The Wangs vs. the World (23 page)

Andrew walked on ahead of her and found them a tiny round table, its black top cracked from years of damp drinks and once-upon-a-time cigarette burns, then dutifully fetched a gin and tonic cluttered with chunks of lemon. His own beer sat sweating and untouched as they suffered through a vaguely amusing comic who talked about mistaking himself for a bear on a hunting trip, a rather boring one who spent his entire seven minutes affecting an unconvincing lisp, and a succession of indistinguishable men in ill-fitting plaid shirts who all seemed to have been blessed with crazy girlfriends. And then it was time.

“Alright, dickheads,” shouted the chubby emcee, his mouth hidden behind a bushy beard that was inexplicably dyed blue. “We’ve got a virgin here tonight! Let’s help pop his open-mic cherry with a warm Austin welcome. Come on up, Andrew Wang! Hey dude, here’s a comedy tip. Don’t suck. Unless you’re gay.”

Without looking at her, Andrew squeaked his seat back and ran towards the stage, managing not to trip as he bounded up the stairs. Once the emcee was done making a lewd gesture with the microphone, Andrew grabbed it and turned towards the audience.

“What’s up, Austin! Yeah, it’s true. It’s my first time here. So, uh, yeah, why do girls always want guys to take them out to a romantic dinner? Dude. Dinner is the least romantic thing ever. There’s nothing romantic about eating. When you buy someone dinner, you’re just, uh, buying things for their . . . you know, for their, uh, for their ass. Right?”

Barbra cringed. What was wrong with Andrew? He’d bragged about how much laughter he’d gotten from doing stand-up at his school, but if this was any indication of his abilities, those classmates must have laughed out of pity or embarrassment.

“I mean, it’s either going to turn into shit and come out their ass, or it’s going to turn into fat and stick to their ass!”

Probably the latter.

“The next time a chick asks me to take her out to dinner, I’m just going to tell her to
sit
on her ass and listen to this poem—I mean, what’s not romantic about poetry?—Roses are red, violets are blue, let’s go to bed, because I want to fuck you! Yeah!”

Andrew paused, waiting as the trickle of polite laughs failed to become a roar. Barbra considered being offended, but found that really she was rather amused. At least the excruciating awkwardness had resulted in something unexpected.

Someone near the front of the stage called out: “He said, ‘Don’t suck’ !” She craned to see who it was, but the heckler was hidden by his friends. Andrew flinched and continued.

“So . . . I’ve totally disappointed my dad. I know what you’re thinking—I’m Asian, so this must be some joke about how he’s disappointed that I’m not a brain surgeon or not a lawyer or how I took a whole month to learn how to play Vivaldi or something. But, no, no, my dad is cool about that kind of shit. He actually wants me to play the guitar and get laid. No, honestly, he does.” This apt description of Charles did make Barbra laugh, a sudden yelp of it, but she was embarrassed to be the only one.

“So, the thing is, my dad, the immigrant, is really,
really
disappointed that I have an allergy. A peanut allergy. Because immigrants do not believe in allergies. I swear to God, ask any brown person with an accent that you see and they’ll tell you that allergies are some New World shit.”
Well, that was true,
thought Barbra, remembering her own surprise when the mother of one of Grace’s young friends refused to allow her daughter to play at the Wangs’ because their housekeeper didn’t use nonallergenic cleaning products.

And then, without warning, Andrew launched into a cross-eyed accent that made her cringe. “My dad was, like, ‘I sail here under cover of night! I fight pirates! I hide out in American sewage system and work as busboy for twenty year, and you cannot defend yourself against
peanut?
One peanut? Peanut that so teeny tiny and de-ricious?’”

Across the room, maybe even from the heckler, there was a single shout of laughter. Besides that, silence. The tables around her fidgeted with their cell phones and drinks, waiting for Andrew’s turn to be over. Not for the first time, Barbra was glad that she’d never wanted to be a performer.

