C
hristine Chiu hadn’t expected
a knock on the bedroom door
on her wedding night. The
visitor was her new mother-in-
law, whom after a whirlwind
engagement she had met for
only the first time that day.
In her hands was a “gigantic”
book, and what was written
inside was also unexpected:
proof that her new husband,
Dr Gabriel Chiu, a renowned
Los Angeles-based plastic surgeon, was
“the 24th generation direct descendant
of the Song dynasty”.
The suggestion was that Gabriel, king
of Beverly Hills’ boobs and bottoms, would
have been the sovereign of a vast Chinese
empire had it not been overthrown in the
13th century. It came as a surprise to
Christine, who was born in Taiwan but
grew up in California. She knew little about
ancient Chinese dynasties. Her mother-in-
law took her through hundreds of years of
male emperors listed in the book, and their
progeny. At the end was her husband’s
name, followed by an empty space. “It is
very important that you do not let us
down,” she was told. The family wanted
a male heir to continue the line.
Christine, then 24, and Gabriel, 15 years
her senior, started trying for a baby emperor
at their Bel Air home. But she couldn’t get
pregnant. They did rounds and rounds of
IVF, with different techniques and different
doctors — the best that money could buy.
A decade passed and still there was no heir.
“I just saw that empty space I was supposed
to fill,” Christine says. “That was my job,
that is the one thing they asked of me, that
was my value.” At family gatherings she was
made to sit at the children’s table and wash
the dishes, all the while harbouring the
secret that it was actually her husband who
had fertility problems. She silently “bore his
shame” for 11 years. Eventually, in 2018, she
gave birth to Gabriel Christian Chiu III, or
“Baby G” as they call him. He arrived
chubby-cheeked, dressed in Versace and
ready to rule his imaginary kingdom.
Now 38, Christine is one of the stars and
producers of Bling Empire, the latest Netflix
docuseries to adopt the tried-and-tested
formula of following the seemingly vacuous
lives and eye-popping consumption of a
group of super-rich friends. The difference
is that this show has an all-Asian cast. It’s
Crazy Rich Asians meets Keeping Up with
the Kardashians — solid gold trash but with
layers of cultural intrigue; yes, it’s about
cash, cars, clothes and plastic surgery, but
it’s also about the balance — and tension
— between therapised, liberal life in LA and
east Asian traditions and responsibilities.
“These are stories of infertility, surrogacy,
parenthood — difficult topics across any
ethnicity, but set against the backdrop of
very traditional eastern expectations there
is an additional layer of complexity,” saysChristine, speaking from her home office
in Bel Air. She says she’s dressed in Loro
Piana cashmere “sweats”, which cost about
£1,800 each, but doesn’t want to turn on
her video. “Nothing glamorous. I’m first
a mom, then a businesswoman, then a
personality and producer,” she says. “On
TV screens Asian faces and perspectives
are underrepresented, so the show was
an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
Usually dripping in “high jewellery”,
she is presented as the self-made, ponytail-
swinging mean girl of the series, the
couture queen of Beverly Hills, never shy
of putting on an ostentatious show of
wealth or mentioning her (considerable)
philanthropic pursuits — and her
acquaintance with the Prince of Wales.
Christine and her husband, who are
worth a reported £80 million through
their private clinic, Beverly Hills Plastic
Surgery, are the main backers of the Prince’s
Foundation Health & Wellbeing Centre at
Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, Scotland,
which uses complementary therapies to
help locals with obesity, loneliness and
depression. Two of its health lodges are
named after none other than Baby G. The
same Baby G who, in one episode of Bling
Empire, is photographed for his preschool
admission portrait, at the age of one,
dressed in a tuxedo, sitting upright in a
miniature sports car as $100 bills rain down.
Christine’s nemesis in the show is Anna
Shay, 60, a withering matriarch figure to the
younger cast members. She’s the eccentric
daughter of the late arms dealer Edward
Shay, whose company was sold by Anna
and her brother to Lockheed Martin for a
reported $1.2 billion in cash in 2006.
Shay shops for diamonds as though they
are sweets, throws dinner parties as though
they are tests of allegiance and sounds
lonely — she met her best friend over the
counter of her favourite jewellery house in
Paris. She trusts few people — particularly
not Christine, whom she appears to view as
a name-dropping, nouveau riche pretender.
The two are set up as frozen-faced
frenemies. In one episode Christine is
moved to the wrong end of the dinner
table for wearing a diamond necklace that
Shay also owns. “I mean, I was seated to the
left of Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace
earlier this year,” Christine complains. Shay
is unfussed. “I do find it odd that she wants
to compete with me,” she purrs. “But she
cannot compete with what I was born into.”“There are certainly discussions on new
money versus old money,” Christine tells
me when I ask about the characters’
different attitudes towards wealth. “I’m of
a younger generation, so I am more open
to speaking about consumption. But I don’t
do it in a way of boasting. I know the show
is edited in that way, unfortunately, because
people are hooked by the bling and the glitz,
but for me I look at luxury consumption as
an investment and a preservation of really
important pieces of art.” She adds: “I hate
to say it, but I don’t think there’s older
money than dynastic money.”
When pushed, Christine is unsure
what proportion of her in-laws’ wealth is
“dynastically related”, but she knows they
do “very, very well” in property. Why, then,
does the family place so much emphasis
on its links to the Song dynasty? Isn’t it all
a bit pretentious?
“I don’t think anyone really cares about or
traces dynasties and I try to downplay that,”
she says. “But I also don’t want to disrespect
someone’s heritage — it’s just being proud
of where they are from. To me and my
husband and our everyday life it has no
relevance. What is a big deal is that my
husband is a good father, an excellent
surgeon and a beautiful human being.”
Gabriel Chiu was born in Hong Kong
and moved to the US as a child. He has
a “traditional” family, very private and
“anything but boastful, you would never
know they have so much money”, Christine
says. The couple met while working at a
large medical corporation: he was a senior
plastic surgeon, the “star of the company”,
and she was a vice-president of marketing.
“I thought there was a lot of untapped
potential,” she says. “I was looking at him,
thinking, this is a man who clearly cares
about his craft and his work more than he
cares about the profit, but I think in the
right setting we can really have it all. We can
give patients the most elevated experience
and he can be recognised for it.”
After their marriage in 2006 Christine
decided to set up a plastic surgery practice,
with herself as the managing director and
Gabriel as lead surgeon. “He was my first
employee,” she says. They launched their
clinic using funds from Gabriel’s family as
well as money of their own. “For a long time
his family called it his very expensive hobby.
They were very much on board, no expense
was spared. The truth is, we didn’t make a
profit [at the beginning] but it didn’t matter
because every morning he woke up and
he was excited, approaching every patient
like it was his canvas. I mean, he had a
bottomless account to tap into to make it
the very best it can be and, in the journey of
doing that, things caught fire and we grew.”
Christine herself comes from a “very
financially comfortable background”.
Her parents were successful in business,
moving from Taiwan to California when she
was five. She struggled at school, speakingThe Prince of Wales “is
just a really remarkable
man, and so funny too!
Really witty — he has the
best sense of humour”
10 • The Sunday Times Magazine