CHAPTER EIGHT
EMERALD HILL, SINGAPORE
Since separating from Michael, Astrid had moved in to one of the heritage shop houses on Emerald Hill Road that she had inherited from her great-aunt Mathilda Leong. As Nick strolled down the street toward her place, he couldn’t help but stop along the way and admire some of the ornamental friezes, timber-framed windows, and elaborate entrance gates on the beautifully restored Peranakan-style terrace homes that made this street so unique. No two façades were alike—each one blended different elements of Chinese baroque, late-Victorian, and art deco details.
When Nick was a child, many of these shop houses where old Peranakan families lived and worked had fallen into neglect and the street had an air of faded grandeur, but now that real estate prices had shot up to absurd levels and the neighborhood had been designated a conservation area, these houses had become highly coveted properties going for tens of millions. Many of them had been turned into hip bars or sidewalk cafés, leading some of Nick’s snootier relatives to derisively refer to Emerald Hill Road as “that street where all the ang mor kow sai go to leem tzhiu,” but Nick found it all rather charming. Arriving at a handsome white shop house with smoky gray shutters, he stopped and rang the doorbell.
A blond girl in her early twenties peered over the pintu pagar—an ornately carved wooden half door that was a typical feature of such houses—and asked in a heavy French accent, “Are you Nicolas?”
Nick nodded, and she slid the lock open to allow him to enter. “I’m Ludivine, Cassian’s au pair,” she said.
“Salut, Ludivine. Ça va?” Nick said with a smile.
“Comme ci comme ça,” Ludivine replied coquettishly, wondering why she’d never met madame’s hottie French-speaking cousin before.
Stepping into the front foyer, Nick could see that the room had been painstakingly restored to its original style. The floor was an elaborate mosaic of ceramic tiles painted in a William Morris–esque floral pattern, and intricately carved gilt wood screens created a partition between the front room and the rest of the house beyond. The centerpiece of a typical Peranakan front room was the ancestral shrine, and Astrid had honored the tradition by installing an elaborate Victorian altarpiece against the back wall. But instead of placing pictures of dead relatives or porcelain gods within the altar, she had cheekily hung a small Egon Schiele drawing of a nude male figure inside.
Ludivine led Nick from the front foyer through a darkened antechamber into the chimchay—the open courtyard exposed to the sky that provided the natural ventilation and lighting essential to these long, narrow shop houses. Here, Astrid had departed from tradition and completely transformed the space: The roof had been glassed in and the entire space air-conditioned, while the usual concrete floor was now covered in obsidian black tiles, making it shimmer like a pool of black ink.
But the pièce de résistance was the east wall of the courtyard, where Astrid had worked with the pioneering French landscape architect Patrick Blanc to install a vertical garden that soared three stories high. Creepers, ferns, and other exotic palms seemed to grow out of the wall, defying gravity. Against this dramatic fresco of flora was a sleek arrangement of sculpted bronze divans covered in soft pillows of blindingly white linen. There was a verdant, monastic stillness to the space, and in the midst of it all, Astrid perched cross-legged on a divan, nestling a cup of tea on her lap, Zenly attired in a black tank top and a voluminous black skirt.
Astrid stood up and gave Nick a tight hug. “I’ve missed you!”
“Same here! So this is where you’ve been slumming it.”
“Yeah, you like it?”
“It’s incredible! I remember coming here as a kid for one of your great-aunt’s nyonya feasts—I can’t believe what you’ve done with it!”
“I moved in here thinking it would just be temporary, but I ended up falling in love with the place so I figured I’d do some work on it. I can feel my great-aunt all around me here.” Astrid gestured for Nick to take a seat next to her on the divan, and she began to pour him some tea out of a cast-iron teapot. “This is a Nilgiri from the Dunsandle Tea Estate in South India…I hope you like it.”
Nick took a sip of the tea, savoring its delicate smokiness. “Hmmm…fantastic.” He gazed in wonder at the ocular-patterned skylight far above. “You’ve really outdone yourself with this space!”
“Thanks, but I can’t take any credit for it—Studio KO, this amazing Parisian duo, designed everything.”
“Well, I’m sure you inspired them much more than you let on. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house quite like this—it feels like Marrakech two hundred years from now.”
Astrid smiled and gave a little sigh. “I wish I could be in Marrakech two hundred years from now.”
“Yeah? I get the feeling it hasn’t been all that great a morning. What’s this latest gossip I hear?” Nick asked, sinking down into the plush sofa.
“Oh, you haven’t seen it?”
Nick shook his head.
