She went on praising her friend, who was right now her one-way ticket to the top of the Shanghai social pyramid.
“You’re incredible. You’re three years her junior and already you’re going to be Dame yourself –”
“It’s not a done deal yet,” said Chanel, but both of them knew it was. It was the only way the Zheng family could conceivably avert a calamitous loss of face. Chanel’s mother, the overpowering and outrageous Dame Zheng Ming-hua, had just about managed to make it look like Sofia had a genuine reason to defect to Dubai so suddenly, but even so, the rumor mills were in full swing now. Everyone was wondering what it was Shanghai’s most powerful and prestigious family had done so wrong for its heir-apparent – the twenty-two-year-old beauty queen, society girl, face of local advertising and future politico Sofia Jiang YuZheng to disappear all of a sudden off the face of the earth. No mind that she had received a huge promotion, unprecedented in the sixty-five-year history of one of the world’s largest ad agencies: she had had it all already here in Shanghai; here in China, the only place anyone wanted to be these days. And she’d given it all up, without so much as a statement to anybody, all to apparently pursue the corporate ladder in Dubai. Had she offended someone high up in the Communist Party? That was the question on everyone’s lips right now. If so, good riddance to her future career as a policymaker in China and that was a big, big deal, too: for as the only one of the Zheng family who had both American and Chinese nationality, it was obviously the intention that Sofia would be the uncontested caretaker of the country some day; the only one who could manage to straddle the increasingly complex process of Americanization that China was undergoing these days.
With Sofia’s resume including a period as Dame of the Shanghai Sorority, a position which itself was elected by an anonymous, silent committee inside the Chinese government, and her status as niece of a woman who would then be an ex-Premier of the PRC, herself a former Sorority Dame, it would be a done deal. That had clearly been the plan, at any rate.
Chanel knew about the sex tape, because her mother had told her.
In that sense, the Zheng Family wasn’t in the clear yet– the video still lay out there, in the hands of their enemies. And there was no way to tell whether that video was the only copy, anyway.
As Chanel’s best friend, Jasmine knew that something was amiss – she knew that Sofia wasn’t leaving because Theo Farrell had made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Still, Chanel hadn’t told her friend what the actual reason for Sofia’s rash departure was: why her mother had been frantically making phone calls and pulling strings for the past 24 hours to get her cousin on the fastest plane out of Shanghai. She probably assumed it was something to do with Sofia’s drug problem, which had become more and more a liability lately, thought Chanel. In a very real way, that was the right answer, too – after all, Sofia would never have gotten herself – and the family, damn her! – Into all this mess in the first place had it not been for her ongoing battle with amphetamines.
Chanel heard Jasmine’s familiar squeaky whine, which always indicated the vocative.
“Sorry, Mindy, I was miles away. What were you saying?” she said, using her friend’s pet name, which her father, the banker Duke Overbagh, had invented for her long ago. Jasmine hated that name, but had grown to tolerate it when it came out absent-mindedly, and only when it was employed by the permissible few.
“I think that we should make plans for the Sorority just in case it does turn out that you are appointed Sorority Dame, though, Chanel. You know how Dame Ming-hua can be, after all. She’s going to want a thorough plan, and she’s hardly going to accept the explanation that you can’t have possibly seen your promotion coming.”
Although Chanel knew that this was her friend’s way of working her way in to one of the two privileged spots available as her First Lady in the sorority, Jasmine had a point. If Chanel was the one appointed as Dame of the sorority and it turned out that she had nothing specific or original planned to propose for the future of Shanghai’s most elite society – especially given the state of current events in the family – her mother would be nothing short of highly displeased. She might even reverse her decision: although highly unlikely, Dame Ming-hua could be most temperamental like that. Whatever the case, it wasn’t worth chancing.
“Well, Jasmine: it goes without saying. My number one to the Dameship is none other than First Lady Jasmine Overbagh.” She let it sink it, expected though it probably was given Jasmine had been her best friend since the two girls were in Kindergarten.
