Your Library Podcasts News. Stream Top Podcasts. Stream the best podcasts from your favorite stations. See All. Help Privacy Policy Terms of Use. What others have said about Amber Pacific: "Matt Young's distinctive voice can be heard on all of Amber Pacific's albums through 's Truth In Sincerity, before his departure in early This return to original form already has fans buzzing with excitement of what could potentially be on the horizon for the group in the very near future.
Amber Pacific is a pop-punk band formed in Contact Amber Pacific. Streaming and Download help. Report this album or account. If you like Amber Pacific, you may also like:. An ambitious pop song cycle about human loneliness and fear, thick with harmonies and buoyed by tight musicianship.
Big, sparkling pop music from The Aces, with hooks for days and glimmering instrumentation. A massive punk record made for the height of summer or drowning out the rest of the world. Not at all. How horrible , Eleanor thought. She had always found Asian girls with American accents to be quite ridiculous. They all sounded like they were faking it, trying to sound so ang mor.
Astrid knew that her aunt was prying, so she felt like she had to present Rachel in the best possible light. Eleanor was nonplussed. A professor! Nicky was dating a professor! Oh my, was this woman older than him? A cunning, calculating older woman. This was sounding worse and worse. Stanford is a great university for anywhere. Rachel is very intelligent and capable, and completely down-to-earth. So, her name was Rachel.
Eleanor paused. But how was she going to get it without Astrid getting suspicious? Suddenly she had a thought. Do you know how she spells her surname? I thought your mother bought a unit here as well. Your parents have so many properties around the world, unlike your poor uncle Philip and me. We just have the house in Sydney and this small little pigeonhole.
Do you need something to get back to sleep? I take fifty milligrams of amitriptyline every night, and then an extra ten milligrams of Ambien if I really want to sleep through the night. Her gamble had paid off. Those two cousins were thick as thieves. Nick brought it up so nonchalantly, as he was sorting the laundry on the Sunday afternoon before their big trip. And oh, by the way, they had just been made aware of her existence too.
Rachel, you know how overbearing Chinese parents can be. I mean, my mom knew about you five minutes after our first date, and you were sitting down to dinner with her—enjoying her winter melon soup—like, two months later.
Did they live through the Great Depression? Nick laughed, shaking his head. Sometimes Nick could be so cryptic, and his explanation made no sense to her. Not really. He knew he had screwed things up royally with his mother. He had waited too long, and when he called to break the news officially about his relationship with Rachel, his mother had been silent.
Ominously silent. Not sure how to get out of this quagmire, Nick sought the counsel of his great-aunt, who was always so good at sorting out these sorts of matters. Great-aunt Rosemary advised him to book into a hotel first, but emphasized that he must arrange to introduce Rachel to his parents on the day of his arrival. Perhaps he should invite his parents out to a meal with Rachel, so they could meet on neutral territory. Someplace low-key like the Colonial Club, and better to make it lunch instead of dinner.
Only after Rachel had been properly received at Friday-night dinner should the topic of where they might stay be broached. Nick decided to keep these delicate arrangements from Rachel. He wanted Rachel to be prepared to meet his family, but he also wanted her to create her own impressions when the time came. Still, Astrid was right.
Rachel needed some sort of primer on his family. But how exactly could he explain his family to her, especially when he had been conditioned his whole life never to speak about them?
Nick sat on the floor, leaning against the exposed-brick wall and putting his hands on his knees. There are three intermarried branches, and to outsiders it can seem a bit overwhelming at first. I have loudmouth uncles, eccentric aunts, obnoxious cousins, the whole nine yards. Everyone will adore you, Rachel. I just know it. Rachel sat quietly on the bed beside the pile of towels still warm from the dryer, trying to soak in everything Nick had said.
This was the most he had ever talked about his family, and it made her feel a little more assured. Back in high school, she had endured dreary meals in the fluorescent-lit dining rooms of her classmates, dinners where not more than five words were exchanged between parent and child. Back when she was a child, it seemed like every year or so her mother would answer a classified ad in World Journal , the Chinese-American newspaper, and off they would go to a new job in some random Chinese restaurant in some random town.
Images of all those tiny boarding-house rooms and makeshift beds in cities like East Lansing, Phoenix, and Tallahassee flashed through her head. I was so young when I had you—nineteen—we were able to be like sisters. Sad to say, but I was never very close to my parents either.
In China, there was no time to be close—my mother and father worked from morning till night, seven days a week, and I was at school all the time.
You have to look at this the Chinese way. In Asia, there is a proper time for everything, a proper etiquette. Like I said before, you have to realize that these Overseas Chinese families can be even more traditional than we Mainland Chinese. Has it occurred to you that they might be quite poor?
