Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  During vacations they would often go InterRailing, their reassuringly heavy backpacks a constant reminder of their independence and liberty. They had a preference for youth hostels and never stayed in anything fancier than a one-star hotel, though arriving late in Bordeaux one night after a missed connection, they were forced by a lack of options to check in to a three-star hotel, which Yinghui secretly enjoyed but never admitted to. Everywhere they went, they made sure they found interesting fringe-theater productions or alternative-music venues, and they never bought anything outside local craft fairs. Toward the end of their time at university, however, they began to spend more and more of their vacations back home in Kuala Lumpur, where C.S. worked with a charity for leprosy victims and set up a salon for “writers and thinkers” that met once a week. Yinghui volunteered twice a week at a refuge for victims of domestic abuse and the rest of the time helped out in the office of Friends of Old KL, a charity that sought to preserve heritage buildings. Dressed simply in jeans or cargo shorts and matching Che Guevara T-shirts they’d bought in Camden Market, their hair styled in similar fashion—short, boyish, with cheeky bangs that fell across their foreheads—they looked like beautiful twins who were fully comfortable only in each other’s company and whose lives would always be entwined. That was certainly the way Yinghui felt.

  The idea to set up Angie’s came as a result of the growth of C.S.’s thriving literary salon, which was beginning to tire at the effort of finding a new place to meet every week. There were now more than a dozen regulars, and often the group ran to twenty or so—a difficult size because they were starting to read their work aloud and there were few places where they could do that outside private homes, nowhere they could just drop in during the day and find someone to chat with. They tried a few places in Bangsar, but the atmosphere there was becoming too elegant and overtly bourgeois, and, besides, the area was beginning to attract too many Westerners, the type who thought it was cool to hang out with the locals.

  And so, the year Yinghui graduated, she set about finding a suitable place to establish a small café. She already had a clear idea of what she wanted: a cozy, unfussy place that served simple organic meals and pastries and fair trade coffee, locally sourced; in the evenings she would host readings and poetry recitals and maybe even songwriters wanting to try out new tunes before a discerning audience. She had no business plan, no financial model, no idea even of how she would make money; all she had was a generous loan from her parents, which she swore to repay at some point in the future, although she, like they, knew that even if she did not, nothing would be said, and the entire venture would go down as a “lesson in life.”

  It took her only a few days to find somewhere perfect, in a residential area that at the time was not at all fashionable. Flanked on one side by a small lottery shop and the other by an old Chinese grocery, the space had been empty for over a year and had last been used as a Nasi Kandar store, whose owner had lost interest in running a restaurant business after returning from the hajj. It was the nondescript nature of the area and the row of shops that thrilled Yinghui—the café would be so unexpected in such surroundings that most people would drive past without ever noticing it. Only people who knew it was there would come in; it was better than she could have hoped for.

  As soon as the main building work was completed, she and C.S. spent every evening at the site, scrubbing and oiling the sustainably grown hardwood work surfaces, sealing the concrete floors with varnish, and cleaning the brick and cement dust from the walls. They agonized over the color of the walls but finally decided to leave them nude and unplastered: The bare concrete looked starkly chic, the ideal backdrop to their carefully chosen furniture (they had planned an artful mélange of mismatched chairs and tables salvaged from sixties’ vintage shops, coupled with old Nyonya pieces C.S. had found in his family’s numerous storerooms). They left the heavy metal shutters drawn tightly shut as they worked, and in the harsh glow cast by the naked lightbulbs (their Noguchi paper lampshades had not yet arrived), they argued over the placement of the library of books and the newspaper stand; they got takeaway char kway teow from the shop around the corner and ate it cross-legged on the newly polished floor, their wooden chopsticks scraping noisily on the Styrofoam boxes; and when it got late and they felt they had quarreled too much and worked too hard, they had sex standing up—as she bent over and leaned on the pristine new counter, she worried, slightly, that the sweat on her hands and elbows would leave marks on the smoothly grained wood. Later, still high on exhaustion but calmer after their lovemaking, he would paraphrase a Slovenian philosopher whose lectures they had attended as students in London: “You know,” he would say, kissing her dust-and-paint-covered hair, “it’s a sign of true love that we can insult each other.”

  “In that case: You are a dirty piece of shit,” she would respond, laughing, smelling the turpentine on his fingers.

  They had that phrase written on a signboard in plain letters, along with other quotes stolen from European auteurs they admired, which they then hung randomly on the walls:

  ALL GREAT NOVELS ARE BISEXUAL

  Q: WHY ARE YOU CRYING? A: BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT

  TRUE LOVE = INSULTING EACH OTHER

  They didn’t care if anyone would get these quotes; in fact, they were sure that few, if any, would understand them or know where they were from. They themselves found the signs amusing, and that was all that mattered. On a whim, they decided to call the café Angie’s, after a movie they had seen that year, one of those so-bad-it’s-good films that C.S. loved. They had lost interest midway through the film and had engaged in surreptitious light petting to while away the time, and they later promised that, when they were finally living together, they would own a cat called Angie. Or a car. Or a café.

