Crazy Rich Asians (11 page)

In the parking garage of their building, they owned five parking spots (valued at
two hundred and fifty thousand each), where their fleet consisted of a Bentley Continental
GT (Eddie’s weekday car), an Aston Martin Vanquish (Eddie’s weekend car), a Volvo
S40 (Fiona’s car), a Mercedes S550 (the family car), and a Porsche Cayenne (the family
sport-utility vehicle). At Aberdeen Marina, there was his sixty-four-foot yacht,
Kaiser
. Then there was the holiday condo in Whistler, British Columbia (the only place to
be seen skiing, since there was semi-decent Cantonese food an hour away in Vancouver).

Eddie was a member of the Chinese Athletic Association, the Hong Kong Golf Club, the
China Club, the Hong Kong Club, the Cricket Club, the Dynasty Club, the American Club,
the Jockey Club, the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, and too many private dining clubs
to recount. Like most upper-crust Hong Kongers, Eddie also possessed what was perhaps
the ultimate membership card—Canadian Permanent Resident Cards for his entire family
(a safe haven in case the powers that be in Beijing ever pulled a
Tiananmen
again). He collected watches, and now possessed more than seventy timepieces from
the most esteemed watchmakers (all Swiss, of course, except
for a few vintage Cartiers), which he installed in a custom-designed bird’s-eye maple
display console in his private dressing room (his wife did not have her own dressing
room). He had made
Hong Kong Tattle
’s “Most Invited” list four years in a row, and befitting a man of his status, he
had already gone through three mistresses since marrying Fiona thirteen years ago.

Despite this embarrassment of riches, Eddie felt extremely deprived compared to most
of his friends. He didn’t have a house on the Peak. He didn’t have his own plane.
He didn’t have a full-time crew for his yacht, which was much too small to host more
than ten guests for brunch comfortably. He didn’t have any Rothkos or Pollocks or
the other dead American artists one was required to hang on the wall in order to be
considered truly rich these days. And unlike Leo, Eddie’s parents were the old-fashioned
type—insisting from the moment Eddie graduated that he learn to live off his earnings.

It was so bloody unfair. His parents were loaded, and his mother was set to inherit
another obscene bundle if his Singapore grandmother would ever kick the bucket. (Ah
Ma had already suffered two heart attacks in the past decade, but now she had a defibrillator
installed and could go on ticking for God only knows how long.) Unfortunately his
parents were also in the pink of health, so by the time they keeled over and the money
was split up between himself, his bitchy sister, and his good-for-nothing brother,
it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Eddie was always trying to guesstimate his parents’
net worth, much of which was gleaned from information his real estate friends leaked
to him. It became an obsession of his, and he kept a spreadsheet on his home computer,
diligently updating it every week based on property valuations and then calculating
his potential future share. No matter how he ran the numbers, he realized he would
most likely never make
Fortune Asia
’s list of “Hong Kong’s Top Ten Richest” with the way his parents were handling things.

But then his parents were always so selfish. Sure, they raised him and paid for his
education and bought him his first apartment, but they failed him when it came to
what was truly important—they didn’t know how to flaunt their wealth properly. His
father, for all his fame and celebrated skill, had grown up middle class, with solidly
middle-class tastes. He was happy enough being the revered doctor, driven around in
that shamefully outdated Rolls-Royce, wearing that
rusty Audemars Piguet watch, and going to his clubs. And then there was his mother.
She was so cheap, forever counting her pennies. She could have been one of the queens
of society if she would just play up her aristocratic background, wear some designer
dresses, or move out of that flat in the Mid-Levels. That goddamn flat.

Eddie hated going over to his parents’ place. He hated the lobby, with its cheap-looking
Mongolian granite floors and the old-lady security guard who was forever eating stinky
tofu out of a plastic bag. Inside the flat, he hated the peach-colored leather sectional
sofa and white lacquered consoles (bought when the old Lane Crawford on Queen’s Road
was having a clearance sale in the mid-1980s), the glass pebbles at the bottom of
every vase of fake flowers, the random collection of Chinese calligraphy paintings
(all presents from his father’s patients) clustering the walls, and the medical honors
and plaques lined up on the overhead shelf that ran around the perimeter of the living
room. He hated walking past his old bedroom, which he had been forced to share with
his little brother, with its nautical-themed twin beds and navy blue Ikea wall unit,
still there after all these years. Most of all, he hated the large walnut-framed family
portrait peeking out from behind the big-screen television, forever taunting him with
its smoky brown portrait-studio backdrop and the gold-embossed
SAMMY PHOTO STUDIO
in the bottom right corner. He hated how he looked in that photograph—he was nineteen,
just back from his first year at Cambridge, with shoulder-length feathered hair, wearing
a Paul Smith tweed blazer he thought was so cool at the time, his elbow arranged jauntily
on his mother’s shoulder. And how could his mother, born to a family of such exquisite
breeding, be completely devoid of taste? Over the years, he had begged her to redecorate
or move, but she had refused, claiming that she “could never part with all the happy
memories of my children growing up here.” What happy memories? His only memories were
of a childhood spent being too embarrassed to invite any friends over (unless he knew
they lived in less prestigious buildings), and teen years spent in the cramped toilet,
masturbating practically underneath the bathroom sink with two feet against the door
at all times (there was no lock).

As Eddie stood in Leo’s new closet in Shanghai, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling
windows at the Pudong financial district
shimmering across the river like Xanadu, he vowed that he would one day have a closet
so cool, it would make this one look like a fucky little pigsty. Until then, he still
had one thing that even Leo’s crisp new money could not buy—a thick, embossed invitation
to Colin Khoo’s wedding in Singapore.

