Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  Looking back on it now, it was clear to Yinghui that it was not a charade to deflect the attention of friends and neighbors from their new Mercedes (and driver) or their extended bathroom suite and generally upwardly mobile status: Her parents truly believed that, in clinging to a certain way of life that was no longer theirs, they could protect themselves from the unknown dangers of newfound wealth, even as they reveled in it.

  By and large, Yinghui was comfortable with their modus vivendi; having grown up with it, she did not find it contradictory and grew to admire their sense of financial prudence and their general distrust of ostentation. Indeed, in her later teenage years she began to affect a certain down-at-heelness, a disregard for material possessions that—she now recognizes—only well-off people are able to enjoy. The resulting overcasual nature of her dress style—consisting largely of cheap, loose-fitting T-shirts bought from the night market, worn with bleached jeans—attracted only mild rebuke from her parents, who were evidently pleased with their daughter’s sartorial miserliness. “People will think you’re a washerwoman,” her mother once said, but in this seeming criticism there was a clear message: that it was safer for strangers to think of you as a servant rather than as a daughter of a government minister.

  It was only when Yinghui started going out with boys that she began to discover that her parents’ natural prudence extended way beyond money, affecting every aspect of life; she began to discover how little of it she had absorbed into her own philosophy of life and, most of all, how much she hated it. “Be careful, don’t take buses. Be careful, don’t take taxis on your own. Be careful, don’t go to Brickfields. Be careful, don’t eat laksa there. Be careful, Singapore is so expensive these days.” She could accept their admonishments, albeit with a growing annoyance common to all teenagers, but she had a harder time dealing with the warnings about boys, which were more forceful and therefore harder to shrug off. “Don’t go out late; otherwise, people will talk. Don’t have too many boyfriends; otherwise, people will think you are loose.”

  She dated two boys, both briefly, knowing her outings with them would amount to nothing. And then, not long after turning eighteen, she met C.S. Lim. It was then that she really found out just how much her parents had based their lives on caution and respect.

  Don’t hang out with that Lim boy. We hear the younger one is bad news.

  Don’t let people know you are seeing him. Second Auntie saw you the other day.

  Don’t get so close to him; don’t let his parents look down on you.

  Don’t go out to those flashy Western places with him; his friends are too flashy.

  And yet, four years later, when she and C.S. had both returned from university abroad and were still happily a couple, her parents managed to overcome their natural reticence toward C.S. and his tendency for flamboyance. Solidity had its benefits: They could see that Yinghui and he had lasted more than three years, which must have meant that they were serious. They could not quite understand the nature of the relationship, which involved holidaying in India and dressing like hippies long after the end of hippiedom and hanging out with people who seemed never to work but knew a lot about politics and philosophy, but they could understand that three years signaled a certain intention, and it was this that they supported.

  Her father gave her a generous loan to start her café, Angie’s—she was so bad with money that she forgot how much it was even as the check was being written. It was clear that he did not expect the loan to be repaid; it was more, even, than a gift: It was a symbol of her parents’ trust in her relationship with C.S. Lim, of whom they had once disapproved. Of course, they never quite got the concept of the café, and when her parents visited the space over its initial months, Yinghui was treated to such comments as, “I didn’t even know they grew coffee in Australia,” or, “Tofu … in a bun? Ei, is it the same tofu that we use, ah?” And yet they laughed when she came home and told them tales of her gross mismanagement—how she had placed a bulk order for coconut milk without specifying that it had to be canned rather than fresh and was now facing hundreds of ringgits’ worth of fermenting santan in the storeroom; or how some of her friends were running up credit accounts worth a thousand bucks from just espresso and cake (they couldn’t believe that coffee could ever amount to that much). All her father offered by way of chastisement was a benign comment now and then. “You have so much to learn about money,” he would say, or, sighing, “I don’t think you’ll ever understand about money.”

  Her parents had become indulgent, they knew; but they also knew that Yinghui was happy living her life differently from theirs. In their own way, they, too, must have sensed that the world was changing.

  Maybe their increasingly relaxed approach to Yinghui and C.S.’s lifestyle (which might not long ago have been deemed too ostentatious) had something to do with her father’s growing ease at being in the public eye. He had been in his post for more than seven years by the time Yinghui and C.S. returned from university—long enough to become accustomed to being in the press and on TV on a regular basis. As Deputy Minister for Housing and Local Government, he was not one of the more high-profile government ministers, and his natural awkwardness in front of cameras did not make him an obvious candidate for media appearances. Nonetheless, a certain degree of exposure to the press and public alike was required of a man in his position, and he gradually became used to the idea that his life was not, and could not be, an entirely private affair.

