Family Trust Read online

  Jack

  * * *

  Jack, back from the beyond. A few billion (US dollars, Fred hoped).

  And Reagan Kwon.

  Reagan Kwon, like Jack, was part of Asia’s economic royalty, though considerably more colorful. Unlike Jack’s parents, who were notoriously private, the elder Kwons were the sort of wealthy couple who loved to see their names on buildings and charity invitations, and they actively encouraged their cosseted only son to make a similar mark for himself. Reagan had started out at Harvard a social star, flying his entire section of ninety to Vegas on a chartered 747 for his birthday. No one was exactly certain where the Kwon money originated, though there was gossip of precious metals and mining and the old shah of Iran. There was even a kidnapped family member or two in the lineage, as well as rumors of lopped-off pinky toes; whispers of the entire ordeal having been orchestrated by an ex-mistress, a stunning former Miss Hong Kong frozen out by the family after what she still insisted was a perfectly innocent pregnancy scare.

  Reagan had barely interacted with Fred during school, though of course he knew Jack. While Reagan was more popular, Jack’s family had the greater fortune; that equation meant it was the former who doggedly pursued the friendship expected by both families. Reagan invited Jack to all his parties and once went as far as to ship a Japanese blow-up doll to Jack’s apartment at the Mandarin in a misguided attempt at a practical joke. The box had been labeled as a grandfather clock, and Jack, assuming it was an antique sent by his parents, enlisted the help of an assistant concierge to unpack the deceptively heavy carton. He’d been so humiliated once the oversize figure had been revealed, and at such a loss to explain its origin, that he could only think to call Fred, who had hurried over. Jack was paranoid about being photographed or captured on security cameras with the offending object, so after some struggle Fred brought down the doll himself using the service elevator and heaved it into the trash bin headfirst, pausing briefly to admire the lifelike limbs and chest. Noting that even for an occasion such as this, Reagan had purchased the very best.

  Fred knew peripherally that since graduation Reagan had calmed somewhat and that in the past few years he and Jack had participated together in multiple investments, mostly Asian copycats of US start-ups. People like Reagan and Jack (or at least their family office advisors) generally didn’t bother with less than 20 percent annualized returns, preferably with tacit government backing. Whatever it was they were proposing, it meant serious money.

  The rattle of heels. Erika had excused herself from her customer and was striding toward him, shoes pounding in even rhythm. “Do you see?” she asked. She lowered her voice. “Right in front of you.”

  Fred peered over her shoulder. The wife’s untouched champagne sat on top of the glass Cartier display, water pooling around its base. It appeared to have been abandoned in her quest for comfortable seating—she was now sunk into a fat chair in the far corner, the Elizabeth Locke bracelet still wrapped around her hands. Fred noticed the security guard’s eyes pass over. One couldn’t be too careful these days, no matter how moneyed or white the patron.

  “The glass?”

  Erika made a grimace. “Disgusting,” she hissed. Fred knew she’d have to clean everything when her customers left, rinsing the crystal in the crude sink in the back and wiping down the counters. She bore a violent animosity toward such tasks, insisting they were beneath her job description.

  “Don’t worry about it. Shouldn’t you be getting back to your customer? You made a big sale, right? Congratulations.”

  She shrugged. “We’re almost done. Here.” She cut over a business card from her palm. Erika asked all her customers for them, looking up the names after work. She kept only the prime specimens, the companies and titles she thought Fred might be impressed by. “This one’s nothing compared to you. He works in mortgages. I should tell him what you do.”

  Fred suppressed a groan. “Please don’t bring up my job with your customers.”

  “But so many of them are in your industry,” she complained. “It’s ridiculous, this resistance you have. And also don’t you see now, how the wives behave? It makes me so angry that they think they’re better than me, when . . . well, we’re kind of engaged, aren’t we? We basically live together; all my things are at your place. And the men, I’m quite certain a lot of them would be very interested to know I actually understand something of their work! You know my style, I always do better when I’m chatting as a friend, not as staff. How do you think I sold this watch? Michael will be thrilled we finally got rid of it. It’s been sitting in the display for almost a year!”

