Five Star Billionaire
Five Star Billionaire
Tash Aw
In this stunning new novel, Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.Phoebe has come to China buoyed with hope, but her dreams are shattered as the job she was promised seems never to have existed. Gary is a successful pop star, but his fans disappear after a bar-room brawl. Yinghui was once a poetry-loving activist and is not sure how she became a wealthy businesswoman. Justin works hard for his powerful family, but begins to wonder if his efforts are appreciated. And then there is the Five Star Billionaire himself, pulling the strings of destiny, his lessons for success unsettling the dynamics of these disparate lives.In FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE, Tash Aw charts the weave of their journeys in the new China, counterpointing their adventures with the old life they have left behind in Malaysia. The result is a brilliant examination of the migrations that are shaping this dazzling new city, and their effect on myriad individual lives.
TASH AW
Five Star Billionaire
A Novel
For Aw Tee Min and Yap Chee Chun
Suppose one can live without outside pressure, suppose one can create one’s own inner tension – then it is not true that there is nothing in man.
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ, The Captive Mind
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u9ecf0847-1295-5620-952c-b94e9da739a0)
Dedication (#u08014885-17e4-5671-aef3-efd9e0c6f831)
Epigraph (#uacc9e0de-adf5-5a1c-b583-4d710848c9b8)
Foreword: How to be a Billionaire (#u2bb89b94-2840-59db-b5c4-8fbf30b8f845)
1. Move to Where the Money Is (#u53e682b9-77a3-5b05-b39d-34eea60f9e62)
2. Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself (#uf033cef7-bbb4-59c4-8ad2-8d5917a7c5ad)
3. Bravely Set the World on Fire (#u92b18f0b-e1e3-51fd-ab15-5e8d9e14e9fa)
4. Forget the Past, Look Only to the Future (#u32722cda-8dad-5f4c-b06d-954187b727fb)
5. Reinvent Yourself (#u9e47a243-930c-5660-9be5-da654795ef0b)
6. Perform All Obligations and Duties with Joy (#u3c5760fa-5934-5fad-81a1-3029953b6df9)
7. Calmly Negotiate Difficult Situations (#u0fe4708d-c500-5989-a616-80a0539f663c)
8. Always Rebound After Each Failure (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Pursue Gains, Forget Righteousness (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Never Lapse into Despair or Apathy (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Inquire Deeply into Every Problem (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Work with a Soulmate, Someone Who Understands You (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Luxuriate in Serendipitous Events (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Even Beautiful Things Will Fade (#litres_trial_promo)
15. A Strong Fighting Spirit Swallows Mountains and Rivers (#litres_trial_promo)
16. Beware of Storms Arising from Clear Skies (#litres_trial_promo)
17. Cultivate an Urbane, Humorous Personality (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Be Prepared to Sacrifice Everything (#litres_trial_promo)
19. There Can Be No Turning Back (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Anticipate Danger in Times of Peace (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Adopt Others’ Thoughts as Though They Were Your Own (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Boundaries Change with the Passing of Time (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Nothing Remains Good or Bad Forever (#litres_trial_promo)
24. Embrace Your Bright Future (#litres_trial_promo)
25. Know When to Cut Your Losses (#litres_trial_promo)
26. Strive to Understand the Big Picture (#litres_trial_promo)
27. Nothing in Life Lasts Forever (#litres_trial_promo)
28. Travel Far, Keep Searching (#litres_trial_promo)
29. Life is a Floating Dream (#litres_trial_promo)
30. The Journey is Long (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword: How to be a Billionaire
Some time ago – I forget exactly when – I decided that I would one day be very rich. By this I mean not just comfortably well off but superabundantly, incalculably wealthy, the way only children imagine wealth to be. Indeed, nowadays, whenever I am pressed to pinpoint the time in my life when these notions of great fortune formed in my head, I always answer that it must have been sometime in my adolescence, when I was conscious of the price of life’s treasures but not yet fully aware of their many limitations, for there has always been something inherently childlike in my pursuit of money – that much I admit.
When I was growing up in rural Malaysia, one of my favourite TV programmes was a drama series set in a legal practice somewhere in America. All the details – the actors, the plots, the setting – are lost to me now, blurred not just by the passage of time but by a haze of bad subtitles and interrupted transmissions (the power generator and the aerial took it in turns to malfunction with crushing predictability, though in those days it seemed perfectly normal). I am not certain I could tell you what happened in a single episode of that soap opera, and besides, I did not care for the artificial little conflicts that took place all the time, the emotional ups and downs, men and women crying because they were falling in love, or out of love; the arguing, making up, making love, etc. I had a sensation that they were wasting time, that their days and nights could have been spent more profitably; I think I probably felt some degree of frustration at this. But even these are fleeting impressions, and the only thing I really remember is the opening sequence, a sweeping panorama of metal-and-glass skyscrapers glinting in the sun, people in sharp suits carrying briefcases as they vanished into revolving doors, the endless rush of traffic on sunlit freeways. And every time I sat down in front of the TV I would think: One day, I will own a building like that, a whole tower block filled with industrious, clever people working to make their fantasies come true.
All I cared for were these introductory images; the show that followed was of secondary importance to me.
So much wasted time.
Now, when I look back at those childhood fantasies, I chuckle with embarrassment, for I realise that I was foolish: I should never have been so modest in my ambitions, nor waited so long to pursue them.
It is said that the legendary tycoon Cecil Lim Kee Huat – still compos mentis today at 101 – made his first profit at the age of eight, selling watermelons off a cart on the old coast road to Port Dickson. At thirteen he was running a coffee stand in Seremban, and at fifteen, salvaging and redistributing automobile spare parts on a semi-industrial scale, a recycling genius long before the concept was even invented. Small-town Malaya in the 1920s was not a place for dreams. He was eighteen and working as an occasional porter in the Colony Club when he had the good fortune to meet a young Assistant District Officer from Fife called MacKinnon, only recently arrived in the Malay States. History does not record the precise nature of their relationship (those ugly rumours of blackmail were never proved); and in any event, as we will see later, imagining the whys and wherefores of past events, the what-might-have-beens – all that is pointless. The only thing worth considering is what actually happens, and what happened in Lim’s case was that he was left with enough money upon MacKinnon’s untimely death (in a drowning accident) to start the first local insurance business in Singapore, a small enterprise that would eventually become the Overseas Chinese Assurance Company, for so long a bedrock of the Malaysian and Singaporean commercial landscape until its recent collapse. We can learn much from people like Lim, but his case study would involve a separate book altogether. For now, it is sufficient to ask: What were you doing when you were eight, thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen? The answer is, I suspect: Not very much.
In the business of life, every tiny episode is a test, every human encounter a lesson. Look and learn. One day you might achieve all that I have. But time is sprinting past you, faster than you think. You’re already playing catch-up, even as you read this.
Fortunately, you do get a second chance. My advice to you is: Take it. A third rarely comes your way.
1
Move to Where the Money Is
There was a boy at the counter waiting for his coffee, nodding to the music. Phoebe had noticed him as soon as he walked through the door, his walk so confident, soft yet bouncy. He must have grown up walking on carpet. He ordered two lattes and a green tea muffin and paid with a silver ICBC card that he slipped out of a wallet covered in grey-and-black chessboard squares. He was only a couple of years younger than Phoebe, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, but already he had a nice car, a silver-blue hatchback she had seen earlier when she was crossing the street and he nearly ran her over. It was strange how Phoebe noticed such things nowadays, as swift and easy as breathing. She wondered when she had picked up the habit. She had not always been like this.
Outside, the branches of the plane trees strained the bright mid-autumn sunlight, their shadows casting a pretty pattern on the pavement. There was a light wind, too, that made the leaves dance.
‘You like this music, huh?’ Phoebe asked as she reached across him for some sachets of sugar.
His coffees arrived. ‘It’s bossa nova,’ he said, as if it was an explanation, only she didn’t understand it.
‘Ei, I also like Spanish music!’
‘Huh?’ he muttered as he balanced his tray. ‘It’s Brazilian.’ He didn’t even look at her, though she was glad he didn’t, because if he had, it would have been a you-are-nothing look, the kind of quick glance she had become used to since arriving in Shanghai, people from high up looking down on her.
Brazil and Spain were nearly the same, anyway.
They were in a Western-style coffee bar just off Huaihai Lu; the streets were busy, it was a Saturday. But the week no longer divided neatly into weekend and weekday for Phoebe; it had ceased to do so ever since she arrived in Shanghai a few weeks prior to this. Every day tumbled into the next without meaning, as they had done for too long now. She didn’t even know what she was doing in this part of town; she couldn’t afford anything in the shops and her Italian coffee cost more than the shirt she was wearing. It was a big mistake to have come here. Her plan was so stupid; what did she think she would accomplish? Maybe she would have to reconsider everything.
Phoebe Chen Aiping, why are you so afraid all the time? Do not be afraid! Failure is not acceptable! You must raise yourself up and raise up your entire family.
She had started keeping a diary. Every day she would write down her darkest fears and craziest ambitions. It was a technique she’d learnt from a self-help master one day in Guangzhou as she waited in a noodle shop, killing time just after she had been to the Human Resources Market. A small TV had been set on top of the glass counter next to jars of White Rabbit sweets, but at first she did not pay attention, she thought it was just the news. Then she realised that it was a DVD of an inspirational life-teacher, a woman who talked about how she had turned her life around and now wanted to show the rest of us how we too could transform our lowly, invisible existence into a life of eternal happiness and success. Phoebe liked the way the woman looked straight at her, holding her gaze so steadily that Phoebe felt embarrassed, shamed by her own failure, the complete lack of even the tiniest achievement in her life. The woman had shimmering lacquered hair that was classy but not old-fashioned. She showed how a mature woman can look beautiful and successful even when no longer in her first springtime, as she put it herself, laughing. She had so many wise things to say, so many clever sayings and details on how to be successful. If only Phoebe had had a pen and paper she would have written down every single one, because now she cannot remember much except the feeling of courage the woman had given her, words about not being afraid of being on one’s own, far from home. It was as if she had looked into Phoebe’s head and listened to all the anxieties that were spinning around inside, as if she had been next to Phoebe as she lay awake at night wondering how she was going to face the next day. Phoebe felt a release, as if someone had lifted a great mountain of rocks from her shoulders, as if someone had said, You are not alone, I understand your troubles, I understand your loneliness, I am also like you. And Phoebe thought, The moment I have some money, the first thing I am going to buy is your book. I will not even buy an LV handbag or a new HTC smartphone, I am going to buy your words of wisdom and study them the way some people study the Bible.
The book was called Secrets of a Five Star Billionaire. This is something Phoebe would never forget.
One tip that did stick in her mind was the diary, which the woman did not call a diary but a Journal of Your Secret Self, in which you would write down all your black terrors, everything that made you fearful and weak, alongside everything you dream of. You must have more positive dreams than burdensome fears. Once you write something in this book it cannot harm you any more because the fears are conquered by the dreams on the opposite page. So when you are successful you can read this journal one last time before you discard it forever, and you will smile to see how afraid and underdeveloped you were, because you will have come so far. Then you will throw this book away into the Huangpu River and your past self will disappear, leaving only the glorious reborn product of your dreams.
She started the journal six months ago, but still her dreams had not cancelled out her fears. It would happen soon. It had to.
I must not let this city crush me down.
Phoebe looked around the café. The chairs were mustard-yellow and grey, the walls unpainted concrete, as if the work had not yet been finished, but she knew that it was meant to look like this, it was considered fashionable. On the terrace outside there were foreigners sitting with their faces tilted towards the sun – they did not mind their skin turning to leather. Someone got up to leave and suddenly there was a table free next to the Brazilian-music lover. He was with a girl. Maybe it was his sister and not a girlfriend.
Phoebe sat down next to them and turned her body away slightly to show she was not interested in what they were doing. But in the reflection in the window – the sun was shining brightly that day, it was almost Mid-Autumn Festival and the weather was crisp, golden, perfect for dreaming – she could see them quite clearly. The girl was bathed in crystal light as if on a stage, and the boy was cut in half by a slanting line of darkness. Every time he leant forward he came into the light. His skin was like candlewax.
As the girl bent over her magazine, Phoebe could see that she was definitely a girlfriend, not a sister. Her hair fell over her face, so Phoebe could not tell if she was pretty, but she sat the way a pretty person would. Her dress was a big black shirt with loads of words printed all over it like graffiti, meaningless sentences such as PEACE
PARIS, and honestly it was horrible and made her body look formless as a ghost, but it was expensive, anyone could see that. The handbag on the floor was made of leather so soft it seemed to melt into the ground. It spread out at the girl’s feet like an exotic pet, and Phoebe wanted to stroke its cross-hatch pattern to see what it felt like. The boy leant forward and in the mirrored reflection he caught Phoebe’s eye. He said something to his girlfriend in Shanghainese which Phoebe couldn’t understand, and the girl looked up at Phoebe with a sideways glance. It was something Shanghainese girls had perfected, this method of looking at you side-on without turning their faces to you. It meant that they could show off their fine cheekbones and appear uninterested at the same time, and it made you feel that you were not important at all to them, not worthy even of a proper stare.
Phoebe looked away at once. Her cheeks felt hot.
Do not let other people step on you.
Sometimes Shanghai weighed down on her with the weight of ten skyscrapers. The people were so haughty, their dialect so harsh to her ears. If someone talked to her in their language she would feel attacked just by the sound of it. She had come here full of hope, but on some nights, even after she had deposited all her loathing and terror into her secret journal, she still felt that she was tumbling down, down, and there was no way up. It had been a mistake to gamble as she did.
She was not from any part of China, but from a country thousands of miles to the south, and in that country she had grown up in a small town in the far north-east. It is a region that is poor and remote, so she is used to people thinking of her as inferior, even in her own country. In her small town the way of life had not changed very much for fifty years, and would probably never change. Visitors from the capital city used to call it charming, but they didn’t have to live there. It was not a place for dreams and ambition, and so Phoebe did not dream. She did what all the other young boys and girls did when they left school at sixteen: they travelled across the mountain range that cut the country in two to find work on the west coast, moving slowly southward until they reached the capital city.
Here are some of the jobs her friends took in the year they left home. Trainee waiter. Assistant fake-watch stall-holder. Karaoke hostess. Assembly-line worker in a semiconductor factory. Bar girl. Shampoo girl. Water-cooler delivery man. Seafood-restaurant cleaner. (Phoebe’s first job was among those listed above, but she would rather not say which one.) Five years in these kinds of jobs, they passed so slowly.
Then she had some luck. There had been a girl who’d disappeared. Everyone thought she was in trouble – she’d been hanging out with a gangster, the kind of big-city boy you couldn’t tell your small-town parents about, and everyone thought it wouldn’t be long before she was into drugs or prostitution; they were sure of it because she had turned up one day with a big jade bracelet and a black eye. But from nowhere Phoebe received an email from this girl. She wasn’t in trouble, she was in China. She’d just decided that enough was enough, and left one morning without telling her boyfriend. She’d saved enough money to go to Hong Kong, where she’d been a karaoke hostess for a while – she was not ashamed to say it because everyone does it, but it was not for long – and now she was working in Shenzhen. She was a restaurant manager, a classy international place, not some dump, you know, and she was in charge of a staff of sixteen. She even had her own apartment (photo attached – small but bright and modern with a vase of plastic roses on a glass table). Thing is, she’d met a businessman from Beijing who was going to marry her and take her up north, and she wanted to make sure everything was OK at the restaurant before she left. They always needed good waiting staff at New World Restaurant. Just come! Don’t worry about visas. We can fix that. There were two smiley faces and a winky one at the end of the email.
Those days were so exciting, when they emailed each other several times a day. What clothes shall I bring? What is the winter weather like? What kind of shoes do I need for my uniform? Each email that arrived from China made Phoebe feel that she was one step closer to lifting herself up in the world and becoming someone successful. It made the hair salon where she was working at the time seem so small – the clients were small people who did not realise how small they were. When they said to her, Hey, Phoebe, you are not concentrating, she just laughed inside because she knew that very soon she would be the one giving them orders and leaving them tips. She was going to experience adventures and see things that none of them could even dream about.
It took her a few weeks to get enough money together for the ticket to Hong Kong plus a bit extra to get her to Shenzhen, but from then on it would be plain sailing, because she had a job lined up and she would stay with her friend for the first couple of months until she found her own place. She didn’t need all that much money, she would start making plenty once she got there, her friend assured her. From then on anything was possible. She could start her own business doing whatever she wanted – some former waitresses at the restaurant were already going around in chauffeur-driven cars just a year after they quit their jobs. New China was amazing, she would see for herself. No one asks too many questions, no one cares where you are from. All that counts is your ability. If you can do a job, you’re hired.
People say that it is hard to leave their lives behind, and that when the time comes for you to do so you will feel reluctance and longing for your home. But these are people with nice lives to leave behind. For others it is different. Leaving is a relief.
The emails continued, full of !!! marks as usual, but they were less frequent, and finally, at the internet café near East Tsim Sha Tsui station, waiting for the train to Shenzhen, Phoebe logged on for the first time in four days to find not a single email from her friend. Not even a short message that said, Hurry, too excited, followed by lots of smileys. When at last she got to Shenzhen it took her some time to locate the restaurant. The sign was proud and shiny. New World International Restaurant, it read above twin pillars of twisted gold dragons – Phoebe recognised it from the photos her friend had sent her. The menu was in a glass case outside, a sure sign of a classy joint. But as she approached, Phoebe’s heart began to experience a dark fluttering in her ribcage, the way she imagined bat wings would feel against her cheek. It was a sensation that would stay with her for the rest of her time in China. The glass doors were open, but the restaurant inside was dim even though it was the middle of the afternoon. When she stepped inside she saw an empty space without any chairs and tables. Part of the floor had been ripped up, and on the bare concrete she could see messy patches of glue where carpets had once been laid. There was a bar decorated with scenes of Chinese legends carved in bronze, cranes flying over mountains and lakes. Some workmen were shifting machinery and tools at the far end of the restaurant, and when Phoebe called out to them they seemed confused. The restaurant had closed down a few days ago, soon it would be a hotpot chain. The people who worked there? Probably just got jobs somewhere else. No one stays in a job for long in Shenzhen anyway.
She thought, This is not a good situation.
She tried calling her friend’s mobile phone number, but it was dead. This number is out of use, the voice told her, over and over again. Each time she dialled it was the same. This number is out of use.
She checked how much money she had and began looking for a cheap guesthouse. The streets were clean but full of people. Everyone looked as though they were hurrying to an appointment, everyone had some place to go. Amid the mass of people that swarmed around her like a thick muddy river, she started to notice a certain kind of person, and soon they were the only people she really saw. Young single women. They were everywhere, rushing for the bus or marching steadfastly with a steely look on their faces, or going from shop to shop handing out their CVs, their entire lives on one sheet of paper. They were all restless, they were all moving, they were all looking for work, floating everywhere, casting out their lives to whoever would take them.
So this is how it happens. This is how I become like them, Phoebe thought. In the space of a few hours she had passed from one world to another. One moment she was almost an assistant manager in a classy international restaurant, next moment she was a migrant worker. Her new life had materialised out of thin air like a trick of fate. Unattached, searching, alone. Some people say that when you find other people who are just like you, who share your position in life, you feel happier, less alone, but Phoebe did not think this was true. Knowing that she was the same as millions of other girls made her feel lonelier than ever.
She went back to her lodgings. The door wouldn’t lock, so she slept with her handbag tucked into her belly, curved into a tight C-shape.
Those first few months in Shenzhen passed very quickly. During this time Phoebe did a number of jobs that she would rather not talk about right now. Maybe some day, but not now.
You can only rely on yourself. There are no true friends in this world. If you place your trust in others you will open yourself to danger and hurtfulness.
She got a job at a place called Guangdong Bigfaith Quality Garment Company, a factory that made fashion clothes for Western brands – not the expensive labels that Phoebe had heard of but lesser ones that sold shiny, colourful clothes, though the other girls told her that these were trendy shops even though they were low-cost. Apparently in the West even rich people buy cheap clothes. Personally Phoebe did not want any of the skirts or jackets or blouses that were made at the factory; they looked unclassy even to her. Her job was to match up the orders to the delivery notes and make sure that everything tallied. It was not a difficult job, but still she cried every night. The hours were long and at night she had to endure being in a dorm with the other girls, so many other girls. She hated seeing their underwear strung up on washing lines in every room, even in the corridors, drying in the damp air. Everywhere you went in the dormitory block all you saw was lines of damp underwear, and the whole place smelled of detergent and sweat. All day and night there was arguing and crying. She hated this, especially the night-time sobbing. It was as if everyone thought that when it was dark no one could hear them cry. She had to get away from them, she was not like them. But for now she had no choice.
The other hard thing to deal with was the jealousy, the things that were said about her. (How did she get such a good job straight away? Why was she in admin and not on the production line when she had only just joined the company? I hear she hasn’t even been out for long.) Well, Phoebe wanted to explain, first of all it was because she could speak English and Cantonese, the language of all the rich factory-owners down here in the south. And, quite simply, it was because she was better than the rest of them. But she knew to keep silent. She was afraid of the large groups of girls who came from the big provinces, especially the Hunanese girls who smuggled things out of the factory to sell outside and threatened to kill anyone who reported them. They liked to fight. Everyone had their own clan for protection: the Sichuan girls looked after each other, even the Anhui girls were numerous enough to have support. Only Phoebe was alone, but she would rise above them all because she was smarter. A line stuck in her head, advice given to her by the self-made millionaire. Hide your brightness, remain in the shadows. So she had to endure the jealousy and the detergent and the sweat and the crying. But for how long?
Do not let lesser people drag you down. You are a star that shines brightly.
She had a picture of a Taiwanese pop star by her bed. It was just a page torn from a magazine, an advertisement for cows’ milk, but it was a nicer decoration than the strung-up panties that the other girls had. It was a struggle to keep the Sellotape attached to the glossy painted wall because of the humidity, and the top corner kept falling away. But she persisted in sticking the picture up so she could look at him and dream about a world where there was no sobbing. If she turned her body at an angle there was only him and her in the world. She liked his delicate smile and watery eyes, and found even the silly white milk-moustache on his lip endearing. When she looked at his face she felt hope swell in her chest. His gentleness made her forget about the harshness of life and made her believe that she could work hard and show the world her true inner beauty. Maybe she could even be his girlfriend one day. Oh, she knew that it was just a fantasy, but he was so dreamy, and reminded her of the boys she had grown up with, whom she would remember forever as teenagers, even though they had now all moved to the cities and were selling fake leather wallets and probably amphetamines on the side. They had been so happy before, and now they were all growing old so quickly, including Phoebe.
But you are so young, little sister. That was what the new manager of her division began saying to her one day. He was a man from Hong Kong, not fat not thin, not ugly not handsome, just a man from Hong Kong. Once a month he would visit the factory and spend four or five days there. Every time he came he would call her into his office and show her the gifts he had brought for her – a bag of the juiciest tangerines, small sugary pineapples from Taiwan, strawberries, some foreign chocolate that tasted bitter and floury – delicacies that people bought when they could afford to travel. The hamper of fruit lay on his desk wrapped in stiff crinkly plastic that made a loud noise when she touched it. She did not know how she was going to carry it all the way back to her dorm, across the huge courtyard and the basketball courts, did not know where she would keep it or how she would explain it to the other girls. The jealousy against her had not really gone away; the tide had just subsided for the time being, but was waiting to well up like a tsunami at any moment. She knew that the gift was wrong, that she had not really done anything to deserve it, but as she looked at the shiny ripe persimmons, she felt special. Someone had noticed her, someone had thought of her enough to buy her nice things. It had been a long time since anyone had done that, so she accepted the gift.
As she carried the basket down the corridor to her dorm, she could feel the other girls’ hot stares burning her with their envy. She was sweating, and her heart was heavy with guilt, heavier than the basket she was carrying. But as she walked into the dorm she found herself talking freely, the words flowing easily from her mouth. Ei, everyone, look what I have! A cousin of mine in Hong Kong got married to a very rich man and they had their wedding. I couldn’t afford to go so they sent me some tokens of their big celebration. Come, come, let’s all share!
Hei, you did not tell us you are from Hong Kong.
Yes, Phoebe said. From just near the border, in the New Territories.
Oooh, the girls said as they reached for the fruit. So I guess it’s natural that you speak Cantonese! We thought you just learnt it to curry favour with the boss!
This is how things happen in China, Phoebe thought as she sat watching her new friends sharing the basket of fruit. Things change so fast. From then on all the girls knew who she was, and they were nice to her. They took her clothes and washed them for her when she was on a long shift, and some of them began to talk to her about their private lives – where they were from, their boyfriend problems, their ambitions. One day she was talking to a girl, just someone she shared meal breaks with in the canteen sometimes, not really a friend. The girl’s mobile phone rang, and she just looked at the screen without answering. Her face twisted into a pained expression and she handed the phone to Phoebe. It’s the boy I was telling you about, the one who bullies me. Phoebe took the phone and did not even say hello. This is your ex-girlfriend’s cousin, she said. This mobile phone belongs to me now. Your ex has a new boyfriend and he is rich and educated, not a stupid peasant like you, so just go away or else I will make trouble for you. I know who you are and which lousy place you work at.
Wah, you are amazing, Phoebe! Everyone was laughing and someone even reached out and put her arm around Phoebe’s shoulder.
On her first day off that month she went with some other girls to the cinema. They stopped at a fast-food place and had bubble milk tea before buying a box of octopus balls which they ate while strolling through the night market, linking elbows as if they were still in middle school. They turned their noses up at the cheap clothes, far cheaper than the ones they made in the factory, stall after stall of thin spangled nylon. The music on the speakers was loud, thumping in their ribcages and drowning out their heartbeats. It made them feel so alive. The smell of fried food and charcoal grills felt familiar to Phoebe – she did not feel so very far from home after all. They saw posters advertising the latest concert of the Taiwanese singer she liked, and the ticket prices did not look too expensive.
Hei, we should all save up some money and go! someone said. Phoebe, you love Gary, don’t you? Maybe we can share the cost of your ticket, because you are always cooking for us and sharing your food with us. I hear he’s going to sing some Cantonese songs too, since it’s here in Guangzhou, so you can teach us to sing along! She was happy that they offered, but she knew that these were empty promises and that no one would actually buy her a ticket.
She stopped to buy a shiny black top decorated with beads, but the other girls scolded her. Forty kuai! Too expensive. Aiya, new girls are always the same, always spending money on useless things instead of sending it home. Besides, you should be buying nicer clothes, something that suits your slim figure better, not some Old Mother style! But Phoebe bought it anyway, she didn’t care. It had pretty embroidery, a red rose adorned with silver beads that fanned out from each petal.
But as swiftly as the bright cool days of autumn give way to the damp chill of winter, life also changes. Phoebe knew this by now. Nothing ever stood still in China, nothing was permanent. A person who is loved cannot expect that love to remain for long. There is no reason for them to keep this love; they do not have a right to be loved.
She shared her third basket of fruit and other delicacies with her dorm friends. This time there were bags of dried scallops and a tin of abalone, which none of them had ever tasted before, and they gathered to cook a meal together. It was too luxurious for lowly people like them, one girl remarked – this meal was all thanks to Phoebe.
Really, said another girl, lifting her rice bowl to her mouth. Boss Lin says this kind of thing is not so special in Hong Kong, everyone eats it over there.
How would you know? When do you ever talk to Boss Lin?
Hm, it’s true. I rarely get a chance to speak to him. The only person he speaks to is Phoebe.
I wish he didn’t, Phoebe joked. He is so boring. Hai, it’s only because of my stupid job that I have to have contact with him.
It seems he takes a special interest in you. He even calls you into his private office.
Yes, but only to scold me for tasks I haven’t done! Come, eat some more!
The next month, Mr Lin summoned Phoebe to see him as soon as he arrived. He shut the door; the blinds were already down as usual. There was no fruit basket this time, only a small box. He opened it and held out a brand-new mobile phone, the type with no buttons on the screen, just a smooth glass surface. It was something a tycoon’s daughter would have, or a businesswoman. Phoebe didn’t even know how to turn it on.
But I already have a phone.
It’s OK, take it. Just tell your friends you won it in a competition.
She held it in her hands, turning it over and over again. She held it up to her face. It was like a mirror – she could see herself in it.
You like it? Mr Lin was standing next to her, though she had not heard him approach her. He put his hand on her buttock, the palm flat, burning through her jeans. Hours later, she would still feel the imprint of his hot hand on her, leaving its mark where it had stayed for less than half a minute, maybe not even that long.
In the dorm someone said, What’s happened to your cousin in Hong Kong? No food hamper this month? I think the cousin must have suddenly died and turned into a ghost!
Next day, two Shaanxi girls from the next block were taken away by the police. When Phoebe asked why, one of her dorm mates said it was because they didn’t have the right papers. They were illegal, and one of them was underage.
But I thought you said that kind of thing doesn’t really matter, that the employer doesn’t ask too many questions, where you’re from and all that, Phoebe said.
Sure, that’s right, her dorm mate replied, smiling. But rules are rules. You can dodge the regulations for so long, but if someone makes a formal report there’s nothing anyone can do. Half the girls here are lying about something, and most of the time it’s OK. Even if you don’t have a proper hukou or your papers are fake, who cares? Only when you step out of line do others make trouble for you. Those girls were unpopular, they were arrogant and made enemies. They thought they were better than everyone else, so what could they expect? It was just a matter of time.