“Ooooooohh, Ma’am Chanel, thank you, thank you!” said Jasmine with a little squeal.
“You can call me Ma’am only if it’s me who gets to be the Dame.”
“Of course, I’m sorry. But it will be, I just know it will be. It has to be! You’ve been a member of the Sorority since you were sixteen You’re Dame Ming-hua’s daughter, for Christ sake, and you’ve said yourself how much she’s been doing to smooth this over! Lixue Lai is theoretically in the running I suppose, but –”
“That’s the other thing – Lixue Lai will be gone. I am striking her from the sorority!” said Chanel firmly.
Jasmine’s surprise was hard to conceal. “You mean; she’s getting –”
“Yes, she’s gone.” To get rid of a sister was highly unusual, even in an unprecedented circumstance such as this one. Usually it meant that the sister had transgressed a fundamental rule of the society, or had lost such a degree of face in society that she had become a liability to the mianzi of the sorority itself. “I’m within my rights to expel her, and as such, she is no longer a sister. She can’t be trusted – that’s all I want to say about the matter. Let’s not bring her up again, OK?”
Jasmine nodded her acknowledgement. Since Chanel couldn’t tell Jasmine the circumstances surrounding her cousin’s abdication, she wasn’t in a position to explain her reasoning behind wanting Lixue Lai out of the Sorority. Lixue Lai – literally, beautiful snow in Chinese – had been a close confident of Sofia’s. For that reason only, people might think that Chanel wanted to replace her with her own, personally loyal lackey in her place. But that wasn’t it.
The real reason was that Lixue Lai was the twenty-four-year-old younger sister of Mason Feng Lee (Mason “Sharp Blade” as the Chinese translated his name, all too appropriately). Together with her twenty-six-year-old cousin, Konrad Von Kyburg-Wintethur, who she deeply, deeply despised, Mason was the owner of HaiSoc.com, formally known as the Shanghai Social Service.
In a country where the barriers to entry in terms of starting a social network were as high as the government approval you were granted to start one, unlike in the rest of the world, very few online social platforms existed. That made the social networks in China much more powerful – and comprehensive – technological interfaces than their international peers. It was the reason that most American technology companies didn’t stand a chance breaking into the domestic mainland Chinese e-commerce space: the dominant platforms were already here to stay. The Shanghai Social Service was one of just a handful of these oversized, all-powerful social networking platforms, offering Shanghai users in addition to their own social networking pages their daily fill of the news, entertainment (including online gaming, which was another social network of sorts), music, e-mail, online payment and messenger platforms. What’s more, HaiSoc was expanding outside Shanghai soon, into other areas of the mainland. Soon, when you made a phone call, used a credit card to make a payment for something, read the news, played a game or did anything of a handful of things online it would be some version of the HaiSoc interface that would capture the activity.
Obviously, all this was why Sofia had chosen Lixue Lai to be her First Lady when she had been appointed Dame two years ago. But the more Chanel thought about the threats to release the file with her cousin in an S&M orgy, the more she realized that to make good on those threats even just a little, you’d have to get past China’s strict internet censorship regulations, and you’d h
ave to have a hell of allot of distribution advantage. The only person she could think with those advantages at her disposal, including the kind of proximity to her cousin that enabled the recording of the sex act in the first place, was Lixue Lai. Of course, in her own defense, Lixue Lai would probably argue that for these reasons it was least likely to be her who was making the anonymous threats; besides, what did she have to gain? While she might not ever stand to be Dame of the sorority, since she was required, as per the society’s rules, to resign in a little over a year when she turned twenty-six, as Jasmine pointed out, in the event of the abdication of Dame Sofia, First Lady Lixue Lai was hardly likely to be considered a real contender against her rival Second Lady Chanel Minzhen Zheng, who was the daughter of the most famous former Dame of all the sorority. Still, the whole tawdry affair seemed a little too close of a call to make Lixue Lai completely innocent, and that meant that Chanel would see to it that she was gone.
