Milana spilled the secret to show off, and it thrilled her how well it worked. Chanel was genuinely surprised, since while she knew that Milana’s family had money, never did she imagine that they were rich enough to bury fifteen million dollars in their kids’ names. Slowly, she scribbled a name and number on the back of her business card and handed it to Milana.
“Here’s the number of the guy that did my Bugatti. Get him to do a custom-job on yours. I’ll tell him it’s on my account,” said Chanel. “When it’s finished, then – well, whatever happens with the whole sorority decision. You can take me out in it to Milk, OK?”
“Ummm. That’s really sweet of you; I honestly don’t know what to say,” was all Milana could think of replying to the extravagant offer.
“Don’t worry about it. Consider it my gift to you for opening up like that just now. I know we’re gonna work out just fine together when there’s this kind of … openness between us, babe.”
Was this the type of gift these girls just handed out like that? If so, Milana thought, they must burn through cash. Her Trust Fund would barely last her any time at all! Still, for now, it hadn’t slipped Milana’s attention that the coolest girl in the whole of Asia had just then called her babe. So excited was Milana was by everything that had just happened – the unburdening of her darkest fantasies, the act of being fingered by the two hippest girls in her social orbit, the fact that she was Chanel Zheng’s babe now – that she didn’t even notice the tiny pulsing bleep! of the recording device installed as an app on Jasmine’s iPhone.
Ω
Once she had listened to the discussion playback in full, Dame Ming-hua laughed and said, “you see what a little patience will get you? American girls, remember,” she instructed her obliging daughter, “they are not like Chinese girls, or even Eurasian girls, like Jasmine. They are so accustomed to bearing their soul, so driven are they towards the extrovert tendency in everything – that even the most private of them will open up like spring flowers as long as patience is exercised.”
Chanel had to agree with Dame Ming Hua, for as much as she had doubted her mother’s wisdom at first, it appeared that Milana Railly made for an awesome addition to the sorority. She was rich, she was pure American, she was pretty; all of these things would give the sorority a new, international air. Chanel even liked her – that is, once Milana had finally begun to open herself up today.
And most of all, Milana was in her back pocket.
That night, Chanel called to tell Milana that she was her Second Lady, effectively making her the third highest-ranking member of Shanghai high society.
Ω
It was as clear as day to Mason that Lixue Lai’s supposed resignation was nothing more than just a façade; by announcing a “radical shake-up” concurrently with her appointment, Chanel Zheng had just told Shanghai society what she thought of the Feng Lee family name: sweet fucking monkey shit!
“FUCK THAT SHIT-HUMPING WENCH!” yelled Mason loudly, picking up the vase on his sister’s dressing table and slamming it down in a CRASH! whereupon it smashed into tiny shards that pierced his skin and made his fingers bleed violently in quick runs over the bedroom floor.
“Fuck-shit-fuck her disrespect of my family name AND her whole pig-molesting family’s disrespect of this blessed country and Communist cause!” he yelled.
And curse the whorish wench who will take Lixue Lai’s place in the sorority now – I will make her pay, too! thought Mason, as he watched his pretty stepsister fall apart all the more for seeing his anger, her hands grappling at her pajama top now as she sobbed, pulling on it so that for a second it revealed the barely detectable nape of her cleavage.
Ω
When Milana received the phone call telling her she was a member of the sorority, she was sat on her bed watching TV and surfing the web with her sister snuggled up next to her. Milana screamed in excitement, and Lora hung onto her tightly.
“C’mon,” said Lora brightly, “let’s check out HaiSoc. I bet it’s on there already!”
Lora was right; there was an entire article on Milana.
“This is fuckin’ insane!” said Milana quietly to herself as she scrolled down through the hundreds and hundreds of reader comments, most of them variations of the typical regional vulgarities you commonly heard travelling throughout the various hills and valleys of the countryside:
Golden_Sword_Chan
… for a foreign white devil girl I would fornicate with her for sure – lots of room for my big Chengdu cock, more than Chinese girls can hold!!!! – too bad she lives in Shanghai, where all the small penises in the country come from?
