Crazy Rich Asians (17 page)

At noon sharp, Goh Peik Lin came walking up the wide staircase of the Kingsford Hotel,
and heads turned as she entered the grand lobby. With her broad nose, round face,
and slightly squinty eyes, she was not a natural-born raving beauty, but she was one
of those girls who really knew how to make the most out of what she had. And what
she had was a voluptuous body and the confidence to pull off bold fashion choices.
Today she was wearing a very short white shift dress that hinted at her curves and
a pair of strappy gold gladiator sandals. Her long black hair was pulled into a tight,
high ponytail and a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses were clamped on her forehead like
a headband. On her earlobes were three-carat diamond solitaire studs, and on her wrist
a chunky gold-and-diamond watch. She finished off the look with a gold mesh tote bag,
flung casually on her shoulder. She looked like she was ready for the beach club in
Saint-Tropez.

“Peik Lin!” Rachel cried, running toward her with her arms out-stretched.
Peik Lin squealed loudly upon seeing her, and the friends hugged tightly. “Look at
you! You look terrific!” Rachel exclaimed, before turning to introduce Nick.

“Great to meet you,” Peik Lin said in a voice that was surprisingly loud for her tiny
frame. She gave Nick the once-over. “So, it took a local boy to finally get her out
here.”

“Glad to be of service,” Nick said.

“I know you’re playing wedding planner today, but when do I get to do my CIA debriefing
on you? You better promise I’ll see you soon,” Peik Lin said.

“I promise.” Nick laughed and kissed Rachel goodbye. As soon as he was out of earshot,
Peik Lin turned to Rachel and raised her eyebrows. “Well
he
was easy on the eyes. No wonder he managed to get you to stop working and take a
holiday for once in your life.”

Rachel just giggled.

“Really, you have no right to poach one of our endangered species! So tall, so fit,
and
that accent
—I normally find Singapore boys with posh English accents to be incredibly pretentious,
but on him it just works.”

As they walked down the long flight of red-carpeted stairs, Rachel asked, “Where are
we going for lunch?”

“My parents have invited you to our house. They are so excited to see you, and I think
you’ll enjoy some traditional home cooking.”

“That sounds great! But if I’m going to be seeing your parents, should I change?”
Rachel asked. She was wearing a white cotton blouse with a pair of khaki slacks.

“Oh, you’re fine. My parents are so casual, and they know you are traveling.”

Waiting for them at the entrance was a large metallic-gold BMW with tinted windows.
The driver quickly got out and opened the door for them. As the car left the hotel
grounds and turned onto a busy street, Peik Lin began to point out the sights. “This
is the famous Orchard Road—tourist central. It’s our version of Fifth Avenue.”

“It’s Fifth Avenue on steroids … I’ve never seen so many boutiques and shopping malls,
lined up as far as the eye can see!”

“Yes, but I prefer the shopping in New York or LA.”

“You always did, Peik Lin,” Rachel teased, remembering her
friend’s frequent shopping jaunts when she was supposed to be in class.

Rachel always knew that Peik Lin came from money. They met during freshman orientation
at Stanford, and Peik Lin was the girl who showed up to 8:00 a.m. classes looking
as if she had just come from a shopping spree on Rodeo Drive. As a newly arrived international
student from Singapore, one of the first things she did was buy herself a Porsche
911 convertible, claiming that since Porsches were such a bargain in America “it’s
an
absolute crime
not to have one.” She soon found Palo Alto to be too provincial, and tried at every
opportunity to lure Rachel into skipping class and driving up to San Francisco with
her (the Neiman Marcus there was
so
much better than the one at Stanford Shopping Center). She was generous to a fault,
and Rachel spent most of her college years being showered with gifts, enjoying glorious
meals at culinary destinations like Chez Panisse and Post Ranch Inn, and going on
weekend spa trips all along the California coast courtesy of Peik Lin’s handy American
Express black card.

