by Tash Aw
“What is ‘fair’? What does that mean?” my father said.
“It means enough-lah,” Nik K. said, before getting into his Datsun and driving off.
Secretly, I was not displeased. One could say that I was even excited by this unexpected development. Someone was going to pay us for a building that was a wreck, a no-hope project that would surely ruin my father. I would no longer have to persuade my father to sell the building, for now we had no choice but to do so. The government wanted the land, and it would have it; there was no argument to be made.
We got the letter a few weeks later, stating the date by which we had to vacate the property and the amount of money we were to receive. I stood with the piece of paper in my hand, counting out the number of zeros in the compensation sum by placing the tip of a pencil under each one, just to make sure I was not making a mistake. The price of our building was to be less than it had been when my father bought it more than a year previously. We were being paid only a third of its original value, nowhere near enough to cover the debt my father had taken on to buy the hotel in the first place.
Still, I said to my father, we had no choice. The government had ordered the purchase of the land; there was nothing we could do to fight against it. It was true, we were being offered very little money, but at least it was something—we couldn’t ask for any more. I knew it was not a good situation, but it enabled us to escape the Tokyo Hotel for a fresh start somewhere: a modest life that suited us. We were not people who were primed for a life of wealth; we would never know how to be millionaires. We could cut our losses and run. To our debtors, we could plead bad luck: The government wanted the land; what could we do? Now that a return to a simple life had suddenly become a real possibility, I could not think of anything else. I urged my father to sign the papers as soon as possible: Take the money, start anew, be content.
“But it’s not fair,” my father repeated, over and over again, as if it were all the reasoning he needed. Even as my desire to abandon the hotel grew, his obsession with completing his fledgling business became stronger, and I knew his will would prevail. For this is what I have always known about my father: His ambitions have a persuasive, almost transformative quality; he makes you believe in him, he absorbs you into his fantasies, even when all logic tells you that he will fail. I guess it is because we all want to live in hope rather than in despair, even when despair is all that we have—all that we are entitled to.
He began to bombard me with calculations of profits we could make in less than a year, persuading me that we would be comfortable in no time at all, and then all that I wanted—a nice modern house, a small car, enough money to go on trips to Penang or Singapore—would be easily attainable. As long as we could keep the hotel, we would be fine. It was ours; we would make it work. He would go and speak to Nik K. again, try to find a way of saving our home. If all else failed, we would organize a protest, show the world how unfair the whole business was. But Nik K. seemed never to be around all of a sudden. His colleagues said he’d gone down to KL, that he had a lot of business there, that maybe he was getting a promotion—they didn’t know.
Every week, we would get a new letter, reminding us of the time limit. We had to sign the documents soon and then vacate the property, otherwise we would get nothing. Every day, my father cycled into town to find Nik K., but he was never there. Eventually he got hold of Nik K. by phone; he was in Terengganu on holiday with his kids. There was nothing he could do, he told my father: He was just a clerk. But, sure, this was a free country—if he wanted to complain or protest, he could do so.
“Who do I speak to?”
“I don’t know,” Nik K. replied. “But the developer is a company called L.K.H. Holdings—there, you know, that Chinese company. Old man Cecil Lim Kee Huat and his sons and grandsons, rich towkays down in KL. The fat youngest son comes up here often. He’s the big boss in charge. Anything else, don’t ask me.”
21.
ADOPT OTHERS’ THOUGHTS AS THOUGH
THEY WERE YOUR OWN
THEY HAD JUST FINISHED DINNER ONE EVENING AND WERE SUPPOSED to go look for a jazz bar somewhere in Luwan that Phoebe had read about. It was already quite late, about ten-thirty on a Saturday evening. They got in the car and Walter said, “Oh, sorry, would you mind if we stopped by my apartment quickly? I’ve left my Hong Kong mobile at home, and I need to check it for messages. I’m in the middle of a business deal, you see.”
