by Cynthia Dane
“Your father is quite wealthy, Natalie,” Sherman said. “I’m surprised you didn’t know. Or at least have an idea.”
“No…” Natalie struggled to keep her chin up. Her pride was as wounded as Sherman’s had been when he was knocked to the floor. “Besides what the American government mandated he give us, I never saw any of that money.”
I rubbed my girlfriend’s back. “We looked into him a while back. It’s true that your father is vice president of Gold Plains Bank, but he also has quite a few investments all around Southeast Asia and even on Mainland China. He owns three properties here in Singapore, all of them appealing to the Taiwanese and Chinese tourists. They don’t do too badly.”
“I just… all I knew was his official job and that he remarried and had another kid. I haven’t even seen him since I was a child.” Natalie’s face paled as she realized something I had known for many weeks: the Chens had been wealthy for more than one generation. In another life, Natalie would have been a proper heiress, like myself.
I don’t pretend to understand Confucian ideologies and what it means to be the daughter of a man’s first, forgotten marriage in another country. Lewis Chen had remarried a woman Natalie had never met. He had a “first born” son everyone lauded as his legacy. Last I heard, his wife was pregnant yet again. Natalie had a whole family she knew nothing about her. Even her aunt had hidden their identities for her own protection, though that same aunt was responsible for Natalie’s safekeeping throughout her life.
“I have a dinner meeting I need to get ready for,” I said. “I want you to come with me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Don’t suppose you brought some evening wear with you.”
Natalie had brought a small backpack and suitcase with her. Even if she had a nice dress in one of them, it was bound to be wrinkled, stained, or worse. There wasn’t any time to dry clean or press her clothes before dinner. “No.”
Nick happened to walk in with my suit at that moment. He nodded to us with a smile, but before he could continue to my room, I said, “Nick, do me a favor and call Madam Georgina’s. I need a dress for Natalie within an hour. Formal, but not black-tie. It’s for the dinner.”
He glanced at Natalie with a grin. “Sure thing. Let me go hang this up first.”
“Is he your personal assistant around here?” Natalie asked.
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “He’s filled in the best that he can.” Which meant… hardly at all. Nick did his best to take minutes of my conference calls, but his handwriting was less than stellar. His typing? Even slower.
Natalie scoffed. “Surely I would be better.”
“You surely would be. But first things first. I want you to come to this meeting. As my date.”
“You’re not mad at me for intruding like this?”
“Mad at you? That’s not my jurisdiction. Take it up with my useless security. They’re the ones you and your family have pissed off.”
“Don’t even get me started,” Sherman grunted.
I wouldn’t dare. Just like I wouldn’t yet dare tell Natalie who we were destined to meet at dinner that night. When I said I had arranged to meet with Lewis Chen again in Singapore… it may or may not have been that night.
First, I wanted Natalie looking like the most beautiful Taiwanese bride to every step out of a Singaporean apartment. Well, a simple red dress would have to do, but as soon as Nick returned from Madam Georgina’s, I knew we had a winner. Natalie was equally delighted to dress up in a fusion of the old and the new in her tight-fitting Chinese dress.
With any luck, her father would approve. And with more luck, he wouldn’t see us together and come to regret his blessings.
…And Natalie wouldn’t kill me.
Chapter 54
NATALIE
We entered the private banquet hall at the top of another skyscraper. The attendants in black and gold qipaos lined the room and bowed their heads in reverence as we entered and took our seats at an elaborately set table that served at least eight. Four golden plates were laid out, two on either side of a gold vase filled with red carnations and yellow daisies.
I didn’t comment on the flawless feng shui of the room or the judicious use of lucky colors and numerology seen in every corner of the room. I didn’t give my beloved a brief lesson on Chinese cultures. I wanted to, of course. I wanted to share that part of my heritage with the woman I was determined to be with, but the moment we sat down on one side of the table I was filled with a sense of dread and foreboding.
I knew what was happening the moment my aunt entered the room dressed in a black evening gown that highlighted her muscular shoulders. She wore her hair down and looked so much more like me that even Erica did a double-take.
“Natalie,” she said, standing in the doorway. She didn’t move, but Erica and I stood to welcome the other guest. “Allow me to introduce…”
A Chinese man with lines on his forehead and gray in his hair pushed past her and met us halfway across the room. His stature was short, but the whole room waited with bated breath for him to acknowledge me.
“You’re a lot prettier than the tabloids give you justice,” my father said in English. “You can thank your Taiwanese side for that.”
I was too shocked to argue.
The room was spinning. It was only by the grace of my girlfriend’s quick reflexes that I didn’t fall on my ass when I half-fainted backward.
“I told you that I should properly introduce you,” my aunt said in the distance.
“Who is there to introduce? I am her father.”
They bickered like brother and sister while Erica helped me into a chair. Her steady grip was the only thing keeping me from plastering my forehead against the table. Can you blame me? I hadn’t seen this man in years! He had the nerve to waltz into my life as if we had dinner every Sunday?