“Well, I’m very famous now,” Astrid said self-mockingly as she handed him the newspapers. It was the South China Morning Post, and on the front page, the headline screamed:
MICHAEL TEO SEEKS RECORD $5 BILLION DIVORCE SETTLEMENT FROM HEIRESS ASTRID LEONG
SINGAPORE—For the past two years, billionaire venture capitalist Michael Teo, 36, has been mired in divorce proceedings with Singapore heiress Astrid Leong. What was supposed to be an amicable divorce has taken a new twist, as Mr. Teo’s legal team is now demanding a $5 billion settlement in light of recent developments.
Last week, pictures of Ms. Leong, 37, went viral on international gossip sites. The images purport to show Ms. Leong being proposed to by Hong Kong tech tycoon Charles Wu, 37, at the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, India. Surrounding them were 100 classical Indian dancers, 20 Sitar players, two elephants and Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who reportedly serenaded the couple with a Hindi version of the Jason Mraz love ballad “I’m Yours.”
Mr. Teo is now accusing Ms. Leong of “intolerable cruelty and adultery” in his latest divorce filings. He claims to have incontrovertible evidence that his wife has been having an affair with Mr. Wu “since as early as 2010.” It is a sad ending to what was once a romantic Cinderella story in reverse: Mr. Teo, the son of two schoolteachers, grew up in middle-income housing in Toa Payoh, met Ms. Teo, an heiress to one of Asia’s largest fortunes, at the birthday party of one of his army friends. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the ridiculously photogenic couple married in 2006.
It was a union that took many in Asia’s society circles by surprise. Ms. Leong is the only daughter of Henry Leong, the president of S. K. Leong Holdings Pte Ltd, the secretive conglomerate said to be the world’s leading supplier of palm oil. Before she married Mr. Teo, she had previously been engaged to Charles Wu and also linked to a Muslim prince and several members of European nobility. Like her family, Ms. Leong is an exceedingly private individual who has never granted an interview and has no social media presence. The Heron Wealth Report has ranked the Leong family number three on a list of Asia’s richest families, and estimates Ms. Leong’s personal fortune to be “in excess of $10 billion.”
Now, half of Ms. Leong’s fortune is at stake, along with custody of their seven-year-old son, Cassian. “My client is a self-made-billionaire—this is not about the money,” claims Mr. Teo’s lawyer Jackson Lee of the esteemed firm Gladwell and Malcolm. “This is about the principle of it all. Michael Teo, a loyal and devoted husband, has been humiliated on the world stage. Imagine how you would feel if the woman you were still married to was proposed to by another man, in such a public and disgustingly showy manner.”
Singapore legal experts feel that Mr. Teo’s legal maneuvers are unlikely to succeed, due to Ms. Leong’s assets being tied up in the labyrinthine S. K. Leong Trusts. But this latest filing has already done its damage. An insider to Singapore’s social scene comments, “The Leongs do not ever like being in the news. This is a huge embarrassment for them.”
“Bloody hell,” Nick said, throwing the newspaper on the floor in disgust.
Astrid smiled at him wanly.
“How does the Post get away with publishing this? I’ve never read so much bullshit in all my life.”
“You’re telling me. Self-made billionaire my ass.”
“And if you’re really worth ten billion, there’s this David Bowie limited-edition box set I want for my birthday. It’s $89.95 on Amazon.”
Astrid laughed for a moment, and then shook her head. “All my life, I’ve done everything to avoid being in any newspapers, but it seems like these days, the harder I try, the more I end up becoming front-page news. My parents are apoplectic with rage. They were angry enough when the pictures first leaked, but this just put them over the edge. My mother has taken to her bed and is mainlining Xanax, and I’ve never heard my father scream so loud as he did this morning when he came by with the newspaper. The blood vessels were bulging out of his temples so hard, I thought he was going to have a stroke.”
“But can’t they see that none of this is your fault? I mean, surely they know that Michael set this all up?”
“It seems pretty obvious to me, but of course, it doesn’t matter to them. I’m the naughty girl who snuck off to India. I mean, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old mother, and I still need to ask my parents’ permission to go away for the weekend. It’s all my fault. I’m the one who’s ‘exposed’ the family, I’m the one who’s disgraced the family name for a thousand generations.”
Nick shook his head in commiseration, cracking his knuckles as something else came to his mind. “You gotta give Michael some credit…he knew that the Singapore papers wouldn’t touch this story, so he purposely had it leaked to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.”
“It was a well-played move. He’s trying to do maximum damage to Charlie and to our future life there.”
“I’ll bet you anything he’s behind those paparazzi pictures too.”