Phoebe thought at once, Aha, this is a seduction technique.
They had been going out for over two months, so she had been expecting him to attempt something of this nature anytime now. Even a man with sexual problems surely could not resist her female qualities for this long. It was not that she desired more-intimate relations—she still found him sexually blank, like a page with no words, impossible to read. It was just that all her books had told her that a healthy sexual relationship was the key to keeping your man, and recently she had started to worry that if she did not make him addicted to her feminine charms, he would soon begin to look elsewhere. All the girls at the spa agreed that this was not a good situation. They asked Phoebe whether he had proposed to her yet, whether she had moved in with him—and she realized that up to this point she had not succeeded in obtaining anything from him at all, apart from a few luxury fashion items and expensive meals in restaurants, and these would not support her in old age.
Even though he was not a soul mate, she knew she had to get closer to him, maybe get enough money to buy a car or an apartment or even a lease on a shop where she could start her own business. She would be happy being his concubine; she didn’t care if he had someone else, as long as her future was secure. So she’d begun to drop certain hints, such as leaving her hand on his arm for longer than usual whenever she greeted him and pressing herself closer to his body when they hugged goodbye. Once she pretended to have a small tear in her tights as she got into the car, so that she would be able to lift up the hem of her skirt and expose her thigh. She knew that before long he would find an excuse to get closer to her.
“It’ll only take a few minutes—sorry.” He said it very casually, as if he had really forgotten his phone; his brow was even wrinkled with a worried look, but she could not be fooled so easily.
“Sure,” she said. “I’m not working tomorrow, anyway—it’s Sunday, my day off, remember?”
“Yes, otherwise I would not suggest going out late. I’d make sure you were home in bed early.”
Even though she was a little concerned about how she would respond to his sexual advances, she was excited because it was the first time she was visiting his luxury apartment. They had driven past it once, a discreet eight-story condominium block just south of Xintiandi public garden, which everyone knew to be where rich foreigners lived, especially the single men with large disposable incomes who wanted to be close to Western-style entertainment facilities. When he first pointed it out, she had wondered for a second if he was lying, if he was just a fantasist who made up crazy stories about himself, or, even worse, a fake like her, whose story was entirely believable and yet entirely untrue.
But now, as they drove up to the same address, she could see that her fears were unfounded. They paused at the entry while a pair of security guards hurried out to flank the electronic gates that were opening very slowly. People who lived here lived leisurely lives, Phoebe thought; even their gates open gracefully. As the car passed through, she caught the eye of one of the security guards, a young man barely past his teens. He watched her with wide eyes, a look of admiration and even fear of something he would never be able to obtain. She saw herself through his eyes: the beautiful girlfriend of a millionaire; the kind of expensive, classy woman who strolled in to hotels and restaurants as if blown in by a warm breeze; the kind of woman who would be rude to you without even knowing it, and you wouldn’t mind her rudeness because she was pretty and rich and you were nothing. In the brief moment when she caught his gaze and held it for a heartbeat, then two, she felt a
great distance opening up between him and her. It was as if she were perched on the top of a mountain and he was sliding away, down a rocky slope to the river valley below. And when he fell he dragged a part of her with him—as if she were being torn into little pieces. She felt not only a great chasm between them but also separated from herself. She thought, Maybe this boy was her soul mate; maybe he was the one the fortune-teller had spoken of, the romantic person she would spend her life with. She blinked and closed her mind to clear away his image. No, he was not the soul mate she was searching for; he was nothing to her.
The car rolled into the underground parking lot, the tires squealing on the smooth polished concrete floor. As she walked with Walter to the lift, she noticed that even the air was fresh and smelled of flowery perfume, unlike the usual stink of fumes and burned rubber that filled most parking lots. She pressed the “up” button on the lift, but Walter beckoned her over to another, more discreet lift. When the doors opened, she saw it was lined with glossy wood with a natural pattern of small dark swirls. Walter inserted a card into a slot and tapped a few numbers into the code lock, and the doors closed. There were only three floors, marked, “B1,” “G,” then, much higher up, “P.”
