by Kevin Kwan
12
The Leongs
SINGAPORE
“At last, the golden couple!” Mavis Oon proclaimed as Astrid and Michael made their entrance into the Colonial Club’s formal dining room. With Michael in his crisp navy Richard James suit and Astrid in a long, flapper-style silk voile dress the color of persimmon, they made an exceedingly striking pair, and the room rippled with the usual hushed excitement from the ladies, who covertly scrutinized Astrid from hair to heels, and the men, who gazed at Michael with a mixture of envy and derision.
“Aiyah, Astrid, why so late?” Felicity Leong scolded her daughter as she arrived at the long banquet table by the trophy wall where members of the extended Leong family and their honored guests from Kuala Lumpur—Tan Sri* Gordon Oon and Puan Sri Mavis Oon—were already seated.
“So sorry. Michael’s flight back from China was delayed,” Astrid apologized. “I hope you didn’t wait for us to order? The food always takes ages here.”
“Astrid, come, come, let me look at you,” Mavis commanded. The imperious lady, who could easily have won an Imelda Marcos look-alike contest with her dramatically rouged cheeks and fat chignon, patted Astrid’s face as if she were a little girl and launched into her trademark gushing. “Aiyah you haven’t aged one bit since I last saw you how’s little Cassian when are you going to have another one don’t wait too long lah you need a little girl now you know my ten-year-old granddaughter Bella absolutely worships you ever since her last trip to Singapore she’s always saying ‘Ah Ma, when I grow up I want to be just like Astrid’ I asked why and she says ‘Because she always dresses like a movie star and that Michael is such a hunk!’ ” Everyone at the table roared with laughter.
“Yes, don’t we all wish we could have Astrid’s clothing budget and Michael’s eight-pack!” Astrid’s brother Alexander quipped.
Harry Leong looked up from his menu and, catching sight of Michael, beckoned him over. With his silvery hair and dark tan, Harry was a leonine presence at the head of the table, and as always, Michael approached his father-in-law with no small amount of trepidation. Harry handed him a large padded envelope. “Here’s my MacBook Air. There’s something wrong with the Wi-Fi connection.”
“What exactly is the problem? Is it not finding the right networks, or are you having log-in problems?” Michael asked.
Harry had already turned his attention back to the menu. “What? Oh, it just doesn’t seem to work anywhere. You’re the one who set it up, and I haven’t changed any of the settings. Thank you so much for taking a look at it. Felicity, did I have the rack of lamb here the last time? Is this where they always overcook the meat?”
Michael dutifully took the laptop with him, and as he made his way back to his seat at the other end of the table, Astrid’s eldest brother, Henry, grabbed him by his jacket sleeve. “Hey, Mike, hate to bother you with this, but can you stop by the house this weekend? There’s something wrong with Zachary’s Xbox. I hope you can fix it—it’s too mah fan† to send it back to the factory in Japan for repair.”
“I might have to go away this weekend, but if not, I’ll try to stop by,” Michael said flatly.
“Oh thank you, thank you,” Cathleen, Henry’s wife, cut in. “Zachary has been driving us absolutely crazy without his Xbox.”
“Is Michael good with gadgets or something?” Mavis inquired.
“Oh, he’s an absolute genius, Mavis, a genius! He’s the perfect son-in-law to have around—he can fix anything!” Harry proclaimed.
Michael smiled uncomfortably as Mavis fixed her gaze on him. “Now why did I think he was in the army?”
“Auntie Mavis, Michael used to work for the Ministry of Defense. He helped to program all the high-tech weapon systems,” Astrid said.
“Yes, the fate of our country’s ballistics defense is in Michael’s hands. You know, in case we get invaded by the two hundred and fifty million Muslims surrounding us on all sides, we can put up a fight for about ten minutes,” Alexander chuckled.