“Charlie seems to think so. He’s got his whole security team trying to figure out how Michael’s had me under surveillance.”
“I know this is going into Jason Bourne territory, but is there any way Michael could have put some sort of tracking device on you before you went on your trip? I mean, he did hack your cell phone once upon a time.”
Astrid shook her head. “I haven’t seen Michael in almost a year. We only communicate through our lawyers now—and that’s his doing, not mine. Ever since he hired this Jackson Lee fellow, who I’m told is a mad legal genius, things have gotten more and more acrimonious.”
“How often does Michael see Cassian?”
“Technically, he gets him three days a week, but Michael rarely lives up to his end of the deal. He takes Cassian for a meal once a week or so, but sometimes he goes two or three weeks before he sees him. It’s like he’s forgotten he even has a son,” Astrid said sadly.
A maid entered the courtyard and set a breakfast tray down on the coffee table.
“Kaya toast!” Nick exclaimed happily at the sight of the perfectly toasted triangles of bread smeared with a thick layer of kaya coconut jam. “How did you know I was craving that this morning?”
Astrid smiled. “Don’t you know I can read your mind? This is Ah Ching’s homemade kaya from Tyersall Park, of course.”
“Brilliant!” Nick said.
Astrid noticed the glint of sadness that played across his eyes as he took his first bite of the crisp yet fluffy white bread. “Listen, I heard about how you’ve been banned from Tyersall Park. It’s so ridiculous. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help, but now that I’m back, I’m going to try to figure something out.”
“Come on, Astrid, you’ve had so much to deal with. Don’t worry about it. Do you know the stunt my mother’s been trying to pull? She wants me to get Rachel pregnant, pronto, and then she’ll announce the news to Ah Ma in the hopes that she will want to see me.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“She called Rachel and demanded to know where she was in her cycle. She had Carol Tai’s plane all lined up to whisk her to Singapore this weekend specifically so that I could impregnate her. She even had a honeymoon suite ready at her friend’s resort in Sentosa.”
Astrid clasped her mouth in laughter. “Jesus! And I thought I had a crazy mother!”
“No one is crazier than Eleanor Young.”
“Well, at least she’s still trying to look out for you. She’ll do anything for you to get back in Ah Ma’s good graces.”
“For my mother, everything’s about the house. But you know I just want to see Ah Ma. It’s taken me a while to get there, but I realize I do owe her an apology.”
“That’s big of you, Nicky. I mean, she was pretty horrendous to you and Rachel.”
“I know, but I still shouldn’t have said the things I said. I know how much it hurt her.”
Astrid reflected on this, staring into her teacup for a moment before looking up at her cousin. “I just don’t understand why Ah Ma suddenly doesn’t want to see you. I sat by her bedside for a whole week while she was at Mount E. She knew you were on your way back, and she never mentioned a thing about not wishing to see you. Something’s up. I think Auntie Victoria or Eddie or somebody’s been influencing her while I’ve been out of the picture.”
Nick looked at Astrid hopefully. “Maybe you can find a way to bring it up with her…delicately. You’ve always had a way with her that no one else has.”
“Oh, didn’t you know? I’m persona non grata at Tyersall Park too. My parents don’t want me to show my face at the house, or anywhere in public for that matter, until this scandal blows over a bit.”
Nick couldn’t help but laugh at the whole situation. “So we’ve both been excommunicated, as if we were the devil’s spawn.”
“Yep. We’re the friggin’ Children of the Corn. But what can we do? Mum doesn’t want anything at all to risk upsetting Ah Ma right now.”
“I think Ah Ma would be more upset that you’re not there by her bedside,” Nick said indignantly.
Astrid’s eyes brimmed with tears. “We’re losing precious time with her, Nicky. Every day, she’s fading away more and more.”
Originally an area of orchards and nutmeg plantations during the colonial era, Emerald Hill was developed into a residential neighborhood for Peranakan families in the early twentieth century. These Peranakans—or Straits Chinese, the term that was used for them in the era—were English educated (many of them at Oxford and Cambridge) and intensely loyal to the British colonial government. Serving as the middlemen between the British and Chinese, they grew rich and powerful as a result, as was clearly evidenced in the opulent shop houses they built.
Although the Hokkien phrase literally translates to “redhaired dog shit go to drink alcohol,” it can be interpreted as “that street where the Eurotrash go to get drunk.”
Deceptively simple, as it turns out—Astrid was wearing a perfectly constructed ribbed jersey tank from The Row over a vintage Jasper Conran black silk skirt in a festive tiered rah-rah design.