The Wangs vs. the World - Jade Chang.epub torrent

When the 2008 financial crash hits, Charles loses his makeup empire as well as his bank accounts, Bel Air estate, and his dignity. Borrowing his aged housekeeper’s hand-me-down Mercedes, he and wife Barbra flee the bank assessor and head east, where they’ll pick up Andrew from college and Grace from boarding school, both kicked out for lack of tuition.  Andrew wakes up slowly to his family’s new economic reality: “He was going to have to work! Actually work. For money. Money that he would need to pay for things like rent and phone bills and air-conditioning — or maybe air-conditioning was free?”

But Charles’ cross-country road trip has a purpose: first, the family will bunk up at Saina’s upstate New York cabin, where she’s been hiding out after a career-ending scandal. Next, he’ll use hidden funds for a triumphant return to China to reclaim ancestral land, a Hail Mary that only Charles believes can work.  This backstory — involving World War II’s Japanese occupation of China — is a risky choice for Chang with its complicated detail, but pays off in the novel as intriguing history and as a crazy quest only Charles could devise.

In alternating chapters, each Wang grapples with the meaning behind money and what he or she will do now that it’s gone. They bicker, suffer truck-stop fast food, and often make each other — as well as readers — laugh out loud.

Even if their father manages to get his land back, what would this imperious urban CEO do with it?  One of his children tries to picture him on a patch of farmland, “demanding that some poor peasant boy make his cappuccino bone-dry, asking villagers if there was a better restaurant in town.” Chang’s lively portrayal of this sibling trio — spoiled, funny and loyal — is one of the novel’s most appealing aspects