One morning Phoebe came back after a night shift and saw that the poster by her bed had been defaced. The pop singer’s moon-bright complexion had been dotted with acne and now he wore round black glasses and there were thick cat whiskers sprouting from his cheeks.
Time was running out for Phoebe. From the first moment she set foot in China she had felt the days vanishing from her life, vanishing into failure. Like the clock she stared at every day at work, her life was counting down the minutes before she became a non-person whom no one would ever remember. As she sat during lunch break on the low brick wall next to the volleyball court, she knew that she had to act now or she would forever be stepped on everywhere she went. The grey concrete dormitory blocks rose up on all four sides of the yard and blocked out the light. There was Cantonese pop music playing from somewhere and through an open window she could see a TV playing reruns of the Olympics, Chinese athletes winning medals. She watched the high jump for a while. A lanky blonde girl failed twice, flopping down heavily on the bar. One more go and she was out. It didn’t really matter, since she wasn’t even going to win a medal. Then suddenly she did something that made Phoebe shiver with excitement. For her third and final jump she asked for the bar to be raised higher than anyone had jumped so far, higher than she had ever attained in her whole life. She had failed at lower heights but now she was gunning for something way beyond her capabilities. She was going to jump all the way to the stars, and even if she failed she could only come down as far as the lowly position she already occupied. She stood at the end of the runway flexing her fingers and shaking her wrists, and then she started running, in big bouncy strides. Phoebe got up and turned away. She didn’t want to see what happened, it was not important to her. The only thing that mattered was that the blonde girl had gambled.
She took her expensive new phone to a Sichuan girl who traded things in the dorm, and sold it for a nice sum of cash. She washed her hair and tied it neatly before going to Boss Lin’s office. She was wearing her tightest jeans that she usually reserved for her day off. They were so tight that she could not sit down comfortably without them cutting into the tops of her thighs.
Little Miss, it’s highly irregular for us to hand out salaries before payday, he said, but he was already looking for the number of the accounts department.
Come on, it’s almost the end of the month, only a week to go. Phoebe twirled her hair and inclined her head the way she noticed other girls doing when they talked to the handsome security guards. Anyway, she laughed, our relationship is a bit irregular, don’t you think?
Foshan, Songxia, Dongguan, Wenzhou – she was going to bypass them all. Her bar was going to be raised all the way to the sky. There was only one city she could go to now, the biggest and brightest of them all.
The girl at the next table was still reading her magazine, her boyfriend sending messages on his iPhone. Sometimes he would read out a message and laugh, but the girl would not respond, she just continued to flick through her magazine. He looked up at Phoebe, just for a split second, and at first she thought he was scowling in that familiar look-down-on-you expression. But then she realised that he was squinting because of the light. He hadn’t even noticed her.
The girl’s mobile phone rang and she began to rummage in her handbag for it, emptying out its contents on the table. There were so many shiny pretty things, lipstick cases, keyrings, and also a leather diary, a pen, stray receipts, and scrunched-up pieces of tissue paper. She answered the phone, and as she did so, stood up and gathered her things, hastily replacing them in her bag. Her boyfriend was trying to help her, but she was frowning with impatience. A 5-mao coin fell to the floor and rolled to Phoebe’s feet. She bent over and picked it up.
‘Don’t worry,’ the boy said over his shoulder as he followed his girlfriend out. ‘It’s only 5 mao.’
They had just left when Phoebe noticed something on the table. Half hidden under a paper napkin was the girl’s ID card. Phoebe looked up and saw that they were still on the pavement, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross the road. She could have rushed out and called to them, done them a huge favour. But she waited, feeling her heart pound and the blood rush to her temples. She reached across and took the card. The photo was bland; you couldn’t make out the cheekbones that in real life were so sharp you could have cut your hand on them. In the photo the girl’s face was flat and pale. She could have been any other young woman in the café.
Outside, the boy was leading the girl by the hand as they crossed the road. She was still on the phone, her floppy bag trailing behind her like a small dog. The skies were clear that day, a touch of autumn coolness in the air.
With a paper napkin, Phoebe wiped the breadcrumbs off the card and tucked it safely into her purse.
2
Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself
Every building has its own sparkle, its own identity. At night, their electric personalities flicker into life and they cast off their perfunctory daytime selves, reaching out to each other to form a new world of ever-changing colour. It is tempting to see them as a single mass of light, a collection of illuminated billboards and fancy fluorescent strips that twinkle in the same way. But this is not true; they are not the same. Each one insists itself upon you in a different way, leaving its imprint on your imagination. Each message, if you care to listen, is different.
From his window he could see the Pudong skyline, the skyscrapers of Lujiazui ranged like razor-sharp Alpine peaks against the night sky. In the daytime even the most famous buildings seemed irrelevant, obscured by the perpetual haze of pollution; but at night, when the yellow-grey fog thinned, he would sit at his window watching them display boastfully, each one trying to outdo the next: taller, louder, brighter. A crystal outcrop suspended high in the sky, shrouded by mist on rainy days; a giant goldfish wriggling across the face of a building; interlocking geometric shapes shattering into a million fragments before regrouping. He knew every one by heart.
Buildings were in his DNA, he sometimes thought. They had given him everything he had ever owned – his houses, his cars, his friends – and even shaped the way he thought and felt; they had been in his life right from the beginning. The years were rushing past, whatever he had left of his youth surrendering to middle age, yet bricks and mortar – real estate – remained a constant presence. When he revisited his earliest memories, trying to summon scenes of family life – his mother’s protective embrace, perhaps, or praise from his father – the results were always blank. They were present in his memories, of course, his parents and grandmother, hovering spectrally. But, just like in real life, they were never animated. All he could see and smell was the buildings around them, the structures they inhabited: cold stone floors, mossy walls, flaking plaster, silence. It was a world from which there had been no escape. A path had been laid down for him, straight and unbending. He had long since given up hope of departing from this track, indeed could not even remember any other option – until he came to Shanghai.
The summer of ’08 had been notable for its stillness, the unyielding humidity that lay trapped between the avenues of concrete and glass. He had arrived in Shanghai expecting a temperate climate, but summer had stretched far into September and the pavements were sticky with heat, the roads becoming rivers of exhaust and steam. Even in his gated compound in Pudong, with its American-tropic-style lawns and palm-filled gardens, the air felt lifeless.
He had known little about Shanghai, and assumed that it would consist solely of shopping malls and plastic reproductions of its history, its traditional life preserved in aspic as it was in Singapore, where he went to school, or inherently Third World, like Malaysia, where he grew up. It might be like Hong Kong, where he had begun his career and established his reputation as an unspectacular but canny businessman who would hold the reins steady as head of the family’s property interests. Whatever the case, he had assumed he would find it familiar – he had spent his life in overcrowded, overbuilt Asian cities, and they were all the same to him: whenever he looked at a tower block he saw only a set of figures that represented income and expenditure. Ever since he was a teenager, his brain had been trained to work in this way, calculating numbers swiftly, threading together disparate considerations such as location, purpose and yield. Maybe there was, in spite of everything, a beauty in the incisiveness of his thinking back then.
But during those initial few weeks it was not easy for him to get any sense of Shanghai at all. His driver picked him up at his house and drove him to a series of meetings punctuated by business lunches, each day finishing with the soon familiar flourish of a banquet. He lived in a development called Lisson Valley, which was owned by his family. This, together with a more modest development in Hongqiao and a condominium block in Xintiandi, were all that they owned in the largest city in China, and they had decided that they needed to expand, which was why he had been sent here. They had spent a hundred years in Malaysia and Singapore, and now they needed to branch out in a serious way – like the great Jewish families of Europe in the nineteenth century, his father had explained, as if the decision needed to be justified. On the annual Forbes list of billionaires his family’s business was described as ‘Henry Lim and family – Diversified Holdings’ – it always made him wince, the term ‘diversified’: the lack of specificity carried with it an accusation, as if the source of the wealth they had amassed was uncertain and, most probably, unsavoury.
‘You’re too sensitive,’ his father had chided him when he was young. ‘You need to grow out of it and toughen up. What do you care what other people think?’
It was true: what other people thought was entirely irrelevant. The family insurance firm, established in Singapore since 1930, had not only survived but prospered during the war, and was one of the oldest continuous companies in South-East Asia. By any reckoning his family now counted as ‘old money’, one of those overseas Chinese families that had risen, in little over a century, from dockside coolies to established billionaires. Every generation built on the achievements of its predecessor, and now it was his turn: Justin CK Lim, eldest son of Henry Lim and heir to the proud, vibrant legacy of LKH Holdings, established by his grandfather.
Property clairvoyant. Groomed from a young age to take over the reins. Steady hands. Wisdom beyond his years.
These were some of the things the Business Times said of him just before he arrived here. His father had had the article cut out, mounted and framed, and had sent it to him gift-wrapped in paper decorated with gold stars. It arrived two days after his birthday, but he was not sure if it was a present. There had never been presents on his birthday.
From the start of his time in Shanghai he was invited to the best parties – the numerous openings of the flagship stores of Western luxury brands, or discreet private banquets hosted by young local entrepreneurs with excellent connections within the Party. He could always get a table at the famous Western restaurants on the Bund, and because people soon got to know and like him – he was easy, unshowy company – he was rarely on his own, and increasingly in the public eye. At one party to launch a new line of underwear, held in a warehouse in the northern outskirts of the city, he found himself unconsciously shrinking away from the bank of flashbulbs that greeted the guests, so that when the photographs appeared, his head was cocked at an angle, as if he had recently hurt his neck in an accident. There were a dozen hydraulic platforms suspended above the party, each one occupied by a model clad only in underwear, gyrating uncomfortably to the thumping music; every time he looked up at them they threw confetti down on him, which he then had to pick out of his hair. The event organiser later sent him copies of the photos – he was frowning in every one, stray bits of confetti clinging to his suit like birdshit. Shanghai Tatler magazine photographed him at a black-tie charity event a few weeks after he arrived, his hair slickly swept back in a nod to the 1930s, a small white flower in his buttonhole, and a young Western woman in a qipao at his side. The caption read, ‘Justin CK Lim and companion’; he hadn’t even known who the woman was. He bid for a guided tour of the city by Zhou X, a local starlet just beginning to make a name for herself in new-wave art-house films. It cost him 200,000 yuan, the money donated to orphans of the Sichuan earthquake. The men at the party nudged him and whispered slyly, ‘Maybe you’ll get to see the most secret sights of Shanghai, like she showed off in her latest movie.’ (It was a film he’d heard of, set in a small village during the Cultural Revolution and already banned in China; the New York Times review of it called Zhou X ‘the intellectual man’s Orientalist fantasy’.)
If he felt a frisson of excitement it wasn’t because of his glamorous tour guide, but because it was his first proper outing in Shanghai, his first sight of the daytime streets at close quarters, unencumbered by briefcases and folders. If anything he felt resentful at Zhou X’s presence; she sat in the car idly sending messages on her BlackBerry, her only commentary being a recital of a list of projects her agent had sent her. ‘Wim Wenders – is he famous?’ she asked. ‘I don’t feel like working with him – he sounds boring.’
They stopped outside a tourist-class hotel on a busy thoroughfare lined with mid-range shopping brands in what seemed to be a fairly expensive part of town (low occupancy, medium yield: unrealised rental potential) – a strange place to start a tour of Shanghai, he thought, as they walked through a featureless archway into a narrow lane lined first with industrial dustbins and then, further on, with low brick houses. These were the famous longtang of Shanghai, she explained, the ones foreigners fell in love with – though personally she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a lane house. ‘Look at them, they’re so primitive and cramped and dark and … old.’
He peered through an open doorway. In the gloom, a staircase of dark hardwood; a tiled kitchen with a two-ring stove-top cooker. He stepped into the house – its quiet half-light seemed welcoming, irresistible.
‘What are you doing?’ Zhou X cried.
But he was already up the stairs, treading across the uneven floorboards, the deep graining of the wood inviting him to bend down and trail his fingers over the smooth, worn surface. There were signs of life – pots of scraggly herbs and marigolds, towels draped on banisters, lines of washing strung up across the small square rooms. And yet there was a stillness that settled heavily on the house, as if its inhabitants had recently abandoned it; as if the present was already giving way to the past. The small windows on the landings allowed little light in, but Justin could nonetheless see that there was dust on the surface of some cardboard boxes that lay stacked in a corner of the room, and also on the handrails of the staircase. He could not decide whether the house was decaying or living. He retreated and joined his companion outside. In spite of her huge black sunglasses she was squinting, shielding her face from the sun with her handbag.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘You can’t just go poking your nose into other people’s houses like that.’
Justin looked at her and smiled. ‘I’ve paid for this, haven’t I? I need to get my money’s worth.’
At his insistence they drove from longtang to longtang, their SUV cruising through the narrow streets lined with plane trees, the balconies of the old French-style villas occasionally visible over the tops of stone walls. Some of the larger houses had shutters that were tightly closed, and in their gloom these mansions reminded him of the house in which he had grown up, full of silence and shadows and the steady ticking of grandfather clocks. He remembered the hallway and staircase of his family house, the ceiling rising so high that it created a cavelike gloom.
As the car crawled through the traffic he began to notice the number of people on foot: a group of middle-school kids, spiky-haired and bespectacled in tracksuits, rushing to beat each other to the head of the queue to buy freshly made shengjian, exclaiming gleefully as the cloud of steam billowed from the pan; an elderly couple crossing the road just in front of the car, walking arm in arm, their clothes made from matching brocade and velvet, worn but still elegant; and at an intersection, about fifty construction workers sitting on the pavement, smoking on their break, their faces tanned and leathery, foreign-looking – Justin could not place where they were from. He wondered why, in the many weeks since arriving, he had not noticed how densely populated the city was. All that time driving around in his limo, he thought, he must have been working on spreadsheets or reading reports.
‘You’re so easy to please,’ Zhou X said, tapping away on her phone without looking at him. ‘All I have to do is show you old houses.’
They stopped the car because he had seen a small lane of nondescript houses that seemed derelict at first glance. It was the property developer’s instinct in him that spotted the lane, he thought, for it was barely distinguishable from the dozens of others they had seen, and in fact a great deal less attractive. Tucked behind a row of small fruit and vegetable shops, the low brick houses had not long ago been rendered in cheap cement and now looked, frankly, ugly: low residential value, ripe for development. Wires sagged along the façades of the buildings, competing for space with lines of washing hung up to dry; a small girl came out of a doorway carrying a basin of grey-hued water, which she splashed into the street. There was something about the way of life here – families living at close quarters, spilling into one another – that reminded him of the slums not far from where he used to live: hundreds of identical, flimsy houses, thousands of lives that seemed to blend into one. Sometimes they would catch fire and the entire area would be razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt a few months later. He had never known any of the people who lived in that world, and even before he became an adult, the shanties were cleared to make way for a shopping mall.
He’d remembered to bring his little digital camera, and began photographing the narrow, sunless alley and the shabby shops that surrounded it; as he did so, an old woman emerged from one of the houses, carrying a few plastic bags bulging with clothes. On the LCD screen of his camera she appeared smiling, gap-toothed, spontaneously lifting her bags to the camera as if displaying a trophy.
‘Hey, people don’t like you interfering with their lives,’ Zhou X called from inside the car. ‘Can you hurry up? I’m late for my next appointment.’
For days afterwards he looked at the picture of the old woman, even putting it on his laptop so that every time he turned it on she was there, smiling at him. There was something about her thin hair, dyed jet-black and set in tight curls, that reminded him of his grandmother – the attempts at vanity making her seem frailer, not younger. He remembered his grandmother’s room: the chalky smell of thick white face powder and tiger balm interlaced with eau de cologne. He would sit on the bed and watch her undo the curlers from her hair; she liked having him around, liked talking to him, even though he could not yet understand all of what she said. He must have been no more than five or six and she was already in her eighties, already weak. And he was surprised by the glassy clarity of these memories, the way they settled insistently on his waking days like a thin, sticky film that he could not shake off. He had never even been close to his grandmother.
With the photo enlarged, he could make out the colour of some of the clothes through the translucent plastic bags the old woman was carrying: a jumble of cheap textiles proudly displayed to the beholder. Her cheeks were red and coarse, her remaining teeth badly tea-stained. He wanted to go back and try to find her, maybe take more photographs – and who knows, on further inspection (and without a nagging actress on his back) he might get a clearer view of those small houses and the neighbouring shops. A thought flashed across his mind: maybe he could restore them, save them from further degradation by thinking of some clever scheme whereby the residents could continue paying low rent and the shops could be run on a cooperative basis. The entire site would become a model for modern urban dwelling in Asia; young educated people would want to come and live cheek by jowl with old Shanghainese.
He jotted down a few rough figures, arranging them in neat columns: how much financing such a scheme might take to work – nothing serious, just the vaguest estimate, and yet, as always, the moment he thought about money, the project began to feel real, crystallising into something solid and attainable. He kept the piece of paper on his desk at work so he would not forget it.
But the whole of the next week was taken up with meetings with bankers and contractors, dinners with Party officials, preparing a presentation to the Mayor’s office; the following week he had to go to Tokyo, and then Hong Kong, then Malaysia. When he finally made it back to Shanghai it was turning cold and damp with the onset of winter, and he did not feel like venturing out much, did not have the energy to track down the old woman and her little lane, for he did not know where it was exactly – maybe somewhere between a highway and a big triangular glass building? He barely had any time to himself these days. Most evenings he was so tired it felt too much of an effort even to shower and clean his teeth before he went to bed; all he wanted to do was fall asleep. His limbs ached, his mouth was dry all the time, and his head felt cloudy, as if set in thick fog on a muggy day, a headache hovering on the horizon. He got the ’flu and was laid up in bed for over a week, and then bronchitis set in and he couldn’t shake it. His bathroom scales showed he had lost nearly ten pounds, but he wasn’t too worried – he was just overworked; it had happened to him before. Whenever he worked too much he got sick. But still he got up every morning, put on his suit, went to meetings, studied site plans and financial models.
After months of planning his family had decided on their masterwork, a project that was to announce their arrival on the Mainland and define their intentions for the coming decades. All his groundwork – the endless days and nights of negotiations and entertaining – had finally unearthed a potential site befitting his family’s ambitions: a near-derelict warehouse built around the remains of a 1930s opium den, surrounded by low lane houses, between Nanjing Xi Lu and Huaihai Lu – an absolutely chao-A prime location. There had been other alternatives, such as a much bigger site in Pudong, large enough to accommodate a skyscraper – a genuine, brash, half-kilometre-high Asian behemoth, but his father and uncles had preferred the old-fashioned prestige of this address. ‘It’ll make more of a statement,’ his father said, his voice measured and steady, but tinged with excitement nonetheless. In the coming year they would make a bid for the site and decide what they would do with it – something outstanding, of course, a future landmark. There was still the matter of greasing palms, identifying the officials who might need to be persuaded to allow the deal to go through, but he was not worried about that – it was something at which he had years of practice. It had become his speciality, people said, making things happen that way.
One cold, crisp morning, during a lull in negotiations – it was that dead time in January when the Westerners were still lethargic after their return from Christmas and the locals were beginning to prepare for the Spring Festival – he woke up to brilliant sunshine and a day off: the first of either that he could remember in a long time. His joints did not feel swollen as they usually did, and his lungs craved air. He called for a taxi and set off vaguely in the direction of the lane he had seen all those months ago, and when he felt he was in the general vicinity he alighted and continued on foot, strolling along the streets lined with low stone houses. The air was cold and sharp in his lungs, almost cleansing; the streets were busy with crisscrossing bicycles and electric scooters, merchants pulling carts of winter melons and oranges. The branches of the trees had been pruned heavily for the winter, and stood sentinel-like before the handsome old European-built houses. On foot he noticed the stone ornaments and moulded window frames that adorned the upper floors of these small buildings – it was impossible to see any of this from a car: all he usually saw was the ground floor, invariably occupied by a featureless shop selling down jackets or mobile phones. He stopped to buy a bag of oranges for the old woman, just in case he saw her again – he wasn’t far now; he recognised a few shops, a familiar curve in the road.
He rounded the corner of where he thought the lane was, but all he saw was a wide, empty square of dirt dotted with pyramid-shaped piles of rubble. The shops had disappeared, and the lane with it. He paused and looked for things he remembered – an old barbershop, a strange Bavarian pebbledashed house on the corner: this was definitely the place. But all that was left of the houses was the faintest imprint of where their foundations had been – shallow, barely discernible. He had his camera in his backpack and wanted to take a photo, but he had the big bag of oranges in his hand and didn’t know what to do with it; all at once it seemed redundant. He looked around, hoping to give it to someone. But for the first time he could remember since arriving in Shanghai, the streets were almost empty – no bored young woman leaning out of a shop entrance, no street vendor watching him suspiciously, not even a child on a tricycle. After a while an old man cycled past, his face creased and leathery – in the basket between his handlebars there was a small poodle wearing a pink quilted coat. It looked at Justin as it went past, its mouth drawn wide as if in a smile, but there were streaks running down from its eyes, like black tears. Justin stood in the brilliant winter sunshine, the bag of oranges cutting into his hand. He had forgotten to wear gloves, and his fingers were getting numb.
He left the oranges by a pile of rubble and walked into the middle of the cleared space. It wasn’t very large, bounded on three sides by old houses. It would have made a lousy building site; he was glad he wasn’t the one developing it. It had seemed larger when those few houses and shops were still on it, so full of life and potential. Maybe he wasn’t a property genius after all. He looked around one last time, hoping to see the old woman he had photographed – it was stupid, he knew, for she had gone.
Just before he left he took some photos of the empty plot of land. In the pale winter light the earth looked so dry it could have been in a desert. The only patch of colour was the electric blue of the plastic bag that had fallen open, revealing a few plump oranges. He walked around a little bit more, coming across more and more pieces of land that looked to him to have been recently cleared – some tiny and compact, some vast and unbounded, hollowed out by bulldozers. He took pictures of each one, and walked until it began to get dark. The winter air felt sharp and icy in his chest, as if he was inhaling tiny shards of glass.
The following week his cough seemed to get worse again; the long walk in the damp January air seemed to have weakened his lungs, and he found the mere act of breathing an effort. In a meeting with potential bankers he was unable to finish his sentences because of a tickling in his throat that rose as he spoke, swiftly triggering a rasping cough that left his chest and ribcage feeling hollow and achy. The doctor prescribed another course of antibiotics – his third since the new year – and ordered some X-rays, which came back clear. He just needed rest, the doctor said; he was run-down. But his days and nights did not get any shorter – the gruelling meetings lasted all day, bleeding into the evening’s social round of banquets and bars. Once he got over the initial few days of feeling ill, the exhaustion became familiar, almost reassuring. It was always like this: whenever a big project was on the table he would slip easily into the grinding nature of this routine, finding comfort in the constancy of his fatigue. When he woke up each morning he could feel the puffiness of his eyes, knew that they would be bloodshot; his breathing would already be desperate, the air feeling thin in his lungs. His limbs would be heavy, but after a shower and a double espresso he would feel better, though he would never satisfactorily shake the mild headache that was already descending on his skull, already escalating into a migraine. He would work through it – it wasn’t a problem.
Besides, he didn’t have a choice. There was a problem with the deal. All the arrangements that had been slotting obediently into place just before Christmas were now looking shaky. Someone was refusing to take a bribe – an official in the municipal Urban Planning Department, a mid-ranking engineer who had found an irregularity in the paperwork, a discrepancy, it seemed, between the proposed project and the preliminary drawings. More buildings would have to be demolished than had been declared in the proposal, and this was a problem because many of those buildings were in the local vernacular. This engineer – a glorified technical clerk – was resisting the pressure placed on her by her superiors, most of whom were sympathetic to the Lim family venture. It was awkward when someone acted out of principle; it would take more than money to solve the impasse. And now the delay was leading to further complications: another party was interested in the piece of land, and there was talk of an imminent bid to rival theirs.
He pressed for emergency meetings with high-ranking officials for whom he had bought Cartier cigarette lighters and weekend trips to the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. There was nothing they could do for the moment, they claimed: his project had to work its way through the system, there was a formal procedure which they couldn’t alter, it would just take a bit of time. Each official he spoke to reassured him gently without committing himself; they were sure the other bid would come to nothing. They said this in a way to suggest that they would do something to prevent it, but now he was not so sure. He was not sure about anything in Shanghai any more.
In the meantime his secretaries began to speak of an internet campaign – a blog site entitled DEFENDERS OF OLD SHANGHAI. They showed him pages and pages of angry commentary under the discussion thread: Save 969 Weihai Lu from destruction by foreign companies!! It was full of accusations that wildly exaggerated the effect of the project on the existing buildings, so, using the pseudonym ‘FairPreserver’, he personally wrote replies to the most outlandish claims. It was not true that the Lim family company were uncaring capitalists wanting to take advantage of China, he said; he had heard from insiders that they cared greatly about history and would do everything in their power to preserve what they could. They had a long record of restoring heritage buildings and would never dream of destroying anything the city deemed to be important. They cared greatly about the lives of the common people and always sought to be considerate and fair when dealing with property belonging to people of modest means, never forcing anyone to move against their will and always providing compensation where necessary.
HAHAHAHA, came the first reply, within minutes of his post. What a joke, are you paid by the Lim family to say these things???
Everything he argued was met with contempt, but still he battled on. No, it was not true that the Lim family had made their money by kicking people off their land in Malaysia; no, they were not going to do the same here. He began to spend hours each day posting replies on the blog site, rushing back from meetings to check what had been said in response to his posts and to write something himself. But then, one day, all of his posts suddenly vanished – he could find no trace of any of them. Every single one had disappeared in the space of an hour, and he was forced to read from the sidelines, marginalised, silenced. He tried inventing a new pseudonym, but every time he posted something it would last less than a day before disappearing. He felt powerless, and was often almost overcome by the urge to scream as he read what was being said about him. He did not know who these people were, and had no way of getting in touch with them. He could only watch helplessly as the blog pages grew longer and more animated with each day; soon all this chatter about his property deals would be in the newspapers. Once it became public the project would be doomed – none of the officials who had been expensively recruited to help facilitate matters would be willing to support his bid openly.
Frustrated by the lack of news, his father rang him on his mobile one evening, catching him by surprise. He tried to explain that it was not his fault, that things in China moved so quickly that it was impossible to anticipate every development in advance. It wasn’t like Indonesia or Singapore; China was at once lawless and unbending in its rules. He talked and talked, his speech cut to ribbons by his cough; he felt the dryness of his throat and mouth and realised he hadn’t drunk anything for hours. His father listened patiently and then said, ‘I see. But I know you will make a success of this deal.’
Soon he was spending all night monitoring the blog site. Sleep evaded him; it was superfluous to his current state. All that seemed relevant to his life now was this torrent of words written by unseen, unknown people. He felt he knew them now, felt he was somehow linked to them, and just before the first of the comments citing him by name appeared, he had a strange presentiment in his stomach, a sensation of exhilaration mixed with nausea, as if he knew what was to come. Justin Lim has been trained by his family to be uncaring and ruthless. From a young age he was already displaying these tendencies. Justin Lim is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he smiles to your face but is ready to eat you up whole. Justin Lim is handsome but like all handsome men cannot be trusted one inch. Justin Lim is a man with absolutely no feelings whatsoever, he does not possess a beating heart. Justin Lim is not human. Justin Lim has committed some terrible acts in the past. Justin Lim will stop at nothing to fulfil his aims, he will crush you like he crushes insects.
His father began to ring him more frequently – every other day, then every day, then several times a day. Each time the phone rang he could sense his father’s anxiety in the ringtone, swelling with every beat. At first he made excuses – he was just going into a meeting, he couldn’t speak. But then he stopped answering the calls altogether, letting the phone ring on to the voicemail; he never checked his messages. He stopped going to the office, for there was nothing left to do now except look at the things people said about him on the blog site. He never strayed far from his laptop, and even if he had to go to the toilet he hurried back as quickly as possible. Taking a shower made him anxious, made him fear that he was missing a new comment on the blog.
One night he managed two hours’ sleep. It had made him groggy but strangely lucid, and his head filled for a moment or two with a painful awareness of the weakness of his body. He went into the bathroom and stepped onto the scales out of curiosity: he had lost even more weight. He splashed his face with water and looked in the mirror. His eyes were sunken and dark, glassy and staring, like a fish’s at the market, his lips chapped and sore: a simulation of life. When dawn broke he packed a few things into a suitcase and checked into a hotel. From there he rang a friend of a friend of a friend who referred him to an estate agent who found him an apartment within three days. It was just off the Bund, on the edge of Suzhou Creek, in an Art Deco building that seemed semi-derelict. The rooms were large and sombre and quiet, the furniture sparse and nondescript; outside, the corridors were badly lit and deserted. He moved in late that afternoon, and when night fell he discovered that he had a view of the skyscrapers of Lujiazui, framed in the sweep of old windows that ran the length of the apartment. From this side of the river, the opposite to the one on which he had lived previously, the towers of Pudong seemed beautiful and untouchable. Before, they had been functional and dull, filled with ballrooms and boardrooms, each one indistinguishable from the others; now they trembled with life, intimate yet unknowable.
That night, his first in the apartment, he slept almost all the way through to the morning. His new bedroom was cavelike in its darkness, and he could hear nothing except the vague metallic creaking of pipes in the night, a comforting faraway echo. It was the first proper sleep he had had in over two months. When he woke up he looked at the mounting number of messages and emails on his BlackBerry. He turned it off without looking at any of them and went back to sleep.
