Last Tang Standing

by Lauren Ho

  We talked about many things: his family history (well-connected, powerful and rich, but lost everything when they fled, although they quickly rebuilt their fortunes in Indonesia) and mine (migrant laborers on both sides, clawed their way into middle class); our common interests (politics, human rights, and poetry); favorite food and drink (Sichuanese and Malaysian food for both of us (!)), pet peeves (him: people who go barefoot on commercial planes—well, on the rare occasions when Eric has to fly commercial business; mine: kept wisely silent, as there were too many to list without seeming unstable).

  At one point during the dinner, he put down his fork and said, “You know, I’ve got a confession to make.”

  “What is it?” I said, immediately wary. Can’t say I hadn’t been waiting for this. It had been too easy, the last info dump.

  “I admire what you do, a lot. It seems so exciting.”

  “Really,” I said in a neutral voice.

  “Well, when I was at university—”

  “Which one?” I asked eagerly.

  “Oxford.”

  “Nice, very nice. Good one, that.”

  “Thanks. May I continue?”

  “Sorry, yes, please.”

  “I had read law and wanted to go whole hog, become a barrister, but my father stepped in and asked me to come home.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted me to stay in the family business of hospitality and real estate, not waste time as a barrister. So I did. I came home. I resented him for it at first, but have made peace with it now.”

  The idea that being a lawyer is “not good enough” to a Chinese family—well, that just shows you the difference in status between his family and mine.

  “It’s not that fun,” I assured him. “Ruling an empire sounds way more interesting.”

  Eric smiled ruefully. “When I first took over it wasn’t great for me. I felt like a cake topper. The company already had a very established growth plan and an excellent management team, and my father was always peering over my shoulder as the chairman. It’s only in the last decade, after his Alzheimer’s, that . . . I could spread my wings, make my mark. The green hotel brand, Lana, is my other child, really. And I guess in hindsight, it was the right choice.”

  Hmm. I suppose in a way our paths had some similarities, although he was persuaded to run a multibillion-dollar empire, but there you go.

  Food was very good, so good that if he had made his move after the second bottle of Montrachet I might have let him kiss me. But he didn’t. He played it very coy and proper, gentlemanly. We made plans to see each other when he gets back from Chengdu. Will just wait and see. At least I’m dating someone who won’t filch my jewelry—the watch he was wearing, a beautiful A. Lange & Söhne chronograph, cost more than the down payment for my two-bed apartment—if anything, he should be worried about me filching his things.

  The conclusion at the end of the evening is: I’d definitely prefer to date him than do business with him. And that’s saying something. The wheel of my dating fortune was, it seemed, finally spinning me upward; my luck was turning at last.

  Monday 2 May

  Valerie and Ralph finally resurfaced on my radar. By Monday morning, she had proclaimed her love for a “mystery man but shh!” on social media, to wit the whole world, because she had 17,300-plus followers on Instagram (How? Who? Why?) and more than two thousand friends on Facebook, including Ralph Kang.

  I missed Linda terribly—she would never have done anything sappy or publicly embarrassing like this. She also didn’t fall in love as quickly as dropping money into a collection box. Her personal motto was “It’s only love if you would give him your liver”—inspired by what Singaporean heartthrob and actor Pierre Png did for his then-fiancée/now-wife, actress Andrea De Cruz, in 2002, a courageous and loving feat so chivalrous that it exploded the ovaries of every single girl and woman who heard of it, even us young adults across the Causeway in faraway Kuala Lumpur. It’s been almost a month since I last saw her. A month since she last called me a dingus bat. A month since she had last pinched me for pronouncing a word in American instead of British (the Queen’s?) English.

  I missed her.

  “Ahem,” Suresh said over my shoulder. I let out a shriek and dropped the photo frame on the floor. “Should I leave you two alone?” he said, in reference to the very unglamorous headshot I was mooning over, a framed photo of Linda as a teenager. It was comforting to see her as she once was, frizzy-haired with braces and tadpole eyebrows, the Vicky Adams before Spice Girls and David Beckham.

