THE SADDEST GIRL SINCE THE SONG DYNASTY

THE SECOND LAST SUPPER - PART I

Ander's revived but languid efforts the next morning to persuade Lady Zhao to let him spend his Saturday night playing on his tablet in a dark room came to an end when she made it clear the meal was likely to be paid for by someone else. She explained that Dor-Yen, the night's social catalyst, was a Singaporean in China hoping to make it rich fast and retire at forty. In an effort to cultivate new and ideally lucrative contacts soon after arriving in the country, he had allocated time and a budget for organizing large dinners, dragging colleagues and acquaintances of acquaintances – anyone who would take his business card, in fact – out for meals. Although this was a centuries-old Chinese tradition, he and the many others who had adopted this strategy in the modern era had the wonders of instant group messaging to pursue it with an unseen efficiency. And Dor-Yen had made real friends, had met people he was happy to spend time eating and drinking around in return for zero or otherwise unquantifiable monetary yield. Lady Zhao happened to be one of them.

"Does he look like a pop star?" Bingbing asked.

Unfortunately, Lady Zhao clarified, Dor-Yen was not technically one of the single guys she had promised would be there and available for vigorous courting that night to help Bingbing forget the boyfriend who had so exhaustively dumped her. Dor-Yen had brought with him from Southeast Asia's sharpest peninsular his fiancée, a humorless but stunning woman called Sooming whose contributions to table conversations were frequently passive aggressive in tone and content. He had proposed marriage a month before his scheduled emigration, and despite spirited dissenting counsel from her family, she had said yes and agreed to go with him. However, after two years, the couple had neglected to actually marry, and according to Lady Zhao's more creative rumor sources, Sooming had grown tired of the city, Dor-Yen had grown weary of Sooming, and they were due at any moment to go supernova as a couple. If Bingbing was corrupt enough, she offered, Bingbing was welcome to try and hasten destiny. Bingbing said she wasn't sure what Lady Zhao was saying.