Chapter Text
Typhoon season comes early to Shanghai: rain pelting into and overflowing out of the gutters, high winds swaying Alina’s building multiple alarming inches.
Still, the pedestrians on the street below make waterlogged attempts at being outdoors. Despite the rain lashing at an alarming sixty degree angle, foolhardy umbrellas grimly dash to bus stops and subway entrances, their owners underneath dressed in shorts and flip flops since, to add insult to injury, it is still unbearably hot. Alina, who has nowhere to be, watches them dart about like fish from the glass-wrapped terrace of her apartment, where the air conditioning has been stuck for the last week at a temperature programmed for a drier day. The crisp vowels of the weather forecaster’s CUC-trained standard Mandarin drift down the hall from the living room, where she had left the television playing for the last five hours after being unable to find the remote. She can just about make out the nation’s favourite weatherman announcing a further week of inclement weather before the channel moves on to a report on the latest corruption charges being levelled against the grandson of a retired member of the politburo.
Down on the street, a delivery man in orange livery nearly topples over on his motorbike as he takes the corner into the alley outside her building a little too fast. He's wearing a flimsy plastic rain covering over his bright uniform and looks a bit like a carrot in a produce bag. Sometimes when she’s in the vegetable market near her building, Alina thinks about tipping over one of the neatly piled stacks of fruit and watching them topple in all directions. Here, she briefly imagines the delivery driver losing control of the vehicle and tumbling through those around him like a bowling ball, but immediately feels guilty when her phone dings to notify her that a package was deposited for her in the lobby.
When she arrives downstairs to pop the parcel from the digital storage locker, she realises it is the first time in several days since she's been outside her apartment. Her wet shoes squeak loudly on the marble flooring, the tactile sense of it so intensely unpleasant she hastens back to the elevator nearly on pointe.
In her flat, she slits open the box with a kitchen cleaver to discover the package contains just another dress, ordered by Genya. Alina stuffs the plastic protective sleeve back into the box and kicks it in the direction of the overflowing recycling pile where it comes to a halt after thumping hollowly against several of its compatriots, also similarly autopsied. Genya, of course, immediately wants photographs so she slides out of her soft house clothes for the first time in days to take a few blurry photographs before a full length mirror. Satisfied, her friend replies with a reminder to moisturise.
Back when her biological father had still been dating Genya, he had said to Alina with some degree of annoyance: “She’s always trying to fix me, insisting I drink water, laying my clothes out for me." This was when the ardour between the two of them had cooled and all the facets of Genya's character that had seemed beneficial at the outset now grated. Her father, having the immaturity of a man whose prefrontal cortex had never developed past the age at which he had attained teen pop stardom, often complained about his girlfriends to Alina during their annual parent-child meetings but, in the case of Genya, his kvetching only made the other woman seem more attractive. So after that unhappy union had ended, Alina had decided to hold onto her as an informal personal stylist. Technically, Genya was just her friend, but Hollywood hanger-on types always felt rather anxious if their relationships were merely a form of commensalism.
Having completed her day’s exercise, Alina sloughs the new dress off like a lizard's skin and pulls on a sweatshirt that she had carelessly tossed over an armchair a few days ago. She wiggles her way back into her bedspread, which still holds the worm tunnel imprint of her body from the morning, and plugs in her cellphone.
The woman on behalf of whom the French prosecutorial office filed charges against Vasily turns out to be a semi-famous pop singer. The press is ruthless, tearing into everything about her public image and history. The hypersexuality of her lyrics and the album cover of her most recent EP — a photograph of her ass as she squats in a thong the colour of pepto bismol — are held up as damning evidence in the court of whore. The poisonous insinuations wind themselves through multiple editions of Page Six, the Sun, and the Daily Mail for the anglophones and Tayny Zvezd, Zhizn, and Komsomolskaya Pravda for the Russians. It's a strangely large amount of scrutiny for a British starlet who previously was largely known for a handful of DJ assisted EDM tracks and the fact that nobody quite understood why she was famous. When screenshots of prejudiced old tweets, a video of her kicking and spitting at the paparazzi in Rome, and old clips from interviews where the singer spoke raunchily about her fondness for having her hair pulled during sex filtered their way through both kpop Twitter and men's rights Reddit respectively, Alina understands. It is a masterwork of astroturf, as good as money could buy.
