by Tash Aw
“Thank you, madame,” the maître d’hôtel said. His French accent was charmingly stereotypical; it amused her. She was going to have a good evening.
For the next minute or so she kept pretending to read the menu, but every so often she would shift her gaze subtly, taking in the people coming into the restaurant, trying to identify Walter Chao. A gaggle of smartly dressed businessmen gathered at the reception desk, handing over their camel-colored coats to the girls dressed in black trouser suits. A Middle-Eastern-looking man and his Chinese girlfriend stood waiting patiently in back of this group. Then, behind the crowd of people, she saw the maître d’hôtel holding out his hand politely but firmly in order to clear a space. Yinghui caught a glimpse of a light-gray jacket and sky-blue shirt. The maître d’hôtel hurried toward her like a one-man police cavalcade; she looked down at her menu, turning the page as if she were deep in concentration. When she looked up, she saw him inclining his head in a half bow; next to him was Walter Chao. She stood up and offered him her hand, which he grasped firmly without squeezing, while looking her in the eye.
“I am so sorry to be late. Like everyone else, I blame the traffic. Will you please forgive me?”
“Traffic is a part of life in Shanghai. Anyway, compared to Beijing, it’s nothing. Please don’t worry. You’re not really late at all.”
The maître d’hôtel eased Walter Chao’s chair into place as he sat down. “That’s very understanding of you. I can’t abide tardiness myself.” He opened the menu briefly and then closed it, pushing it to one side. He was not a tall man, Yinghui had noticed—about the same height as she was, maybe five feet five or six—and yet, once seated, he had a way of dominating the space at the table in the subtlest way, his forearms resting on the edge of the table, his head leaning just the tiniest bit across toward her, as if anticipating greater intimacy.
A waiter appeared with an ice bucket on a stand. He briefly showed the label to Walter Chao, who nodded without really looking, without really taking his eyes off Yinghui. He could not be considered handsome in any conventional sense, yet Yinghui felt the same sense of embarrassment as when, as a schoolgirl, she had spoken to the cool, good-looking boys in her neighborhood—a sense of timidity mixed with excitement. That feeling was entirely foreign to her now, belonging as it did to another era in her life.
She averted her gaze and looked at the champagne—a bulbous bottle with an unfamiliar label, not a high-fashion name favored by gangster rappers and trashy heiresses but something with everlasting chic.
“Pink champagne,” she said. “I haven’t had that in years.”
“I like the idea of starting each new venture with a celebration,” he said, “rather than waiting for the end. That way I can look forward to a successful venture. I don’t understand people who only celebrate a successful affair at its conclusion. But, please, do say if you don’t like it. We can always order a different one. Or just orange juice if you’re not up for champagne tonight.”
“Oh, no,” Yinghui said, lifting her flute, “I am always up for champagne.”
“Glad to hear that,” he said, lifting his flute to match hers, “because I have a feeling we’re going to get on very well together. Ever since I heard about you and read those articles in the business news, I thought, Now, there’s someone formidable. Cheers.”
The night sky was heavy with a dusky purple glow, the lights of the city blotting out the darkness. She was glad she had arrived early, that she had had a chance to settle in and stake out her position at the table. She felt him watching her, and even though he did so discreetly, she knew that she was being judged.
“What are you going to eat?” she said. “The great thing about arriving early is that I was able to decide what to eat before you got here.”
“Great,” he said. “I always take the same thing here. But I’m not going to tell you what I’m having, because I don’t want to influence your decision.”
He brushed an invisible speck of dust off his lapel, and she noticed the quality of the fabric of his jacket: smooth, matte, unblemished. As he inclined his head for an instant, she saw that his nose was uneven, curving to one side just at its tip; for the rest of the evening she would notice this tiny imbalance from time to time and be struck by how it made his face look damaged, in spite of his perfect grooming.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Why don’t we talk business for just a few minutes before we order our food? That way we can get it out of the way and enjoy ourselves—chat about life, find out more about each other, all the things that normal people do when they first meet. What do you think?”
