Hwen de hao. Well mixed.

Once, in front of one of her mixed friends, Grace's dad had told Barbra that it was too bad that the girl was hwen de chou. Mixed ugly. "Like maybe she have the Down syndrome." The girl had cried, Grace had flamed with embarrassment, Charles had sworn that he forgot he was speaking English and got his secretary to send the girl an enormous box of cosmetics the next day, which made her totally stop talking to Grace at all. But it was what Barbra said that Grace remembered most. In the midst of the commotion, she'd just shrugged, and said, in an effort to stop Grace's protesting, "Daddy was only telling the truth. There's nothing wrong with being ugly if that's what you are."

And now Ama and Kathy understood her, too, of course, but they didn't say anything, just held on to each other's hands for a minute and headed into the spaceship house.

Conversation savers. That was another good reason to have kids around. Whenever there was a pause in the grown-ups' talk, before it got unbearable, one of the adults would look over at Nico or Naia, who were setting up a store with stray personal items charmed from their visitors, and make some comment about their cuteness. Everyone enthusiastically agreed, and then the conversation could resume again. Phew. After a while, Grace slid off the scratchy plaid couch and scooched across the linoleum floor.

"Want me to be your customer?" she asked.

Nico, the older one, beamed at Grace and nodded, holding out a leather key fob unhooked from Barbra's purse.

"You could have it," he said. "Except that you have to put it in your pocket."

She tucked it into her jeans as Naia crouched close to the ground and examined Grace's shoes.

"Why do you have holes in your shoes?" she asked.

How do you explain fashion to a little kid?

"Don't you think they're cool-looking?"

Naia looked up, all serious, and shook her head. "Is it because you couldn't buy the other parts?" Grace cocked her head and locked eyes with Naia. This couldn't be part of it. These kids were too . . . kidlike to be a test.

Nico turned to Grace. "Guess what we're having for dinner? Guess!" Grace shrugged and pretended to look very mystified. "Hot dogs! Hot dogs! Hot dogs!"

Hot dogs? Cow lips and tails and ears and vaginas, probably. Or udders. Mushed udders. In a tube. Tube steak. Gross.

"Ai-ya, ni je me xing zuo hot dog ne? Shei yao chi zhe gou? Jen shi de!" Ama hissed disapproval at her daughter while Grace tried to avoid her father's and Barbra's looks.

Kathy shrugged. "What's wrong with hot dogs? Did you think I was going to make a banquet?" Shouldering the kids, she headed into the kitchen, leaving Ama to splutter after her, "Shei shuo bi yao ge banquet? Nu er tai chou la!"

Ten minutes later, Kathy came out with a platter of boiled hot dogs nestled in soft white buns and then brought out an armful of brand-new condiments: A big forty-ounce Heinz ketchup bottle, a bright yellow bottle of French's mustard that was half as big, and a tiny squeeze bottle of Vlasic sweet relish.

Bleh. Hot dogs were just as gross as Grace remembered. It was like they were all gathered around the living room eating skinny penises on buns-seriously, hot dogs were basically the same thing.

Barbra had drawn two thin lines on hers, one of ketchup and one of mustard, and was now taking neat bites of it, not smudging the lines. Her dad's was piled with relish and he opened his mouth for a giant bite. Kathy was cutting Nico's into pieces and popping them in his mouth while Naia had hers gripped in both hands and inserted halfway in her mouth. She slipped it out again and grinned at Grace. "It's like a ketchup lollipop!" she said.

Ama's plain hot dog rested in her lap, her hands folded on top of it. She watched Kathy for a long moment before she turned to Grace's dad, and said, quietly, bowing her head, "Jen shi dwei bu qi."

"Hmm?" he asked, focusing on the last, mustard-streaked bite of his hot dog.

"Wang jia dwei wo ne me hao, wo xian zai je me xing zhi gei ni men hot dogs lai chi?"

Grace watched the bulge of chewed-up hot dog go down his throat as he swallowed before answering. "Ama, qing ni bu yao ne yang zi xiang la." He turned to Grace. "Gracie, you like hot dog, right? Say to Ama that there is nothing to apologize." Grace wanted to leave, to get up and run out on this moment, on huffy Kathy who must feel completely betrayed by her mom, on this test that was feeling less and less like a game, even on the kids who were getting sticky with ketchup.