"Sure, he's an idiot playboy," remark the Russian tabloids, "but he's OUR idiot playboy."
"Your fave is racist sksksks," declares stan Twitter.
"Clearly she had sex with him and regretted it," says the manosphere.
It is also almost enough to distract one from the fact that Vasily has assiduously not returned to France — the scene of the crime and the jurisdiction in which the warrant was issued. A brief perusal of his private instagram shows her that the eldest Lantsov is currently floating on a yacht off the coast of Croatia, this blip barely derailing the endless bender that compromises his life.
Alina can't help but wonder, despite herself, what Aleksandr makes of all this. It occurs to her that his disgust at Vasily's actions, when they talked under the cover of night, could have been manufactured for her sensibilities. After all, he's managed to survive for years as a retainer of that notoriously chaotic family. Why would he be honest to her if he was planning to mount the defence of an accused sex criminal?
She knows his name now, but it's less helpful information than she realised. The world is full of Aleksandrs, and hers doesn't show up with a cursory Google — even with his last name. She supposes if she looks on VK or in Cyrillic there might be more results, but that feels both toilsome and privately humiliating. It’s the same with asking either Zoya or Nikolai for his contact. They're playing a game and if she tips her hand that far, she loses.
Besides, they don't have a relationship like that, do they? Where she has his number and knows where he is going to appear. Yet when she thinks about how statistically unlikely it is that she will ever serendipitously see him again, her face feels tight.
Bud. Chrysanthemum. Petal. Flower. Root.
Those are the words for sex in the Taiwanese erotica she scrolls through on her cellphone. She slides her fingers through her petals, penetrates her flower with a digit, and grinding against her pillow imagines Aleksandr's root filling her instead.
She wakes many hours later, tangled in her duvet, underwear dangling off one foot, to the metallic sound of the tumblers of the front door lock opening. It’s nearly midday already, Alina realises with a jolt as she sits up for the first time in twelve hours and when she stumbles out of bed, an entire empty tube of Pringles follows her onto the floor. The rest of the apartment is similarly exploded, but it’s much too late to salvage any of her dignity beyond pulling a few items of clothing off the still lit table lamp and dressing haphazardly.
“Ah-Lin,” her housekeeper calls into the flat, thick Northern accent blurring the Mandarin words.
Ana Kuya normally comes every other day, but had stayed home the last two weeks due to the inclement weather. Enough time for packets of crisps to build up in and next to Alina’s bed and for half of the walk-in wardrobe to be on the floor. She had originally been hired by Alina’s mother for domestic work back when all they could afford on the salary of a minor actress was a two bedroom flat in an old shikumen neighbourhood that has now long been torn down in favour of a subway station, but as her mother had shed her former home for mansions, so too had she replaced her old maid with a fleet of silent and polished service workers. No more countryside accents and illiteracy, only personal assistants and executive chefs.
It wasn’t until Alina had returned to Shanghai and promptly spent six months not leaving the flat, but also refusing to move back into the primary family home, did her mother summon the old auntie back from the Heilongjiang countryside where she had been raising her nieces, paying her the equivalent price of four pairs of shoes to watch over her eldest daughter, a grandmother bound to Alina by indifferent cash paid under the table.
“You bought so many things again?” Ana Kuya asks bluntly as she examines the piled delivery boxes in the foyer.
“Some of them were sent by Genya.”