  Right from the beginning, his friends loved Angie’s. Their friends loved Angie’s, for Yinghui realized that C.S. brought many people into her life—into their joint lives. She was not the only one drawn to his blend of nonchalance and intellect, his elegant skinniness, his don’t-give-a-shit attitude summed up by the permanent dark circles under his eyes and his charmingly disheveled hair. Standing at the counter, pretending to tally up the figures on the cash machine that she never fully mastered, she would watch him slouch on the battered fake Alvar Aalto sofa, his feet stretched out on the floor, surrounded by a coterie of eager disciples, predominantly young women. He would often be content to let others do the speaking; sometimes he would even stare into space or close his eyes as if he was thinking of something else entirely, but then, in the midst of the fiercest debates, he would begin to speak, and everyone would automatically fall silent and turn to him. His one-liners were pithy and original and always provocative; often there would be a ripple of embarrassed laughter at what he said. Each night, just after nine-thirty, she would pull the shutters half shut and lock the doors before opening a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. She would settle down with C.S. and a few of his close friends—their close friends—and chat until the early hours of the morning, sometimes until they heard the call for Fajr from the nearby mosque. Often she would stretch out on the sofa, lay her head on his lap, and doze off to the sound of his voice.

  She felt that she could spend every evening like this, for years and years to come, and very possibly forever.

  The business side of Angie’s was more bothersome. Yinghui struggled with the accounts, the indecipherable debits and credits and never-ending trail of invoices from suppliers, which she would often forget or even lose altogether, yet pride prevented her from hiring a bookkeeper. She had set out to run this business herself, to prove that she was not useless. Once, she enthusiastically offered to organize a party for the launch of one of C.S.’s friend’s latest poetry collection. The evening was a huge success, with readings interspersed with music by a soulful folk guitarist whose slangy lyrics spoke of urban migration and loneliness. The next morning Yinghui realized that she had not agreed on a fee for any of the food or drink she had provided;
her business had paid for everything and she was left staring at the enormous bill. The Indonesian cleaners were late; the whole place was filled with the sour reek of stale beer; there were cigarette butts all over the floor; and someone had accidentally dislodged the plug to the ice cream freezer, leaving Yinghui to contemplate a few hundred ringgits’ worth of melted organic homemade coconut ice cream.

  “Sweetheart, why are you so grumpy?” C.S. said, putting his arm around her. “It’s really not a big deal. Next time, if you don’t want to do stuff for our friends, just don’t do it. No one’s forcing you.”

  “It’s not that,” she said, shrugging away from him. “It’s … well, Angie’s is a business, too, you know, not only a place for your friends to hang out.”

  “So it’s ‘my friends’ now, is it? Don’t do it, then; no one asked you to throw a party for Ramli.” He put a Tom Waits tape into the cassette player, the same music they had had at the party the night before, and the music started playing loudly on the expensive German speakers: Colder than a well-digger’s ass, colder than a well-digger’s ass … “Anyway, Jojo was there last night. She’s Ramli’s publisher, for God’s sake; you could have just asked her for some money if you’re that worried about it.”

  “Money’s not the issue,” she said, staring at a pile of dried-up prawnsambal canapés that had fallen onto the sofa.

  “I know this is about independence and proving your worth and all that crap,” he said, sweeping aside the bits of food from the sofa before stretching out on it. “But, frankly, if the going’s tough, why don’t you ask your dad to help you out for a while? We’ve got to get real here. Your old man’s rolling in it at the moment—everyone knows he just got a share of that big oil concession up north in Terengganu.”

  “Fuck you,” Yinghui said. She realized she was wiping the counter with a damp cloth even though it was already clean. It was the only part of the café that was not filthy, the only bit she was in control of. “How fucking dare you bring that up? That’s rich, coming from you. Anyway, I said it’s not about money.”

  “Ya, sure. So what is it about, then?” His foot was tapping in the air to the rhythm of the music.

  She looked him in the eye and then, fearing she would start to cry, looked away again. “No one even thanked me.”

  He stared at her for a while, waiting, she thought, for her to cry. But then he came and stood behind her, circling his arms around her waist and drawing her toward him. “Hey, hey,” he whispered, “shhh, you silly thing. Everyone knows this place can’t exist without you. Everyone loves you; it goes without saying, huh? We’re all so grateful and happy. What would we do if you didn’t keep this place running? Where else would we go? Oh, my God, we’d be screwed. The reason this place is so cool is you. Everyone knows this. Especially me. Especially me.”

  She nodded, feeling his warm breath on her ear, his face pressing close to hers. She knew then that as long as he was around and happy to be at Angie’s, she would keep it going, no matter how much it cost. They stayed wrapped in their embrace, saying nothing, listening to the music filling the empty space.… Lucky that you found someone to make you feel secure … Yinghui chuckled. “You played that song on purpose, you bastard.”

  “No I didn’t. It’s kind of a sad song.”

  … ’cause we were all so young and foolish, now we are mature.

  “You know, that thing that you mentioned, that … oil thing. You’re wrong. It’s in Kelantan, not Terengganu.”

  “Same difference,” he said, leaning in to kiss her. “Somewhere up north, anyway. It’s all the same up there. Beautiful and backward.”