  “I know you’re an excellent salesperson. That’s why you don’t need to mention anything about me or Lion Capital.”

  “But Amanda talks about her husband all the time, and he’s just a regular broker at TD Ameritrade. Amanda says he’s proud that she talks about him. He even jokes that she should give out his card to customers!”

  “Good for Amanda’s husband. Not for me.”

  “This is so stupid.” Erika’s mouth twisted with displeasure. “I’m just proud of you!” And she abruptly swiveled, gliding back.

  This was his fault, Fred understood. He had created this problem. From the beginning of their relationship Erika had been so eager for him to be a certain type of man (the finance god, the technologist, the power broker) that over time he’d developed a bad habit of aggrandizing his work, relaxing all the anxieties his ex-wife had worked so hard to instill. Fred Huang, the Venture Capital God! He knew that how he’d represented his particular vantage point in the overwrought matrix that made up Silicon Valley’s power structure hadn’t been—if one wanted to be brutally fair—particularly accurate. But it had all been so easy, as Erika lacked even a rudimentary understanding of the caste system that ruled his world. Didn’t he rate a little fun, after what he’d been through with Charlene? Didn’t his ego deserve some time in the sun?

  Charlene, a fellow HBS alum, had known implicitly where Fred’s job lay in his industry’s pecking order: near its swampy bottom. Lion Capital, the investment arm of its larger parent company—Lion Electronics, the technology behemoth headquartered in Taiwan—awarded its employees none of the traditional perks of venture capital, such as carried interest or management fees, where the real fortunes were made. Lion was corporate venture capital, which meant it invested cash from its parent’s balance sheet and, as it generally went for the industry, paid modestly. While a senior partner at a traditional venture firm like Tata Packer could be expected to take home anywhere between $2 and $4 million per annum, Fred—the second-highest-ranked investment professional at Lion—garnered a mere fraction: $325,000, a pittance in Silicon Valley! Nowhere close to what was needed to buy a house in Hillsborough or responsibly stay any longer than a few days at Post Ranch Inn or Amangiri.

  While with his ex this fact had lain between them, Charlene’s sighs as she leafed through Architectural Digest a tacit reminder of his ongoing parity with the average corporate chump, with Erika it had been entirely deprived of oxygen from the start. She never saw his pay stubs and didn’t have a loose network of hundreds of classmates as well as a particularly haughty cousin who worked in private equity. The only proof of status Erika had ever required was his title (managing director) and industry (venture capital), and her hearty approval had gushed with full force. Urging him, as she had with each delighted smile, to brag with reckless bravado:

  Why wouldn’t I be able to find the wrapping paper at Target? I did a $250 million IPO last quarter, didn’t I?

  Griffin Keeles and I flew on a private plane; it was no big deal.

  Teslas are a dime a dozen. I could buy one whenever I want. Could afford to get you one too!

  Exquisite Erika, who was at her most appealing when captivated by his swagger; the loose hazelnut curls and light filtered through green eyes, a thrilling contrast to the plain blacks and dark browns of the Asians he’d mostly dated before. Her youth set off by the classic luxury of
her wardrobe, the result of careful utilization of employee sales and double-discount days. Her elegant posture and doe-like features and spectacular breasts; more than adequate compensation for the occasional crudity.

  For outside the learned confines of the retail environment, Erika could be unpolished, even crude. She was the only woman Fred knew who regularly flipped the bird at reckless drivers, and given even the most minor of lapses, she regularly barked at service staff. At times, Fred almost liked the crassness. Charlene had possessed perfect manners, relentlessly honed during the course of a childhood spent in a twelve-bedroom turreted monstrosity in Bergen County, while the lone other white woman he’d seriously dated before Erika—Tiffany Cantor, a college volleyball player turned ad sales rep at Google—had been uniformly sweet to the point of near sickening. Gushing “thank you so much” nonstop at restaurants, impressed beyond belief that the food they ordered and would be paying for was actually being delivered to their table. And if the establishment happened to be ethnic, always layering on an extra “And everything tasted wonderful.”

