Crazy Rich Asians (9 page)

“Please don’t. I’m sorry if it seems that way. It’s just that …” Nick swallowed nervously.
“It’s just that I’ve always tried to keep clear boundaries between my personal life
and my family life, that’s all.”

“But shouldn’t your personal life be the same as your family life?”

“Not in my case. Rachel, you
know
how overbearing Chinese parents can be.”

“Well, yeah, but it still wouldn’t keep me from telling my mom about something as
important as my boyfriend. I mean, my mom knew about you five minutes after our first
date, and you were sitting down to dinner with her—enjoying her winter melon soup—like,
two months later.”

“Well, you have a very special thing with your mum, you know that. It’s not that easy
for most other people. And with my parents, it’s just …” Nick paused, struggling for
the right words. “We’re just different. We’re much more formal with each other, and
we don’t really discuss our emotional lives at all.”

“What, are they cold and emotionally shut down or something? Did they live through
the Great Depression?”

Nick laughed, shaking his head. “No, nothing like that. I just think you’ll understand
when you meet them.”

Rachel didn’t know what to think. Sometimes Nick could be so cryptic, and his explanation
made no sense to her. Still, she didn’t want to overreact. “Anything else you want
to tell me about your family before I get on a plane and spend the whole summer with
you?”

“No. Not really. Well …” Nick paused for a bit, trying to decide if he should mention
the housing situation. He knew he had screwed things up royally with his mother. He
had waited too long, and when he called to break the news officially about his relationship
with Rachel, his mother had been silent. Ominously silent. All she asked was, “So
where will you be staying, and where will
she
be staying?” It suddenly dawned on Nick that it would
not
be a good idea for the both of them to stay with his parents—not initially, at least.
Nor would it be appropriate for Rachel to stay at his grandmother’s house without
her explicit invitation. They could stay with one of his aunts or uncles, but that
might incite his mother’s wrath and create even more of an internecine war within
his family.

Not sure how to get out of this quagmire, Nick sought the counsel of his great-aunt,
who was always so good at sorting out these sorts of matters. Great-aunt Rosemary
advised him to book into a hotel first, but emphasized that he must arrange to introduce
Rachel to his parents on the day of his arrival. “The very first day. Don’t wait until
the next day,” she cautioned. Perhaps he should invite his parents out to a meal with
Rachel, so they could meet on neutral territory. Someplace low-key like the Colonial
Club, and better to make it lunch instead of dinner. “Everyone is more relaxed at
lunchtime,” she advised.

Nick was then to proceed to his grandmother’s by himself and formally request permission
to invite Rachel to the customary Friday-night dinner that Ah Ma hosted for the extended
family. Only after
Rachel had been properly received at Friday-night dinner should the topic of where
they might stay be broached. “Of course your grandmother will have you to stay, once
she meets Rachel. But if worse comes to worst,
I
will invite you to stay with me, and no one will be able to say anything then,” Great-aunt
Rosemary assured him.

Nick decided to keep these delicate arrangements from Rachel. He didn’t want to give
her any excuse to back out of the trip. He wanted Rachel to be prepared to meet his
family, but he also wanted her to create her own impressions when the time came. Still,
Astrid was right. Rachel needed some sort of primer on his family. But how exactly
could he explain his family to her, especially when he had been conditioned his whole
life never to speak about them?

Nick sat on the floor, leaning against the exposed-brick wall and putting his hands
on his knees. “Well, you probably should know that I come from a very big family.”

“I thought you were an only child.”

“Yes, but I have lots of extended relatives, and you’ll be meeting lots of them. There
are three intermarried branches, and to outsiders it can seem a bit overwhelming at
first.” He wished he hadn’t used the word
outsiders
as soon as he said it, but Rachel seemed not to notice, so he continued. “It’s like
any big family. I have loudmouth uncles, eccentric aunts, obnoxious cousins, the whole
nine yards. But I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of meeting them. You met Astrid, and
you liked her, didn’t you?”

“Astrid is awesome.”

“Well, she adores you.
Everyone
will adore you, Rachel. I just know it.”

Rachel sat quietly on the bed beside the pile of towels still warm from the dryer,
trying to soak in everything Nick had said. This was the most he had ever talked about
his family, and it made her feel a little more assured. She still couldn’t quite fathom
the deal with his parents, but she had to admit that she had seen her fair share of
distant families—especially among her Asian friends. Back in high school, she had
endured dreary meals in the fluorescent-lit dining rooms of her classmates, dinners
where not more than five words were exchanged between parent and child. She had noticed
the stunned reactions from her friends whenever she randomly hugged her mother or
said “I love you” at the end of a phone call. And several years ago, she had been
e-mailed a humorous list entitled “Twenty
Ways You Can Tell You Have Asian Parents.” Number one on the list:
Your parents never, ever call you “just to say hello.”
She didn’t get many of the jokes on the list, since her own experience growing up
had been entirely different.

“We’re so fortunate, you know. Not many mothers and daughters have what we have,”
Kerry said when they caught up on the phone later that evening.

“I realize that, Mom. I know it’s different because you were a single mom, and you
took me everywhere,” Rachel mused. Back when she was a child, it seemed like every
year or so her mother would answer a classified ad in
World Journal
, the Chinese-American newspaper, and off they would go to a new job in some random
Chinese restaurant in some random town. Images of all those tiny boarding-house rooms
and makeshift beds in cities like East Lansing, Phoenix, and Tallahassee flashed through
her head.

