by Kevin Kwan
Astrid popped into the kitchen to chat with her cook about the menu, and decided they should set up dinner on the balcony tonight. She lit some fig-apricot-scented candles and set a bottle of the new Sauternes she had brought back from France in the wine chiller. Michael had a sweet tooth when it came to wines, and he had taken a liking to late-harvest Sauternes. She knew he was going to love this bottle, which had been specially recommended to her by Manuel, the brilliant sommelier at Taillevent.
To the majority of Singaporeans, it would seem that Astrid was in store for a lovely evening at home. But to her friends and family, Astrid’s current domestic situation was a perplexing one. Why was she popping into kitchens talking to cooks, unpacking luggage by herself, or worrying about her husband’s workload? This was certainly not how anyone would have imagined Astrid’s life to be. Astrid Leong was meant to be the chatelaine of a great house. Her head housekeeper should be anticipating every one of her needs, while she should be getting dressed up to go out with her powerful and influential husband to any one of the exclusive parties being thrown around the island that night. But Astrid always confounded everyone’s expectations.
For the small group of girls growing up within Singapore’s most elite milieu, life followed a prescribed order: Beginning at age six, you were enrolled at Methodist Girls’ School (MGS), Singapore Chinese Girls’ School (SCGS), or the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ). After-school hours were consumed by a team of tutors preparing you for the avalanche of weekly exams (usually in classical Mandarin literature, multivariable calculus, and molecular biology), followed on the weekends by piano, violin, flute, ballet, or riding, and some sort of Christian Youth Fellowship activity. If you did well enough, you entered the National University of Singapore (NUS) and if you did not, you were sent abroad to England (American colleges were deemed substandard). The only acceptable majors were medicine or law (unless you were truly dumb, in which case you settled for accounting). After graduating with honors (anything less would bring shame to the family), you practiced your vocation (for not more than three years) before marrying a boy from a suitable family at the age of twenty-five (twenty-eight if you went to med school). At this point, you gave up your career to have children (three or more were officially encouraged by the government for women of your background, and at least two should be boys), and life would consist of a gentle rotation of galas, country clubs, Bible study groups, light volunteer work, contract bridge, mah-jongg, traveling, and spending time with your grandchildren (dozens and dozens, hopefully) until your quiet and uneventful death.
Astrid changed all this. She wasn’t a rebel, because to call her one would imply that she was breaking the rules. Astrid simply made her own rules, and through the confluence of her particular circumstances—a substantial private income, overindulgent parents, and her own savoir faire—every move she made became breathlessly talked about and scrutinized within that claustrophobic circle.
In her childhood days, Astrid always disappeared from Singapore during the school holidays, and though Felicity had trained her daughter never to boast about her trips, a schoolmate invited over had discovered a framed photo of Astrid astride a white horse with a palatial country manor as a backdrop. Thus began the rumor that Astrid’s uncle owned a castle in France, where she spent all her holidays riding a white stallion. (Actually, it was a manor in England, the stallion was a pony, and the schoolmate was never invited again.)
In her teen years, the chatter spread even more feverishly when Celeste Ting, whose daughter was in the same Methodist Youth Fellowship group as Astrid, picked up a copy of Point de Vue at Charles de Gaulle Airport and came upon a paparazzi photograph of Astrid doing cannonballs off a yacht in Porto Ercole with some young European princes. Astrid returned from school holidays that year with a precociously sophisticated sense of style. While other girls in her set became mad for head-to-toe designer brands, Astrid was the first to pair a vintage Saint Laurent Le Smoking jacket with three-dollar batik shorts bought off a beach vendor in Bali, the first to wear the Antwerp Six, and the first to bring home a pair of red-heeled stilettos from some Parisian shoemaker named Christian. Her classmates at Methodist Girls’ School strove to imitate her every look, while their brothers nicknamed Astrid “the Goddess” and anointed her the chief object of their masturbatory fantasies.