  The following week, without telling Yinghui, C.S. paid off all of Angie’s outstanding loans, invoices, and credit notes and deposited an additional sum in the account. When she thanked him, he shrugged and said it was easy; he’d done it through one of the family companies. Well, actually, his brother, Justin, had arranged everything for him, he said, reclining in his customary position on the low gray sofa, but don’t ask how it was done, because he did not understand. It was no big deal—it was just money, after all.

  She was moved not so much by the generosity of C.S.’s actions but by the solidity of his intentions; there was a permanence in the gesture, a suggestion of longevity. It was irrelevant that his family would not have even noticed a sum of money like that—because, let’s face it, her parents could have helped her out too (though perhaps not with such ease). What mattered was C.S.’s swiftness of commitment. He had done it with his customary nonchalance, but, in keeping Angie’s afloat, he meant to keep Yinghui afloat too.

  It was just money, after all.

  It wasn’t his fault.

  It was her father’s fault, the mess he had gotten them all into.

  It wasn’t her father’s fault; he was dead now.

  Too many thoughts, spinning and clashing in her mind.

  It was just money.

  These were some of the excuses that she ran through her head, a thousand times each day, barely eighteen months later, when C.S. decided that he would stop seeing her. She tried to rationalize his decision, but the logic of it defied her. There were too many lines of reasoning that crisscrossed without ever joining up. He would not answer her calls, would not come out to see her. She passed messages through his friends—now she realized they really were his friends, not theirs—but she never heard from them. People stopped coming to Angie’s, and soon there was no one left who could act as a messenger. Even when Justin was dispatched to explain the reason behind the breakup, Yinghui could not understand it. Justin spoke with all his usual clarity—so clear as to make no sense at all. It was nothing to do with her; she had to understand this. It was just that, as a family, they had to think of the future happiness of each of their children and also that of the family. It was not an easy decision. But, well, it was getting difficult now, because of her family’s position and the sad business with her father.

  “What do you mean, ‘sad business’?”

  “I mean all the bad publicity. The whole … scandal.”

  He smiled after saying this, as if the word “scandal” would make everything clear. As he left, he turned back to look at her, and she saw that he was still smiling. He smiled in the way that someone smiles when they don’t know what to say—when they don’t know what to say because they don’t feel anything, because they are thinking of more important things in their life. When he had left, she looked around her, surveying the sudden stillness of her world: the café’s chairs and tables pushed together alongside one wall, some stacked on top of one another; the vintage jukebox she and C.S. had bought on a whim, dark now, devoid of sparkle; the wires hanging from the ceiling, stripped of their designer lampshades, which she’d sold to pay the electricity bill; the empty freezer, with its door left open, a watermark at its base and a dry ring where the thawing ice had stained the polish she and C.S. had applied to the concrete floor. The only things that remained in place were the sofa on which she sat—the low gray sofa that C.S. had stretched out on, night after night, for nearly two years—and, on the walls, the signs that she had not bothered to take down. TRUE LOVE = INSULTING EACH OTHER.

  She thought of the word “scandal,” letting it echo in her head for a few moments. It sounded wrong, provided no answers.

  She decided that it was all about money. C.S. Lim, Justin C.K. Lim—they had plenty, would always have plenty, but she had nothing now. It was just about money.

  When people heard of Angie’s closure, or when they drove past it, they would shrug as if it was no great surprise. KL was full of places like that nowadays, they would say, opened and closed in no time at all. But they would snigger and add, under their breath: She didn’t know how to do business, that girl. She was an airhead rich kid who thought her father’s money would last forever. But, ah there, you see? Some more kena dump by that Lim boy. Serve her right. If you act big, that’s what happens. She didn’t know how to do business at all, that girl; she was really
stupid.

  IT WAS THREE MINUTES past the appointed hour—not a good sign. Up to that point, she had assumed only good things about her host, had imagined someone with perfect manners. Walter Chao. Even the name had a stylish elegance to it, a restrained old-world quality that suggested courtesy and understated flair in a city where such things seemed to have been swept away by the relentless advance of concrete and steel, bright lights and nightlife—the kind of fast living that she herself had become accustomed to. She looked at her BlackBerry: no message. Maybe she was being stood up; maybe she should start composing a message, tell him that she had suffered a malaise, that she had been forced to go home unexpectedly: leave him in the lurch before he did it to her. But, then again, she might never know what he was going to propose; she might miss the opportunity of a lifetime. She wasn’t here on a date, for goodness’ sake, she was here to do business. But was that really worth the risk of humiliation? She was just beginning to form the opening sentence in her head—so very sorry, but I must have eaten something bad at lunchtime—when she noticed the maître d’hôtel hurrying over to the table.

  “Mr. Chao is coming up in the lift now,” he said. “He is sorry to be late. He rang and left a message with me about ten minutes ago, but I was away and I didn’t see it. I’m so sorry—please will you … be understanding when you speak to him. It’s so busy tonight and I just didn’t see the message.”

  Yinghui nodded and looked at her watch. 8:04 P.M. “Not a problem,” she said.