Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  Yinghui watched him as he nodded in agreement with her mother’s tales of vegetable woe. He wore the air of a defeated man—an old, broken man. Her mother’s unrelenting assessment of food prices suddenly felt reassuring. It had never changed; it had provided solidity to their Sunday evenings all these years, and now, more than ever, they needed it. Yinghui knew that she did not want to change that.

  The court case against him started more than a year after the first allegations surfaced. At long last, people said: A government minister was being rightly tried for his misdemeanors. Poor fellow, others said: Someone had it in for him; he was the fall guy, taking the flak for something that had happened higher up; either that or he had been too greedy and stepped on someone else’s toes, someone more powerful. But most people—especially the kind of people who hung out at Angie’s, the people who had once been Yinghui’s friends—did not express great interest in the trial. It was a joke, they said; everyone knows that he’ll get off without any punishment whatsoever. He won’t even resign from his post.

  They were both right and wrong. He was eventually acquitted after a messy trial that dragged on for several months, including two adjournments. He was found innocent of all charges except the most minor one—accepting a free weekend at a hotel in Singapore owned by a famous property-development company, whose owner and CEO was a personal friend. It was the sort of thing that most people didn’t even think of as a crime. During the proceedings, many embarrassing allegations were made, most of them completely unfounded—for example, his visiting a famous (and famously shady) karaoke bar in Kota Bharu. His connections to famous public companies were also exposed, and though there was no evidence of impropriety, it was enough to make people raise a knowing eyebrow. His relationship with Lim Kee Huat Holdings, for example, surprised no one—after all, his daughter was the girlfriend of the younger Lim grandson. As some of their ex-friends said, shit sticks.

  The weight of lingering suspicion began to affect his health, and he suffered a small stroke one night. Although his condition improved enough for him to return to work, he resigned a few months later, reputation ruined. If people remembered him at all, they would recall not a hardworking man of humble roots but yet another inefficient politician whose major preoccupation was to amass as much money as possible before he was discovered. But in this regard he was barely remarkable, and after a few years no one would remember him at all. No one remembers you if they don’t respect you; and he had lost all the respect he had worked so hard to gain.

  When he died, several months after resigning, the scandal reignited briefly before fading away again. The manner of his death was fitting for a corrupt politician, violent and sudden and even—to be honest—unsurprising. That was what most people thought in private, Yinghui knew. For her, the end was not the end, it was merely the postscript: His life had finished the moment he had lost the respect he so craved.

  She left Malaysia two months after his funeral, heading for Singapore, but it was too familiar, too much like home. It was not until she reached Shanghai that she felt she was sufficiently far away from all she had lost. She began to change the way she lived, consciously hardening herself to the world around her, taking an interest in matters she had barely noticed before. Art, music, literature—all the things she had once loved—now seemed less solid, more dangerous in their fluidity than business and finance. She found reassurance in the methodical workings of money. Every time she struggled to comprehend something in the financial press, she remembered her father saying that she would never understand how money worked, and she would begin to cry, though she was not sure if it was out of frustration or grief. She would press on, forcing herself to be at ease with company reports and meetings with bankers. She would become a great businesswoman, she promised herself. Her parents had been wrong about her, as they had been about many things. Every time she thought about them, she felt a huge swell of sadness, an inarticulate yet crushing sense of injustice: Her parents had been victims, yet there had been no perpetrator, no target for her anger. She had messed around with a boy who hadn’t loved her, devoted years of her life to him—the memory of her fecklessness, too, made her teary and unstable and even ashamed. Her businesses comforted her, made her feel that she was on solid ground; they helped her forget the aimless young girl she had once been.