“I think it’s an excellent idea. But let’s get it done quickly, because I’m starving. And curious too.”
When he laughed, his face creased into deep lines, aging him. She had thought of him as around her age, but now she could see that he was quite a few years older, his skin weathered by the sun (she could imagine him on holiday on the French Riviera or Pansea Beach in Phuket, a compact, dark man dressed in Bermuda shorts and an ironed short-sleeved shirt). “I take it you’ve Googled me, so there’s no need to go into my background.”
“Not really,” she lied (she had spent a frustrating and ultimately fruitless hour on the Internet trying to piece together a picture of this man, then rung contacts in various countries in Southeast Asia to see if anyone knew him). “But I have a rough idea of your work. Very impressive. Of course, I’d known about you vaguely in the past, especially the projects in Malaysia. I just didn’t make the connection, that’s all—I mean, I didn’t know you were the person who’d done all of them.” She sipped her champagne and looked him in the eye. “But I was always aware of your name,” she lied again.
He shrugged. “Reputation is not important to me. The past is the past—what’s important is what one does next.”
“I quite agree.” She pushed a small bowl of olives toward him. “So, what is one going to do next?”
“That depends on how the rest of this dinner goes.”
“I see.”
He took his napkin and unfolded it over his lap. “Let me ask you a question: When you’re working on a project—late at night, at the end of another sixteen-hour day, when you’re utterly exhausted and wondering why the hell you’re doing it—what goes through your head? I mean, what drives you? What are you hoping to gain by working day in, day out, being nice to people you don’t much like, poring over accounts, talking to boring bankers and accountants. What is it you’re searching for? Is it money?”
“No. Well, yes. No one ever works to become poor,” Yinghui answered. “But obviously it’s not just about money.”
“What is it about, then?”
“I don’t really know.”
“I’ll tell you: It’s about respect. Money is the conduit for respect. The richer you are, the more respect you gain.”
Yinghui shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s that simple.”
He smiled. “You know it is. So let me tell you how I am going to help you gain plenty of respect. Great, massive piles of it.”
HOW TO INVEST WISELY—
A CASE STUDY IN
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT
As I’ve said on many an occasion, the best way to sharpen one’s business acumen is to analyze real-life situations. Consider the following example, paying close attention to the triumphs and errors of human judgment:
In 1981, my father bought a near-derelict building in Kota Bharu for thirty thousand ringgit. City dwellers would scoff at that price, for it was not a lot of money even in those days. But back then it represented all of my father’s meager savings, plus a considerable amount of money borrowed from well-intentioned friends and relatives who believed that my father was going to make good this time and repay their loans with interest; they thought they were making an investment rather than lending money. I was the only one who was not convinced. Even though this was some time before the gambling properly took hold of him, I could see that his reckless fantasies were a
lready becoming an addiction and that no good would come out of this venture. It would be a failure like everything else he ever did; there would be no glorious curtain call. My time away from him had enabled me to see this as clearly as sunshine after a night’s rain.
I received a letter from him, telling me to take the first bus north to join him at his new home—our new home. I had been living, if you recall, with my aunt in the far south of Johor and had recently gotten a place at a technical college, where I was learning to be an electrician, much to the joy of my aunt. That was the extent of her ambitions for me (people of my background, I remind you, were not primed for greatness). My father’s note was brief but breezy in tone. I looked at the address of the building that had become both his home and new business venture, the enterprise that would reunite us at last and provide us with a solid income sufficient to last him through his final years and—who knows—a legacy I could inherit. The name of the building looked at once bizarre and familiar, and it took me a while to place it.
