Crazy Rich Asians

by Kevin Kwan

  “So you don’t model professionally?” Astrid asked.

  The guys all started laughing. “He does! He does! He’s Michael Zoolander,” Andy cracked.

  “No, I’m serious,” Astrid insisted. “If you ever want to model professionally, I know a few agencies in Paris that would probably love to represent you.”

  Michael just looked at her, not knowing how to respond. There was a palpable tension in the air, and none of the guys knew what to say.

  “Listen, I’m famished, and I think I have to have some of that delicious-looking mee rebus† back at the house,” Astrid said, giving Andy a quick peck on the cheek before striding back toward the house.

  “Okay, laeng tsai,‡ what are you waiting for? She was obviously into you,” Shen Wei said to Michael.

  “Don’t want to get your hopes up, Teo, but she’s untouchable,” Andy warned.

  “What do you mean untouchable?” Shen Wei asked.

  “Astrid doesn’t date in our stratosphere. You know who she almost married? Charlie Wu, the tech billionaire Wu Hao Lian’s son. They were engaged, but then she broke it off at the last minute because her family felt that even he wasn’t good enough,” Andy said.

  “Well, Teo here is going to prove you wrong. Mike, that was an open invitation if I’ve ever seen one. Don’t be so kiasu,§ man!” Shen Wei exclaimed.

  Michael did not know what to make of the girl sitting across the table from him. First of all, this date should not even be happening. Astrid wasn’t his type. This was the kind of girl he would see shopping at one of those pricey boutiques on Orchard Road or sitting in the lobby café of some fancy hotel having a double decaf macchiato with her banker boyfriend. He wasn’t even sure why he had asked her out. It wasn’t his style to go after girls in such an obvious way. All his life, he had never needed to chase after women. They had always given themselves freely to him, starting with his older brother’s girlfriend when he was fourteen. Technically, Astrid had made the first move, so he didn’t mind going after her. Andy’s talk about her being “out of his league” really irked him, and he thought it would be fun to bed her, just to shove it in Andy’s face.

  Michael never expected she would say yes to the date, but here they were, barely a week later, sitting at a restaurant in Dempsey Hill with cobalt-blue glass votives on every table (the trendy sort of place filled with ang mors that he hated) with nothing much to say to each other. They had nothing in common, except for the fact that they both knew Andy. She didn’t have a job, and since all his work was classified, they couldn’t really talk about that. She had been living in Paris for the past few years, so she was out of touch with Singapore. Hell, she didn’t even seem like a true Singaporean—with her Englishy accent and her mannerisms.

  Yet he couldn’t help but feel incredibly drawn to her. She was the complete opposite of the type of girls he normally dated. Even though he knew she came from a rich family, she wasn’t wearing brand-name clothes or any jewelry. She didn’t even appear to be wearing makeup, and still she looked smoking hot. This girl wasn’t as seow chieh‖ as he had been led to believe, and she even challenged him to a game of pool after dinner.

  She turned out to be pretty lethal at billiards, and it made her even sexier. But this was obviously not the kind of girl he could have a casual fling with. He felt almost embarrassed about it, but all he wanted to do was keep staring at her face. He couldn’t get enough of it. He was sure he lost the game partly because he was just too distracted by her. At the end of the date, he walked her out to her car (surprisingly, just an Acura) and held the door open as she got in, convinced he would never see her again.

  Astrid lay in bed later that night, trying to read Bernard-Henri Lévy’s latest tome but having no luck focusing. She couldn’t stop thinking about her disastrous date with Michael. The poor guy really didn’t have much in the way of conversation, and he was hopelessly unsophisticated. Figures. Guys who looked like that obviously did not have to work hard to impress a woman. There was something to him, though, something that imbued him with a beauty that seemed almost feral. He was simply the most perfect specimen of masculinity she had ever seen, and it unleashed a physiological response in her that she did not realize she possessed.

