Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  “But we live in modern times,” Walter said. He perched his elbows on the handrail and folded his arms, stretching his back. “Anyway, didn’t you once tell me that the past isn’t important and that all that matters is what we are going to do in the future?”

  “Yes, sure, but …” Phoebe could sense herself getting flustered—men always tried to defeat her by twisting her logic. “But how can you just forget your childhood and upbringing?”

  “Quite easily.”

  “I can’t. That’s why, in spite of my achievements, sometimes I admit my heart feels heavy. Hearing this music—it gives me a nostalgic feeling. I can’t help thinking of my mother and my childhood.”

  “All those years growing up in Guangzhou?”

  Phoebe paused. This was the moment. She could say, No, not Guangzhou; I did not grow up in that huge ugly polluted city. I grew up in a place surrounded by forests and lakes and warm winds, not far from the sea, where you could walk in the heavy rain and not fall sick with cold, where the tallest building was four stories high—a place many thousands of miles from here. I am not what you think I am, I am just an idea in your head. I don’t really exist at all.

  Yes, he would be confused at first, maybe he would even be angry, because no one likes to be cheated. But soon he would see how he was fortunate to be rid of her. He would say to himself, Thank God I did not end up with an unsophisticated, lying village girl, a gold digger; what a lucky escape that was. He’d been in love with an idea of someone, a simple illusion, and, like all ideas, she would be forgotten quickly. It would take no more than a few days, a week, maybe, and then the memory of her would vanish from his mind. The pain of being cheated—that might linger a bit longer, but the affection would have long since disappeared. Sweetheart. Cutie. He would forget he’d ever called her those things. The past doesn’t matter—he’d said it himself, not half a minute ago. Just a few days from now, the slate would be wiped clean. It would be so easy.

  She looked at him, the outline of his face barely visible in the dark—his wide flat nose, the stick-out ears. He was looking out across the water, trying to spot where the music was coming from.

  “You know how you once told me you were different?” Phoebe said. “I am different too.”

  He nodded. “That’s why … that’s why I like you.”

  Phoebe looked away. She wanted to tell him everything that was on her mind, everything about herself, but all she could feel was shame. Crushing, sickening shame. “I have to leave China,” she said. The words choked her, she could hardly speak; she felt she was suffocating with nausea. “I can’t stand it here anymore.”

  A song floated over the nighttime park, a thin voice singing “The Wandering Songstress.”

  “Are you okay?” he said, turning to face her. He leaned close and looked at her. “You look unwell.”

  “I feel a bit sick. My liver has an imbalanced feeling. Must be the food, I think—I ate too much.”

  “Who can’t take spicy now? Give me the keys to the scooter. I’ll take you home. You should get some rest—if you don’t feel better tomorrow, we should forget about going to the concert this weekend. I know we agreed to go together, but you can just give the tickets to Yanyan. You really don’t look well.”

  The wide avenues that cut through the city were quieter now, and Walter rode fast and sharp over the elevated sections. The apartment blocks lined the highways like ranks of sentries, and the undersides of the giant overpasses were lit with soft blue light, the color of exotic birds. The warm air that rushed into Phoebe’s face made it hard for her to breathe—it stole the air from her lungs and made her feel giddy. She turned her face to shelter from the rushing wind and placed her cheek on Walter’s back, just between his shoulder blades. She tried to listen for his heartbeat, but the noise of the scooter and the wind was too great, and she heard nothing.

  26.

  STRIVE TO UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE

  JUSTIN BEGAN TO DIAL YINGHUI’S NUMBER. HE HAD SAVED IT IN HIS phone, as if she were a regular contact—a friend.

