Rich People Problems-Kwan 2017 (WWT)

million, forty if the market ever recovered. Split five ways between her children, that
meant his father would only inherit six or seven million at the most if the house was ever
sold. Far, far less than what his parents were now in debt for.
For years, they had taken out loan after loan, and Oliver had spent his youth living the
life of a rich man’s son, sent abroad to the best schools money could buy—from Le Rosey
to Oxford. But after the Barings crash, he found himself in the unthinkable position of
having to work for a living. Oliver had always existed among the world’s point-one
percent crowd, and very few people understood the special hell of having to live in a world
where every single person around you was staggeringly rich but you were not.
No one knew the degrees of subterfuge he took to keep up appearances for the sake of
his family and career. There were the ballooning interest payments on all their bank
loans. There were ten credit cards that he had to play Russian roulette with month after
month. There were the mortgages on his parents’ hutong in Beijing, his flat in London,
and the condo in Singapore. Last year had been the worst, when his mother had been
forced to sell off the legendary T’sien jade brooch along with other family heirlooms in
order to pay for unexpected medical expenses. The bills kept coming, and they were
endless. And now Kitty was threatening to renege on her gargantuan decorating bills—
bills he had signed off on. If he couldn’t work a miracle and get Kitty her title, he knew his
whole life, his family, his career, his reputation—all would come crashing down.