Michael tried to hide his grimace and opened up his heavy leather-bound menu. This month’s culinary theme was “Taste of the Amalfi,” and most of the dishes were in Italian. Vongole. That was clams, he knew. But what the heck was Paccheri alla Ravello, and would it have killed them to include an English translation? This was par for the course at one of the island’s oldest sporting clubs, a place so pretentious and buttoned-up in Edwardian-era tradition that women were not even allowed to peek into the Men’s Bar until 2007.
As a teenager, Michael had played soccer every week at the Padang, the immense green field in front of city hall that was used for all the national parades, and he often stared curiously at the august Victorian structure at the eastern edge of the Padang. From the goalie post, he could see the glittering chandeliers within, the silver-domed dishes set on crisp white tablecloths, the waiters in their black tuxedo jackets scurrying around. He would observe the important-looking people enjoying their dinners and wonder who they were. He longed to walk into the club, just once, to be able to look at the soccer field from the other side of those windows. On a dare, he had asked a couple of his friends to sneak into the club with him. They would go one day before soccer, when they were still dressed in their St. Andrew’s school uniforms. They could just stroll in casually, as if they were members, and who would stop them from ordering a drink at the bar? “Don’t even dream, Teo, don’t you know what this place is? It’s the Colonial Club! You either have to be ang mor, or you have to be born into one of those ultrarich families to get inside,” one of his buddies commented.
“Gordon and I sold our Pulau Club memberships because I realized I was only going there to eat their ice kacang,”‡ Michael overheard Mavis telling his mother-in-law. What he wouldn’t give to be back out on the field with his friends right now. They could play soccer until the sun went down, and then head to the nearest kopi tiam§ for cold beers and some nasi goreng‖ or char bee hoon.a It would be so much better than sitting here in this tie that choked him half to death, eating unpronounceable food that was insanely overpriced. Not that anyone at this table ever noticed the prices—the Oons owned practically half of Malaysia, and as for Astrid and her brothers, Michael had never once witnessed any of them pick up a dinner check. They were all adults with children of their own, but Papa Leong always signed for everything. (In the Teo family, none of his brothers or sisters would even consider letting their parents pick up the check.)
How long would this dinner take? They were eating European style, so it would be four courses, and here that meant one course per hour. Michael stared at his menu again. Gan ni na!b There was some stupid salad course. Who ever heard of serving salad after the main course? This meant five courses, because Mavis liked her desserts, even though all she ever did was complain about her gout. And then his mother-in-law would complain about her heel spurs, and the ladies would volley chronic health complaints back and forth, trying to outdo each other. Then it would be time for the toasts—those long-winded toasts where his father-in-law would toast the Oons for their brilliance in having been born into the right family, and then Gordon Oon would turn around and toast the Leongs for their genius in having been born into the right family as well. And then Henry Leong Jr. would make a toast to Gordon’s son Gordon Jr., the wonderful chap who was caught with the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in Langkawi last year. It would be a miracle if dinner ended before eleven thirty.
Astrid glanced across the table at her husband. That ramrod-straight posture and tense half smile he was forcing himself to make as he spoke to Bishop See Bei Sien’s wife was a look she knew well—she had seen it the first time they were invited to tea at her grandmother’s, and when they had dinner with the president at Istana.c Michael clearly wished he were somewhere else right now. Or was it with someone else? Who was that someone else? Since the night she had discovered that text message, she couldn’t stop asking herself these questions.
MISS U NSID
E ME. For the first few days, Astrid tried to convince herself that there must be some rational explanation. It was an innocent mistake, a text to the wrong number, some sort of prank or private joke she didn’t understand. The text message had been erased by the next morning, and she wished it could just as simply be erased from her mind. But her mind would not let it go. Her life could not go on until she solved the mystery behind these words. She began calling Michael at work every day at odd times, inventing some silly question or excuse to make sure he was where he said he would be. She started checking his cell phone at every fleeting opportunity, feverishly scrolling through all the text messages in the precious few minutes that he was away from his phone. There were no more incriminating text messages. Was he covering his tracks, or was she just being paranoid? For weeks now, she had been deconstructing every look, every word, every move of Michael’s, searching for some sign, some evidence to confirm what she could not bring herself to put into words. But there had been nothing. Everything was seemingly normal in their beautiful life.