“Also, I plan to create some new rules. It’s time a new sense of order prevailed among the sisters,” said Chanel. “I find it totally ridiculous that we sisters just trust one another, without having anything to hold against one another as insurance.”
That also took Jasmine by complete surprise. “What d’you mean – the Sorority is all about trust. Isn’t that kind of the point?”
“Trust, yes, but not blind faith. At least it won’t be under my tutelage. I plan to make sure that all new entrants to the sorority are completely vetted, properly this time, and that in particular, the Sorority Dame holds a certain – grip – over the other sisters. That will mean you too, unfortunately,” said Chanel. “But there should be a certain price for climbing this high, I think,” she added after a little consideration.
Suddenly Jasmine wasn’t so sure that being a part of the Shanghai Sorority was all she had hoped it would be, and yet there was no turning back now, not at this stage. Not now that she had effectively accepted Chanel’s offer to be her First Lady.
Ω
Dame Ming-hua listened to her father, the senior party official Zheng Chao, explode over the phone in a cascade of blasphemies and said, “Ni bu shuohua name duo de xiedu, Baba.” Please don’t speak so many blasphemies, Papa.
But that only brought on his wrath all the more. “Ta bushi bun …” She isn’t … he began earnestly, his tone suddenly descending into abject revile. “She’s not even one of them stupid inbred stacks of meat as are most of those rich kids today, filthy fornicators of livestock that they are! So why does the dog fucking whore have to go and star in a porn movie? Do you know the mianzi this has cost us inside the party now? I’m not talking in Shanghai, where no frog-humping son of a bitch knows what’s decent any more, so corrupted are they by money, money, money! But I’m talking in Beijing, right where I am sitting now, with our dignified party members! And they’re all asking me, Honorable Chao, when we bestowed such honor on your oldest grand daughter by making her the Dame of the Shanghai Sorority, why did she run away at the first opportunity she was given by an American marketing company to earn American dollars? Shove all the pants in the universe up my ass, it’s like having a shit-throwing contest with a monkey!”
“Papa, accept my apology if the decisions I made hurt you in any way. I didn’t consider that Theo Farrell was an American company; I just tried to tie up a plausible explanation as fast as I could before Niece Jiang’s orgiastic romp had a chance to tear down the edifice we have built: indeed, the whole Zheng family-name was at stake. We had only a day to make the arrangements,” Dame Ming-hua explained wearily, in one of her rare displays of humility that were exclusively reserved for her father and only a handful of senior party members, all of whom were his closest friends. “But the threats were real. We know they were real because the video footage was sent to us from inside the American consulate. They planned to use it against us – against China even!”
“Those foreign devils, the pig headed rotten eggs! They can go eat shit!” yelled Honorable Chao. “Maybe that might slim them out a little after too many hamburgers and pizzas, and clean out the shit-odor of the smelly slave wench-whores who they pass off as their wives!”
“Papa – I don’t mind your swearing so much but remember when you are doing so that your two granddaughters are both children of white devils! To call them smelly slave wench whores whose cunts need a cleaning is unbecoming.” Dame Ming-hua’s regained sense of entitlement was all the more formidable because of her staunch observance of moral codes: she never swore, she never put down her opponents – she never allowed anyone to move her to an irrational place out of emotion. Thus her firmness suddenly silenced her father.
“I think it’s better we change the subject for now until we learn more. We have people looking into this. We think that coming from the US Embassy anyway, this is highly likely to be an American plot.”
“I’d love to see some of these so-called modern Han Chinese usurpers face eight generations of their ancestors!” said Honorable Chao. “They’d show them a quick ride to hell! Piss-ants! Just because we worked harder than anyone in this God-forsaken world to get what we have …”
“That may be so,” Dame Ming-hua said, both intercepting and cutting short another of her father’s oncoming tirades. “But we have to keep working at it. I am just the daughter of a party official still, a successful business woman, and my daughter, who is the one we must rely on now, is barely nineteen years old. When can you get the committee to swing the endorsement for my daughter?”