In the days that followed he spent much of his time in bed. Often he would not be able to sleep, his mind completely empty, his body alternating between aching and numb. Sometimes he was afraid he was going mad. He had never been like this before, and the thought of madness panicked him. Yet he could do nothing about it. He lay in bed with the curtains drawn during the day, feeling the dampness of his sheets as he sheltered in his lightless room. At night he would open the curtains and watch the lights of the skyscrapers glinting until he began to recognise their rhythms, the exact hour they would come on or off, when they became brighter and how long it took for each sequence to repeat. When he had stared at these repeating patterns long enough they became abstract, divorced from the real world. Once or twice he felt strong enough to venture out for a stroll along the creek, and sometimes he was compelled to go out to buy drinking water from the convenience store down the road, but the slightest effort weakened him, filling him with a sickening anxiety. He longed for the safety of his bed, and decided not to leave the apartment again. He had his meals delivered to him once a day, deposited at the door. He would sometimes hear the doorbell at lunchtime but could not summon the energy to get up until the evening, when it was dark. The bag of food would still be on the doormat, cold and unappealing. Twice a week his ayi would come to clean the apartment, and from behind his closed bedroom door he would hear her gently moving the furniture and washing the dishes. He told her he was sick. She said, ‘I guessed that.’ One day he emerged from his bedroom to find that she had double-boiled a chicken with medicinal herbs to make soup for him. He sat before it at the kitchen counter, unable to eat it. He found himself crying – hot streams of tears flowed down his cheeks. He hated crying and didn’t know why he was doing so. The strangest thing was that he felt nothing – no sadness or bitterness or loneliness. And yet he was unable to stem the tears.
He felt the walls of the apartment draw in on him, encircling him, making everything beyond their confines seem irrelevant, reducing the city to a mere idea, a vague memory.
Late one sleepless night, the hundreds of messages on his BlackBerry did not seem so terrifying, so he began to work his way through the emails and voicemails, deleting most before getting to the end of them. There were dozens of messages from his family – his uncles, father and brothers – whose title headings charted a growing sense of worry. It was fine, he thought: he was immune to their anxiety now. A few weeks ago he would have been panicked by their panic, but now none of it touched him. It no longer bothered him that he was uncontactable.
But among the more recent messages, one caught his attention: a voicemail from his mother, who rarely rang him. It began calmly, saying they missed him, and whatever wrongs they might have committed against him, would he please forgive them. They needed him now, he was the only one who could save them, his brother was not good at this sort of thing. His father had become very ill because of the situation, and there were creditors hovering like vultures. She sounded as if she was beginning to cry: she didn’t understand this sort of thing very well, but she knew the situation was very grave.
The situation. What situation? He checked earlier emails from his father. His tone was, as always, dry, the messages dictated and typed out by his secretary. There was no unnecessary information, just the basics: the family insurance business had collapsed. It had not withstood the global crisis. The biggest, oldest insurance firm in South-East Asia, founded by his grandfather, was no longer. Now an investor was offering them $1 to buy the entire company that, just a year ago, was worth billions. It was humiliating. They were facing ruin. He was their only hope. Maybe the property market in China would save them. Whatever the case, he had to take over the running of the entire family business now.
One other message he checked said, simply, Where are you, my son?
He turned off his BlackBerry and stared at the skyscrapers. It was after midnight, and most of the lights were off now, but still the buildings glowed softly. He went to bed without drawing the curtains, gazing at the watery quality of the sky, the swell of the low rainclouds illuminated by the fading lights of the city. He tried to feel something – anything. In his head he replayed his mother’s tearful voice, cracking, weak. We’re sorry for things we might have done. He imagined his father, proud even in his humbled state.
But none of those images and sounds moved him. He felt nothing. As he closed his eyes he could just make out the very tip of a skyscraper, a sharp rod stretching into the sky. It seemed fixed not just in space but in time, its metallic glint impervious to the passing of the days, months, years.
And he thought, I am free now.
How to Achieve Greatness
Greatness is never measured purely in terms of money. You must always remember this. For history to judge a man as truly remarkable, that man has to leave a legacy more profound than a collection of Swiss bank accounts for his children. He has to enrich the world around him in a way that is permanent and moving.
Recently I have been thinking of ways to leave behind something meaningful to the world once I am gone. My various philanthropic efforts are well documented, but I nonetheless feel that I have not yet given enough to mankind. All my donations to charity are, I feel, ephemeral; the giving of cash to the needy is a mere Band-Aid on a gaping wound. If I were to die tomorrow I would be known primarily as a visionary entrepreneur and perhaps a brilliant motivator. Occasionally at public events someone will realise who I am and insist on bathing me in compliments, which embarrasses me, for I have always scrupulously avoided the public eye. Adulation is a funny thing. Most people seek it in vain, often unconsciously, from their spouses, children, professional colleagues, or – the ultimate dream – from the public at large. To be admired by people who don’t know you would seem to be the summit of human achievement. Yet those of us who are in this position know that to be the centre of attraction in this way is not only distasteful, it is empty.
Once, and only once, I gave an interview. I was young and just beginning to make waves with a succession of audacious acquisitions. I was also, I admit, slightly prone to vanity in those days. My interviewer, a young woman from a respected local newspaper, peppered me with banal questions about my business strategy and then probed me with inappropriate questions about my private circumstances. Did I find it difficult to sustain relationships because of my punishing schedule? What did I look for in a partner? Was it true that I was so dedicated to my work that I had broken off not one but two engagements in the past? Had I even cut off contact with close family members? What about rumours that I’d changed my name to make myself appear more Westernised? She kept calling me ‘Walter’, in that familiar way that young people do these days, assuming it would be fine to address me by my first name rather than as ‘Mr Chao’. I asked if it was truly necessary to obtain this information from me. She shrugged and said that her editor had asked her for a ‘personal angle’ to the story. So incensed was I by this intrusion that I ordered the feature article to be reduced to a mere footnote in the business pages. Then, as an afterthought, I asked for even that little vignette to be deleted altogether. (There is a postscript to this because, a few years ago, when the newspaper was ailing, I bought it and fired the editor who had commissioned the interview. He was in his sixties and ready for retirement anyway.)
I have never done anything for the sake of public acclaim. Even my books have been written under a pseudonym. I want to inspire people – you – not because I seek gratitude or glory but because I gain immense pleasure just from the knowledge that I might have been able to help them, to change their lives. Giving without receiving. That is what truly satisfies me. In all the years of working hard, of the accumulation of huge wealth, I admit that I sometimes lost sight of this sentiment of charity, which is why I sometimes felt exhausted and dispirited and negative – as I suspect you do on occasion after a long, fruitless day at work. Maybe your boss has not acknowledged your talent and dedication. Maybe your clients are late in paying you. Maybe the taxman is being uncooperative. Maybe a colleague you thought was a friend is now brown-nosing his way ahead of you. Maybe you’ve come home after a nightmarish day in the office and your partner hasn’t done the washing up or made you dinner. Yes, it is dispiriting. But only if you are working only for yourself, if you are seeking praise. Let go of this neediness. Say to yourself: I am not working for glory, but for the joy of it. One day – soon – I will be dead, and who will remember my petty little promotion to Assistant Executive Managing Sub Director then?
Work to help others.
Elevate yourself from trivia.
That is the only way to true greatness.
All this brings me to the question of how best to leave my legacy without being thrust into the limelight. It is sad that even philanthropy these days is tied to celebrity, but I have to accept that this is the world we live in. Reluctantly, therefore, I might have to accept the accolades that will surely accompany my project. There are still many details to be ironed out before I can announce the nature of this venture, but for now I can reveal that it will be a sort of community centre for the twenty-first century that will benefit the young, the poor – all those who need nourishment, either for their stomachs or their minds or spirits.
The idea comes to me because, looking back at my own underprivileged childhood, I realise that the village school I attended between the ages of six and twelve carried an importance far beyond its modest proportions. Its three classrooms and tin roof were typical of primary schools in rural Malaysia at the time, but it was supported by wealthy benefactors, which meant that we had generators to power the ceiling fans and provide lighting during the monsoons when the storms were at their fiercest and the feeble electricity supply most vulnerable to power cuts. There was a paved lane leading to it from the main road that carved its way through the jungle, and at the confluence of the two there was a bus shelter so that we could remain dry from the rain while waiting for the bus that came by only three times a day. I was lucky, for my journey beyond where the bus deposited me was only twenty minutes long, on paths that rarely flooded. Others had over an hour to walk across muddy terrain with tracks that often got washed out by the rain.
None of us was ever earmarked for greatness. From birth, we were the also-rans in life’s great race, kept afloat because we were human and someone – thank God – could not bear to let us wither away and die. So rich people paid for us to have the basics, salving their consciences, thinking that they were doing the bare minimum and nothing more. They never thought that their small acts of mercy would ever produce anything remarkable. They did not believe that amongst those they had written off as menial and pathetic and worthy only of pity, there would be one who would rise to glory.
Some might say that my beginnings are irrelevant, that wherever I came from, a man like me would still have been a success. Who I am today cannot be attributed to that little school. But that would be ungenerous, and I wish to acknowledge those early days, because when I look back at them I feel something. Not much, but a small debt of gratitude nonetheless.
Despite the charitable nature of its aims, my project will not be modest. It will not be a modern version of the old village school. Its reach will be wide and deep and long-lasting. A hundred years from now, its beneficial impact should still be felt. Every venture needs a physical space, its own village school, as it were. I think I know where mine will be situated – I’ve drawn up a shortlist of cities – and I am in the process of considering a suitable architect. At the moment I am veering towards Rem Koolhaas, or perhaps Zaha Hadid. Someone iconic, in any case, whose work, like mine, will last well into the future.
When planning any venture, always think of how it will be remembered by future generations.
Always think of how you will be remembered.
3
Bravely Set the World on Fire
Gary won a talent competition when he was two months short of his seventeenth birthday. It was a small provincial affair in the north of Malaysia, not very professional, but it enabled him to move down to the capital to take part in a bigger contest which was televised on all the main channels. The finale was watched by nearly four million people, and over two million voted by SMS. At the time, Gary was amazed by these figures. He came from a town of two hundred, and could not believe that so many people would ever listen to him sing. He performed three songs, one in Malay, one in Mandarin, and the final one in English – an arrangement of a Diana Ross song, the words of which he did not fully understand. He was the youngest contestant and was shining with the innocence of a boy recently arrived from the countryside. His hair was spiky and dyed with flame-coloured streaks, which he had done himself. Recently he saw a video of this performance on YouTube and could not believe how bad he looked.
After the first song the judges said he had the voice of an angel. But even before that, from the moment he opened his mouth to sing the very first note, he knew he was going to win. He heard the strange, pure sound of his voice amplified by the microphone in the vast auditorium, its echoes separated by a split second from the time he felt it in his throat. He recognised that the voice was his, but he felt distanced from it too. It sounded as if it no longer belonged to him. In the audience, young girls were waving multicoloured fluorescent batons that glowed in the dark. When he sang the love ballad in Mandarin everyone screamed as he hit the high notes in the chorus. He felt the noise they made reverberating in his chest and ribcage, and he knew in that instant that his life was going to become confused and messy, full of privileges and sorrows he hadn’t asked for.
He won by a landslide.
He did not have time to celebrate his victory because he was signed up by an artist-management company that arranged for him to go to Taiwan two weeks later. He stayed in a hotel with a bathtub in which he had his very first bubble bath. The furniture was modern and new, with clean lines and leather upholstery. The room smelled of paint, but he thought it was extremely luxurious. Now he realises, of course, that it was only a modest and functional hotel used by sales companies wanting somewhere cheap to hold their training conferences. These days, Gary only stays in the most exclusive hotels in every city he visits.
In just under eight years in Taipei he released four albums, each of which sold more than three million copies across Asia. In the months following the release of his debut album, Rainy Day in My Heart, he narrowly missed out on winning the Best Newcomer category at the Golden Melody Awards, and starred in a film as an apprentice cop who ends up accidentally shooting the gangster girl he has fallen in love with. The film was a total failure at the box office, but everyone who saw it remarked that Gary’s face was perfectly proportioned, beautiful to look at from every angle. Maybe you saw it too and came to the same conclusion. Teenage girls began to send him presents – designer clothes, jewellery, watches, home-made CDs, cards with photos stuck to them, and even highly personal items, such as the girls’ own underwear or antiques that had belonged to their families. Every week his record company would receive enough of these gifts to fill a room. He would stare at this unwanted pile and feel guilty that so many fans wanted to give him such valuable things. He could not bear the thought that all these people, whom he did not know, were thinking of him. They were thinking of him so much that they would spend time and money sending him objects that represented parts of their lives – of themselves. And he felt bad because he was not strong or big or deep enough to accept their love. The record company arranged for it all to be donated to charity or simply destroyed, but still he could feel their desire for him lingering over him like a raincloud on a muggy day, refusing to budge.
Early last year, on the eve of a major concert at the Taipei Arena, Gary collapsed and was admitted to hospital. The diagnosis was not serious – he was anaemic, which explained not only his famously pale complexion but his frequent dizzy spells. He was also found to have low blood pressure and an elevated cholesterol level for someone so young. It was all the takeaway curries, the pizzas and other junk food he ate during late-night sessions in the recording studio. His punishing work schedule exacerbated these underlying conditions, and it was no surprise that he eventually succumbed to the pressure, the doctors said. They prescribed a fortnight’s complete rest, some supplements, and a balanced diet. Before he left, one doctor asked him if he was stressed. When Gary appeared somewhat confused by the question, the doctor posed it again, this time asking whether he found it difficult to deal with the pressures he had placed upon himself and whether, for example, he worried about things beyond his control. Gary thought for a few seconds before truthfully answering no. Because when he stopped for that moment to consider his life, he realised that there was nothing in it that was within his control. Every minute of his day was organised by his management company, even the number of hours he should sleep. It had been like this for so long that he wondered if he had ever known a different way of living.
The press was full of hysterical reports. Some said he had fallen ill from toxins ingested while eating moray eel down on the coast, some said he had suffered an overdose, others said he had AIDS. He had not been seen in public or been photographed by the paparazzi for only five days when one tabloid newspaper began to surmise that he was dead. From his apartment he peered cautiously out between the metallic slats of the blinds and saw a group of teenage fans holding a vigil for him. At night they lit candles and huddled together to console each other. In daylight, he could see that some of them had been crying. He wished they would go away, and after two days he began to resent them. Their presence weighed down on him, and he couldn’t sleep. He longed to be free of his apartment, which he hated even at the best of times. He had become used to having the blinds down all the time – from the moment he moved in, he had never seen the apartment in daylight, not even for one minute. It was always night in his home.
What most bothered him was the lack of activity. He wasn’t used to having time on his hands. Now that he was rested and feeling better he could not stand the hours spent watching DVDs or Korean TV dramas. He tried strumming tunes on his guitar or tinkling on the piano, but the apartment was too dark and oppressive, and he could feel no enthusiasm for music. He began spending too much time on the internet, on websites he shouldn’t have been looking at. In fact, it was during this period of imprisonment that he first discovered sexually explicit sites. At first he hated himself for trawling endlessly through them, but he was surprised at how his initial feelings of wariness and guilt soon gave way to an unthinking numbness, and he would spend hours sitting in the semi-dark staring at images that were initially shocking but quickly became dull. He would fall asleep at odd hours because he could not stop sifting through the pages for new images of graphic sexual acts, even though he felt nothing when he looked at them. He went to bed feeling empty and full of anger at his fans outside, for they were the ones who had forced him into this position.
Finally his management company called a press conference at which Gary appeared, happy and smiling, saying that he had taken some time off to return to Malaysia to spend time with friends and family following a ‘sad occurrence’ which he would rather not discuss in public. Relieved that he was alive and in good health, his fans did not press any further, assuming that his temporary disappearance was somehow linked to the fact that he was an orphan, raised by distant relatives with whom he had enjoyed no closeness. His troubled youth following the death of his mother was well documented – it was something that made him appear human and vulnerable to his fans. As his manager once told him, his childhood tragedies were a great selling point. But though he was grateful for his fans’ loyalty and adoration, when he looked at the mass of jubilant teenage faces at his next concert, he found their joy so empty and unquestioning that it unnerved him, and he could not get rid of the feeling that had entered his soul during the ten days of confinement in his night-dark apartment. It was unmistakable. He had started to hate them.
That three-week period of internment and difficult public relations upset his tightly packed schedule and cost him in many ways. Not only was the cancelled concert an expensive write-off, but the negative publicity surrounding his sudden and mysterious disappearance caused several projects to be suspended, and one or two sponsors even doubted whether they should continue to support him. His calendar became compressed to the point where he could not fulfil his obligations, and his scheduled participation in the Beijing Olympics music video was cancelled, depriving him of a chance to be seen widely by the biggest audience of them all.
Now he had to work twice as hard to penetrate the Mainland market, his management team said. Everything they did over the coming year would be geared towards establishing him in China – every song he recorded, every TV show he appeared on, every commercial he shot, every hour he slept, every meal he ate. He had everything it took to be a superstar in China, but it would be hard. He had to be ready to sacrifice everything. Gary thought about all the things he had already sacrificed – friends, a social life, family commitments, love, relationships. And he was not at all frightened by what he was about to embark on, because he had none of the things that people normally hold dear. He had nothing to sacrifice.
The giant billboards that stood along the elevated highway bore the poster announcing Gary’s ground-breaking concert in Shanghai. Music Angel has arrived! The Angel of Music is here to save us … His image was spread across each billboard, his newly gym-toned torso showing through a shirt that had been strategically slashed to display his abdominal muscles, the result of eight months’ work with a personal trainer. His head was bowed to show off his thick black hair, that looked slick with sweat, and computer trickery had provided him with a giant pair of angel wings, giving the impression that he was landing gently on earth after a celestial journey. It was impossible to miss these posters. As his car drove him along the busy highway, he reckoned that they appeared every couple of miles, each time positioned in the middle of a cluster of three billboards. On one side of him there was a young woman dressed only in underwear, her index finger to her lips, which were pursed in a hushing shape; on the other side were washing machines and refrigerators.
He had just performed a sell-out concert in Wuhan which had been widely covered in the local press and gained enormous publicity for his principal sponsors, a soft-drink company. They had shot a TV commercial to coincide with his tour, a big-budget production involving sophisticated computer graphics, in which the Angel Gary flies over a devastated landscape defeating gruesome monsters by shining a light that emanates from his heart. As Gary flutters softly to earth, the desert around him turns lush and green. The power to turn darkness to light, he whispers, looking at the camera with his trademark sideways glance before taking a sip of soda.
It was remarked within the industry and by the public alike that Gary was looking great. After many months of limited public appearances, during which he was rarely photographed, he had unveiled his new image – muscular and with a streak of danger. He was still boyish and innocent-looking, but his presence now carried a faint physical threat, as if he had a dark side to him. His stylists and costume designers were showered with praise, as were the people at the record company who had devised the new marketing strategy.
‘Thank goodness we invested so much in your gym work,’ his agent said as they drove past the fifth billboard. ‘Your physical condition is crucial. We can’t afford to have a repeat of Taipei last year.’
Gary did not answer. As usual, the previous night’s concert had left him both exhausted and unable to sleep. It was always like this. The adrenalin of the performance would rush through his veins, and he would feel the deep pounding of the bass notes reverberate in his chest and ribcage hours after the concert had ended, when he was lying in bed trying to sleep. Every tiny light in the room – the green numbers showing the time on the DVD player, the red dot on the TV set – seemed noon-bright and blinding even when his eyes were closed. Often he would just sit in front of the TV with the remote control in his hand, staring at the black screen. He could not even summon enough enthusiasm to turn it on. Sometimes he would eventually fall asleep at around three or four o’clock, but often he would just count the hours until dawn, which would come as a relief, because daylight brought with it activity, and he would not have to sit alone with only his thoughts for company.
In Wuhan the night before, he had tried to surf the internet for the porn sites he had become addicted to, but had failed. That was the problem with China – he could not access any of his usual sites. It had become a late-night ritual for him: turning on his laptop and idly searching for new, more dangerous sites each time. He did this after work or a concert, when he was alone in his apartment or hotel room and the night ahead seemed very long. He was not even excited by these sites any more; they had simply become something like a calming reassurance after a long day. Even the nastiest failed to provoke any response from him. The moment he arrived on the Mainland, however, he was deprived of this source of comfort. He had spent several frustrating hours after the concert searching for the kind of hard-core images he was used to, but the best he could find were women who, though immodestly dressed, wore more than the models he was now seeing on billboards in Shanghai. So he had opened the mini-bar and drunk all the vodka in it, and when he finished he rang to order some more.
Drinking was a recent thing. It helped him sleep, that was all.
He had now been on the road for sixteen days, and in that time he had played fourteen concerts.
‘But, Little Brother,’ his agent continued, ‘you need to sleep. I don’t know what you are doing at night – probably chasing girls, I suppose – but we need to do a lot of public appearances, and you can’t wear your sunglasses all the time. The photoshoots, they’re OK because we can always adjust the photos later, but in public – that’s different. You know what these Shanghainese are like. They will scrutinise your appearance to the very last detail! Please remember what a huge investment we have made for this album – who else gets concerts like the one you’ve just had? Don’t waste this opportunity.’
Gary adjusted his sunglasses. They were becoming his trademark – oversized black plastic shades that gave him a mysterious, futuristic appearance.
‘We can’t say no to the press conferences and guest appearances at malls. You have to look good, Little Brother. To be honest, at the moment even our make-up artists are saying it’s hard to disguise the shadows under your eyes. If we send you out wearing too much make-up these Shanghainese will laugh out loud. They’re haughty and not easily impressed like provincial Chinese, you know. Hey, Little Brother, are you paying attention? Shanghai is at your feet. You can be one of the biggest stars in China, you’re almost there! We have two days to charm them before your concert.’
As his agent spoke Gary knew that sleep would be impossible that night. He tried to remember when he had last slept through the entire night and woken up feeling refreshed and free of worries. It did not seem as if there had ever been such a time. He could fall asleep easily on planes and in cars, and have uncomfortable fifteen-minute naps, but night-sleep was unattainable.
That evening, when he had finished the last round of press obligations, Gary went back to his hotel. He promised his agent that he would have a bath and a massage and go straight to bed, but of course he turned on his laptop instead and began to search idly for sites that did not load properly. He did not feel like drinking on his own while continuing a frustrating search for internet porn, so he took a cab to the Bund, where he knew the high-end Western bars were located. Going out in public, unaccompanied, just before a concert, was contrary to all the advice he had ever received, but he thought that if he went to a place frequented only by Westerners he might not be recognised. His guess proved to be correct. He found a place with a view of the wide sweep of the river and the skyscrapers of Pudong. Although the music was loud and the bar was evidently popular, it was large enough to have plenty of darkened nooks and comfortable chairs from which Gary could sit and watch the crowd of foreigners, some of whom were dancing in the spaces between the tables. They were heavy-footed and big-thighed, their buttocks clattering into chairs and occasionally upsetting the drinks of passers-by. He ordered several unfamiliar cocktails that turned out to be too sweet, and then changed to vodka. He kept his baseball hat on, having decided that the sunglasses would be too ostentatious. It was a relief for him to be away from his hotel room, to hear music that he did not have to perform to. For at least two hours he sat near a window, quietly sipping his drinks. He felt his cheeks flush with the alcohol and his temples begin to throb, but it did not matter – at least he was not alone in the oppressive silence of his hotel room.
His discomfort began when he noticed a few of the Chinese waiters huddling together and whispering. They were trying to hide their curiosity, but could not resist glancing at him. He did not want to leave the bar. It was not yet one o’clock and there were too many hours of darkness left ahead of him. And then the pleasant Australian couple sitting near him – who had just been holding hands and kissing – left, and their place was taken by a sweaty Western man who tried to engage Gary in conversation. The man was drunk, but Gary did not feel like moving from his spot. Soon the man would grow tired and leave him alone.
‘What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Don’t feel like speaking, eh? Jeez, you Chinese are so goddamn unfriendly. Hey, look at me when I talk to you.’
Gary looked around. The bar was full and there was nowhere to move to.
‘Hey, I’m talking to you.’
Gary turned and said, ‘Fuck off.’
The reports that began to appear the following morning were full of inaccuracies as usual, and there were conflicting accounts from bystanders as to who had started the ensuing altercation, what it had been about, who had taken the first swing. What was in no doubt was that Gary had swiftly lost control and knocked the other man off his feet, even though he was heftily built. The internet was full of photos taken with camera phones – grainy and badly lit, but clearly showing Gary standing over the man with his fist raised. The now-infamous video – again captured on a mobile phone and freely available on YouTube the next day – shows Gary swaying and unsteady on his feet, then bouncing up and down like a boxer ready for a fight before stumbling towards the man on the ground and aiming a casual kick to his midriff as if toe-poking a football. When the man shouts out an inarticulate insult, Gary attempts to pick up a bar stool, presumably to attack him with it. But the stool is fixed and doesn’t budge, so Gary turns his attention to a signboard that says WOW! and rips it off the wall. When some of the waiters attempt to restrain him he fights them off and shouts, Don’t touch me. Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? The camera wobbles and cuts out, and when it begins to play again Gary is seen surrounded by a group of consoling strangers. The rest of the bar is emptying and the music has stopped. His head is in his hands and his shoulders are heaving up and down as he sobs. In the grey-pink half-light of the video, he is briefly seen in profile, silhouetted against what seems to be a curtain made from shimmering glass beads that look almost electric in the way they sparkle. Although it is dark and his face is not properly lit, his features are unmistakable – the perfect straight nose that ends in a delicate point, the soft angle of the jaw, the hair that falls over his brow. His head is bowed, his shoulders hunched and defeated. It is this image that graces the cover of all the tabloid newspapers the following evening.
4
Forget the Past, Look Only to the Future
That morning’s emails bore no shocks, only positive developments. These days there were no longer any brutish demands from creditors or feeble excuses from non-paying clients, and the daily ritual of replying to emails each morning had become a pleasurable affair for Yinghui, to be carried out at an almost leisurely pace over a cappuccino. There were, amongst other upbeat messages, an invitation to the opening of a new hotel on the river in Shiliupu and an interesting proposition from someone wanting to build a carbon-neutral cultural centre in the middle of town. New contacts and possibilities revealed themselves nowadays without her even having to seek them out. What a change, she thought, as she finished her coffee.
Business was going well for Yinghui. The two upmarket lingerie stores she’d established were flourishing, and in little more than a year she had broken even and was now watching the profits accumulate, week by week, the spreadsheets filling out with handsome-looking figures bursting with promise. Occasionally, when she glanced at the documents her breathless accountant showed her, she ceased to take note of the substantial numbers, for their trajectory was so steep that she had difficulty imagining where they would take her twelve months hence. And yet she was not a person with a modest imagination – quite the opposite.
Her ad campaigns had been striking and wildly successful. She had used only Chinese models, never mixed-race ones, and they never flaunted their bodies in an overtly sexual way. Although they did display a good deal of bare skin, the models were styled beautifully, and the overall aesthetic was classy rather than trashy. The catchy taglines were mysterious and playful, like the images themselves.
Elegant Outside, Passionate Inside
Secret Exciting
Amazing Beautiful You
Although she had originally thought that the shop would cater mainly to the wives of high-ranking party officials and low-profile billionaires who wanted a discreet custom service, Yinghui soon found a huge demand amongst ordinary professional women who were willing to spend upwards of four hundred yuan for the simplest bra. The low lighting and shadowy spaces of the stores, together with the women-only entry policy and touches of luxury such as the Venetian chandeliers created an ambience that proved incredibly popular, with many clients lingering on the plush sofas, and leafing through the glossy magazines and catalogues as they chatted and decided what else to purchase. Before long Yinghui had taken over the adjoining shops and added a coffee bar in one store and a wine bar in the other, extending the opening hours and turning both venues into destinations in their own right. The lingerie was all but removed from the store itself and transferred into specially designed semi-private ‘modelling rooms’, and the newly vacated space was now filled with stylish mannequins, artwork, and giant floral displays.
The income and publicity generated by the two stores made it possible for Yinghui to seek business partners for new ventures on a much larger scale, and her financial projections were such that banks were suddenly willing to listen to her requests for loans. Her plans for expansion included a chain of small shops in metro stations, which would sell the basic Amazing Beautiful You range; twelve shops selling clothes for teenage girls called FILGirl (Fly in Love Girl); an internet-based cosmetics brand called Shhh … aimed at women over the age of forty; and a luxury spa modelled on a northern Thai village, the construction of which was nearing completion.
These exciting ventures made people in the retail industry take notice of Yinghui, and the expatriate community was especially interested to learn that a foreigner was able to negotiate the complex world of Chinese retail. She began to give talks to the various foreign Chambers of Commerce, speaking to budding entrepreneurs about the pressures of being a foreigner and a woman in a male-dominated world. As she became more visible she did an interview with the Shanghai Daily – a brief article, nothing more – in which she was asked to reveal the key to her success at a time when many businesses were experiencing difficulties due to the global recession.
‘I smile every day while coolly evaluating my business model,’ she replied, smiling coolly. ‘I remain 100 per cent optimistic even in a crisis while being decisive enough to act as required.’
Was she ruthless? the interviewer asked.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You have to be tough to succeed.’
