by Kevin Kwan
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 NSIDE 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 Elea
nor 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!”
“If he hasn’t already,” Philip teased.
“Alamak! Do you know something I don’t? Has Nicky told you—”
“No, no, no, don’t panic. Darling, you are letting your silly girlfriends work you up for nothing. You just need to trust our son’s good judgment. I’m sure this girl is going to turn out just fine.” The fish was really tugging at the line now. Maybe it was a barramundi. He could ask his chef to grill it for lunch. Philip just wanted to get off the phone.
That Thursday, at Carol Tai’s Bible study, Eleanor decided that it was time to call in her ground troops. As the ladies sat around enjoying homemade bobo chacha and helping Carol organize her collection of Tahitian black pearls by color grade, Eleanor began her lament as she savored her chilled coconut-and-sago pudding.
“Nicky doesn’t realize what a terrible thing he is doing to us. Now he tells me he’s not even going to stay at our new flat when he arrives. He’s going to stay at Kingsford Hotel with that girl! As if he needs to hide her from us! Alamak, how is this going to look?” Eleanor sighed dramatically.
“So disgraceful! Sharing a hotel room when they aren’t even married! You know, some people might think they eloped and are coming here for their honeymoon!” Nadine Shaw chimed in, though secretly the thought of any potential scandal that might bring those high-and-mighty Youngs down a peg filled her with glee. She continued to fan Eleanor’s flames, not that they needed any further stoking. “How dare this girl think she can just waltz right into Singapore on Nicky’s arm and attend the social event of the year without your approval? She obviously has no clue how things work here.”
“Aiyah, children these days don’t know how to behave,” Daisy Foo said quietly, shaking her head. “My sons are just the same. You’re lucky that Nicky even told you he was bringing someone home. I would never be able to expect that from my boys. I have to find out in the newspapers what they’re doing! What to do, lah? This is what happens when you educate your children overseas. They become too Westernized and aksi borak‡ when they return. Can you imagine—my daughter-in-law Danielle forces me to make an appointment two weeks in advance just to see my grandchildren! She thinks that because she graduated from Amherst she knows better than me how to raise my own grandchildren!”
“Better than you? Everyone knows these ABCs are descended from all the peasants that were too stupid to survive in China!” Nadine cackled.
“Hey, Nadine, don’t underestimate them. These ABC girls can be tzeen lee hai,”§ Lorena Lim warned. “Now that America is broke, all these ABCs want to come to Asia and sink their claws into our men. They are even worse that the Taiwanese tornadoes because they are Westernized, sophisticated, and worst of all, college educated. Do you remember
Mrs. Hsu Tsen Ta’s son? That Ivy League–degreed ex-wife of his purposely introduced him to the girl who would become his mistress, and then used that silly excuse to get a huge divorce settlement. The Hsus had to sell so many properties just to pay her off. So sayang!”‖
“My Danielle was so kwai kwaia at first, so dutiful and modest,” Daisy recalled. “Hiyah—the minute that thirty-carat diamond was on her finger, she transformed into the bloody Queen of Sheba! Nowadays she wears nothing but Prada, Prada, Prada, and have you seen how she makes my son waste money by hiring that whole security team to escort her everywhere she goes, as if she is some big shot? Who wants to kidnap her? My son and my grandchildren are the ones who should have the bodyguards, not this girl with the flat nose! Suey doh say!”b
“I don’t know what I would do if my son brought home a girl like that.” Eleanor moaned and put on her saddest expression.
“Come, come, Lealea, have some more bobo chacha,” Carol said, trying to soothe her friend as she ladled more of the fragrant dessert into Eleanor’s bowl. “Nicky is a good boy. You should thank the Lord that he isn’t like my Bernard. I gave up trying to get Bernard to listen to me long ago. His father lets him get away with everything. What to do? His father just pays and pays, while I just pray and pray. The Bible tells us we must accept what we cannot change.”
Lorena looked at Eleanor, wondering whether this was the right time to drop her bombshell. She decided to go for it. “Eleanor, you asked me to do a little investigating for you about this Chu girl’s family in China, and I don’t want you to get too excited, but I’ve just received the most intriguing tidbit.”
“So fast? What did you find out?” Eleanor perked up.
“Well, there’s a fellow who claims to have ‘very valuable’ info on Rachel,” Lorena continued.
“Alamak, what, what?” Eleanor asked, getting alarmed.