Phoebe thought, I am going to a real-life penthouse.
When the doors opened, all she could see was the city arranged in front of her, sparkling, framed by darkness. As they walked into the room, the lights came on automatically, and she saw that the wall of glass stretched the whole length of the apartment. She walked up to it and looked down at the tops of the trees; they looked soft and velvety in the early-summer breeze. There were some people taking their dogs for a late-night walk around the lake in the park. A tiny delicate brown puppy with legs like matchsticks leapt up to a sausage-shaped dog with huge floppy ears and ran circles around it, hopping up and down. Phoebe could not hear the puppy, but she could see that it was yapping as it played. An old couple strolled past, their arms linked at the elbows. The branches of the trees would catch the wind, and as they fanned across the streetlamps, their shadows cast pretty patterns on the pavements, flower shapes that danced and swirled but then disappeared.
Phoebe could hear Walter somewhere else in the apartment, his voice sounding urgent as he spoke on the telephone, a businesslike voice she had not heard from him before. She turned around and began to walk slowly around the huge space. There was barely any furniture in it, just two chairs placed at an angle to each other and, at the far end of the room, a dining table with no chairs. Halfway along there was an aquarium built into the wall, lit with a blue glow. There were no carpets anywhere, no rugs or cushions or anything soft. The clacking noise that Phoebe’s heels made on the floor echoed so loudly that she did not dare to walk quickly. It took her a few minutes to reach the other side of the room, where she paused at the chairless dining table. There was an empty Starbucks cup on it that filled the air with a stale smell, and on the side of the cup was a mark where some coffee had spilled over, like a long brown tearstain. She peered through a door and saw a kitchen that was about three times the size of the room she shared with Yanyan, with a gray floor and cabinets made of smooth steel. There was no food to be seen, no stray plastic bags or washing liquid, just a coffee machine and fridge made of the same cold steel as the cabinets. It reminded Phoebe of some of the factories she had worked in, only much cleaner.
She went back and stood in the middle of the apartment and gazed out at the never-changing view. She thought, If she lived here she would not know where to look. It frightened her to see the city like this, to be reminded of how big it was, how it would never change, how it would only get bigger and bigger. She wished there were curtains or blinds, but, no, there was only the vast expanse of glass, which did not hide anything. She could see Shanghai; Shanghai could see her.
She turned around. There was nowhere to sit except those chairs in the middle of the room, like two small islands in the middle of a cold, cold ocean. It did not seem as if anyone lived in this apartment, and Phoebe suddenly thought, Maybe it is a pretense; maybe this place is not really his after all; maybe I have been duped.
She walked over to the aquarium. It looked like a painting from afar, the rocks and coral in it arranged like mountains in an old watercolor landscape. When she came close to it, she saw two streams of fine bubbles rising from the gravel bed, the only movement she could see. There were no shoals of fish in the tank, no waving mermaids. She pressed her face close to the glass and peered between the rocks—she saw the tip of a long feathery tail but could not make out a body.
“There used to be loads of fish, but they all died,” Walter said, startling her as he walked across the apartment. He stood next to her and tapped the glass firmly with his knuckle. “But this one’s still hanging on in there.”
A long oval-shaped fish wriggled out of the rocks and drifted for a few seconds in the open water as if it were lost. It had markings like ink spots on its side, a large stain on its tail in the shape of a wide-open eye, and long tendrils that trailed from its gills. Then it dived again, darting to the bottom of the tank to hide behind a piece of coral.
“That’s not a sea fish,” Phoebe said. “It’s a tropical fish from ponds and streams.”
“Yes, I think the tank is heated,” Walter said. “Are you an expert on fish? You sound very knowledgeable.”
“No, I just know that fish because it’s really common in the ponds around where I grew up. The boys used to catch them and sell them to the aquarium shops in town.”