  Time and distance allowed her to look forward, ever forward, and the momentum she built up along her journey allowed her to breathe, to settle as the years passed, changing until she became who she was now. As she walked in to the offices of the bank in the new IFC Tower, the sweet-toxic smell of varnish hanging richly in the air, an image briefly came to Yinghui’s mind: her mother wailing at her father’s funeral, the loud sobs turning swiftly to shrieks, all her poise lost in a matter of seconds as she muttered gibberish about the injustices her husband had suffered, about the cruelty that life had inflicted upon him, sprinkled with profanities against his numerous and unnamed killers.

  It was so undignified, a total loss of self-respect.

  The memory flashed into Yinghui’s mind for just an instant before she snuffed it out again. Like a candle flame pinched between the fingers, it hurt for only a half second before being extinguished, leaving nothing but a bland waxy impression on her brain.

  She announced herself to the receptionist and sat down to have one last look at her papers. She had spent most of the previous evening rehearsing what she would say and how she would say it: a winning combination of forcefulness and seduction. Walter had rung her at midnight, as she was finalizing her presentation, to see how she was doing. He spoke on his mobile from his car; he had just finished a long, tedious evening with business associates and wanted to call before it got too late. He was brief but warm and encouraging. And that morning the first message on her BlackBerry was from him. It said: They will BEG to give you a loan. Hugs W.

  She checked her appearance in the compact mirror she kept in her handbag. She stood up and smoothed her trouser suit, discreetly looking into the mirror that ran along the wall of the reception area. She breathed steadily, calmly.

  She would never allow herself to be like her mother, not even for one second.

  HOW TO BE INVENTIVE—

  PROPERTY-MANAGEMENT CASE STUDY,

  CONTINUED

  Nearly two months passed with no communication from my father, and then, suddenly, a letter brimming with his customary positive thinking arrived. He had had a bad cough, he said, and had spent several feverish days confined to his little room. Lying on the camp bed, he noticed small, quick birds flitting in and out of the airy rooms of the ground floor. When he finally summoned the strength to go upstairs, he noticed more of them darting about in the darkness like bats, even though he had boarded up the windows to protect the building from the elements. They were squeezing through the cracks in the plywood, wheeling around in the gloom. He mentioned his discovery casually in the coffee shop one day and was surprised to learn that everyone seemed already to know of these birds: They were swiftlets, the very kind whose nests were prized as a delicacy by the Chinese, who boiled them in soups and served them at banquets. Yes, the famous bird’s nest soup that cured everything from bad skin to rheumatism to lethargy to sluggish digestions—well, that came from these little birds. And Kota Bharu was becoming a bit of a bird town: The swiftlets fed on the clouds of tiny winged insects along the banks of the great muddy river, and colonies of them were being established in the abandoned buildings in the part of town where my father lived. No one knew why they went into some buildings and not others, but if they were nesting in your house, it was as good as having a small jewelry shop! Did I know what those birds’ nests sold for in Hong Kong? U.S. $100 per hundred grams—or just three nests! As soon as you harvested one nest, the birds would simply make another, which you could then harvest, and so on—it was as easy as that!

  Thus began the frenzy of building work of a bizarre nature, which added to the hotel’s air of ghostly decrepitude. Every single wi
ndow, bar the one in my father’s room, was boarded up and sealed with cement rendering. Water was allowed to seep slowly through the leaky pipes, making the floors and walls damp with constant humidity (Lucky thing I could not afford to replace the old pipes with good new ones! he exulted in one letter). The aim, he explained, was to re-create the atmosphere of a dank, gloomy cave—the natural habitat of the birds. Encouraged in his endeavors by acquaintances and other birdhouse owners who offered helpful tips, he bought a portable stereo set and played a hissy cassette recording of the birds’ sonar clicking, which echoed in the darkness of the Tokyo Hotel. Hearing the noises of a nesting colony would not only encourage birds to enter the building but, once they were inside, would make them feel at home and believe that there were many other birds already breeding there. He had to use all these modern scientific techniques, you see.