"They're great," she said. "It's like we're at a carnival! There's the kids, and the bouncy castle, and the hot dogs!"

"She me boun-cee cah-sul de?"

As soon as Ama started talking, Barbra leaned back. She always did that, thought Grace, just took herself out of the family whenever she wanted to. Of course, when Saina had a big gallery opening or something, Barbra was always ready to get dressed up and be part of the Wangs, but she never stayed on the team for the whole game. So unfair.

"Oh nothing, Ama. It's just-hot dogs are fine, really," said Grace.

"See!" said Charles, waving the last hot dog at Kathy. "All good! No worries!"

"Ah bao, I think that's Kathy's," said Barbra. "Kathy, have you had one yet?"

"You want it, you take it," said Kathy, shrugging again. Her salt-and-pepper hair was all bristled up; with her gray fleece and un-made-up face, she looked like she was all one color.

"Well," said Barbra, "we should probably be going soon."

"Ni men bu shi yao zhu yi wan ma?"

"Oh," said Kathy, in a strange, high voice, "did you drive two cars? Did I miss the other one? Did you drive another car besides my ma's?"

Grace looked at the three of them. Getting old was horrible.

She watched her father shuffle uncomfortably on the sofa. Grace hadn't even thought about it, but it was true. This car was supposed to be Ama's. Were they just going to steal it from her now? Sure, her dad had been the one to give it to Ama, but a gift was a gift, wasn't it?

"Ama is very kind, too kind," said Grace's dad. "She will let us drive the car to Saina's house. We hope we can give it back soon."

"Too kind," said Kathy. "Too kind, too, too kind."

THE WANGS had fallen so far, so fast.

As a child, Charles never entirely believed his own family's tales of grandeur: The five-story estate carved into the side of a stone mountain, with a legion of porters ready to carry the mistress of the house up and down on a palanquin. The koi ponds and amusing lap dogs and gold-edged dishes brought out for endless banquets of freshly slain suckling pigs. The hall of treasures, where hunks of amber that contained prehistoric creatures lined the rosewood shelves along with polished nautilus shells and a Faberge ostrich egg. All of it surrounded by acres upon acres, all green.

He could never parse that mythic life with the spare rooms and quiet meals of his childhood. Over the years, his aunties' remembrances of their familial past had taken on a faded fairy-tale air, mixing in his young mind with thumbed-through stories of the archer who saved the world from seven suns and the goddess who was exiled to the moon, where her only friend was a rabbit.

And now Charles had managed to lose an entire gilded existence twice as quickly, without the assistance of a world war or a murderous demagogue. Maybe failure was encoded in the DNA, like sickle-cell anemia or Tay-Sachs disease, revisiting generation after generation until some quirk of crossbreeding finally managed to eradicate those traitorous chromosomes. Maybe May Lee's blithe stupidity would bubble up and lift the stain of failure from his children. Not that it was working yet. Saina was hiding out in the forgotten countryside, Grace was still a child, and Andrew, well, Andrew wanted to be a stand-up comedian, a career choice that might as well be a deliberate rebellion against success.

He'd tainted them all with his own fatal misstep. Charles had always thought of himself as a businessman's businessman. He was in the makeup game because he had landed on a way to produce popular products cheaply, but it could just as easily have been gourmet peanut butter or building insulation or shoelaces-wherever the opportunity presented itself. He'd trained himself to love the mythos of makeup because of the money to be made, but if he'd come to America with a list of algae-farm contacts, he might even now be extolling the virtues of green juice and branching out into bee pollen.

Everything he did, he did with passion; emotion didn't enter into it. Women were ruled by emotion; men by passion. That was the truth of it. Forget Mars and Venus, the real secret of the difference between the sexes was right there.

Men: conquerors of lands, seekers of beauty, upholders of truth.

Women: bearers of the children, keepers of the homes, mourners of the slain.

It was something that Charles had always known. Look at magazines. Women's magazines were all about feeling something. There was advice on how to feel pretty, how to feel love, how to feel happy, all sold to you by making you feel like you were none of those things. Men's magazines, on the other hand, were about making money, going places, having sex with beautiful women, and eating rare or bloody things. Passions, not emotions.

