Page 21 of Worth Fighting For

“No, you don’t. And yet, here I am.”

“Doesn’t the whole ‘Show them you can be manly, too’ thing bother you, though?”

“Nope.”

I give her the side-eye. “Not even a little bit?”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing this whole time at the firm? So you don’t look like yourself. You know what? I don’t even know what the real you looks like. I always see you in the office wearing power suits and talking like a finance bro. Or when you’re with your parents, you turn into this perfect Chinese kid and you carry yourself different. You even laugh differently. You’re used to playing all these roles, what’s one more?”

A lump forms in my throat. “Jeez, Mushu,” I joke, trying to hide how much Mushu’s words have affected me. “Since when did you become so perceptive?”

“Oh please, I have always been perceptive. I am one of life’s quiet observers. Also, I literally heard you out-burp Brian in the lunchroom last Tuesday.”

“That was because we were—We’d gotten those giant subs for lunch and were…” My voice trails off as I recall what I and the other analysts were doing.

“And you were having a competition to see who could eat their sub the fastest,” Mushu says. “A more dudebro way of spending your lunchtime I have never heard of.”

I sigh and look down at my feet.

“Face it, you’ve spent half your life trying to fit into the finance world, and it’s dominated by bros. The worst of bros, actually.”

“The quants at hedge funds aren’t that bad,” I mumble.

“They’re the least bad of the bunch, but guess what, we don’t work with them.”

“It’s the only way I can get taken seriously.” I haven’t felt so miserable, so much like a sellout, in a long time.

“I know,” Mushu says, her voice suddenly turning gentle. “I’m not holding it against you. I may not be an associate or an analyst, but I know what it’s like to have to work in a man’s world. I hate that we can’t just be ourselves for these dudebros to take us seriously. It’s just a sad fact, and you’re doing everything right. Which is why I know you can do this, you can convince the Lis that you’re man enough to take their stupid whiskey all the way to the top.”

“If you say so. But…” I massage my temples. “I don’t even have a plan beyond ‘Get the deal done.’ I mean, what’s going to happen if we do get the deal? I don’t have a long-term plan in place. Are we going to keep up this charade even after we acquire the company?”

“One step at a time,” Mushu says in a reassuring tone of voice. “First of all, you’re not the one who usually steps in and runs the companies you guys acquire. You hire someone else to actually run the operation, right?”

I nod. “Wow, Mushu, so you do pay attention to all this ‘finance-y stuff’ after all.”

“I’ve got hidden layers so deep you don’t even know,” Mushu says. “So you’ll acquire this company, you’ll find the right person to help fix whatever’s broken in it, and you’ll meet with these people, what, twice a year? Or maybe every quarter to look over their performance? That’s doable, right?”

It does sound doable, but none of it feels good to me. Why didn’t I foresee how slimy it would all feel? “I guess so.”

“I know so.”

Somehow, even though Mushu’s pep talk is the most confused pep talk in the history of pep talks, it’s having an effect on me. I gaze into the mirror and watch as my face turns from uncertainty to determination, my brows setting low and my mouth pinching grimly. Mushu’s right. One step at a time. The most important thing here is to not lose the company that Baba was so excited to acquire. I’ve had years of experience fighting to be accepted in a heavily male-dominated industry. This trip is going to be nothing compared to everything else I’ve had to go through to get to where I am in life. So I’ll have to herd a few cows, maybe, uh, feed a couple of chickens or whatever it is they do at a ranch. Did I not graduate top ten in my class? Did I not wow my Princeton professor with my thesis on game theory models and how to shed light on determining financial offers? Did I not beat out my classmates, many of whom were savants with IQs above 140 and titles like World Chess Champion or World Mathematics Champion? I am Hua Mulan, daughter of Hua Zhou and Hua Li, and the Lis would do well not to underestimate me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

By the time we’re through shopping, Mushu has talked me into buying so many things for the trip that I know my suitcase will be filled to bursting.

To add to my apprehension, when Mushu picks me up to drive to the rendezvous point at Uncle Hong’s house, she takes one look at my giant bag and says, “Jeez, cuz, what did you pack in here, a whole horse?”

“Don’t make me put you on probationary leave,” I snap, at which Mushu giggles. It takes both of us to lug the suitcase into the trunk.

Uncle Hong’s house is a palatial mansion in Atherton with a long, snaking driveway lined with lush trees. Gravel crunches under the tires as Mushu navigates the car through the drive, and I’m more and more intimidated as we get to the end of the driveway and find ourselves staring up at the massive mansion. The Lis are already gathered out front, chatting and carrying their bags to various vehicles—it’s a mix of sporty cars and even a humongous, flashy trailer that will take some of the family up to the ranch and distillery.

Mushu parks the car and, with one last deep inhale, I get out. Here we go.

Conversations pause mid-sentence as we climb out, and I have to remind myself not to hunch my shoulders as eyes crawl over us. Oh god, I knew it. I knew I shouldn’t have listened to Mushu about the stupid outfit!

It’s a scene straight out of my nightmares—not one of the Lis is dressed in a ranch outfit. Sure, a few of them are wearing cowboy boots, but these boots look like proper work boots, dusty and hardy and not at all ornate like mine are. A couple of them are indeed wearing checkered shirts, but none of the shirts are as tight as mine. They look like shirts that the wearers can move around freely in. And no one, not a single one of them, is wearing a cowboy hat. Some are wearing baseball caps, many of the women are wearing aggressively large visors, but there isn’t a single cowboy hat to be found in the crowd.

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