  He had been working with Little Tang for a while now, long enough to feel confidently part of the business selling short-term leases to young artists and photographers. It was undemanding, slightly dull work, but it suited Justin’s current frame of mind; best of all, though, it sounded much more interesting when he practiced describing it to complete strangers: “a new concept that we call ‘guerrilla’ rentals to young artists.” It had an edgy feel to it that would appeal to Yinghui, he thought; she wouldn’t know how banal it was in real life. Little Tang had been pushing Justin to get involved in new, bigger projects—a photography gallery, an arts center. But the enthusiasm of his proposals worried Justin; the quality of his insistence made Justin anxious, reminded him of the life he had had. Little Tang wanted more, more, more, wanted to absorb Justin into his ambition, but Justin wanted to stay as he was. He did not want anything big now. Being an employee was enough for the moment.

  Before ringing Yinghui, Justin rehearsed what he would say to her. He practiced the tone—breezy, friendly, not too familiar, not too keen to reestablish contact; he would speak silently about his modest new life and venture, would not be too obvious about how he was a different person now, would not speak about his family’s downfall—all things that would have pleased her. He would let her join the dots and form her own conclusion.

  In the morning her phone was diverting all calls directly to voice mail. In the afternoon it rang and rang—then voice mail. Unsure of what to say (he had rehearsed only a proper conversation, not the leaving of a message), he hung up each time he heard her voice on the answering machine. He was waiting for the lift up to his apartment that evening when his phone rang. He looked at the caller ID: LEONG YINGHUI. Jostled by bodies as he squashed himself into the tiny lift, he hesitated for a second, not wanting to take such an important call while crammed in among twelve other people in the lift—but what if she didn’t ring back?

  “I got a few calls from this number?” she said as soon as he answered. Her voice was brisk, challenging, as if she was in the middle of something else.

  “Oh, hi, yeah, it’s me, Justin.”

  “Who? Can you speak up? I can’t hear.”

  “Justin. Justin Lim,” he repeated, whispering. This wasn’t the way he had planned his reintroduction into her life.

  “Who is it? You’re breaking up.”

  “Yinghui, it’s me, Justin Lim.”

  Silence; the noise of traffic—a scooter beeping; radio announcements.

  “Yinghui?”

  “Yes. Hello.”

  The lift doors opened at Justin’s floor, and as he pushed his way out of the lift he realized he was strangely out of breath. “Sorry, I was in a crowded place,” he said. “Can you hear me now?”

  “Yes. How can I help you?” She sounded like a disgruntled hotel receptionist, polite only because she was obliged to be.

  “Sorry I haven’t rung earlier. It’s been ages since I saw you at that awards ceremony—congratulations, by the way.”

  “I didn’t win.”

  “I don’t know how, but I lost your card, and I just found it the other day by chance and thought, hey, why don’t I call her and catch up properly? It’s been years and years—no doubt plenty has happened in both our lives. It would be interesting to catch up over a drink or lunch or dinner, don’t you think?”

  A moment’s pause; a car door closing.

  “That would be nice, but you know, I’m so busy right now. Lots of projects going on at the moment, and I’ve just taken on the mother of all deals.”

  “Right, sure. That sounds interesting. What kind of deal?”

  “Oh—really complicated stuff. I think I’m out of my depth! Anyway, look—I’m in a rush. Can I call you back sometime? When things are a bit calmer?”

  He paused, imagining her in the middle of complicated financial arrangements she couldn’t handle. His first instinct was to offer her help—he remembered how h
opeless she had been in the running of her little café back in Malaysia, how she couldn’t even get the accounts straight or pay the bills on time—but now he sensed a hard edge to her voice, an efficiency that he recognized from having worked for so long with similar people. When she said she was out of her depth, she didn’t mean it at all.

  “Sure, yes, do call me.”

  More rustling on the other end of the phone. He heard a man’s voice saying something—muffled, as if Yinghui had tried to cover the phone but hadn’t done so completely. I’ll go in first and grab a table.

  “Yinghui? You there?”

  She said, “… sorry, give me a sec, I won’t be long. Hello? Yes, Justin, well, nice of you to call. Let’s be in touch soon. All okay with you?”

  “Yes. All fine.”

  She laughed—a soft, gentle laugh. “Everything’s always been fine with you. Okay, great, I’ll call you. Bye.”

