stayed far away from Isabel because she reminded me of you. Like you, she was constantly being underestimated because of her looks. Turns out she was an intensely smart lawyer, University of Birmingham Law School grad, and fast becoming one of Hong Kong’s top litigators. And she had a sense of style and breeding that set her apart. Her father was Jeremy Lai, the distinguished barrister. The Lais are an old-money family from Kowloon Tong, and her mother is from a rich Indonesian Chinese family. I did not want to fall for another unattainable princess who was chained to the rules of her family.
But then as I got to know her, I found that she was nothing like you. No offense, but she was your polar opposite—wild and uninhibited, completely carefree. I found it exhilarating. She didn’t give a damn what her family thought, and as it turns out, they thought the sun and moon orbited around her and she could do no wrong. And to top it off, her parents liked me. (I think it was partly because her last three boyfriends had been Scottish, Aussie, and African American, respectively, and they were just so relieved when she brought home a Chinese boy.) They welcomed me into the family even during the early days of our dating, and it was such a refreshing change to be accepted and even liked by my girlfriend’s family. After six months of our whirlwind romance, we got married, and you know the rest.
But actually, you don’t.
Everyone thinks that we got married so fast because I got her pregnant. Yes, she was pregnant, but it wasn’t with my child. The thing I initially loved about Isabel—her unpredictability—was also her curse. Three months after we started dating, she suddenly disappeared. Things had been going so well, I was actually beginning to heal from our breakup. Then one day Isabel was gone. Turns out she had met up with one of her Indonesian cousins for a drink at Florida (you remember that ghastly bar in Lan Kwai Fong), and he had another friend tagging along. Some Indonesian chap who was a model. Before her cousin even knew what was happening, Isabel had disappeared with the guy. After a few days, I found out they had gone to Maui and were holed up in some private villa having a torrid romance. She wouldn’t come back to Hong Kong, and she broke off contact with all of us. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was distraught, as were her parents.
Then it came out that something like this had happened before. Not once, but several times. The year before, she had met this African American guy on a plane on the way to London, and suddenly she quit her job and moved to New Orleans with him. Two years before that, it was the Aussie surfer and a condo on the Gold Coast. I soon realized that the problem was bigger than any of us could have fathomed—my sister was studying psychopharmacology at the time, and she thought Isabel might have borderline personality disorder. I tried to talk to her parents about it, but they seemed to be in denial. They could not face up to the fact that their darling daughter might have any sort of mental illness—albeit one that can be managed with proper treatment. Through all her episodes, they never made her see a psychologist or get a proper evaluation. They just put up with her “dragon phases,” as they called it. She was born in the year of the dragon, and that was always the excuse they had for her behavior. They implored me to go to Hawaii and “rescue her.”
So I went. I flew to Maui, and it turns out the male model was long gone but Isabel was now living in some sort of commune with a bunch of Radical Faeries. And she was pregnant. Four months pregnant, no longer manic, but too embarrassed to come home. It was too late to have an abortion, she didn’t want to give up her child, but she couldn’t go back to Hong Kong like that. She told me no one ever loved her like I did, and she begged me to marry her. Her parents begged me to marry her quickly in Hawaii. And so I did. We had one of those “intimate weddings with only close family” at the Halekulani in Waikiki.
I want you to know that I went into this marriage with