“For my Second Lady I haven’t decided. Perhaps I’ll look further afield than the usual selection. I think we need to diversify now. We’re obviously vulnerable.”
“That’s a sensible idea. Yes, I completely agree with you.”
“So the younger five girls will consist of two of the current members of the society – that’s Shuijing “Crystal” Gao, the niece of Shanghai’s city mayor, and Ai An Zhong, the child-star. They are harmless enough I suppose. In the place of the other four of the younger ones, I’m appointing Jingfei Kwang Sun, the younger second cousin of Easton Sun Goldberg, who’s a close friend of mine – you remember him. He was sort of dating Sofia, although you won’t know about that. He’s Eurasian, like me, but Jewish-Chinese – very smart family. They’re the ones who’re big in shipping and shipping insurance – and I’ll also appoint Biyou Zhao, who’s her best friend. I think bringing in a couple girls so closely related to Sofia will show there’s nothing to hide, personally.”
“That’s only four girls,” said her mother.
“Well, I’m going to create a junior leadership position among the younger crew, mainly so that I don’t have to spend so much pig-fuc-, I mean, pointless time taken up with the issues of a group of sixteen-year-old girls. I figure that there are enough very important adult items on the agenda right now not to get distracted by childish nonsense – at least initially. That can be for when I’ve made my mark.”
Dame Ming-hua nodded approvingly. Her daughter, she thought, was smarter than she gave her credit for sometimes. “OK, sure.”
“So Leticia Overbagh, Jasmine’s younger sister – she’s sixteen, the same age as the other girls. She will look after them and report to her sister, who’ll be First Lady –”
“Don’t you think you lay yourself a little overexposed to the Overbagh clan there?” asked Dame Ming-hua critically.
“Perhaps, but there’s not a lot of girls right now I know who to trust more than Jasmine or Leticia to be honest.”
Dame Ming-hua tut-tutted but let it slide. “So how about your Second Lady? What more have you for your mother than ‘I might look outside and interview some candidates.’”
Chanel’s cheeks glowed a soft red. She had no answer. Her mother was always doing this to her.
“Don’t worry,” Dame Ming-hua said. “I’ve got an idea for you. The threats to reveal Sofia’s orgy to the public on that tape came from inside the American embassy.”
“You don –”
“It wasn’t your boyfriend, no, even though he is the son of the U.S. Ambassador. It couldn’t have been –”
“He’s been away in Tokyo for the whole of the month, practically! He got back last night!”
“I’m quite aware of where you spent the night last night,” said Chanel’s mother, slowly. “But it still got me to thinking – we are unnecessarily exposed to the American political and social circuit – unnecessarily vulnerable –”
“I know you’re not his greatest fan, and I know this situation is – well, very serious. But I’m not going to stop seeing him because of this!”
“Shhhh! Child, please!” Her mother made patting motions with her palms to indicate that Chanel should stop talking, in the same way she used to when she was still a little girl. “I don’t expect you to stop seeing Taylor Milliken. In fact, I think we should have more to do with the Americans for the time being. I think we are too alienated – too cut off from that side right now. I mean, us Chinese. I think your Second Lady could be an American.”
Chanel gaped at her mother in amazement.
“Give it a try –”
“Alright,” said Chanel. “I’ll ask Taylor who he thinks would work on the sorority.”
“No, no, no, no, no! You leave Taylor for your personal enjoyment only. You need to be more strategic if you are appointing an American to the sorority. You need to appoint someone who’s relatively new here, and yet who speaks our language, Chinese, reasonably well. Someone who you can shape, turn into a spy of sorts against her own side when you need her, such as now.”
“An American girl who’s new to China but speaks Chinese; who I will be able to exert enough influence over to turn on her own side eventually? Who in status terms isn’t a total middle-class, white-collar working whore-of-a-middle-class-strumpet!” Chanel laughed heartily, but only until her mother passed her a file.