He had pleased himself with that thought whenever he looked over the piles of glossy business magazines commingling with the fashion books in the waiting room of his office: Fortune pairing with Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire splayed across Fast Company, staid Inc. and Money getting their kicks with V, SmartMoney sticking it to Glamour. Those magazines had always made him feel vaguely sorry for women, as much as he admired them and lusted after them.

Charles remembered reading something in one of the magazines-Fortune, he thought it was-back in the early days of the millennium, when it had seemed like nothing he did could possibly go wrong. "Companies fail the way Ernest Hemingway wrote about going broke," the writer had said. "Gradually, and then suddenly." That was exactly what it had been like for Charles, though even the gradual part had been very, very sudden.

Emotion was the culprit.

Really, Charles's mistake had been as dumb as keeping all his cash in a box under the bed and then getting drunk and chatty with a thieving locksmith.

For years he'd expanded judiciously, buying factories only when demand raged or prices dropped, but suddenly, simultaneously, sales of three of the brands that he manufactured had skyrocketed, bringing a jump in orders and an influx of cash. The money needed to be reinvested in order to avoid a big tax hit, and Charles's competitive streak was stoked. Why stay in the background, churning out goods for small-time makeup artists, when, in fact, he was the visionary? If it was all about the verticals, then he should be getting right in front of the consumer with his own product. Why let these amateurs earn the giant markup? Charles Wang knew what the world wanted, and he was going to give it to them.

But to do it right, he needed more cash.

In certain dark moments, Charles allowed the conversation to replay in his mind. Each time the turning point loomed larger, each time his own failings stood out more harshly.

Really, it was a series of strikes.

ONE:.

Marco Perozzi, the banker he was accustomed to dealing with, was gone.

In his place, J. Marshall "Call me Marsh" Weymouth.

Charles was not a man who believed in the false familiarity of nicknames.

TWO:.

It was 2006.

The Fed had just raised interest rates to 5.25 percent and threatened to go higher.

Charles was a man who knew that when governments made threats they tended to keep their word.

THREE:.

The luxury cosmetics market was worth $6 billion.

The largely untapped ethnic cosmetics market was worth a potential $3 billion.

Charles was a man who believed in potential.

Right, wrong, wrong.

"Marsh," Charles had said, wielding the nickname like a hundred prep-school roommates and fellow eating-club members had done before him, "no one is doing this right now. We can make fortunes!"

Marsh twisted his signet ring. He looked at the line of products that Charles had arranged on the long obsidian tabletop and fiddled with the trackpad of the laptop that Charles used for his presentation.

"What are your intentions in creating this line, Mr. Wang?"

"Intention? To make money."

The banker shifted again. "Is that it?"

Charles was confused. He had already talked about his growth strategy, about the buying power of nonwhite women, about the success of other targeted makeup lines, about his stellar supply chain and his plans for distribution.

"What else is there?" asked Charles.

Marsh leaned back dispassionately, dismissively.

"Business is no place for politics," he said.

"Politics?"

"The fight for inclusion is a worthy fight," said Marsh, "but it's not one that traditionally yields high financial returns."

Who did this wan, overbred man think Charles Wang was? Some sort of brown-people revolutionary with a tube of red lipstick in his raised fist and an ammo belt strung with eyelash curlers?

"This is not some NAACP for eye shadow, Marsh. Do you know what the markup is on cosmetics even when label is buying straight from manufacturer? Seventy-eight percent! Do you know how much I can make, since I make it all myself? Ninety-five percent markup! The research is there. The market is open. I know how to sell. I have mucho skin in the game. I only need more capital; not so much money for very substantial return."

"No one is questioning your business sense, Mr. Wang. You've clearly been very successful so far. It's my experience, though, that businesses created to do some perceived good rarely achieve that goal."

That asshole. Worse than the Communists, with words that confirmed their meaning by denying it.

"We simply like to be certain that our money is being used to make more of it."

Charles thought longingly of Perozzi, his former point man at the bank. They had enjoyed a nearly perfect borrower-banker relationship. Charles requested; Marco assented. Charles prospered; Marco collected. What more was there?

