Кевин Кван - China Rich Girlfriend

ALSO BY KEVIN KWAN

Crazy Rich Asians

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Kevin Kwan

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Cover design and illustration by Joan Wong

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Kwan, Kevin.

China rich girlfriend: a novel / Kevin Kwan. — First edition.

pages; cm

ISBN 978-0-385-53908-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-385-53909-8 (eBook)

1. Fiancées — Fiction. 2. Rich people — China — Shanghai — Fiction. 3. Socialites — Singapore — Fiction. I. Title.

PS3611.W36C48 2015

813′. 6—dc23

2015003996

eBook ISBN 9780385539098

v4.1

a

Contents

Cover

Also by Kevin Kwan

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: Beijing Capital International Airport

Part One

1: The Mandarin

2: Cupertino, California

3: Scotts Road

4: Ridout Road

5: Tyersall Park

6: Morton Street

7: Belmont Road

8: Diamond Ballroom, Ritz-Carlton Hotel

9: The Locke Club

10: Arcadia

11: Four Seasons Biltmore

12: Arcadia

Part Two

1: Ko-Tung Consulting Group Social Impact Assessment

2: Rachel and Nick

3: Astrid

4: The Baos

5: Charlie

6: Carlton and Colette

7: Nick and Rachel

8: Colette

9: Michael and Astrid

10: The Bings

11: Corinna and Kitty

12: Astrid

13: Save the Seamstress Fashion Show

14: Trenta

15: 28 Cluny Park Road

16: Paris

17: The Mandarin Oriental

18: The Shangri-La

Part Three

1: Shek O

2: Changi Airport

3: Jinxian Lu

4: Riverside Victory Towers

5: Pulau Club

6: Imperial Treasure Restaurant

7: The West Lake

8: National Library of China

9: Ridout Road

10: Queen Mary Hospital

11: Bukit Brown Cemetery

12: Mar Vista

13: Triumph Towers

14: Central Police Station

15: Ridout Road

16: 188 Taiyuan Road

17: Newspapers Around the World

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

For my brothers and my cousins

LONDON, 8 SEPTEMBER 2012, 9:00 A.M. GMT

A red Ferrari 458 Italia crashed through the window of the Jimmy Choo shoe boutique on Sloane Street sometime between 4:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. last night. No one witnessed the accident. Metropolitan Police reported that two passengers were taken to St Mary’s Paddington, where they are being treated for serious but noncritical injuries. The vehicle owner’s name was not released pending further investigation .

— SARAH LYRE, The London Chronicle

PROLOGUEBEIJING CAPITAL INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

SEPTEMBER 9, 2012, 7:45 P.M.

“Wait a minute — I’m in first class. Take me to first class,” Edison Cheng said contemptuously to the flight attendant escorting him to his seat.

“This is first class, Mr. Cheng,” the man in the crisp navy uniform informed him.

“But where are the cabins?” Eddie asked, still confused.

“Mr. Cheng, I’m afraid British Airways does not have private cabins in first class. *1But if you’d allow me to show you some of the special features of your seat—”

“No, no, that’s fine.” Eddie tossed his ostrich leather briefcase onto the seat like a petulant schoolboy. Fucky fuck — the sacrifices I have to make for the bank today! Edison Cheng, the pampered “Prince of Private Bankers”—famous in Hong Kong society pages for his bon vivant lifestyle, his dapper wardrobe, his elegant wife (Fiona), his photogenic children, and his superb lineage (his mother is Alexandra Young, of the Singapore Youngs) — was unaccustomed to such inconveniences. Five hours ago he had been interrupted during a luncheon at the Hong Kong Club, rushed aboard the company jet bound for Beijing, and then hustled onto this flight to London. It had been years since he had suffered the indignity of flying commercial , but Mrs. Bao was on this godforsaken plane, and Mrs. Bao needed to be accommodated.

But where exactly was the lady? Eddie expected to find her seated nearby, but the chief purser informed him that there was no such person by that name in the cabin.

“No, no, she’s supposed to be here. Can you check the flight manifest or something?” Eddie demanded.

Minutes later, Eddie found himself being led to row 37, seat E of the aircraft — economy class — where a petite woman in a white vicuña turtleneck and gray flannel slacks sat sandwiched between two passengers.

“Mrs. Bao? Bao Shaoyen?” Eddie inquired in Mandarin.

The woman looked up and smiled wanly. “Are you Mr. Cheng?”

“Yes. So glad to meet you, but I’m sorry we had to meet like this.” Eddie smiled in relief. He had spent the past eight years managing the Bao family’s offshore accounts, but they were such a secretive lot, he had never met any of them until today. Even though she looked rather tired at the moment, Bao Shaoyen was much prettier than he had imagined. With alabaster skin, large eyes that slanted upward at the edges, and high cheekbones accentuated by the way she wore her jet-black hair — pulled into a tight, low ponytail — she did not look old enough to have a son in grad school.

“Why are you seated here? Was there some mix-up?” Eddie asked urgently.

“No, I always fly economy class,” Mrs. Bao replied.

Eddie couldn’t hide his look of surprise. Mrs. Bao’s husband, Bao Gaoliang, was one of Beijing’s top politicians, and what’s more, he had inherited one of China’s biggest pharmaceutical firms. The Baos weren’t just one of his regular clients; they were his ultra-high-net-worth clients.

“Only my son flies first class,” Bao Shaoyen explained, catching Eddie’s look. “Carlton can eat all the fancy Western food and, being a student under so much pressure, he needs all the rest he can get. But for me, it’s not worth it. I don’t touch airplane food, and I can never sleep on these long flights anyway.”

Eddie had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Typical Mainlanders! They lavished every penny on their Little Emperor and suffered in silence. Well, look where that got them. Twenty-three-year-old Carlton Bao was supposed to be at Cambridge finishing his master’s dissertation, but had instead spent the previous evening doing his best Prince Harry impersonation — running up a £38,000 bar tab at half a dozen London nightspots, wrecking his brand-new Ferrari, destroying public property, and almost getting himself killed. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst of it Eddie had been explicitly instructed not to reveal to Bao Shaoyen.

Eddie faced a conundrum. He urgently needed to go over the plans with Mrs. Bao, but he would sooner endure a colonoscopy than spend the next eleven hours slumming it in coach . God in heaven, what if someone recognized him? A picture of Edison Cheng crammed into an economy-class seat would go viral within seconds. Yet Eddie grudgingly realized that it would be unseemly for one of his bank’s most important clients to remain here in steerage while he was up front, stretched out on a flatbed recliner, sipping twenty-year-old cognac. He eyed the spiky-haired youth slouching dangerously close to Mrs. Bao on one side, and the elderly woman clipping her nails into the air sickness bag on her other side, a solution springing to mind.