“Take a look at this one, then,” she said. “Her father is the new Managing Director of McIntyre & Co, the management consulting firm. They did some amazing business for Zengky Bank, the family company, recently. This gentlemen, Ross Railly, practically persuaded your friend Jasmine’s father to sell us the best pieces of Shanghai Savings & Loan that he’d bought just six-and-a-half years earlier. It saved us from going under in that irritating loan scandal that many of the other family banks succumbed to.”
“He has a daughter?” asked Chanel incredulously, irritated with her mother’s impeccable way of interfering in her own affairs.
“He has two daughters, and a son. But the oldest one is the one you will want to interview for the position. I think you’ll find there’s something very worthwhile in a conversation right now. She’s the sort of American the sorority needs: eighteen, pretty, unpretentious, clever. Down-to-earth in that American way that will take some of the heat off Sofia’s obvious celebrity and glamorous appeal.”
And I don’t have glamorous appeal? thought Chanel, as her eyes cast over the name her mother had highlighted for her in the file: MILANA RAILLY.
Ω
Milana’s driver eased through the gold-horned granite gates of the fancy housing compound that lay just off Hong Chao Road in the ultra-upper-class Shanghai suburb of Gubei. The afternoon sunlight glared a polluted orange everywhere as it struck the ripples of the double-Olympic swimming pool that sprawled out ostentatiously in front of the Zheng mansion.
A security guard with a whistle balanced between his teeth gesticulated in a series of high-pitch wheeeeeeerrrrrss for Milana’s Mercedes S-Class to come to a gradual halt in front of a carved-out layby just before the main entrance to the giant building, which was supported on two, massive, thirty-five-foot pillars at the front.
Sitting atop the pillars was an oversized, round golden dome glinting in the surprisingly clear blood-orange sunset. Along with the palm trees and the exotic flowers, the dome gave the entrance to the mansion an almost ecclesiastic feel, as if you’d arrived at the destination point of a pilgrimage. Milana got out of the car and saw Chanel marching towards her. Her strides were those of a girl with status and money on her side, more aggressive and adult in a way than those of most girls her age, lending her a certain all-business purpose that was vaguely eccentric.
Just behind, parked slightly beyond the giant dome, were a series of automobiles that looked like something off a movie set basking in the after-glow of a golden colored shaft of light that dropped immediately down off the glaring dome at a sharp angle in a series of ribbons of air composed of yellowish hues.
“In most families, it’s the men who love their supercars,” Chanel said flippantly, turning back towards the automobiles and leading a passage towards them. “But not in ours. My biological father, who’s half-Eurotrash, hates them. My cousins are not especially fond of them; boats and planes are more their thing. But my mother and I are fanatical about them,” she explained.
“This first one you see is a blue-and-white Buggati Veyron. It was built in 2010 but the tan interiors were custom-installed by a specialist here in Shanghai only earlier this year. You really ought to have him do something with that,” she said, pointing towards Milana’s S-Class.
“Me and Mommy go crazy for all things with rocks, so if you look carefully at the headrests you’ll see a different stone ensconced in the leather of every one of them, just below the point where it typically touches your head. One’s a ruby, the other is an emerald – I can’t remember what the other three are any more, to be honest.” She let forth a guilty little rich girl
giggle.
This one,” she said, circling a dark purple Lamborghini Gallardo with a beige-and-black seating configuration bearing a red strip through the middle, Formula 1 style, “is just a standard racing supercar for the evenings when you’re out showing off with friends. If you crash it, it’ll suck, but it’s easily replaceable. This one on the other hand – a silver Ferrari four five eight with a V12 engine and custom Pinifarina interiors – is what you get if you are a real car aficionado. We actually modeled it on the singer Eric Clapton’s one, except it’s in right-hand drive, obviously, and we upgraded the engine from a V8. Mommy and me just couldn’t figure out why after blowing four million dollars creating this amazing aesthetic work of art, he didn’t bother ponying up the extra half million to make the darn thing beat any of the other cars in a race!”