Even as she said it she regretted the way she sounded – matter-of-fact, unthinking, as if nothing bothered her. She tried immediately to laugh and find common ground with the interviewer, a young woman in her mid-twenties. But as Yinghui joked about things in the news – celebrity gossip, cute pop singers, the latest films – she could feel the journalist withdrawing behind the safety of a polite smile, the gulf between them widening. She felt old, her laugh sounded fake and robotic; the girl merely smiled and listened as Yinghui’s jokes became more and more risqué.
That interview sealed her growing reputation in more ways than one. Her image hardened into this: a bold businesswoman, certainly; but also a super-efficient, humourless automaton who would coldly plunge a knife into you, but she wouldn’t bother to do it in your back, she’d stick it in your chest. She saw this written in a ‘joke’ email circulating in her office, copied to her by mistake. Ultrawoman, Dragon Queen, Terminatress, Rambo – these were some of the nicknames she discovered as she scrolled down the email chain, which was full of comments on her boring suits and severe hairstyle – ‘like a rural Party official dressed for an interview with Hu Jintao’, someone joked. Some months later, at a cocktail party thrown by an American law firm, she heard one Western man say to another, ‘Hey, look, there’s that Chinese lesbian.’
She had got used to having her hair short – it had been her style for almost twenty years, ever since university days. There was a time when people found the look charming and gamine, like Jean Seberg in À Bout de Souffle, from which Yinghui first got the idea. She didn’t think she’d changed much since then – she didn’t look very different from the Yinghui she saw whenever she looked at her college photos – but she wondered if she was getting a bit old for the hairstyle now. No woman in Shanghai had short hair – they all seemed to have long glossy locks that fell to their shoulders or were gathered in a dramatic pile on their heads in the style of air hostesses. She began to grow her hair out, but was frustrated by how long it took. At first it became thin and shabby, like a scarecrow’s, then thicker but still messy, like a schoolboy’s. When, finally, it reached a decent length, her hairdresser said, ‘Don’t expect me to perform miracles.’
She began to dread the social functions that were becoming an increasing necessity in her professional life: a thrusting entrepreneur had to go out and be seen, but a single, always unaccompanied woman of thirty-seven was, in Shanghai, an invitation for people to comment. The locals had names for women like her, whom they considered sadly past their prime. Shengnü, Baigujing – that sort of thing. Sometimes she wondered if she really was that: a leftover woman, the dregs; or a shaggy monster waiting to be slain by the Monkey God.
‘Style issues.’ That was the phrase her friends used to describe what her new priorities should be. She needed to find a look that projected an image: someone effortlessly successful, who had accomplished all that she had while remaining gentle and feminine – a real Chinese woman. She wanted to ask what a real Chinese woman was, whether in some way she differed from a real Indian woman or a real American woman. And if she wasn’t a real Chinese woman, what was she – a fake one?
These new concerns – style issues – were not a welcome addition to her list of considerations. She woke every morning at 6 a.m., had a glass of fruit juice, then went for a forty-five-minute run on the treadmill. After a breakfast of soy protein and mixed berry fruitshake she would head down to the office and begin to deal with phone calls and emails before the first meetings began to force their way into her day. In a city where lunch breaks began religiously at 11.30 a.m., she rarely had lunch unless she had arranged a business meeting at a restaurant. Most of the time she would work through midday and simply forget to eat. Afternoons were reserved for visiting her various businesses, spending time chatting to the staff in the stores, gauging their morale and energy levels – the little human touches that made her a good employer. The evenings were nowadays taken up with entertaining or being entertained, which she neither enjoyed nor disliked. She would get home at eleven and answer any outstanding emails on her BlackBerry while in bed, in the few moments other people might have spent reading glossy magazines to ‘wind down’. At precisely midnight she would put the light out and swiftly fall asleep, rarely allowing the thoughts of her day to overspill into her slumber.
Three times a week she went for Power Yoga at a studio in Xintiandi, never speaking to the other women who had time to hang around and chat in the corridors. At the end of her session, when she lay briefly on her mat blinking at the pistachio-green ceiling, her mind would still be racing, energised by the thought of all the things ahead of her. Empty your mind and be still, her teachers would say, enjoy being in the present: Let go of all that has happened in the past. Do not think about what lies ahead but stay in the stillness of this moment. But this was not possible for her. There was too much for her to do, too many thoughts spinning and clashing in her mind. She needed to look ahead, map out her future, every minute of the day – like a constantly moving ocean creature that would drown if ever it stopped swimming, forward, forward.
She could never stand emptiness, and stillness was even worse.
She had a small group of friends, a mixture of local and expat women, with whom she tried to meet up for dinner once every other week – the last semblance of her dwindling social life. They usually met at a Hunan restaurant on the top floor of a Japanese department store on Nanjing Lu, not far from Yinghui’s office. Recently, she had begun to notice during these get-togethers that the other women would casually mention male friends of theirs, all of whom seemed to be single or divorced and in their late thirties or early forties. Discussion of these men seemed innocent enough at first; Yinghui tried to shrug it off as merely catching up on gossip. But after a while she could no longer ignore the fact that her (securely married) friends were taking pity on her, particularly as the men in question were almost exclusively Western – for everyone knew that once a woman was past thirty-five, there was little point in even trying to hook up with a local guy: Westerners were so much more accepting of age.
‘Are you trying to matchmake me?’ she challenged them jokingly one day as the double-chilli fish head arrived. She expected them to be embarrassed by the exposure of their scheming ways, but instead they were upfront about it. ‘Let’s face it,’ one of them said, beginning to pluck the meat from the fish cheeks with her chopsticks, ‘you can’t be happy in a place like Shanghai if you’re single. We’re all feminists, blah blah blah, but this is not London or New York, you know, this is China. Without a husband, you won’t be successful in your work. You can’t expect to work the hours you do and come back to an empty apartment. Besides, if you want children, you have to get moving. We know it sounds cruel, but … get real.’
Yinghui stared at the dull-eyed fish, its eyes opaque and porcelain-white. She reached for it with her chopsticks and prodded it slightly without great enthusiasm. ‘I’m too busy for a relationship,’ she said.
‘Listen, where do you want to be in ten years’ time? Still flogging panties to rich women?’
Yinghui could not hide her annoyance, but nonetheless she allowed herself to be persuaded to go on a couple of blind dates – friends of friends of friends. The first was in a Mexican restaurant near Tianzifang, the next in a Xinjiang restaurant at the far end of Hengshan Lu. On both occasions the men were polite, professionally successful, and bland. Towards the end of the second date, Yinghui decided that it would be her last. As she watched the man (Michael? Mark? A nice American lawyer) pull the leathery pieces of lamb off the skewer, she realised that she wasn’t able to summon any energy to be witty or flirtatious, to behave as she knew she should on a first date with a perfectly OK man. It wasn’t, as her friends claimed, that she was out of practice: she doubted she had ever known how to do so. The small talk left her feeling bewildered and exhausted, and she was constantly afraid that the conversation would turn towards more personal things, towards the past: how and why she had first come to Shanghai – the normal things foreigners asked each other. She tried to seize control of the conversation, filling it with lengthy explanations of how each dish was prepared, what bizarre Xinjiang ingredients they contained. The man listened politely and asked questions with the requisite level of cultural awareness, which made the transaction less painful for Yinghui. At one point, as she felt the evening slipping dangerously into ‘Tell me about your family’ territory, she changed the subject abruptly by turning to the waitress who had fortuitously arrived with more tea. She began to engage her in idle chat, hoping to glean insights on her exotic homeland, which she would then translate as conversation fillers, making it impossible for Michael/Mark to ask more personal questions. The waitress’s name badge read ‘Aliya’ – such a beautiful Xinjiang name, Yinghui remarked; tell us about where you are from. The waitress giggled and shrugged – she was actually from way down south, Fujian province; she wasn’t an exotic Muslim at all. Mercifully, the lights suddenly dimmed for the entrance of the Uighur dancers. Yinghui was pleased that the music was loud and that the dancers yelped and shrieked all the way through their performance, for it meant that no further conversation was necessary. She smiled at Michael/Mark, and he smiled back.
She really did not need a man to be successful.
One afternoon Yinghui left work early to get dressed for an evening function. It had not been a particularly stressful day, but she was fidgety and distracted. Hours before the event, she had begun to feel anxious; even thinking about what dress to wear and how to style her still-too-short hair made her nervous, which in turn filled her with self-loathing for having allowed such trivial concerns to enter her life.
She had been nominated for the Businesswoman of the Year awards, in the ‘Breakthrough’ category, in which she was the oldest person. The ceremony was held in the ballroom of a hotel in Jing’an, decorated with huge bouquets of pink flowers and banners bearing quotes from Sunzi’s Art of War: ‘Opportunities Multiply as They are Seized’; ‘A Leader Leads by Example, Not Force’. The other nominees all looked the same to Yinghui – pretty, sylphlike, twenty-something local women, their hair effortlessly long, curling featherlike towards their collarbones. Yinghui wished she had been nominated for the ‘Lifetime Achievement’ award that was made up almost exclusively of older Western women; she might have looked more delicate and feminine lined up next to them when the group photographs were taken. Instead, surrounded by women at least ten years younger than herself, she looked square-cut and boxy. She did not win the award (which went to a girl of twenty-four who sold recycled toilet paper to Europe), but her work gained considerable publicity.
Among the guests were a few people she knew well, including one or two she considered friends, some business associates, and many others who were mere acquaintances. A man caught her eye but she couldn’t figure out which category he belonged to. He had a familiar gait – stiff at the joints, the way a marionette might walk, like an arthritic soldier. He was about her age, well-groomed, impeccably dressed, deliberate in his movements: the way he shook hands, firmly, or held chairs back for women, or leant forward to kiss them on both cheeks in a courteous but professional manner – every gesture seemed elegant yet practised. He carried an air of privilege, but he was certainly not Shanghainese. He was well packaged, Yinghui thought, the right age too. The right age: she hated how she had come to assess men this way, the way they assessed her – it was a way of seeing people that had seeped into her thinking unconsciously, as if by osmosis. Right age. Good match. A real woman. Style issues. That was what happened when you lived in Shanghai. She couldn’t escape it now.
She circled him from a distance, trying to work out whether she really knew him. He was wearing a light-grey suit made of a fabric with a faint herringbone pattern, a pale-blue shirt and a dark tie. His jawline was just turning from sleek to heavy. She eased her way through the throng, dodging precariously held champagne flutes, keeping him on the edge of her field of vision all the time. He was on his own now, reading a brochure, wandering away from the crowd, slowly circling the room. She moved closer, making sure he could not see her. Then, when the time was right, she turned and caught his eye. She felt a tightness in her throat, a quickening knot that threatened to turn swiftly into panic.
‘Sorry – Chee Keong? Justin?’
‘Yes. Leong Yinghui!’ He made a movement towards her, his head leaning forwards; but then he corrected himself and extended his hand. ‘Hi. My God, it’s been years. I’d never have thought I’d meet you at a business event.’
‘Justin Lim Chee Keong. What a surprise.’ She shook his hand as firmly as she could, with a brisk up-and-down movement. She wondered if her voice sounded artificially confident, over-bright. ‘How long has it been – ten years? More, perhaps.’
‘I’d say at least fifteen years. Though at my age I try not to keep count. You haven’t changed at all – I mean, not one bit.’
‘You too,’ Yinghui lied. Up close, she could see the lines drawing down on either side of his mouth, the dark circles that shadowed his slightly bloodshot eyes. His skin seemed dry and brittle. When he smiled she saw vestiges of the person she had known – a young, physical man with a full, open face. The same features were now touched with a certain hollowness, a glimpse of what he might look like as an old man. ‘So what brings you to Shanghai – don’t tell me, family business?’
‘What else is there in my life?’ His laugh was rehearsed, mechanical, and it made him seem tired, not happy. He looked at her with a neutral expression; she searched for traces of shock or surprise in his reddened eyes, but could discern nothing. ‘It’s a real surprise seeing you here. I was just looking at the list of nominees for the awards, and when I saw your name I thought, “No way, that can’t be the same person I knew.” A businesswoman? I never thought that was possible. Amazing.’ Yinghui thought he was going to follow up with questions about her life – how she had arrived in Shanghai, the nature of her business – but he merely continued to stare at her in a blank, awkward manner, exactly the way she remembered from all those years ago.
‘Stranger things happen in life,’ she said, filling in the silence at last. ‘It’s not exactly the Virgin Birth, you know. Anyway, how is, um, how is your brother?’ she asked. ‘I read about CS’s wedding about five, six years ago – it looked very luxurious. I knew the bride at school. She was in the year above me. And your parents, still glamorous as ever?’
‘I believe all is well with them.’
‘I read about your family’s business in the papers – not that I was looking out for it or anything, I just read an article by chance. Things must be tough.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a global crisis, isn’t it? It’s tough for everyone – though you seem to be doing pretty well.’
A young woman appeared at his side and slid her hand around his waist, inviting him to do the same; but she was looking away from him, towards something behind Yinghui’s back. There was a sudden burst of camera flashes around them, two or three photographers taking pictures of the couple. Yinghui stepped back and watched them strike poses as they faced the cameras – he stiffly, his new companion sinuously and expertly. Yinghui recognised her from magazines she’d read in the hairdressers – a local actress on the verge of stardom. She certainly did not have style issues. From a distance they made a handsome couple, Yinghui thought, and she could already envisage the photos in the magazines: a perfect union of modern Chinese beauty and old overseas Chinese money. The lines of his drawn, tired face would not be visible, and the readers would only see his good cheekbones, his perfect bearing and casual elegance – the sort of thing that could only have been produced by generations of good breeding.
He turned to look at Yinghui, mouthing the word ‘Sorry,’ and she mouthed back, ‘No problem.’ She hung about for a while, wondering what to do. Should she slip away in a dignified manner without a proper goodbye, or continue waiting for him, the feeling of being superfluous mounting with every second? She had just about decided on the former when she was suddenly seized by a need to talk to him – to tell him things. She felt a rush of unaired grievances welling up in her chest, pushing up into her throat; the need to vocalise them took her by surprise, shocked her. She wanted to sit him down, face to face, and speak at him. She didn’t need him to reply, she merely needed him to be physically present while she said her piece. He could listen passively, unabsorbingly, and she wouldn’t care, but she needed to catch hold of him.
This was ridiculous, she thought, just ridiculous. It was over fifteen years ago – what did it matter now? She was an entirely different person now. The quick flash of irrational hatred that she felt for him began to subside. He was a few years older than she was, a man slipping surely into middle age; he had his own problems. She hadn’t felt even the slightest bit of malicious pleasure when she had read in the financial press about his family’s business going bust. She had felt almost indifferent, her emotional detachment tinged with pity – much as she was feeling now. Look at him, taking up with a trashy actress fifteen years younger than himself. It was sad. He was sad. Yinghui had barely known him in the first place.
Never let the past affect how you perform. Every day is a new day. That was something else she’d said in that defining interview, so she ought to practise what she preached. She gathered herself to leave, and as she did so she dipped into her clutch bag for her business card – she was a consummate professional, and this was a professional setting. She reached across and handed it to him with both hands.
‘So sorry, but I have to rush off now. Good to see you again, a real surprise. Here’s my card if ever you need to get in touch.’
He accepted it, also with both hands, and she realised that the formality between them was entirely appropriate: they were strangers to each other now. ‘Wonderful,’ he said, slipping the card into his pocket. ‘Great. I will call you.’
But she knew, as one always does in these situations, that he would not call her.
As she sat in bed that night she allowed herself one minute to remember how Justin CK Lim and the rest of his family had looked fifteen years ago, how they had behaved.
Just one minute; and then she would put them out of her mind.
She checked her BlackBerry, scrolling through the emails that had come in that day – all the fascinating projects she was going to begin in the weeks, months and years ahead.
How to Manage Time
When I was thirteen, I was sent away to live with relatives in the far south of Malaysia, at the opposite end of the country from where I had been born. Do not be alarmed – this sort of displacement is quite normal amongst underprivileged rural families. My mother had died a few years previously and my father, unable to care for me properly, decided to ask my great-aunt to take me in. He himself had to move away from our village to seek work in Kota Bharu, where he lived in one room above a tyre repair shop. It made sense for him to be free of me.
My great-aunt lived and worked on a small pineapple farm about thirty miles north of Singapore. The peaty soil of the region was famous for producing the best pineapples in the country, but ours were an exception to the rule, being meagre in size and acidic in taste. Nothing I did seemed to improve them – not the addition of buffalo manure or even the chemical fertilisers I found on a lorry parked by the road one day (there was no one about, and far too much fertiliser for any one person to use, so I helped myself). Even at that age I found the lack of a satisfactory solution very frustrating. Why couldn’t I make those pineapples big and sweet? I worked on the farm every day after school – it was my way of earning my keep and it kept me out of mischief, said my great-aunt. I do not have fond memories of this period, because it involved failure: the only failure I have encountered in my life thus far. To this day, even a brief encounter with hard, unripe pineapple (of the kind one routinely encounters on aeroplanes) is enough to send me into quite a rage.
Life in the south was not a thing of beauty. The landscape lacked the soul of the north, the wilderness, the poetry. It is surprising how one’s childhood days can be troubled by the finer concerns of the spirit, filled as they are with the anxieties of youth. I was picked on at school, teased for my accent, which I was never fully able to lose – the unconscious warping of ‘a’s to ‘e’s or ‘o’s, the dropping of the ends of words, the addition of unfamiliar emphatic exclamations. My speech marked me out as foreign and, unsurprisingly, I became known as a quiet boy who said very little. I spent much time lurking in the background, so to speak, watching from the sidelines and never thrusting myself into the spotlight. By remaining in the shadows I learnt to observe the workings of the human psyche – what people want and how they get it. Everything that I was to achieve later in life can be traced back to this period, when I began my apprenticeship in the art of survival.
All that earnest study of the cut and thrust of life meant that I did not have time to miss home. I did not suffer from any longing for my homeland in the north, with its strange, warm dialect and its melancholy coastline scarred with brackish streams that ebbed and flowed with the tide. It is only now that I have the luxury of time and rich personal accomplishment that I can sit back and appreciate a certain sentiment for the village in which I grew up. This does not, however, mean that I am someone prone to nostalgia. I am certainly not encumbered by the past.
Like most people in our position, we lived an industrious but precarious existence. My great-aunt had worked part-time in a factory on the outskirts of Johor Baru that produced VHS players for export, but, being in her fifties, she was soon laid off and had no work other than to tend to our smallholding, and we were therefore forced to be inventive in the way we made our living. Nowadays I hear liberal, educated people refer sympathetically to such a way of life as ‘hard’, or even ‘desperate’, but I prefer to think of it as creative. I had just turned thirteen, and thought that if we had more money I would be able to return home.
I began selling pineapples on a disused wooden stand by the side of the road that led to the coast, hoping to ensnare day-trippers from Singapore on their way to Desaru. Knowing that our pineapples were sour, I sold them cheaply, and in the first few weeks I managed to make a little money. But even this began to dry up as people realised the low quality of my wares. So one day I bought a supersweet pineapple in the market and cut it up in pieces, offering it as proof of my own fruit’s tenderness. A number of people fell for it, and only one couple complained on their way back from the coast. I feigned innocence – I couldn’t guarantee that every pineapple would be sweet. They showed me a pineapple cut in half, and I recognised its dry, pale flesh as one of mine. They insisted I give them five pineapples for free, and when I refused, the woman called me names and her companion ended up hurling the pineapple at my head. I ducked but it caught me on my ear, making it swell like a mushroom. Soon afterwards I abandoned the stall and got a job waiting tables at a local coffee shop.
I did not see my father for nearly four years. I received news from him occasionally, when a letter would arrive via my great-aunt. He would write about the Kelantan river bursting its banks in the monsoon season, the kite-flying contests that year, the second-hand scooter he had bought, things he had eaten in the market – uninteresting news of daily life. Once he told me he had bought me a large spinning top which awaited my return, but when I finally went home there was no further mention of it.
There was never any news of jobs or money – the very reason we had to move away from home. There was no indication of how he was planning our future, no sense that he was aware of the passage of time. I had never been aware of this myself, but now, hundreds of miles from home, I could almost hear the seconds of an invisible clock ticking away in my head. I had gone to live with my great-aunt thinking that it was temporary, and that I would be back home as soon as my father ‘got settled’. That was what he told me. After a year I realised that my residence in the dull flatlands of the south was not going to be as fleeting as I had hoped. One learns quickly at that age. Like all children, I had never before appreciated what time meant – the years stretched infinitely beyond me, waiting, impossibly, to be filled. But all of a sudden I began to feel the urgency of each day. I counted them down, saddened by how much I could have been doing with every sunrise and sunset, if only I had been at home.
I waited for my father to think of a plan that would reunite us in our village, but, incapable of understanding that time was not on his side, he left me waiting.
You must appreciate that time is always against you. It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. Therefore, if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you.
Four years. They passed so quickly.
5
Reinvent Yourself
The first rule of success is, you must look beautiful. No one taught Phoebe this secret, but she could tell by simple observation that successful people always looked good. Just by looking at the women hurrying along Henan Lu, running for buses, or reading their magazines in the metro at rush hour, she could spot the few who were on life’s upward curve. At first she did not really think about the connection between appearance and achievement; she could not even imagine such a link. But then she kept noticing more and more women who looked immaculate in their dress, and what’s more, that they often carried bags that looked as though they contained serious life items instead of mere beauty accessories. Often, these impressive-looking women would take out papers or a book from their sleek bags and read them on the bus with an air of purpose, and even if they were reading mere novels, Phoebe could see that they were absorbing the words the way high-achieving people do. All the time working, working, in a way that was steely yet elegant. It reminded her of a girl at school who always came first in class, the way that girl read books with a determination no one else had. All the teachers said she would go on to great things, and sure enough, she got a job as a quantity surveyor in Kuantan. Gradually, Phoebe realised that the reason these women looked so beautiful was that they had good positions in life; she could not deny that the two things were inseparable. Which one came first, beauty or success, she did not know.
She started taking notes on the type of clothes they wore, how they styled their hair, even the way they walked. When she compared these to her own way of dressing and behaving, it became clear why she had not yet been able to find a decent job in Shanghai. No one would look at her and think, that woman is going to astound the world with her abilities, we should give her a job. No, she was not someone you would even look at twice on the bus, never mind give a job to.
She knew she was not a mediocre person, but she looked like one to the outside world. This was not her fault, she thought; it was also because of where she lived. Every day she was surrounded by mediocre people who dragged her down into their sea of mediocrity. She had found a room in an apartment block not far from the river, which she had thought would be beautiful and prestigious. A girl she had worked with in a mobile-phone keypad factory in Guangzhou had a childhood friend who had gone to work in Shanghai, and she had a good job working in an office. The girl’s apartment was just one room, but it had a small washroom and a space to prepare simple meals. Her name was Yanyan, and in her text message she said that Phoebe could stay there for free until she got a job – surely it wouldn’t be long before Phoebe found a good position. When Phoebe looked at the address she saw that it was close to the centre of town, a nice area near some famous attractions that foreign visitors loved, and by the bank of the river, about which people wrote love songs. The apartment was on the tenth floor, so she imagined magnificent views of this great metropolis that would inspire her with the spirit of high achievement. Every day she would wake up and breathe the intoxicating air of excellence.
But when she came out of the subway station she found herself in a low-class shopping centre full of small shops that sold everything in bulk – clothes, mushrooms, teapots, pink plastic hairclips, fake trainers. She stood for a minute trying to work out the right direction. In front of her was a row of shops with makeshift beds outside them – there were people stretched out on each one, getting tattoos. She walked past them, looking at the huge rose being tattooed on a man’s arm, its petals reaching around his biceps; an eagle on the nape of someone else’s neck; a manga kitten on a young woman’s ankle. Outside, the pavement was black with grease from the dozens of stalls selling skewers of grilled meat and squid. It was hard to walk properly because of all the discarded skewer-sticks, which made her feel unstable in her heels.
In the entrance hall to the apartment block there was a cramped wooden booth where two watchmen sat, drinking tea from plastic flasks. They did not even look up when Phoebe walked in; they did not care who came into the building. The floor was pale, with a covering of dust and streaked with black marks that Phoebe could not identify, and on the walls were patches of cement where the crumbling brickwork had fallen away and been hastily filled in. The wooden noticeboards and the metal pigeon-hole letterboxes were old and had not been changed for at least fifty years – their green paint looked almost black. The place was dirtier than some of the factory hostels she had lived in. As she waited for the lift to take her up to her new life, she felt the heavy weight of dread descend upon her shoulders. There were hundreds and hundreds of apartments in the building, and only one lift, and as she waited a crowd began to gather around her, everyone pushing forward. These people were not the sort of neighbours she had imagined. She had envisaged herself surrounded by the kind of women she saw on TV, well-dressed modern Shanghainese, but instead she found a crowd of old-age pensioners dressed in revolutionary clothes, stern padded jackets and shapeless trousers that matched their expressionless faces, which seemed to have crumpled inwards. No light shone from their eyes, no feeling sprang from their gazes, and when Phoebe looked at them she felt a shiver of fear run down her neck. It was like looking at an abandoned house where everything had been kept as it was in the past, the clocks ticking, the furniture clean and shiny, the plants watered, only there was no one living there; they had long since gone away. Even the younger people seemed old and worn down by unknown cares, their clothes as uninspired as their faces.
They shuffled past Phoebe as the lift neared the ground floor, their shoulders and arms jostling her. She watched the numbers light up on the counter, and as she did so she felt as though her life was also descending: 4, 3, 2, 1. Soon it would be zero. As the lift doors opened she saw that it was tiny and filled with cigarette smoke, so she decided to take the stairs instead. She only had a small bag with her – she had learnt to travel light. Even so, she was soon out of breath because the stairs were steep and the windows that lined the stairwell were open and let in the dust and pollution from outside. There were pipes everywhere, and some of them were leaky. Where they dripped onto the floor there were crusted brown patches that looked like mushrooms sprouting from the concrete.
As she climbed the stairs she could see a giant construction site taking shape right next to the apartment block. Huge steel columns jutted out from the hole being dug for the foundations. Beyond it was a shopping centre, painted in coral pink and blue. In the daytime its neon signboard looked like scaffolding, and it was hard to read what it said: Shanghai Liteful Fashion Shopping Market. The signboards that covered its entire length advertised cheap clothing brands that Phoebe had never heard of, the colours gold and bright green and yellow. Nothing matched. The streets below were dark with a mass of people waiting for buses or emerging from the shopping centre – it must have been a wholesale market where you could buy anything from skirts to electronic goods to dried food very cheaply. Even from where she was she could hear the thumping of music and the cries of advertisements from loudspeakers. She paused and looked at the scene – at the thick, wriggling river of bodies so dense and colourless that it was hard to make out each individual human being. She could be anywhere in China, she thought. In fact, she could be in any no-value town in Asia. She had known so many of them, and they all looked like this.
But maybe the apartment would be nice. Maybe her view would not be of this no-place city she was now staring at; maybe she would look out at the river instead, and wake up every day to views of Shanghai.
She reached the top floor. The corridor was long, and stretched into the gloom – she could not see the end of it. There were dozens of doors, each one a separate apartment. She walked down the corridor, counting down the numbers until she found the right one.
Why are you always so doubtful? Phoebe Chen Aiping, do not allow yourself to be dragged down by your childish fears.
The door was protected by a metal grille, just like all the others. Phoebe reached between the bars and knocked on it, but there was no answer. She knocked again and waited. Perhaps Yanyan had unexpectedly been called out to an important meeting, even though she had said it was her day off. It was often like this with busy people who had important jobs; they had to respond to unpredictable events at short notice and be flexible – they were successful because they were able to deal with stressful situations using their skill and talent. The door opposite opened and an old woman peered out, glaring at Phoebe and surveying her from head to foot. Phoebe wondered how she appeared to the old woman, whether she looked acceptable, a decent upstanding person paying a visit to a friend, or whether she looked like someone with shady intentions, a potential criminal. She reached into her handbag for her phone and rang Yanyan’s number. She heard a ringing on the other side of the door, and a few moments later she heard the locks being undone from the inside, three of them, heavily bolted.
‘Why didn’t you call out and say who you were?’ Yanyan mumbled as she opened the door. ‘I thought you were the man coming for the gas bill again.’ She seemed sleepy, her hair was a mess, as if she had just woken up, and she was dressed in pyjamas even though it was nearly midday. She let Phoebe in and went to sit on her bed. Phoebe thought, maybe she was very tired from working hard at her important job. Yanyan was wearing fluffy slippers in the shape of smiling puppies, and her pyjamas were printed with sunny flower-faces that grinned at Phoebe. There was only one single bed in the room, and a small chair piled with clothes.
‘I’m so tired,’ Yanyan said, kicking off her slippers and leaning back against the wall with her knees drawn in to her body. It was true, she looked very haggard.
‘You must be working very hard,’ Phoebe said. She did not know what to do, whether to sit on the bed or not, so she just stood in the middle of the tiny room. Looking around, she saw a cooker on one side of the door and a washroom cubicle on the other, so small that she was not sure there was enough space to stand and have a shower between the toilet and the wall. There was almost nothing in the main room apart from a small TV balanced on some shelves that held cooking utensils and a jar of pumpkin seeds. On the wall hung one of those calendars that fast-food chains give away free of charge at the end of the year if you are lucky and are there at the right time. The pages were open at June, four months ago.
Yanyan shook her head and laughed. ‘I got fired. That’s why I need someone to share the rent.’