Honorable Chao sighed dramatically. “I don’t know. It won’t be as easy as you think, you know? Now that granddaughter Jiang has left the seat wide open, what do I tell them in our family’s defense? Oh, I’m so sorry it didn’t work out, but her piss-whoring cousin, my other mongrel Chinese white-devil granddaughter wants a go at the job if that’s OK?”
“No, you tell them the truth without telling them all of it. Tell them that young girls will be young girls. That young girls make mistakes, and that there was a mistake made. That’s all you say, nothing more. It’ll cost us mianzi but it’s up to Chanel to earn that back for us now. Then tell them that as a gesture of reconciliation over the debacle with Niece Jiang, subject to a satisfactory conclusion of affairs by close of business today, Zengky Bank will open every member of the committee a ten-year unsecured line of credit for an amount up to ten million US dollars at our branch in Switzerland, repayable in local currency at the end of the term. They won’t refuse my daughter’s appointment then.”
Ω
Dame Ming-hua looked her nineteen-year-old daughter up and down as she strode up to the entrance of her formidable office, and thought, not for the first time, how despite being three-quarter Chinese, how much like her father – who was half Swiss – she looked. Perhaps it was just the fashion – the dark bangs tinged with a caramel-red, the haute couture synthesis of her simple Elie Saab spaghetti-strap together with the voluminous soft-metallic azure-charcoal Armani pants and simple, thigh-high open-toe Chanel boots – but that wasn’t just it. It was the European pronouncement of her nose, she figured, which was so much more apparent when she was wearing all her make-up.
Chanel sat on the little porch outside and took off her boots. This pleased her mother: an increasing number of the Eurasian kids these days – Sofia included – often saw no need for such cultural observations, wearing whatever it was that padded the undersides of their feet – heels, flattops, boots – indoors with no consideration for the traditional Chinese custom of taking them off before entering.
“It’s good to see you again, darling little daughter,” she said in Chinese.
“You too, Mama. I think you did the most amazing job of averting a scandal with cousin Jiang –
“I just don’t know what she could have been thinking,” said Dame Ming-hua, smiling at the praise from her daughter.
Chanel said, perhaps a little over-matter-of-factly given that she was addressing her mother: “She wasn’t thinking, Mama. She was on cocaine.”
“She was what?”
“She was on coke. And crystal meth, I think. And she was drunk obviously. If she wasn’t a junkie, she was as good as getting there.”
Dame Ming-hua stood there, gaping opened mouthed at her daughter’s nonchalant blitheness. Quickly, she brought her heavily jeweled open left palm over her daughter’s right cheek with a loud THWACK!
“And you didn’t think to tell me anything about this earlier?” seethed Dame Ming-hua.
Chanel’s eyes filled with tears. She put her hands up to the red mark across her cheek. She looked at her like an animal eyeing the needle that is about to put it to rest for good. “Mama, I was her Second Lady, I hardly knew anything. It just – it just all came out in the wash, afterwards. It’s Lixue Lai who was privy to this sort of thing.”
Her mother indicated for Chanel to sit down. “And what are you planning on doing about Lixue Lai?” she asked.
Chanel regained her composure. Back upright, just as her mother liked. Dry eyes – or else she would be told that she wasn’t an eight-year-old girl any more, that at nineteen years old, she was an adult representative of the Zheng family name. Voice direct – or else she wouldn’t be believed.
“I’m getting rid of her,” said Chanel, adding cautiously, “that is, if it so happens that I am elected by the committee to be the next Dame of the sorority.”
“I’ve made sure of it.”
“Well then, Lixue Lai is gone. My First Lady is to be Jasmine Overbagh.”
“I thought so. Jasmine’s crafty, but she’s loyal, at least. Or rather, she’s loyal to power, which we have, so that’s good. What about the others?”
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 7