“By the way,” continued Andrew, valiantly, “I know that the only thing that white people love more than jokes
about
white people is when
black
people make jokes about white people. Right, guys, right? But you know what white people really, really,
really
love? When Asian comedians make fun of their parents. Yep, because you guys just want an excuse to laugh at Asian accents. Black people, no offense, but in this joke you basically count as white people. Admit it, as soon as I came up, you thought to yourselves, ‘Oh man, I hope he says lots of
r
words, just tons of them, I hope this whole night is brought to you by the letter
r
.’”

All that scribbling in the backseat and
this
was what he came up with? It wasn’t going very well—Barbra saw a black girl roll her eyes at her friend. Andrew must have rehearsed his pauses, because he again stared out into the audience, expectant, uncertain, waiting for the laughs she knew were never going to come. Finally, he went on.

“Here’s what I don’t understand: British people do not say the letter
h
. They just drop it entirely. Like, don’t even try it, but we don’t laugh at that. French people are not on speaking terms with zee
th
s, isn’t zat true? But none of that turns y’all on like an Asian person messing up the letter
r
. The only thing that comes vaguely close is a Canadian
oo:
aboot, hoose. Just close your eyes for a minute and imagine an Asian immigrant who learned to speak English in Canada saying the word
roustabout
—oh, what does that mean? It’s an unskilled laborer, you roustabouts! Seriously, though, what does that even sound like? Here, let’s try it, let’s say it out loud. You know you want to. It’s okay. I’m telling you, on behalf of Asians everywhere, it’s okay. Here, I’ll say it with you, we can do it together, okay? On three. One, two, three—
loostaboot!
”

Only a couple of game audience members played along, dutiful. Someone else said something that sounded like “Loser dude,” and several people headed towards the bathroom, but Andrew went on, his good cheer starting to sound a little desperate.

“You racist motherfuckers! No, no, I’m just kidding. Really, I’m kidding, I know all of your best friends are colored. Ha! Aw, I feel kinda guilty. I tricked you into it, and now you feel like douchebags.” Andrew flapped his hands in a gesture that would have been meant to quiet down the crowd if they’d been making any noise at all. “Okay, okay, to make up for it I’ll give you what you really want, okay?” He stood up straight and looked off into the distance. Raising an arm, he said, in a Laurence Olivier voice, “An elderly Chinese man, perhaps my father, perhaps not, just saying words. Words with the letter
r
.” And then, again, that embarrassing accent. “
L
obots.
L
ogaine.
L
ome.
L
ota
l
y C
r
ub—good one, right? Co
rr
abo
l
ate. Co
ll
obo
l
ate—that was two different words, by the way. Well, thanks for helping me undo the last fifty years of the Civil Rights Movement. Y’all are assholes. Good night!”

Barbra realized that she’d managed to drink the entire gin and tonic, and was now clenching the small red straw between her teeth. She let it drop, the plastic shredded and wet, onto her lap.

In Chinese, the word for ugly was
chou
—it was the same as the word for shameful. Ugly and shameful, both
chou.
And the slang for shameful was
diou lian,
which was usually translated to English as “lose face” but more literally meant “throw face.” As if the bereft had willfully tossed away anything worth finding and keeping. Thrown away the pretty face on top, leaving only the ugly, embarrassed face underneath.

Andrew stood in front of her, dripping sweat.

“Can we go?” he asked. She looked up, trying to pull together some words of congratulation or encouragement, but she had none.

“Now?” he added.

Andrew was too soft,
thought Barbra. It made sense that you had to
make
people laugh. Comedy was an act of aggression, and Andrew was not a fighter.

“Please?”

For a brief moment, Barbra felt the urge to refuse, to make him stay and watch the other comedians, to point out the moments where he’d fallen short. She could coach him into being a better comedian. Force him into it.

But Andrew continued to stand, not taking his hurt eyes off her, and Barbra realized that it was a decade or two too late to be a mother, so instead she gathered her things and led Andrew out of the bar.

二十五
Helios, NY

IT WAS STRANGE that nothing calamitous happened when Saina and Grayson first broke up.

