Crazy Rich Asians (26 page)

This time it was Michael who noticed her first. He was leaning against a ledge at
the bottom of the garden at the Ong bungalow with Andy and some friends when Astrid
appeared on the terrace in a long white linen dress with delicate lace cutouts. Here’s
a girl who does
not
belong at this party, he thought to himself. The girl soon spotted the birthday boy,
and made a beeline toward them, giving Andy a big hug. The guys around him stared
openmouthed.

“Many happy returns!” she exclaimed, handing over a small present exquisitely wrapped
in purple silk fabric.

“Aiyah, Astrid,
um sai lah
!”
^*
Andy said.

“It’s just a little something I thought you’d like from Paris, that’s all.”

“So did you get that city totally out of your system? Back for good now?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Astrid said carefully.

The guys were all jockeying for position, so as reluctant as he was, Andy felt that
it would be rude not to introduce them. “Astrid, allow me to introduce Lee Shen Wei,
Michael Teo, and Terence Tan. All army buddies.”

Astrid smiled sweetly at everyone before fixing her gaze on Michael. “If I’m not mistaken,
I’ve seen
you
in a speedo,” she said.

The guys were equal parts stunned and baffled by her statement. Michael just shook
his head and laughed.

“Er … what is she talking about?” Shen Wei asked.

Astrid peered at Michael’s sculpted torso, which was clearly evident despite his loose
T-shirt. “Yes, it
was
you, wasn’t it? At Churchill Club’s fashion show to benefit juvenile shopaholics?”

“Michael,
you modeled in a fashion show
?” Shen Wei said in disbelief.

“In a speedo?” Terence added.

“It was for charity. I got dragged into it!” Michael sputtered, his face turning beet
red.

“So you don’t model professionally?” Astrid asked.

The guys all started laughing. “He does! He does! He’s Michael Zoolander,” Andy cracked.

“No, I’m serious,” Astrid insisted. “If you ever want to model professionally, I know
a few agencies in Paris that would probably love to represent you.”

Michael just looked at her, not knowing how to respond. There was a palpable tension
in the air, and none of the guys knew what to say.

“Listen, I’m famished, and I think I have to have some of that delicious-looking
mee rebus
^†
back at the house,” Astrid said, giving Andy a quick peck on the cheek before striding
back toward the house.

“Okay,
laeng tsai
,
^‡
what are you waiting for? She was obviously into you,” Shen Wei said to Michael.

“Don’t want to get your hopes up, Teo, but she’s
untouchable
,” Andy warned.

“What do you mean
untouchable
?” Shen Wei asked.

“Astrid doesn’t date in our stratosphere. You know who she almost married? Charlie
Wu, the tech billionaire Wu Hao Lian’s son. They were engaged, but then she broke
it off at the last minute because her family felt that even
he
wasn’t good enough,” Andy said.

“Well, Teo here is going to prove you wrong. Mike, that was an open invitation if
I’ve ever seen one. Don’t be so
kiasu
,
^§
man!” Shen Wei exclaimed.

Michael did not know what to make of the girl sitting across the table from him. First
of all, this date should not even be happening. Astrid wasn’t his type. This was the
kind of girl he would see shopping at one of those pricey boutiques on Orchard Road
or sitting in the lobby café of some fancy hotel having a double decaf macchiato with
her banker boyfriend. He wasn’t even sure why he had asked her out. It wasn’t his
style to go after girls in such an obvious way. All his life, he had never needed
to chase after women. They had always given themselves freely to him, starting with
his older brother’s girlfriend when he was fourteen. Technically, Astrid had made
the first move, so he didn’t mind going after her. Andy’s talk about her being “out
of his league” really irked him, and he thought it would be fun to bed her, just to
shove it in Andy’s face.

Michael never expected she would say yes to the date, but here they were, barely a
week later, sitting at a restaurant in Dempsey Hill with cobalt-blue glass votives
on every table (the trendy sort of place filled with
ang mors
that he hated) with nothing much to say to each other. They had nothing in common,
except for the fact that they both knew Andy. She didn’t have a job, and since all
his work was classified, they couldn’t really talk about that. She had been living
in Paris for the past few years, so she was out of touch with Singapore.
Hell, she didn’t even seem like a true Singaporean—with her Englishy accent and her
mannerisms.

Yet he couldn’t help but feel incredibly drawn to her. She was the complete opposite
of the type of girls he normally dated. Even though he knew she came from a rich family,
she wasn’t wearing brand-name clothes or any jewelry. She didn’t even appear to be
wearing makeup, and still she looked smoking hot. This girl wasn’t as
seow chieh
^‖
as he had been led to believe, and she even challenged him to a game of pool after
dinner.

She turned out to be pretty lethal at billiards, and it made her even sexier. But
this was obviously not the kind of girl he could have a casual fling with. He felt
almost embarrassed about it, but all he wanted to do was keep staring at her face.
He couldn’t get enough of it. He was sure he lost the game partly because he was just
too distracted by her. At the end of the date, he walked her out to her car (surprisingly,
just an Acura) and held the door open as she got in, convinced he would never see
her again.