Dragon_Slay_Master99
Chengdu is known for rubber slave’s hands; I think she would die on your frog-humping black rubbery dick Swordless Chan!
Treasure_Lee
Well, her tits are not too big – rather, they seem nice and small like a Chinese girl’s breasts; her skin is the very purest of white, like a delicious teenage Dalian bride
BigMoon_Zhou
Eeeeeeehhh!!! Give me a Dalian bride any time of day. Too bad here in Deqen we only have these peasant farmer-wife whores left ‘cause all these young ladies are moving out to Shanghai ... p.s. she’s a good choice for a white devil, agreed, I too would fornicate with her gladly, hehehehehe!!
Lonely_JadeMaster
Anyone have this white devil’s number?
Golden_Sword_Chan
Oh I think you’re wrong Dragon99 … she would just love my BIG Chengdu cock butt-fucking her sweet dirty pearl-hole!!! Could out-master your Shanghai cigarette butt in her slimy cunt for a fornicating week I assure you!!! Hahaha! LONG LIVE CHENGDU COCK INSIDE SWEET WHITE DEVIL PUSSY!
“Ewww!” said Lora, as Milana translated the comments from the Chinese one-by-one for her younger sister. But then Lora’s eyes became wet with tears and she kissed Milana hard on her cheek. “I-I can’t believe you mentioned me to those girls!” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Here: it says that Chanel mentioned in particular that it was Milana’s devotion to her sister Lora, who’s just fourteen, and who she regards as a true beauty queen all unto herself. ‘It’s this deep, innate love she has for Lora that told us she understands the importance of the type of trust and unwavering commitment that we place upon each and every sister in the sorority,’ said Zheng Meizhen. Awwww, Milana. You really said all that neat stuff about me?”
Milana smiled and said cheerily: “Of course I did, honey.” But still, her heart missed a beat. Somewhere deep down, she couldn’t help but feel that darkly, the comment Chanel had made about Lora was really just a sort of thinly-veiled warning shot; one that had narrowly missed her fourteen-year-old sister just now.
Ω
Taylor Milliken’s penthouse was split into essential bachelor-pad furniture items: two dark, army-polished wood tables, four deep red leather chairs to match, five fifty inch flat HD screens displaying a revolving sequence of the day’s headlines and the world’s hottest celebrities, three oversized Mac computer monitors of roughly the same size with various charts and numbers flash-trading in red and green and blue rectangles.
At the end of the main living room, a row of vintage Shanghai photographs from the 1920’s was hung on the walls just over the full-width sliding glass balcony doors, under which unfolded a magnificent view of the same city a century the future, all super-high-rises, the mirror-tinted windows of the buildings opposite reflecting the sunshine back into the slate grey clouds above, their impenetrable and polluted darkness the scars of recent industrialization.
Taylor was dressed smart, dramatic, in a double-breasted navy Armani suit, yellow-red-black-white Oriental-pattern Versace tie, crisp white shirt and pearl Longines cufflinks. He struck a figure of power and opulence behind his enormous desk; like the looming clouds in the sky above him, his figure cast a foreign shadow over a city that had, for many of its 20-hour-a-day inhabitants, long ago lost the ability to discern between dawn and dusk. As if to
demonstrate that very fact, Taylor pulled out a packet of white powder. It was only just past noon.
“Yes, bro, cut that shit up will ya,” said Jace, who within minutes, rolled a 1000 RMB note, slid it between his right nostril and brought it down to the line of cocaine that Taylor had laid out for him on the table. He drew his breath in deeply through his open nostril, and made a deep snnooooaaaaaar-ing sound as he inhaled the drug into the glands of his nose.
High as a kite, Taylor’s 22-year-old former classmate and Harvard dropout-turned-self-styled-alcoholic-beverage-entrepreneur then began to excitedly detail the never-ending list of reasons for making a big purchase order of his upcoming Jace’s Vodka.
“I’ve got all the Cantopop crowd down courtesy of Sony, I’ve got Grammy’s artists in the Thai market, I’ve got the Taiwanese labels taking little pot-shots at each other just to be associated with it. Wait ’till Goldbug arrives – he’s one ’em courting me now!” Jace did a mini air-slingshot imitation with both his hands as he said pot shots. Then he swung back in Taylor’s comfy leather chair and put his feet up on the desk as if to make a point of being casually recognized for his genius.