Alina drifts down the hallway to meet her, but the housekeeper has already moved into the kitchen and now picks through the debris of a week’s worth of takeout lunches and dinners on the countertops — decapitated KFC boxes, straw-lanced milk tea cups, disembowelled packages of tofu pudding, and even an entire crayfish buffet, the gossamer plastic gloves stained orange and mixed with crustacean shells. Ana Kuya digs around for a saucepan, but all of them are piled into the sink and caked with the cratered remains of midnight personal hotpot dinners. She finally gives up and chucks a styrofoam tub of soy milk into the microwave instead. While it spins, she begins decanting the contents of her shopping bags with practised speed, plastic containers resolving themselves into a full breakfast spread, which she delivers all at once to the dining table.
“Eat up,” she orders before marching into the rest of the apartment to survey the extent of an unmitigated two weeks of biological warfare.
As Alina sticks a straw in her yoghurt, she hears the woman exclaim from the terrace: “Saints, why is it so cold in here?”
Despite being a woman of exactly Alina's generation, Tamar, like someone much older or younger, has the habit of sending all her messages as voice notes. They've piled up in her WeChat inbox, the little white bubbles resting there like accusatory lozenges. Although Alina hasn’t left the house — and some days not even the bed — in quite some while, there never seemed to be a good private moment to listen to them, so she had avoided thinking about them assiduously until one day, having scrolled so far she touched the bottom of instagram, she finally relents, averting her eyes as she taps play on the missives as if that would do anything.
"My dearest darling baby," says the Tamar of nearly a week ago in Mandarin, "do not forget, we're going to that Prada party on Saturday. If you don't show your face, I won't forgive you for a thousand years!"
Normally rather strait-laced in English, Tamar is one of those women who ups the melodrama when speaking Mandarin, slipping into a slightly unnatural sugary voice. Alina rolls her eyes and starts to compose a response — the highlighted pinyin text resolving swiftly into the words "Sorry, I already have plans" — before she checks the date and realises with a pulse of pure fear that she had dithered for so long that it is already Saturday.
Or as the next voice message from Tamar chides: "Headed out in twenty minutes. It's just down the block from you, so you better not be late."
Alina runs a tentative hand through her hair, which has passed through the valley of uncomfortably greasy into merely being slightly stiff. While oozing reluctantly out of bed and dreading having to think about what to wear, her foot slides slightly on a filmy bit of fabric. She grips it with her toes and tugs out a length of yellow jacquard from under the bed like a magician pulling handkerchiefs from a pocket. It's the dress Genya had sent her some weeks ago, slightly crumpled in several places due to its inglorious resting place, but still entirely wearable.
She arrives at the Rong Zhai manor seventy minutes late, hair still damp from a hurried last minute shower as her final can of dry shampoo had only made a few exhausted coughs when she had hopefully pumped it. It’s like a fish market inside, the women shimmering like peeled scales on crushed ice, their mouths painted red like serrated flesh. Technically the actual agenda for this party is the launch of a series of video installations created by a Chinese contemporary artist she's never heard of. Some guy from Fuzhou, although he could be from any part of the country based on Alina's quick survey of the homogenous 35mm footage he had spliced together; very little of his work would have looked out of place if it had been presented as a fashion advertisement instead, even though the artist statement claims his work is nominally about wealth inequality. Just as she is thinking this, she catches a snippet of a sub-editor at Vogue China commissioning the man to work on a future editorial feature.
When she had first seen this historic mansion, from the stained glass ceilings to the custom tile work and oiled blackwood inlays, she had felt awed and strangely patriotic, even though it was entirely built by Germans and restored by Italians. It's the sanitised fantasy of the Old Shanghai of her grandparent's childhood, one of the many little Chinese glamorizations of the past that have become so popular as of late. But like many other supposedly singular and expensive things, its allure has faded from repeat visits.