“Is this your doing?” I asked Erica.
She steadied me in my seat while Sherman looked on in mild amusement. “Let me explain, Natalie.”
Lewis Chen, the man who I owed half of my DNA to, approached me with a furrowed brow and a familiar jawline that I saw every time I looked into a mirror. Looking into my mother’s face never offered me the illusion that she and I were related. But looking into my father’s? If seeing my aunt was like looking at an older version of myself, then my father was like meeting every ancestor who deigned to come down from their heavenly thrones and judge me with their impossible-to-meet standards.
This man was as finely dressed as Erica. For “only” being the vice president of a national bank, he screamed old money.
That was the day I learned that the Chen clan were no mere beggars and peasants a few generations ago. My father wasn’t new money, whether Taiwanese or Mainland. Both he and his sister announced to the world that they were King and Queen of Taipei.
There was no way… how had I had never known? Did my mother even know who she had married when she roped Lewis Chen into a wedding ceremony?
The deepest parts of myself were disgusted. I knew what that meant. He married my mother instead of dumping her American ass stateside with a bastard child so he could save face and not be surprised by my presence one day. If I were acknowledged as his child – his American child, of course – then I couldn’t ruin his reputation when he finally reached this position. All he had to do was divorce my mom and leave me when the opportunity was ripe for him to start climbing the ranks back in Taiwan. He could procure a much more socially acceptable wife there.
My father stood before me, and I had never felt so thrown away like common garbage!
“Natalie,” my aunt said in sophisticated Taiwanese Mandarin. More proof that she was raised in the same class that my father now occupied. Just because she knew how to shoot a man dead and incapacitate a large American like Sherman, didn’t mean she couldn’t sound like the honorable little sister of Gold Plain Bank’s senior vice president. “This is your father. He has been looking forward to meeting you these past few
weeks.”
He slightly nodded. My Americanness shone through when I didn’t get up to bow deeper to my own father. I had seen my Asian friends do it countless times with family members growing up, but it was never a part of my half-white world.
Even though I looked every bit as Taiwanese as my blood relatives. My piss-poor manners and inability to sputter in my carefully curated dialect were what gave me away as Western to my core.
In America, I will always be the Asian girl. In Asia, I will always be the American girl. The identity crisis I had suffered most of my life blazed within me. Hell had never been so real.
“Yes… hello.” I couldn’t remember Mandarin to save our lives. I knew my father could speak English, but even his flawless command of my native language surprised me. At least it meant we could communicate in English. “I’m sorry for my rude manners. I am shocked.”
My father rounded the table and waited for his sister to pull out his chair before sitting down. Erica helped me sit up in my seat and sat down next to me. Once my aunt was situated by her brother, a man in a black uniform swiftly entered the room and served us our drinks.
Every time I glanced across the table, I saw them. My eyes.
And my aunt’s mouth twitching, because she itched to start the conversation. But she was the bottom of the family pile during this dinner, so would not speak unless spoken to first. For most of the dinner, she sucked in her cheeks and chomped down on her bottom lip to keep her words to herself.
“So…” I said. “Could someone please explain to me what’s going on here?”
The wine was poured. My father ordered a whisky on the rocks, and Erica was quick to ask for a glass of her favorite bourbon. My aunt was content with wine (or maybe she didn’t want to come across as a burden who asked for more than she was offered.) As for me, I could barely drink the water, let alone ask for alcohol.
“I didn’t want you to find out this way,” Erica began, placing her napkin across her lap, “but I’ve been in contact with your father for a while now. About two weeks after you started working at the office. This has moved quite efficiently in Chinese time.”
“Taiwanese,” the three of us Chens said in unison.
“Right.” Eric blushed. “Taiwanese. My honest mistake.”
“First thing you need to learn,” I said, too droll to risk offending anyone, “is that Taiwanese are not Chinese.”
“But you…”
“That’s different here.”
Erica quickly changed the subject. “Anyway, I approached your father’s company on the basis that I wanted to take out a loan to buy a vacation home in Taipei. Since I am very high profile, they assigned your father to speak with me. He quickly figured out that I was your employer, and the rest is history, I suppose.” She put her hand on mine, and there was no longer any denying to my father that I was sleeping with my boss. “I didn’t want to reveal any of this until we were certain the time was right. I was going to tell you before we arranged a formal meeting, but then…”
“Then I barged into your apartment here in Singapore.”
“On the night I was scheduled to meet him again, yes.”
I looked to my aunt on the other side of the bouquet. “Is that why you were in America? You were accompanying my father?”
“Yes. I stepped out for a few minutes to speak with you.”
“You mean kidnap me…”
“It’s my fault,” my father interrupted. “I was the one who insisted that your aunt oversee your security over the years. She is much more equipped and knowledgeable about such things. We’ve been watching over you your whole life.”
“I never found out until Jimmy revealed herself.”
