Kevin Kwan - Crazy Rich Asians

10

Edison Cheng

SHANGHAI

It was the mirror in the closet that did it. The closet in Leo Ming’s brand-new triplex penthouse in the Huangpu district really put Eddie over the edge. Ever since Shanghai became Asia’s party capital, Leo had been spending more time here with his latest mistress, a Beijing-born starlet whose contract he had to “buy over” from a Chinese film company at the cost of nineteen million (one million for every year of her life). Leo and Eddie had flown up for the day to inspect Leo’s new super-luxe apartment, and they were standing in a hangarlike two-thousand-square-foot closet that boasted an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, Macassar ebony cupboards, and banks of mirrored doors that parted automatically to reveal cedar-lined suit racks.

“It’s all climate controlled,” Leo noted. “The closets on this end are maintained at fifty-five degrees specifically for my Italian cashmere, houndstooth, and fur. But the shoe-display cabinets are kept at seventy degrees, which is optimal for leather, and the humidity is regulated to a constant thirty-five percent, so my Berlutis and Corthays never break a sweat. You gotta treat those babies right, hei mai? ” *

Eddie nodded, thinking that it was time to redo his own closet.

“Now let me show you the pièce de résistance,” Leo said, pronouncing “pièce” like “peace.” With a flourish, he glided his thumb over a mirrored panel and its surface instantly transformed into a high-definition screen that projected the life-size image of a male model in a double-breasted suit. Above his right shoulder hovered the brand names of each item of clothing, followed by the dates and locations where the outfit was previously worn. Leo waved a finger in front of the screen as if he were flicking a page, and the man now appeared in corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater. “There’s a camera embedded in this mirror that takes a picture of you and stores it, so you can see every single thing you’ve ever worn, organized by date and place. This way you’ll never repeat an outfit!”

Eddie stared at the mirror in amazement. “Oh, I’ve seen that before,” he said rather unconvincingly as the envy began to coarse through his veins. He felt the sudden urge to shove his friend’s bloated face into the pristine mirrored wall. Once again, Leo was showing off another shiny new toy he did fuck-all to deserve. It had been like this since they were little. When Leo turned seven, his father gave him a titanium bicycle custom-designed for his pudgy frame by former NASA engineers (it was stolen within three days). At sixteen, when Leo aspired to become a Canto hip-hop singer, his father built him a state-of-the-art recording studio and bankrolled his first album (the CD can still be found on eBay). Then in 1999, he funded Leo’s Internet start-up, which managed to lose more than ninety million dollars and go belly-up at the height of the Internet boom. And now this—the latest in a countless collection of homes around the globe showered upon him by his adoring father. Yes, Leo Ming, charter member of Hong Kong’s Lucky Sperm Club, got everything handed to him on a diamond-encrusted platter. It was just Eddie’s shitty luck to have been born to parents who never gave him a cent.

In what is arguably the most materialistic city on earth, a city where the key mantra is prestige , the tongue-waggers within Hong Kong’s most prestigious chattering circles would agree that Edison Cheng lived a life to be envied. They would acknowledge that Eddie was born into a prestigious family (even though his Cheng lineage was, frankly, a bit common), had attended all the prestigious schools (nothing tops Cambridge, well … except Oxford), and now worked for Hong Kong’s most prestigious investment bank (though it was a pity he didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor). At thirty-six, Eddie still retained his boyish features (getting a bit plump, but never mind—it made him look more prosperous); had chosen well by marrying pretty Fiona Tung (Hong Kong old money, but what a shame about that stock-manipulation scandal her father had gotten into with Dato’ Tai Toh Lui); and his children, Constantine, Augustine, and Kalliste, were always so well-dressed and well-behaved (but that younger son, was he a bit autistic or something?).

Edison and Fiona lived in the duplex penthouse of Triumph Towers, one of the most sought-after buildings high on Victoria Peak (five bedrooms, six baths, more than four thousand square feet, not including the eight-hundred-square-foot terrace), where they employed two Filipino and two Mainland Chinese maids (the Chinese were better at cleaning, while the Filipinos were great with the kids). Their Biedermeier-filled apartment, decorated by the celebrated Hong Kong–based Austro-German decorator Kaspar von Morgenlatte to evoke a Hapsburg hunting schloss, had recently been featured in Hong Kong Tattle (Eddie was photographed preening at the bottom of his marble spiral staircase in a forest-green Tyrolean jacket, his hair slicked back, while Fiona, sprawled uncomfortably at his feet, wore a claret-colored gown by Oscar de la Renta).

In the parking garage of their building, they owned five parking spots (valued at two hundred and fifty thousand each), where their fleet consisted of a Bentley Continental GT (Eddie’s weekday car), an Aston Martin Vanquish (Eddie’s weekend car), a Volvo S40 (Fiona’s car), a Mercedes S550 (the family car), and a Porsche Cayenne (the family sport-utility vehicle). At Aberdeen Marina, there was his sixty-four-foot yacht, Kaiser . Then there was the holiday condo in Whistler, British Columbia (the only place to be seen skiing, since there was semi-decent Cantonese food an hour away in Vancouver).

Eddie was a member of the Chinese Athletic Association, the Hong Kong Golf Club, the China Club, the Hong Kong Club, the Cricket Club, the Dynasty Club, the American Club, the Jockey Club, the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, and too many private dining clubs to recount. Like most upper-crust Hong Kongers, Eddie also possessed what was perhaps the ultimate membership card—Canadian Permanent Resident Cards for his entire family (a safe haven in case the powers that be in Beijing ever pulled a Tiananmen again). He collected watches, and now possessed more than seventy timepieces from the most esteemed watchmakers (all Swiss, of course, except for a few vintage Cartiers), which he installed in a custom-designed bird’s-eye maple display console in his private dressing room (his wife did not have her own dressing room). He had made Hong Kong Tattle ’s “Most Invited” list four years in a row, and befitting a man of his status, he had already gone through three mistresses since marrying Fiona thirteen years ago.

Despite this embarrassment of riches, Eddie felt extremely deprived compared to most of his friends. He didn’t have a house on the Peak. He didn’t have his own plane. He didn’t have a full-time crew for his yacht, which was much too small to host more than ten guests for brunch comfortably. He didn’t have any Rothkos or Pollocks or the other dead American artists one was required to hang on the wall in order to be considered truly rich these days. And unlike Leo, Eddie’s parents were the old-fashioned type—insisting from the moment Eddie graduated that he learn to live off his earnings.

It was so bloody unfair. His parents were loaded, and his mother was set to inherit another obscene bundle if his Singapore grandmother would ever kick the bucket. (Ah Ma had already suffered two heart attacks in the past decade, but now she had a defibrillator installed and could go 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.