Until this afternoon.
Michael had just returned from the airport, and when he complained of being sore from cramming into a middle seat in the last, non-reclining row of an older China Eastern Airlines plane, Astrid suggested that he take a warm soak in the tub with Epsom salts. While he was out of commission, Astrid went snooping through his luggage, aimlessly looking for something, anything. Rifling through his wallet, she came upon a folded piece of paper hidden underneath the plastic flap that held his Singapore Identity Card. It was a receipt for dinner from the night before. A receipt from Petrus. For HK$3,812. Pretty much the price of dinner for two.
What was her husband doing having dinner at Hong Kong’s fanciest French restaurant when he was supposed to be working on some cloud-sourcing project in Chongqing in southwest China? And especially this restaurant, the sort of place he normally would have been dragged to kicking and screaming. There was no way his cash-strapped partners would approve this sort of expense, even for their top clients. (And besides, no Chinese clients would ever want to eat French nouvelle cuisine if they could possibly help it.)
Astrid looked at the receipt for a long time, staring at the bold strokes of his dark-blue signature against the crisp white paper. He had signed it with the Caran d’Ache fountain pen she had given him on his last birthday. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to jump out of her chest, and yet she felt completely paralyzed. She imagined Michael sitting in the candlelit room perched atop the Island Shangri-La hotel, staring out at the sparkling lights of Victoria Harbour, enjoying a romantic dinner with the girl who had sent the text message. They started off with a splendid Burgundy from the Côte d’Or and finished with the warm bitter-chocolate soufflé for two (with frosted lemon cream).
She wanted to burst into the bathroom and hold the receipt in his face while he was soaking in the tub. She wanted to scream and claw at his skin. But of course, she did no such thing. She breathed in deeply. She regained her composure. The composure that had been ingrained since the day she was born. She would do the sensible thing. She knew that there was no point making a scene, demanding an explanation. Any sort of explanation that could cause even the tiniest scratch on their picture-perfect life. She folded the receipt carefully and tucked it back into its hiding place, willing it to disappear from his wallet and from her mind. Just disappear.
* * *
* The second most senior federal honorific title in Malaysia (similar to a British duke), conferred by a hereditary royal ruler of one of the nine Malay states; his wife is called a puan sri. (A tan sri is usually richer than a dato’, and has likely spent far more time sucking up to the Malay royals.)
† Cantonese for “troublesome.”
‡ A Malay dessert made of shaved ice, colorful sugar syrup, and a variety of toppings such as red beans, sweet corn, agar-agar jelly, palm seed, and ice cream.
§ Hokkien for “coffee shop.”
‖ Indonesian fried rice, an immensely popular dish in Singapore.
a Fried vermicelli, another local favorite.
b A Hokkien term that could mean “fuck your mother,” or, as in this case, “fuck me.”
c “Palace” in Malay; here it refers to the official residence of the president of Singapore. Completed in 1869 on the orders of Sir Harry Saint George Ord, Singapore’s first colonial governor, it was formerly known as Government House and occupies 106 acres of land adjacent to the Orchard Road area.
13
Philip and Eleanor Young
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, AND SINGAPORE
Philip sat in his favorite metal folding chair on the dock that stretched out from his waterfront lawn, keeping one watchful eye on the fishing line that went straight into Watson’s Bay and the other eye on the latest issue of Popular Mechanics. His cell phone began to vibrate in the pocket of his cargo pants, disrupting the serenity of his morning. He knew it would be his wife on the line; she was practically the only person who ever called his cell. (Eleanor insisted that he keep the phone on his body at all times, in case she needed him in an emergency, although he doubted he could be of any help since he spent much of the year here in Sydney while she was constantly traveling between Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai, and God knows where else.)
