on ticking for God only knows how long.) Unfortunately his parents were also in the pink of health, so by the time they keeled over and the money was split up between himself, his bitchy sister, and his good-for-nothing brother, it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Eddie was always trying to guesstimate his parents’ net worth, much of which was gleaned from information his real estate friends leaked to him. It became an obsession of his, and he kept a spreadsheet on his home computer, diligently updating it every week based on property valuations and then calculating his potential future share. No matter how he ran the numbers, he realized he would most likely never make Fortune Asia’s list of “Hong Kong’s Top Ten Richest” with the way his parents were handling things.
But then his parents were always so selfish. Sure, they raised him and paid for his education and bought him his first apartment, but they failed him when it came to what was truly important—they didn’t know how to flaunt their wealth properly. His father, for all his fame and celebrated skill, had grown up middle class, with solidly middle-class tastes. He was happy enough being the revered doctor, driven around in that shamefully outdated Rolls-Royce, wearing that rusty Audemars Piguet watch, and going to his clubs. And then there was his mother. She was so cheap, forever counting her pennies. She could have been one of the queens of society if she would just play up her aristocratic background, wear some designer dresses, or move out of that flat in the Mid-Levels. That goddamn flat.
Eddie hated going over to his parents’ place. He hated the lobby, with its cheap-looking Mongolian granite floors and the old-lady security guard who was forever eating stinky tofu out of a plastic bag. Inside the flat, he hated the peach-colored leather sectional sofa and white lacquered consoles (bought when the old Lane Crawford on Queen’s Road was having a clearance sale in the mid-1980s), the glass pebbles at the bottom of every vase of fake flowers, the random collection of Chinese calligraphy paintings (all presents from his father’s patients) clustering the walls, and the medical honors and plaques lined up on the overhead shelf that ran around the perimeter of the living room. He hated walking past his old bedroom, which he had been forced to share with his little brother, with its nautical-themed twin beds and navy blue Ikea wall unit, still there after all these years. Most of all, he hated the large walnut-framed family portrait peeking out from behind the big-screen television, forever taunting him with its smoky brown portrait-studio backdrop and the gold-embossed SAMMY PHOTO STUDIO in the bottom right corner. He hated how he looked in that photograph—he was nineteen, just back from his first year at Cambridge, with shoulder-length feathered hair, wearing a Paul Smith tweed blazer he thought was so cool at the time, his elbow arranged jauntily on his mother’s shoulder. And how could his mother, born to a family of such exquisite breeding, be completely devoid of taste? Over the years, he had begged her to redecorate or move, but she had refused, claiming that she “could never part with all the happy memories of my children growing up here.” What happy memories? His only memories were of a childhood spent being too embarrassed to invite any friends over (unless he knew they lived in less prestigious buildings), and teen years spent in the cramped toilet, masturbating practically underneath the bathroom sink with two feet against the door at all times (there was no lock).
As Eddie stood in Leo’s new closet in Shanghai, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Pudong financial district shimmering across the river like Xanadu, he vowed that he would one day have a closet so cool, it would make this one look like a fucky little pigsty. Until then, he still had one thing that even Leo’s crisp new money could not buy—a thick, embossed invitation to Colin Khoo’s wedding in Singapore.
* * *
* Cantonese for “isn’t that right?”
11
Rachel
NEW YORK TO SINGAPORE
“You’re kidding, right?” Rachel said, thinking Nick was pulling a prank when he steered her onto the plush red carpet of the Singapore Airlines first-class counter at JFK.
Nick flashed a conspiratorial grin, relishing her reaction. “I figured if you were going to go halfway around the world with me, I should at least try to make it as comfy as possible.”