Jace Buchanan was almost half-Chinese, quarter-Portuguese, quarter Spanish, with some Scottish in his bloodline way back, five or six generations ago. Although Scottish was the most diluted of the nationalities within the mongrel-mix that formed his Celtic heritage, much like the rough red-blooded sea-faring pirate from where the family’s Eastern half had originated, no doubt in some whore house on a stop-over in Macau on the way to Japan somewhere in the mid-1700s, the Buchanan name had stuck stubbornly like a rope burn in Jace’s family. Throughout each and every generation since, despite the exponent pettiness of the Chinese women who had born and mothered the clan into a virile early-adolescence, nearly all the babies had, like himself, continued to be born large, macho, go-getting sons.
To look at Jace was the archetypal Macau import – if somewhat superior in appearance. He was handsome in that severe, dark, youthful, Eurasian way, with high-cheekbones and penetrating black eyes set amidst his clear, olive skin. He had a naturally athletic frame. In fact, it was more than that – his was a downright pugnacious front, built for winning fights in 2 a.m. seedy dive-bar brawls.
Intellectually, he was sharp as hell, but he didn’t let that constrain his choices. That was just being fuckin’ dumb, according to Jace. Harvard, he liked to say, had been full of too many pussies and not enough actual pussy to bother pissing away 4 years on. That, and the money sucked, ’cause white Yankees don’t know shit ’bout making money any more. That’s why they have to resort to all those stupid-ass ponzi schemes, he’d told the Dean of his Bachelor’s in Business Administration upon the announcement of his premature departure from the world’s most prestigious business academy.
In the last 4 years, he’d proven his point to his former Dean and to all of his former Harvard classmates: this past Spring, as they had been graduating with their paper certificates in business administration, Jace was administering to his own rapidly-expanding enterprise: an Asia-wide brand of premium whisky blends, breaking over ten million dollars a year in revenue, and now branching out into Vodka and Rum and New World wines.
It didn’t matter to him that he had only pulled three hundred thousand dollars in income out of the business last year – that’s what it was about. Reinvestment. Consistency. Growth. Beating everyone else. Saying fuck you to the pussies who went and slaved away to corporate religions like retards with Ivy League shit-for-brains idiot friends and saying fuck me to a life filled constantly with an endlessly-revolving door of beautiful women and big cars and glitzy hotel clubs and bars and parties on yachts and penthouse suites and a business that kept generating more and more and more of this lifestyle incessantly, the way an iPod generates music, while paying you all the time just for tuning in.
In Jace’s mind all that mattered was that he was on the way to being what he always knew he would be; a filthy rich entrepreneur getting richer by day and living larger by night. Only here in Shanghai did he have a shot at that: it was the only place in the world grand and gaudy and gregarious enough to accommodate his incessant drive to seize it all up, spit out the bitter and the sour, and chew on the sweet stuff ’till it made you high just on the rush of it all.
That’s what it was all about, Jace liked to say. Not getting high off the drugs – at least not just the drugs. He never understood why people got so stuck on one thing like that, when all it was with drugs or sex or alcohol was just one aspect of the thing itself.
It was about getting high off it ALL, off the gold rush in the never-ending journey to MORE. It was about waking up every morning to set sail to a new shore with a better view of the sunset and prettier pussy to lick first thing in the morning and sweeter oranges and limes with a better bite to taste between the teeth in the middle of the day and by nightfall to become all blended in with Jace’s Whisky and Jace’s Rum and Jace’s Vodka, until all the ingredients were properly mixed and crushed up over great big ice cubes in fancy crystal glasses and they made for a non-stop cocktail party of Mai Tais and White Peach Margaritas and whatever new they cooked up over there on the backside of the horizon, where nobody ever dared to go and look for sweeter tasting pussy for no other reason than that they were too Goddamn pussy themselves to try and make a go of it.
“So what did you want to talk about?” asked Jace.
“What?”