Not everyone is rich in Asia, you know. They could be devout Buddhists, you know. You know Nick. You know he is a decent man, and though he may have kept you secret for a while, he is doing things the honorable way now. Maybe she was being too hard on Nick. She had let her insecurities get the better of her, and her knee-jerk reaction was to assume that Nick waited so long to tell his parents because he was somehow embarrassed about her.
But could it be the other way around? Was he embarrassed of them? Rachel remembered what her Singaporean friend Peik Lin had said when she Skyped her and excitedly announced that she was dating one of her fellow countrymen. Astrid arrived home from her Paris sojourn in the late afternoon, early enough to give three-year-old Cassian his bath while Evangeline, his French au pair, looked on disapprovingly Maman was scrubbing his hair too forcefully, and wasting too much baby shampoo.
After tucking Cassian into bed and reading him Bonsoir Lune , Astrid resumed the ritual of carefully unpacking her new couture acquisitions and hiding them away in the spare bedroom before Michael got home. She was careful never to let her husband see the full extent of her purchases every season. Poor Michael seemed so stressed out by work lately. Everyone in the tech world seemed to work such long hours, and Michael and his partner at Cloud Nine Solutions were trying so hard to get this company off the ground.
He was flying to China almost every other week these days to supervise new projects, and she knew he would be tired tonight, since he had gone straight to work from the airport. She wanted everything to be perfect for him when he walked through the door. Astrid popped into the kitchen to chat with her cook about the menu, and decided they should set up dinner on the balcony tonight.
She lit some fig-apricot-scented candles and set a bottle of the new Sauternes she had brought back from France in the wine chiller.
Michael had a sweet tooth when it came to wines, and he had taken a liking to late-harvest Sauternes. She knew he was going to love this bottle, which had been specially recommended to her by Manuel, the brilliant sommelier at Taillevent. To the majority of Singaporeans, it would seem that Astrid was in store for a lovely evening at home. Astrid Leong was meant to be the chatelaine of a great house. Her head housekeeper should be anticipating every one of her needs, while she should be getting dressed up to go out with her powerful and influential husband to any one of the exclusive parties being thrown around the island that night.
After-school hours were consumed by a team of tutors preparing you for the avalanche of weekly exams usually in classical Mandarin literature, multivariable calculus, and molecular biology , followed on the weekends by piano, violin, flute, ballet, or riding, and some sort of Christian Youth Fellowship activity. If you did well enough, you entered the National University of Singapore NUS and if you did not, you were sent abroad to England American colleges were deemed substandard.
The only acceptable majors were medicine or law unless you were truly dumb, in which case you settled for accounting. After graduating with honors anything less would bring shame to the family , you practiced your vocation for not more than three years before marrying a boy from a suitable family at the age of twenty-five twenty-eight if you went to med school.
At this point, you gave up your career to have children three or more were officially encouraged by the government for women of your background, and at least two should be boys , and life would consist of a gentle rotation of galas, country clubs, Bible study groups, light volunteer work, contract bridge, mah-jongg, traveling, and spending time with your grandchildren dozens and dozens, hopefully until your quiet and uneventful death.
Astrid changed all this. Astrid simply made her own rules, and through the confluence of her particular circumstances—a substantial private income, overindulgent parents, and her own savoir faire—every move she made became breathlessly talked about and scrutinized within that claustrophobic circle. In her childhood days, Astrid always disappeared from Singapore during the school holidays, and though Felicity had trained her daughter never to boast about her trips, a schoolmate invited over had discovered a framed photo of Astrid astride a white horse with a palatial country manor as a backdrop.
Actually, it was a manor in England, the stallion was a pony, and the schoolmate was never invited again. In her teen years, the chatter spread even more feverishly when Celeste Ting, whose daughter was in the same Methodist Youth Fellowship group as Astrid, picked up a copy of Point de Vue at Charles de Gaulle Airport and came upon a paparazzi photograph of Astrid doing cannonballs off a yacht in Porto Ercole with some young European princes.
Astrid returned from school holidays that year with a precociously sophisticated sense of style. While other girls in her set became mad for head-to-toe designer brands, Astrid was the first to pair a vintage Saint Laurent Le Smoking jacket with three-dollar batik shorts bought off a beach vendor in Bali, the first to wear the Antwerp Six, and the first to bring home a pair of red-heeled stilettos from some Parisian shoemaker named Christian.
After famously and unabashedly flunking every one of her A levels how could that girl concentrate on her studies when she was jet-setting all the time? Everyone knew the story of how eighteen-year-old Charlie Wu—the eldest son of the tech billionaire Wu Hao Lian—bade a tearful goodbye to her at Changi Airport and promptly chartered his own jet, ordering the pilot to race her plane to Heathrow. When Astrid arrived, she was astonished to find a besotted Charlie awaiting her at the arrival gate with three hundred red roses.