She’d expected the Los Angeles basin to split apart like a giant glacier, calving pink stucco islands studded with palm trees that would float off across the Pacific. She’d expected an epic fire in New York City. A crosstown conflagration that would swallow entire neighborhoods, leaving behind a crisped and broken Manhattan. An earthquake, a tsunami, another flood or terrorist attack—something, anything, to commemorate their cleaving. But instead, nothing. Just a mild winter and a glorious spring and fewer murders in the five boroughs.

It wasn’t vanity.

Everyone thought that their breakups should cause time to stop and birds to drop out of the sky. It’s just that with Saina’s, it actually happened.

In first grade she’d spent an entire art period building a papier-mâché rocketship for Adam Garcia, who told Kelly Park that he liked Saina. But when she tried to present her handiwork to him, he laughed and said that it was a joke. As her heart broke, the Challenger exploded right in front of them on the classroom television screen.

Three months later, Adam saw a corner of her notebook where she’d written SW + AG. He said he thought she was gross. She cried.

Then Chernobyl.

Saina had sworn off boys after that, avoiding the potential nuclear disaster of spin the bottle and ignoring the famine that was sure to come if she confessed her crush on her best friend’s older brother. In tenth grade she’d developed a giant, embarrassing crush on her art teacher, who had praised her teenage insights and given her his favorite art books and stared a beat too long at her cutoffs. She imagined a bohemian life for the two of them that was interrupted by heartbreak when she saw him kissing the Spanish teacher in the school parking lot. That night, as she lay awake into morning, the walls of the house jumped up and slammed down into the earth with a crack and roar. It was heartbreak that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale and felled an entire apartment building in the San Fernando Valley. She limited herself to a string of amusing dalliances for the rest of high school, but after the first breakup with a college boyfriend who went on to launch an empire of pinup porn stars, September 11. After the second, with a sweet and lovely Canadian who studied the structure of snowflakes, Hurricane Katrina.

Saina knew it was gross. She felt guilty for ever having made that first connection, for thinking that her minuscule personal heartbreak had anything to do with the Challenger or Chernobyl. But we can only ever see the world through our own half-blind eyes, set in our own stupid heads, backed by our own self-obsessed brains, and from that vantage point, it just didn’t make any
sense
that nothing fell apart after Grayson left. If Saina was being completely honest with herself, half the motivation for her retreat to the country was a fear of some calamitous terror strike that was sure to follow that first, worst breakup with the man she thought she was going to marry.

Instead, she’d walked into the Catskills and met Leo.

It was the first warm day of spring. She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd. Except that there were no crowds in Helios. At four o’clock its only street was nearly deserted and the shopkeepers were occupying themselves by sweeping sidewalks and gossiping in doorways. Neither of the street’s restaurants was scheduled to open for another couple of hours, but the door of one swung open on a lazy hinge. Taking a chance, Saina pushed in, tiptoeing through the wood-paneled vestibule. All of the chairs were stacked on top of the tables, and a mop and bucket sat abandoned in the middle of the ceramic-tile floor. The lamps were switched off, but the late afternoon sun sent a hazy, dust-filled shaft of light across the men on either side of the copper bar, making the two of them look like a Caravaggio.

Behind the bar, a dirty blond with a red beard held a glass up to her. “Afternoon drinking. Nothing like it.” His voice echoed across the empty room.

She grinned. “Morning drinking. Even better.”

And then the other guy, the one who would turn out to be Leo, leaned back and laughed, parting his pink lips, showing every single one of his pretty teeth, leaving his smooth throat open and vulnerable.

That,
she thought,
looks like a healthy diversion.

Saina had chosen a house on the outskirts of Helios because the town was small (population: 1,214) and isolated (three miles off of County Road 19) and she thought that she didn’t want to see or talk to anyone ever again.

Actually, that wasn’t quite right.

It was more like she’d seen it all as bucolic set dressing for her inevitable comeback. This was the magazine story she really wanted—not some exegesis on failure penned by Billy, but a tribute to her rebirth.

Depressed and disgraced, artist Saina Wang traded her Meatpacking District loft for a ramshackle Catskills farmhouse only to undergo a creative and personal renaissance.