  And he knew, of course, that she would not call.

  He had barely stepped into his apartment when the call ended. He had imagined the call lasting longer, imagined himself on the sofa with a glass of wine, listening to her tell him how she had moved to Shanghai, how she was looking forward to meeting up later that week for lunch. Instead he found himself standing on the doormat, phone in one hand, Shanghai Daily in the other, not knowing what to do now that she was no longer on the phone. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine anyway and sat down on the sofa. He could not be bothered to turn on any lamps. The summer night sky and the lights from the buildings beyond lit the living room—a colored twilight. He stared at the skyscrapers, their lights so familiar to him now, so comforting. Nothing he planned ever came to fruition.

  He wondered if that was the last conversation he would ever have with Yinghui—very probably, he thought. He wished it had turned out differently, that he had anticipated its finality, and that he could have planned a more polite, gentler ending. Still, when viewed in the context of their past relationship, that minute and a half had been an unexpected bonus—a civil, mature coda to a ragged symphony. Maybe it was enough to count as “closure,” and he should be content with that. After all, the last time he saw her in Malaysia, when they were both still young, she had said: “Please don’t ever speak to me again.”

  He had planned, nearly fifteen years ago, to tell her that he was in love with her—or words to that effect. It was a young man’s act of bravado, he recognized that now—an out-of-the-blue, unilateral declaration of love: It wouldn’t have been welcome, but he would have done it anyway. It was just as well that, like most of his plans, that one had been thwarted.

  There had been a campaign in the press to save the New Cathay cinema, led by Yinghui and her Friends of Old KL—unprecedented in its consistency and its coverage. On the cover of the Sunday Star magazine, there was a portrait of the old Indian jaga who had sat in his little booth in the parking lot for fifty years, making sure the cinema didn’t get broken into at night. The photo was taken by a friend of Yinghui’s, a professional photographer who had used an old-fashioned large-format camera to capture every line in the old man’s face, the white of his eyes glowing milk-like as he stared at the lens. What would be his fate if the cinema closed down? Every day there was a famous person in the newspapers reminiscing about childhood outings at the New Cathay—actors and filmmakers, local celebrities who had been inspired to act by early experiences at the New Cathay.

  “It’s all these stupid rich kids coming back from university overseas,” Sixth Uncle complained on the telephone to Justin. “No one gives a shit about that old dump; it’s just a bunch of idiots who have taken over the newspapers. Why are your friends so stupid?”

  Justin wanted to point out that they were not his friends, they were his brother’s. But C.S., with his customary ease, managed to escape being implicated. He spent all his time with the same people who were campaigning against his family’s plans to redevelop the cinema, but in his family’s eyes, his “artistic temperament” excused any lapses in judgment and absolved him of any responsibility. No one ever told him to have a discreet word with his girlfriend or stand up for his family’s interests; Yinghui continued to visit the family home and dine with his parents. By virtue of being C.S.’s future fiancée, she was exempt from criticism. And she, too, played her part in the transaction, becoming strangely docile and uncombative whenever she was with his parents; it was as if C.S.’s presence smoothed away all conflict: Everyone was willing to forget their disputes to make him happy. It was Justin who bore the brunt of his family’s frustrations at not being able to advance with plans for the cinema.

  “There’s nothing I can do right now,” Justin protested at yet another meeting with his father and Sixth Uncle. “There’s too much bad publicity. No investor wants to touch the place. We just need to let the fuss die down, then we’ll see.”

  “You shouldn’t have let it get to this stage,” his father said. “A sleeping site like that is costing millions in lost revenue.”

  “You’re too soft,” said Sixth Uncle. “You need to harden up.”

  “And do what?” Justin retorted. He thought of Yinghui, of how she would react if he could find some way of preserving the cinema—what would she say when, one evening, he casually announced that he had convinced the family to restore the cinema to its former glory? If he could delay plans for development as long as possible, surely his family would lose interest.