Part of Peik Lin’s charm was that she made no apologies for being loaded—she was completely
unabashed when it came to spending money or talking about it. When
Fortune Asia
magazine did a cover profile on her family’s property development and construction
company, she proudly forwarded Rachel a link to the article. She threw lavish parties
catered by the Plumed Horse at the town house she rented off campus. At Stanford,
this did not exactly make her the most popular girl on campus. The East Coast set
ignored her, and the low-key Bay Area types found her much too SoCal. Rachel always
thought Peik Lin would have fit in better at Princeton or Brown, but she was glad
that fate had sent her this way. Having grown up under far more modest circumstances,
Rachel was intrigued by this free-spending girl, who, while being filthy rich, was
never a snob about it.

“Has Nick filled you in on the real estate insanity here in Singapore?” Peik Lin asked
as the car zipped around Newton Circus.

“He hasn’t.”

“The market is really hot at the moment—everyone’s flipping properties left and right.
It’s practically become the national sport. See that building under construction on
the left? I just bought two
new flats there last week. I got them at an insider price of two point one each.”

“Do you mean two-point-one
million
?” Rachel asked. It always took her a while to get used to the way Peik Lin spoke
about money—the numbers just seemed so unreal.

“Yes, of course. I got them at the insider price, since our company did the construction.
The flats are actually worth three million, and by the time the building is completed
at the end of the year I can sell each of them for three-point-five, four mil easy.”

“Now why would the prices shoot up so quickly? Isn’t that a sign that the market is
in a speculative bubble?” Rachel inquired.

“We’re not in a bubble because the demand is real. All the HNWIs want to be in real
estate these days.”

“Um, what are
Henwees
?” Rachel asked.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot you’re not up on the lingo. HNWI stands for ‘High Net Worth Individuals.’
We Singaporeans love to abbreviate everything.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”

“As you may know, there’s been an explosion of HNWIs from Mainland China, and they
are the ones really driving up the prices. They are flocking here in droves, buying
up properties with golf bags stuffed full of hard cash.”

“Really? I thought it was the other way around. Doesn’t everyone want to move to China
for work?”

“Some, yes, but the
super-rich
Chinese all want to be here. We’re the most stable country in the region, and Mainlanders
feel that their money is far safer here than in Shanghai, or even Switzerland.”

At this point, the car turned off a main thoroughfare and drove into a neighborhood
of tightly packed houses. “So there actually
are
houses in Singapore,” Rachel said.

“Very few. Only about five percent of us are lucky enough to live in houses. This
neighborhood is actually one of the first ‘suburban-style’ developments in Singapore,
begun in the seventies, and my family helped to build it,” Peik Lin explained. The
car drove past a high white wall, over which peeked tall thick bushes of bougainvillea.
A large gold plaque on the wall was engraved
VILLA D
’
ORO
, and as the car pulled up to the entrance, a pair of ornate golden gates parted to
reveal an imposing façade that bore a not so accidental
resemblance to the Petit Trianon at Versailles, except that the house itself took
up most of the lot, and the front portico was dominated by a massive four-tiered marble
fountain with a golden swan spouting water from its long upturned beak.

“Welcome to my home,” Peik Lin said.

“My God, Peik Lin!” Rachel gasped in awe. “Is this where you grew up?”

“This was the property, but my parents tore down the old house and built this mansion
about six years ago.”

“No wonder you thought your town house in Palo Alto was so cramped.”

“You know, when I was growing up, I thought that everyone lived like this. In the
States, this house is probably worth only about three million. Can you guess how much
it’s worth here?”

“I won’t even try to guess.”

“Thirty million, easy. And that’s just for the land—the house itself would be a teardown.”

“Well, I can only imagine how valuable land must be on an island with, what, four
million people?”

“More like five million now.”

The cathedral-size front door was opened by an Indonesian girl in a frilly black-and-white
French maid’s uniform. Rachel found herself standing in a circular entrance foyer
with white-and-rose marble floors radiating out in a sunburst pattern. To the right,
an enormous staircase with gold balustrades wound its way to the upper floors. The
entire curved wall going up the staircase was a frescoed replica of Fragonard’s
The Swing
, except that this re-creation was blown up to fill a forty-foot rotunda.

