Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  Even as a small boy, Gary sensed the nature of her character—he sensed the way she had begun to absorb him into the ups and downs of her life. It went beyond the tasks expected of a young child in his position—helping her hang out the washing and deliver laundered clothes, or accompanying her when she needed help cleaning someone’s house, or running into town to buy a forgotten bottle of bleach. In fact, every sentence she uttered was intended to be shared with her son; everything she did was for his benefit. He could not escape the knowledge of responsibility for this, not even at his young age. “This is what I have to do now,” she would say, sighing, as if it were a joke, as if she had accepted her fate. “I just clean other people’s houses.” It was a comment that enveloped her son in a shared intimacy and involved him in her struggles: She worked as a washerwoman to support him, and every demeaning thing she did was for his benefit.

  He knew that she had been a musician. She had been a pianist, good enough to study with a famous teacher in Singapore. Her parents, who had been schoolteachers in Kota Bharu, had sold their car and the few bits of jade jewelry they’d owned and emptied their savings to pay for her tuition fees. In spite of the generosity of Singaporean cousins, who gave her a room for free, it was always a struggle—even in the seventies, Singapore was an expensive place to live. Her parents were optimistic but realistic about their hopes for her; like other people from modest backgrounds, they did not allow themselves the luxury of imagination and so did not heap the pressure of expectation on their daughter. Partly this was because they did not really know what a pianist’s life might involve and therefore could not envisage all the possibilities open to their daughter. Perhaps if they had been more worldly and sophisticated, they would have been more expectant and demanding. People like them—humble, hardworking, fearful—did not hope for very much. They had seen what happened in the sixties, not just in their country but in all the neighboring countries—the violence, the turmoil—and they knew that the lives of ordinary people could be changed in an instant. Solidity was the key to survival; ambition would lead only to heartbreak.

  All they hoped was that she would have enough of an education to be able to teach music when she was older. Teachers themselves, they knew it was a decent profession. They could imagine what that sort of life would be.

  The weight of expectation came from Gary’s mother herself. A diligent, technically able student, she allowed herself to dream about playing in concert halls in Europe. She was aware of her limitations, but that did not quell her fantasies. As she practiced her cadenzas, she felt the growing tension between imagination and reality: She wanted to perform with more brilliance, but her fingers would not obey her brain; she wanted to express more-profound sentiments, but she had nothing to say.

  Worst of all, she allowed herself to fall in love with her music teacher. He was twenty years her senior, with a failed marriage behind him, but she didn’t care. He was kind, handsome, and attentive and had led the kind of life she still dreamed of. He had been a student in London and had given small recitals in Paris and Vienna. She never questioned why he had returned home, never questioned his failure. Most important, he had also grown up in rural Malaysia, in small-town Pahang. She thought he understood her.

  If you read this in the Sunday newspapers, you might assume that it was the beginning of a love story reflecting the spirit of the time, the fortunes of a country—the change, the optimism, people believing they could overcome all the disadvantages of their history and achieve happiness. And indeed it could have been.

  When she announced, a few years later, that she was going to marry this man, her parents objected not only to his age and the fact that he had already been married. It was something else that troubled them. He was too ready with his smile, and his hair was always neatly combed, with a precise side parting. He knew the right thing to say and was too quick to say it, as if he had prepared the responses, had rehearsed them in a similar setting. He was a handsome man, there was no doubt about that—but his eyes were set a fraction too close to each other and his nose was slim, which lent him an effete air. Not feminine, just unreliable. These physical attributes, passed to his son through the filter of a generation, would produce a beauty considered rare and strange and delicate; but, unlike the son, the father lived in an earlier, harsher time, when a man who looked as he did was judged to be not desirable but suspicious. What was his use in life, other than to be charming?