Rachel

“You’re kidding, right?” Rachel said, thinking Nick was pulling a prank when he steered
her onto the plush red carpet of the Singapore Airlines first-class counter at JFK.

Nick flashed a conspiratorial grin, relishing her reaction. “I figured if you were
going to go halfway around the world with me, I should at least try to make it as
comfy as possible.”

“But this must have cost a fortune! You didn’t have to sell a kidney, did you?”

“No worries, I had about a million frequent-flier miles saved up.”

Still, Rachel couldn’t help feeling a little guilty about the millions of frequent-flier
points that Nick must have sacrificed for these tickets. Who even flew first class
anymore? The second surprise for Rachel came when they boarded the hulking two-story
Airbus A380 and were promptly greeted by a beautiful stewardess who looked as if she
had materialized straight out of a soft-focus ad from a travel magazine. “Mr. Young,
Ms. Chu, welcome aboard. Please allow me to show you to your suite.” The stewardess
sashayed down the aisle in an elegant, figure-hugging long dress,
^*
ushering them to the front section of the plane, which consisted of twelve private
suites.

Rachel felt as if she was entering the screening room of a luxurious TriBeCa loft.
The cabin consisted of two of the widest armchairs she had ever seen—upholstered in
buttery hand-stitched Poltrona Frau leather—two huge flat-screen televisions placed
side by side, and a full-length wardrobe ingeniously hidden behind a sliding burled-walnut
panel. A Givenchy cashmere throw was artfully draped over the seats, beckoning them
to snuggle up and get cozy.

The stewardess gestured to the cocktails awaiting them on the center console. “An
aperitif before takeoff? Mr. Young, your usual gin and tonic. Ms. Chu, a Kir Royale
to get you settled in.” She handed Rachel a long-stemmed glass with chilled bubbly
that looked like it had been poured just seconds ago.
Of course
they would already know her favorite cocktail. “Would you like to enjoy your lounge
chairs until dinner, or would you prefer us to convert your suite into a bedroom right
after takeoff?”

“I think we’ll enjoy this screening-room setup for a while,” Nick replied.

As soon as the stewardess was out of earshot, Rachel declared, “Sweet Jesus, I’ve
lived in apartments smaller than this!”

“I hope you don’t mind roughing it—this is all rather lowbrow by Asian hospitality
standards,” Nick teased.

“Um … I think I can make do.” Rachel curled up on her sumptuous armchair and began
fiddling with her remote control. “Okay, there are more channels than I can count.
Are you going to watch one of your bleak Swedish crime thrillers? Oooh,
The English Patient
. I want to see that. Wait a minute. Is it bad to watch a film about a plane crash
while you’re flying?”

“That was a tiny single-engine plane, and wasn’t it shot down by Nazis? I think it
should be just fine,” Nick said, placing his hand over hers.

The enormous plane began to taxi toward the runway, and Rachel looked out the window
at the planes lined up on the tarmac, lights flashing on the tips of their wings,
each one awaiting their turn to hurtle skyward. “You know, it’s finally sinking in
that we’re going on this trip.”

“You excited?”

“Just a bit. I think sleeping on an actual
bed
on a plane is probably the most exciting part!”

“It’s all downhill from here, isn’t it?”

“Definitely. It’s all been downhill since the day we met,” Rachel said with a wink,
entwining her fingers with Nick’s.

NEW YORK CITY, AUTUMN 2008

For the record, Rachel Chu did not feel the proverbial lightning-bolt strike when
she first laid eyes on Nicholas Young in the garden of La Lanterna di Vittorio. Sure,
he was terribly good-looking, but she had always been suspicious of good-looking men,
especially ones with quasi-British accents. She spent the first few minutes silently
sizing him up, wondering what Sylvia had gotten her into this time.

When Sylvia Wong-Swartz, Rachel’s colleague at New York University’s Department of
Economics, walked into their faculty suite one afternoon and declared, “Rachel, I
just spent the morning with your future husband,” she dismissed the declaration as
another of Sylvia’s silly schemes and didn’t even bother to look up from her laptop.

“No, seriously, I’ve found your future husband. He was at a student governance meeting
with me. It’s the third time I’ve met him, and I’m convinced he’s
the one
for you.”

“So my future husband is a student? Thanks—you know how much I like jailbait.”

“No, no—he’s the brilliant new prof in the history department. He’s also the faculty
adviser to the History Organization.”

“You know I don’t go for professor types. Especially from the history department.”

“Yeah, but this guy is different, I’m telling you. He’s the most impressive guy I’ve
met in years. So charming. And HOT. I would be after him in a second if I wasn’t already
married.”

“What’s his name? Maybe I already know him.”

“Nicholas Young. He just started this semester, a transfer from Oxford.”

“A Brit?” Rachel looked up, her curiosity piqued.

“No, no.” Sylvia put her files down and took a seat, inhaling deeply. “Okay, I’m going
to tell you something, but before you write him off, promise you’ll hear me out.”

Rachel couldn’t wait for the other shoe to drop. What fabulously dysfunctional detail
had Sylvia left out?

“He’s … Asian.”

“Oh God, Sylvia.” Rachel rolled her eyes, turning back to her computer screen.

“I
knew
you were going to react like this! Hear me out. This guy is the total package, I
swear—”

“
I’m sure
,” Rachel said, dripping with sarcasm.

“He has the most seductive, slightly British accent. And he’s a terrific dresser.
He had the most perfect jacket on today, rumpled in all the right places—”

“Not. Interested. Sylvia.”

“And he looks a bit like that Japanese actor from those Wong Kar-wai movies.”

“Is he Japanese or Chinese?”

“What does it matter? Every single time any Asian guy so much as looks in your direction,
you give them the famous Rachel Chu Asian freeze-out and they wither away before you
give them a chance.”