  She turned off her bedside lamp and lay in the dark under the mosquito netting of her heirloom Peranakan bed, wishing Michael could read her mind at this very moment. She wanted him to dress up in night camouflage and scale the walls of her father’s house, evading the guards in the sentry house and the German shepherds on patrol. She wanted him to climb the guava tree by her window and enter her bedroom without a sound. She wanted him to stand at the foot of her bed for a while, nothing but a leering black shadow. Then she wanted him to rip off her clothes, cover her mouth with his earthy hand, and ravish her nonstop till dawn.

  She was twenty-seven years old, and for the first time in her life, Astrid realized what it really felt like to crave a man sexually. She reached for her cell phone and, before she could stop herself, dialed Michael’s number. He picked up after two rings, and Astrid could hear that he was in some sort of noisy bar. She hung up immediately. Fifteen seconds later, her phone rang. She let it ring about five times before answering.

  “Why did you call me and hang up?” Michael said in a calm, low voice.

  “I didn’t call you. My phone must have rung your number accidentally while it was in my purse,” Astrid said nonchalantly.

  “Uh-huh.”

  There was a long pause, before Michael casually added, “I’m at Harry’s Bar now, but I’m going to drive over to the Ladyhill Hotel and check into a room. The Ladyhill is quite near you, isn’t it?”

  Astrid was taken aback by his audacity. Who the hell did he think he was? She felt her face go hot, and she wanted to hang up on him again. Instead, she found herself turning on her bedside lamp. “Text me the room number,” she said simply.

  SINGAPORE, 2010

  Astrid drove along the meandering curves of Cluny Road, her head swimming in thoughts. At the start of the evening at Tyersall Park, she had entertained the fantasy that her husband was at some one-star hotel engaged in a torrid affair with the Hong Kong sexting tramp. Even while she was on conversational autopilot with her family, she envisioned herself bursting in on Michael and the tramp in their sordid little room and flinging every available object at them. The lamp. The water pitcher. The cheap plastic coffeemaker.

  After Oliver’s comment, however, a darker fantasy began to consume her. She was now convinced that Oliver had not made a mistake, and that it was indeed her husband he had spotted in Hong Kong. Michael was too distinctive to be mistaken for anyone else, and Oliver, who was equal parts schemer and diplomat, was obviously sending her a coded message. But who was the little boy? Could Michael have fathered another child? As Astrid turned right onto Dalvey Road, she almost didn’t notice the truck parked just a few yards ahead, where a nighttime construction crew stood repairing a tall streetlamp. One of the workers suddenly flung open the truck door, and before Astrid could even gasp, she swerved hard to the right. The windshield shattered, and the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was the complex root system of an ancient banyan tree.

  * * *

  * Cantonese for “You really didn’t have to.”

  † Malay egg noodles in a spicy-sweet curry gravy.

  ‡ Cantonese for “pretty boy.”

  § Hokkien for “afraid to lose.”

  ‖ Mandarin for “prissy” or “high maintenance.”

  6

  Nick and Rachel

  SINGAPORE

  When Rachel awoke the morning after the tan hua party, Nick was talking softly on the phone in the sitting room of their suite. As her vision slowly came into focus, she lay there silently, looking at Nick and trying to take in everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours. Last night had been magical, and yet she couldn’t help but feel a burgeoning sense of unease. It was as if she had stumbled into a secret chamber and disc
overed that her boyfriend had been living a double life. The ordinary life they shared as two young college professors in New York bore no resemblance to the life of imperial splendor that Nick seemed to lead here, and Rachel didn’t know how to reconcile the two.

  Rachel was by no means an ingenue in the realms of wealth. After their early struggles, Kerry Chu had landed on her feet and gotten her real estate license right when Silicon Valley was entering the Internet boom. Rachel’s Dickensian childhood was replaced by teenage years growing up in the affluent Bay Area. She went to school at two of the nation’s top universities—Stanford and Northwestern—where she encountered the likes of Peik Lin and other trust-fund types. Now she lived in America’s most expensive city, where she mingled with the academic elite. None of this, though, prepared Rachel for her first seventy-two hours in Asia. The exhibitions of wealth here were so extreme, it was unlike anything she had ever witnessed, and not for a moment would she have fathomed that her boyfriend could be part of this world.