  The house in which they lived began to reflect this change in attitude; this was clear to Yinghui even then. They continued to reside at the same address, but the physical structure had grown enormously, nearly doubling in size following renovation work of various kinds—two new guest bathrooms, an entirely new kitchen, an air-conditioned breakfast room that led to a shaded terrace cooled by ceiling fans and capable of being turned into a banqueting space that seated fifty quite easily. Everything was done to accommodate their increased entertaining: the turning of messy private spaces into coolly impersonal public ones. The shabby bits of mismatching furniture were either thrown away or banished to the bedrooms upstairs, replaced downstairs by carefully coordinated bland, modern furniture. “Good taste,” Yinghui joked. “The curse of the nouveaux riches.” Sometimes, when she drove in to the garage, she would be struck by how their once-expansive garden had now been reduced to a few slivers of grass here and there, bordered by palm trees; the rest had been swallowed up by the immensity of the house. Stealthily and without them even realizing it, her parents’ own lives had become that very thing they most feared: flashy.

  They clung to the token display of frugality, their family dinners, now confined to a Sunday evening, when Yinghui’s café was shut and her father was freed from ministerial duties. The dishes they ate were markedly different now, vegetables augmented by abalone as well as mushrooms, the meat often taking the form of whole suckling pig; and they would have Western desserts, too, plus chocolate—previously unthinkable symbols of decadence. But the appearance of each of these items was easily explained: They were gifts from so-and-so, a colleague of her father’s, or Signor Franchetti, a visiting Argentinian dignitary, and so on. Left to their own devices, they could never—would never—afford such extravagant treats.

  This was the conceit that Yinghui found harder to stomach with each passing Sunday: that somehow their new wealth was an accident, a burden that happened to befall them but which they shouldered admirably by pretending it didn’t exist. Even as the driver sat outside by the black Mercedes, waiting to take her father to late-night meetings, her mother would be complaining about the rising prices of vegetables now that everything was being exported to Hong Kong and Singapore.

  Perhaps the fixation with the minutiae of food economics was a way to avoid talking about other things—like her father’s new job, which was still referred to as a recent occurrence, even after eight or nine years. Yinghui had little idea what he did on a day-to-day basis and did not seek to find out. Like most o
f her friends whose parents were well-off members of the establishment, she had drifted naturally and easily into an antiestablishment circle, surrounding herself with other young overseas-educated people who adopted an antigovernment point of view as a matter of course. For reasons of street cred and gaiety of conversation, their parents’ jobs were conveniently ignored. It was almost an unwritten rule that they should not discuss what their parents did for a living—the source of the income that allowed these bright young things to spend so much time discussing how to improve the world was better left unexplored.

  Nonetheless, there were often instances that made the indiscretions of the older generation impossible to overlook—cases of fraud, embezzlement, or abuses of power that were just too excessive in a country already becoming inured to excess. There were the parents of someone who had been at St John’s Institution with C.S. Lim, a geeky boy who liked jazz; his father was a lawyer who had gotten rich handling the corporate affairs of government companies—a shadowy area if ever there was one. But on paper everything was impeccable, and even though everyone had their doubts, nothing was ever said apart from good-natured teasing every time the boy appeared with a new pair of shoes or a new laptop computer. “Looks like the government’s doing good business in hi-tech shares!” his friends would joke. But when the scandal broke in the press that his father had in fact been channeling parts of the proceeds of share deals into his private bank account, humor was no longer possible. All the jokes Yinghui and their circle of friends had been making now carried a dreadful truth to them. Likewise, when the father of another member of their circle, a state minister, was found stealing from public funds, all the banter that the group of friends had previously shared now became out of bounds. Although the subsequent inquiries cleared both parties of wrongdoing, as they always did, there was only one option left to the children of the culprits—they had to slip away quietly, swiftly detaching themselves from their circle of friends, who would, in turn, refrain from speaking about them.

  There were important nuances, however. If your parents were exposed as shady characters because they had fallen out of favor with the government, that was acceptable and would, in fact, increase your street cred within the circle of cool kids: The family was being persecuted by the establishment, even though they had enjoyed years enriching themselves within it. This is what happened to a scholarly, Godard-loving girl called Nurul: It wasn’t her parents’ fault that they’d backed the wrong horse, someone who had since been ousted from power and whose entourage was now paying the price for their loyal support. Their predicament earned her the unqualified right to deliver lengthy, impassioned analyses of the ills of the country to a sympathetic audience every night at Angie’s, where Yinghui made sure she never had to pay for her cappuccinos. Nurul hung out regularly at Angie’s, adding to its edgy, on-the-fringes appeal, until finally she fled to Australia to do a PhD in Asian politics at Canberra.

  Her father’s accession to the highest reaches of government placed Yinghui in a tricky position. On the one hand, the very fact that he was a sitting member of the cabinet made him a central part of the government, which in turn meant that he was part of the malaise facing the country. On the other hand, his relatively uncontroversial job meant that the potential for abuse was limited—deciding on the routing of interstate highways around housing developments seemed to be as serious as his job got. Besides, his reputation was that of a modest, somewhat unimaginative workhorse, someone so dull he was above corruption. He was from the far northern reaches of Kelantan; his fluency in the local Malay dialect and his continued loyalty to the region had proved an asset to the government, which needed someone with strong grassroots appeal. He was a rarity, someone who not only identified with voters in the poor, antigovernment northeast but who had proper multiracial credentials, being firmly Chinese yet speaking the Kelantanese dialect as his first language.

