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“Steven Wright,” whispered Andrew, touching the scarred glass as if it were a reliquary. He was wishing himself onto the wall, it was clear. Barbra had never seen her stepson look at anything like that before. The Wang children were so used to getting things that it rarely occurred to them to want anything. But was this what Andrew really wanted? A life of lonely motel rooms, performing for white people who probably wouldn’t think that he was funny?
What if Andrew was gay? That was impossible. He was too handsome. Girls had always liked Andrew—even when he was a teenager with braces and a pimple or two, they had called the house at all hours and gathered in eager bunches around the pool during the kids’ birthday parties, their smooth young bodies in bikinis that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago in Taiwan. But there were men like that, Charles knew, gay men whose friends were all beautiful women who were half in love with them.
I give the world thoughtful observations and considered theses, and it gives me back a dozen Kardashians.
“A friend of mine, she lost her mom at around the same time, when she was thirteen. She said the only true thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about their mom dying. We were . . . I don’t know, it’s weird. I think we were laughing about something. We were trying to joke about it, because that’s what nobody else ever does, right? And then she looked up at me, and said, ‘That bitch just keeps on dying.’”
Saina hated pie.
A life predicated on survival might have been a better life in so many ways. Who cared about artistic fulfillment when your main concern was finding enough food to eat? And, Saina was positive, she would have excelled at finding enough food to eat, no matter what the environment. The hallmarks of twenty-first-century success, at least in her world, were all so abstract. Be a Simpsons character! Give a TED talk! Option your life story!
This driveway was endless. It was some grand, plantation shit. Could you make plantation jokes? Should he? It was easy to joke about offensive Asian things, but taking on slavery seemed a little advanced.
Her sister looked up from the magazine. “Do you really want me to keep reading this? It’s terrible! Do you think this is how Jennifer Aniston feels?”
When had the children of China gotten so tall? They towered over him, these little treasures, six feet high and rising.
Charles felt comforted in this swirl of humanity, in this sea of black hair.
There would be so many variations on the theme of human that all typologies would be completely bulldozed. This was why he had never worried himself about how America viewed his children, never bothered himself over unflattering stereotypes and prejudices. What did it matter how a country full of white people saw them when the whole world was theirs?
