The Wangs vs. the world

Review by New York Times Review

THE BEST moment of "The Wangs vs. the World" comes when young Andrew Wang attempts his first stand-up open mike. He talks honestly about his family, privilege and Chinese-American identity, but it's only when he does an impression of his father's broken English that he finally gets "a single shout of laughter." The entire scene is hilariously cringeworthy, especially when Andrew becomes ashamed mid-act for imitating his father. "You know what white people really, really, really love?" he asks the audience. "When Asian comedians make fun of their parents. Yep, because you guys just want an excuse to laugh at Asian accents." The crowd is uncomfortable; as a reader, I was overjoyed. "The Wangs vs. the World" is not a book where you laugh at Asian accents - you laugh at the people who would laugh at Asian accents. Jade Chang is unendingly clever in her generous debut novel about the comedy of racial identity. If there is a stereotype that Asian-Americans kids are quiet, unpopular and studious, that their parents are strict disciplinarians (think Tiger Mom), then Chang has conjured up the Wangs to prove otherwise. All the Wang kids are creative and popular: There's Andrew, the sensitive jock and wannabe comedian who is beloved by women but wants to save his virginity for his future first love; the older sister, Saina, a conceptual artist who is humiliatingly dumped by her artist boyfriend; and the younger sister, Grace, a precocious teenager and fashion blogger. At the center of it all is the patriarch Charles, the owner of an extremely lucrative cosmetics business. His embrace of American ideals extends to his parenting: He's not a dad who wants his kids to master the violin or study for the SATs; he instead urges them to "play the guitar and get laid," a parody of what he believes America stands for. That is until a combination of his own hubris and bad timing (the 2008 financial crisis) causes the Wangs to lose everything - from rags to riches to rags again. Having lost their Bel-Air estate and newly disillusioned by the American dream, Charles decides to pull his kids out of school and drive them to Saina's home in upstate New York. As much as "The Wangs vs. the World" is about Asian-American identity, it is also a sprawling family adventure compressed into a road trip novel. The result is a manic, consistently funny book of alternating perspectives as the Wangs make various cross-country stopovers in their '80s station wagon. The teasing-but-loving dynamic of all three kids on the phone together illustrates Chang's aptitude for writing dialogue and characters; as in the stand-up scene, she is at her finest when playing with the different expectations of an Asian audience and a white one. It's just too bad the end of the novel is such a mess. Unsatisfying resolutions for all of the Wang children feel forced when they are sent to the other end of the earth. The one plotline that is convincingly finished is Charles's, as he tackles the book's strongest idea: "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." It's in this moment that we understand the novel's title more clearly: Even as the Wangs have defied the traditional arc of the immigrant story, there is no one place for them in the world. To be a first- or second-generation immigrant means wrestling with the reality that no place is ever truly home. In Chang's compassionate and bright-eyed novel, she proves that struggling with that identity can at least be funny and strange, especially when you struggle together with family. KEVIN NGUYEN is the digital deputy editor of GQ.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 23, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

Chang throws the immigrant journey on its head in this offbeat debut. Charles Wang built a hugely successful cosmetics company after coming to the U.S. from China. After some poor business choices, however, multiplied by the bottom dropping out of the economy, he is officially bankrupt. The only thing to do? Round up his family and return to China to claim his ancestral lands. The first stop is his oldest daughter's house in rural New York, prompting a cross-country road trip involving Charles, second-wife Barbra, and his two other children, college-age Andrew (a would-be stand-up comedian) and teenager Grace, who thinks this all might be a joke. It turns out that the Wangs can't function without the trappings of their now-lost lavish lifestyle, a situation that gives the road trip a decidedly wacky bent and infuses the novel with humor. Although the story strains credulity at times, readers with a taste for outsize family dysfunction, à la Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's The Nest (2016) and Emma Straub's The Vacationers (2014), will whip through this one with smiles on their faces.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Chang's sparkling debut novel, a family whose fortune has been lost in the 2008 financial crisis takes a cross-country road trip in an effort to regroup. Bouncy patriarch Charles Wang, who immigrated to Los Angeles from China by way of Taiwan when he was a young man and made a fortune manufacturing makeup, drives his daughter, teenage Grace, an avid fashion blogger, and his son, Andrew, an aspiring stand-up comic, across the country with Barbra, their stepmother. Their destination is a little town in the Catskills, where his oldest daughter, Saina, a conceptual artist who has retired in shame from the New York City art world, lives. The family stops in New Orleans, where virginal Andrew becomes temporarily involved with an older woman, and in Alabama, where Charles attempts to deliver a U-Haul full of custom makeup to a boutique country store. Various small crises, notably Saina's attempt to decide between a sweet new lover and an unreliable older one, keep the plot percolating. Chang's charming and quirky characters and comic observations make the novel a jaunty joy ride to remember. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In Chang's wonderfully offbeat debut novel, bad business decisions, coupled with the Great Recession of 2007-09, force the now penniless Charles Wang, patriarch and self-made cosmetics tycoon, out on a cross-country journey with his family-"a troupe of Chinese Okies fleeing a New Age Dust Bowl." Accompanying Charles on the voyage from Bel-Air to upstate New York is his teenage daughter Grace, a fashion-obsessed high schooler; his college-aged son Andrew, an aspiring stand-up comedian; and Barbra, his second wife, whom the children have always resented for "replacing" their mother who died when Grace was a baby. Their destination is Helios, a small town in the Catskills, to the farmhouse of eldest daughter Saina, a somewhat successful artist whose inheritance could not be forfeited in Charles's business bankruptcy. An engaging family portrait gradually emerges as the chapters alternate among the protagonists' perspectives; accomplished narrator Nancy Wu deftly handles all the wacky twists and turns. VERDICT This boisterous and heartwarming novel is highly recommended to all fans of contemporary family sagas. ["Clever...informative...enjoyable": LJ 8/16 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Chinese-American family tumbles from riches to rags in Changs jam-packed, high-energy debut. The financial crisis of the last decade is turning out to be a gold mine for American writers, one which includes a rich comic vein. Here, an immigrant businessman named Charles Wang has lost his cosmetics empire, his house, and his cars. His son (a wannabe stand-up comic) will have to leave college and his daughter (a precocious fashion blogger) must withdraw from private school. Once he fires their live-in maid, he takes back the car he gave her and drives the family across the country to live with his oldest daughter (a disgraced conceptual artist) in the Catskills. Like many Chinese families, the Wangs lost their ancestral land in the communist takeover, but Charles is determined to get it back. His explanation: What if all the Persian kids in Beverly Hills torched their Ferraris and smashed their bottles of Dior Homme before joining the Taliban? What if they marched through the city and snatched up properties, pulling you onto the street and calling you a godless capitalist pig, kicking you with feet still clad in the tasseled Prada loafers they couldnt bear to relinquish? Wasnt your house still rightfully yours? Wouldnt you want it back after they were inevitably vanquished by some makeshift Arizona militia? Switching among the points of view of all the Wangs and several supporting players, racing back and forth in time and across the country and thenbsp;world, dropping into Chinese, stuffing in stand-up routines and savvy details on finance, journalism, the beauty industry, and the art world, this debut novelist holds nothing back. Head-spinning fun with many fine momentsbut the emotional aspects of the book are weakened by the barrage effect. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Bel-Air, CA   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 idolized 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 assholes from the bank ​-- ​the bank that had once gotten down on its Italianate-marble knees and kissed his ass ​-- ​to come over and repossess his life.       Without history, he wouldn't be here at all.       He'd be there, living out his unseen birthright on his family's ancestral acres, a pampered prince in silk robes, writing naughty, brilliant poems, teasing servant girls, collecting tithes from his peasants, and making them thankful by leaving their tattered households with just enough grain to squeeze out more hungry babies.       Instead, the world that should have been his fell apart, and the great belly of Asia tumbled and roiled with a noxious foreign indigestion that spewed him out, bouncing him, hard, on the tropical joke of Taiwan and then, when he popped right back up, belching him all the way across the vast Pacific Ocean and smearing him onto this, this faceless green country full of grasping newcomers, right alongside his unclaimed countrymen: the poor, illiterate, ball-scratching half men from Canton and Fujian, whose highest dreams were a cook's apron and a back-alley, backdoor fuck.       Oh, he shouldn't have been vulgar.       Charles Wang shouldn't even know about the things that happen on dirt-packed floors and under stained sheets. Centuries of illustrious ancestors, scholars and statesmen and gentlemen farmers all, had bred him for fragrant teas unfurling in fresh springwater, for calligraphy brushes of white wolf hair dipped in black deer-glue ink, for lighthearted games of chance played among true friends.       Not this. No, not this. Not for him bastardized Peking duck eaten next to a tableful of wannabe rappers and their short, chubby, colored-contact-wearing Filipino girlfriends at Mr. Chow. Not for him shoulder-to-shoulder art openings where he sweated through the collar of his paper-thin cashmere sweater and stared at some sawed-in-half animal floating in formaldehyde whose guts didn't even have the courtesy to leak; not for him white women who wore silver chopsticks in their hair and smiled at him for approval. Nothing, nothing in his long lineage had prepared him for the Western worship of the Dalai Lama and pop stars wearing jade prayer beads and everyone drinking goddamn boba chai.       