  “Buzz off, buzzkill,” I said, wheeling around in my swivel chair to glare up at him, instead of maintaining an otherwise indecent eyeline. “Don’t you have your own woman troubles?” He and Anousha were still arguing over a free house. Goddamn spoiled rich people.

  Suresh grinned. “Touché. By the way, bad news. I just ran into Mong in the pantry.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Apparently the both of us have to be in Luxembourg tomorrow on his behalf. Remember that due diligence report that Loesch sent to you last week, the one that made you stress-eat a pack of gummy bears?”

  “Hmm,” I said. I eat a lot of gummy bears, sometimes even when I’m not stressed.

  “Sungguh Capital wants us to check up on an issue that the Luxembourg lawyers have identified in their due diligence report on VizWare’s Luxembourg holdco.” Sungguh was coinvesting in some newfangled drone technology used in Spanish and Portuguese farms called VizWare, and the Luxembourg holding company (or “holdco,” in lawyer-speak) was, erm, holding everything in a very sexy (if your fetish was tax efficiency), totally legal tax optimization structure. It was a big acquisition and Suresh was also working on the file, although I, haha, was lead senior associate. Hahaha.

  “Why can’t Mong ever come to us to just tell us a charming factoid or a knock-knock joke?” I muttered.

  “He wouldn’t be the Mong we know and love if he did.”

  I sighed. “Don’t I know it. But why do we have to personally fly up? It’s just a delayed filing of some accounts. It seems like something we can sort out over the phone.”

  Suresh shrugged. “The investment committee prefers that we fly over to speak to the Luxembourg lawyers, do our own informal due diligence. Also the Singapore desk rep from our London office, Tristan Langford-Bauer, will be on hand to give his input on the acquisition. He’s very familiar with Luxembourg holding structures and is a tax expert, and since he is attending the ALFI conference anyway, he thought he’d lend a hand. So we’re going to Luxembourg!”

  “Urgh. But it’s so far.”

  “Yes, but the client has promised to put us up in a fancy place and fly us business. We leave tonight.”

  I pumped the air with my fist. “We’re going to Luxembourg!”

  Suresh patted my back. “Don’t worry, it won’t be all fun and games. We’ll also have to attend the same showcase and the gala dinner because Langford-Bauer thinks it’s important for the Singapore office to be there, mingle, blah blah, rich people, blah blah.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That sounds exciting.”

  “I look forward to traveling with you and finding out all your weaknesses that I will later exploit,” Suresh said, poker-faced.

  “Ditto,” I said, puffing out my chest to appear larger to my opponent. In a purely nonsexual way.

  Anyway, Luxembourg. Land of hills and medieval cobblestones, asset management firms and farmers, Pinot Gris and good pork. So Suresh was coming along, but how bad could it be?

  26

  Tuesday 3 May

  12:16 a.m. Very bad start to our trip. Left home later than planned because I had to put on makeup before meeting Suresh at the airport at this ungodly hour.

  Speaking of which, why do people use the expression “ungodly hour”? All hours are godly. It just depends on who your god is.

 
; Made it to the airport with only minutes to spare before they closed check-in, but looking fabulous (for myself, obviously, not because I was flying with Suresh). Made it through security checks and frantically texted Suresh, pretending that I had been there for the past hour. No luck. Apparently the freak had been there for two hours, pottering around duty-free, thoughtfully buying boxes of pineapple tarts and TWG tea to cart all the way to Luxembourg.

  As if clients, the Sauron-worshipping tapeworms that they are, can be appeased by pineapple tarts.

  The only thing that tapeworms understand is, erm . . . hmm. I don’t think tapeworms actually have the capacity to understand. Well, then the only thing tapeworms are driven by is . . .

  What are they driven by?

  12:25 a.m. I now know all the types of intestinal worms you can get and how to get them.

  12:27 a.m. How to get Genevieve to drink from muddy swamp water? How to ensure the swamp water sample contains eggs of flukes?

  12:33 a.m. How to get water from a lake containing Guinea worm, surely the Lamborghini of parasitic worms?