After famously and unabashedly flunking every one of her A levels (how could that girl concentrate on her studies when she was jet-setting all the time?), Astrid was shipped off to a preparatory college in London for revision courses. Everyone knew the story of how eighteen-year-old Charlie Wu—the eldest son of the tech billionaire Wu Hao Lian—bade a tearful goodbye to her at Changi Airport and promptly chartered his own jet, ordering the pilot to race her plane to Heathrow. When Astrid arrived, she was astonished to find a besotted Charlie awaiting her at the arrival gate with three hundred red roses. They were inseparable for the next few years, and Charlie’s parents purchased a flat for him in Knightsbridge (for the sake of appearances), even though the cognoscenti suspected Charlie and Astrid were probably “living in sin” at her private quarters in the Calthorpe Hotel.
At age twenty-two, Charlie proposed on a ski lift in Verbier, and though Astrid accepted, she supposedly refused the thirty-nine-carat diamond solitaire he presented as far too vulgar, flinging it onto the slopes (Charlie did not even attempt to search for the ring). Social Singapore was atwitter over the impending nuptials, while her parents were aghast at the prospect of becoming connected to a family of no particular lineage and such shameless new money. But it all came to a shocking end nine days before the most lavish wedding Asia had ever seen when Astrid and Charlie were sighted having a screaming match in broad daylight. Astrid, it was famously said, “chucked him like she chucked that diamond outside Wendy’s on Orchard Road, throwing a Frosty in his face,” and took off for Paris the next day.
Her parents supported the idea of Astrid having a “cooling-off period” away, but try as she might to maintain a low profile, Astrid effortlessly enchanted le tout Paris with her smoldering beauty. Back in Singapore, the wagging tongues resumed: Astrid was making a spectacle of herself. She was supposedly spotted in the front row at the Valentino show, seated between Joan Collins and Princess Rosario of Bulgaria. She was said to be having long, intimate lunches at Le Voltaire with a married philosopher playboy. And perhaps most sensational, rumor had it that she had become involved with one of the sons of the Aga Khan and was preparing to convert to Islam so that they could marry. (The Bishop of Singapore was said to have flown to Paris on a moment’s notice to intervene.)
All these rumors came to naught when Astrid surprised everyone again by announcing her engagement to Michael Teo. The first question on everyone’s lips was “Michael who?” He was a complete unknown, the son of schoolteachers from the then middle-class neighborhood of Toa Payoh. At first her parents were aghast and mystified by how she could have come into contact with someone from “that kind of background,” but in the end they realized that Astrid had made something of a catch—she had chosen a fiercely handsome Armed Forces Elite Commando who was a National Merit Scholar and a Caltech-trained computer systems specialist. It could have been much worse.
The couple married in a very private, very small ceremony (only three hundred guests at her grandmother’s house) that garnered a pictureless fifty-one-word announcement in the Straits Times, even though there were anonymous reports that Sir Paul McCartney flew in to serenade the bride at a ceremony that was “exquisite beyond belief.” Within a year, Michael left his military post to start his own tech firm and the couple had their first child, a boy they named Cassian. In this cocoon of domestic bliss one might have thought that all the stories involving Astrid would simmer down. But the stories were not about to end.
A little after nine, Michael arrived home, and Astrid rushed to the door, greeting him with a long embrace. They had been married for more than four years now, but the sight of him s
till sent an electric spark through her, especially after they had been apart for a while. He was just so startlingly attractive, especially today with his stubble and the rumpled shirt that she wanted to bury her face in—secretly, she loved the way he smelled after a long day.
They had a light supper of steamed whole pomfret in a ginger-wine sauce and clay-pot rice, and stretched out on the sofa afterward, buzzed from the two bottles of wine they had polished off. Astrid continued to recount her adventures in Paris while Michael stared zombielike at the sports channel on mute.
“Did you buy many of those thousand-dollar dresses this time?” Michael inquired.
“No … just one or two,” Astrid said breezily, wondering what would happen if he ever realized that two hundred thousand per dress was more like it.