Chanel laughed and Milana laughed a little along with her, although supercars weren’t really a topic of interest to her at all.
Milana was glad she had at least made a presentence this time at playing her image a little bit high-society, arriving as she had in a luxury chauffeur-driven car, even if her own was no match for these wonder-vehicles. Usually such things didn’t matter so much to her; the past two times she had arrived at Jasmine’s house for the preliminary meetings she’d just taken a cab. But Milana’s father had frantically insisted she take the driver last night when he had discovered it was to the Zheng mansion she was headed on this particular occasion.
“They’re really amazing,” said Milana.
“I know,” said Chanel, and she let a silence hang in the air before she spoke again. “Jasmine and I have a lot to try and get done today, so we should probably get going inside. The last two times that we spoke to you at Jasmine’s place were essentially a warm-up; a practice test for what we are going to go through today. Basically, this is going to be the final time we are going to meet with you before making a decision about whether we want you to become a sister of ours or not, so there’s a lot riding on this one. Remember that. Now, come on – enough gawking over supercars, as much as I sympathize with you for doing so, especially at the four five eight! Let’s go inside and get started.”
Ω
Chanel Meizhen Zheng Kyburg, the new – albeit unofficial still – Dame Chair of the Shanghai Sorority, finished asking Milana for the third time now about her academics, which were exemplary, her internship at Theo Farrell, the global ad agency her Dad had snuck her into on an internship program at the last minute four weeks ago, and about what she wanted to do in the future (she still had no idea of that yet; she hadn’t even studied college applications yet, the move to China acting as an artificial postponing of the inevitable).
“If you want to be a part of this, we’re going to make sure first that we know a LOT about you. Even then, there are no guarantees at all,” Chanel repeated, in exactly the same way she had said these lines the previous two times that Milana had interviewed at the Overbagh house, which, while impressively large, was much more like her own than the Zheng’s sprawling mansion.
Milana knew from her previous two interviews with the girls what was next on the agenda now: sex.
As she had in the last two sessions, Jasmine started by justifying the two girls’ attempted intrusion with a more in-depth contextual background.
“Some of these things you might not have even considered yourself before. But that’s OK, just relax and give us the answers as they come. The main thing is that you are truthful to us. In the past two years Chanel has held literally hundreds of these interviews, and she’s got the ability to spot a lie down to a finely honed art form. The questions might seem slightly invasive, but it’s understandable when you think hard about it.”
“It only makes sense for you to be completely straight with us, too, that’s absolutely right,” Chanel said emphatically. “I can’t stress that enough – in fact, it’s absolutely the most important thing. I realize that a lot of this might be a bit repetitious, but let me tell you why you must be honest with us if you expect to become a sister of ours, since I realize I may have been a bit vague here on our previous meetings.
“If we invite you to join us on the Sorority it affects all of our guanxi. You’re probably familiar with what that term is, but given that you’ve only been here a short while still, and that a widening number of social circles here in China today seem to hold slightly differential ideas about what it means, I’ll tell you about what our understanding of it is. Guanxi is a Chinese term that describes the process by which social relationships; hierarchies and so on come together.
“So, for example, right now, Jasmine and myself form a significantly – magnificently, in fact – greater orientation in your personal guanxi than you do in ours. And if we decide that for whatever reason, we’re going to adopt another girl as our new sister, which will forever remain the case. That’s not meant to mean, it’s just a fact as it stands. But if we do invite you to become a part of the sorority, then over night, all of a sudden you will become a HUGELY significantly part of our guanxi; immediately, you are a part of our most intimate, immediate social network. A member of the family, if you like. Here in China, as you’re probably becoming aware by now, when someone is affected positively or negatively in terms of reputation, it has a massive knock-on effect among all the others in that person’s immediate social circle.”
Jasmine said, “So much so that people frequently still take their lives over malignant disruptions to their guanxi.”