“You can’t expect other families to be like us. I was so young when I had you—nineteen—we
were able to be like sisters. Don’t be so hard on Nick. Sad to say, but I was never
very close to my parents either. In China, there was no time to be close—my mother
and father worked from morning till night, seven days a week, and I was at school
all the time.”

“Still, how can he hide something as important as this from his parents? It’s not
like Nick and I have only been going out for a couple of months.”

“Daughter, once again you are judging the situation with your American eyes. You have
to look at this the Chinese way. In Asia, there is a proper time for everything, a
proper etiquette. Like I said before, you have to realize that these Overseas Chinese
families can be even more traditional than we Mainland Chinese. You don’t know anything
about Nick’s background. Has it occurred to you that they might be quite poor? Not
everyone is rich in Asia, you know. Maybe Nick has a duty to work hard and send money
back to his family, and they wouldn’t approve if they thought he was wasting money
on girlfriends. Or maybe he didn’t want his family to know that the two of you spend
half the week living together. They could be devout Buddhists, you know.”

“That’s just it, Mom. It’s dawning on me that Nick knows everything there is to know
about me, about us, but I know almost nothing about his family.”

“Don’t be scared, daughter. You know Nick. You know he is a decent man, and though
he may have kept you secret for a while, he is doing things the honorable way now.
At last he feels ready to introduce you to his family—properly—and that is the most
important thing,” Kerry said.

Rachel lay in bed, calmed as always by her mother’s soothing Mandarin tones. Maybe
she was being too hard on Nick. She had let her insecurities get the better of her,
and her knee-jerk reaction was to assume that Nick waited so long to tell his parents
because he was somehow embarrassed about her. But could it be the other way around?
Was he embarrassed of
them
? Rachel remembered what her Singaporean friend Peik Lin had said when she Skyped
her and excitedly announced that she was dating one of her fellow countrymen. Peik
Lin came from one of the island’s wealthiest families, and she had never heard of
the Youngs. “Obviously, if he comes from a rich or prominent family, we would know
them. Young isn’t a very common name here—are you sure they’re not Korean?”

“Yeah, I’m sure they’re from Singapore. But you know I couldn’t care less how much
money they have.”

“Yes, that’s the problem with you,” Peik Lin cracked. “Well, I’m sure if he passed
the Rachel Chu test, his family’s perfectly normal.”

Astrid

Astrid arrived home from her Paris sojourn in the late afternoon, early enough to
give three-year-old Cassian his bath while Evangeline, his French au pair, looked
on disapprovingly (
Maman
was scrubbing his hair too forcefully, and wasting too much baby shampoo). After
tucking Cassian into bed and reading him
Bonsoir Lune
, Astrid resumed the ritual of carefully unpacking her new couture acquisitions and
hiding them away in the spare bedroom before Michael got home. (She was careful never
to let her husband see the full extent of her purchases every season.) Poor Michael
seemed so stressed out by work lately. Everyone in the tech world seemed to work such
long hours, and Michael and his partner at Cloud Nine Solutions were trying so hard
to get this company off the ground. He was flying to China almost every other week
these days to supervise new projects, and she knew he would be tired tonight, since
he had gone straight to work from the airport. She wanted everything to be perfect
for him when he walked through the door.

Astrid popped into the kitchen to chat with her cook about the menu, and decided they
should set up dinner on the balcony tonight. She lit some fig-apricot-scented candles
and set a bottle of the new Sauternes she had brought back from France in the wine
chiller. Michael had a sweet tooth when it came to wines, and he had taken a liking
to late-harvest Sauternes. She knew he was going to love this
bottle, which had been specially recommended to her by Manuel, the brilliant sommelier
at Taillevent.

To the majority of Singaporeans, it would seem that Astrid was in store for a lovely
evening at home. But to her friends and family, Astrid’s current domestic situation
was a perplexing one. Why was she popping into kitchens talking to cooks, unpacking
luggage by herself, or worrying about her husband’s workload? This was certainly not
how anyone would have imagined Astrid’s life to be. Astrid Leong was meant to be the
chatelaine of a great house. Her head housekeeper should be anticipating every one
of her needs, while she should be getting dressed up to go out with her powerful and
influential husband to any one of the exclusive parties being thrown around the island
that night. But Astrid always confounded everyone’s expectations.

For the small group of girls growing up within Singapore’s most elite milieu, life
followed a prescribed order: Beginning at age six, you were enrolled at Methodist
Girls’ School (MGS), Singapore Chinese Girls’ School (SCGS), or the Convent of the
Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ). After-school hours were consumed by a team of tutors preparing
you for the avalanche of weekly exams (usually in classical Mandarin literature, multivariable
calculus, and molecular biology), followed on the weekends by piano, violin, flute,
ballet, or riding, and some sort of Christian Youth Fellowship activity. If you did
well enough, you entered the National University of Singapore (NUS) and if you did
not, you were sent abroad to England (American colleges were deemed substandard).
The
only
acceptable majors were medicine or law (unless you were truly dumb, in which case
you settled for accounting). After graduating with honors (anything less would bring
shame to the family), you practiced your vocation (for not more than three years)
before marrying a boy from a suitable family at the age of twenty-five (twenty-eight
if you went to med school). At this point, you gave up your career to have children
(three or more were officially encouraged by the government for women of your background,
and at least two should be boys), and life would consist of a gentle rotation of galas,
country clubs, Bible study groups, light volunteer work, contract bridge, mah-jongg,
traveling, and spending time with your grandchildren (dozens and dozens, hopefully)
until your quiet and uneventful death.