  Nick’s lifestyle in New York could be described as modest, if not downright frugal. He rented a cozy alcove studio on Morton Street that didn’t seem to contain anything of value aside from his laptop, bike, and stacks of books. He dressed distinctively but casually, and Rachel (having no reference for British bespoke menswear) never realized just how much those rumpled blazers with the Huntsman or Anderson & Sheppard labels cost. Otherwise, the only splurges she had known Nick to make were on overpriced produce at the Union Square Greenmarket and good seats to a concert if some great band came to town.

  But now it was all beginning to make sense. There had always been a certain quality to Nick, a quality Rachel was unable to articulate even to herself, but it set him apart from anyone she had ever known. The way he interacted with people. The way he leaned against a wall. He was always comfortable fading into the background, but in that way, he stood out. She had chalked it up to his looks and his formidable intellect. Someone as blessed as Nick had nothing to prove. But now she knew there was more to it. This was a boy who had grown up in a place like Tyersall Park. Everything else in the world paled by comparison. Rachel longed to know more about his childhood, about his intimidating grandmother, about the people she had met last night, but she didn’t want to start the morning peppering him with a million questions, not when she had the whole summer to discover this new world.

  “Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” Nick said, finishing his call and noticing that Rachel was awake. He loved the way she looked when she was just waking up, with her long hair so alluringly disheveled, and the sleepy, blissful smile she always gave when she first opened her eyes.

  “What time is it?” Rachel asked, stretching her arms against the padded headboard.

  “It’s about nine thirty,” he said, striding over and slipping under the sheets, wrapping his arms around her from behind, and pulling her body against his. “Spooning time!” he declared playfully, kissing the nape of her neck several times. Rachel turned around to face him and began to trace a line from his forehead to his chin.

  “Did anyone ever tell you …” she began.

  “… that I have the most perfect profile?” Nick said, finishing her question with a laugh. “I only hear that every single day from my beautiful girlfriend, who is clearly deranged. Did you sleep well?”

  “Like a log. Last night really took it out of me.”

  “I’m so proud of you. I know it must have been exhausting having to meet so many people, but you really charmed the socks off everyone.”

  “Arggh. That’s what you say. I don’t think that aunt of yours in the Chanel suit felt the same way. Or your uncle Harry—I should have spent a full year studying up on Singapore history, and politics, and art—”

  “Come on, no one was expecting you to be a scholar of Southeast Asian affairs. Everyone just enjoyed meeting you.”

  “Even your grandmother?”

  “Definitely! In fact, she’s invited us to come stay next week.”

  “Really?” Rachel said. “We’re going to stay at Tyersall Park?”

  “Of course! She liked you, and she wants to get to know you better.”

  Rachel shook her head. “I can’t believe I made any sort of impression on her.”

  Nick took a stray lock of hair hanging down her forehead and gently tucked it behind her ear. “First of all, you have to realize that my grandmother is exceedingly shy, and sometimes that comes across as being standoffish, but she is an astute observer of people. Second, you don’t need to make any sort of impression on her. Just being yourself is quite enough.”

  Based on what she’d gleaned from everyone else, she wasn’t so sure about that, but she decided not to worry about it for the moment. They lay entwined in bed, listening to the sounds of splashing water and children shrieking as they did cannonballs into the pool. Nick suddenly sat up. “You know what we haven’t done yet? We haven’t ordered from room service. You know that’s one of the things I love most about staying in a hotel! Come on, let’s see how good their breakfast is.”

  “You read my mind! Hey, does Colin’s family really own this hotel?” Rachel asked, picking up the leather-bound menu by the side of the bed.

  “Yes, they do. Did Colin tell you?”

  “No, Peik Lin did. I mentioned yesterday that we were going to Colin’s wedding, and her whole family almost had a fit.”

  “Why?” Nick asked, momentarily perplexed.

