by Tash Aw
One morning Phoebe came back after a night shift and saw that the poster by her bed had been defaced. The pop singer’s moon-bright complexion had been dotted with acne, and now he wore round black glasses and there were thick cat whiskers sprouting from his cheeks.
Time was running out for Phoebe. From the first moment she set foot in China, she had felt the days vanishing from her life, vanishing into failure. Like the clock she stared at every day at work, her life was counting down the minutes before she became a non-person whom no one would ever remember. As she sat during lunch break on the low brick wall next to the volleyball court, she knew that she had to act now or she would forever be stepped on everywhere she went. The gray concrete dormitory blocks rose up on all four sides of the yard and blocked out the light. There was Cantonese pop music playing from somewhere, and through an open window she could see a TV playing reruns of the Olympics, Chinese athletes winning medals. She watched the high jump for a while. A lanky blond girl failed twice, flopping down heavily on the bar. One more go and she was out. It didn’t really matter, since she wasn’t going to win a medal. Then suddenly she did something that made Phoebe shiver with excitement. For her third and final jump, she asked for the bar to be raised higher than anyone had jumped so far, higher than she had probably ever attained in her whole life. She had failed at lower heights, but now she was gunning for something way beyond her capabilities. She was going to jump all the way to the stars, and even if she failed she could only come down as far as the lowly position she already occupied. She stood at the end of the runway, flexing her fingers and shaking her wrists, and then she started running, in big bouncy strides. Phoebe got up and turned away. She didn’t want to see what happened; it was not important to her. The only thing that mattered was that the blond girl had gambled.
She took her expensive new phone to a Sichuan girl who traded things in the dorm and sold it for a nice sum of cash. She washed her hair and tied it neatly before going to Boss Lin’s office. She was wearing her tightest jeans, which she usually reserved for her day off. They were so tight that she could not sit down comfortably without them cutting into the tops of her thighs.
Little miss, it’s highly irregular for us to hand out salaries before payday, he said, but he was already looking for the number of the accounts department.
Come on, it’s almost the end of the month—only a week to go. Phoebe twirled her hair and inclined her head the way she had noticed other girls doing when they talked to the handsome security guards. Anyway, she laughed, our relationship is a bit irregular, don’t you think?
Foshan, Songxia, Dongguan, Wenzhou—she was going to bypass them all. Her bar was going to be raised all the way to the sky. There was only one city she could go to now, the biggest and brightest of them all.
THE GIRL AT THE next table was still reading her magazine, her boyfriend still sending messages on his iPhone. Sometimes he would read a message aloud and laugh, but the girl would not respond; she just continued to page through her magazine. He looked up at Phoebe, for only a split second, and at first Phoebe thought he was scowling in that familiar look-down-on-you expression. But then she realized that he was squinting because of the light. He hadn’t even noticed her.
The girl’s mobile phone rang and she began to rummage in her handbag for it, emptying out its contents on the table. There were so many shiny pretty things—lipstick cases, key rings, and also a leather diary, a pen, stray receipts, and scrunched-up pieces of tissue paper. She answered the phone and, as she did so, stood up and gathered her things, hastily replacing them in her bag. Her boyfriend was trying to help her, but she was frowning with impatience. A five-mao coin fell to the floor and rolled to Phoebe’s feet. Phoebe bent over and picked it up.
“Don’t worry,” the boy said over his shoulder as he followed his girlfriend out. “It’s only five mao.”
They had just left when Phoebe noticed something on the table. Half hidden under a paper napkin was the girl’s ID card. Phoebe looked up and saw that they were still on the pavement, waiting for a gap in the traffic in order to cross the road. She could have rushed out and called to them, done them a huge favor. But she waited, feeling her heart pound and the blood rush to her temples. She reached across and took the card. The photo was bland; you couldn’t make out the cheekbones that in real life were so sharp you could have cut your hand on them. In the photo, the girl’s face was flat and pale. She could have been any other young woman in the room.