“You’re such a bad liar,” Michael grunted. Astrid nestled her head on his chest, slowly stroking his right leg. She brushed the tips of her fingers in one continuous line, tracing his calf, up the curve of his knee, and along the front of his thigh. She felt him get hard against the nape of her neck, and she kept stroking his leg in a gentle continuous rhythm, moving closer and closer toward the soft part of his inner thigh. When Michael could stand it no longer, he scooped her up in one abrupt motion and carried her into the bedroom.
After a frenzied session of lovemaking, Michael got out of bed and headed for the shower. Astrid lay on his side of the bed, deliriously spent. Reunion sex was always the best. Her iPhone let out a soft ping. Who could be texting her at this hour? She reached for the phone, squinting at the bright glare of the text message. It read:
MISS U NSIDE ME.
Makes no sense at all. Who sent me this? Astrid wondered, gazing in half amusement at the unfamiliar number. It looked like a Hong Kong number—was this one of Eddie’s pranks? She peered at the text message again, realizing all of a sudden that she was holding her husband’s phone.
10
Edison Cheng
SHANGHAI
It was the mirror in the closet that did it. The closet in Leo Ming’s brand-new triplex penthouse in the Huangpu district really put Eddie over the edge. Ever since Shanghai became Asia’s party capital, Leo had been spending more time here with his latest mistress, a Beijing-born starlet whose contract he had to “buy over” from a Chinese film company at the cost of nineteen million (one million for every year of her life). Leo and Eddie had flown up for the day to inspect Leo’s new super-luxe apartment, and they were standing in a hangarlike two-thousand-square-foot closet that boasted an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, Macassar ebony cupboards, and banks of mirrored doors that parted automatically to reveal cedar-lined suit racks.
“It’s all climate controlled,” Leo noted. “The closets on this end are maintained at fifty-five degrees specifically for my Italian cashmere, houndstooth, and fur. But the shoe-display cabinets are kept at seventy degrees, which is optimal for leather, and the humidity is regulated to a constant thirty-five percent, so my Berlutis and Corthays never break a sweat. You gotta treat those babies right, hei mai?”*
Eddie nodded, thinking that it was time to redo his own closet.
“Now let me show you the pièce de résistance,” Leo said, pronouncing “pièce” like “peace.” With a flourish, he glided his thumb over a mirrored panel and its surface instantly transformed into a high-definition screen that projected the life-size image of a male model in a double-breasted suit. Above his right shoulder hovered the brand names of each item of clothing, followed by the dates and locations where the outfit was previously worn. Leo waved a finger in front of the screen as if he were flicking a page, and the man now appeared in corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater. “There’s a camera embedded in this mirror that takes a picture of you and stores it, so you can see every single thing you’ve ever worn, organized by date and place. This way you’ll never repeat an outfit!”
Eddie stared at the mirror in amazement. “Oh, I’ve seen that before,” he said rather unconvincingly as the envy began to coarse through his veins. He felt the sudden urge to shove his friend’s bloated face into the pristine mirrored wall. Once again, Leo was showing off another shiny new toy he did fuck-all to deserve. It had been like this since they were little. When Leo turned seven, his father gave him a titanium bicycle custom-designed for his pudgy frame by former NASA engineers (it was stolen within three days). At sixteen, when Leo aspired to become a Canto hip-hop singer, his father built him a state-of-the-art recording studio and bankrolled his first album (the CD can still be found on eBay). Then in 1999, he funded Leo’s Internet start-up, which managed to lose more than ninety million dollars and go belly-up at the height of the Internet boom. And now this—the latest in a countless collection of homes around the globe showered upon him by his adoring father. Yes, Leo Ming, charter member of Hong Kong’s Lucky Sperm Club, got everything handed to him on a diamond-encrusted platter. It was just Eddie’s shitty luck to have been born to parents who never gave him a cent.
