It was in the queue to leave the Bel-Air launch of Trump Tower, Dubai, that Jade Chang’s debut novel was conceived. It was August 2008. Christina Aguilera had serenaded hundreds of guests, each of whom had been given an iPod in their doggy bag after feasting on cake dusted with flakes of gold. “I was standing there in the valet line waiting for my beat-up Mitsubishi to arrive in a sea of Bentleys, a sea of excess,” she recalls.
Chang had been invited as a journalist working for a luxury magazine. On the drive home she turned to her friend and said: “‘Everything’s going to collapse.’ I remember thinking there’s another story here that I really wanted to tell — a story set at a point when it was all going to change. I wanted to write about fracture, but I also wanted to write a different type of immigrant story: one that I hadn’t seen before.”
A fortnight later, Lehman Brothers filed the biggest bankruptcy petition in US history, forcing the US to confront its descent into recession. In “The Wangs Vs the World”, self-made millionaire Charles Wang has just suffered his own Lehmans moment, after the banks foreclosed on his cosmetics business. The first few pages of the novel were the first that Chang wrote, starting with three outraged paragraphs:
“Charles Wang was mad at America.
“Actually, Charles Wang was mad at history.
“If the death-bent Japanese had never invaded China, if a million — a billion — misguided students and serfs had never idolised a balding academic who parroted Russian madmen and couldn’t pay for his promises, then Charles wouldn’t be standing here staring out the window of his beloved Bel-Air home, holding an aspirin in his hand, waiting for those calculating [expletive] from the bank — the bank that had once gotten down on its Italianate-marble knees and kissed his [expletive] — to come over and repossess his life.”
Packing his family into a 30-year-old station wagon, borrowed back from the woman who used to be his nanny, he sets off on a riotous road trip from Los Angeles to hole up with his eldest daughter in New York, en route to fulfilling his dream of reclaiming his ancestral lands in China.
With him in the car are his two younger children, wannabe standup Andrew and private-school brat Grace, and his second wife, Barbra — self-named after Barbra Streisand, to the cruel derision of her stepchildren.
The Wangs are both an embodiment of America and at odds with it. On a literal level, their riches-to-rags story takes them in the opposite direction to most classic road-trip fiction, from west to east. The illusions of belonging that were shored up by extreme wealth are dashed when they take to the highway. “So, where are you from?” asks a paramedic after their car spins off the road. “No, but where are you from?” he repeats, when a dazed Grace tries to insist that she’s from LA.
Chang, who lives and until recently worked as a journalist in Los Angeles, describes herself as “100 per cent Chinese, 100 per cent American and 100 per cent Asian, all at the same time”.
Though the novel is not autobiographical, the Wangs’ history mirrors that of her own family, and one of the ways in which this is not the typical immigrant yarn is that neither family arrived impoverished in search of a better life.
She was born in 1976 in Ohio, the older of two daughters to Chinese parents who met at graduate school in the US. Both sides of the family had owned land in China, which they had lost under communism. “They had to flee the country and, along with many other people, fled with the nationalist army to Taiwan — not literally, but as part of the pretty widespread diaspora,” she explains, “They grew up in a Taiwan that they basically colonised: only Mandarin was allowed to be spoken. A lot of native Taiwanese worked as cooks and nannies.”
It’s a history that gave her an understanding of Charles Wang’s yearning for the land that he feels is rightfully his, and an ear for his voice: “rageful, funny, ridiculous, kind of dumb in some ways but smart in others. Once I had Charles’s voice I had the world and the family.”
Chang grew up speaking Mandarin at home and has peppered the dialogue with Chinese sentences, written in the English alphabet. “I wanted people to have a sense of what it felt like to be in the car with the family and the way they would be speaking. I wanted readers to be able to sound out the words. I didn’t actually translate any of it but it’s all there in the context.”
She’s intrigued that some readers have reported finding the Chinese dialogue “destabilising”, pointing out that there are several different languages in the book, which readers may or may not understand. Charles’s oldest daughter, Saina, is an artist provocateur who has suffered her own downfall after playing one stunt too many. “If you’re really familiar with the art world you will have a different understanding of the story, just as you will if you’re familiar with the fashion world or with finance. All the characters have to learn to understand each other’s worlds and trust each other’s interpretations of them.”
Both Saina and Andrew suffer for being unable to “read” the unwritten rules on racial representation and good taste. In one of the novel’s most excruciating scenes, Andrew tanks at an open-mic comedy session in Austin, Texas.
“You know what white people really, really, really love?” he burbles. “When Asian comedians make fun of their parents. Yep, because you guys just want an excuse to laugh at Asian actors. Black people, no offence, 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.’”
To understand what she was putting her character through, Chang enrolled on an improvisation course. The first three classes left her wondering if she was “this undiscovered comic genius — pitching situations is easy for me”. But once it came to embodying the situations she had pitched, she fell flat on her face.
Though there is a lot of embarrassment in a novel that was described as “richly entertaining” in the “Guardian”, it always falls short of humiliation. “I’m not interested in putting something out in the world that leaves people feeling diminished in any way,” she says. “I like satire, but I’m not interested in writing it because it’s important to me to write something with a generosity of spirit and I don’t think satire has that generosity.”
Like the protagonist of Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout”, the Wangs come from Los Angeles. Though not as fast and furious as Beatty’s Booker winner, the novel shares something of “The Sellout”’s stroppy refusal to euphemise its characters’ experience. “I like to describe it as ‘The Sellout’ meets ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, because I think that’s funny but it’s also spiritually accurate,” she says. “It’s easy to see it as ‘The Corrections’ meets ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, but I think in intention and emotion that’s not really it.”
For all the eccentricity of their predicament — and a diversity of viewpoint that extends to some passages being narrated by a car — the Wangs carry with them a weight of communal history, which is pointed out from time to time with Dickensian omniscience:
“All across the country, one by one, foreclosed home by shuttered business, in cold bedrooms and empty boardrooms and cars turned into homes, people had the same thoughts.
“I couldn’t rescue myself.
“I will never win.
“My failure will always be epic and my sorrow will always be great.”
This is precisely the hardship and the social solipsism that propelled the UK out of Europe and Donald Trump into the White House. It’s one reason why “The Wangs Vs the World” is unlikely to date anytime soon.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