Outside, the boy was leading the girl by the hand as they crossed the road. She was still on the phone, her floppy bag trailing behind her like a small dog. The skies were clear that day, a touch of autumn coolness in the air.
With a paper napkin, Phoebe wiped the bread crumbs off the card and tucked it safely into her purse.
2.
CHOOSE THE RIGHT MOMENT TO LAUNCH YOURSELF
EVERY BUILDING HAS ITS OWN SPARKLE, ITS OWN IDENTITY. AT night, their electric personalities flicker into life and they cast off their perfunctory daytime selves, reaching out to one another to form a new world of ever-changing color. It is tempting to see them as a single mass of light, a collection of illuminated billboards and fancy fluorescent bulbs that twinkle in the same way. But this is not true; they are not the same. Each one insists itself upon you in a different way, leaving its imprint on your imagination. Each message, if you care to listen, is different.
From his window he could see the Pudong skyline, the skyscrapers of Lujiazui ranged like razor-sharp Alpine peaks against the night sky. In the daytime, even the most famous buildings seemed irrelevant, obscured by the perpetual haze of pollution; but at night, when the yellow-gray fog thinned, Justin would sit at his window watching them display boastfully, each one trying to outdo the next: taller, louder, brighter. A crystal outcrop suspended high in the sky, shrouded by mist on rainy days; a giant goldfish wriggling across the face of a building; interlocking geometric shapes shattering into a million fragments before regrouping. He knew every one by heart.
Buildings were in his DNA, he sometimes thought. They had given him everything he ever owned—his houses, his cars, his friends—and even now, they shaped the way he thought and felt. The years were rushing past, whatever he had left of his youth surrendering to middle age, yet bricks and mortar—real estate—remained a constant presence. When he revisited his earliest memories, trying to summon scenes of family life—his mother’s protective embrace, perhaps, or praise from his father—the results were always blank. They were present in his memories, of course, his parents and grandmother, hovering spectrally. But, just like in real life, they were never animated. All he could see and smell were the buildings around them, the structures they inhabited: cold stone floors, mossy walls, flaking plaster, silence. It was a world from which there had been no escape. A path had been laid down for him, straight and unbending. He had long since given up hope of departing from this track, indeed could not even remember any other option—until he came to Shanghai.
The summer of ’08 had been notable for its stillness, the unyielding humidity that lay trapped between the avenues of concrete and glass. He had arrived in Shanghai expecting a temperate climate, but summer had stretched far into September, and the pavements were sticky with heat, the roads becoming rivers of exhaust and steam. Even in his gated compound in Pudong, with its American-tropic-style lawns and palm-filled gardens, the air felt lifeless.
He had known little about Shanghai and assumed that it would consist solely of shopping malls and plastic reproductions of its history, its traditional life preserved in aspic, as it was in Singapore, where he went to school, or else inherently Third World, like in Malaysia, where he grew up. It might be like Hong Kong, where he had begun his career and cemented his reputation as an unspectacular yet canny businessman who would hold the reins steady as head of the family’s property interests. Whatever the case, he had assumed he would find it familiar—he had spent his life in overcrowded, overbuilt Asian cities, and they were a
ll the same to him: Whenever he looked at a tower block, he saw only a set of figures that represented income and expenditure. Ever since he was a teenager, his brain had been trained to work in this way, calculating numbers swiftly, threading together disparate considerations such as location, purpose, and yield. Maybe there was, in spite of everything, a beauty in the incisiveness of his thinking back then.