  They got married, drifted away from her parents, moved to KL, got a small link house in Cheras. He found another woman. Gary’s mother was four months pregnant when he left, almost too late to abort, not that she really wanted to; besides, it was illegal. Her life was beginning to feel full of choices she was free to make—but, at the same time, not at all free. She wanted to pursue her husband and reclaim him, or else make him suffer, but pride stifled all such vengeful intention; she wanted to go back to her parents and seek refuge in their care, but shame made that impossible; she wanted to abort the baby, but the possibilities of love made her keep it. She realized that so many things in her life had given her the illusion that she was in control of her destiny, but she was, in fact, not in control at all.

  Her husband did come back, two or three times, but each visit lasted only a couple of weeks before he vanished again. Each time, he appeared carrying his clothes in a small vinyl bag; he bore stories of new people he’d met, new things he was doing. He’d given up teaching, turned his back on music altogether. It wasn’t lucrative enough, and there were so many other things he could do to make money. He was getting involved in door-to-door selling—a friend of his told him he could make a thousand ringgit a month selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and even Tupperware sales could bring in a bit of cash. He had many projects in the pipeline: He was also dabbling in small-time politics, canvassing on behalf of a businessman from KL who was competing in the local by-election. He wanted to get into journalism, too, because he wanted to expose all the injustice around him, all the rotten things happening in the country—the politicians on the make, robbing and cheating their own people, letting down the ones who needed them most.

  He seemed not to notice her labored movements or how heavy she had grown with the pregnancy. He rambled incoherently at times, and she remembered what her parents had said about him: an artistic temperament … unreliable. When he talked about politicians failing in their duties, she did not have the heart to say, Talk about letting down the people who need you the most. She could not explain why, during his brief stays, she continued to cook for him and lie down next to him at night, listening to his quick, shallow breathing, as if he were the one who needed looking after. Even when he left for good, she continued to worry that he was not eating properly, that he might not have anywhere safe to sleep at night, that he had lost his direction in life.

  Not long after her baby was born, she heard that her husband had ended up in prison for organizing a political rally somewhere up north. He was in and out of jail for a while, and then she heard no more news from him.

  For a time she gave music lessons to middle-class kids whose parents wanted them to become “rounded individuals.” As she watched her students bang through their pieces she wondered what being a rounded individual really meant. “If you want to go to Harvard,” one mother explained to her as her six-year-old son played “Chopsticks,” “you need to be a rounded individual. That means you have to play the piano, doesn’t it?” It was not what she’d imagined for her life, but it was okay—at least she was a teacher of music, even if she was teaching people who had no love of music.

  But this did not last very long—eight months, a year maybe. Taking the bus to Bangsar and Damansara—all those smart suburbs, so far away—and then walking, always walking, through the wide lanes lined with split-level houses and decorative trees in the gardens: It meant she would travel for four hours for a lesson that lasted one hour, and all this time her small baby was at home. Sometimes she left Gary with a neighbor; sometimes she
hired an Indonesian maid with glassy red eyes and a vacant smile, but this left her with very little money to spare at the end of each week. And then there was the worrying. So many things could happen to her and her baby in the city. The way men looked at her on the bus made her feel nervous and uncomfortable. She didn’t dare take taxis. She stopped working after dark. If anything happened to her, what would happen to her baby?

  It was a relief of sorts when her parents died—first her father, then, a few months afterward, her mother. She had to move back up north to Kelantan to sort out their affairs, which involved living in their little house in Temangan. The place was barely more than a village; it was not far from where she had grown up, and she appreciated the air and the landscape, the feeling of civilization melting away into the wilderness. Ten years previously she had found the isolation stifling, but now it felt comforting. Her parents’ deaths gave her a reason to escape her life in KL. Everyone would understand why she had to give up all that she had had in the big city; all her ambitions had reached a legitimate end; she could even pretend it was a hardship to return to a rural existence.