  “They were just very excited, that’s all. You didn’t tell me that Colin’s wedding was going to be such a big deal.”

  “I didn’t think it was going to be.”

  “It’s apparently front-page news in every newspaper and magazine in Asia.”

  “You’d think the newspapers would have better things to write about, with everything that’s happening in the world.”

  “Come on, nothing sells like a big fancy wedding.”

  Nick sighed, rolling onto his back and staring at the wood-beamed ceiling. “Colin is so stressed. I’m really worried about him. A big wedding is the last thing he wanted, but I guess it was unavoidable. Araminta and her mum just took over, and from what I hear, it’s going to be quite a production.”

  “Well, thankfully I can just sit in the audience,” Rachel smirked.

  “You can, but I’ll be up there in the middle of the three-ring circus. That reminds me, Bernard Tai is organizing the bachelor party, and it seems he’s planned quite the extravaganza. We’re all meeting at the airport and going to some secret destination. Would you mind terribly if I abandoned you for a couple of days?” Nick asked, stroking her arm lightly.

  “Don’t worry about me—you do your duty. I’ll do some exploring on my own, and Astrid and Peik Lin both offered to show me around this weekend.”

  “Well, here’s another option—Araminta called this morning, and she really does want you to come to her bachelorette party this afternoon.”

  Rachel pursed her lips for a moment. “Don’t you think she was only being polite? I mean, we just met. Wouldn’t it be kind of weird if I show up to a party of her close friends?”

  “Don’t look at it like that. Colin’s my best friend, and Araminta’s a big social butterfly. I think it’s going to be a large group of girls, so it will be fun for you. Why don’t you call her and talk it over?”

  “Okay, but let’s order some of those Belgian waffles with maple butter first.”

  7

  Eleanor

  SHENZHEN

  Lorena Lim was talking on her cell phone in Mandarin when Eleanor entered the breakfast room. She sat down across from Lorena, taking in the hazy morning view from this glass aerie. Every time she visited, the city seemed to have doubled in size.* But like a gangly teenager in the middle of a growth spurt, many of the hastily erected buildings—barely a decade old—were already being torn down to make way for shinier towers, like this place Lorena had recently bought. It was shiny all right, but sorely lacking in the taste department. Every surface in this breakfast room, fo
r instance, was covered in a particularly putrid shade of orange marble. Why did all these Mainland developers think that more marble was a good thing? As Eleanor tried to imagine the countertops in a neutral Silestone, a maid placed a bowl of steaming fish porridge in front of her. “No, no porridge for me. Can I have some toast with marmalade?”

  The maid did not appear to understand Eleanor’s attempt at Mandarin.

  Lorena finished her call, flipped off her phone, and said, “Aiyah, Eleanor, you’re in China. At least try some of this delicious porridge.”

  “Sorry, I can’t eat fish first thing in the morning—I’m used to my morning toast,” Eleanor insisted.

  “Look at you! You complain your son is too Westernized, and yet you can’t even enjoy a typical Chinese breakfast.”

  “I’ve been married to a Young for too many years,” Eleanor said simply.

  Lorena shook her head. “I just spoke to my lobang.† We are going to meet him in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton tonight at eight, and he is going to escort us to the person with the inside information about Rachel Chu.”

  Carol Tai swept into the breakfast room in a luxuriant lilac peignoir. “Who are these people you are taking Eleanor to meet? Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “Aiyah, don’t worry. It will be just fine.”

  “So what should we do until then? I think Daisy and Nadine want to go to that enormous mall by the train station,” Eleanor said.

  “You’re talking about Luohu. I have an even better place to take all of you first. But it must remain top secret, okay?” Carol whispered conspiratorially.

  After the ladies had breakfasted and beautified themselves for the day, Carol took the group to one of the many anonymous office buildings in downtown Shenzhen. A lanky youth standing at the curb of the building, who seemed to be texting away furiously on his cell phone, looked up when he saw the two late-model Mercedes sedans pull up and a bevy of women emerge.