Rich People Problems-Kwan 2017 (WWT)

CHAPTER ONE
LONDON, ENGLAND
Wandi Meggaharto Widjawa was in London with her mother, Adeline Salim Meggaharto,
supposedly to watch her nephew Kristian compete in a fencing tournament, but secretly
they were both there for their triannual visits to the clinic of Dr. Ben Stork on Harley
Street, who was considered by the most discerning filler addicts to be the Michelangelo of
Botox. So deft were his hands at plunging needles into fine lines, fragile cheekbones, and
delicate nasolabial folds, even his patients with the thinnest skins never bruised, and so
subtle was his artistry that every patient visiting his clinic departed with the guarantee
that they would be able to close both eyelids completely should they ever choose to
blink. *1
As Wandi sat in the elegant Hollywood Regency–style waiting room of the clinic in her
floral embroidered Simone Rocha dress, waiting for her mother to get her usual combo of
Botox ® , Juvéderm Voluma ® , Belotero Balance ® , Restylane Lyft ® , and Juvéderm
Volbella ® injections, she paged through the latest issue of British Tattle. She always
flipped to the back of the magazine first to look at the Spectator section, which featured
party pictures from the only parties that mattered throughout the realm. She loved
scrutinizing all the English socialites from head to toe—the women looked like either chic
swans or unmade beds (there was no middle ground).
This month’s Spectator section was quite disappointing—nothing but photos from the
twenty-first birthday bash of yet another kid named Hugo, the launch party for yet
another Simon Sebag Montefiore book, and some boring country wedding. She could
never understand why all these aristocrats loved getting married in decrepit little English
country churches when they could have the most lavish nuptials at Westminster Abbey or
St. Paul’s Cathedral. *2 Suddenly Wandi’s eyes zeroed in on the obligatory photo of the
bride and groom. As was the custom with all the wedding shots in British Tattle, the
couple was pictured posing underneath the stone archway of the modest rectory
festooned with a few anemic sprigs of roses, sporting painful grins as rice was being
pelted at them. But the thing that stood out to Wandi was that the bride was Asian, and
this immediately triggered an alert.