  By the time Gary was old enough to put a name to simple human emotions—fear, loneliness, joy—his mother’s life was already in retreat, its boundaries shrinking. In order to escape the feeling of being trapped by the confines of rural life, she surrendered to it. Her world was defined now by the rhythms of the market laid out along the dusty street every morning. She chatted with the old makcik who came in from the surrounding villages to sell vegetables and food from their own kitchens—she knew each one by name and sometimes even shared tea with the dodol woman. It was how she had grown up; she knew how to live like this. She tried to imagine that the roads leading out of town all headed north, to Kota Bharu and the other small towns in the no-man’s-land on the Thai border, or to the coast, where the long stretches of empty white-sand beaches were interrupted only by fishing villages; she wanted to imagine that she could no longer go south to KL or Singapore, or west across the mountains to Penang, where there were cities and music and foreigners and ambition.

  At that age—six, seven?—Gary would notice her watching him as he played in the dirt yard in front of the house, and on a number of occasions he found her sitting by his bed when he woke up in the morning. But she would never actually hold him or pick him up to cradle him in her arms or even rush over to help him to his feet if he fell over. The look in her eyes was empty, hollowed out by fatigue: The mere act of reaching out to him was too great an effort for her. She wanted to love him, he knew, but she had no strength to do so. The divide between them always remained, and before long he became aware that he no longer needed her touch.

  She worked every day, including Fridays, when many of the shops were closed for prayers. By now she was washing clothes and cleaning houses for a living. In those days there weren’t any Indonesian maids, so it was still easy for a Chinese woman like her to find work. Occasionally she would mention the possibility of giving music lessons—often enough to make Gary remember that his mother had been someone whose life had been full of potential. But they both knew it was ridiculous—there was no one in a small town like theirs who would want or could afford piano lessons. It was not like down south, where Gary knew from his mother’s stories that there were concert venues that played host to foreign musicians dressed in tuxedos.

  Once a month his mother would take the bus into Kota Bharu. “I have some friends—it’s our music evening. They sing and sometimes I play the piano. Traditional songs, like the ones I sing for you sometimes. You know,” she said, as she broke into song, “like ‘Sweet Little Rose.’ ” He liked the idea of his mother playing the piano and wished he could one day see her perform. For a few days after her music evenings, she would often smoke some cigarettes, usually Winstons out of a crushed pack. Gary never questioned this, even though she didn’t normally smoke; maybe a friend had given them to her. One day he noticed a box of matches she’d used to light her cigarettes. When she had finished the matches, she threw the box into the waste bin, where it grew damp from the vegetable peelings before he had a chance to salvage it. Every month she came back with the same matchbox, and he began to pay attention to the bright red lips printed against the black background. By now he was old enough to read the words easily: ICHIBAN KARAOKE.

  It made him sad to think of his mother, who might have played in concert halls in Europe, in such a place as Ichiban Karaoke, with its red-lipped matchboxes, in Kota Bharu. He was just a child—it would be years before he would visit a karaoke bar himself—but already he knew that Ichiban Karaoke was not good enough for his mother, that she did not belong in a place like that.

  People always say that their mother is beautiful, that she is the most amazing woman in the world. Now that Gary has seen hundreds and hundreds of pretty women all over Asia, he knows that his mother’s looks could never be considered exceptional. To be honest, she was on the plain side. All the same, when he remembers the way she looked back then, with red pinched eyes and the faint lines of age already beginning to show around her temples and her mouth, as she sat on the front step of the house singing old Chinese songs while watching him cycle round and round the dirt yard, he thinks: She should not have gone to Ichiban Karaoke Bar.

  Every year, as he grew older, the dirt yard in front of his house seemed to grow wider. Trees were felled and the scrubby undergrowth was cleared, bringing the town out toward them. This was a good thing, his mother explained, for it made it easier for her to get work. There were more houses that needed cleaning, more people who needed their clothes washed and ironed, and now they lived close by. Had she lived for another few years, she would have lived—almost—among them. Things might have turned out differently for them both. Maybe the buses would have been more reliable, not so old and broken down. Maybe the roads would have been improved, with fewer potholes after the rainy season and the floods in November and December that always washed the tarmac away, leaving a patchwork of holes. Maybe she would not have had to catch a lift from a stranger on a two-stroke scooter when she was coming back from Ichiban Karaoke late at night; maybe there would have been fewer goats and chickens straying onto the road and into oncoming traffic. Maybe she would still be alive today, and Gary would be a bus driver, not a pop star. Maybe he would not be sitting here flicking through the TV channels once again; maybe he wouldn’t be on the Internet, waiting for someone interesting to log on to MSN.