He shouldn't be here at all. Never should have set a single unbound foot on the New World. There was no arguing it. History had started fucking Charles Wang, and America had finished the job.   America was the worst part of it because America, that fickle bitch, used to love Charles Wang.       She had given him this house, a beautiful Georgian estate once owned by a minor MGM starlet married to a studio lawyer who made his real money running guns for Mickey Cohen. At least that's what Charles told his guests whenever he toured them around the place, pointing out the hidden crawl space in the wine cellar and the bullet hole in the living room's diamond-pane window. "Italians don't have nothing on gangster Jews!" he'd say, stroking the mezuzah that he'd left up on the doorway. "No hell in the Old Testament!"       Then he'd lead his guests outside, down the symmetrical rows of topiaries, and along the neat swirls of Madame Louis Lévêque roses until he could arrange the group in front of a bowing lawn jockey whose grinning black face had been tactfully painted over in a shiny pink. He'd gesture towards it, one eyebrow arched, as he told them that the man who designed this, this house destined to become the Wang family estate, had been Paul Williams, the first black architect in the city. The guy had built Frank Sinatra's house, he'd built that ridiculous restaurant at LAX that looked like it came straight out of The Jetsons  ​-- ​stars and spaceships, and a castle for Charles Wang.       Martha Stewart had kvelled over this house. She'd called it a treasure and lain a pale, capable hand on the sleeve of Charles Wang's navy summer-silk blazer with the burnished brass buttons, a blazer made by his tailor who kept a suite at the Peninsula Hong Kong and whose name was also Wang, though, thank god, no relation. Martha Stewart had clutched his jacket sleeve and looked at him with such sincerity in her eyes as she'd gushed, "It's so important, Charles, so essential, that we keep the spirit of these houses whole."   It was America, really, that had given him his three children, infinitely lovable even though they'd never learned to speak an unaccented word of Mandarin and lived under their own roofs, denying him even the bare dignity of being the head of a full house. His first wife had played some part in it, but he was the one who had journeyed to America and claimed her, he was the one who had fallen to his knees at the revelation of each pregnancy, the one who had crouched by the hospital bed urging on the birth of each perfect child who walked out into the world like a warrior.       Yes, America had loved him once. She'd given him the balls to turn his father's grim little factory, a three-smokestack affair on the outskirts of Taipei that supplied urea to fertilizer manufacturers, into a cosmetics empire. Urea. His father dealt in piss! Not even real honest piss ​-- ​artificial piss. Faux pee. A nitrogen-carrying ammonia substitute that could be made out of inert materials and given a public relations scrubbing and named carbamide, but that was really nothing more than the thing that made piss less terribly pissy.       The knowledge that his father, his tall, proud father with his slight scholar's squint and firmly buttoned quilted vests, had gone from quietly presiding over acres of fertile Chinese farmland to operating a piss plant on the island of Taiwan ​-- ​well, it was an indignity so large that no one could ever mention it.       Charles's father had wanted him to stay at National Taiwan University and become a statesman in the New Taiwan, a young man in a Western suit who would carry out Sun Yat Sen's legacy, but Charles dropped out because he thought he could earn his family's old life back. An army of well-wishers ​-- ​none of whom he'd ever see again ​-- ​had packed him onto a plane with two good-luck scrolls, a crushed orchid lei, and a list of American fertilizer manufacturers who might be in need of cheap urea.       Charles had spent half the flight locked in the onboard toilet heaving up a farewell banquet of bird's-nest soup and fatty pork stewed in a writhing mass of sea cucumber. When he couldn't stomach looking at his own colorless face for another second, he picked up a miniature bar of wax-paper-wrapped soap and read the label, practicing his English. It was a pretty little package, lily scented and printed with purple flowers. "Moisturizing," promised the front, "Skin so soft, it has to be Glow." And in back, there was a crowded list of ingredients that surprised Charles. This was before anything in Taiwan had to be labeled, before there was any sort of unbribable municipal health department that monitored claims that a package of dried dates contained anything more than, say, "The freshest dates dried in the healthy golden sun."       Charles stood there, heaving, weaving forward and back on his polished custom-made shoes, staring cross-eyed at the bar of soap, trying to make out the tiny type. Sweet almond oil, sodium stearate, simmondsia chinensis, hydrolyzed wheat proteins, and then he saw it: UREA. Hydroxyethyl urea, right between shea butter and sodium cocoyl isethionate.   Urea!   Urea on a pretty little American package! Excerpted from The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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