These sorts of fashion label "cultural event" parties are like automaker sponsored museum exhibitions: it would be gauche to have a mid-size Korean sedan revolving in the centre of a modern art gallery, how much more palatable to commission a Kara Walker sculpture on the Atlantic slave trade sponsored by Hyundai. Thus, the reminder to buy Prada is just a tickle in the consciousness here, a gentle imprinting of the idea that purchasing yet another colour-way of the world’s most uninteresting logo-ed bucket hat can impart on the Chinese nouveau riche the apocryphal glamour of their pre-war, pre-revolution antecedents. But, maybe the real fantasy, as old Mao or Marx would say, is the idea that anyone had ever, as a collective people, had any ownership over this kind of wealth fantasy.
She cranes her neck looking for Tamar, who retaliatorily hasn't responded to her last message. All around her people are parting and meeting and exchanging places. It isn't a crush, but she feels them pressing in on her on all sides, expectant, the air thick with their mingling perfumes. None of them are paying attention to anyone else, including the people they are directly conversing with, and yet they still all thrum with the anxious energy of wanting to be watched, wanting to be acknowledged, wanting to matter in this mansion full of people they seek to impress. She imagines them all dressing carefully before coming, conscious of the eyes that would be upon them even while alone. She can recognise most of the items they are wearing, like totems of status, and loathes herself for that awareness, while simultaneously feeling the pleasurable thrill of judging them for the little mundane lives each choice reveals.
Just to have something to do, she snags a flute of champagne from a tray gliding past and downs it quickly, coughing a little as the rush of bubbles goes down her throat. She fumbles in the direction of another shining silver saucer filled with hors d'oeuvres, snags a choice morsel, and tips the little glass back in one motion, the oysters sliding balm-like down her scratchy throat. She checks her phone again for any sign of Tamar, but there’s only a message, on mute, from her mother’s assistant notifying her of her parent’s anniversary in two weeks. She ignores the message assuming that, as always, the woman would just forge her signature on a sentimental note and attach it to a present that could plausibly come from Alina herself.
"Are you also alone?" inquires a hesitant voice at her elbow and she turns to see a shockingly tiny woman. When Alina doesn't respond immediately, the newcomer fiddles nervously with the rectangular strap of her white Lemaire croissant bag, which was likely not a replica because she had opted for the slightly uglier, budget-conscious paper-leather version.
"I'm waiting for my friend," she finally replies tersely, but the newcomer takes this as an invitation to converse and launches into a full-throated interrogation.
After a few moments of very dry small talk, Alina finds out that the girl is an assistant of a stylist from Shanxi. Still a little wide-eyed despite having already spent four years at Donghua studying fashion and so grateful it was almost palpable. (Apparently her employer had gifted her his unwanted invitation to this party — a dubious perk, given that it was in exchange for not paying her a living wage.) Alina wonders if she looks like that much of a saddo that this assistant of an assistant would approach her out of some kind of misplaced wishful wallflower fellow feeling.
The assistant-assistant has fused together the MBTI, blood type, astrology, and the Chinese zodiac into a general typology of personality and spends a good ten minutes quizzing Alina in detail about the particulars of her birth, preferences, and genetics to the point that she begins to feel like she’s trapped in an endless loop of bank security questions. At one point, after the assistant-assistant intimates that she should text her mother for a copy of her birth certificate, Alina simply begins making up answers to her detailed questions and watches as the young woman’s face becomes graver and graver with every additional data point. Eventually, the combined stigmata of scorpio-B-type-ESTJ-rat becomes too much for her and she finally subtly shifts her attention away from Alina to stare into the crowd hopefully, for someone with a better birth chart.
Now that she isn’t being interrogated, Alina actually takes a closer look at the girl. Compared to the primarily black-clad attendees of the party, the assistant-assistant is covered in bows and ribbons and there’s a deeply hopeful watchfulness to the way she’s waiting for somebody to notice her. Alina has met the type before, the sort of romantic young woman who secretly believes the stars and planets will align to deliver her a dashing young captain of industry who will sweep her away into a penthouse suite away from a life of drudgery.
