The Wangs vs. the World

by Jade Chang

Drink made the world thrum with possibility. When sober morning came, Charles always realized that he’d spent the previous evening talking too loudly and with too much conviction about things that he would never do and could never change, but in the moment, it all seemed endlessly possible. Sometimes

Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.

“They see too much,” her father had said once, when she was doing a report for history class and asked him whether his own parents had ever talked about the war. “They see too much so they have to close their hearts tight. Can’t get them open again.”

He wasn’t going to come, she knew. The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.

The words weren’t traveling correctly between his heart and his head.