In what is arguably the most materialistic city on earth, a city where the key mantra is prestige, the tongue-waggers within Hong Kong’s most prestigious chattering circles would agree that Edison Cheng lived a life to be envied. They would acknowledge that Eddie was born into a prestigious family (even though his Cheng lineage was, frankly, a bit common), had attended all the prestigious schools (nothing tops Cambridge, well … except Oxford), and now worked for Hong Kong’s most prestigious investment bank (though it was a pity he didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor). At thirty-six, Eddie still retained his boyish features (getting a bit plump, but never mind—it made him look more prosperous); had chosen well by marrying pretty Fiona Tung (Hong Kong old money, but what a shame about that stock-manipulation scandal her father had gotten into with Dato’ Tai Toh Lui); and his children, Constantine, Augustine, and Kalliste, were always so well-dressed and well-behaved (but that younger son, was he a bit autistic or something?).
Edison and Fiona lived in the duplex penthouse of Triumph Towers, one of the most sought-after buildings high on Victoria Peak (five bedrooms, six baths, more than four thousand square feet, not including the eight-hundred-square-foot terrace), where they employed two Filipino and two Mainland Chinese maids (the Chinese were better at cleaning, while the Filipinos were great with the kids). Their Biedermeier-filled apartment, decorated by the celebrated Hong Kong–based Austro-German decorator Kaspar von Morgenlatte to evoke a Hapsburg hunting schloss, had recently been featured in Hong Kong Tattle (Eddie was photographed preening at the bottom of his marble spiral staircase in a forest-green Tyrolean jacket, his hair slicked back, while Fiona, sprawled uncomfortably at his feet, wore a claret-colored gown by Oscar de la Renta).
In the parking garage of their building, they owned five parking spots (valued at two hundred and fifty thousand each), where their fleet consisted of a Bentley Continental GT (Eddie’s weekday car), an Aston Martin Vanquish (Eddie’s weekend car), a Volvo S40 (Fiona’s car), a Mercedes S550 (the family car), and a Porsche Cayenne (the family sport-utility vehicle). At Aberdeen Marina, there was his sixty-four-foot yacht, Kaiser. Then there was the holiday condo in Whistler, British Columbia (the only place to be seen skiing, since there was semi-decent Cantonese food an hour away in Vancouver).
Eddie was a member of the Chinese Athletic Association, the Hong Kong Golf Club, the China Club, the Hong Kong Club, the Cricket Club, the Dynasty Club, the American Club, the Jockey Club, the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, and too many private dining clubs to recount. Like most upper-crust Hong Kongers, Eddie also possessed what was perhaps the ultimate membership card—Canadian Permanent Resident Cards for his entire family (a safe haven in case the powers that be in Beijing ever pulled a Tiananmen again). He collected watches, and now possessed more than seventy timepieces from the most esteemed watchmakers (all Swiss, of course, except for a few vintage Cartiers), which he installed in a custom-designed bird’s-eye maple display console in
his private dressing room (his wife did not have her own dressing room). He had made Hong Kong Tattle’s “Most Invited” list four years in a row, and befitting a man of his status, he had already gone through three mistresses since marrying Fiona thirteen years ago.
Despite this embarrassment of riches, Eddie felt extremely deprived compared to most of his friends. He didn’t have a house on the Peak. He didn’t have his own plane. He didn’t have a full-time crew for his yacht, which was much too small to host more than ten guests for brunch comfortably. He didn’t have any Rothkos or Pollocks or the other dead American artists one was required to hang on the wall in order to be considered truly rich these days. And unlike Leo, Eddie’s parents were the old-fashioned type—insisting from the moment Eddie graduated that he learn to live off his earnings.
It was so bloody unfair. His parents were loaded, and his mother was set to inherit another obscene bundle if his Singapore grandmother would ever kick the bucket. (Ah Ma had already suffered two heart attacks in the past decade, but now she had a defibrillator installed and could go on ticking for God only knows how long.) Unfortunately his parents were also in the pink of health, so by the time they keeled over and the money was split up between himself, his bitchy sister, and his good-for-nothing brother, it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Eddie was always trying to guesstimate his parents’ net worth, much of which was gleaned from information his real estate friends leaked to him. It became an obsession of his, and he kept a spreadsheet on his home computer, diligently updating it every week based on property valuations and then calculating his potential future share. No matter how he ran the numbers, he realized he would most likely never make Fortune Asia’s list of “Hong Kong’s Top Ten Richest” with the way his parents were handling things.