Speculatively built in the late 1960s upon rumors of vast, soon-to-be-discovered offshore oil fields, the Tokyo Hotel anticipated an influx of itinerant low-skilled workers that never quite materialized. It had not been designed to be anything but functional: a three-story concrete block with small windows and a flat roof on which rainwater collected, breeding mosquitoes and dripping down the leaky gutters to form rivulets of black moss that scarred the building’s façade. When the rumors of the oil fields turned out to be untrue, the hotel quickly fell into disrepair—and, soon, disrepute too, offering cheap rooms by the afternoon or even by the hour for those in a hurry. It was mainly Chinese girls who hung around the Tokyo Hotel; sometimes Thai girls came from across the border with their traveling-salesman boyfriends. One of the tales often told about the hotel—perhaps apocryphal, but who knows?—was that the rooms were limited strictly to the hour, and that each had an alarm wired to a clock that started ticking the moment you entered the room and sounded right on sixty minutes. It was said that the clocks were the only appliances that worked in the rooms—none of the sockets seemed to be wired, which made the kettle and plastic table fan redundant. Sometimes the ceiling fans worked but spun so languidly that they raised no breeze at all. Your hour there would be stifling, sweaty.
These were details I picked up from older teenage boys, some of whom claimed to have visited the hotel. They said that the partition walls were so thin that they could hear everything from the next room—local radio dramas, Thai news from across the border, sports commentaries: always the radio, to drown out the moaning and breathy cries. And there were noises you simply couldn’t recognize—the sharp slapping of a hand on bare flesh, but delivered with metronomic regularity so that it began to sound machinelike; or a coconut grater, almost like a dentist’s drill, applied to soft rubber; or people speaking in strange harsh languages that sounded like nothing you ever heard on TV, that not even the villains in Hollywood films spoke. Someone said he’d heard the voices of extraterrestrials; one boy even said he’d heard his own dad.
Sometime in the mid-seventies, the Tokyo Hotel began to be raided by the religious police—once, twice, then every month. They’d heard that Malay girls from out of town had been seen there; one or two had even become regulars. No one really cared when it became obvious the place would close down. It didn’t seem exotic or exciting anymore, just run-down and filthy. Everyone secretly hoped it would be torn down, but it wasn’t. Without the new oil fields that people hoped for, there was no money in town even to demolish a lousy building like that.
Left abandoned, the Tokyo Hotel became a hangout for local junkies, increasing in number with the easy availability of Burmese heroin filtering across the border from Hat Yai and Songkhla. Whereas prepubescent boys might once have happily cycled past in the hope of catching sight of a scantily clad girl, they now shied away from the needles and broken bottles and general unsavoriness that hung over the area. The entire street leading to the hotel slowly began to look shabby too—never one of the more bustling streets in town, it now looked decrepit, the shutters on the few remaining shops permanently pulled down. All the business had moved to the other side of town, closer to the market, where there were now modern department stores and an open-air plaza for food stalls, cooled in the evening by balmy sea breezes, its perimeter decorated with hanging neon lightbulbs. The contrast was almost laughable: Why would anyone want to go to that side of town, where the air was fetid and stagnant, the land becoming swampy and mosquito-ridden as it stretched toward the riverbank? The roads were ravaged by the floods, and, as newer routes into the center of town were built, the lanes in the area became overgrown with weeds and small trees sprouted in the gaps between the buildings.
From both a commercial and lifestyle point of view, a derelict hotel in a rapidly degenerating part of town did not seem to offer any possibilities at all—any prudent entrepreneur would have avoided it, any business manual would have warned against it—but it was at precisely this point that my father took over the Tokyo Hotel.
9.
PURSUE GAINS, FORGET RIGHTEOUSNESS
PHOEBE FELT THAT HER LIFE WAS AWASH WITH GOOD FEELINGS. SHE WAS dressed according to the rules of fashion that she had picked up from observing Shanghai women: Wear the biggest sunglasses you can find; carry the smallest handbag possible. The new attitude she had been cultivating was filling her with a magnificent confidence.
Already she could tell that she was making a good impression on the man she had just met. His eyes were wandering up and down her tight-fitting dress—he was making no attempt to hide that he found her sexually attractive.
Good, she thought.