Phoebe looked out of the window and saw the same view she had seen from the stairs, the deep hole of the construction site, the broad avenue cut by concrete bridges, the multicoloured Liteful shopping centre, the masses of people dragging heavy black bags full of cheap goods – a nowhere, could-be-anywhere place.
‘I know the room’s a bit small,’ Yanyan said, ‘but we can shift that chair and the TV and roll out the mattress.’ She reached underneath the bed and attempted to drag something out. Phoebe could see that it was a thin mattress rolled up and stuffed under the low bed.
‘It’s OK,’ Phoebe said. ‘We don’t have to do it now.’ She calculated that with the mattress rolled out, there would be about a handbag’s width between it and the bed. She wondered how long ago Yanyan had lost her job, how long she had spent her days waking up at midday, how long she had let her hair get greasy and go unwashed, but it did not seem the right time to ask such questions.
Imagine your new splendid life and it will soon come true!
Phoebe thought, it would be so easy to walk out of this tiny room. She could make up an excuse and say, I’m late for an appointment, but thank you for showing me the room, I’ll call you later once I’ve decided. But she remained standing in the middle of the room, still clutching her bag. She did not know where else to go.
‘Hey, are you hungry? It must be lunchtime now,’ Yanyan said, looking around at the walls as if hoping to find a clock, but there wasn’t one.
Phoebe shook her head. ‘Don’t worry, please don’t go to any trouble. I’ve just arrived, I don’t want to inconvenience you.’
‘I’m starving – let’s have a simple lunch!’ Yanyan insisted, and went to the cooking area. Phoebe wondered what kind of meal she would prepare. Just thinking about lunch made her realise she had not had breakfast, and suddenly she felt so hungry her stomach began to swell with an ache she had never experienced before. As she listened to the sounds of Yanyan busying herself by the stove – water from the tap drumming against the bottom of an empty kettle, the clang of steel against steel, the click-clack of chopsticks, Yanyan humming a little tune – Phoebe felt tired and in need of rest. She tried to think of the number of times someone had cooked a meal for her since she came to China, the number of times she had sat in someone’s home eating a meal – but not a single instance came to mind. She sat down on the bed and found the mattress thin but firm. The window was open and she could hear the noise of the traffic, the non-stop beeping of scooters and the growl of buses. A cool wind was blowing, making the room feel airy. She looked across at Yanyan, whom she had not yet had a chance to scrutinise – a tall, thin girl, scrawny, most would say, who walked with a stoop, which was a shame because her height would have given her a striking appearance were she not rapidly turning into a young hunchback. She could be beautiful, but instead she was mediocre. Maybe she would watch Phoebe and learn how to stand upright and keep her hair neat and stylish. Phoebe looked at Yanyan’s long, unwashed hair, which shrouded her cheeks messily, making her look like a child who had recently awoken from a bad dream.
‘Come, come, eat,’ Yanyan said, and sat down next to her. She handed Phoebe a plastic bowl of instant noodles, spicy seafood flavour. She had not torn off the wrapping properly, and when Phoebe brought the bowl to her mouth little bits of paper tickled her lips.
‘Hey, look!’ cried Yanyan. She held up a cheap plastic toy – a keyring with a small blue plastic cat attached to it. When she pulled at the chain the cat lifted a pair of chopsticks to its whiskery snout, greedily slurping some plastic noodles. ‘It came free with the packet of noodles. Here, take it – it’ll be your good-luck charm in Shanghai. It will help you get the best job in the world.’
Phoebe took the blue cat and put it in her handbag. She did not want it, but she did not want to hurt Yanyan. She stirred her noodles with her chopsticks, watching the little bits of freeze-dried vegetables slowly uncurling. They all looked the same – she couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. From the construction site below, heavy works were starting up, and the deep booming sound of piledrivers resonated in her chest.
She wrote in her journal: Wind and rain are raging, I am shaking and swaying, but I must recover, I will rise up.
She went to the fake-goods market at Zhongshan Science and Technology Park, even though she’d heard it was cheaper to buy counterfeit products on the internet. The thing about luxury high-style goods was, you had to see what they were like in real life before knowing whether they would suit you; even she knew this. She spent a long time going from shop to shop, expressing interest in certain items before walking away, knowing that the same things would be on sale a few shops away, and that the shopkeepers would be forced to come running out to the street after her to offer her lower prices than their competitors. First she selected a purse made from glossy red leather with a gold clasp buckle, which even came in a box with the logo printed in gold above the words ‘Made in Italy’. When she was bargaining with the shopkeeper, she said to him, You are so unscrupulous, you dare to say this is made in Italy when everyone knows it’s fake, and the shopkeeper said, Little Miss, it’s the truth! Don’t you know, Italy is full of factories owned by Chinese people, and those factories are full of Chinese workers producing large volumes of luxury goods! Phoebe did not fully believe this – she could not imagine entire towns and villages in Italy full of Chinese people stitching clothes and handbags and having nothing to do with the locals – but maybe it was true, maybe she now owned a genuine foreign-manufactured luxury item. Next, she hesitated over a scarf with distinctive checks and some large shawls made from pure 100 per cent pashmina, and since winter was just around the corner she thought about buying a fashionable down jacket too, something in a bright shiny colour that would make her look energetic and sporty, and even give the impression that she had just come back from a holiday in an expensive snowy place like Hokkaido.
Finally she chose the most important item, a handbag. This is how people would judge her. From afar they would notice what kind of bag she was carrying, and would decide if she was a person of class or not. She knew which kind of bag she wanted: it was the most desirable brand, but also the most illegal of all the counterfeit products. Some of the shopkeepers thought she was a spy for the trading office, and asked her many questions before admitting that they kept it in stock. The difficulty in purchasing this bag made her feel excited, as if she was buying something very rare and exclusive, even though it was a fake. Eventually one shopkeeper pushed aside a wall lined with shelves to reveal a smaller room hidden behind it, and behind this smaller room, which was filled with ordinary bags, there was another, even smaller room, and it was here that the bag she wanted was kept. There were two other women in that tiny room, examining the high-quality stylish bags with care. They were both executive-looking women wearing business clothes and carefully applied make-up, and being in that private space with them made Phoebe feel equally important. There was only one brand of bag in that room – the coveted LV brand – but in many styles and variations, the famous pattern and coloured monogram repeating all over the walls and surrounding her like the very air she breathed, making her feel slightly giddy. Phoebe took a long time before selecting the one she wanted, for even the fakes were expensive, and in the end she had to settle on the most inferior model and style. But it was still beautiful, she thought, as she walked out of the shop with it already on her shoulder. She had transferred some of the contents of her old bag into the new one, and discarded all the unwanted items in a bin just outside the shop. When she looked at some of the things she’d thrown away – the cheap dried-up lipstick, a cracked mirror, a worker’s pass from one of her old jobs in Guangzhou – she wondered why she had carried those dead objects with her for so long.
She went to an internet bar and made herself new profiles on QQ and MSN so she could chat with people online – so she could chat with men. Searching her email attachments, she found a nice photo of herself. It had been taken in Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou, but in the background there were only trees and lakes, so no one would look at the picture and make the link: Guangzhou, factory worker, immigrant. She remembered that day well – she had just left one job and was about to start another, but she had two days off in between and also some money saved up. She had dressed in nice jeans and a colourful T-shirt and taken the subway to the park as if she was having a day out with friends, only she did not have any friends. She bought red-bean shaved ice and ate it while strolling around the artificial lakes, watching the artists painting watercolours of goldfish and hilly landscapes and oil portraits of Hollywood actors. There were couples and families everywhere, and although she was on her own she felt that she was one of them, that she was someone who had a past and a future – and that life was only going to get better, just as it would for everyone around her. Near the boating lake she found a spot to sit under some bamboo trees. She was on her own, but it was OK, she was happy. She took out her phone and held it at arm’s length, holding it up slightly so that she could look at it with a raised chin – it was better that way, as it made her neck look thinner. She took a photo, but it wasn’t so good, since she was squinting a bit because of the sun. She tried it again, but it didn’t work this time either. One of the old men who sold tickets for the rowing boats called out to her, asked if she wanted him to help her take a photo. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I won’t ask you to marry me in return!’
He peered into the narrow screen, and Phoebe worried that he didn’t know how to work the camera. But as he held it in front of her he said, ‘This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school.’ It made her laugh, and in the photo she appears sunny-faced and natural, full of the promise of the bounteous years ahead of her.
As she looked at the photo on the computer screen she knew it was just the right kind to have on her profile – taken by someone else, a friend on an outing, maybe even a boyfriend. It made her appear desirable, unlike the kind of blurry self-shot images where the person was always looking up at the camera, which instantly told the viewer: I have no friends. She wrote a few lines about herself, a ‘professional career-oriented young woman with experience of foreign work and travel’. She gave her true age and stated that she wanted to meet respectable, successful men.
Within minutes of posting her profile she began to get requests from men who wanted to get to know her better. She was overwhelmed; she never imagined she could be so popular. Suddenly the whole of Shanghai seemed full of friends and potential partners, thousands of them. She began typing replies to the men she deemed the most suitable, her fingers moving across the keyboard trying to keep up with several conversations at once, but it was difficult, she was not used to typing so much and she knew she was making mistakes. Sorry for the delay in my replies, she typed as some of the men began to get impatient. It was thrilling to chat to people she barely knew, and she began to imagine what some of them might be like – rich, handsome, successful.
But very soon she realised that many of them were just high-school and college kids who were having some online fun – they said so themselves. They had no intention of ever meeting up. She became angry that they were wasting her time, so she learnt how to block them from contacting her. Young boys were no use to her; she needed to meet successful adults, she was not interested in spotty adolescents. Some men seemed OK when they first started chatting, but gradually Phoebe would discover something wrong with them.
To tell you the truth, I am married, so I am just looking for casual fun.
Actually, my age is 61, not 29, but I am still very energetic and strong.
Honestly, I really do drive a Ferrari and I live in a luxurious penthouse apartment, but you cannot visit me because my grandmother lives with me and she is disapproving of the girls I meet – you should not suspect me of being a factory worker!
My internet business is going so well at the moment but I have cashflow problems, could you lend me 2,000 yuan and I will pay you back on our first date?
I am not so interested in knowing what your favourite ice cream flavour is. Right now I am imagining lifting your skirt and touching your thighs higher and higher until …
Some men became angry when she didn’t reply immediately. They were pushy and said impolite things to her. But she couldn’t type very fast, and it was hard to keep so many chats going at once. She soon learnt to tell which men were educated, because they were the ones who typed their answers very quickly, but she also discovered that educated men often used the most obscene words. And then there were men who seemed nice at first, but soon it was clear that they were just out to trick her. Even though she did not know what they could possibly cheat her out of, she sensed that they were bad people who were up to no good. She heard stories all the time, tales of swindlers and liars – bamboozlers. She did not want to be one of those poor victims who got bamboozled.
One by one, Phoebe deleted her newly made friends, blocking them until her contact list showed only a couple of guys – guys who had just said hello, how are you, but had not yet had the chance to show how deceitful and black-spirited they were. She began to get random messages that didn’t even start with a greeting, just shameless suggestions for physical relations, most probably high-school students, but who knows, maybe they were frustrated middle-aged husbands and fathers. She knew it was because she had a nice profile picture, and decided she should replace it with something fake or a neutral image, like a cartoon character. A superhuman character with great strength, maybe. That would deter anyone with unsavoury intentions. She would become like so many other people in cyberspace, hiding behind an image of something other than themselves. But as she looked at the photo of herself she hesitated. Her eyes were glowing with laughter and promise, and the vegetation behind her was so lush it reminded her of her home. She could not bring herself to delete this image from her profile. When the rest of Shanghai looked at her, she did not want them to see just a grey shadow of a nobody; she wanted them to see her, Phoebe Chen Aiping.
She looked at her brand-new fake Omega watch. It was 6.55 p.m. She had not realised how late it was – she had spent nearly four hours in the internet café. She double-checked the time on the computer, just in case the watch she had been sold was a dud. It was still 6.55. She looked at the photo of herself one last time, just as another message popped up on screen. Little Miss, hello, I like your profile, would you like to chat? I think we might be compatible. She closed the page and signed herself off the computer.
When she got home the apartment was dark and Yanyan was asleep on the bed, wrapped in a thin blanket. The window was open and there was a slight chill in the room. Phoebe stood at the window and looked down at the blinking red and pale-gold lights of the cars below. The street stalls had their lights on now, the plumes of smoke from the little charcoal grills rising into the evening air.
‘Where have you been? You’re very late,’ Yanyan said quietly.
‘Trying to find work. Why are you in bed so early? It’s barely eight o’clock.’
‘I haven’t got out of bed all day.’
‘Oh, Yanyan,’ Phoebe sighed as she sat down on the bed next to her. ‘Not again. What are we going to do?’
As night fell, the giant hole in the construction site below the window looked black and infinite, as if it was ready to swallow up the cranes and bulldozers around it. Maybe she and Yanyan and everyone in their building would disappear into the hole too, Phoebe thought.
‘Come, I’ll make some dinner,’ she said.
Yanyan sat up and pulled her knees to her chest, shielding her eyes as Phoebe turned on the light. The single fluorescent strip bathed the room in a harsh white glow.
‘Only instant noodles again. Sorry,’ Phoebe said.
‘It’s better than eating a banquet on your own,’ Yanyan replied.
Later, once Yanyan had settled back in bed, Phoebe opened the Journal of Her Secret Self. She had not written in it for some days. She paused, knowing that Yanyan was not yet asleep – her breathing was even and almost soundless. Phoebe needed solitude when she wrote in her journal; she had become used to being alone when confronting her fears. It was easier that way, for she could be as weak and fearful as she wanted, and there would be no one to witness it. She turned off the light and waited in the darkness. When she heard Yanyan’s breaths turn heavy with dream sleep, she held her mobile phone next to her journal and began to scribble a few lines in the ghostly blue light.
Time is flying past you, Phoebe Chen Aiping, you know you are being defeated. You are a new person here in Shanghai, you must dare to do things the old you would not have done. Forget who you were, forget who you are. Become someone else.
6
Perform All Obligations and Duties with Joy
The weather turned colder and sharper as Spring Festival approached. Most days, Justin spent the morning staring at the ice that had formed overnight on the balcony, bizarre shapes hanging from the railings in jagged shards or clinging to the drainpipes like brilliant shiny fungus. The leaves of the potted plants were coated in ice – fat glassy bulbs that reminded him of Christmas decorations. On brighter days the sun would be strong enough to start shrinking the icicles, and he would stand at the window watching the water drip slowly onto the cement floor of the balcony. Most of the time, though, the ice would stay hard and unmoving, glinting ever so slightly despite the absence of light in the pale, snow-shrouded afternoon.
He had not left the apartment for five days, not even to walk to the convenience store at the end of the street to stock up on bottled water and instant noodles. The apartment felt too warm and cosseting to leave, and the weather outside too harsh. Realising he had stopped going out altogether, his ayi came every other day now, leaving him enough food and water to live on – more than enough, it turned out, for she worried about him – so he did not have to venture out, did not have to see or speak to anyone, which suited him. If he happened to be in the living room when he heard the ayi unlock the first of the heavy double doors, he would retreat to the dark safety of his bedroom, knowing that she would not enter his lair. He would lie in bed and chart her movements by the sounds she made: the breathy exclamation on entering the overheated apartment; the running of the tap in the kitchen; the expressions of shock and even mild revulsion when she discovered and disposed of leftover food festering on the kitchen counter; the clink of porcelain; the scrape of chairs on the wooden floor; the gentle tread of her feet as she dusted the coffee table. And, finally, the moment of relief when she left the apartment, pulling once, twice, three times at the door that always snagged on the rug as she closed it. Then he would be alone again.
Occasionally she would leave a note asking if he needed anything else, and he would scribble a reply – All still fine – and leave it with some cash on the kitchen table. He was thankful she came, but he could not bear the thought of interacting with anyone, not even someone as unobtrusive as a bespectacled middle-aged ayi.
All around him he could hear the sounds of families preparing for Spring Festival – children’s footsteps upstairs, the occasional burst of excited chatter, the rumble of wheeled bags heavy with treats being dragged along the corridor. He heard people singing along to their karaoke machines, sometimes a family singalong with croaky old voices mingling with cartoon-happy children’s voices, other times a lone female voice, surprisingly pure and sad, falling flat from time to time. He hated this voice; it wriggled into his head and cut into his innards, forcing its way into his space as if it wanted to be close to him. It was not like the other noises, which were impersonal and distant; this voice was intimate, intrusive, and he was thankful that it never lasted very long. He did not know where any of these noises came from, for they echoed strangely, rebounding in the walls and pipes.
He thought about what his own family would be doing at that precise moment – their New Year celebrations were a well-rehearsed ritual, comforting in their predictability. In the family mansion they would be taking delivery of inhuman quantities of food, and the caterers would be setting up for the open-house party that would take place over the first few days of the festival following the family dinner on New Year’s Eve. His mother would play at being stressed by the pressure of organising affairs, even though her distaste for physical work meant that she rarely performed any function more strenuous than making phone calls to the florist or the confectioners, leaving the servants to deal with the deliveries and the setting up of tables and chairs. In recent years the family had even taken to having the New Year’s Eve dinner in a hotel – the servants were getting old, his mother had said, and they simply couldn’t trust getting a young Filipina or Indonesian maid (she’d heard such horror stories: family heirlooms being stolen, phone bills full of calls to Manila, people being killed in their own homes). So they would book a private room in the Chinese restaurant of a fancy hotel, twelve of them sitting in near-silence around a big table laden with food that would remain half consumed at the end of the evening. ‘How lucky we are to have a family like this,’ his father would say at the conclusion of the meal. He’d said that every single year Justin could remember. But those extravagant banquets of bird’s-nest and shark-fin soups, whole suckling pigs, the finest New Zealand abalone, and strange sea creatures he hadn’t even recognised – perhaps they were all in the past, now that his family was ruined. He wondered if they were having more modest celebrations, or if they were celebrating at all. He imagined bitter recriminations: mother blaming father, brother blaming mother, grandmother blaming uncle – for the loss of their fortune, for the loss of their eldest son.
But he was deluding himself. They would not be blaming each other for their misfortune; they would be blaming him. He had disappeared, he had let them down, he would not answer their calls for help, he was selfish – that was why they were in this mess now. It was a line of reasoning he had heard many times before, so often that sometimes he too believed it. It was all his fault.
As he stood at the window and looked out at the strange frozen shapes of the city – the glass-ice trees, the streets scarred by snaking tracks of snow – he thought of the family holiday he had once had in Sapporo, when he was about thirteen, old enough to understand that the vacation was happening under a cloud of discontent; that it was not a holiday but an escape of sorts. It had taken place over the New Year period, the decision to leave for Japan made late in the day, when preparations for the usual celebrations were already well advanced. There had been no explanation for this hasty change in plan, which triggered a frantic search for the children’s woollen jumpers and down jackets in the store room, and the attendant anxiety as to whether or not they had outgrown them since their trip to Canada the previous year. His mother simply said, ‘I’ve always wanted to spend New Year’s in a snowy place.’ In the coded language of their family, full of unaired grievances, her firm statement of intent spoke loud and clear to Justin. Something was not right, and this something was compelling enough for them to leave home over the holiday.
The snow that blanketed Sapporo felt permanent, comfortably settled on the long straight avenues and the mountainous landscape around it. The freezing air raked the lining of his nostrils, burning its way down his throat and into his lungs; his lips and fingertips became sore and chapped, and his thin tropical blood felt powerless against the cold. And yet he was not unhappy; the omnipresent snow had a way of silencing the unspoken troubles that had arisen in his family, dampening them, making everyone calm. His younger brother did not take so well to the cold: he whimpered softly and became sullen and uncommunicative, refusing to venture out of the hotel room. Justin observed the way his mother and father avoided each other – she lavishing extra attention on the younger of her two sons while her husband worked on his papers even at breakfast, concentrating on indecipherable sets of accounts as he ate his rice porridge, rarely looking up at the rest of the family.
‘I’m going to take Mother out to dinner tonight,’ his father said one morning, without looking up from his paperwork, and Justin recognised this statement to be a sort of apology, or at least as much of an apology as his father was capable of offering. There was a cry from his brother, aged six – the start of a tantrum over being forced to finish his eggs; then he began to scrape a piece of burnt toast noisily, the black powder scattering on the cream-coloured tablecloth. No, his mother replied, that would be too much hassle – the young one needed looking after. Justin listened for signs of regret or gratitude in her voice, but could discern nothing other than the turbulent silence that descended on his family in times of anger and dispute. Outside the sky was clear, the winter light glassy, pale. He thought how fortunate he was to be in a foreign place, for somehow the problems of his family seemed easier to bear when they were far from home, in an unfamiliar land shrouded in snow.
With his mother clinging more and more to her younger son and his father disappearing to work for long stretches, Justin was left to discover the wonders of Sapporo with Sixth Uncle, who had come on holiday with them as he often did, partly to help with the children but mainly to organise the logistics of travelling in a foreign country – booking tickets, sorting out the best rooms in hotels, moving the family swiftly through airports, finding good restaurants. He always seemed to know people everywhere they went – contacts he’d met through business, or friends of friends of friends who were willing to help show them round or lend a car and a driver. He was ‘good with people’ – affable, insistent, often daring in his humour, occasionally foul-mouthed but always unthreatening in his chubbiness. He would flirt with hotel receptionists and sweet-talk directors of airline companies; he always got what he wanted. The youngest of the uncles, he was only twelve years older than Justin – barely in his mid-twenties at the time, though already very much a man, someone Justin recognised as inhabiting his father’s world, not his, in spite of the childish banter that passed between him and Sixth Uncle.
They visited the Snow Festival, just the two of them. It felt like an adventure, striding forth into the bitter cold, walking through the snow and feeling it seep through their boots, leaving behind the younger brother, who was too small and weak, and his parents, who were too old and slow. ‘I’m going to have my ass kicked for leading you astray,’ Sixth Uncle said, and laughed as they walked around the fantastic ice sculptures. ‘Your mother is going to bite my head off when she sees her dear little son frozen to the bone. Hey, look at that – remember that?’
It was the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which they had seen during a previous holiday, but made entirely of snow. Elsewhere there was a life-size Pyramid and a faithful reproduction of the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto; there were fearsome ogres and cuddly polar bears and a herd of long-necked dinosaurs; Mount Rushmore with different, unrecognisable heads; Eskimos and penguins; a tropical landscape of palm trees and a beach with sun loungers – all glowing with the pale white-blue of snow and ice. They threw snowballs at each other, as people who are not used to snow always do, and if they tripped and fell they just lay on the snow, feeling its strange powdery-crusty texture beneath them. Justin no longer noticed the cold; his fingers felt swollen and numb but impervious to the biting frost, and he felt a growing strength in his legs as he ran along the edge of a perfectly flat snow-canal that led to a Dutch windmill.
‘Little bastard, you’ve got a lot of energy,’ Sixth Uncle wheezed as he caught up. ‘Your grandmother keeps telling me I need to lose weight, but thank God I’m a bit fat because it protects me from this damn cold.’
They found a restaurant, a dimly lit place hidden down a nondescript alley – a tip from a local acquaintance, Sixth Uncle said, guaranteed to be the best food in the area. Out of the cold, the warmth of the small room felt delicious, the air humid and wood-scented. They ordered too much food, as was the custom of their family, and Sixth Uncle had a bottle of sake that seemed too big for one person.
‘What a great holiday this is,’ Sixth Uncle said as he refilled the tiny cup; he misjudged the size of it, and the sake spilled onto the smooth lacquered surface of the table. ‘Thank goodness you’re around, though, otherwise it would just be your shit-boring parents.’
Justin smiled; Sixth Uncle was the only person he knew who spoke of his parents in this way – irreverently, whatever respect he had for Justin’s father well hidden under layers of coarse humour.
‘How on earth did such boring parents bring up a happy, strong boy like you? If you were just a couple of years older I’d let you drink some sake while no one’s looking. Hey – maybe I could slip it into your teacup? No, no, that would be too bad of me. Not even I would do that to my favourite nephew – though you’ve always been very grown-up for your age, so I wouldn’t give a shit about getting you drunk. Only thing I’d worry about is your dragon-tongued mother. Oh my God, speaking of getting drunk, I think I’m already pretty wasted.’
Justin toyed with a piece of lamb that was drying out on the helmet-shaped griddle in front of him, slowly sizzling to a crisp alongside a charred piece of corn. Sixth Uncle had told him that the dish was called ‘Genghis Khan’ because the grill was modelled on the exact form of an ancient Mongol armoured helmet, but Justin had not believed him – Sixth Uncle was full of amazing, unbelievable stories. Often Justin had thought that they were Sixth Uncle’s way of livening the heavy atmosphere at the dinner table, for he was the only one who would ever say anything amusing (and Justin would be the only one to laugh); but recently Justin had begun to realise that Sixth Uncle’s anecdotes were aimed at him. He had sensed a growing connivance, Sixth Uncle reaching out to him tentatively, for reasons he was not able to fathom. He was glad of the jovial company, but troubled by the lack of clarity; in spite of Sixth Uncle’s almost comic façade, he too operated within the family’s unspoken language, in which one was somehow expected to understand all that was not articulated.
‘Do you know what I’m going to do when I retire?’ Sixth Uncle continued. ‘I’m going to buy a stinking huge farm in Tasmania and never come back. People tell me property is dirt cheap down there. I can get a massive ranch with sheep and cows and live happily ever after.’
‘But Sixth Uncle, you don’t know anything about sheep or cows.’
‘How difficult can it be?’ Sixth Uncle poured another overfilled cup of sake and looked at the clear beads of liquid on the table. ‘Must be easier than dealing in property.’
There followed a silence that made Justin anxious: one of those moments just before someone said something important. In his family’s unsaid-said ways, he understood that this was a preparation for an announcement of some kind, the delivery of news that would mark a turning point – perhaps something relatively minor, but a shift nonetheless.
‘Do you know what people in the business call me? “The Fixer”. Sometimes they call me “The Enforcer”, but I don’t really like to hear that. “The Fixer” sounds better. Even the family calls me that sometimes.’
Justin nodded. He had heard his father refer to Sixth Uncle’s pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to problem-solving, the way he could always untangle a sticky situation.
‘In every generation of our family there needs to be a Fixer. Before me there was my Third Uncle, who you never knew. Without him the family business would have gone bust several times over – your grandfather was a clever man, but he wasn’t streetwise at all. The family needed someone to look after the more practical side of things so the glamorous stuff could happen. The minor details are important too, that’s what Third Uncle told me. I learnt everything from him. And after me it’ll be your turn.’
The small window next to their table offered a view of the narrow alley; above the doorways, lamps had come on. Justin could not see the sky, but he guessed that the snow had made the evening draw in. A flag sign fluttered above an entranceway; amidst the Japanese characters he recognised the Chinese name for Hokkaido: North Sea Island, a place marooned in the cold north.
‘Your father says it’s not normal for the eldest son to do the work I do. He wants you to sit in a fancy office the way he does, or look after the money in Singapore. What a shit-boring job that is! But what choice do we have? Look at your brother – he’s a sweet kid, but already you can see that he’s too weak, spoilt rotten, he’ll never have what it takes to deal with the harsher things in life. At his age you were already much more mature, you were different. Remember a few years ago? When you fractured your ankle or leg or whatever and for a few days you were hobbling around? Your father got mad because he thought you were pretending. And then you just forced yourself to walk normally, and no one knew anything for months, until the doctor said, My God, I think he’s fractured his leg. I thought, wow, this kid is tough! No one said so, but everyone was so impressed by your bravery. And I guess it’s because of – OK, let’s just say it – your background.’
Justin nodded. He tried to read the signs above the doorways in the alleyway outside; some of them were written in traditional Chinese script, and it was fun trying to make out the names. White Birch Mountain Village. Brilliant Plum Teahouse.
‘But you know, you’ve been raised as the eldest son, you’ve never been treated as anything other than the Number One Brother, so whose blood you are exactly is not important. We’re not so old-fashioned that we care about these things. It’s just – like I said, it explains why you are different from your brother. And better than him, frankly. Yes, we should just say it! He’s going to become a lawyer or an accountant; maybe he’ll look after some small part of the business, like the tea or rubber plantations. Or maybe he’ll do what your dad does now – sit in the office and watch the money coming in and sometimes play with the accounts before going off to play golf. That’s for pussies. You’re different. You’re stronger. That’s why you’ll have to carry more responsibility.’
That he was different was undeniable, as was the fact that he was the eldest son. At times he wondered how someone who was not born of the family could be treated to its privileges – and now its responsibilities – but his family did not question it, and neither, therefore, did he. They had been clear about the situation from the start, had not lied or sought to protect him from the truth: they had taken him in, the infant son of a distant relative, a poor girl from the provinces who had been abandoned by her husband and could not cope with a baby. She was so tenuously related that she might not even have been part of the extended clan, though in the old Chinese way she was referred to as ‘cousin’, and in today’s terms, in a family more modern than his, the process by which he came to live in his new home would be called ‘adoption’ rather than just ‘taking in’. His birth mother had emigrated to Canada, and had he wanted to, Justin could easily have asked about her, perhaps even asked to see her. But he felt no filial curiosity; his bloodline offered no lure. His family had raised him as their own, and not just as their own but as the highest of the male cousins – the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son – a position not usurped even when his younger brother came along. His place within the family had always been indisputable, despite his provenance. And for that he would always be grateful. He would always obey the family and fight for them and never fail them; he did not need Sixth Uncle to tell him to do so.
