The Wangs vs. the World

Charles Wang, the patriarch at the heart of The Wangs V. the World, was raised in Taiwan, having fled the Communists in mainland China. He grows up with a yen for his family’s unseen acres in a lost homeland. He is a brash, brilliant, lovable asshole who came to America and built a cosmetics fortune. When the book begins, it is the late summer of 2008, and thanks to a bad case of “irrational exuberance,” he has just lost it all.

Now all Charles wants is to get his family safely stowed away so that he can go back to China, the homeland he has never even seen, and attempt to reclaim his ancestral lands. The Wangs V. the World follows the Wang family on a cross-country journey from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the Upstate New York retreat of Charles’s eldest daughter, Saina, an art-world “It Girl” in hiding after the disaster of her most recent show and the breakup of her engagement. Charles pulls Andrew, his virginal, aspiring-comedian son, and Grace, his style- and suicide-obsessed teen daughter, out of schools that he can no longer afford and packs them into the only car that wasn’t repossessed—along with their wealth-addicted stepmother, Barbra. The story is told from all five of the Wangs’ third-person POVs. But with his son waylaid by a much-older temptress in New Orleans, his wife ready to defect for a set of 1000-thread-count sheets, and an epic smash-up in North Carolina, Charles may have to choose between the old world and the new, between keeping his family intact and finally, finally fulfilling his dream of China.