Even though the weather was already turning cold and the light was not as bright as before, it was important for her to look as glamorous as possible, as if she were going to a fancy evening function, because this was the way women of style carried themselves, whether on the streets of Xintiandi or on billboards or in magazines. On this day, going to have coffee with a man she’d met on the Internet, she felt certain that she had finally attained the level of sophistication she aspired to. Her life would now surely change for the better.
For a few weeks now, she had been planning a new approach to finding a man, which was also the key to finding success in Shanghai. She had invested a lot of time and money in observing the different methods of accomplishing this. To begin with, she spent many evenings in bars where she knew men and women gathered to meet one another. In one place in Hongqiao, which she had heard was favored by foreigners, she saw that the local women were dressed provocatively, with figure-hugging dresses that showed off a lot of flesh, the very opposite of how Chinese girls were supposed to dress, with modesty and respect. Phoebe had always thought that nice girls could attract men with their demure charm, but now she could see that she was wrong. That was such an old-fashioned and outdated way of thinking; she had to change her whole attitude. The black satin dress she had worn specially for such evenings out seemed dull and overprotective now, with its long sleeves and strip of see-through lace over her collarbone. She had thought it alluring, but now it made her feel like a Muslim wife, covered up so that no man could approach her.
She watched as a young woman flirted with a group of American men at the bar. The men were laughing and touching the woman on her arm, on her bare shoulder. They were drinking beer from bottles, Budweiser, and every so often they would touch the lips of the bottles together with a loud clinking noise as they made a joke. The bar was lit with neon lights set under the glass counter, and the colors that reflected in the faces of the men and woman seemed too bright, unreal, as if in an old movie. The woman’s heels were so high that her calf muscles were contracted and tense, which made her long legs look like an African warrior’s. She distributed her card among the group of men, and Phoebe could tell they were impressed by it. Before too long, the woman left the bar with one of the men, their arms linked like longtime lovers.
When the whole group h
ad dispersed, Phoebe saw that the woman’s card had fallen to the floor. It had a name on it, and the nature of her business: PRODUCTS FOR THE BED. There was no address, just a QQ ID number for online chatting and a mobile-phone number. Yes, maybe she was a prostitute, Phoebe thought; maybe she was what people called kuaican—maybe, like so many other girls Phoebe had known in the past, she was just a cheap, quick snack. But tonight she had a man, and maybe by tomorrow she would have a boyfriend. And maybe in a few months’ time she would be married, and maybe she would have security for the rest of her life—maybe that was the last evening she would ever have to spend in a bar. And all because she dared to wear a short skirt and a top that showed off her too-skinny body.
In her “Journal of My Secret Self,” Phoebe wrote down the following rules:
I must improve my appearance; I must dare to dress like a slut.
I must exercise my body; to be fat is not acceptable.
Sleep—five hours a day is enough.
I must improve myself always; I must practice my English.
She bought a few self-help books, cheap counterfeit copies being sold on the pavement near the subway station in Tiantong Lu, such as Sophistify Yourself. The most valuable one was called Why Men Love Bitches. When she read it, she scribbled down more notes:
Use men just as they would use you.
Lying to a man is okay, as long as you get what you want.
Do not stick to only one man.
Being nice is your mom’s job—and look where it got her.
Do not grow old waiting.
She started to spend more time on the Internet again, but this time she was more careful. It was her best bet, since there were so many men out there she could ensnare. She put new photos on her profile page, images that showed her in outfits carefully selected in the cramped market in Qipu Lu, not far from where she lived. She didn’t really like going there, because it was full of poor people who reminded her of her desperate situation, but she told herself that it would not be like this for long. In many of these new photos, she adopted the poses that she had learned from other girls’ profiles: side on, lifting her shoulder to her chin, or pursing her lipsticked mouth at the camera with her eyes lifted teasingly. They looked so much more tantalizing than her old photo, taken in the park in Guangzhou. If she were a man, she would surely want to go out with such a sexy girl. She was about to remove the old photo from her profile, but then, for a reason she could not understand, she let it remain, the last of the many photos, where it would not be noticed.