  One evening he stopped in at Angie’s, where he knew he would find Yinghui and C.S., along with the general air of hostility that seemed to greet him there those days. It was late, and the closed sign had long since been hung on the door, but they were still sipping green tea and listening to Tom Waits. On the daily notice board, the triumphant front page of that day’s New Straits Times had been pinned up like a trophy: “Town Hall Delays Decision on New Cathay Cinema”—a stay of execution, following a huge petition organized by Yinghui and her friends.

  “Here comes your property-magnate brother,” Yinghui said to C.S. as Justin sat down with them. “How’s the heritage-destruction business these days?”

  “Sweetie, drop it for tonight, okay?” C.S. said. “We’re drinking oolong—want some, bro?”

  “Sure,” Justin said. “I’ve just been at a meeting with Dad and Sixth Uncle. I’m so tired.”

  “Vandalism is tiring business,” Yinghui said, turning the pages of her magazine without looking up.

  “Actually, they’re pissed off at me for not doing anything with the New Cathay. I had to tell them—the whole business isn’t really my cup of tea.”

  “Yeah?” Yinghui poured Justin a cup of tea from the small earthenware teapot C.S. had placed on the table. It was incised with a fine drawing of a blade of wheat—a ghost of a shadow, barely noticeable. “Then tell them that there’s no deal to be made.”

  C.S. pretended to read his paper—the London Review of Books, Justin noticed; every time C.S. felt uncomfortable, he would engage in earnest reading to extract himself from the conversation. It was his default setting.

  Justin sipped from the tiny porcelain cup. “You know it’s not that easy with my family, but to tell you the truth,” he lowered his voice, “I am pretty sure I’ll manage to find a way to save the cinema. Please don’t go telling all this to your friends and publishing stuff in the papers. I’m telling you this in confidence, as my brother’s soon-to-be fiancée, not as a random journalist, campaigner, or whatever you are these days.”

  Yinghui looked at him and nodded. She refilled his cup. “Sure. Are you serious?”

  Justin nodded.

  “Listen, did C.S. tell you we’re going to the seaside this weekend? We’re going to fill the family house down there with a bunch of friends. Talk about abandoned old houses—that place hardly gets used. Why don’t you come along too?”

  C.S. stood up and ran his hand through Yinghui’s hair. He stretched, yawning, and said, “Yeah, come.” She reached back and gently touched his hands as he stood behi
nd her, massaging her shoulders for a few moments. She closed her eyes and let her chin fall to her collarbone, a faint smile imprinted on her face.

  C.S. said, “I gotta take a piss—too much tea.”

  That weekend, Justin drove down to Port Dickson on his own. Yinghui and C.S. had already gone there with another couple to set the house up—open the shutters, sweep the veranda, raise the bamboo blinds, make the beds. When he arrived, he found them on the sandy lawn that ran down to the beach; they had brought out the old rattan chairs and were sitting in the scant shade of the coconut trees, sipping cold drinks and listening to P. Ramlee songs playing from a small portable stereo. The day was overcast, the sun warm but barely visible. Yinghui was on a hammock strung between two trees, fanning herself with a broad-brimmed straw hat.

  “Look, it’s Eldest Brother himself,” she said when she saw him. She struggled to get out of the hammock, then came over and greeted him with a touch of her hand on his elbow. In his chinos and long-sleeved shirt, he felt overdressed and stiff—the others were in shorts and T-shirts; C.S. was shirtless, the razor-sharp lines of his ribs and his haunches giving him the appearance of a sixties’ hippie after a month in an ashram, a look accentuated by his long hair, which made his head seem out of proportion with his body—all he needed was a beard, Justin thought.

  “Sorry, I’ve just come from the office,” Justin said, undoing the top button of his shirt as he sat down.

  “But it’s Saturday afternoon—you must be very busy,” said a Malay girl whom Justin did not recognize. She had a small, oval-shaped face and was wearing a T-shirt that said LOVE HATE over bright pink shorts.

  “Didn’t you know?” Yinghui said, pouring Justin some iced lemon tea. “Justin’s working to save the New Cathay.”