But, in fact, during those initial few weeks it was not easy for him to get any sense of Shanghai at all. His driver picked him up at his house and drove him to a series of meetings relieved only by business lunches, each day finishing with the soon-familiar flourish of a banquet. He lived in a development called Lisson Valley, which was owned by his family. This, together with a more modest development in Hongqiao and a condominium block in Xintiandi, was all that his family owned in the largest city in China, and they had decided that they needed to expand, which was why he had been sent here. They had spent a hundred years in Malaysia and Singapore, and now they needed to branch out in a serious way—like the great Jewish families of Europe in the nineteenth century, his father had explained, as if the decision needed to be justified. On the annual Forbes list of billionaires, his family’s business was listed as Henry Lim and Family—Diversified Holdings. It always made him wince, the term “diversified”: The lack of specificity carried with it an accusation, as if the source of the wealth they had amassed was uncertain and, most probably, unsavory.
“You’re too sensitive,” his father had chided him when he was young. “You need to grow out of it and toughen up. What do you care what other people think?”
It was true: What other people thought was entirely irrelevant. The family insurance firm, established in Singapore in 1930, had not only survived but prospered during the war and was one of the oldest continuous companies in Southeast Asia. The original company had extended its reach over the years, diversifying into property, shipping, and, recently, “environmental services,” a lucrative business in the waste-producing economies of Asia these days. By any reckoning his family now counted as “old money,” one of those overseas Chinese families that had risen, in little over a century, from dockside coolies to established billionaires. Every generation built on the achievements of its predecessor, and now it was his turn: Justin C. K. Lim, eldest son of Henry Lim and heir to the proud, vibrant legacy of L.K.H. Holdings, established by his grandfather.
Property clairvoyant. Groomed from a young age to take over the reins of the real estate divison of LKH. Steady hands. Wisdom beyond his years.
These were some of the things the Business Times said of him just before he arrived here. His father had had the article cut out, mounted, and framed, and had sent it to him gift-wrapped in paper decorated with gold stars. It arrived two days after his birthday, but he was not sure if it was a present. There had never been presents on his birthday.
From the start of his time in Shanghai, he was invited to the best parties—the numerous openings of the flagship stores of Western luxury brands, or discreet private banquets hosted by young local entrepreneurs with excellent connections within the Party. He could always get a table at the famous Western restaurants on the Bund, and because people soon knew and liked him—he was easy, unshowy company—he was rarely on his own and was increasingly in the public eye. At one party to launch a new line of underwear, held in a warehouse in the northern outskirts of the city, he found himself unconsciously trying to shrink away from the bank of flashbulbs that greeted the guests, so that when the photographs appeared, his head was cocked at an angle, as if he had recently hurt his neck in an accident. There were a dozen hydraulic platforms suspended above the party, each one occupied by a model clad only in underwear, gyrating uncomfortably to the thumping music; every time he looked up at them, they threw confetti down on him, which he then had to pick out of his hair. The event organizer later sent him copies of the photos—he was frowning in every one, stray bits of confetti clinging to his suit like bird shit. Shanghai Tatler magazine photographed him at a black-tie charity event a few weeks after he arrived, his hair slickly swept back in a nod to the 1930s, a small white flower in his buttonhole, and a young Western woman in a qipao at his side. The caption read, Justin C. K. Lim and companion; he hadn’t even known the woman. He bid on a guided tour of the city by Zhou X., a local starlet just beginning to make a name for herself in New Wave art-house films. It cost him 200,000 yuan, which was donated to orphans of the Sichuan earthquake. The men at the party nudged him and whispered slyly, “Maybe you’ll get to see the most secret sights of Shanghai, like she showed off in her latest movie.” (He’d heard of the film, which was set in a small village during the Cultural Revolution and already banned in China; The New York Times review of it called Zhou X. the intellectual man’s Orientalist fantasy.)
If he felt a frisson of excitement, it wasn’t because of his glamorous tour guide but because it was his first proper outing in Shanghai, his first sight of the daytime streets at close quarters, unencumbered by briefcases and folders. If anything, he felt resentful of Zhou X.’s presence; she sat in the car, idly sending messages on her BlackBerry, her only commentary being a recital of a list of projects her agent had sent her. “Wim Wenders—is he famous?” she asked. “I don’t feel like working with him—he sounds boring.”
