wounded soul—an unwilling goddess to be worshipped and adored, but never, ever worried over or taken care of. No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes.
Giant canvases that glorified her naked breasts and half smile, songs rhyming Saina and wanna, unfinished novels about an unknowable girl of dreams—none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favor.