Crazy Rich Asians (10 page)

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 still 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:

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.

Edison Cheng

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).