  12:36 a.m. Pleasant fantasy of Guinea worm bursting forth from a screaming Genevieve is shattered by the insistent buzzing of my phone. It was Suresh asking where I was in the duty-free zone. Realized I had not budged more than twelve feet since I cleared immigration. Shit. Am ten minutes away from the gate and that gate is closing in seven minutes.

  12:40 a.m. Went to a pharmacy and bought a box of Zentel. My mother, God bless her, was right in this limited case: kill them worms.

  12:43 a.m. Arrived just before they closed the gate, last second. Smiled triumphantly at Suresh as I waltzed into business class, looking immaculate even though I was gasping for breath after sprinting to the gate.

  12:45 a.m. Shit. Just looked down at my feet and realized that in rush to the airport, I’ve worn different-colored ballerina shoes in different styles.

  Also dropped the box of Zentel in plain sight of Suresh, who was seated across the aisle, when bending over in a panic to stick my handbag in front of my feet so as to obscure the different shoes. The box lay in the middle of the aisle, its lettering visible from space.

  “Is everything OK?” he said in a pseudo-concerned voice when I tried to pick up the box with nonchalance.

  “I’m being prudent: Europeans don’t boil their tap water.”

  “The heathens,” he deadpanned. “Thank God I know for a fact we’ll be served mineral water one hundred percent of the time.”

  “Unboiled mineral water is just as bad. We’ll see who’s laughing when you swallow the eggs of a parasitic worm,” I replied. What I didn’t say was where said eggs would come from, but I expect it will not be difficult to get a sample of swamp water the next time I’m in Malaysia.

  10:00 a.m. Luxembourg Airport at last, after taking the connecting flight from Zurich. “Wake up, quail face,” I said, elbowing Suresh, who awoke with a jerk.

  “Wahh? Wahh?” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, groggy and disoriented. “Have we arrived already?”

  “Yes,” I said. The passengers around us were reaching for their luggage in the overhead compartments, eager to disembark. “And you’ve been drooling in your seat for the past fifteen minutes since we landed, so I’d really like to get going.”

  He straightened and looked embarrassed. “Sorry, you should have woken me up.”

  “I didn’t want to; you looked so peaceful,” I admitted. I leaned close and whispered, “Plus I like listening to you sleep-talk. I’ve learned so much about you. Like the name of your kissing cousin, the actual polytechnic school you graduated from instead of Leeds . . .”

  He cuffed me playfully on my shoulder; I responded by punching him, harder than I’d intended to, in the chest. “Ack!” he wheezed. “What was that for?”

  “C’mon, slowpoke, let’s go.” I was already pulling our luggage down the aisle.

  11:30 a.m. Soon after our landing, we were strolling down the pretty cobblestone Grand-Rue (honestly, everything sounds better in French, doesn’t it?), enjoying the bright, cloudless day. We’d checked our bags into the Sofitel Luxembourg Le Grand Ducal, where the client had booked us adjoining suites (“Sweet!” Suresh had said. “Get it—suite? Sweet?” to which I must shamefacedly admit to giggling; it must have been the jet lag) and had a few hours to play tourist before meeting the Luxembourg lawyers, Loesch & Kremer, in their office in Kirchberg, the sparkling new CBD of Luxembourg, at 2:00 p.m. Suresh, predictably, had done all the research as to where to go for food and to take Instagram-worthy photos (yes, we were conforming to cultural stereotypes); we had coffee and a selection of delicate pastries from Oberweis, spicy hot chocolate from a beautiful café facing the Grand Ducal Palace, followed by a late lunch in a small, hole-in-the-wall Laotian (!) eatery. It was annoyingly useful that Suresh spoke French, one of the official administrative languages used in Luxembourg.* For once though, it was nice to be led along from one place to another, not thinking, not planning. Just enjoying the sights and trading insults.