‘You need to start hanging out with me, I’ll teach you a thing or two. Your dad wants you to start learning the business soon. With property, you have to begin with the basics. See that chef over there, slicing the fish as if he’s creating some fucking work of art? Well, he started life as a kitchen porter, collecting scraps of garbage and dumping them outside for the rats to eat. Our work is like that too. You want to build apartment blocks all over Vancouver and Melbourne? Want to reclaim a bit of Hong Kong harbour so you can build a new office tower? First you have to learn the shit that I have to deal with. All the goddamn shit.’
There was no one else in the restaurant, except for the chef-owner who was now cleaning his knives with a small white cloth folded into a little triangle; when he finished each one he would hold the tip level with his eyes and stare at it for a few seconds before putting it away.
Still seated, Sixth Uncle began to pull on his down jacket. His arms snagged in the sleeves and the collar twisted awkwardly against his neck. He sat at the table rubbing his eyes, the puffy jacket making him seem even more rotund than usual. ‘God, my head hurts,’ he said.
Outside, the afternoon had given way to a long northern twilight that tinged the snow-draped city a faint electric blue. They walked slowly back to the hotel along the long, windswept avenue. All around them, the branches of the cherry trees were clad in sleeves of frost studded with ice crystals. In a few months they would be covered in blossom again. They paused to look at a snow sculpture of a plump little cartoon cat with its paw raised in greeting. ‘Looks like me,’ Sixth Uncle said. When Justin glanced at his uncle he saw that his eyes were moist, and tears were streaming down his reddened cheeks.
‘Are you OK, Sixth Uncle?’ he asked, returning his gaze to the cat.
Sixth Uncle blinked and wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands. ‘It’s just the wind. I hate this damned cold.’
They continued walking and Sixth Uncle put his arm around Justin’s shoulders. ‘I swear to God, the moment you’re old enough to take over this damn family’s affairs, I’m going to buy that farm and piss off to Tasmania forever.’
How to be Gracious
I think we have already spoken of the value of education. Those of you who follow the cut and thrust of modern international entrepreneurship will be quick to point out that the majority of the world’s billionaires are not in fact highly educated in the traditional sense: all those Chinese property tycoons and coal-mining emperors, those Indian steel magnates – they skipped the glitter of Harvard and slid straight into life’s great river, thrashing about in the muddy waters until they learnt to swim smoothly. The more pedantic among you will say that they were educated too, only in a different way – all that nonsense about ‘the university of life’, &c, &c.
But that is not what I meant when I spoke of education, for to my mind, learning how to double-cross someone is not education. All those fancy things that men (yes, it is usually men, though increasingly women too) of high finance speak about, like takeovers, selling short, asset stripping – are these not rich people’s terms for bullying, gambling and cheating? I risk the wrath of my fellow entrepreneurial giants by saying this, but most tycoons I know are, frankly, not very gracious. What can you expect? Tycoon. Mogul. Magnate. Even the words these people use to describe themselves would indicate a certain mentality, for they are not kindly words, but ones designed to impress in the crassest of ways. They seek to dominate in that old-fashioned feudalistic way, to conquer, to destroy. And it is these base tendencies that you must resist if ever you are to become a gracious, generous billionaire. The time for that kind of old-fashioned accumulation of wealth is over. Indeed, part of the purpose of this book is to announce the end of this financial smash-and-grab and urge you to look away from the excesses committed by those who consider themselves the elite.
I say ‘they’. But maybe I should say ‘we’. Most of you who are aware of my reputation will have assumed that I belong to this band of brutal overlords, and I do not blame you for doing so. On paper, my ruthless credentials are impeccable: the swift mergers and acquisitions of well-known companies that take the markets by surprise, the penthouse living, the intercontinental first-class flights – certain elements of my life will not endear themselves to the casual observer. Sometimes when I read an article about myself even I recoil at the seeming callousness of my financial manoeuvring. I look at the unflattering photo of myself sitting in front of a microphone at some hastily arranged press conference, my face largely expressionless. What a dreadful life this Walter Chao must have, I think. Imagine being him. Often I forget that he is in fact me.
But then I remember my tireless charitable and educational projects, such as the construction of modern fibreglass bus shelters in rural areas of South-East Asia, which provide schoolchildren with respite from the downpours of the monsoon season, or the recent community centre built entirely of recycled plastic bottles – the first of its kind anywhere in the world, I think. I read with dismay a few ungracious accusations in the press that made it seem that my bus shelters were a sneaky way of marketing in hard-to-reach villages, simply because they happen to carry advertisements for the brand of soft drinks that I acquired several years ago. Next they will be saying that my carbon-neutral, waste-utilising community centre is a mere publicity stunt because it is made from the same soft-drink bottles.
Fortunately I pay little attention to these sorts of comments, just as I ignore the sneering that accompanies my self-help books. I write these not to make money, you understand, but to share the map of my success with ordinary people in need of inspiration. Nor are these books an outlet for vanity or a search for deeper recognition: most of them have been written under various pseudonyms, including the multi-million-bestselling Secrets of a Five Star Billionaire.
So those of you who think you know me – think again.
Shrugging off all ungracious thoughts, let us return to the concept of graciousness and education. Of giving and not expecting any return. I mentioned before that I am planning a long-lasting legacy to the world, and the ideas are accelerating as I write. My original proposal to build a fairly unassuming cultural centre has mushroomed somewhat since I began working on it. I was at dinner with one of the world’s leading avant-garde architects and urban planners (whose identity must remain secret until approval for the project is granted), who became terribly excited at my plans. This architect virtually leapt out of his/her chair as soon as I explained what I intended to do, nearly embarrassing our host (the cold hors d’oeuvres had barely been served). He/she called me a visionary – a compliment indeed, coming from someone responsible for some of the most arresting buildings in the world. He/she has flung him/herself with great enthusiasm at this project – the first set of drawings is in development right now: part charitable foundation, part cultural centre, part dreamscape. No municipal council in the world will be able to resist a work of such ground-breaking importance.
Annoyingly, I have been somewhat distracted from this noble project by developments elsewhere in my portfolio of interests – what the ungracious would call my ‘empire’. But as I am on the brink of a daring acquisition of one of the oldest, most famous companies in South-East Asia, I suppose it is hard to dispute accusations of bravado and entrepreneurial plundering. Yet I am only doing what others have done many times before me. It will hit the headlines in the next few days, so you will know all about it then – there’s no need to elaborate here. I will be a happier, more contented man once the deal is done and I can return to the work that really matters to me – the gracious business of giving.
I forgot to say that I have identified a site for my cultural centre. I will be travelling there very shortly to push matters along. The city? I said before that it should be one capable of showing off my legacy in all its twenty-first-century glory. That doesn’t leave many choices. So in a few weeks I shall move my base of operations to the chosen city: Shanghai.
7
Calmly Negotiate Difficult Situations
It seems that Gary has a history of misconduct which is impressive for someone so young. Readers of tabloid newspapers will not fail to be astounded by the unexpectedly long catalogue that is beginning to emerge. How the record company has managed to keep these incidents hushed up for so long is anyone’s guess – public relations people are so powerful these days.
Among the revelations on the front pages of the papers these days are:
The wrecked luxury suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Singapore after his much-lauded concert there last year (no comment was made by the hotel, which prides itself on its discretion, but everyone supposes that it was paid off by Gary’s record company).
A hotel chambermaid in Hangzhou who claims Gary exposed himself inappropriately to her last week. She says that he came out of the bathroom and let his towel fall to the ground before making an obscene suggestion to her. She did not report the incident because she felt no one would believe her.
An unpaid bill of US$12,000 in an upscale Kuala Lumpur restaurant, which included five bottles of Krug champagne.
And an altercation in a trendy drinking spot in the Soho area of Hong Kong, when Gary allegedly grabbed a barman by the throat and threatened to kill him.
Yes, it is clear that Gary has a drinking problem, no one can deny it. Like many young people, he certainly does not react well to alcohol. But is it right for a superstar with so many privileges to behave in this way in public, especially when his actions hurt other people? This is a tragic affair, and no matter how many innocent, ordinary people are harmed by his alcohol-fuelled madness, the ultimate victim is Gary himself: the Fallen Angel.
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Tash Aw
In this stunning new novel, Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.Phoebe has come to China buoyed with hope, but her dreams are shattered as the job she was promised seems never to have existed. Gary is a successful pop star, but his fans disappear after a bar-room brawl. Yinghui was once a poetry-loving activist and is not sure how she became a wealthy businesswoman. Justin works hard for his powerful family, but begins to wonder if his efforts are appreciated. And then there is the Five Star Billionaire himself, pulling the strings of destiny, his lessons for success unsettling the dynamics of these disparate lives.In FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE, Tash Aw charts the weave of their journeys in the new China, counterpointing their adventures with the old life they have left behind in Malaysia. The result is a brilliant examination of the migrations that are shaping this dazzling new city, and their effect on myriad individual lives.
TASH AW
Five Star Billionaire
A Novel
For Aw Tee Min and Yap Chee Chun
Suppose one can live without outside pressure, suppose one can create one’s own inner tension – then it is not true that there is nothing in man.
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ, The Captive Mind
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u9ecf0847-1295-5620-952c-b94e9da739a0)
Dedication (#u08014885-17e4-5671-aef3-efd9e0c6f831)
Epigraph (#uacc9e0de-adf5-5a1c-b583-4d710848c9b8)
Foreword: How to be a Billionaire (#u2bb89b94-2840-59db-b5c4-8fbf30b8f845)
1. Move to Where the Money Is (#u53e682b9-77a3-5b05-b39d-34eea60f9e62)
2. Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself (#uf033cef7-bbb4-59c4-8ad2-8d5917a7c5ad)
3. Bravely Set the World on Fire (#u92b18f0b-e1e3-51fd-ab15-5e8d9e14e9fa)
4. Forget the Past, Look Only to the Future (#u32722cda-8dad-5f4c-b06d-954187b727fb)
5. Reinvent Yourself (#u9e47a243-930c-5660-9be5-da654795ef0b)
6. Perform All Obligations and Duties with Joy (#u3c5760fa-5934-5fad-81a1-3029953b6df9)
7. Calmly Negotiate Difficult Situations (#u0fe4708d-c500-5989-a616-80a0539f663c)
8. Always Rebound After Each Failure (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Pursue Gains, Forget Righteousness (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Never Lapse into Despair or Apathy (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Inquire Deeply into Every Problem (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Work with a Soulmate, Someone Who Understands You (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Luxuriate in Serendipitous Events (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Even Beautiful Things Will Fade (#litres_trial_promo)
15. A Strong Fighting Spirit Swallows Mountains and Rivers (#litres_trial_promo)
16. Beware of Storms Arising from Clear Skies (#litres_trial_promo)
17. Cultivate an Urbane, Humorous Personality (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Be Prepared to Sacrifice Everything (#litres_trial_promo)
19. There Can Be No Turning Back (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Anticipate Danger in Times of Peace (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Adopt Others’ Thoughts as Though They Were Your Own (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Boundaries Change with the Passing of Time (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Nothing Remains Good or Bad Forever (#litres_trial_promo)
24. Embrace Your Bright Future (#litres_trial_promo)
25. Know When to Cut Your Losses (#litres_trial_promo)
26. Strive to Understand the Big Picture (#litres_trial_promo)
27. Nothing in Life Lasts Forever (#litres_trial_promo)
28. Travel Far, Keep Searching (#litres_trial_promo)
29. Life is a Floating Dream (#litres_trial_promo)
30. The Journey is Long (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword: How to be a Billionaire
Some time ago – I forget exactly when – I decided that I would one day be very rich. By this I mean not just comfortably well off but superabundantly, incalculably wealthy, the way only children imagine wealth to be. Indeed, nowadays, whenever I am pressed to pinpoint the time in my life when these notions of great fortune formed in my head, I always answer that it must have been sometime in my adolescence, when I was conscious of the price of life’s treasures but not yet fully aware of their many limitations, for there has always been something inherently childlike in my pursuit of money – that much I admit.
When I was growing up in rural Malaysia, one of my favourite TV programmes was a drama series set in a legal practice somewhere in America. All the details – the actors, the plots, the setting – are lost to me now, blurred not just by the passage of time but by a haze of bad subtitles and interrupted transmissions (the power generator and the aerial took it in turns to malfunction with crushing predictability, though in those days it seemed perfectly normal). I am not certain I could tell you what happened in a single episode of that soap opera, and besides, I did not care for the artificial little conflicts that took place all the time, the emotional ups and downs, men and women crying because they were falling in love, or out of love; the arguing, making up, making love, etc. I had a sensation that they were wasting time, that their days and nights could have been spent more profitably; I think I probably felt some degree of frustration at this. But even these are fleeting impressions, and the only thing I really remember is the opening sequence, a sweeping panorama of metal-and-glass skyscrapers glinting in the sun, people in sharp suits carrying briefcases as they vanished into revolving doors, the endless rush of traffic on sunlit freeways. And every time I sat down in front of the TV I would think: One day, I will own a building like that, a whole tower block filled with industrious, clever people working to make their fantasies come true.
All I cared for were these introductory images; the show that followed was of secondary importance to me.
So much wasted time.
Now, when I look back at those childhood fantasies, I chuckle with embarrassment, for I realise that I was foolish: I should never have been so modest in my ambitions, nor waited so long to pursue them.
It is said that the legendary tycoon Cecil Lim Kee Huat – still compos mentis today at 101 – made his first profit at the age of eight, selling watermelons off a cart on the old coast road to Port Dickson. At thirteen he was running a coffee stand in Seremban, and at fifteen, salvaging and redistributing automobile spare parts on a semi-industrial scale, a recycling genius long before the concept was even invented. Small-town Malaya in the 1920s was not a place for dreams. He was eighteen and working as an occasional porter in the Colony Club when he had the good fortune to meet a young Assistant District Officer from Fife called MacKinnon, only recently arrived in the Malay States. History does not record the precise nature of their relationship (those ugly rumours of blackmail were never proved); and in any event, as we will see later, imagining the whys and wherefores of past events, the what-might-have-beens – all that is pointless. The only thing worth considering is what actually happens, and what happened in Lim’s case was that he was left with enough money upon MacKinnon’s untimely death (in a drowning accident) to start the first local insurance business in Singapore, a small enterprise that would eventually become the Overseas Chinese Assurance Company, for so long a bedrock of the Malaysian and Singaporean commercial landscape until its recent collapse. We can learn much from people like Lim, but his case study would involve a separate book altogether. For now, it is sufficient to ask: What were you doing when you were eight, thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen? The answer is, I suspect: Not very much.
In the business of life, every tiny episode is a test, every human encounter a lesson. Look and learn. One day you might achieve all that I have. But time is sprinting past you, faster than you think. You’re already playing catch-up, even as you read this.
Fortunately, you do get a second chance. My advice to you is: Take it. A third rarely comes your way.
1
Move to Where the Money Is
There was a boy at the counter waiting for his coffee, nodding to the music. Phoebe had noticed him as soon as he walked through the door, his walk so confident, soft yet bouncy. He must have grown up walking on carpet. He ordered two lattes and a green tea muffin and paid with a silver ICBC card that he slipped out of a wallet covered in grey-and-black chessboard squares. He was only a couple of years younger than Phoebe, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, but already he had a nice car, a silver-blue hatchback she had seen earlier when she was crossing the street and he nearly ran her over. It was strange how Phoebe noticed such things nowadays, as swift and easy as breathing. She wondered when she had picked up the habit. She had not always been like this.
Outside, the branches of the plane trees strained the bright mid-autumn sunlight, their shadows casting a pretty pattern on the pavement. There was a light wind, too, that made the leaves dance.
‘You like this music, huh?’ Phoebe asked as she reached across him for some sachets of sugar.
His coffees arrived. ‘It’s bossa nova,’ he said, as if it was an explanation, only she didn’t understand it.
‘Ei, I also like Spanish music!’
‘Huh?’ he muttered as he balanced his tray. ‘It’s Brazilian.’ He didn’t even look at her, though she was glad he didn’t, because if he had, it would have been a you-are-nothing look, the kind of quick glance she had become used to since arriving in Shanghai, people from high up looking down on her.
Brazil and Spain were nearly the same, anyway.
They were in a Western-style coffee bar just off Huaihai Lu; the streets were busy, it was a Saturday. But the week no longer divided neatly into weekend and weekday for Phoebe; it had ceased to do so ever since she arrived in Shanghai a few weeks prior to this. Every day tumbled into the next without meaning, as they had done for too long now. She didn’t even know what she was doing in this part of town; she couldn’t afford anything in the shops and her Italian coffee cost more than the shirt she was wearing. It was a big mistake to have come here. Her plan was so stupid; what did she think she would accomplish? Maybe she would have to reconsider everything.
Phoebe Chen Aiping, why are you so afraid all the time? Do not be afraid! Failure is not acceptable! You must raise yourself up and raise up your entire family.
She had started keeping a diary. Every day she would write down her darkest fears and craziest ambitions. It was a technique she’d learnt from a self-help master one day in Guangzhou as she waited in a noodle shop, killing time just after she had been to the Human Resources Market. A small TV had been set on top of the glass counter next to jars of White Rabbit sweets, but at first she did not pay attention, she thought it was just the news. Then she realised that it was a DVD of an inspirational life-teacher, a woman who talked about how she had turned her life around and now wanted to show the rest of us how we too could transform our lowly, invisible existence into a life of eternal happiness and success. Phoebe liked the way the woman looked straight at her, holding her gaze so steadily that Phoebe felt embarrassed, shamed by her own failure, the complete lack of even the tiniest achievement in her life. The woman had shimmering lacquered hair that was classy but not old-fashioned. She showed how a mature woman can look beautiful and successful even when no longer in her first springtime, as she put it herself, laughing. She had so many wise things to say, so many clever sayings and details on how to be successful. If only Phoebe had had a pen and paper she would have written down every single one, because now she cannot remember much except the feeling of courage the woman had given her, words about not being afraid of being on one’s own, far from home. It was as if she had looked into Phoebe’s head and listened to all the anxieties that were spinning around inside, as if she had been next to Phoebe as she lay awake at night wondering how she was going to face the next day. Phoebe felt a release, as if someone had lifted a great mountain of rocks from her shoulders, as if someone had said, You are not alone, I understand your troubles, I understand your loneliness, I am also like you. And Phoebe thought, The moment I have some money, the first thing I am going to buy is your book. I will not even buy an LV handbag or a new HTC smartphone, I am going to buy your words of wisdom and study them the way some people study the Bible.
The book was called Secrets of a Five Star Billionaire. This is something Phoebe would never forget.
One tip that did stick in her mind was the diary, which the woman did not call a diary but a Journal of Your Secret Self, in which you would write down all your black terrors, everything that made you fearful and weak, alongside everything you dream of. You must have more positive dreams than burdensome fears. Once you write something in this book it cannot harm you any more because the fears are conquered by the dreams on the opposite page. So when you are successful you can read this journal one last time before you discard it forever, and you will smile to see how afraid and underdeveloped you were, because you will have come so far. Then you will throw this book away into the Huangpu River and your past self will disappear, leaving only the glorious reborn product of your dreams.
She started the journal six months ago, but still her dreams had not cancelled out her fears. It would happen soon. It had to.
I must not let this city crush me down.
Phoebe looked around the café. The chairs were mustard-yellow and grey, the walls unpainted concrete, as if the work had not yet been finished, but she knew that it was meant to look like this, it was considered fashionable. On the terrace outside there were foreigners sitting with their faces tilted towards the sun – they did not mind their skin turning to leather. Someone got up to leave and suddenly there was a table free next to the Brazilian-music lover. He was with a girl. Maybe it was his sister and not a girlfriend.
Phoebe sat down next to them and turned her body away slightly to show she was not interested in what they were doing. But in the reflection in the window – the sun was shining brightly that day, it was almost Mid-Autumn Festival and the weather was crisp, golden, perfect for dreaming – she could see them quite clearly. The girl was bathed in crystal light as if on a stage, and the boy was cut in half by a slanting line of darkness. Every time he leant forward he came into the light. His skin was like candlewax.
As the girl bent over her magazine, Phoebe could see that she was definitely a girlfriend, not a sister. Her hair fell over her face, so Phoebe could not tell if she was pretty, but she sat the way a pretty person would. Her dress was a big black shirt with loads of words printed all over it like graffiti, meaningless sentences such as PEACE
PARIS, and honestly it was horrible and made her body look formless as a ghost, but it was expensive, anyone could see that. The handbag on the floor was made of leather so soft it seemed to melt into the ground. It spread out at the girl’s feet like an exotic pet, and Phoebe wanted to stroke its cross-hatch pattern to see what it felt like. The boy leant forward and in the mirrored reflection he caught Phoebe’s eye. He said something to his girlfriend in Shanghainese which Phoebe couldn’t understand, and the girl looked up at Phoebe with a sideways glance. It was something Shanghainese girls had perfected, this method of looking at you side-on without turning their faces to you. It meant that they could show off their fine cheekbones and appear uninterested at the same time, and it made you feel that you were not important at all to them, not worthy even of a proper stare.
Phoebe looked away at once. Her cheeks felt hot.
Do not let other people step on you.
Sometimes Shanghai weighed down on her with the weight of ten skyscrapers. The people were so haughty, their dialect so harsh to her ears. If someone talked to her in their language she would feel attacked just by the sound of it. She had come here full of hope, but on some nights, even after she had deposited all her loathing and terror into her secret journal, she still felt that she was tumbling down, down, and there was no way up. It had been a mistake to gamble as she did.
She was not from any part of China, but from a country thousands of miles to the south, and in that country she had grown up in a small town in the far north-east. It is a region that is poor and remote, so she is used to people thinking of her as inferior, even in her own country. In her small town the way of life had not changed very much for fifty years, and would probably never change. Visitors from the capital city used to call it charming, but they didn’t have to live there. It was not a place for dreams and ambition, and so Phoebe did not dream. She did what all the other young boys and girls did when they left school at sixteen: they travelled across the mountain range that cut the country in two to find work on the west coast, moving slowly southward until they reached the capital city.
Here are some of the jobs her friends took in the year they left home. Trainee waiter. Assistant fake-watch stall-holder. Karaoke hostess. Assembly-line worker in a semiconductor factory. Bar girl. Shampoo girl. Water-cooler delivery man. Seafood-restaurant cleaner. (Phoebe’s first job was among those listed above, but she would rather not say which one.) Five years in these kinds of jobs, they passed so slowly.
Then she had some luck. There had been a girl who’d disappeared. Everyone thought she was in trouble – she’d been hanging out with a gangster, the kind of big-city boy you couldn’t tell your small-town parents about, and everyone thought it wouldn’t be long before she was into drugs or prostitution; they were sure of it because she had turned up one day with a big jade bracelet and a black eye. But from nowhere Phoebe received an email from this girl. She wasn’t in trouble, she was in China. She’d just decided that enough was enough, and left one morning without telling her boyfriend. She’d saved enough money to go to Hong Kong, where she’d been a karaoke hostess for a while – she was not ashamed to say it because everyone does it, but it was not for long – and now she was working in Shenzhen. She was a restaurant manager, a classy international place, not some dump, you know, and she was in charge of a staff of sixteen. She even had her own apartment (photo attached – small but bright and modern with a vase of plastic roses on a glass table). Thing is, she’d met a businessman from Beijing who was going to marry her and take her up north, and she wanted to make sure everything was OK at the restaurant before she left. They always needed good waiting staff at New World Restaurant. Just come! Don’t worry about visas. We can fix that. There were two smiley faces and a winky one at the end of the email.
Those days were so exciting, when they emailed each other several times a day. What clothes shall I bring? What is the winter weather like? What kind of shoes do I need for my uniform? Each email that arrived from China made Phoebe feel that she was one step closer to lifting herself up in the world and becoming someone successful. It made the hair salon where she was working at the time seem so small – the clients were small people who did not realise how small they were. When they said to her, Hey, Phoebe, you are not concentrating, she just laughed inside because she knew that very soon she would be the one giving them orders and leaving them tips. She was going to experience adventures and see things that none of them could even dream about.
It took her a few weeks to get enough money together for the ticket to Hong Kong plus a bit extra to get her to Shenzhen, but from then on it would be plain sailing, because she had a job lined up and she would stay with her friend for the first couple of months until she found her own place. She didn’t need all that much money, she would start making plenty once she got there, her friend assured her. From then on anything was possible. She could start her own business doing whatever she wanted – some former waitresses at the restaurant were already going around in chauffeur-driven cars just a year after they quit their jobs. New China was amazing, she would see for herself. No one asks too many questions, no one cares where you are from. All that counts is your ability. If you can do a job, you’re hired.
People say that it is hard to leave their lives behind, and that when the time comes for you to do so you will feel reluctance and longing for your home. But these are people with nice lives to leave behind. For others it is different. Leaving is a relief.
The emails continued, full of !!! marks as usual, but they were less frequent, and finally, at the internet café near East Tsim Sha Tsui station, waiting for the train to Shenzhen, Phoebe logged on for the first time in four days to find not a single email from her friend. Not even a short message that said, Hurry, too excited, followed by lots of smileys. When at last she got to Shenzhen it took her some time to locate the restaurant. The sign was proud and shiny. New World International Restaurant, it read above twin pillars of twisted gold dragons – Phoebe recognised it from the photos her friend had sent her. The menu was in a glass case outside, a sure sign of a classy joint. But as she approached, Phoebe’s heart began to experience a dark fluttering in her ribcage, the way she imagined bat wings would feel against her cheek. It was a sensation that would stay with her for the rest of her time in China. The glass doors were open, but the restaurant inside was dim even though it was the middle of the afternoon. When she stepped inside she saw an empty space without any chairs and tables. Part of the floor had been ripped up, and on the bare concrete she could see messy patches of glue where carpets had once been laid. There was a bar decorated with scenes of Chinese legends carved in bronze, cranes flying over mountains and lakes. Some workmen were shifting machinery and tools at the far end of the restaurant, and when Phoebe called out to them they seemed confused. The restaurant had closed down a few days ago, soon it would be a hotpot chain. The people who worked there? Probably just got jobs somewhere else. No one stays in a job for long in Shenzhen anyway.
She thought, This is not a good situation.
She tried calling her friend’s mobile phone number, but it was dead. This number is out of use, the voice told her, over and over again. Each time she dialled it was the same. This number is out of use.
She checked how much money she had and began looking for a cheap guesthouse. The streets were clean but full of people. Everyone looked as though they were hurrying to an appointment, everyone had some place to go. Amid the mass of people that swarmed around her like a thick muddy river, she started to notice a certain kind of person, and soon they were the only people she really saw. Young single women. They were everywhere, rushing for the bus or marching steadfastly with a steely look on their faces, or going from shop to shop handing out their CVs, their entire lives on one sheet of paper. They were all restless, they were all moving, they were all looking for work, floating everywhere, casting out their lives to whoever would take them.
So this is how it happens. This is how I become like them, Phoebe thought. In the space of a few hours she had passed from one world to another. One moment she was almost an assistant manager in a classy international restaurant, next moment she was a migrant worker. Her new life had materialised out of thin air like a trick of fate. Unattached, searching, alone. Some people say that when you find other people who are just like you, who share your position in life, you feel happier, less alone, but Phoebe did not think this was true. Knowing that she was the same as millions of other girls made her feel lonelier than ever.
She went back to her lodgings. The door wouldn’t lock, so she slept with her handbag tucked into her belly, curved into a tight C-shape.
Those first few months in Shenzhen passed very quickly. During this time Phoebe did a number of jobs that she would rather not talk about right now. Maybe some day, but not now.
You can only rely on yourself. There are no true friends in this world. If you place your trust in others you will open yourself to danger and hurtfulness.
She got a job at a place called Guangdong Bigfaith Quality Garment Company, a factory that made fashion clothes for Western brands – not the expensive labels that Phoebe had heard of but lesser ones that sold shiny, colourful clothes, though the other girls told her that these were trendy shops even though they were low-cost. Apparently in the West even rich people buy cheap clothes. Personally Phoebe did not want any of the skirts or jackets or blouses that were made at the factory; they looked unclassy even to her. Her job was to match up the orders to the delivery notes and make sure that everything tallied. It was not a difficult job, but still she cried every night. The hours were long and at night she had to endure being in a dorm with the other girls, so many other girls. She hated seeing their underwear strung up on washing lines in every room, even in the corridors, drying in the damp air. Everywhere you went in the dormitory block all you saw was lines of damp underwear, and the whole place smelled of detergent and sweat. All day and night there was arguing and crying. She hated this, especially the night-time sobbing. It was as if everyone thought that when it was dark no one could hear them cry. She had to get away from them, she was not like them. But for now she had no choice.
The other hard thing to deal with was the jealousy, the things that were said about her. (How did she get such a good job straight away? Why was she in admin and not on the production line when she had only just joined the company? I hear she hasn’t even been out for long.) Well, Phoebe wanted to explain, first of all it was because she could speak English and Cantonese, the language of all the rich factory-owners down here in the south. And, quite simply, it was because she was better than the rest of them. But she knew to keep silent. She was afraid of the large groups of girls who came from the big provinces, especially the Hunanese girls who smuggled things out of the factory to sell outside and threatened to kill anyone who reported them. They liked to fight. Everyone had their own clan for protection: the Sichuan girls looked after each other, even the Anhui girls were numerous enough to have support. Only Phoebe was alone, but she would rise above them all because she was smarter. A line stuck in her head, advice given to her by the self-made millionaire. Hide your brightness, remain in the shadows. So she had to endure the jealousy and the detergent and the sweat and the crying. But for how long?
