Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  Gary himself feels like laughing when he sees these images. Surrounded by newspapers strewn across the floor of his hotel room—his agent has every single newspaper and magazine delivered daily to his room as punishment for the mess he has gotten the whole company into—he sees just how ridiculous this situation is. If he were not the subject of these stories, he would be eager to read all of them, because there is a sense of unreality about this whole affair—no one could possibly be so idiotic. Every day he would want to get the cheap newspapers and magazines with colorful covers and ask himself, chuckling: How can someone so famous be so goddamn stupid? He would be fascinated but, frankly, he wouldn’t take any of it seriously.

  And when he zaps through the channels on TV and sees people he knew in past times, he begins to giggle. Here is one, a boy who extorted money from Gary for two years, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. The money Gary had was not even worth the effort, but the boy did it anyway, he and his band of friends, until the day Gary pushed him into a monsoon drain. And now here he is, showing off his fat fleshy nose, which he claims Gary broke in a fight. He is wearing the uniform of a fast-food restaurant—the first KFC to open in that small provincial town. When he speaks to the journalist, he tries to summon up long-suppressed pain, his eyes narrowed, his voice anguished, as if the event traumatized him, but the camera picks up a hint of a smile even as he talks about how Gary always had a “dark soul” and how everyone feared him. This guy who spends his days serving fried chicken and coleslaw and his nights racing scooters with his Ah Beng friends around a small town in the north of Malaysia—he is so proud that someone has come all the way from Taipei to ask him questions and put him on TV. He is ridiculous; he makes Gary want to laugh out loud. LOL LOL LOL.

  Gary’s foster father appears on TV again. Now, that really was a comic arrangement if ever there was one. Gary never addressed that man properly, barely had a conversation with him, yet he is being described as Gary’s “closest relative.” The two of them spent their entire lives avoiding each other, timing their respective arrivals at the house in order to minimize the chances of seeing each other. Gary remembers the huge relief he felt whenever he came home and found the place empty and the dread when he heard the front grille creak open in the night. Often he would come home and find his foster father slumped in the lounger made of plastic strings, his mouth open, trails of dried spittle tracing the line of his jaw down to his bony collarbone, like sea salt on rocks. His head was rounded at the back, the feather-thin white hair rising up in a wispy tuft, his nose pointed like the beak of a turtle. He truly did look like a comic-book animal—an Old-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle. The first time Gary got thrown out of school (the exact misdemeanor is forgotten now—probably for smoking on school grounds during morning break), he did not think about what would happen if he came home early. His foster father hit him, said it was a waste of money sending him to school, he should just get a job serving tables at the coffee shop or carrying sacks of rice. As he raised the shoe to beat Gary, his jerky movements and bony arms made him look just like a make-believe animal. Old-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle, Old-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle. Alone in his hotel room, sitting amid a sea of comic-book memories from his childhood, Gary feels like laughing, laughing, laughing.

  Laughing until he cries.

  This endless pantomime tires him, but now, thank God, there is a break. The celebrity news on TV moves on to someone else—an older pop singer who fell to the floor at a meet-and-greet session last night, and now people think she is pregnant. Gary knows her. To the public, she seems like a stuck-up woman, but he feels a certain closeness to her because she gave him generous advice when he first moved to Taipei. When he was struggling with voice coaching and trying to break into acting at the same time, she said, Don’t worry, one way or another you will be a big star—you have no other option in life but to be a big star.

  Ha-ha, he said. Maybe I don’t want to be a star.

  She said, There is no other possibility for you.