  But maybe it would not have changed a thing. His mother might have lived to become a fat happy old woman and he would have been a failed pop star anyway. He changes the channel—he’s tired of watching lions savage zebras—and finds the pop channels. Before long he sees the latest of his music videos. It includes arty black-and-white footage of his last concert, which everyone hailed as a huge success. As he watches himself being lowered onto the stage in a messianic pose, surrounded by a twenty-strong dance troupe dressed as half-naked aliens, or in the middle of a complex dance routine, there is one thing he cannot fail to notice: the vacant expression on his face, the absence of any enthusiasm. And he remembers how difficult it was for him during those performances to feel present onstage. His body and voice did what they were trained to do, but he imagined himself elsewhere. It is so obvious now that he sees images of himself. Perhaps it is something he inherited from his mother, this absence of expression—her sole legacy to him.

  This is why, when he sings love ballads—rather, when he sang love ballads (he must get used to speaking of his career in the past tense)—he often closed his eyes. Fans used to say that was because he felt so much pain, so much love, that it hurt him too much. But the truth is that he felt nothing, which is why he had to close his eyes—so that they would not betray him.

  As he contemplates this emptiness once more, a text bleeps on his phone. It is his agent: Hv to leave hotel tmrw. Hv fixed rental apt 4u. Taxi at 11am. Some work is coming thru. Will call u soon.

  Where r u

  Taipei

>   Shd I come back

  Better stay in Shanghai. Many journalists here. No work.

  He looks at his room. Most people would panic at the thought of packing all their things overnight. But he has nothing to pack, no possessions at all, so he goes back to the chat rooms on the Internet. The girl he saw earlier is still online, still searching for someone. Her messages are not so bright and courageous anymore: Looking for any nice friend. I am alone tonight.

  Gary draws his laptop to his knees and begins to type a reply. Hi … so am I.

  12.

  WORK WITH A SOUL MATE,

  SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS YOU

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN WORKING WITH ME, BUT I AM AFRAID I am otherwise engaged and will be unable to commit to any new business venture for at least six to twelve months. I am grateful for your inquiry and wish you great luck and success. Leong Yinghui.

  She did not pause too long to consider the tone of the message before sending it out as a standard response to the many proposals that she was receiving. Every week since the awards ceremony, the number of people interested in developing a business with her, or hiring her in some capacity or another, was growing exponentially, it seemed. At first she responded fully and personally to each request, carefully considering the pros and cons of each proposal before dictating an email to her PA. Although many of the projects were vague and flimsy or downright ridiculous, there were more than a few that struck her as being potentially interesting, such as the proposal from a young woman who wanted to start a chain of tiny shops called Great Sunrise, selling socks and undergarments in the dead spaces in metro stations all across the city. But as the number of requests multiplied, her patience diminished, until eventually the banal outnumbered the intriguing, and, in refusing most, Yinghui began to find it easier to refuse them all. She knew that among the rubbish she was also throwing out possibly fascinating, life-changing opportunities. Not so long ago she would have pursued every faint trail to its end, but now things were different. Since meeting Walter Chao several weeks ago, she no longer had to worry about finding that single perfect project that would change her life. Besides, there were only so many times that one could revolutionize one’s life. Sooner or later the frantic somersaults of fortune have to end and the restlessness of desire fades. It was time—so all her friends said—that she started settling down. Such a strange expression, she thought: settling down, as if she were silt in a warm river, sinking slowly to the muddy bed. Still, it was an inevitable process, and mysterious too. Yinghui had never known how it would happen, until now.