Do not let lesser people drag you down. You are a star that shines brightly.
She had a picture of a Taiwanese pop star by her bed. It was just a page torn from a magazine, an advertisement for cows’ milk, but it was a nicer decoration than the strung-up panties that the other girls had. It was a struggle to keep the Sellotape attached to the glossy painted wall because of the humidity, and the top corner kept falling away. But she persisted in sticking the picture up so she could look at him and dream about a world where there was no sobbing. If she turned her body at an angle there was only him and her in the world. She liked his delicate smile and watery eyes, and found even the silly white milk-moustache on his lip endearing. When she looked at his face she felt hope swell in her chest. His gentleness made her forget about the harshness of life and made her believe that she could work hard and show the world her true inner beauty. Maybe she could even be his girlfriend one day. Oh, she knew that it was just a fantasy, but he was so dreamy, and reminded her of the boys she had grown up with, whom she would remember forever as teenagers, even though they had now all moved to the cities and were selling fake leather wallets and probably amphetamines on the side. They had been so happy before, and now they were all growing old so quickly, including Phoebe.
But you are so young, little sister. That was what the new manager of her division began saying to her one day. He was a man from Hong Kong, not fat not thin, not ugly not handsome, just a man from Hong Kong. Once a month he would visit the factory and spend four or five days there. Every time he came he would call her into his office and show her the gifts he had brought for her – a bag of the juiciest tangerines, small sugary pineapples from Taiwan, strawberries, some foreign chocolate that tasted bitter and floury – delicacies that people bought when they could afford to travel. The hamper of fruit lay on his desk wrapped in stiff crinkly plastic that made a loud noise when she touched it. She did not know how she was going to carry it all the way back to her dorm, across the huge courtyard and the basketball courts, did not know where she would keep it or how she would explain it to the other girls. The jealousy against her had not really gone away; the tide had just subsided for the time being, but was waiting to well up like a tsunami at any moment. She knew that the gift was wrong, that she had not really done anything to deserve it, but as she looked at the shiny ripe persimmons, she felt special. Someone had noticed her, someone had thought of her enough to buy her nice things. It had been a long time since anyone had done that, so she accepted the gift.
As she carried the basket down the corridor to her dorm, she could feel the other girls’ hot stares burning her with their envy. She was sweating, and her heart was heavy with guilt, heavier than the basket she was carrying. But as she walked into the dorm she found herself talking freely, the words flowing easily from her mouth. Ei, everyone, look what I have! A cousin of mine in Hong Kong got married to a very rich man and they had their wedding. I couldn’t afford to go so they sent me some tokens of their big celebration. Come, come, let’s all share!
Hei, you did not tell us you are from Hong Kong.
Yes, Phoebe said. From just near the border, in the New Territories.
Oooh, the girls said as they reached for the fruit. So I guess it’s natural that you speak Cantonese! We thought you just learnt it to curry favour with the boss!
This is how things happen in China, Phoebe thought as she sat watching her new friends sharing the basket of fruit. Things change so fast. From then on all the girls knew who she was, and they were nice to her. They took her clothes and washed them for her when she was on a long shift, and some of them began to talk to her about their private lives – where they were from, their boyfriend problems, their ambitions. One day she was talking to a girl, just someone she shared meal breaks with in the canteen sometimes, not really a friend. The girl’s mobile phone rang, and she just looked at the screen without answering. Her face twisted into a pained expression and she handed the phone to Phoebe. It’s the boy I was telling you about, the one who bullies me. Phoebe took the phone and did not even say hello. This is your ex-girlfriend’s cousin, she said. This mobile phone belongs to me now. Your ex has a new boyfriend and he is rich and educated, not a stupid peasant like you, so just go away or else I will make trouble for you. I know who you are and which lousy place you work at.
Wah, you are amazing, Phoebe! Everyone was laughing and someone even reached out and put her arm around Phoebe’s shoulder.
On her first day off that month she went with some other girls to the cinema. They stopped at a fast-food place and had bubble milk tea before buying a box of octopus balls which they ate while strolling through the night market, linking elbows as if they were still in middle school. They turned their noses up at the cheap clothes, far cheaper than the ones they made in the factory, stall after stall of thin spangled nylon. The music on the speakers was loud, thumping in their ribcages and drowning out their heartbeats. It made them feel so alive. The smell of fried food and charcoal grills felt familiar to Phoebe – she did not feel so very far from home after all. They saw posters advertising the latest concert of the Taiwanese singer she liked, and the ticket prices did not look too expensive.
Hei, we should all save up some money and go! someone said. Phoebe, you love Gary, don’t you? Maybe we can share the cost of your ticket, because you are always cooking for us and sharing your food with us. I hear he’s going to sing some Cantonese songs too, since it’s here in Guangzhou, so you can teach us to sing along! She was happy that they offered, but she knew that these were empty promises and that no one would actually buy her a ticket.
She stopped to buy a shiny black top decorated with beads, but the other girls scolded her. Forty kuai! Too expensive. Aiya, new girls are always the same, always spending money on useless things instead of sending it home. Besides, you should be buying nicer clothes, something that suits your slim figure better, not some Old Mother style! But Phoebe bought it anyway, she didn’t care. It had pretty embroidery, a red rose adorned with silver beads that fanned out from each petal.
But as swiftly as the bright cool days of autumn give way to the damp chill of winter, life also changes. Phoebe knew this by now. Nothing ever stood still in China, nothing was permanent. A person who is loved cannot expect that love to remain for long. There is no reason for them to keep this love; they do not have a right to be loved.
She shared her third basket of fruit and other delicacies with her dorm friends. This time there were bags of dried scallops and a tin of abalone, which none of them had ever tasted before, and they gathered to cook a meal together. It was too luxurious for lowly people like them, one girl remarked – this meal was all thanks to Phoebe.
Really, said another girl, lifting her rice bowl to her mouth. Boss Lin says this kind of thing is not so special in Hong Kong, everyone eats it over there.
How would you know? When do you ever talk to Boss Lin?
Hm, it’s true. I rarely get a chance to speak to him. The only person he speaks to is Phoebe.
I wish he didn’t, Phoebe joked. He is so boring. Hai, it’s only because of my stupid job that I have to have contact with him.
It seems he takes a special interest in you. He even calls you into his private office.
Yes, but only to scold me for tasks I haven’t done! Come, eat some more!
The next month, Mr Lin summoned Phoebe to see him as soon as he arrived. He shut the door; the blinds were already down as usual. There was no fruit basket this time, only a small box. He opened it and held out a brand-new mobile phone, the type with no buttons on the screen, just a smooth glass surface. It was something a tycoon’s daughter would have, or a businesswoman. Phoebe didn’t even know how to turn it on.
But I already have a phone.
It’s OK, take it. Just tell your friends you won it in a competition.
She held it in her hands, turning it over and over again. She held it up to her face. It was like a mirror – she could see herself in it.
You like it? Mr Lin was standing next to her, though she had not heard him approach her. He put his hand on her buttock, the palm flat, burning through her jeans. Hours later, she would still feel the imprint of his hot hand on her, leaving its mark where it had stayed for less than half a minute, maybe not even that long.
In the dorm someone said, What’s happened to your cousin in Hong Kong? No food hamper this month? I think the cousin must have suddenly died and turned into a ghost!
Next day, two Shaanxi girls from the next block were taken away by the police. When Phoebe asked why, one of her dorm mates said it was because they didn’t have the right papers. They were illegal, and one of them was underage.
But I thought you said that kind of thing doesn’t really matter, that the employer doesn’t ask too many questions, where you’re from and all that, Phoebe said.
Sure, that’s right, her dorm mate replied, smiling. But rules are rules. You can dodge the regulations for so long, but if someone makes a formal report there’s nothing anyone can do. Half the girls here are lying about something, and most of the time it’s OK. Even if you don’t have a proper hukou or your papers are fake, who cares? Only when you step out of line do others make trouble for you. Those girls were unpopular, they were arrogant and made enemies. They thought they were better than everyone else, so what could they expect? It was just a matter of time.
One morning Phoebe came back after a night shift and saw that the poster by her bed had been defaced. The pop singer’s moon-bright complexion had been dotted with acne and now he wore round black glasses and there were thick cat whiskers sprouting from his cheeks.
Time was running out for Phoebe. From the first moment she set foot in China she had felt the days vanishing from her life, vanishing into failure. Like the clock she stared at every day at work, her life was counting down the minutes before she became a non-person whom no one would ever remember. As she sat during lunch break on the low brick wall next to the volleyball court, she knew that she had to act now or she would forever be stepped on everywhere she went. The grey concrete dormitory blocks rose up on all four sides of the yard and blocked out the light. There was Cantonese pop music playing from somewhere and through an open window she could see a TV playing reruns of the Olympics, Chinese athletes winning medals. She watched the high jump for a while. A lanky blonde girl failed twice, flopping down heavily on the bar. One more go and she was out. It didn’t really matter, since she wasn’t even going to win a medal. Then suddenly she did something that made Phoebe shiver with excitement. For her third and final jump she asked for the bar to be raised higher than anyone had jumped so far, higher than she had ever attained in her whole life. She had failed at lower heights but now she was gunning for something way beyond her capabilities. She was going to jump all the way to the stars, and even if she failed she could only come down as far as the lowly position she already occupied. She stood at the end of the runway flexing her fingers and shaking her wrists, and then she started running, in big bouncy strides. Phoebe got up and turned away. She didn’t want to see what happened, it was not important to her. The only thing that mattered was that the blonde girl had gambled.
She took her expensive new phone to a Sichuan girl who traded things in the dorm, and sold it for a nice sum of cash. She washed her hair and tied it neatly before going to Boss Lin’s office. She was wearing her tightest jeans that she usually reserved for her day off. They were so tight that she could not sit down comfortably without them cutting into the tops of her thighs.
Little Miss, it’s highly irregular for us to hand out salaries before payday, he said, but he was already looking for the number of the accounts department.
Come on, it’s almost the end of the month, only a week to go. Phoebe twirled her hair and inclined her head the way she noticed other girls doing when they talked to the handsome security guards. Anyway, she laughed, our relationship is a bit irregular, don’t you think?
Foshan, Songxia, Dongguan, Wenzhou – she was going to bypass them all. Her bar was going to be raised all the way to the sky. There was only one city she could go to now, the biggest and brightest of them all.
The girl at the next table was still reading her magazine, her boyfriend sending messages on his iPhone. Sometimes he would read out a message and laugh, but the girl would not respond, she just continued to flick through her magazine. He looked up at Phoebe, just for a split second, and at first she thought he was scowling in that familiar look-down-on-you expression. But then she realised that he was squinting because of the light. He hadn’t even noticed her.
The girl’s mobile phone rang and she began to rummage in her handbag for it, emptying out its contents on the table. There were so many shiny pretty things, lipstick cases, keyrings, and also a leather diary, a pen, stray receipts, and scrunched-up pieces of tissue paper. She answered the phone, and as she did so, stood up and gathered her things, hastily replacing them in her bag. Her boyfriend was trying to help her, but she was frowning with impatience. A 5-mao coin fell to the floor and rolled to Phoebe’s feet. She bent over and picked it up.
‘Don’t worry,’ the boy said over his shoulder as he followed his girlfriend out. ‘It’s only 5 mao.’
They had just left when Phoebe noticed something on the table. Half hidden under a paper napkin was the girl’s ID card. Phoebe looked up and saw that they were still on the pavement, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross the road. She could have rushed out and called to them, done them a huge favour. But she waited, feeling her heart pound and the blood rush to her temples. She reached across and took the card. The photo was bland; you couldn’t make out the cheekbones that in real life were so sharp you could have cut your hand on them. In the photo the girl’s face was flat and pale. She could have been any other young woman in the café.
Outside, the boy was leading the girl by the hand as they crossed the road. She was still on the phone, her floppy bag trailing behind her like a small dog. The skies were clear that day, a touch of autumn coolness in the air.
With a paper napkin, Phoebe wiped the breadcrumbs off the card and tucked it safely into her purse.
2
Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself
Every building has its own sparkle, its own identity. At night, their electric personalities flicker into life and they cast off their perfunctory daytime selves, reaching out to each other to form a new world of ever-changing colour. It is tempting to see them as a single mass of light, a collection of illuminated billboards and fancy fluorescent strips that twinkle in the same way. But this is not true; they are not the same. Each one insists itself upon you in a different way, leaving its imprint on your imagination. Each message, if you care to listen, is different.
From his window he could see the Pudong skyline, the skyscrapers of Lujiazui ranged like razor-sharp Alpine peaks against the night sky. In the daytime even the most famous buildings seemed irrelevant, obscured by the perpetual haze of pollution; but at night, when the yellow-grey fog thinned, he would sit at his window watching them display boastfully, each one trying to outdo the next: taller, louder, brighter. A crystal outcrop suspended high in the sky, shrouded by mist on rainy days; a giant goldfish wriggling across the face of a building; interlocking geometric shapes shattering into a million fragments before regrouping. He knew every one by heart.
Buildings were in his DNA, he sometimes thought. They had given him everything he had ever owned – his houses, his cars, his friends – and even shaped the way he thought and felt; they had been in his life right from the beginning. The years were rushing past, whatever he had left of his youth surrendering to middle age, yet bricks and mortar – real estate – remained a constant presence. When he revisited his earliest memories, trying to summon scenes of family life – his mother’s protective embrace, perhaps, or praise from his father – the results were always blank. They were present in his memories, of course, his parents and grandmother, hovering spectrally. But, just like in real life, they were never animated. All he could see and smell was the buildings around them, the structures they inhabited: cold stone floors, mossy walls, flaking plaster, silence. It was a world from which there had been no escape. A path had been laid down for him, straight and unbending. He had long since given up hope of departing from this track, indeed could not even remember any other option – until he came to Shanghai.
The summer of ’08 had been notable for its stillness, the unyielding humidity that lay trapped between the avenues of concrete and glass. He had arrived in Shanghai expecting a temperate climate, but summer had stretched far into September and the pavements were sticky with heat, the roads becoming rivers of exhaust and steam. Even in his gated compound in Pudong, with its American-tropic-style lawns and palm-filled gardens, the air felt lifeless.
He had known little about Shanghai, and assumed that it would consist solely of shopping malls and plastic reproductions of its history, its traditional life preserved in aspic as it was in Singapore, where he went to school, or inherently Third World, like Malaysia, where he grew up. It might be like Hong Kong, where he had begun his career and established his reputation as an unspectacular but canny businessman who would hold the reins steady as head of the family’s property interests. Whatever the case, he had assumed he would find it familiar – he had spent his life in overcrowded, overbuilt Asian cities, and they were all the same to him: whenever he looked at a tower block he saw only a set of figures that represented income and expenditure. Ever since he was a teenager, his brain had been trained to work in this way, calculating numbers swiftly, threading together disparate considerations such as location, purpose and yield. Maybe there was, in spite of everything, a beauty in the incisiveness of his thinking back then.
But during those initial few weeks it was not easy for him to get any sense of Shanghai at all. His driver picked him up at his house and drove him to a series of meetings punctuated by business lunches, each day finishing with the soon familiar flourish of a banquet. He lived in a development called Lisson Valley, which was owned by his family. This, together with a more modest development in Hongqiao and a condominium block in Xintiandi, were all that they owned in the largest city in China, and they had decided that they needed to expand, which was why he had been sent here. They had spent a hundred years in Malaysia and Singapore, and now they needed to branch out in a serious way – like the great Jewish families of Europe in the nineteenth century, his father had explained, as if the decision needed to be justified. On the annual Forbes list of billionaires his family’s business was described as ‘Henry Lim and family – Diversified Holdings’ – it always made him wince, the term ‘diversified’: the lack of specificity carried with it an accusation, as if the source of the wealth they had amassed was uncertain and, most probably, unsavoury.
‘You’re too sensitive,’ his father had chided him when he was young. ‘You need to grow out of it and toughen up. What do you care what other people think?’
It was true: what other people thought was entirely irrelevant. The family insurance firm, established in Singapore since 1930, had not only survived but prospered during the war, and was one of the oldest continuous companies in South-East Asia. By any reckoning his family now counted as ‘old money’, one of those overseas Chinese families that had risen, in little over a century, from dockside coolies to established billionaires. Every generation built on the achievements of its predecessor, and now it was his turn: Justin CK Lim, eldest son of Henry Lim and heir to the proud, vibrant legacy of LKH Holdings, established by his grandfather.
Property clairvoyant. Groomed from a young age to take over the reins. Steady hands. Wisdom beyond his years.
These were some of the things the Business Times said of him just before he arrived here. His father had had the article cut out, mounted and framed, and had sent it to him gift-wrapped in paper decorated with gold stars. It arrived two days after his birthday, but he was not sure if it was a present. There had never been presents on his birthday.
From the start of his time in Shanghai he was invited to the best parties – the numerous openings of the flagship stores of Western luxury brands, or discreet private banquets hosted by young local entrepreneurs with excellent connections within the Party. He could always get a table at the famous Western restaurants on the Bund, and because people soon got to know and like him – he was easy, unshowy company – he was rarely on his own, and increasingly in the public eye. At one party to launch a new line of underwear, held in a warehouse in the northern outskirts of the city, he found himself unconsciously shrinking away from the bank of flashbulbs that greeted the guests, so that when the photographs appeared, his head was cocked at an angle, as if he had recently hurt his neck in an accident. There were a dozen hydraulic platforms suspended above the party, each one occupied by a model clad only in underwear, gyrating uncomfortably to the thumping music; every time he looked up at them they threw confetti down on him, which he then had to pick out of his hair. The event organiser later sent him copies of the photos – he was frowning in every one, stray bits of confetti clinging to his suit like birdshit. Shanghai Tatler magazine photographed him at a black-tie charity event a few weeks after he arrived, his hair slickly swept back in a nod to the 1930s, a small white flower in his buttonhole, and a young Western woman in a qipao at his side. The caption read, ‘Justin CK Lim and companion’; he hadn’t even known who the woman was. He bid for a guided tour of the city by Zhou X, a local starlet just beginning to make a name for herself in new-wave art-house films. It cost him 200,000 yuan, the money donated to orphans of the Sichuan earthquake. The men at the party nudged him and whispered slyly, ‘Maybe you’ll get to see the most secret sights of Shanghai, like she showed off in her latest movie.’ (It was a film he’d heard of, set in a small village during the Cultural Revolution and already banned in China; the New York Times review of it called Zhou X ‘the intellectual man’s Orientalist fantasy’.)
If he felt a frisson of excitement it wasn’t because of his glamorous tour guide, but because it was his first proper outing in Shanghai, his first sight of the daytime streets at close quarters, unencumbered by briefcases and folders. If anything he felt resentful at Zhou X’s presence; she sat in the car idly sending messages on her BlackBerry, her only commentary being a recital of a list of projects her agent had sent her. ‘Wim Wenders – is he famous?’ she asked. ‘I don’t feel like working with him – he sounds boring.’
They stopped outside a tourist-class hotel on a busy thoroughfare lined with mid-range shopping brands in what seemed to be a fairly expensive part of town (low occupancy, medium yield: unrealised rental potential) – a strange place to start a tour of Shanghai, he thought, as they walked through a featureless archway into a narrow lane lined first with industrial dustbins and then, further on, with low brick houses. These were the famous longtang of Shanghai, she explained, the ones foreigners fell in love with – though personally she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a lane house. ‘Look at them, they’re so primitive and cramped and dark and … old.’
He peered through an open doorway. In the gloom, a staircase of dark hardwood; a tiled kitchen with a two-ring stove-top cooker. He stepped into the house – its quiet half-light seemed welcoming, irresistible.
‘What are you doing?’ Zhou X cried.
But he was already up the stairs, treading across the uneven floorboards, the deep graining of the wood inviting him to bend down and trail his fingers over the smooth, worn surface. There were signs of life – pots of scraggly herbs and marigolds, towels draped on banisters, lines of washing strung up across the small square rooms. And yet there was a stillness that settled heavily on the house, as if its inhabitants had recently abandoned it; as if the present was already giving way to the past. The small windows on the landings allowed little light in, but Justin could nonetheless see that there was dust on the surface of some cardboard boxes that lay stacked in a corner of the room, and also on the handrails of the staircase. He could not decide whether the house was decaying or living. He retreated and joined his companion outside. In spite of her huge black sunglasses she was squinting, shielding her face from the sun with her handbag.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘You can’t just go poking your nose into other people’s houses like that.’
Justin looked at her and smiled. ‘I’ve paid for this, haven’t I? I need to get my money’s worth.’
At his insistence they drove from longtang to longtang, their SUV cruising through the narrow streets lined with plane trees, the balconies of the old French-style villas occasionally visible over the tops of stone walls. Some of the larger houses had shutters that were tightly closed, and in their gloom these mansions reminded him of the house in which he had grown up, full of silence and shadows and the steady ticking of grandfather clocks. He remembered the hallway and staircase of his family house, the ceiling rising so high that it created a cavelike gloom.
As the car crawled through the traffic he began to notice the number of people on foot: a group of middle-school kids, spiky-haired and bespectacled in tracksuits, rushing to beat each other to the head of the queue to buy freshly made shengjian, exclaiming gleefully as the cloud of steam billowed from the pan; an elderly couple crossing the road just in front of the car, walking arm in arm, their clothes made from matching brocade and velvet, worn but still elegant; and at an intersection, about fifty construction workers sitting on the pavement, smoking on their break, their faces tanned and leathery, foreign-looking – Justin could not place where they were from. He wondered why, in the many weeks since arriving, he had not noticed how densely populated the city was. All that time driving around in his limo, he thought, he must have been working on spreadsheets or reading reports.
‘You’re so easy to please,’ Zhou X said, tapping away on her phone without looking at him. ‘All I have to do is show you old houses.’
They stopped the car because he had seen a small lane of nondescript houses that seemed derelict at first glance. It was the property developer’s instinct in him that spotted the lane, he thought, for it was barely distinguishable from the dozens of others they had seen, and in fact a great deal less attractive. Tucked behind a row of small fruit and vegetable shops, the low brick houses had not long ago been rendered in cheap cement and now looked, frankly, ugly: low residential value, ripe for development. Wires sagged along the façades of the buildings, competing for space with lines of washing hung up to dry; a small girl came out of a doorway carrying a basin of grey-hued water, which she splashed into the street. There was something about the way of life here – families living at close quarters, spilling into one another – that reminded him of the slums not far from where he used to live: hundreds of identical, flimsy houses, thousands of lives that seemed to blend into one. Sometimes they would catch fire and the entire area would be razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt a few months later. He had never known any of the people who lived in that world, and even before he became an adult, the shanties were cleared to make way for a shopping mall.
He’d remembered to bring his little digital camera, and began photographing the narrow, sunless alley and the shabby shops that surrounded it; as he did so, an old woman emerged from one of the houses, carrying a few plastic bags bulging with clothes. On the LCD screen of his camera she appeared smiling, gap-toothed, spontaneously lifting her bags to the camera as if displaying a trophy.
‘Hey, people don’t like you interfering with their lives,’ Zhou X called from inside the car. ‘Can you hurry up? I’m late for my next appointment.’
For days afterwards he looked at the picture of the old woman, even putting it on his laptop so that every time he turned it on she was there, smiling at him. There was something about her thin hair, dyed jet-black and set in tight curls, that reminded him of his grandmother – the attempts at vanity making her seem frailer, not younger. He remembered his grandmother’s room: the chalky smell of thick white face powder and tiger balm interlaced with eau de cologne. He would sit on the bed and watch her undo the curlers from her hair; she liked having him around, liked talking to him, even though he could not yet understand all of what she said. He must have been no more than five or six and she was already in her eighties, already weak. And he was surprised by the glassy clarity of these memories, the way they settled insistently on his waking days like a thin, sticky film that he could not shake off. He had never even been close to his grandmother.
With the photo enlarged, he could make out the colour of some of the clothes through the translucent plastic bags the old woman was carrying: a jumble of cheap textiles proudly displayed to the beholder. Her cheeks were red and coarse, her remaining teeth badly tea-stained. He wanted to go back and try to find her, maybe take more photographs – and who knows, on further inspection (and without a nagging actress on his back) he might get a clearer view of those small houses and the neighbouring shops. A thought flashed across his mind: maybe he could restore them, save them from further degradation by thinking of some clever scheme whereby the residents could continue paying low rent and the shops could be run on a cooperative basis. The entire site would become a model for modern urban dwelling in Asia; young educated people would want to come and live cheek by jowl with old Shanghainese.
He jotted down a few rough figures, arranging them in neat columns: how much financing such a scheme might take to work – nothing serious, just the vaguest estimate, and yet, as always, the moment he thought about money, the project began to feel real, crystallising into something solid and attainable. He kept the piece of paper on his desk at work so he would not forget it.
But the whole of the next week was taken up with meetings with bankers and contractors, dinners with Party officials, preparing a presentation to the Mayor’s office; the following week he had to go to Tokyo, and then Hong Kong, then Malaysia. When he finally made it back to Shanghai it was turning cold and damp with the onset of winter, and he did not feel like venturing out much, did not have the energy to track down the old woman and her little lane, for he did not know where it was exactly – maybe somewhere between a highway and a big triangular glass building? He barely had any time to himself these days. Most evenings he was so tired it felt too much of an effort even to shower and clean his teeth before he went to bed; all he wanted to do was fall asleep. His limbs ached, his mouth was dry all the time, and his head felt cloudy, as if set in thick fog on a muggy day, a headache hovering on the horizon. He got the ’flu and was laid up in bed for over a week, and then bronchitis set in and he couldn’t shake it. His bathroom scales showed he had lost nearly ten pounds, but he wasn’t too worried – he was just overworked; it had happened to him before. Whenever he worked too much he got sick. But still he got up every morning, put on his suit, went to meetings, studied site plans and financial models.
After months of planning his family had decided on their masterwork, a project that was to announce their arrival on the Mainland and define their intentions for the coming decades. All his groundwork – the endless days and nights of negotiations and entertaining – had finally unearthed a potential site befitting his family’s ambitions: a near-derelict warehouse built around the remains of a 1930s opium den, surrounded by low lane houses, between Nanjing Xi Lu and Huaihai Lu – an absolutely chao-A prime location. There had been other alternatives, such as a much bigger site in Pudong, large enough to accommodate a skyscraper – a genuine, brash, half-kilometre-high Asian behemoth, but his father and uncles had preferred the old-fashioned prestige of this address. ‘It’ll make more of a statement,’ his father said, his voice measured and steady, but tinged with excitement nonetheless. In the coming year they would make a bid for the site and decide what they would do with it – something outstanding, of course, a future landmark. There was still the matter of greasing palms, identifying the officials who might need to be persuaded to allow the deal to go through, but he was not worried about that – it was something at which he had years of practice. It had become his speciality, people said, making things happen that way.
One cold, crisp morning, during a lull in negotiations – it was that dead time in January when the Westerners were still lethargic after their return from Christmas and the locals were beginning to prepare for the Spring Festival – he woke up to brilliant sunshine and a day off: the first of either that he could remember in a long time. His joints did not feel swollen as they usually did, and his lungs craved air. He called for a taxi and set off vaguely in the direction of the lane he had seen all those months ago, and when he felt he was in the general vicinity he alighted and continued on foot, strolling along the streets lined with low stone houses. The air was cold and sharp in his lungs, almost cleansing; the streets were busy with crisscrossing bicycles and electric scooters, merchants pulling carts of winter melons and oranges. The branches of the trees had been pruned heavily for the winter, and stood sentinel-like before the handsome old European-built houses. On foot he noticed the stone ornaments and moulded window frames that adorned the upper floors of these small buildings – it was impossible to see any of this from a car: all he usually saw was the ground floor, invariably occupied by a featureless shop selling down jackets or mobile phones. He stopped to buy a bag of oranges for the old woman, just in case he saw her again – he wasn’t far now; he recognised a few shops, a familiar curve in the road.
He rounded the corner of where he thought the lane was, but all he saw was a wide, empty square of dirt dotted with pyramid-shaped piles of rubble. The shops had disappeared, and the lane with it. He paused and looked for things he remembered – an old barbershop, a strange Bavarian pebbledashed house on the corner: this was definitely the place. But all that was left of the houses was the faintest imprint of where their foundations had been – shallow, barely discernible. He had his camera in his backpack and wanted to take a photo, but he had the big bag of oranges in his hand and didn’t know what to do with it; all at once it seemed redundant. He looked around, hoping to give it to someone. But for the first time he could remember since arriving in Shanghai, the streets were almost empty – no bored young woman leaning out of a shop entrance, no street vendor watching him suspiciously, not even a child on a tricycle. After a while an old man cycled past, his face creased and leathery – in the basket between his handlebars there was a small poodle wearing a pink quilted coat. It looked at Justin as it went past, its mouth drawn wide as if in a smile, but there were streaks running down from its eyes, like black tears. Justin stood in the brilliant winter sunshine, the bag of oranges cutting into his hand. He had forgotten to wear gloves, and his fingers were getting numb.
He left the oranges by a pile of rubble and walked into the middle of the cleared space. It wasn’t very large, bounded on three sides by old houses. It would have made a lousy building site; he was glad he wasn’t the one developing it. It had seemed larger when those few houses and shops were still on it, so full of life and potential. Maybe he wasn’t a property genius after all. He looked around one last time, hoping to see the old woman he had photographed – it was stupid, he knew, for she had gone.