  They share a love of spicy beef noodles, and when she played her concert in Malaysia, she spent much time eating at neighborhood street stalls in order to experience the delicacies Gary had recommended to her. In an interview with the local press, she referred to him as her “surrogate son,” and even though they are not that close, Gary knew what she meant, because he, too, felt in a small way that she was like his mother. He knows that she is indeed pregnant and that the father is a rich married man who will not leave his wife, and she is very unhappy. At the age of forty-six, she believes she has lost her charm and has resorted to plastic surgery, which lends her beauty a harsh, tense quality. The cameras wait outside the hospital day and night, making her even more miserable. But here’s the problem: Her sadness brings relief to Gary. Every moment the news concentrates on her, he is able to take time out from the ridiculous spectacle of his own life. He wishes the news to remain focused on her misery, but he knows that, sooner or later, the loop will come back around to him. For the fact is that her fame has all but diminished, whereas he is still a huge star. Or at least he was until a few days ago.

  He turns the TV off and stares at the blank screen. His hand twitches, resisting the urge to turn the TV on again. He cannot bear the sad ridicule of his life, but at the same time he is used to it now. He wants to see those people from his past, see what has become of them—laugh at them the way others are laughing at him. But he manages to resist the temptation and instead logs on to the Facebook page that his record company maintains for him. He is not allowed to respond personally to any messages. Whenever he makes a statement to his fans on this page, it is in fact the PR department that writes the words: I’m deeply sorry for all the embarrassment my behavior has caused. Knowing you are all there to support me has touched me deeply and keeps me strong. My problems have brought me closer to you all. Thank you, thank you.

  The messages of support stream in from all over Asia. Girls of fifteen, sixteen, refusing to give up hope on Gary. I will always love you no matter what you do, because you are a beautiful human being. I refuse to believe Gary has done any of these things—his enemies are liars liars LIARS. Gary is an innocent of love’s dreams! Gary is a victim! I LOVE YOU GARY YOU ARE MY SPECIAL FOREVER.

  He thought that he would be reassured by these messages, but he is not. Instead, they make him angry. He hates his fans. They refuse to see the truth; they are blind to how rotten his life has become. They still believe that he is a pure, innocent person who can make their pathetic lives happy and bring meaning to their paltry existences, when in fact the only sensation he is capable of provoking is disgust. He loathes them for needing him in this way, for needing him to supply them with dreams. He closes his eyes and feels their neediness weighing down on him like monsoon days, heavy and unmoving, ready to engulf him. Like everyone else, his fans think that the stories they read in the magazines and on the Internet are a joke, a fabrication of events not to be taken seriously. But they do not realize that even if they are exaggerations, distortions, made-up stories by pathetic people with no lives of their own, they are true in one respect: He has always been a disgusting person.

  He kneels on the floor and looks at the patchwork carpet of papers and magazines strewn across the floor in front of him. He surveys what lies before him: all the words and images that sum up his entire life. The room around him is filthy—clothes cling to the silk upholstery like rotting vegetation, and there are dirty plates and cups everywhere. No one has come to clean the room in three days. Maybe it is because his manager has forbidden anyone to come in. Maybe it is because the cleaning people are afraid of Gary and fear that he will hit them or even sexually assault them. He is suddenly very tired, but climbing into the bed on the other side of the room seems too much of an effort. His limbs ache, and his face and neck feel clammy. He lies down on the floor, trying to find a soft pile of carpet, but the newspapers and magazines are too densely laid out and he ends up lying on top of them, curled up on his side in a little
ball. They make a loud rustling noise every time he moves.