  I began to receive excited letters, increasing in their frequency, detailing the nature of his progress. He had never been a literary type and he provided only the bare outline of what he was doing, but it was easy to chart the upward curve of his sentiments, initially at least:

  Birds nesting on floor number 3! Number of nests: 4. Must increase humidity level. Just finished closing up windows on floor number 2—very dark up there now!

  Birds on floor number 2 now too. Number of nests: 9 already! They are stuck to the ceiling like big cobwebs.

  Birds on floors 2 and 3, but not descending to floor 1. Number of nests: 16.

  Still no birds on floor number 1. Don’t know what I am doing wrong.

  Number of nests: 28! Have bought heavy locks for the front and back doors. Uncle Yong told me that people will break in and steal the nests if I am not careful.

  Number of nests today: 41! I read a book my friend Lee gave me, which says I can start harvesting the nests soon.

  Some nests have disappeared. Maybe I miscounted before. Today only 34.

  Number of nests: 21. I have not yet harvested any. I found 3 fallen on the floor. Maybe someone is stealing the rest. Yes, I think so.

  Number of nests: 11. My friends say don’t worry, I am doing all the right things.

  Number of nests: 6. I am sure they will build more nests soon.

  I did not receive any further word from him for nearly two months. I’d been working as an apprentice electrician at that time, earning a lowly wage that I am now too embarrassed to reveal. (When I think of the sum of money nowadays, it seems hardly likely that a human being would be able to survive on so little, but indeed I did.) Fearing for my father’s safety, I took the bus up to Kelantan again, and when I arrived I found the hotel looking almost resplendent in its dereliction. With its windows sealed up and its front door shut against the elements, it looked like a sculpture, and had it been transported in time and place to a modern metropolis like Beijing or London, it could easily have passed for an art installation, its ghostly isolation making it seem almost beautiful. But it was not in one of the world’s great cities; it was on the shabby side of a shabby town, bordering marshy scrubland that served as a breeding ground for dengue fever, and so it looked only sad. I went around the back, where I found my father sitting in the shade of the porch, piercing an old rubber hose with a large needle over and over again.

  He looked up at me and said, “It’s my new humidifier system.” He spoke to me as if I had popped out to the shops for a packet of cigarettes and had come back after an absence of ten minutes, not four months. “I think it’s because it’s too dry in the house. Birds like moisture; otherwise they get mites in their feathers. Don’t know why, but Lee’s house down the road has got many, many birds. Last week he harvested over eighty nests. Sold them to a dealer from Hong Kong. Know how much he got? Thousand-plus ringgit. People in Hong Kong going crazy for birds’ nests. Don’t know why my house got no birds.”

  “Ba,” I said, “what if the birds never establish themselves here?”

  “They will! I know they will. I just need a bit of luck. They are everywhere—look.” He pointed to the sky, and in the fading light of that warm, still afternoon, right before the skies turned purple with dusk, I could see tiny birds wheeling and swooping in the air.

  “I just need a bit of luck,” he said again.

  In the days to come, I tried, gently, to persuade him to give up on his venture. We might be able to sell the hotel and cut our losses. We had debts to repay, I reminded him: If we sold the building, we’d be able to pay everyone back and maybe have enough left over to buy a small place somewhere, and he could get a job, nothing special, maybe help out at a garage or a shop, or as a rice merchant or anything, and now that I was old enough to work too, we would be okay, we could live a simple life, just like before.

  But he laughed away my suggestions, smiling benignly as if I, not he, were the fantasist. On more than a couple of occasions, he simply walked away from me as if I had not even been addressing him—as if I were mad. He could not abandon his project, he said, as if explaining a rudimentary idea to a small child: His friends and relatives had given him money as an investment, and it was his duty to see that their investment bore fruit. They had placed more than money in his hands; they had invested trust in him. Profits take time to accrue, my son, he said, and trust—trust takes a lifetime to repay.

  He never mentioned the words “saving face,” but I knew, for him, the birds’ nests had become an exercise in avoiding shame. None of the people who had lent him money were rich; they were village folk, just like him, scraping by with little to spare. There was no turning back for him.

