appointed with a grouping of armchairs upholstered in raw silk on one end and a large round table with lacquered rosewood chairs by the window. Rachel noted that the table was set for twelve. She wondered whom she would be meeting tonight. Aside from her father, his wife, Shaoyen, and her half brother, Carlton, what other relatives would be joining them?
“Isn’t it interesting that since we’ve arrived, practically everyone has addressed us in English instead of Mandarin?” Rachel commented.
“Not really. They can tell from the minute we walk in that we’re not native Chinese. You’re an Amazon compared to most of the women here, and everything else about us is different—we don’t dress like the locals, and we carry ourselves in a completely different way.”
“When I was teaching in Chengdu nine years ago, my students all knew I was an American, but they still spoke to me in Mandarin.”
“That was Chengdu. Shanghai has always been a sophisticated, international city, so they are much more used to seeing pseudo-Chinese like us here.”
“Well, we’re certainly not as dressed up as many of the locals I’ve seen today.”
“Yeah, these days we’re the bumpkins,” Nick joked.
As the minutes ticked by, Rachel sat on one of the sofas and began to flip through the tea menu. “It says here they have over fifty premium teas from across China, served in traditional ceremonies in their private tearooms.”
“Maybe we’ll get to sample some tonight,” Nick replied as he paced around the room, pretending to admire the contemporary Chinese art.
“Can you just sit down and chill? Your pacing is making me nervous.”
“Sorry,” Nick said. He took a seat across from her and started flipping through the tea menu too.
They sat in silence for another ten minutes, until Rachel could take it no more. “Something’s gone wrong. Do you think we’ve been stood up?”
“I’m sure they’re just stuck in traffic.” Nick tried to sound calm, although he was secretly fretting as well.
“I don’t know…I have a strange feeling about this. Why would my father book a room so early when no one’s showed up for more than half an hour?”
“In Hong Kong, people are notoriously late to everything. I’m thinking Shanghai must be the same. It’s a matter of face—no one wants to be the first to show up, in case they look too eager, so they try to outdo one another in lateness. The last one to arrive is deemed the most important.”
“That’s totally ridiculous!” Rachel snorted.
“You think? I feel a similar thing happens in New York, though it’s not quite as overt. At your department meetings, isn’t the dean or some star professor always the last to show up? Or the chancellor just ‘drops in’ at the tail end, because he’s too important to sit through the whole meeting?”
“That’s not the same.”
“It isn’t? Posturing is posturing. Hong Kongers have just elevated it to an art form,” Nick opined.
“Well, I can see that happening for a business lunch, but this is a family dinner. They are really quite late.”
“I was once at a dinner in Hong Kong with my relatives, and I ended up waiting over an hour before everyone else got there. Eddie was the last to arrive, of course. I think you’re getting paranoid a little too quickly. Don’t worry—they’ll be here.”
A few minutes later, the door slid open, and a man in a dark navy suit entered the room. “Mr. and Mrs. Young? I’m the manager. I have a message for you from Mr. Bao.”
Nick’s heart sank. What now?
Rachel looked at the manager anxiously, but before he had a chance to say anything, they were distracted by a commotion in the hallway. They poked their heads out of the doorway and saw someone surrounded by a crowd of gawkers. It was a girl in her early twenties, strikingly attired in a figure-hugging strapless white dress with an ornately sequined red matador cape flung casually over her milk-white shoulders. Two burly security guards and a woman with a faux-hawk hairstyle wearing a pinstriped suit attempted to clear the way, while proper teenage girls who had minutes before been enjoying polite, posh dinners with their families had suddenly transformed into shrieking fans taking pictures with their camera phones.
“Is she a movie star?” Nick asked the manager, staring at the girl as she posed glamorously with her fans. With long, voluminous raven hair piled up into a loose beehive, a perfectly sculpted ski-jump nose, and bee-stung lips, she seemed larger than life—like a Chinese Ava Gardner.