Crazy Rich Asians

Rachel sat quietly on the bed beside the pile of towels still warm from the dryer, trying to soak in everything Nick had said. This was the most he had ever talked about his family, and it made her feel a little more assured. She still couldn’t quite fathom the deal with his parents, but she had to admit that she had seen her fair share of distant families — especially among her Asian friends. Back in high school, she had endured dreary meals in the fluorescent-lit dining rooms of her classmates, dinners where not more than five words were exchanged between parent and child. She had noticed the stunned reactions from her friends whenever she randomly hugged her mother or said “I love you” at the end of a phone call. And several years ago, she had been e-mailed a humorous list entitled “Twenty Ways You Can Tell You Have Asian Parents.” Number one on the list: Your parents never, ever call you “just to say hello.” She didn’t get many of the jokes on the list, since her own experience growing up had been entirely different.

“We’re so fortunate, you know. Not many mothers and daughters have what we have,” Kerry said when they caught up on the phone later that evening.

“I realize that, Mom. I know it’s different because you were a single mom, and you took me everywhere,” Rachel mused. Back when she was a child, it seemed like every year or so her mother would answer a classified ad in World Journal, the Chinese-American newspaper, and off they would go to a new job in some random Chinese restaurant in some random town. Images of all those tiny boarding-house rooms and makeshift beds in cities like East Lansing, Phoenix, and Tallahassee flashed through her head.

“You can’t expect other families to be like us. I was so young when I had you — nineteen — we were able to be like sisters. Don’t be so hard on Nick. Sad to say, but I was never very close to my parents either. In China, there was no time to be close — my mother and father worked from morning till night, seven days a week, and I was at school all the time.”

“Still, how can he hide something as important as this from his parents? It’s not like Nick and I have only been going out for a couple of months.”

“Daughter, once again you are judging the situation with your American eyes. You have to look at this the Chinese way. In Asia, there is a proper time for everything, a proper etiquette. Like I said before, you have to realize that these Overseas Chinese families can be even more traditional than we Mainland Chinese. You don’t know anything about Nick’s background. Has it occurred to you that they might be quite poor? Not everyone is rich in Asia, you know. Maybe Nick has a duty to work hard and send money back to his family, and they wouldn’t approve if they thought he was wasting money on girlfriends. Or maybe he didn’t want his family to know that the two of you spend half the week living together. They could be devout Buddhists, you know.”

“That’s just it, Mom. It’s dawning on me that Nick knows everything there is to know about me, about us, but I know almost nothing about his family.”

“Don’t be scared, daughter. You know Nick. You know he is a decent man, and though he may have kept you secret for a while, he is doing things the honorable way now. At last he feels ready to introduce you to his family — properly — and that is the most important thing,” Kerry said.

Rachel lay in bed, calmed as always by her mother’s soothing Mandarin tones. Maybe she was being too hard on Nick. She had let her insecurities get the better of her, and her knee-jerk reaction was to assume that Nick waited so long to tell his parents because he was somehow embarrassed about her. But could it be the other way around? Was he embarrassed of them? Rachel remembered what her Singaporean friend Peik Lin had said when she Skyped her and excitedly announced that she was dating one of her fellow countrymen. Peik Lin came from one of the island’s wealthiest families, and she had never heard of the Youngs. “Obviously, if he comes from a rich or prominent family, we would know them. Young isn’t a very common name here — are you sure they’re not Korean?”

“Yeah, I’m sure they’re from Singapore. But you know I couldn’t care less how much money they have.”

“Yes, that’s the problem with you,” Peik Lin cracked. “Well, I’m sure if he passed the Rachel Chu test, his family’s perfectly normal.”

9 Astrid

SINGAPORE