  Once, when Fred was in a bad mood, he’d informed Tiffany that most of the cheap restaurants they patronized didn’t care what she thought of the food, and he could certainly vouch that the Chinese ones didn’t. As if the Cantonese chefs and Hispanic line cooks had been waiting their entire lives for a pretty Caucasian girl from Huntington Beach to cast her approval over their cuisine! Tiffany had blushed a deep crimson. This was just how she’d learned to behave, she explained, to establish incontrovertibly that she was a nice person before the other party invariably docked her for being attractive and thin and blond. “You wouldn’t be able to understand,” she added, before quickly raising her hands to her mouth in horror. Because a truth had accidentally materialized that until then had always lain between them unspoken: that she as a young white woman was desirable in America, and Fred as an Asian man was not.

  Fred of course was already aware of this stereotype, had discussed it ad nauseam with other friends over the years—first with indignation, then with rage, and then with the mild acceptance that turned to pride when he walked into bars and restaurants with Tiffany. He was proud of his outward refutation of it—he was six two, lean but built, and conventionally successful; he had no difficulties attracting women. So he’d been surprised to feel the warmth of inarticulate anger and shame return so quickly in the midst of what had at the time been his greatest romantic triumph to date; he rapidly shifted topics, and they’d proceeded as if it were just a throwaway comment, already left by the wayside. When they arrived back at the apartment, Tiffany went after him with a focused determination that seemed to prove she’d understood the unexpected candor of her statements; the fact that she went down on him—a service she had rendered only once prior in the three months they had dated—solidified his theory.

  None of this was a problem with Erika. Erika didn’t like most ethnic restaurants, and in particular the cheap authentic ones, an admission that in native Bay Area circles was viewed with the same muted horror as Holocaust denial or the use of trans fats. She’d been twenty-seven when she emigrated from Hungary, and her impression of dating culture in the United States was constructed around entirely different ideals: red roses and lobster entrées and warmed desserts à la mode. She had little excitement for popular peer-reviewed eateries with $7 tapas and yuzu sangria—to her these were just cheap outings, designed to land her in bed with the least amount of spent resources.

  Unlike past girlfriends, Erika never offered to pay for meals or activities, which Fred thought he’d mind more than he did. Each time he treated, she was graciously thankful though not gratuitously so, which he found he preferred to the usual tedious routine of wallet fumbling. The check lingering awkwardly on the table at the end of the night, his date reaching into her bag after a precisely timed delay; the halfhearted attempt to offer a credit card before it was tucked away. The woman sheepishly thanking him after it was all over with a small undertone of resentment, as if Fred were personally responsible for making her violate some bullshit tenet of female equality she didn’t really believe in the first place.

  Erika simply sat, watched him pay, and said thank you. She wasn’t complicated about these things, she said. American women complicated too much.

  * * *

  In the parking lot, as they walked toward his car, Erika once again brought up her father’s upcoming birthday. “Are you going to send him a present?” she asked. “And maybe something small for my mother?” When he was quiet, she hounded on. “Because there’s only so much time left, to ship economy. Of course if you still want to buy something next week you can, but then you’ll have to use FedEx, pay for overnight. It’s a waste of money, no? Better to spend on the actual gift.”

  They entered the BMW—a decade-old 3 Series Fred was determined to drive until he had enough in his house fund to justify an auxiliary splurge on a Big Swinging Dick vehicle—and instead of answering he turned up the volume on NPR. Even before they’d met, Fred had never liked the sound of György and Anna Varga, two supposed Budapest intellectuals who, despite regularly espousing the superior merits of Socialism, made it clear they fully expected to spend their retirement in spacious comfort in sunny California. The elder Vargas regarded their two adult children as the primary means of attaining said goal, and they had practically shoved Nora—Erika’s older sister—into the arms of a distant American friend of a friend thirty years her senior who had been visiting Budapest on a hall pass. The fact that Nora had subsequently become impregnated by Dominik—who then divorced his wife and moved Nora to Northern California, only to freak out and repeat the entire scenario anew three years later—had been disappointing only in that Nora had merely managed to wrest a studio apartment in Fremont for herself and baby Zoltan out of the deal.