“A team of artists from Prague camped out for three months to paint the frescos,”
Peik Lin said as she led Rachel up a short flight of steps into the formal living
room. “This is my mother’s re-creation of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Get ready,”
she warned. Rachel ascended the steps and entered the room, her eyes widening a little.
Aside from the red velvet brocade sofas, every single object in the cavernous formal
living room appeared to be made of gold. The vaulted ceiling was composed of layers
upon layers of gold leaf. The baroque console tables were gilt gold. The Venetian
mirrors and candelabra lining the walls were gold. The elaborate tassels on the gold
damask curtains were yet a deeper shade of gold. Even the tchotchkes scattered
around every available surface were golden. Rachel was completely dumbstruck.

To make matters even more surreal, the middle of the room was dominated by an enormous
oval pond-cum-aquarium sunken into the gold-flecked marble floor. The pond was brightly
lit, and for a second Rachel thought she could make out baby sharks swimming in the
bubbling water. Before she could process the scene fully, three golden-haired Pekingese
ran into the room, their high-pitched yaps echoing loudly against the marble.

Peik Lin’s mother, a short, plumpish woman in her early fifties with a shoulder-length
bouffant perm entered the room. She wore a tight shocking-pink silk blouse that stretched
against her ample cleavage, belted with a chain of interlinked gold medusa heads and
a tight pair of black trousers. The only thing incongruous about the outfit was the
pair of cushioned pink slippers on her feet. “Astor, Trump, Vanderbilt, naw-tee naw-tee
boys, stop barking!” she admonished. “Rachel Chu! Wel-kum, wel-kum!” she cried in
her heavy Chinese-accented English. Rachel found herself crushed into a fleshy hug,
the heady scent of Eau d’Hadrien filling her nose. “
Aiyah! So long I haven’t seen you. Bien kar ah nee swee, ah!
” she exclaimed in Hokkien, cupping Rachel’s cheeks with both hands.

“She thinks you’ve become very pretty,” Peik Lin translated, knowing that Rachel only
spoke Mandarin.

“Thank you, Mrs. Goh. It’s so nice to see you again,” Rachel said, feeling rather
overwhelmed. She never knew what to say when someone complimented her looks.

“Whaaat?” the woman said in mock horror. “Don’t call me Mrs. Goh. Mrs. Goh is my hor-eee-ble
mah-der-in-law! Call me Auntie Neena.”

“Okay, Auntie Neena.”

“Come, come to the keet-chen.
Makan
time.” She clamped her bronze fingernails onto Rachel’s wrist, leading her down a
long marble-columned hallway toward the dining room. Rachel couldn’t help but notice
the enormous canary diamond flashing on her hand like a translucent egg yolk, and
the pair of three-carat solitaires in her earlobes, identical to Peik Lin’s.
Like mother, like daughter—maybe they got a two-for-one deal
.

The baronial dining hall was somewhat of a respite after the rococo hell of the living
room, with its wood boiserie walls and windows
overlooking the lawn where a large oval swimming pool was encircled by Grecian sculptures.
Rachel quickly registered two versions of the
Venus de Milo
, one in white marble, another in gold, of course. There was a huge round dining table
that seated eighteen comfortably covered with a heavy Battenberg lace tablecloth and
high-backed Louis Quatorze chairs that were, thankfully, upholstered in a royal blue
brocade. Assembled in the dining room was the entire Goh family.

“Rachel, you remember my father. This is my brother Peik Wing and his wife, Sheryl,
and my younger brother, Peik Ting, whom we call P.T. And these are my nieces Alyssa
and Camylla.” Everyone went around shaking hands with Rachel, who couldn’t help but
notice that not one of them happened to be over five foot five. The brothers were
both much darker complexioned than Peik Lin, but they all shared the same pixieish
features. Both were dressed in almost identical outfits of pale blue button-down dress
shirts and dark gray slacks, as if they had adhered exactly to a company manual on
how to dress for casual Fridays. Sheryl, who was much paler, stuck out from the rest
of the family. She wore a pink floral tank top and a short denim skirt, looking rather
frazzled as she fussed over her two young daughters, who were both being fed Chicken
McNuggets, the paper boxes placed on heavy gold-rimmed Limoges plates along with the
packets of sweet-and-sour dipping sauce.