Rich People Problems (Crazy Rich Asians #3)(156)
"Of course! It's soooo easy to have babies these days!" Nadine exclaimed. "I mean, my Francesca didn't even have to get pregnant herself. She was so scared of getting stretch marks, she hired a pretty girl from Tibet to carry the baby. The day after Joshie was born she was already off to some party in Rio!"
Carol tried to step in. "Ladies, let's not get too worked up. I think we should all say a prayer together-"
"You want a prayer? I'll give you a prayer. Dear Lord, thank you for getting me the fuck out of here. Amen!" Rachel said, storming out of the room.
* * *
*1 Singapore's impressive Electronic Road Pricing system (ERP), used to manage road congestion, has also led to impressive levels of bitching from citizens.
*2 Ah Meng was an irrepressible orangutan that was for many years in the 1980s the star attraction of the Singapore Zoo.
*3 A sweet rolled pancake filled with coconut palm sugar that, because of the way the pancake is folded at the ends, just happens to resemble a small uncircumcised penis.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MANILA, PHILIPPINES
From Tommy Yip's daily gossip column:
Titas were atwitter last night over what happened in the middle of the spectacularly elegant party at China Cruz's divine mansion in Dasmariñas. Apparently, while Chris-Emmanuelle Yam (clad in a curvy Chloé confection) was belting out the Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" accompanied by a full orchestra, a tremendous crashing noise sent the couture-clad guests rushing out of the ballroom to the grand foyer. There they found debonair Diego San Antonio wrestling on the marble floor with an intruder.
"It was this Chinese man, rather handsome, but obviously quite deranged. He had Diego by the collar and he kept shouting, 'Tell me where she is!' " social dynamo Doris Hoh (enchanting in an emerald Elie Saab) breathlessly told me. "It was surreal. Here were two men rolling around on the floor, with purple glass everywhere and a huge roasted pig right next to them!" Apparently the fight began upstairs, where Diego first encountered the intruder in China's library. A tussle began and they ended up rolling down the dramatic curving Gone with the Wind –style double staircase, toppling over the buffet table where a huge lechon* was just about to be carved, and smashing into a Ramon Orlina glass sculpture.
"That sculpture was of my breasts. It was a beautiful masterpiece that got destroyed!" China (sheathed in a showstopping strapless Saint Laurent) lamented. "What a waste! I was so looking forward to the lechon. I heard it was a special pig that had only eaten truffles its entire life and was flown in from Spain," Josie Natori (draped in a dress of her own design, of course) said with a sigh. Thankfully, before the intruder could do much damage to Diego's fabulous Brioni blazer, Brunomars-China's 250-pound Tibetan mastiff-leapt onto the intruder and according to onlookers "bit him in the ass."
But the intrepid journalist Karen Davila (astonishingly alluring in Armani) quashed that story. "Tommy, do your fact-checking, please! Brunomars did not bite him in the ass! He is still a puppy, and he leapt onto the men on the floor because he was trying to get a taste of the lechon! He bit the lechon on the ass!" Whoever's ass it was, Brunomars saved the day, because the intruder suddenly calmed down when he saw all the guests clustered around like they were watching Manny Pacquiao in the boxing ring. (Manny was actually at the party too, but he was in the basement having an intense chess match with China's son.) He ran out the front door without another word, jumped into a waiting black Toyota Alphard, and sped off before any of China's guards could stop him.
···
Charlie leaned against the bathroom sink in his suite at the Raffles Makati, holding a towel full of ice to his face to soothe the swelling. How in the world had he let things devolve to this point? He had snuck unnoticed into China Cruz's party, and managed to get Diego's attention when the singing began. Diego had suggested that they go upstairs to the library to talk things over, but things became heated when Diego had refused to reveal Astrid's whereabouts.
"I can assure you, Mr. Wu, that you can search every corner of Manila and all seven thousand islands of the Philippines, but you'll never find her. If she wanted you to know where she was, she would have told you," Diego had said rather nonchalantly.
"You don't understand! If she knew what was really happening, she'd come out of hiding. The situation has changed, and there's some vitally important information she needs to know!" he had pleaded.