  These were the attributes that Yinghui liked to drop into conversation, casually, often disguised as complaints. “Oh, God, my dad’s English is so bad. He didn’t even learn to speak it until he was, like, thirteen or fourteen. His Malay is crap too. Kelantanese is basically his first language.” She had begun to boast about his rural origins, just as he had done when she was a child—it was as if, by emphasizing his backwardness, she could reduce the possibility of scandal; it was as if she already sensed what was going to happen.

  The first of the rumors began to circulate not long after the building of another extension of the North-South Expressway. It started as an environmental issue, hapless ecologists claiming that yet more jungle had been needlessly felled for the construction of the highway and that no one was using it. That was easy enough to defend: There were new oil fields on the East Coast that needed supporting infrastructure, her father said in the press. But then more and more allegations surfaced, evidence of road-building contracts worth billions of dollars, when the real cost of construction was found to be a fraction of the stated price; huge roads that led to nowhere; and, worst of all, vast tracts of forest cleared for sprawling housing estates that swiftly resembled ghost towns. In all cases, it was Yinghui’s father who had approved the projects.

  He must have had enemies in the government, Yinghui protested to C.S.; he must have done something to upset someone powerful, who was now organizing this whispering campaign. Everyone—everyone—knew that if the government didn’t want the public to know about something, it would be kept under wraps; it would never come out in the newspapers, would it?

  “But is it true?” C.S. said in his customarily detached, languid way. The more heated the topic, the higher the stakes, the more languid he became. “That is the important question. Not whether it’s a campaign against him.”

  “Of course it’s not true,” Yinghui said. “Otherwise, why would the newspapers be making such a fuss about it? Since when did you start believing what you read in the papers?”

  C.S. opened his book and began to leaf through it until he found his page marker. It was something else he liked to do when he got into arguments—pretend to read a book. “Listen, sweetheart, I don’t really care what your old man does. If it’s proved he’s a cheating crook, who cares—he’s not the only one. And I’ll still love you. But if he is indeed a bastard, you have to admit it. What your dad does is nothing to me, but what you do is important. I don’t want to get married to a fantasist who can’t admit the truth.”

  Yinghui was arranging the wheat-free brownies in the chiller cabinet. “He’s not a cheat like the rest of them. Why do you keep saying he is?”

  “I’m not saying he is, I’m just asking if he is. You know, making inquiries.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on what people are saying. And, also, look at how rich he’s become in the last few years.”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing that from you. Look who’s talking about rich.”

  C.S. looked up at Yinghui as he settled into his favorite spot on the low gray sofa. “Money isn’t necessarily dirty. Money is money; dirty money is dirty money. People don’t understand the difference these days.”

  “ ‘People’? Which ‘people’ do you mean, exactly, when you use that tone of voice?”

  He shrugged, raising his arm in an airy wave in the direction of the entrance. “You know, the nouveaux riches who seem to be springing up everywhere with their vulgar cars and handbags. God only knows how they got their money. They can’t see the difference between money and money.”

  “Money is not the same as money. Only really loaded rich dicks like you can say something like that. What the hell is the difference?”

  “Respect. Some money you respect, other money you don’t. Clean money versus dirty money. It’s how you earn it, how you spend it. It’s whether people respect you.”

  Yinghui wanted to protest, but it was no use; he had begun to read, holding his book over his face as he stretched out on the sofa, signaling the end of the discussion.

  The simplest solution was,
she knew, to ask her father a direct question: Were the allegations true? Did he take huge bribes in return for granting contracts to the wrong kinds of companies? When he’d taken Mum to Tokyo last month and bought her a pearl necklace and new shoes, was it really because he’d had official duties to perform and would have been lonely without her—or was it a trip funded by a company hoping to gain favors from him? When she saw him at home that Sunday, at their weekly dinner, she waited for a suitable moment, a chance to steer the conversation in the right direction before asking him in a measured, non-confrontational manner about what was being said in the press.

  But their dinners were set pieces designed to avoid true exchange; it had never been clearer than it was now. All that talk about how expensive the vegetables and fish were these days—it eliminated the possibility of anything controversial or troubling. It was a performance they had honed to perfection over the years, just in case they would one day need it. Now that day had come, and the actors, including Yinghui, were playing their roles. She was complicit in the charade, she realized. She could so easily have ruptured the falseness of their happy-family image with a direct question; even if it upset the dinner, it would at least make them talk. But, no, every time she felt the urge to blurt out her question—is it true?—an equally strong sensation began to arise, a feeling of guilt and responsibility, which negated the first impulse to seek the truth. She looked at her father, his face bent over his bowl of soup, lips trembling slightly as he sipped at the spoon. There were dark spots on his hands, and his skin was cracked and wrinkly. She had not appreciated how much he had aged in recent years; his movements seemed fragile now, uncertain. “It’s the job pressure,” her mother had whispered to her recently. But it was more than just the job, Yinghui thought: It was as if being a rich man had taken its toll on his body.