  When György and Anna booked their first visit to the Bay Area, Nora and Erika had obsessed for weeks prior to their arrival, going as far as to rent a black Cadillac Escalade to transport them in lavish comfort. Eager to impress, Fred had invited the group to Seasons, a Michelin two star serving upscale French-Californian in Los Gatos, where he’d ordered the tasting menu with full wine pairings for the table. When the bill arrived, Fred had fully expected to pay—had already estimated in his mind the exact hit in terms of tax and tip—but it still galled to not even have György make an attempt for the leather folder, especially as he and Anna had been the only two to opt for the caviar and black truffle supplements.

  “Hello?” Erika poked him between the ribs. “Did you hear what I said?”

  The light outside was undergoing the rapid shift from warm to cool as they approached San Francisco; there was a chill in the car, and goose bumps rose along his arm. Fred raised the window to buy a few seconds of time.

  “Your father,” he said finally, “is an idiot.”

  Erika sighed, as if she’d anticipated this. “I told you already, you misunderstood what he meant about the Jews. It’s cool in Hungary to be Jewish. The most successful Hungarians are all Jewish.”

  “And the Chinese—excuse me, I mean, Orientals—are all criminals.”

  “He didn’t say that. He just isn’t used to them. Fred, please.”

  When their group had first entered Seasons, Fred had assumed György’s gaping to be directed at the opulent yet modern decor—the broad redwood beams and pressed gold leaf ceiling, the wine cellar made entirely of glass and visible from the dining room—and felt proud of his choice. The restaurant was a reflection on him, after all: proof to Erika’s parents that he had the culture and resources to look after their daughter in a splendid fashion. Until then, he’d made a deliberate point of ignoring certain particulars regarding their interactions, such as a habit of communicating with him as if he were an exotic animal of unknown provenance, enunciating at a louder decibel; classifying their confusion over certain adjectives as his language deficiency, not theirs. It was only after overhearing Erika’s gently worded explanations during the sea bream ap
petizer course that Fred realized György assumed they’d been taken to some sort of lower-class establishment. That György had expected the best restaurants in California to be filled with Caucasian faces, not yellow and brown.

  “In Hungary, you have to understand that most of the Chinese, they are not so rich. And there are barely any Indians. He was just confused, Fred. He didn’t know.”

  “Uh-huh. And just how confused is György over you dating someone Chinese?”

  “He understands . . .” Erika hesitated. “He understands that in America things are different.”

  “In America? What if you were back in Budapest?”

  “In Hungary, of course it would never happen.”

  “That’s an insane statement to make.” He jammed angrily at the nearest button on the dashboard, which unfortunately turned the air-conditioning on full blast. “Don’t you understand how racist that makes you sound?”

  Erika remained calm. To her racist wasn’t such a bad word, unless used in conjunction with uneducated, which she found far more insulting. “It is the truth,” she said. “How can someone be so angry over the truth?”

  “Because it’s ignorant. And based on the worst stereotypes I’ve had to battle against my entire life, that Asian men are less desirable than every other race, because we’re passive, and small, and not worthy of female attention.”

  “But I don’t have those thoughts,” she protested. “It’s just that I never knew any Chinese before I moved here. And I’m sorry, but it is true, that in Budapest they do crime. Though they mostly keep it between themselves,” she added charitably. “In Hungary, if you bring a gift to someone’s house, the first thing they will check for when they are alone is whether it was made in China. Because then they know whether you paid a lot or a little.”

  “Oh really? So everything made in China is cheap? So your father wouldn’t like it if I bought him an iPhone?” That had been the ongoing hint for Christmas the year before, with Erika laying the groundwork in September and campaigning through mid-December. Fred had shipped György and Anna the joint present of an iPad mini and a $100 iTunes gift card instead. Collectively the two had cost less than one smartphone, and that wasn’t even including the continuing overhead of a data plan.