At age twenty-two, Charlie proposed on a ski lift in Verbier, and though Astrid accepted, she supposedly refused the thirty-nine-carat diamond solitaire he presented as far too vulgar, flinging it onto the slopes Charlie did not even attempt to search for the ring. Social Singapore was atwitter over the impending nuptials, while her parents were aghast at the prospect of becoming connected to a family of no particular lineage and such shameless new money. But it all came to a shocking end nine days before the most lavish wedding Asia had ever seen when Astrid and Charlie were sighted having a screaming match in broad daylight.
Back in Singapore, the wagging tongues resumed: Astrid was making a spectacle of herself. She was supposedly spotted in the front row at the Valentino show, seated between Joan Collins and Princess Rosario of Bulgaria. She was said to be having long, intimate lunches at Le Voltaire with a married philosopher playboy. And perhaps most sensational, rumor had it that she had become involved with one of the sons of the Aga Khan and was preparing to convert to Islam so that they could marry.
All these rumors came to naught when Astrid surprised everyone again by announcing her engagement to Michael Teo. It could have been much worse. In this cocoon of domestic bliss one might have thought that all the stories involving Astrid would simmer down.
But the stories were not about to end. A little after nine, Michael arrived home, and Astrid rushed to the door, greeting him with a long embrace. They had been married for more than four years now, but the sight of him still sent an electric spark through her, especially after they had been apart for a while.
He was just so startlingly attractive, especially today with his stubble and the rumpled shirt that she wanted to bury her face in—secretly, she loved the way he smelled after a long day. They had a light supper of steamed whole pomfret in a ginger-wine sauce and clay-pot rice, and stretched out on the sofa afterward, buzzed from the two bottles of wine they had polished off. Astrid continued to recount her adventures in Paris while Michael stared zombielike at the sports channel on mute.
Astrid nestled her head on his chest, slowly stroking his right leg. She brushed the tips of her fingers in one continuous line, tracing his calf, up the curve of his knee, and along the front of his thigh. She felt him get hard against the nape of her neck, and she kept stroking his leg in a gentle continuous rhythm, moving closer and closer toward the soft part of his inner thigh.
When Michael could stand it no longer, he scooped her up in one abrupt motion and carried her into the bedroom. After a frenzied session of lovemaking, Michael got out of bed and headed for the shower. Astrid lay on his side of the bed, deliriously spent. Reunion sex was always the best. Her iPhone let out a soft ping. Who could be texting her at this hour? She reached for the phone, squinting at the bright glare of the text message. It read:. Makes no sense at all.
Who sent me this? Astrid wondered, gazing in half amusement at the unfamiliar number. It was the mirror in the closet that did it. But the shoe-display cabinets are kept at seventy degrees, which is optimal for leather, and the humidity is regulated to a constant thirty-five percent, so my Berlutis and Corthays never break a sweat.
You gotta treat those babies right, hei mai? Above his right shoulder hovered the brand names of each item of clothing, followed by the dates and locations where the outfit was previously worn. Leo waved a finger in front of the screen as if he were flicking a page, and the man now appeared in corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater. Eddie stared at the mirror in amazement. Once again, Leo was showing off another shiny new toy he did fuck-all to deserve.
It had been like this since they were little. When Leo turned seven, his father gave him a titanium bicycle custom-designed for his pudgy frame by former NASA engineers it was stolen within three days.
At sixteen, when Leo aspired to become a Canto hip-hop singer, his father built him a state-of-the-art recording studio and bankrolled his first album the CD can still be found on eBay. And now this—the latest in a countless collection of homes around the globe showered upon him by his adoring father.
Edison and Fiona lived in the duplex penthouse of Triumph Towers, one of the most sought-after buildings high on Victoria Peak five bedrooms, six baths, more than four thousand square feet, not including the eight-hundred-square-foot terrace , where they employed two Filipino and two Mainland Chinese maids the Chinese were better at cleaning, while the Filipinos were great with the kids.
Their Biedermeier-filled apartment, decorated by the celebrated Hong Kong—based Austro-German decorator Kaspar von Morgenlatte to evoke a Hapsburg hunting schloss, had recently been featured in Hong Kong Tattle Eddie was photographed preening at the bottom of his marble spiral staircase in a forest-green Tyrolean jacket, his hair slicked back, while Fiona, sprawled uncomfortably at his feet, wore a claret-colored gown by Oscar de la Renta.
At Aberdeen Marina, there was his sixty-four-foot yacht, Kaiser. Then there was the holiday condo in Whistler, British Columbia the only place to be seen skiing, since there was semi-decent Cantonese food an hour away in Vancouver.
