“She had witnessed firsthand the scars that blatant parental interference could inflict; why, even those assembled here were a reminder of that —Daisy’s relationship with her sons was tenuous at best, while Lorena’s eldest daughter no longer spoke to her after immigrating to Auckland with her Kiwi husband.”
“Eleanor had a long-held theory about men. She truly believed that for most men, all that talk of ‘being in love’ or ‘finding the right one’ was absolute nonsense. Marriage was purely a matter of timing, and whenever a man was finally done sowing his wild oats and ready to settle down, whichever girl happened to be there at the time would be the right one.”
“This was the way things had been since their childhood as neighbors growing up on Serangoon Road, mainly because, coming from a Chinese-speaking family, Carol had always felt inferior to Eleanor, who was brought up speaking English first.”
“Within thirty seconds of learning their name and where they lived, she would implement her social algorithm and calculate precisely where they stood in her constellation based on who their family was, who else they were related to, what their approximate net worth might be, how the fortune was derived, and what family scandals might have occurred within the past fifty years.”