Free Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

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
    Astrid arrived home from her Paris sojourn in the late afternoon, early enough to
     give three-year-old Cassian his bath while Evangeline, his French au pair, looked
     on disapprovingly (
Maman
was scrubbing his hair too forcefully, and wasting too much baby shampoo). After
     tucking Cassian into bed and reading him
Bonsoir Lune
, Astrid resumed the ritual of carefully unpacking her new couture acquisitions and
     hiding them away in the spare bedroom before Michael got home. (She was careful never
     to let her husband see the full extent of her purchases every season.) Poor Michael
     seemed so stressed out by work lately. Everyone in the tech world seemed to work such
     long hours, and Michael and his partner at Cloud Nine Solutions were trying so hard
     to get this company off the ground. He was flying to China almost every other week
     these days to supervise new projects, and she knew he would be tired tonight, since
     he had gone straight to work from the airport. She wanted everything to be