~ Family Trust, by Kathy Wang ~
This novel predominantly set in the Bay Area – though it is also partially sited in Hong Kong, Bali, etc. – features elite Asian Americans who attended Ivy League universities and hold high-paying jobs mostly in finance and investment. In this world, a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars a year is apparently considered pitiable. In this world, men and women alike calculate their own and each other’s worth based on income and affluence. In this world, there seems very little room for warmth, kindness, goodwill, compassion, and other nicer human characteristics. Most of the characters who populate this book come across as cold-hearted, calculating, mercenary, grasping, and self-centered. It is not a very nice world; it is not a very nice book.
At the heart of the story is the dysfunctional Huang family. Stanley and Linda are divorced after thirty years of marriage; Stanley has remarried a woman almost 3 decades younger than himself, Mary; who is not a 2nd generation Asian American, but a Chinese woman from China who was serving/hostessing in a restaurant, and whose English is apparently poor. Needless to say, the family consider her a gold digger despite the fact she tries to look after Stanley well. Linda lives on her own, is apparently a financial whiz, and is perhaps the key protagonist in this novel. She is depicted as fairly emotionless, practical, commonsensical, high principled, frugal, cautious, not particularly likable, but at least a character in her own right, with a recognisable identity. And at least she knows her own mind. The rest of the characters were also typecast, some to even further degrees, including Linda’s two children Fred and Katie. Fred, divorced from his first marriage to a wealthy Korean woman, is dating Erika Vargas, an Eastern European first generation migrant, who is apparently also on the make. In this book, everyone is apparently on the make. Most women are, in the language of this book, ‘bitches’, and overtly so. As if it were practically a badge of honour.
The novel is peopled with neighbours, colleagues, friends of the Huangs, who are all caricatured, not particularly well. In fact, most of the book is a series of stereotypes. It may have been intended for comic effect, but well, perhaps not every reader shares that particular sense of humour. The writing is lacking in the sense that every character speaks and sounds like every other character, none is distinct, none has a unique voice, none are even able to be differentiated from others, male and female alike, except by their names. They also act very similarly, and predictably. This book is seemingly full of automatons.
Stanley is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the book goes on to how his wife and ex-wife and children react to his illness and death. For different reasons, his two children are both in need of their assumed-generous, assumed-forthcoming inheritances which will make them millionaires a couple of times over. Fred’s relationship with Erika fails, dramatically, while Katie’s marriage to Denny (who is apparently “launching a start-up” – using the correct speak is supposedly key in this world) falls apart. Linda’s boyfriend found on a dating website, Tigerlily, turns out to be one extensive con, and so ends in disappointment too. Even Mary’s (the 2nd wife) relationship with Stanley is tarnished when she risks probing too far into her inheritance from him.
In fact, Stanley disappoints everyone. He is the most uncharming of characters: violent, a bully, self-aggrandising, controlling, an ego-maniac, misogynistic, self-absorbed. His story seems to be the implicit moral of the novel – good things happen to pretty awful people, as long as they attended the right schools and clinched the right jobs and/or partners.The novel is not without interest. Some of the nuances were nice, such as how Erika’s mixed-race, cross-cultural relationship with Fred needed some unpacking, culturally. How she wanted to be associated with the wealthy, regardless of race, whereas Fred who is prickly about being and Oriental/Asian male, assumed initially she preferred white people. More such understated and cleverly subsumed nuances would improve the quality of the novel. Sometimes the novel was palatable because there was so much pragmatism, the characters were so unhistrionic. The bits which lifted the lid on Chinese culture and expectations, on the unspoken but universally understood, on the unwritten social norms, on the hypocritical double-speak, were also good, and again, much more of this would have been even better. The novel focused on class – in terms of class as created by wealth, rather than other criteria or constructing factors – but possibly, its authorial strength actually lies in the observation and deconstruction of race and culture. Possibly, it has more to offer readers who enjoy name dropping, brand naming, materialistic details for their own sake.
Not dragging but not generating much momentum either, the novel plodded along for the most part. It lacked tension and suspense – most likely because its characters lacked distinction and expression. There was a lot of telling rather than showing. Reading it was certainly no hardship, but not much of a joy either. Considering its promising backdrop and topic, it was singularly unimpressive and unremarkable.
Family Trust, by Kathy Wang. William Morrow, 2018
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