She watches as the girl’s circle-lens-enhanced-stare hopefully pins itself on a handsome young man texting orthogonal to them. His almost trapezoidal black bucket hat could have made him look hairless, but instead emphasises his high cheekbones and full lips. Alina slowly realises she knows him and had last seen him at the birthday party, held at a terribly ugly club with an open bar, of the second princess of Huawei five years ago. She does not remember his name, but she does recall that their mothers have afternoon tea every other month together in order to gossip before they each go home to complain with relish about the other to their families. Alina makes the mistake of catching the man’s eye, and before she can whip her gaze away, he comes as if summoned.
The assistant-assistant preens, expectant, but his attention moves past her to focus squarely on Alina.
“Lina,” he says, giving the syllables of her name a mandarin lilt, “when did you come back from America?”
"Three years ago," she replies disinterestedly.
What follows is an intensely tedious recitation from the young man about the holidays he has embarked on since their last meeting. Alina becomes briefly engaged in the conversation because the places he has visited — Lhasa, Dalmatia, Rajapalayam, Pomerania — are slightly out of the usual rich kid grand tour itinerary, until she slowly realises that each region name checked is also a breed of dog and lapses back into indifference. Every time there is a pause the stylist opens her mouth to speak, but cannot get a word in edgewise as bucket hat guy entirely blanks her, leaving her gasping like a catfish on land. She looks expectantly at Alina, who derives a tiny amount of spiteful amusement out of ignoring the entreaty in her artificially blue eyes.
Out of a lack of things to say, but now mildly enjoying keeping the little assistant boxed out, Alina admits to the young man she doesn’t remember his name.
“To be honest,” he laughs, not particularly offended, “I only remember yours because you are on my mother’s spreadsheet.”
“Her what?”
Bucket hat guy explains that upon his graduation from university, his mother had compiled a list of every eligible young heiress he could marry and then gone to an astrologer to have his fortune read with each of the women on the list (medium luck with Alina). He produces the document, which has been printed out and scanned at least once and also contains the categories: “would I be willing to holiday with her family” (yes), “wealth level” (billionaire, but unsure if stepfather will leave her money), and “other considerations” (eurasian, has a US passport). The young man cheerfully assures Alina he is not after her hand in marriage and has in fact been fending off matrimonial minded aunties by owning sixteen dogs.
Tamar, who also has a line in the spreadsheet (strong luck, no, rich but assets could be seized, grandmother former Politburo member), finally shows up with her fiancé in tow. Upon returning home to China, she had reversed her way back into the closet and, after unspoken family pressure, accepted a ring from a very inoffensive management consultant working for McKinsey out of Singapore. He is the squarest man Alina has ever seen, with a head like a Platonic solid and a personality to match. She hopes he is also gay, but the one time she broached the topic of the engagement with Tamar, the other had merely said, “it’s nice that he is also Mongolian.” Either way, the man travels so much that this is a rare appearance. The happy couple’s arrival pushes the assistant stylist fully out of their circle and, after they all switch to speaking English, she finally recedes, trailing icy tears like a comet.
"Who was that, leh?" asks the fiancé.
"Nobody important,” replies bucket hat guy who, it turns out, had noticed the girl after all.
Around them, people have gotten drunk enough off the free alcohol to tentatively begin to dance. It is such an intensely off-putting sight that the group begins to strategise on their next location.
“Alina won’t let us come to her penthouse even though it’s next door,” Tamar complains.
“It’s not a penthouse, there are four other families who live on my floor.”
“But you moved in three years ago and you’ve never invited me once.”
“What would we even do there that we couldn’t do better elsewhere?”
“I dunno, like, eat hotpot?”
“It’s not America, we can just go to Haidilao.”
Finally, after far too much time spent debating, they settle on an after party at a graphic designer’s apartment. Alina feints towards the restroom, telling the others she will rejoin them at the address forwarded to her phone, but instead limps her way back home.
It is not entirely dark yet and a summer breeze swirls through the tree lined boulevards around her. The leaves rustle like the reeds that surround her grandfather’s house in Suzhou. Despite all the champagne hitting her mostly empty stomach, Alina knows the way home by instinct and only pauses to purchase a string of jasmine from an old lady with a roadside spread.