He motioned suggestively with his hands. “You invited me here – presumably to talk about something specific.”
Taylor thought for a second. The problem was that his real sales numbers at the two nightclubs he owned – Milk and Prima Donna – didn’t add up to anything nearly like what he claimed they did. It was the sour reality of having to maintain mianzi, thought Taylor. It was an Eastern reality. In London or New York, someone like him – someone with significant status – might be able to get by telling his well-connected socialite party-going friends that he was suffering a little and asking if maybe they might show him a little short-term love for the cameras and the reviews? But in Shanghai, that was the kiss of death. Tell anyone that you were hurting – especially your friends, since they were often only your friends simply because they were envious of you – and you were finished.
In that sense, Jace was different. He didn’t give a shit so much about mianzi the way others here did. The same was true of Easton Soon Goldberg, another of his friends he had invited here to share the dark secret of his failed disconomics. Maybe that’s because they have so much already, and yet typically so little to spare, he thought gloomily.
“Let’s wait ’till Easton gets here first,” said Taylor.
“However you like it, bro,” said Jace. “But in that case, you better cut us up another line.”
Ω
Given the small gathering of just eight girls, the majority in their teens, who congregated together at Dame Ming-hua’s expansive residence for the first official meeting of the sorority under the tutelage of Ma’am Chanel Zheng, the food, the entertainment – the whole ostentatiousness of the event itself – was, to Milana’s American eyes, almost obscene. It was clear that there was no expense too grand to be spared for the sake of making a first impression when it came to Dame Ming-Hua’s famously extravagant entertainment tendencies.
The chefs spent two weeks formulating the menu and its recipes, a further additional week before the occasion of the first sorority meeting preparing and re-preparing each dish to perfection, feeding the vagabonds on Hong Chao Road with their practice leftovers for nearly a month.
When it came to the occasion, a succulently-devised Shanghai-Cantonese molecular menu had been so meticulously crafted that even the best restaurants in the city would find trouble rivaling the morsels the girls were served that night.
In traditional form, the dinner took place at a huge, round table, with the food served on a series of small plates, one-course-at-a-time. Every course in itself was its own u
nique, completely original mini-entree.
There were the spring-onion flavored Hong Kong egg-style waffles served as little ovular-shaped beige parecelletes; molecular xiao long bao, clear white Chinese rice pastries stuffed with a seasoned meat and with a Shanghainese vinegar sauce added to it in the form of a soup, in which a dash of one month preserved ginger was sprinkled for the culinary after-effect; French-imported foie gras with muoy choi kau yoke, a braised pork steam-fried with Chinese mustards and a variety of local vegetables; individual cutlets of crispy woba and sweet sugar peas drizzled in jolo sauce, a type of fermented red rice vinegar in which live prawns were served at boiling point in a separate bowl; Dan Dan Noodles with chili, finely-sliced green peppers, pine nuts, almonds and cashews, crispy egg noodles, preserved Chinese mustard, Iberico ham, a dash of Ikura stirred in with a light topping of green apple and a very slight hint of raspberry; these dishes were followed by a classic lo mein with an infusion of baby shrimps embalmed in a green chili seafood-and-garlic sauce and finally, the prize dish, a huge red snapper fish steamed with dehydrated Yunnan ham, Mandarin peel, Shiitake mushroom and a syrupy onion puree. To wash it all down, the Zheng kitchen served the girls a continuous supply of fine wines: the reds consisting of a Petrus 1991 and Chateau Latour 1982 and the white wine a perfectly-chilled Guy Saget Sancerre 1994.
Milana had never witnessed anything like it, and she paced herself carefully throughout the multi-course three-hour long dinner, which was then followed by an emotional ninety-minutes of classic Chinese operatic hits sung in the classically bold, tragic melodies, accompanied by a full orchestra consisting of various types of lute players, two- and three-string fiddlers, oboe players, an old man on the gongs and cymbals, and an incredible laruan soloist – an instrument which was, she learned, a type of ancient north Chinese cello devised many hundreds of years before her great-grandparents or whomever had begun to embrace the classic composers that the western world hailed as geniuses and prodigies.
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 11