Astrid lay in bed later that night, trying to read Bernard-Henri Lévy’s latest tome
but having no luck focusing. She couldn’t stop thinking about her disastrous date
with Michael. The poor guy really didn’t have much in the way of conversation, and
he was hopelessly unsophisticated. Figures. Guys who looked like that obviously did
not have to work hard to impress a woman. There was
something
to him, though, something that imbued him with a beauty that seemed almost feral.
He was simply the most perfect specimen of masculinity she had ever seen, and it unleashed
a physiological response in her that she did not realize she possessed.

She turned off her bedside lamp and lay in the dark under the mosquito netting of
her heirloom Peranakan bed, wishing Michael could read her mind at this very moment.
She wanted him to dress up in night camouflage and scale the walls of her father’s
house, evading the guards in the sentry house and the German shepherds on patrol.
She wanted him to climb the guava tree by her window and enter her bedroom without
a sound. She wanted him to stand at the foot of her bed for a while, nothing but a
leering black shadow. Then she wanted him to rip off her clothes, cover her mouth
with his earthy hand, and ravish her nonstop till dawn.

She was twenty-seven years old, and for the first time in her life, Astrid realized
what it
really
felt like to crave a man sexually. She reached for her cell phone and, before she
could stop herself, dialed Michael’s number. He picked up after two rings, and Astrid
could hear that he was in some sort of noisy bar. She hung up immediately. Fifteen
seconds later, her phone rang. She let it ring about five times before answering.

“Why did you call me and hang up?” Michael said in a calm, low voice.

“I didn’t call you. My phone must have rung your number accidentally while it was
in my purse,” Astrid said nonchalantly.

“Uh-huh.”

There was a long pause, before Michael casually added, “I’m at Harry’s Bar now, but
I’m going to drive over to the Ladyhill Hotel and check into a room. The Ladyhill
is quite near you, isn’t it?”

Astrid was taken aback by his audacity. Who the hell did he think he was? She felt
her face go hot, and she wanted to hang up on him again. Instead, she found herself
turning on her bedside lamp. “Text me the room number,” she said simply.

Astrid drove along the meandering curves of Cluny Road, her head swimming in thoughts.
At the start of the evening at Tyersall Park, she had entertained the fantasy that
her husband was at some one-star hotel engaged in a torrid affair with the Hong Kong
sexting tramp. Even while she was on conversational autopilot with her family, she
envisioned herself bursting in on Michael and the tramp in their sordid little room
and flinging every available object at them. The lamp. The water pitcher. The cheap
plastic coffeemaker.

After Oliver’s comment, however, a darker fantasy began to consume her. She was now
convinced that Oliver had not made a mistake, and that it was indeed her husband he
had spotted in Hong Kong. Michael was too distinctive to be mistaken for anyone else,
and Oliver, who was equal parts schemer and diplomat, was obviously sending her a
coded message. But who was the little boy? Could Michael have fathered another child?
As Astrid turned right onto Dalvey Road, she almost didn’t notice the truck parked
just a few yards ahead, where a nighttime construction crew stood repairing
a tall streetlamp. One of the workers suddenly flung open the truck door, and before
Astrid could even gasp, she swerved hard to the right. The windshield shattered, and
the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was the complex root system of
an ancient banyan tree.

Nick and Rachel

When Rachel awoke the morning after the
tan hua
party, Nick was talking softly on the phone in the sitting room of their suite. As
her vision slowly came into focus, she lay there silently, looking at Nick and trying
to take in everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours. Last night
had been magical, and yet she couldn’t help but feel a burgeoning sense of unease.
It was as if she had stumbled into a secret chamber and discovered that her boyfriend
had been living a double life. The ordinary life they shared as two young college
professors in New York bore no resemblance to the life of imperial splendor that Nick
seemed to lead here, and Rachel didn’t know how to reconcile the two.

Rachel was by no means an ingenue in the realms of wealth. After their early struggles,
Kerry Chu had landed on her feet and gotten her real estate license right when Silicon
Valley was entering the Internet boom. Rachel’s Dickensian childhood was replaced
by teenage years growing up in the affluent Bay Area. She went to school at two of
the nation’s top universities—Stanford and Northwestern—where she encountered the
likes of Peik Lin and other trust-fund types. Now she lived in America’s most expensive
city, where she mingled with the academic elite. None of this, though, prepared Rachel
for her first seventy-two hours in Asia. The exhibitions of wealth here were so extreme,
it was unlike anything she had ever witnessed, and not
for a moment would she have fathomed that her boyfriend could be part of this world.

Nick’s lifestyle in New York could be described as modest, if not downright frugal.
He rented a cozy alcove studio on Morton Street that didn’t seem to contain anything
of value aside from his laptop, bike, and stacks of books. He dressed distinctively
but casually, and Rachel (having no reference for British bespoke menswear) never
realized just how much those rumpled blazers with the Huntsman or Anderson & Sheppard
labels cost. Otherwise, the only splurges she had known Nick to make were on overpriced
produce at the Union Square Greenmarket and good seats to a concert if some great
band came to town.