“The reason for this is that face, or mianzi as we call it, is so fragile,” continued Chanel. “It’s really, really, really fragile. No one tells you that when you come here – all those introductory seminars and pep-talks put on for you when you first arrived by your father’s employer, and all the guidebooks and so forth – they focus on how to build face, how to collect it like it’s just some sort of social goodwill.”
“I think I even remember one of them using that phrase to describe it, actually,” said Milana. “Goodwill, I mean.”
“That’s like saying in America that free speech is just an oratory style,” said Chanel. “It’s a highly dangerous assumption. Our mianzi, just like your free speech, is so fragile and yet so fundamental to our society – to whom each of us are as individuals – that to downplay it as nothing more than mere everyday social courtesy or worse, to try and frame it in terms of a point-scoring device that enables social and commercial success or whatever is to seriously misjudge the reality of life here to such a degree as to walk around blind. Face is a fragility, something you guard – literally, with your life.
“There are so many people looking to get the rewards and spoils and prestige associated by elevated social status in China that if someone can – even just for a couple minutes – get just a tiny, tiiiiny little bit of extra mianzi by tearing your whole life down, many will not think twice about it. They’ll do that, if that’s what it takes. And they do exactly that. It’s why you see some people or some things one day, and then the next day – never again.”
“Like the villages they tear down just to build factory plants in the countryside. I saw some of that last year upcountry,” said Milana. “Bulldozers everywhere. The houses were all abandoned like something out of a Stephen King novel. Like people hadn’t packed – instead, they’d just disappeared. It was so strange.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Those tens of thousands of vacated homes that you saw, that equated to probably hundreds of thousands of lives upheaved at a moment’s notice, to wherever they are now, without their personal belongings, without their memories, someone somewhere got big mianzi for doing that. That’s why you saw what you did.”
“You mean – they got face for moving the families elsewhere?”
“In a practical sense, they did. They got mianzi for the foreign construction contract that necessitated the families’ removal,” Chanel replied, seriously. “So, if we invite you to become a sister of ours, and then it turns out that there’s some dark secret of yours that�
�s lying around, just waiting for someone somewhere to find it and bring it out into the open, and neither Jasmine nor myself know anything about it yet, then that’s a catastrophe in the making.”
“Now,” Jasmine added, ever the helpful third-party commentator. “Obviously it wouldn’t be a catastrophe in the making for Chanel personally if you didn’t bring something out into the open with us first. Chanel’s from one of the richest and most politically powerful families in China: it’s very, very unlikely that anything you’ve ever done or do right now or even any time soon could realistically affect her that much. Her family would just have to deny it or whatever and it would go away – for her, and maybe for me too, that is.
“But for the other five girls who are part of the sorority, if a scandal erupted of your making, without us being prepared in advance for it, then it would be terminal, socially speaking,” Jasmine continued.
“Forever after negative associations would be made everywhere about them concerning their purity, their sanctity, their virginity or what have you. They’d blow all the chances they’d built up thus far through the good fortune provided to them by their wealth and beauty and their good, virtuous family names. We have a duty to protect our younger sisters here – all the other sisters are just sixteen remember.”
That was only marginally more than a year or so older than her own brother and sister, so it wasn’t difficult for Milana to take Jasmine seriously as she said this. She also knew how greedy and thirsty people could get for no apparent end: it was obvious to her even back in America, just watching the hours of mindless fakery that constituted reality TV. In addition, Milana was beginning to see that, despite their somewhat overbearing presence, the two girls were clearly very sophisticated socially. There was almost no crisis she could not envisage them handling better than her.
It wasn’t impossible some overlooked should-have-been confessed secret would bite her in the ass, either; in fact, the chances of that were inestimably high. The sorority sisters were, in one way or another, practically in every single social diary, magazine, newspaper gossip column and television celebrity slot in the city; increasingly, they were making national celebrity headlines. It was a big deal becoming a sister.
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 8