They stopped outside a tourist-class hotel on a busy thoroughfare lined with midrange shopping brands in what seemed to be a fairly expensive part of town (low occupancy, medium yield: unrealized rental potential)—a strange place to start a tour of Shanghai, he thought, as they walked through a featureless archway into a narrow lane lined first with industrial dustbins and then, farther on, with low brick houses. These were the famous longtang of Shanghai, she explained, the ones foreigners fell in love with—though personally she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a lane house. “Look at them, they’re so primitive and cramped and dark and … old.”
He peered into an open door. In the gloom, he made out a staircase of dark hardwood and a tiled kitchen with a two-ring stove-top cooker. He stepped into the house—its quiet half-light seemed welcoming, irresistible.
“What are you doing?” Zhou X. cried.
But he was already up the stairs, treading across the uneven floorboards, the deep graining of the wood inviting him to bend down and trail his fingers over the smooth worn surface. There were signs of life—pots of scraggly herbs and marigolds, towels draped on banisters, lines of washing strung up across the small square rooms. And yet there was a stillness that settled heavily on the house, as if its inhabitants had recently abandoned it, as if the present was already giving way to the past. The small windows on the landings allowed in little light, but Justin could nonetheless see that there was dust on the surface of some cardboard boxes that lay stacked in the corner of the room and also on the handrails of the staircase. He could not decide whether the house was decaying or living. He retreated and joined his companion outside. In spite of her huge black sunglasses, she was squinting, shielding her face from the sun with her handbag.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You can’t just go poking your nose into other people’s houses like that.”
Justin looked at her and smiled. “I’ve paid for this, haven’t I? I need to get my money’s worth.”
At his insistence, they drove from longtang to longtang, her SUV cruising through the narrow streets lined with plane trees, the balconies of the old French-style villas occasionally visible over the tops of stone walls. Some of the larger houses had shutters that were tightly closed, and in their gloom these mansions reminded him of the house in which he had grown up, full of silence and shadows and the steady ticking of grandfather clocks. He remembered the hallway and staircase of his family house, the ceiling rising so high that it created a cavelike gloom.
As the car crawled through the traffic, he began to notice the number of people on foot: a group of middle-school kids, spiky-haired and bespectacled in tracksuits, rushing to beat one another to the he
ad of the queue to buy freshly made shengjian, exclaiming gleefully as the cloud of steam billowed from the pan; an elderly couple crossing the road just in front of the car, walking arm in arm, their clothes made from matching brocade and velvet, worn but still elegant; and, at an intersection, about fifty construction workers sitting on the pavement, smoking on their break, their faces tanned and leathery, foreign-looking—Justin could not place where they were from. He wondered why, in the many weeks since arriving, he had not noticed how densely populated the city was. All that time driving around in his limo, he must have been working on spreadsheets or reading reports, he thought.
“You’re so easy to please,” Zhou X. said, tapping away on her phone without looking at him. “All I have to do is show you old houses.”
The driver stopped the car, because Justin had seen a small lane of nondescript houses that seemed derelict at first glance. It was the property developer’s instinct in him that spotted the lane, he thought, for it was barely distinguishable from the dozens of others they had seen and in fact was a great deal less attractive. Tucked behind a row of small fruit and vegetable shops, the low brick houses had not long ago been rendered in cheap concrete and now looked, frankly, ugly: low residential value, ripe for development. Wires sagged along the façades of the buildings, competing for space with lines of washing hung up to dry; a small girl came out of a doorway, carrying a basin of gray-hued water, which she splashed into the street. There was something about the way of life here—living in close quarters, families spilling into one another—that reminded him of the slums not far from where he grew up: hundreds of identical flimsy houses, thousands of lives that seemed to blend into one. Sometimes the houses would catch fire and the entire area would be razed, only to be rebuilt a few months later. He had never known any of the people who lived in that world, and even before he became an adult, the shanties were cleared to make way for a shopping mall.