Just before she turns onto her street, she catches her heel on a gap in the pavement and, worse than falling, she merely wrenches off kilter and dangles, folded like laundry on a line.
Like clockwork, Mal calls her near the end of the month. Alina has been sleeping through the day lately, only waking up to the grainy dark of late evening to scavenge through the fridge for meals prepped by Ana Kuya or to pour hot water on Korean instant ramen, so the ringing bursts her awake. She lets the phone continue to vibrate against the bedspread for a few long moments as she blinks the crust of claustrophobic dreams from her eyes.
Her voice is still a little hoarse when she picks up, but it's not the worst Mal has heard.
"Alina!" His volume is much too loud. Thankfully he immediately launches into an executive précis of his recent exploits and it is a few minutes before she needs to say anything substantial in reply.
“How’s—” here she pauses, not remembering the woman’s name, “your girlfriend.”
“We broke up, but it was a long time coming.”
Apparently, the now ex-girlfriend had emailed Mal a one page cost-benefit analysis of their relationship (conclusion: we would be better off as friends) followed by a five page procedure for the break-up (instructions for everything from separating streaming subscriptions and deleting Instagram photos to the date and time when the moving company would be coming for her sofa). Alina can never parse Mal’s tone anymore, she doesn’t know what sort of reply she should give in the continuum between “I’m so sorry” and “fuck her.”
Finally, despite her best efforts to fend him off with questions about the breakup, Mal begins to inquire about what she has been up to and bats away her lies easily. He is speaking delicately now, trying to gauge whether she wants to kill herself, taking little mincing conversational steps like a metal detectorist on the beach. Knowing him, he probably has a guide open in some browser tab, what to expect when your friend is ideating.
She'd given up trying to reassure him that death-itis wasn't one of her problems. Why bother to actively plan a suicide when the state of arms control was so poor internationally? A few crossed wires in Pakistan and some ICBMs aimed at either India or Tibet could set her free — or at least irradiate her enough that she wouldn't feel so psychosomatic about feeling like shit all the time.
“You can’t keep living like this,” he informs her, Silicon Valley striver optimism leaking from the phone. “You need to find your purpose.”
“I don’t need to be for anything,” she snaps, upset.
“Listen,” he says finally. “You should come visit. I would love to have you.”
She hangs up.
Alina remembers that it is her parent’s wedding anniversary when her stepfather video calls the entire family chat at once. She keeps her camera off, but one after another the faces of her siblings pop into view.
Ouyang Zheng is in a boisterous mood, and clearly a few cups of rice wine in. “Children,” he says grandiosely, “look at this.” He flips to the front facing camera to show them a banquet table laden with dishes, which their mother is picking over and barely eating from, before panning it around the empty restaurant around them. Every year, he rents out the entire revolving top floor restaurant of the Oriental Pearl Tower for the anniversary and every year he shows them this view that they all have seen in person together and separately. “Nice, right?” In the corner of the screen, Alina watches her mother push a slice of white fish back and forth across her plate until it looks plausibly chewed at.
Her younger brother congratulates the two of them with some solemnity, and then immediately asks for a motorcycle.
“No,” their mother says, off-camera. “Too dangerous.”
“I’ll be careful!”
“That’s what you said when you got the dog,” is the unsympathetic reply.
“We are really responsible,” her sister pleads. “Heihei is so well behaved now.”
Heihei referred to the children’s pet Mongolian Bankhar, who was the special request three anniversaries ago. The two received the dog as a puppy and carelessly raised it for several months with a feeding schedule so inconsistent that it could have qualified as intermittent fasting if the staff hadn’t been supplementing their ministrations. Unsurprisingly, as the dog grew ever larger, the inexperienced household was unable to control its overwhelming wild enthusiasm and eventually it was banished to the guest house after eating a 28cm Hermes Kelly. Shortly thereafter, it was hit by a car at the tail end of a Gregorian New Year’s party and quietly replaced with a better trained genetic clone. The children were told that the dog’s brush with death and six month recuperation at Zhongshan Medical Hospital had caused it to reconsider its life choices and learn some lessons about good behaviour.
