by Kevin Kwan
“Oh, so she’s the brainy type, like Nicky.”
“Yes, definitely. I’m told she’s one of the up-and-coming professors in her field.”
Eleanor was nonplussed. A professor! Nicky was dating a professor! Oh my, was this woman older than him? “Nicky didn’t tell me what her specialty was.”
“Oh, economic development.”
A cunning, calculating older woman. Alamak. This was sounding worse and worse. “Did she go to university in New York?” Eleanor pressed on.
“No, she went to Stanford, in California.”
“Yes, yes, I know Stanford,” Eleanor said, sounding unimpressed. It’s that school in California for those people who can’t get into Harvard.
“It’s a top school, Auntie Elle,” Astrid said, knowing exactly what her aunt was thinking.
“Well, I suppose if you are forced to go to an American university—”
“Come on, Auntie Elle. Stanford is a great university for anywhere. I believe she also went to Northwestern for her master’s. Rachel is very intelligent and capable, and completely down-to-earth. I think you’ll like her very much.”
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” Eleanor replied. So, her name was Rachel. Eleanor paused. She just needed one more piece of information—the correct spelling of the girl’s surname. But how was she going to get it without Astrid getting suspicious? Suddenly she had a thought. “I think I’m going to get one of those nice cakes from Awfully Chocolate and put her name on it. Do you know how she spells her surname? Is it C-H-U, C-H-O-O, or C-H-I-U?”
“I think it’s just C-H-U.”
“Thank you. You’ve been so helpful,” Eleanor said. More than you’ll ever know.
“Of course, Auntie Elle. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help out for your party. I can’t wait to see your spectacular new flat.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen it yet? I thought your mother bought a unit here as well.”
“She may have, but I haven’t seen it. I can’t keep up with all of my parents’ property juggling.”
“Of course, of course. Your parents have so many properties around the world, unlike your poor uncle Philip and me. We just have the house in Sydney and this small little pigeonhole.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s anything but small, Auntie Elle. Isn’t it supposed to be the most luxurious condo ever built in Singapore?” Astrid wondered for the millionth time why all her relatives constantly tried to outdo each other in proclaiming their poverty.
“No, lah. It’s just a simple flat—nothing like your father’s house. Anyway, I’m sorry to wake you. Do you need something to get back to sleep? I take fifty milligrams of amitriptyline every night, and then an extra ten milligrams of Ambien if I really want to sleep through the night. Sometimes I add a Lunesta, and if that doesn’t work, I get out the Valium—”
“I’ll be fine, Auntie Elle.”
“Okay then, bye-bye!” With that, Eleanor hung up the phone. Her gamble had paid off. Those two cousins were thick as thieves. Why didn’t she think of calling Astrid sooner?
* * *
* In this instance, ang mor is used in reference to British politicians, most likely Tories.
† Abbreviation for “members of Parliament,” used in this instance to refer to Singapore MPs, most definitely from the People’s Action Party.
‡ A Hokkien term that literally means “three legs” and comes from a rude hand gesture made by holding up three fingers as if supporting someone’s genitals. This is the Chinese version of a practice more commonly known to Westerners as “sucking up.”
§ Old-money Chinese absolutely loathe wasting money on long-distance telephone calls, almost as much as they hate wasting money on fluffy towels, bottled water, hotel rooms, expensive Western food, taking taxis, tipping waiters, and flying anything other than economy class.
8
Rachel
NEW YORK
Nick brought it up so nonchalantly, as he was sorting the laundry on the Sunday afternoon before their big trip. Apparently Nick’s parents had only just been informed that Rachel was coming with him to Singapore. And oh, by the way, they had just been made aware of her existence too.
“I don’t quite understand … you mean your parents never knew about me in all this time?” Rachel asked in astonishment.
“Yes. I mean, no, they didn’t. But you need to know this has absolutely nothing to do with you—” Nick began.
“Well, it’s a little hard not to take it personally.”
“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 th
e 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.”
9
Astrid
SINGAPORE
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.
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.