  2:55 p.m. It was a shame to leave the picturesque medieval part of Luxembourg and head by (scandalously expensive) taxi toward the anonymous steel-and-glass facades of the new city when it came time for our meeting. A tall, pale, mousy-haired man in an attractive suit was waiting in the lobby. I recognized him as Tristan Langford-Bauer, our Singapore desk representative in London. He shook our hands hard and did not smile. He was one of those men who sucked the charm out of a room, but was apparently born with the resilience and hardiness of the superbug MRSA (great name for a boy band or a logistics company BTW), which is how, despite his lack of warmth, he’d flourished in new environments and slithered up the ladder. I comforted myself with the knowledge that we’d only need to be around him for one day.

  Once we had been seated in a conference room (“Aspiration”) and met our Luxembourg lawyers, Etienne Mousel and his underling, Frédéric Weber, our doubts were quickly assuaged. They assured us that the common sense approach would be to sign the SPA with some carve-outs. Very sensible, business-friendly suggestions. Got to love the Luxembourgians.

  We left the firm an hour later, after exchanging some regulatory chitchat, and Suresh, bless him, very kindly suggested that we all get tea or beer, since Tristan had succeeded him as the Singapore desk rep and had been bringing in a steady flow of business and Suresh wanted to exchange ideas.

  “No,” said Langford-Bauer, turdily, not even bothering to find some excuse.

  “We have to update Sungguh Capital’s counsel, he’s waiting on us,” I said, desperate to find some excuse to leave him.

  “Right,” said Suresh, acquiescing because I was stabbing him in the back with a pen.

  I had already finished composing an update email to Baldev Singh, Sungguh Capital’s general counsel, by the time we got into a cab, and was eager to explore the picturesque Les Rives de Clausen area (where a local brewery had a bar). We found it and proceeded to order giant pints of fresh Mousel beer, and something porky and fried as a snack. I was thinking the whole unnecessary drama was over and we could now drink ourselves silly, but a panicked email titled “URGENT: VIZWARE CLOSING” arriving barely twenty minutes after we’d sat down proved me wrong.

  Turns out Langford-Bauer, who was friends with Baldev from university (London School of Economics), had told Baldev that the closing was potentially jeopardized if, because of the delayed filing, the Luxembourg authorities decided to liquidate the holding company before the closing was done. So Baldev was demanding we have a conference call in an hour.

  Langford-Bauer replied to the thread and said that he’d already booked a conference room in his hotel and was ready.

  I updated Suresh, who was as upset as I was to be leaving after downing only one pint: we shared a love of fresh beer. But work called. Literally.

  4:30 p.m. “What’s this I hear about the closing being jeopardized?” Baldev
demanded when we got on the phone.

  Langford-Bauer explained the situation with great exaggeration, clearly having gone behind our backs to paint a grimmer picture of the delayed filing than was necessary. So much for being on the same side on this file.

  “Andrea, why wasn’t this flagged earlier?” Baldev said in agitation. “What am I going to tell the investment committee? Not to mention Mr. Zhang.”

  “They had seven months to file, Andrea,” added Langford-Bauer silkily. “I’m a little appalled myself that you and Suresh didn’t push for all the boxes to be checked when the client has been working on this transaction for the past ten months, and the closing is supposed to be in two months, tops.” He shook his head. “I was under the impression that, biologically, women were better multitaskers.”

  WTF?

  “This is unacceptable,” Baldev said, now shouting. “I think Mr. Zhang has made it clear that this closing cannot be delayed. How could this have slipped through your fingers?”

  I was flustered; our relations over the past couple of years had always been super cordial and professional. Langford-Bauer must have shanked us in the back with a machete. “Well, w-when the due diligence really got off ground, the holdco still had two weeks or so to file the accounts, and it was the Luxembourg lawyers’ duty to make sure—”

  “No fucking excuses,” Baldev yelled. “You’re the lead coordinating counsel; what were you doing?”

  I gaped. Langford-Bauer looked at me in his supercilious way. I had the distinct impression that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t like me.

  “If I may, Baldev, this is really not Andrea’s fault,” Suresh cut in. “It was clearly something beyond her or the Luxembourg lawyers’ control. Plus Andrea has already drafted some carve-out language in the SPA, to mitigate the very remote risk of a liquidation by the Luxembourg authorities.”