  17.

  CULTIVATE AN URBANE,

  HUMOROUS PERSONALITY

  THE WEEK BEGAN WELL FOR PHOEBE, JUST AS THE ASTROLOGER SAID it would. It had cost Phoebe 400 yuan to have a full assessment of her prospects, including detailed advice on how to maximize the chances of meeting a suitable partner and gaining a promotion at work. At the time, Phoebe thought it was a scandal to pay so much money, but now she could see it was worth every mao.

  On Monday morning, she received an email from Boss Leong informing her that, in recognition of her excellent performance, she was being promoted to the position of manager of the spa. Boss Leong was opening another two branches of the beauty spa elsewhere in the city and needed someone reliable to look after the original establishment. Phoebe was the first person who came to mind. Her salary would increase nearly threefold and she would be required to wear a smart suit or at least a jacket, replacing the Chinese silk dress she wore as a receptionist.

  Two days later, while she was still floating on a tidal wave of happiness, she received an email from a dating site she belonged to, from a man who proposed a dinner date with no obligations to take things further if they did not like each other. It was a proper matchmaking website for professional people, expensive to join, so she was naturally more optimistic when men sent her messages on this site. Of course, she had long since learned that the appearance of classiness in Shanghai was no guarantee of truthfulness, and she treated all approaches from men with the same caution as she would when shopping for counterfeit luxury goods. China was full of copycat products and people. She was now experienced enough to tell from one simple message whether a man was serious or not, whether he was just looking for sex, whether he was a married man in search of a mistress, or if he was indeed in need of a future wife. She could tell if a man was lying about who he was, about his job and income, where he was from. She could tell if he was from Beijing or if he was a Pakistani pretending to be from Beijing. All those scam marriage proposals from Indian, Nigerian, and Arab men—she was aware of them all; she did not even know what they wanted from her, but she made sure she stayed clear of them. She had become an expert in the courtship rituals of the Internet; no one could trick her with flowery words or insincere promises. To Phoebe, Internet dating had become like a book written in a language that she had mastered, just as she had conquered the rocky path to employment in Shanghai.

  She had struck up several online relationships with men—
two in Shanghai and one in Beijing—but she knew that none of them would lead to anything serious. All of them were hiding something; she could sense that they were not telling the full truth. She laughed and shared her life with them, sometimes even opening up her troubled heart and allowing her frustrations to spill out onto the computer screen, but she continued to hold back her deepest thoughts, disguising her true identity just as she disguised herself at work. These men would see only what she wanted them to see; they would never know the real Phoebe Chen Aiping. She could see that they were not serious, and so, in keeping with the wise advice gained from her books, she, too, kept her distance. Being open and honest with a man is like asking him to drive over you with a bulldozer!

  From the moment the new message came through, however, she sensed that there was something interesting about this man. He did not make comments about her physical beauty but said simply that she struck him as someone who could make him laugh, with whom he could share long conversations on many subjects. The photo of her that he liked the most was the one she had forgotten to delete, taken in the park in Guangzhou. He made no mention of the sophisticated fashion-style images shot by a professional photographer in the spa. As usual, she suggested chatting on QQ or MSN, but he declined, saying that he preferred meeting in real life. He also refused to send a photo, saying he did not want her to judge him by how he looked but that she would have every right to leave the moment she saw him if she really didn’t like him. He gave her a phone number and a list of dates on which to meet, all in the following week. I am just looking for a companion who can understand me, someone I can have sweet, peaceful times with. At first, the serious tone of his message made Phoebe doubtful of his sincerity. No man had been so earnest and straightforward with her since she came to China. He must surely be a sexual pervert, she thought. But each time she reread the message, her fears subsided. She checked the piece of paper on which the astrologer had written the details of Phoebe’s romantic prospects: The dates the man had suggested coincided perfectly with those in the window marked Time of Perfect Meeting with Lifelong Soul Mate.