  So in some ways all the reports of Gary’s troubled, mixed-up life today are a simple continuation of his troubled, mixed-up life before. We would all love to believe in a fairy-tale story of a village boy made good, becoming a world-renowned figure while retaining his simplicity and integrity, but the nature of our modern world is that everything is corruptible from the beginning; Gary is merely proof that purity and decay are entwined, that beauty is another form of depravity. Vanity has its price, and Gary is paying it right now. Every single one of his remaining concerts, including the major events in Shanghai and Beijing, have been canceled, and even the smaller venues in Xian and Fuzhou have been postponed indefinitely. Already, one of his major sponsors has canceled his endorsement contract, rumored to be worth RMB 10 million. Even as we speak, the posters of him smiling and drinking a can of soda are coming down from billboards across Asia. Others are certain to follow: You can’t advertise wholesome cow’s milk drinks if you are an alcoholic. No one will employ him anymore, and his young career appears to be over. His innocence, which was his Unique Selling Point—in fact, his Only Selling Point—is now lost, and there can surely be no comeback. Like a brilliant show of fireworks, he dazzled for a while but now leaves us contemplating the dark night sky. What will he do now? Might you turn up at your local real estate office a couple of years from now and find that Gary is your broker? Quite possibly. But should we be sad? Clearly not. He wanted this life, so we should not pity him for being where he is. Nor should we mourn the loss of his talent (though therein lies another debate: Was he actually talented or only pretty?). Others will soon come along to replace him, and others will fall just as he has. In a few years no one will remember him. So let us now leave this unfortunate young man to survey his broken career in peace and isolation. He deserves that much.

  8.

  ALWAYS REBOUND AFTER EACH FAILURE

  THE RESTAURANT WAS NOT YINGHUI’S CHOICE, BUT SHE WAS IMMEDIATELY struck by how appropriate it was. Set on the top floor of a handsome 1930s redbrick building on Shaanxi Nan Lu, its décor was rich, modern, and just a touch masculine—white-oak floors, French bergères, plum-colored rugs, and large paintings of swirly abstract shapes. It was the perfect setting for a first business meeting. Floor-to-ceiling windows all around the room offered a view of the maze of streets lined densely with plane trees and office blocks that sparkled in a jigsaw of lights in the night sky. The table was tucked away in a corner of the restaurant, discreet but not screened off from the rest of the room, unlike the private rooms that most rich businessmen favored. Its balance of intimacy and openness made her feel at ease. She thought, This man has class.

  She had arrived early, as she always did for such meetings, in order to familiarize herself with her surroundings so that she would appear relaxed when the other person arrived. It allowed her a few moments to compose her thoughts, to think of a few opening lines that would make her seem funny yet assured—to assume control of the situation. The bigger and more important the rendezvous, the earlier she arrived, and this time she was nearly half an hour early.

  She sipped the house cocktail she had ordered (Insensé, it was called) and looked in her handbag for her host’s card. It had made a striking impression on her when she received it, by courier, together with a handwritten note confirming the date and venue of their meeting. This had, of course, followed a concise email from his PA, which proposed a business venture that he would like to discuss with Yinghui—this man had perfect protocol, unlike most of the boorish men she had grown accustomed to dealing with. The name card was printed on thick buff-colored paper, with nothing but his name on it in English and Chinese, in scarlet ink: Walter Chao. No titles, posts, or qualifications, merely a phone number and the email address of his PA. The edges of the card were slightly uneven, a subtle hint at its handmade provenance, and she could easily imagine it having been crafted by an exquisite Florentine printer.

  As she retrieved the card from her leather card case, another card slipped out with it. JUSTIN C. K. LIM, it read, listing his various positions in the family conglomerate he headed. She had not thought much about him since she’d run into him at the awards ceremony several weeks before; she had decided, consciously, to put him out of her mind for good. And yet she was at a loss to explain why she had not thrown out his card, why she had not been able to cut away the association with her past, why she was not being her usual ruthless self. She looked at the even, standard size of the card and considered its banality. Even the company logo was dull—his grandfather’s initials, L.K.H., squashed into a square, as if designed by a middle-schooler in art class. Over the years, she had read and heard of Justin C. K. Lim’s entrepreneurial skills, but as a person he had always been somewhat pedestrian. He spoke infrequently, and what little he did say was leaden, weighed down by platitudes. She remembered a discussion among friends in Kuala Lumpur a long time ago, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It became quite heated; they were all young and idealistic. And every time they asked Justin C. K. Lim what his opinion was, he said, “Well, I think every country has a right to a peaceful existence,” or, “Both countries have valid arguments, don’t they?” or, when pushed, “I don’t really know much about that.”

