Crazy Rich Asians

There would be no need for fights, no hysterical confrontations. That would be much too cliché, even though every silly thing her husband had done could have come straight out of one of those “Is My Husband Cheating on Me?” quizzes from some cheesy women’s magazine: Has your husband been going on more business trips lately? Check. Are you making love less frequently? Check. Has your husband incurred mysterious expenses with no explanation? Double check. She could add a new line to the quiz: Is your husband getting text messages late at night from some girl proclaiming to miss his fat cock? CHECK. Astrid’s head was beginning to spin again. She could feel her blood pressure rise. She needed to sit down for a minute and take a few deep breaths. Why had she missed yoga all week, when she so badly needed to release the tension that had been building up? Stop. Stop. Stop. She needed to put all this out of her mind and just be in the moment. Right now, in this moment, she needed to get ready for Ah Ma’s party.

Astrid noticed her reflection in the glass coffee table and decided to change her outfit. She was wearing an old favorite—a gauzy black tunic dress by Ann Demeulemeester, but she felt like she needed to turn up the volume tonight. She was not going to let Michael’s absence ruin her night. She was not going to spend one more second thinking about where he could possibly be going, what he might or might not be doing. She was determined that this would be a magical night of wild blooming flowers under the stars, and that only good things would happen. Good things always happened at Ah Ma’s.

She went into the spare bedroom, which had basically become an extra closet for her overflow of clothes (and this didn’t even include the rooms upon rooms of clothes she still kept at her parents’ house). The space was filled with metal rolling racks on which garment bags of outfits had been meticulously organized by season and color, and Astrid had to move one of the racks into the hallway in order to fit comfortably into the room. This apartment was much too tiny for the family of three (four if you counted the nanny, Evangeline, who slept in Cassian’s room), but she had made the best of it for the sake of her husband.

Most of Astrid’s friends would have been utterly horrified to discover the conditions in which she lived. To the majority of Singaporeans, a spacious two-thousand-square-foot, three-bedroom condo with two and a half baths and a private balcony in District Nine would be a cherished luxury, but for Astrid, who had grown up in such palatial surroundings as her father’s stately house on Nassim Road, the modernist weekend beach bungalow in Tanah Merah, the vast family plantation in Kuantan, and her grandmother’s Tyersall Park estate, it was totally unfathomable.

As a wedding gift, her father had planned to commission an up-and-coming Brazilian architect to build the newlyweds a house in Bukit Timah on land that had already been deeded to Astrid, but Michael would have none of that. He was a proud man and insisted on living in a place that he could afford to purchase. “I am capable of providing for your daughter and our future family,” he had informed his stunned future father-in-law, who instead of being impressed by the gesture, found it rather foolhardy. How was this fellow ever going to afford the kind of place his daughter was accustomed to on his salary? Michael’s meager savings would barely even get them a down payment on a private flat, and Harry found it inconceivable that his daughter might live in government-subsidized housing. Why couldn’t they at the very least just move into one of the houses or luxury apartments that she already owned? But Michael was adamant that he and his wife begin their life on neutral territory. In the end, a compromise was struck and Michael agreed to let both Astrid and her father match what he was able to put in as a down payment. The combined amount allowed them a thirty-year fixed mortgage on this condo in an eighties-era apartment complex off Clemenceau Avenue.