He answered the phone and immediately the hysterical torrent from his wife began. “Calm down and speak slower, lah. I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Now, why do you want to jump off a building?” Philip asked in his usual laconic manner.
“I just got the dossier on Rachel Chu from that private investigator in Beverly Hills who Mabel Kwok recommended. Do you want to know what it says.” It wasn’t a question; it sounded like more of a threat.
“Er … who is Rachel Chu?” Philip asked.
“Don’t be so senile, lah! Don’t you remember what I told you last week? Your son has been dating some girl in secret for more than a year, and he had the cheek to tell us about it just days before he brings her to Singapore!”
“You hired a private investigator to check up on this girl?”
“Of course I did. We know nothing about this girl, and everyone is already talking about her and Nicky—”
Philip looked down at his fishing pole, which was beginning to vibrate a hair. He knew where this conversation was leading, and he wanted no part in it. “I’m afraid I can’t talk right now, darling, I’m in the middle of something urgent.”
“Stop it, lah! This is urgent! The report is even worse than my worst nightmare! Your stupid cousin Cassandra got it wrong—it turns out the girl is not one of the Chus from that Taipei Plastics family!”
“I always tell you not to believe a word out of Cassandra’s mouth. But what difference does it make?”
“What difference? This girl is being deceitful—she is pretending to be a Chu.”
“Well, if her last name happens to be Chu, how can you accuse her of pretending to be a Chu?” Philip said with a chuckle.
“Aiyah—don’t contradict me! I’ll tell you how she’s being deceitful. At first, the private investigator told me she was ABC, but then after more digging he found out that she’s not even truly American-born Chinese. She was born in Mainland China and went to America when she was six months old.”
“So?”
“Did you hear me? Mainland China!”
Philip was baffled. “Doesn’t everybody’s family ultimately originate from Mainland China? Where would you rather her be from? Iceland?”
“Don’t be funny with me! Her family comes from some ulu ulu* village in China that nobody has ever heard of. The investigator thinks that they were most likely working class. In other words, they are PEASANTS!”
“I think if you go back far enough, darling, all our families were peasants. And don’t you know that in ancient China, the peasant class was actually revered? They were the backbone of the economy, and—”
“Stop talking nonsense, lah! You haven’t heard the worst yet—this girl came to America as a baby with her mother. But where’s the father? There’s no record of the father, so they must have divorced. Can you believe it? Alamak, a child from some divorced no-name ulu family! I’m going to tiao lau!”†
“What’s wrong with that? There are plenty of people these days who come from broken homes and go on to have happy marriages. Just look at the divorce rate here in Australia.” Philip was trying to reason with his wife.
Eleanor sighed deeply. “These Aussies are all descended from criminals, what do you expect?”
“This is why you’re so popular down here, darling,” Philip joked.
“You are not seeing the big picture. This girl is obviously a cunning, deceitful GOLD DIGGER! You know as well as I do that your son can never marry someone like that. Can you imagine how your family is going to react when he brings this gold digger home?”
“Actually, I couldn’t care less what they think.”
“But don’t you see how this will affect Nicky? And of course your mother is going to blame me for this, lah. I always get blamed for everything. Alamak, surely you know how this will end.”
Philip sighed deeply. This was the reason he spent as much time as he possibly could away from Singapore.
“I’ve already asked Lorena Lim to use all her Beijing contacts to investigate the girl’s family in China. We need to know everything. I don’t want to leave a single stone unturned. We need to be prepared for every possibility,” Eleanor said.
“Don’t you think you’re going a bit overboard?”
“Absolutely not! We must put a stop to all this nonsense before it goes any further. Do you want to know what Daisy Foo thinks?”
“Not really.”
“Daisy thinks that Nicky is going to propose to the girl while they’re in Singapore!”