And then it came. The fatal flaw. Emotion slunk into the picture.

J. Marshall Weymouth made Charles feel small, like he hadn't made his first million by the time he was thirty-three years old, like he didn't have a flaming redhead named Saoirse on call, like he hadn't blown out of Taiwan with nothing but a urea pipeline and lucked himself into the most ideal wife-and-children combo possible. Made Charles feel like five thousand years of Chinese culture didn't stand up to a few generations of penitent nobodies who thought a single act of tea-soaked rebellion was enough to crown a nation. Nobodies who took pride in being nicknamed for a winged parasitic bug. Fucking WASPs.

"Fine," said Charles. "Personal guarantee. This is not some sort of multi-culti show, this is a strong and serious business investment. Here-"

Charles reached for the loan papers and uncapped a black Sharpie. Across the section that began LOAN AND DELIVERY OF COLLATERAL PURSUANT TO PROMISSORY NOTES, he penned 836 Glover Circle.

"My home," he said, shoving the papers back across the table. "You wonder how much money I expect to make for you? Enough that I stake my family house on it. Personal guarantee. This tell you enough?"

Hot. Charles remembered being burning hot, the tiny points on his scalp jumping and prickling.

Weymouth had simply raised an eyebrow, and said, "Alright, Mr. Wang. I'll choose to believe in the numbers."

And then, to add insult to stupidity, Charles had said-oh, how he hated himself now!-"Right, then. I believe in the numbers, too," and opted for a fixed-rate loan.

And then interest rates dropped step by step as surely as they had climbed in the twenty-two months before he locked in his loan. Every day Charles watched them fall as he bit his knuckles and told himself that he was about to be so successful that none of this would matter. Nothing would matter. The point of making so much money was so that money itself would no longer matter. He'd pay off the whole loan at once and beat the rates at their own game.

He was, of course, wrong.

All of it mattered; mattered so much that it wiped out everything else that had ever mattered before.

All it took was two years. Charles secured that loan and opened two ten-thousand-square-foot, no-expense-spared flagship stores in San Francisco and Chicago-cities that, he thought, were underserved by beauty-and filled them both with a flotilla of makeup-artists-slash-salesgirls who ranged in hue from champagne gold to glistening obsidian, each possessed of the ability to transform a customer's face with a few sure strokes, raising cheekbones and defining jawlines using creams and ointments that melted smoothly into the clientele's variegated complexions.

It should have been a success. Charles knew it was brilliant. And necessary. At its core, good makeup involved nothing more than a technical knowledge of skin tone and facial structure-it had as much in common with taxidermy as it did with art-and no one else was bringing that knowledge to the millions of nonwhite women who were walking around with chalky faces.

But from the start, it was a mess. His factories were focused on supplying the new stores, which made them late on shipments to a few long-standing clients. Some of them were understanding, and some were ungrateful pricks who forgot that Charles was the one who had believed in them when they'd first walked in with lint in their pockets and a meager little dream in their hearts.

And the stores weren't drawing in customers the way they should have been. Charles himself had masterminded the ads for the Failure and, just as he'd predicted, they had created a sensation: five beauties, glistening and nude, covered only in images inspired by their cultures. The black woman, a regal Ethiopian model who had grown up in a tiny brick row house in Astoria, had a tribal pattern that ran from knee to hip; that leg was slung across the lap of the Asian woman, a fiery Tibetan girl whose favorite word was balls and whose breasts were painted with a fire-breathing dragon; it panted flames towards the Latina model, actually an Italian who took care never to let her tan fade, who faced away from the camera, her back entirely covered in an Aztec sun; the rays of which were obscured only by the smooth brown head of the Indian model, a well-behaved Orange County girl who had never been seen entirely naked by a man until the makeup artist disrobed her and whose arms were intricately patterned with mehndi; wrapped in those arms was the final model, a mixed-race girl so beautiful that Charles almost, almost, began to feel a bit more sanguine about the prospect of grandchildren that were not 100 percent Chinese. Her name was Opal and she was the face of the store, an exclusive contract that took a not-insignificant bite out of the Failure's generous ad budget. Thanks, in part, to that very, very generous ad budget, the beauty press was quick to lend Charles their support, but their readers didn't follow suit.