“In Guangzhou? I didn’t know there were any ponds left that were unpolluted enough to have fish in them!”
“Yes. In Guangzhou,” Phoebe said. She caught sight of her reflection in the glass, hovering against a background of coral and bubbles and blue-tinged water. And she thought, It is so obvious I am lying. I have the expression of a liar.
“Right, Guangzhou,” Walter said. Phoebe could tell he was smiling, even though his reflection was watery and dim. “You know, you’re unlike any Guangzhou girl I’ve ever met—you’re funny.”
“Listen,” she said, “it’s getting a bit late now. Do you mind if we have a drink here?”
“Sure,” Walter said, shrugging. She could see that he had a mobile phone in each hand. “I don’t mind either way. It’s just you seemed very keen on that jazz bar.”
Looking down at her feet, Phoebe smiled and then raised her eyes to meet his. It was a technique she had learned from a book. It gave her a seductive look that men found irresistible. She had practiced it in front of a mirror and then with Yanyan until they both agreed that she had fully mastered it. “But you haven’t given me a tour of your apartment yet. It’s so, so … big and impressive.” She reached forward and, with one finger, lightly touched the top button of his shirt, close to his collarbone. His face reddened suddenly, changing color rapidly, like a chameleon. Phoebe thought, He is probably taking Viagra or some kind of sexually stimulating drug; that’s why he blushes so easily.
“Of course. What would you like?” said Walter as he walked to the kitchen. “Tea, coffee? I don’t know if I have herbal tea.”
Phoebe followed him through the doors into the kitchen. “Do you have cognac? I like Hennessy X.O. Or whiskey. I am in the mood for something strong.”
Walter opened a cabinet, but it was empty. “Sorry, I don’t spend much time here, so I don’t know where everything is.”
Phoebe joined him in searching for some glasses. She opened a cabinet filled with plates. None of them matched—they were all different kinds, cheap plastic ones mixed in with porcelain and china. Nearly all of them were marked with some brand or another—Nescafé, petrol, cornflakes, soy milk, Horlicks—the kind of thing you get for free if you cut out enough vouchers and collect them over several months before sending them off to the address on the back of the packet.
“Found the glasses,” Walter said. He produced two crystal tumblers, but Phoebe could see that the cabinet was also full of cheap plastic mugs. One of them h
ad a picture of a cartoon movie character on it. She had been to see the film in Guangzhou more than a year ago, but she could not remember its name.
As he poured cognac into the glasses, she said, “Do you live here on your own?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “No one would want to live with me.” He chuckled softly, but he was not smiling. Phoebe did not know whether it was meant as a joke; she did not know if she should laugh.
“Everything here is yours, then?”
“Yes—there isn’t much, though, just stuff I’ve picked up over the years.”
With their glasses in hand, they walked back out into the living room. “Are you going to give me a tour of the apartment, then?” Phoebe said. She gave him the same head-down-eyes-up seductive look again. When she lowered her head, she could smell the strong perfume of the cognac in the glass. She took a sip and felt the alcohol burn her throat, flowing down, down to the base of her stomach.
“There isn’t much else to see; this is pretty much all of it. There’s only one bedroom, believe it or not. I had it constructed that way.”
Phoebe laughed. “I’m not allowed to see the bedroom?”
Walter shrugged. “If you must. But I warn you, it’s a real mess because I haven’t had time to clean up. My ayi doesn’t come on weekends, so the place is quite dirty. I didn’t think anyone would see it.”
He opened a dark sliding door and stood at the entrance. Phoebe peered inside—a large room with an unmade bed facing the window. On the bedside table and on the floor next to the bed, there were piles of books that looked intriguing.
“I wouldn’t go in if I were you,” Walter called out. “It’s really messy in there. I haven’t changed my sheets this week.”
But Phoebe was already walking across to look at the books. They were written in English and Chinese.