Crazy Rich Asians

“God is in the details.” Mies van der Rohe’s iconic quote was the mantra Annabel Lee lived by. From the sculpted mango popsicles handed out to guests lounging by the pool to the precise placement of a camellia blossom on every eiderdown pillow, Annabel’s unerring eye for detail was what made her chain of luxury hotels the favored choice for the most discriminating travelers. Tonight the object of scrutiny was her own reflection. She was wearing a high-collared champagne-colored dress woven from Irish linen, and trying to decide whether to layer it with a double strand of baroque pearls or an opera-length amber necklace. Were the Nakamura pearls too ostentatious? Would the amber beads be subtler?

Her husband, Peter, entered her boudoir wearing dark gray slacks and a pale blue shirt. “Are you sure you want me to wear this? I look like an accountant,” he said, thinking his butler had surely made a mistake in laying out these clothes.

“You look perfect. I ordered the shirt specifically for tonight’s occasion. It’s Ede & Ravenscroft—they make all of the Duke of Edinburgh’s shirts. Trust me, it’s better to be underdressed with this crowd,” Annabel said, giving him a careful once-over. Although there were grand events every single night of the week in the ramp-up to Araminta’s wedding, the party that Harry Leong was throwing tonight in honor of his nephew Colin Khoo at the fabled Leong residence on Nassim Road was the one Annabel was secretly most eager to attend.

When Peter Lee (originally Lee Pei Tan of Harbin) made his first fortune in Chinese coal mining during the mid-nineties, he and his wife decided to move their family to Singapore, like many of the newly minted Mainlanders were doing. Peter wanted to maximize the benefits of being based in the region’s preferred wealth management center, and Annabel (originally An-Liu Bao of Urümqi) wanted their young daughter to benefit from Singapore’s more Westernized—and in her eyes, superior—education system. (The superior air quality didn’t hurt, either.) Besides, she had tired of the Beijing elite, of all the interminable twelve-course banquets in rooms filled with bad replicas of Louis Quatorze furniture, and she longed to reinvent herself on a more sophisticated island where the ladies understood Armani and spoke perfect accentless English. She wanted Araminta to grow up speaking perfect accentless English.

But in Singapore, Annabel soon discovered that beyond the bold-faced names that eagerly invited her to all the glamorous galas, there hid a whole other level of society that was impervious to the flash of money, especially Mainland Chinese money. These people were snobbier and more impenetrable than anything she had ever encountered. “Who cares about those old mothball families? They’re just jealous that we’re richer, that we really know how to enjoy ourselves,” her new friend Trina Tua (wife of the TLS Private Equity chairman Tua Lao Sai) said. Annabel knew this was something Trina said to console herself that she would never be invited to Mrs. Lee Yong Chien’s legendary mah-jongg parties—where the women bet with serious jewelry—or get to peek behind the tall gates of the magnificent modernist house that architect Kee Yeap had designed for Rosemary T’sien on Dalvey Road.