“You are both fourteen,” Alina reminds them. Chuyi and Yangting are not twins. They were merely born at the same time separately from two different American surrogates.
“Ah-Lin,” says her stepfather, sidestepping promising the teens anything. “Tell that Russian friend of yours, thank you for the invitation. It was a nice wedding.”
“She’s Kazakh,” Alina replies while distractedly clicking at a game on her phone. “I wasn’t sure why you even wanted to go.”
“I was looking to informally have a conversation with one of the Trio, so it was a fruitful excursion.”
Belatedly, she remembers that Patokh Chodiev is one of Zoya’s godparents, a dubious honour he shares jointly with Nazarbayev’s wife. She imagines for a moment, a squalling baby Zoya being baptised before a robber baron and a dictator’s wife. She doesn’t recall seeing either party at the wedding, but she had been rather distracted by — well it doesn’t matter now.
“That’s a sinking ship, father,” she says instead. “They bit off more than they could chew by listing ENRC on the London Stock Exchange.”
He is undeterred. “They have some valuable natural resource monopolies. We’re looking to get into the semiconductor market. Taiwan has gone unchallenged for too long.”
“What? That’s a terrible idea—” Alina is so startled she even tabs away from her game back to the video call. “You don’t want to get involved with that. What could you possibly even gain?”
Her stepfather merely smiles with all the serenity of a bodhisattva. “You’re still too young to understand.”
“How else would he get the money to pay for the good lives we live,” says her mother. Despite being a relatively intelligent woman, her mother’s general inability to understand the numerical scale of twenty billion dollars — of which a substantial amount is liquid — against even the most profligate household spending, often gave Alina tension headaches.
“He doesn’t need to be a breadwinner, he can retire now.”
As always, however, the other woman’s hearing is selective. “Speaking of breadwinners, how is Mal?”
“He’s fine.”
“I’ve always liked him,” her mother muses. “I hear he makes 400k a year now.”
“How do you even know this?”
“I speak to his mother, of course.” The auntie information network is, unfortunately, faster than the speed of sound.
Alina can feel some sort of trap coming. “Does that matter?”
“You could marry him.”
“I don’t need his money, though.”
“But you don’t want to be married to a loser.”
“And earnings potential signifies in this?”
“It’s like Yifang’s daughter, they got divorced so quickly because his ego couldn’t handle it.” As with many Chinese mothers, ‘divorce’ is the true two character explicative for her.
In this however, Alina has hidden trump, which she deploys with a certain amount of glee. “Unfortunately for you, mama, he’s quit his job to become an indie game developer.”
After burning out as an engineer at a triple A game studio, Mal had decided to take a soul crushing role at an e-commerce website notorious for workers rights abuses and fast delivery times, but he had only lasted six financial quarters before that too became intolerable. After spending a sleepless night listening to podcasts issued by a self-proclaimed Burmese Zen master, he had an epiphany of some sort and, like St Augustine, had quit his job the next day to pursue his true spiritual passion. He is now working on a metroidvania... or something.
“Heavens, what a terrible idea, you must stop him at once.”
“I don’t have any influence on him in particular and, even if I did, he’s in California.” Alina is smugly buoyant.
“That’s why you must go to him immediately,” her mother replies, already typing furiously on her phone, almond French tips clicking against the screen. “Daidai is booking you a ticket to SFO. Ana Kuya will pack your bags. My driver will take you to Pudong.”
“What—! Are you— are you trying to reverse international kidnap me?” Alina tries to get the word ‘no’ out but, like always with her mother, finds herself beyond the ability to reach for any coherent words to express herself further.
“You aren’t doing anything with your time anyway,” her mother replies, setting down her phone decisively.