Rich People Problems

Nick had just gotten off of the phone with his wife, Rachel, before chastising his mother about asking her what kind of birth control they used. He reminded Eleanor that he and Rachel wouldn’t be pressured into having children. Eleanor told him that he didn’t know pressure. When she and Philip returned from their honeymoon, Su Yi ordered her maids to search through their luggage. When she found their condoms, which Eleanor called “French letters,” she demanded that Eleanor get pregnant in six weeks, otherwise Su Yi was going to throw her out of the house.

Eleanor then insisted that having a child would put Nick back in Su Yi’s good graces. Nick said that, if his grandmother didn’t want to see him, he’d get over it. He then left the house to go meet Astrid for breakfast. As he left, his mother asked if he had heard the latest gossip about his cousin.

After her separation from her husband, Michael Teo, Astrid moved into one of the Peranakan-style homes that she had inherited from her great-aunt, Mathilda Leong. The property was “one of the heritage shop houses on Emerald Hill Road” (152). Nick arrived there to find a young blonde woman, peering over the wooden half door to look upon him. She introduced herself as Ludivine, Cassian’s au pair.

Ludivine let Nick into the house, where he found Astrid sitting cross-legged on a divan, drinking a cup of tea. When she saw Nick, she stood and hugged him warmly. Nick complimented Astrid on her decoration of the house, though she credited the Parisian design team she had hired to do the job.

Nick then asked Astrid about the latest gossip regarding her personal life. She handed him the newspapers, including the South China Morning Post, which featured a headline about her estranged husband’s demand for a $5 billion divorce settlement. Her parents, Astrid told him, were “apoplectic with rage” over the scandal (155). Astrid figured that Michael leaked the story to the South China Morning Post—a Hong Kong-based newspaper—to ruin her and Charlie’s future there. Nick also suspected that Michael hired the photographers who took the pictures of Astrid and Charlie on their trip to India.

Astrid changed the subject to Nick and their grandmother. Astrid couldn’t understand why their Ah Ma wouldn’t want to see Nick, especially because Astrid sat at her bedside for a week without Su Yi ever expressing an aversion to Nick. Astrid suspected that Victoria and Eddie were influencing Su Yi while she was away.

Nick wondered if Astrid could bring up the subject of his visit with Su Yi, seeing how Astrid was one of her grandmother’s favorites. Astrid told him that she could do no such thing because she was banned from Tyersall Park. She then began tearing up, thinking of all the time that she and Nick were losing with their grandmother.

Eddie entered his grandmother’s bedroom and found his mother, Alix, there, rearranging flowers that Su Yi had received. When Su Yi muttered a request for water, Alix went to fill a glass at the tap. Eddie chastised her and asked about the Swiss water that the Aakaras had ordered. He demanded that his grandmother’s maids come up from the kitchen where they were preparing Su Yi’s breakfast and bring the water. Seeing the look of frustrated thirst on her mother’s face, Alix told her son to step aside so that she could give her mother a drink. Eddie grabbed the cup and offered it to his grandmother.

Su Yi drank, gazed around her bedroom, and asked for Astrid. Eddie told her that Astrid went to India, and the news made Su Yi happy, which took Eddie by surprise. She then asked about Nick. It was now Alix’s turn to be surprised, as she didn’t realize that her mother wanted to see Nick. Eddie said that Nick couldn’t visit because of work. Alix stared quietly at her son, amazed by his lie.

When they were out of the bedroom, Alix asked Eddie what he was up to. Eddie revealed that his plan was to keep Nick away so that he could inherit Tyersall Park. Alix sighed wearily, saying that everyone knew that Nick would eventually inherit the house because he carried the Young name. Eddie then burst out in anger, telling his mother that it was her fault that he was “just a Cheng” (164). Alix felt the urge to slap her son, but instead merely took a deep breath and said that she was proud to be the wife of one of the world’s best cardiologists, despite Eddie’s assertion that Malcolm Cheng was “a complete nobody from Hong Kong” (164).

Eddie went on to complain that his lowly status as a Cheng robbed him of getting “a cushy no-show job at one of the Hong Kong banks” and of being invited to exclusive parties and weddings (165). Alix rose from her chair and told Eddie that she would no longer listen to his complaints about how much he had supposedly suffered when he hardly made time for his own children. Eddie then told his mother that if she truly cared for her own children, she wouldn’t say anything to Su Yi about Nick and would work with him in reinforcing to his aunt Felicity that Astrid wasn’t welcome in the house. He then said that he would sit outside of Su Yi’s bedroom, guarding it from those he deemed unwelcome. He was doing, he asserted, what he thought was best for the Cheng family.

The servants at Tyersall Park were preparing for the arrival of Su Yi’s brother, Alfred Shang. Alfred was particularly fond of yen woh, which the servants would ensure was ready. Meanwhile, they gossiped about the confrontation between Alix and Eddie on her balcony the other day. From what Vikram heard, it seemed that Su Yi hadn’t banned Nick from the house at all. Instead, Eddie had hatched a plan to keep Nicky away from the house and enlisted his aunt, Victoria, to assist him in the effort by convincing her that Nick’s presence disturbed his grandmother. The news made Ah Ling, Su Yi’s most trusted servant, angry. However, she didn’t feel that she and Vikram should have intervened, despite the awful prospect of Eddie inheriting Tyersall Park.

Vikram, however, reminded Ah Ling that he swore a Gurkha’s oath to protect and serve Su Yi with his life, and he intended to do so. He swore to ensure that Su Yi would see her grandson before she died, even if it meant his job.

Around this time, Nick and Colin were spending the afternoon in a record store when Colin got a text message summoning him to his family home to pick up an urgent package. Nick agreed to join him on the trip. When Colin arrived at his house and opened the package, he found a Post-it note affixed to an envelope, requesting that Colin hand off the package to Nick. Colin took a step back, wondering if the envelope might have contained anthrax.