  That discussion, like so many others, had taken place at Angie’s, which occupied a unit in a modest row of shop lots in Taman Tun Dr. Ismail, surrounded by streets of pleasant, identical suburban houses. Yinghui had opened the café more than a decade before she moved to Shanghai: It was her very first business venture—though nowadays she realizes that it could barely be called a “business.” It was not far from where she had grown up and still lived at the time, a fifteen-minute drive through the grounds of the golf club that, in her childhood, used to be jungle. Justin C. K. Lim’s family had sold the land some years before the crash of ’97, when the property boom was in full swing, and before long the golf course, designed by a famous American golfer, had been completed, its velvety undulating terrain and neo-Grecian clubhouse bounded by a private road manned by Nepalese security guards. It had been a shame to lose the vast patch of forest, but it did make the commute between the smart middle-class suburbs in that part of the city so much easier.

  Every day, when Yinghui drove to the café, she passed the small cemetery where Justin’s grandmother was buried. The family burial ground had been excluded from the sale of the golf club and now lay protected by a pair of ancient banyan trees whose thick vines lent a curtain of privacy, shrouding the elaborate tombs from open view. Often, she would slow down as she drove past, watching out for signs of recent visits, but there was never anyone there, not even an old retainer or gardener. And yet the tombs were clean and neat, the forest kept at bay. It was exactly the way that family worked: silently, mysteriously, efficiently, as if they had been and would be there forever. It used to make her laugh, this little reminder of her growing involvement with the Lim family—there was her steady relationship with Duncan C. S. Lim, of course, and now she was driving past and paying her respects to his ancestors every day, as though she were already part of their clan. She was not even formally engaged to Duncan C. S. Lim, and yet her daily rituals anticipated a marriage in the not-too-distant future. They were a good match; everyone said so. Right kind of family, right kind of education, that sort of thing. But Yinghui and Duncan knew that it was something else that counted: the right kind of temperament.

  The younger of the two boys, C.S. was, predictably, the polar opposite of Justin: willowy and almost fragile in appearance, but opinionated and temperamental. He lacked Justin’s athleticism and conventional good looks, but his angular features coupled with permanently disheveled hair and an artfully messy way of dressing made him a striking figure. He and Yinghui had started to date just before they left Malaysia to attend university in London, he at University College, she at London School of Economics. He studied philosophy, she sociology and politics—subjects that their parents only half jokingly cal
led “useless.” It was this uselessness that bound them together, Yinghui knew, as well as the appreciation that they were the children of families who could afford to be indulgent and who had assigned different roles to each of the children. They both knew that their role was to be beautifully useless.

  And so they spent all their time proving that they were not useless rich kids. In London, while their friends spent long evenings in the student bar, they would seek out talks by obscure Eastern European writers on such topics as “Ideas of Beauty in Post-Communist Guilt” or attend lectures on Sanskrit texts at the Brunei Gallery. They once went to a reading by a Chinese novelist whose latest work contained no fewer than seven scenes of heterosexual anal sex and four instances of sadomasochism, which led to a furious audience debate on the nature of censorship and prudishness in Asia, which in turn provoked a late-night argument between Yinghui and C.S., after which they had sex—rather more timidly than the characters in the novel they’d just read, they laughingly agreed the following morning.

  In their second year, they decided to take the same course in political thought at the LSE. They would sit in lectures holding hands under their desks while formulating opinions on Milosz and Aron and Sartre, and afterward they would always go for dry-fried noodles at a small restaurant in Chinatown, where they would exchange views with a vehemence that matched the strength of their growing relationship. He always played the role of the cynic, arguing that man had succumbed irreversibly to the unquestioning nature of authority; she was the wide-eyed optimist, believing in man’s capacity for redemption. And although their debates were genuine in their ferocity, there was also a comforting quality to them—a feeling of permanence, as if the passions they felt at the time would accompany them into old age.