My aunt replied to my father’s unspoken inquiry. “Ji-min Cho. The Korean girl.”
Even poor Jimmy will always be “the Korean girl” here. None of us can catch a break.
Erica attempted to make a joke out of it. “None of us had any idea that she really worked for you. My assistant hired her because of her impeccable interviewing skills.”
“And she’s beautiful,” my aunt supplemented. “I chose who to send in based on those three assets. She hasn’t been a half-bad receptionist, right?”
“Quite good.”
I didn’t want to talk about Jimmy. “Why the hell are you doing it like this and not calling me?” There it was. The thing that pissed me off the most. Didn’t my father know that it was 2017 and Skype was a thing? He apparently had enough money and power to fly to America twice a year and speak to me face-to-face for a few hours. Maybe it didn’t mean as much now, but when I was a little kid who didn’t look like anyone on her mom’s side of the family?
It would’ve meant everything.
My aunt snorted. “Told you she’s wonderfully American,” she muttered in Mandarin.
Her brother, on the other hand, only squared his shoulders and looked me in the dark brown eyes. “It’s not that simple, Natalie. The life I had in America is not the same life I can have in Taiwan. There were expectations…”
“Expectations? What about your daughter’s expectations?”
Erica squeezed my hand. “Natalie…”
“I didn’t come here to argue with you,” Lewis Chen snapped back at me. “I came to see my daughter and the young woman she has become. Just because I haven’t written you letters or wasted your time on the phone doesn’t mean I haven’t been following your progress into adulthood. It was a great moment of pride when you were number one in your business school’s graduating class. You did it without the handouts my other children enjoy.”
“Your other children?” I only knew of the one. Some little brother I could never remember, even though my aunt told me his name a hundred times. “How many do you have?”
My father relaxed his shoulders. “My wife has recently given birth to a healthy baby girl. Her Taiwanese name is Mei-ling.”
Red colored my vision. It had nothing to do with the decorations, my dress, or the woman in a red qipao standing on the side of the room.
“That was my baby name.” I stood up as if all the red in my face would combust into fire. “I should know, because my mom could never say it when she took me to Mandarin classes!”
“Natalie!” My aunt leaped up with me.
“I can’t believe this.” I turned to Erica. “I know you didn’t know I was coming, but I can’t believe this…”
I made the excuse that I needed to go to the ladies’ room and demanded that one of the women in the black and gold qipaos show me the way. She hurried to the other side of the room while my aunt and father argued in heated Mandarin.
Didn’t care. I needed to get away from them.
Too bad I didn’t get two minutes’ worth of respite in the women’s restroom before my aunt gently knocked on the door and poked her head in.
“Hello.” She didn’t touch me, although she stood close enough that I could smell her deodorant. “I’m sorry this is so overwhelming. I honestly didn’t think you would be introduced to everyone so soon.”
“Your brother’s an asshole.”
“Yes, he is.” She leaned against the counter, her beautiful evening gown wrinkling against her ass. “We all are. In the end, it’s always been more about saving face than making meaningful family connections. Be glad you’ve never met your grandfather. He was the one who taught us that.”
“But…”
“You know what?” My aunt waited until I glanced at her through swelling eyes. “My baby name was also Mei-ling. Where do you think my parents got Melanie from? It’s a tradition in the family for first-born girls to be named Mei-ling.”
“I’m his first-born girl,” I growled.
“You are. But you’re not his wife’s. Besides, I hear they’re going to start calling her Katherine or Charlotte when she starts school. Your stepmother is soooo up British royalty’s butt. You should’ve seen her wedding dress! Straight-up ripoff of Kate Middleton’s.”
I didn’t respond.
“He… knows…” I shook my head. “He only approves because of how wealthy Erica is.”
“That and she could pump a shitton of money through Gold Plains, and money always greases the more progressive wheels whirring in the back of people’s minds, but… yes, Natalie. You probably won’t be able to bring her to certain places in Taiwan, but if you ever get married, your father would be there.”
“He’s not so different from my mom like that.”
“Your mother was… definitely something. I doubt your father ever loved a gold digger like that, but he did the right thing when he found out about you. Because of that, you’ll get a sizable inheritance.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Of course you don’t. Because you’re going to make your own fortune, like your father. That’s what would make him most proud. Even prouder than you securing a wealthy spouse. Could your mother say that?”
“Nope.”
“Come on.” My aunt took my hand and directed me to the door. “I told my brother to stop overwhelming you. We’re going to sit down and have a nice family dinner. I’m not your father’s bodyguard tonight. I’m your aunt, and a very proud one at that.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
The door opened. My father stood a few feet away, turning the moment he heard us.
“Why don’t you start by telling us your favorite ice cream flavor? Mango, right?”
My eyes widened. “How did you know that?” I asked my father.
“After your aunt told me a long time ago, I always made sure your fridge had a pint. Assuming your mother didn’t eat it.”