Like most upper-crust Hong Kongers, Eddie also possessed what was perhaps the ultimate membership card—Canadian Permanent Resident Cards for his entire family a safe haven in case the powers that be in Beijing ever pulled a Tiananmen again. Despite this embarrassment of riches, Eddie felt extremely deprived compared to most of his friends. It was so bloody unfair. His parents were loaded, and his mother was set to inherit another obscene bundle if his Singapore grandmother would ever kick the bucket.
Ah Ma had already suffered two heart attacks in the past decade, but now she had a defibrillator installed and could go on ticking for God only knows how long. It became an obsession of his, and he kept a spreadsheet on his home computer, diligently updating it every week based on property valuations and then calculating his potential future share.
But then his parents were always so selfish. His father, for all his fame and celebrated skill, had grown up middle class, with solidly middle-class tastes. He was happy enough being the revered doctor, driven around in that shamefully outdated Rolls-Royce, wearing that rusty Audemars Piguet watch, and going to his clubs. And then there was his mother.
She was so cheap, forever counting her pennies. She could have been one of the queens of society if she would just play up her aristocratic background, wear some designer dresses, or move out of that flat in the Mid-Levels. That goddamn flat. He hated the lobby, with its cheap-looking Mongolian granite floors and the old-lady security guard who was forever eating stinky tofu out of a plastic bag.
He hated walking past his old bedroom, which he had been forced to share with his little brother, with its nautical-themed twin beds and navy blue Ikea wall unit, still there after all these years.
And how could his mother, born to a family of such exquisite breeding, be completely devoid of taste? His only memories were of a childhood spent being too embarrassed to invite any friends over unless he knew they lived in less prestigious buildings , and teen years spent in the cramped toilet, masturbating practically underneath the bathroom sink with two feet against the door at all times there was no lock. Nick flashed a conspiratorial grin, relishing her reaction.
Who even flew first class anymore? The second surprise for Rachel came when they boarded the hulking two-story Airbus A and were promptly greeted by a beautiful stewardess who looked as if she had materialized straight out of a soft-focus ad from a travel magazine. Young, Ms. Chu, welcome aboard. Please allow me to show you to your suite. Rachel felt as if she was entering the screening room of a luxurious TriBeCa loft.
The cabin consisted of two of the widest armchairs she had ever seen—upholstered in buttery hand-stitched Poltrona Frau leather—two huge flat-screen televisions placed side by side, and a full-length wardrobe ingeniously hidden behind a sliding burled-walnut panel.
A Givenchy cashmere throw was artfully draped over the seats, beckoning them to snuggle up and get cozy. The stewardess gestured to the cocktails awaiting them on the center console. Young, your usual gin and tonic. Chu, a Kir Royale to get you settled in. Of course they would already know her favorite cocktail. Are you going to watch one of your bleak Swedish crime thrillers? Oooh, The English Patient. I want to see that.
Wait a minute. The enormous plane began to taxi toward the runway, and Rachel looked out the window at the planes lined up on the tarmac, lights flashing on the tips of their wings, each one awaiting their turn to hurtle skyward.
I think sleeping on an actual bed on a plane is probably the most exciting part! For the record, Rachel Chu did not feel the proverbial lightning-bolt strike when she first laid eyes on Nicholas Young in the garden of La Lanterna di Vittorio.
Sure, he was terribly good-looking, but she had always been suspicious of good-looking men, especially ones with quasi-British accents. She spent the first few minutes silently sizing him up, wondering what Sylvia had gotten her into this time. He was at a student governance meeting with me. Thanks—you know how much I like jailbait.
Especially from the history department. So charming. And HOT. He just started this semester, a transfer from Oxford. What fabulously dysfunctional detail had Sylvia left out? Hear me out. Every single time any Asian guy so much as looks in your direction, you give them the famous Rachel Chu Asian freeze-out and they wither away before you give them a chance. How about you? Should I go on? Sylvia sighed. The real reason you treat Asian men the way you do is because they represent the type of man your family wishes you would bring home, and you are simply rebelling by refusing to date one.
Because you would see that Asians are the dominant race in Cupertino. Stop projecting your own issues onto me. If you like Amber Pacific, you may also like:. Welsh art-rock group HMS Morris make music full of plot twists; explosive, colorful rhythms can turn into shadowy introspection on a dime.
A massive punk record made for the height of summer or drowning out the rest of the world. Colleen Green covers Blink's "Dude Ranch," the songwriter's self-professed "favorite album of all time," in its entirety.
Tracklist: The Rumjacks — Christmas in Killarney Naked Aggression — What We Buy Pulley — O Holy Night The Queers — Ramones Christmas Reagan Youth — Punk Rock Christmas Bankrupt — When Johnny Saved Christmas Parasites — Father Christmas
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