Just before he left he took some photos of the empty plot of land. In the pale winter light the earth looked so dry it could have been in a desert. The only patch of colour was the electric blue of the plastic bag that had fallen open, revealing a few plump oranges. He walked around a little bit more, coming across more and more pieces of land that looked to him to have been recently cleared – some tiny and compact, some vast and unbounded, hollowed out by bulldozers. He took pictures of each one, and walked until it began to get dark. The winter air felt sharp and icy in his chest, as if he was inhaling tiny shards of glass.
The following week his cough seemed to get worse again; the long walk in the damp January air seemed to have weakened his lungs, and he found the mere act of breathing an effort. In a meeting with potential bankers he was unable to finish his sentences because of a tickling in his throat that rose as he spoke, swiftly triggering a rasping cough that left his chest and ribcage feeling hollow and achy. The doctor prescribed another course of antibiotics – his third since the new year – and ordered some X-rays, which came back clear. He just needed rest, the doctor said; he was run-down. But his days and nights did not get any shorter – the gruelling meetings lasted all day, bleeding into the evening’s social round of banquets and bars. Once he got over the initial few days of feeling ill, the exhaustion became familiar, almost reassuring. It was always like this: whenever a big project was on the table he would slip easily into the grinding nature of this routine, finding comfort in the constancy of his fatigue. When he woke up each morning he could feel the puffiness of his eyes, knew that they would be bloodshot; his breathing would already be desperate, the air feeling thin in his lungs. His limbs would be heavy, but after a shower and a double espresso he would feel better, though he would never satisfactorily shake the mild headache that was already descending on his skull, already escalating into a migraine. He would work through it – it wasn’t a problem.
Besides, he didn’t have a choice. There was a problem with the deal. All the arrangements that had been slotting obediently into place just before Christmas were now looking shaky. Someone was refusing to take a bribe – an official in the municipal Urban Planning Department, a mid-ranking engineer who had found an irregularity in the paperwork, a discrepancy, it seemed, between the proposed project and the preliminary drawings. More buildings would have to be demolished than had been declared in the proposal, and this was a problem because many of those buildings were in the local vernacular. This engineer – a glorified technical clerk – was resisting the pressure placed on her by her superiors, most of whom were sympathetic to the Lim family venture. It was awkward when someone acted out of principle; it would take more than money to solve the impasse. And now the delay was leading to further complications: another party was interested in the piece of land, and there was talk of an imminent bid to rival theirs.
He pressed for emergency meetings with high-ranking officials for whom he had bought Cartier cigarette lighters and weekend trips to the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. There was nothing they could do for the moment, they claimed: his project had to work its way through the system, there was a formal procedure which they couldn’t alter, it would just take a bit of time. Each official he spoke to reassured him gently without committing himself; they were sure the other bid would come to nothing. They said this in a way to suggest that they would do something to prevent it, but now he was not so sure. He was not sure about anything in Shanghai any more.
In the meantime his secretaries began to speak of an internet campaign – a blog site entitled DEFENDERS OF OLD SHANGHAI. They showed him pages and pages of angry commentary under the discussion thread: Save 969 Weihai Lu from destruction by foreign companies!! It was full of accusations that wildly exaggerated the effect of the project on the existing buildings, so, using the pseudonym ‘FairPreserver’, he personally wrote replies to the most outlandish claims. It was not true that the Lim family company were uncaring capitalists wanting to take advantage of China, he said; he had heard from insiders that they cared greatly about history and would do everything in their power to preserve what they could. They had a long record of restoring heritage buildings and would never dream of destroying anything the city deemed to be important. They cared greatly about the lives of the common people and always sought to be considerate and fair when dealing with property belonging to people of modest means, never forcing anyone to move against their will and always providing compensation where necessary.
HAHAHAHA, came the first reply, within minutes of his post. What a joke, are you paid by the Lim family to say these things???
Everything he argued was met with contempt, but still he battled on. No, it was not true that the Lim family had made their money by kicking people off their land in Malaysia; no, they were not going to do the same here. He began to spend hours each day posting replies on the blog site, rushing back from meetings to check what had been said in response to his posts and to write something himself. But then, one day, all of his posts suddenly vanished – he could find no trace of any of them. Every single one had disappeared in the space of an hour, and he was forced to read from the sidelines, marginalised, silenced. He tried inventing a new pseudonym, but every time he posted something it would last less than a day before disappearing. He felt powerless, and was often almost overcome by the urge to scream as he read what was being said about him. He did not know who these people were, and had no way of getting in touch with them. He could only watch helplessly as the blog pages grew longer and more animated with each day; soon all this chatter about his property deals would be in the newspapers. Once it became public the project would be doomed – none of the officials who had been expensively recruited to help facilitate matters would be willing to support his bid openly.
Frustrated by the lack of news, his father rang him on his mobile one evening, catching him by surprise. He tried to explain that it was not his fault, that things in China moved so quickly that it was impossible to anticipate every development in advance. It wasn’t like Indonesia or Singapore; China was at once lawless and unbending in its rules. He talked and talked, his speech cut to ribbons by his cough; he felt the dryness of his throat and mouth and realised he hadn’t drunk anything for hours. His father listened patiently and then said, ‘I see. But I know you will make a success of this deal.’
Soon he was spending all night monitoring the blog site. Sleep evaded him; it was superfluous to his current state. All that seemed relevant to his life now was this torrent of words written by unseen, unknown people. He felt he knew them now, felt he was somehow linked to them, and just before the first of the comments citing him by name appeared, he had a strange presentiment in his stomach, a sensation of exhilaration mixed with nausea, as if he knew what was to come. Justin Lim has been trained by his family to be uncaring and ruthless. From a young age he was already displaying these tendencies. Justin Lim is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he smiles to your face but is ready to eat you up whole. Justin Lim is handsome but like all handsome men cannot be trusted one inch. Justin Lim is a man with absolutely no feelings whatsoever, he does not possess a beating heart. Justin Lim is not human. Justin Lim has committed some terrible acts in the past. Justin Lim will stop at nothing to fulfil his aims, he will crush you like he crushes insects.
His father began to ring him more frequently – every other day, then every day, then several times a day. Each time the phone rang he could sense his father’s anxiety in the ringtone, swelling with every beat. At first he made excuses – he was just going into a meeting, he couldn’t speak. But then he stopped answering the calls altogether, letting the phone ring on to the voicemail; he never checked his messages. He stopped going to the office, for there was nothing left to do now except look at the things people said about him on the blog site. He never strayed far from his laptop, and even if he had to go to the toilet he hurried back as quickly as possible. Taking a shower made him anxious, made him fear that he was missing a new comment on the blog.
One night he managed two hours’ sleep. It had made him groggy but strangely lucid, and his head filled for a moment or two with a painful awareness of the weakness of his body. He went into the bathroom and stepped onto the scales out of curiosity: he had lost even more weight. He splashed his face with water and looked in the mirror. His eyes were sunken and dark, glassy and staring, like a fish’s at the market, his lips chapped and sore: a simulation of life. When dawn broke he packed a few things into a suitcase and checked into a hotel. From there he rang a friend of a friend of a friend who referred him to an estate agent who found him an apartment within three days. It was just off the Bund, on the edge of Suzhou Creek, in an Art Deco building that seemed semi-derelict. The rooms were large and sombre and quiet, the furniture sparse and nondescript; outside, the corridors were badly lit and deserted. He moved in late that afternoon, and when night fell he discovered that he had a view of the skyscrapers of Lujiazui, framed in the sweep of old windows that ran the length of the apartment. From this side of the river, the opposite to the one on which he had lived previously, the towers of Pudong seemed beautiful and untouchable. Before, they had been functional and dull, filled with ballrooms and boardrooms, each one indistinguishable from the others; now they trembled with life, intimate yet unknowable.
That night, his first in the apartment, he slept almost all the way through to the morning. His new bedroom was cavelike in its darkness, and he could hear nothing except the vague metallic creaking of pipes in the night, a comforting faraway echo. It was the first proper sleep he had had in over two months. When he woke up he looked at the mounting number of messages and emails on his BlackBerry. He turned it off without looking at any of them and went back to sleep.
In the days that followed he spent much of his time in bed. Often he would not be able to sleep, his mind completely empty, his body alternating between aching and numb. Sometimes he was afraid he was going mad. He had never been like this before, and the thought of madness panicked him. Yet he could do nothing about it. He lay in bed with the curtains drawn during the day, feeling the dampness of his sheets as he sheltered in his lightless room. At night he would open the curtains and watch the lights of the skyscrapers glinting until he began to recognise their rhythms, the exact hour they would come on or off, when they became brighter and how long it took for each sequence to repeat. When he had stared at these repeating patterns long enough they became abstract, divorced from the real world. Once or twice he felt strong enough to venture out for a stroll along the creek, and sometimes he was compelled to go out to buy drinking water from the convenience store down the road, but the slightest effort weakened him, filling him with a sickening anxiety. He longed for the safety of his bed, and decided not to leave the apartment again. He had his meals delivered to him once a day, deposited at the door. He would sometimes hear the doorbell at lunchtime but could not summon the energy to get up until the evening, when it was dark. The bag of food would still be on the doormat, cold and unappealing. Twice a week his ayi would come to clean the apartment, and from behind his closed bedroom door he would hear her gently moving the furniture and washing the dishes. He told her he was sick. She said, ‘I guessed that.’ One day he emerged from his bedroom to find that she had double-boiled a chicken with medicinal herbs to make soup for him. He sat before it at the kitchen counter, unable to eat it. He found himself crying – hot streams of tears flowed down his cheeks. He hated crying and didn’t know why he was doing so. The strangest thing was that he felt nothing – no sadness or bitterness or loneliness. And yet he was unable to stem the tears.
He felt the walls of the apartment draw in on him, encircling him, making everything beyond their confines seem irrelevant, reducing the city to a mere idea, a vague memory.
Late one sleepless night, the hundreds of messages on his BlackBerry did not seem so terrifying, so he began to work his way through the emails and voicemails, deleting most before getting to the end of them. There were dozens of messages from his family – his uncles, father and brothers – whose title headings charted a growing sense of worry. It was fine, he thought: he was immune to their anxiety now. A few weeks ago he would have been panicked by their panic, but now none of it touched him. It no longer bothered him that he was uncontactable.
But among the more recent messages, one caught his attention: a voicemail from his mother, who rarely rang him. It began calmly, saying they missed him, and whatever wrongs they might have committed against him, would he please forgive them. They needed him now, he was the only one who could save them, his brother was not good at this sort of thing. His father had become very ill because of the situation, and there were creditors hovering like vultures. She sounded as if she was beginning to cry: she didn’t understand this sort of thing very well, but she knew the situation was very grave.
The situation. What situation? He checked earlier emails from his father. His tone was, as always, dry, the messages dictated and typed out by his secretary. There was no unnecessary information, just the basics: the family insurance business had collapsed. It had not withstood the global crisis. The biggest, oldest insurance firm in South-East Asia, founded by his grandfather, was no longer. Now an investor was offering them $1 to buy the entire company that, just a year ago, was worth billions. It was humiliating. They were facing ruin. He was their only hope. Maybe the property market in China would save them. Whatever the case, he had to take over the running of the entire family business now.
One other message he checked said, simply, Where are you, my son?
He turned off his BlackBerry and stared at the skyscrapers. It was after midnight, and most of the lights were off now, but still the buildings glowed softly. He went to bed without drawing the curtains, gazing at the watery quality of the sky, the swell of the low rainclouds illuminated by the fading lights of the city. He tried to feel something – anything. In his head he replayed his mother’s tearful voice, cracking, weak. We’re sorry for things we might have done. He imagined his father, proud even in his humbled state.
But none of those images and sounds moved him. He felt nothing. As he closed his eyes he could just make out the very tip of a skyscraper, a sharp rod stretching into the sky. It seemed fixed not just in space but in time, its metallic glint impervious to the passing of the days, months, years.
And he thought, I am free now.
How to Achieve Greatness
Greatness is never measured purely in terms of money. You must always remember this. For history to judge a man as truly remarkable, that man has to leave a legacy more profound than a collection of Swiss bank accounts for his children. He has to enrich the world around him in a way that is permanent and moving.
Recently I have been thinking of ways to leave behind something meaningful to the world once I am gone. My various philanthropic efforts are well documented, but I nonetheless feel that I have not yet given enough to mankind. All my donations to charity are, I feel, ephemeral; the giving of cash to the needy is a mere Band-Aid on a gaping wound. If I were to die tomorrow I would be known primarily as a visionary entrepreneur and perhaps a brilliant motivator. Occasionally at public events someone will realise who I am and insist on bathing me in compliments, which embarrasses me, for I have always scrupulously avoided the public eye. Adulation is a funny thing. Most people seek it in vain, often unconsciously, from their spouses, children, professional colleagues, or – the ultimate dream – from the public at large. To be admired by people who don’t know you would seem to be the summit of human achievement. Yet those of us who are in this position know that to be the centre of attraction in this way is not only distasteful, it is empty.
Once, and only once, I gave an interview. I was young and just beginning to make waves with a succession of audacious acquisitions. I was also, I admit, slightly prone to vanity in those days. My interviewer, a young woman from a respected local newspaper, peppered me with banal questions about my business strategy and then probed me with inappropriate questions about my private circumstances. Did I find it difficult to sustain relationships because of my punishing schedule? What did I look for in a partner? Was it true that I was so dedicated to my work that I had broken off not one but two engagements in the past? Had I even cut off contact with close family members? What about rumours that I’d changed my name to make myself appear more Westernised? She kept calling me ‘Walter’, in that familiar way that young people do these days, assuming it would be fine to address me by my first name rather than as ‘Mr Chao’. I asked if it was truly necessary to obtain this information from me. She shrugged and said that her editor had asked her for a ‘personal angle’ to the story. So incensed was I by this intrusion that I ordered the feature article to be reduced to a mere footnote in the business pages. Then, as an afterthought, I asked for even that little vignette to be deleted altogether. (There is a postscript to this because, a few years ago, when the newspaper was ailing, I bought it and fired the editor who had commissioned the interview. He was in his sixties and ready for retirement anyway.)
I have never done anything for the sake of public acclaim. Even my books have been written under a pseudonym. I want to inspire people – you – not because I seek gratitude or glory but because I gain immense pleasure just from the knowledge that I might have been able to help them, to change their lives. Giving without receiving. That is what truly satisfies me. In all the years of working hard, of the accumulation of huge wealth, I admit that I sometimes lost sight of this sentiment of charity, which is why I sometimes felt exhausted and dispirited and negative – as I suspect you do on occasion after a long, fruitless day at work. Maybe your boss has not acknowledged your talent and dedication. Maybe your clients are late in paying you. Maybe the taxman is being uncooperative. Maybe a colleague you thought was a friend is now brown-nosing his way ahead of you. Maybe you’ve come home after a nightmarish day in the office and your partner hasn’t done the washing up or made you dinner. Yes, it is dispiriting. But only if you are working only for yourself, if you are seeking praise. Let go of this neediness. Say to yourself: I am not working for glory, but for the joy of it. One day – soon – I will be dead, and who will remember my petty little promotion to Assistant Executive Managing Sub Director then?
Work to help others.
Elevate yourself from trivia.
That is the only way to true greatness.
All this brings me to the question of how best to leave my legacy without being thrust into the limelight. It is sad that even philanthropy these days is tied to celebrity, but I have to accept that this is the world we live in. Reluctantly, therefore, I might have to accept the accolades that will surely accompany my project. There are still many details to be ironed out before I can announce the nature of this venture, but for now I can reveal that it will be a sort of community centre for the twenty-first century that will benefit the young, the poor – all those who need nourishment, either for their stomachs or their minds or spirits.
The idea comes to me because, looking back at my own underprivileged childhood, I realise that the village school I attended between the ages of six and twelve carried an importance far beyond its modest proportions. Its three classrooms and tin roof were typical of primary schools in rural Malaysia at the time, but it was supported by wealthy benefactors, which meant that we had generators to power the ceiling fans and provide lighting during the monsoons when the storms were at their fiercest and the feeble electricity supply most vulnerable to power cuts. There was a paved lane leading to it from the main road that carved its way through the jungle, and at the confluence of the two there was a bus shelter so that we could remain dry from the rain while waiting for the bus that came by only three times a day. I was lucky, for my journey beyond where the bus deposited me was only twenty minutes long, on paths that rarely flooded. Others had over an hour to walk across muddy terrain with tracks that often got washed out by the rain.
None of us was ever earmarked for greatness. From birth, we were the also-rans in life’s great race, kept afloat because we were human and someone – thank God – could not bear to let us wither away and die. So rich people paid for us to have the basics, salving their consciences, thinking that they were doing the bare minimum and nothing more. They never thought that their small acts of mercy would ever produce anything remarkable. They did not believe that amongst those they had written off as menial and pathetic and worthy only of pity, there would be one who would rise to glory.
Some might say that my beginnings are irrelevant, that wherever I came from, a man like me would still have been a success. Who I am today cannot be attributed to that little school. But that would be ungenerous, and I wish to acknowledge those early days, because when I look back at them I feel something. Not much, but a small debt of gratitude nonetheless.
Despite the charitable nature of its aims, my project will not be modest. It will not be a modern version of the old village school. Its reach will be wide and deep and long-lasting. A hundred years from now, its beneficial impact should still be felt. Every venture needs a physical space, its own village school, as it were. I think I know where mine will be situated – I’ve drawn up a shortlist of cities – and I am in the process of considering a suitable architect. At the moment I am veering towards Rem Koolhaas, or perhaps Zaha Hadid. Someone iconic, in any case, whose work, like mine, will last well into the future.
When planning any venture, always think of how it will be remembered by future generations.
Always think of how you will be remembered.
3
Bravely Set the World on Fire
Gary won a talent competition when he was two months short of his seventeenth birthday. It was a small provincial affair in the north of Malaysia, not very professional, but it enabled him to move down to the capital to take part in a bigger contest which was televised on all the main channels. The finale was watched by nearly four million people, and over two million voted by SMS. At the time, Gary was amazed by these figures. He came from a town of two hundred, and could not believe that so many people would ever listen to him sing. He performed three songs, one in Malay, one in Mandarin, and the final one in English – an arrangement of a Diana Ross song, the words of which he did not fully understand. He was the youngest contestant and was shining with the innocence of a boy recently arrived from the countryside. His hair was spiky and dyed with flame-coloured streaks, which he had done himself. Recently he saw a video of this performance on YouTube and could not believe how bad he looked.
After the first song the judges said he had the voice of an angel. But even before that, from the moment he opened his mouth to sing the very first note, he knew he was going to win. He heard the strange, pure sound of his voice amplified by the microphone in the vast auditorium, its echoes separated by a split second from the time he felt it in his throat. He recognised that the voice was his, but he felt distanced from it too. It sounded as if it no longer belonged to him. In the audience, young girls were waving multicoloured fluorescent batons that glowed in the dark. When he sang the love ballad in Mandarin everyone screamed as he hit the high notes in the chorus. He felt the noise they made reverberating in his chest and ribcage, and he knew in that instant that his life was going to become confused and messy, full of privileges and sorrows he hadn’t asked for.
He won by a landslide.
He did not have time to celebrate his victory because he was signed up by an artist-management company that arranged for him to go to Taiwan two weeks later. He stayed in a hotel with a bathtub in which he had his very first bubble bath. The furniture was modern and new, with clean lines and leather upholstery. The room smelled of paint, but he thought it was extremely luxurious. Now he realises, of course, that it was only a modest and functional hotel used by sales companies wanting somewhere cheap to hold their training conferences. These days, Gary only stays in the most exclusive hotels in every city he visits.
In just under eight years in Taipei he released four albums, each of which sold more than three million copies across Asia. In the months following the release of his debut album, Rainy Day in My Heart, he narrowly missed out on winning the Best Newcomer category at the Golden Melody Awards, and starred in a film as an apprentice cop who ends up accidentally shooting the gangster girl he has fallen in love with. The film was a total failure at the box office, but everyone who saw it remarked that Gary’s face was perfectly proportioned, beautiful to look at from every angle. Maybe you saw it too and came to the same conclusion. Teenage girls began to send him presents – designer clothes, jewellery, watches, home-made CDs, cards with photos stuck to them, and even highly personal items, such as the girls’ own underwear or antiques that had belonged to their families. Every week his record company would receive enough of these gifts to fill a room. He would stare at this unwanted pile and feel guilty that so many fans wanted to give him such valuable things. He could not bear the thought that all these people, whom he did not know, were thinking of him. They were thinking of him so much that they would spend time and money sending him objects that represented parts of their lives – of themselves. And he felt bad because he was not strong or big or deep enough to accept their love. The record company arranged for it all to be donated to charity or simply destroyed, but still he could feel their desire for him lingering over him like a raincloud on a muggy day, refusing to budge.
Early last year, on the eve of a major concert at the Taipei Arena, Gary collapsed and was admitted to hospital. The diagnosis was not serious – he was anaemic, which explained not only his famously pale complexion but his frequent dizzy spells. He was also found to have low blood pressure and an elevated cholesterol level for someone so young. It was all the takeaway curries, the pizzas and other junk food he ate during late-night sessions in the recording studio. His punishing work schedule exacerbated these underlying conditions, and it was no surprise that he eventually succumbed to the pressure, the doctors said. They prescribed a fortnight’s complete rest, some supplements, and a balanced diet. Before he left, one doctor asked him if he was stressed. When Gary appeared somewhat confused by the question, the doctor posed it again, this time asking whether he found it difficult to deal with the pressures he had placed upon himself and whether, for example, he worried about things beyond his control. Gary thought for a few seconds before truthfully answering no. Because when he stopped for that moment to consider his life, he realised that there was nothing in it that was within his control. Every minute of his day was organised by his management company, even the number of hours he should sleep. It had been like this for so long that he wondered if he had ever known a different way of living.
The press was full of hysterical reports. Some said he had fallen ill from toxins ingested while eating moray eel down on the coast, some said he had suffered an overdose, others said he had AIDS. He had not been seen in public or been photographed by the paparazzi for only five days when one tabloid newspaper began to surmise that he was dead. From his apartment he peered cautiously out between the metallic slats of the blinds and saw a group of teenage fans holding a vigil for him. At night they lit candles and huddled together to console each other. In daylight, he could see that some of them had been crying. He wished they would go away, and after two days he began to resent them. Their presence weighed down on him, and he couldn’t sleep. He longed to be free of his apartment, which he hated even at the best of times. He had become used to having the blinds down all the time – from the moment he moved in, he had never seen the apartment in daylight, not even for one minute. It was always night in his home.
What most bothered him was the lack of activity. He wasn’t used to having time on his hands. Now that he was rested and feeling better he could not stand the hours spent watching DVDs or Korean TV dramas. He tried strumming tunes on his guitar or tinkling on the piano, but the apartment was too dark and oppressive, and he could feel no enthusiasm for music. He began spending too much time on the internet, on websites he shouldn’t have been looking at. In fact, it was during this period of imprisonment that he first discovered sexually explicit sites. At first he hated himself for trawling endlessly through them, but he was surprised at how his initial feelings of wariness and guilt soon gave way to an unthinking numbness, and he would spend hours sitting in the semi-dark staring at images that were initially shocking but quickly became dull. He would fall asleep at odd hours because he could not stop sifting through the pages for new images of graphic sexual acts, even though he felt nothing when he looked at them. He went to bed feeling empty and full of anger at his fans outside, for they were the ones who had forced him into this position.
Finally his management company called a press conference at which Gary appeared, happy and smiling, saying that he had taken some time off to return to Malaysia to spend time with friends and family following a ‘sad occurrence’ which he would rather not discuss in public. Relieved that he was alive and in good health, his fans did not press any further, assuming that his temporary disappearance was somehow linked to the fact that he was an orphan, raised by distant relatives with whom he had enjoyed no closeness. His troubled youth following the death of his mother was well documented – it was something that made him appear human and vulnerable to his fans. As his manager once told him, his childhood tragedies were a great selling point. But though he was grateful for his fans’ loyalty and adoration, when he looked at the mass of jubilant teenage faces at his next concert, he found their joy so empty and unquestioning that it unnerved him, and he could not get rid of the feeling that had entered his soul during the ten days of confinement in his night-dark apartment. It was unmistakable. He had started to hate them.
That three-week period of internment and difficult public relations upset his tightly packed schedule and cost him in many ways. Not only was the cancelled concert an expensive write-off, but the negative publicity surrounding his sudden and mysterious disappearance caused several projects to be suspended, and one or two sponsors even doubted whether they should continue to support him. His calendar became compressed to the point where he could not fulfil his obligations, and his scheduled participation in the Beijing Olympics music video was cancelled, depriving him of a chance to be seen widely by the biggest audience of them all.
Now he had to work twice as hard to penetrate the Mainland market, his management team said. Everything they did over the coming year would be geared towards establishing him in China – every song he recorded, every TV show he appeared on, every commercial he shot, every hour he slept, every meal he ate. He had everything it took to be a superstar in China, but it would be hard. He had to be ready to sacrifice everything. Gary thought about all the things he had already sacrificed – friends, a social life, family commitments, love, relationships. And he was not at all frightened by what he was about to embark on, because he had none of the things that people normally hold dear. He had nothing to sacrifice.
The giant billboards that stood along the elevated highway bore the poster announcing Gary’s ground-breaking concert in Shanghai. Music Angel has arrived! The Angel of Music is here to save us … His image was spread across each billboard, his newly gym-toned torso showing through a shirt that had been strategically slashed to display his abdominal muscles, the result of eight months’ work with a personal trainer. His head was bowed to show off his thick black hair, that looked slick with sweat, and computer trickery had provided him with a giant pair of angel wings, giving the impression that he was landing gently on earth after a celestial journey. It was impossible to miss these posters. As his car drove him along the busy highway, he reckoned that they appeared every couple of miles, each time positioned in the middle of a cluster of three billboards. On one side of him there was a young woman dressed only in underwear, her index finger to her lips, which were pursed in a hushing shape; on the other side were washing machines and refrigerators.
He had just performed a sell-out concert in Wuhan which had been widely covered in the local press and gained enormous publicity for his principal sponsors, a soft-drink company. They had shot a TV commercial to coincide with his tour, a big-budget production involving sophisticated computer graphics, in which the Angel Gary flies over a devastated landscape defeating gruesome monsters by shining a light that emanates from his heart. As Gary flutters softly to earth, the desert around him turns lush and green. The power to turn darkness to light, he whispers, looking at the camera with his trademark sideways glance before taking a sip of soda.
It was remarked within the industry and by the public alike that Gary was looking great. After many months of limited public appearances, during which he was rarely photographed, he had unveiled his new image – muscular and with a streak of danger. He was still boyish and innocent-looking, but his presence now carried a faint physical threat, as if he had a dark side to him. His stylists and costume designers were showered with praise, as were the people at the record company who had devised the new marketing strategy.
‘Thank goodness we invested so much in your gym work,’ his agent said as they drove past the fifth billboard. ‘Your physical condition is crucial. We can’t afford to have a repeat of Taipei last year.’
Gary did not answer. As usual, the previous night’s concert had left him both exhausted and unable to sleep. It was always like this. The adrenalin of the performance would rush through his veins, and he would feel the deep pounding of the bass notes reverberate in his chest and ribcage hours after the concert had ended, when he was lying in bed trying to sleep. Every tiny light in the room – the green numbers showing the time on the DVD player, the red dot on the TV set – seemed noon-bright and blinding even when his eyes were closed. Often he would just sit in front of the TV with the remote control in his hand, staring at the black screen. He could not even summon enough enthusiasm to turn it on. Sometimes he would eventually fall asleep at around three or four o’clock, but often he would just count the hours until dawn, which would come as a relief, because daylight brought with it activity, and he would not have to sit alone with only his thoughts for company.
In Wuhan the night before, he had tried to surf the internet for the porn sites he had become addicted to, but had failed. That was the problem with China – he could not access any of his usual sites. It had become a late-night ritual for him: turning on his laptop and idly searching for new, more dangerous sites each time. He did this after work or a concert, when he was alone in his apartment or hotel room and the night ahead seemed very long. He was not even excited by these sites any more; they had simply become something like a calming reassurance after a long day. Even the nastiest failed to provoke any response from him. The moment he arrived on the Mainland, however, he was deprived of this source of comfort. He had spent several frustrating hours after the concert searching for the kind of hard-core images he was used to, but the best he could find were women who, though immodestly dressed, wore more than the models he was now seeing on billboards in Shanghai. So he had opened the mini-bar and drunk all the vodka in it, and when he finished he rang to order some more.
Drinking was a recent thing. It helped him sleep, that was all.
He had now been on the road for sixteen days, and in that time he had played fourteen concerts.
‘But, Little Brother,’ his agent continued, ‘you need to sleep. I don’t know what you are doing at night – probably chasing girls, I suppose – but we need to do a lot of public appearances, and you can’t wear your sunglasses all the time. The photoshoots, they’re OK because we can always adjust the photos later, but in public – that’s different. You know what these Shanghainese are like. They will scrutinise your appearance to the very last detail! Please remember what a huge investment we have made for this album – who else gets concerts like the one you’ve just had? Don’t waste this opportunity.’
Gary adjusted his sunglasses. They were becoming his trademark – oversized black plastic shades that gave him a mysterious, futuristic appearance.
‘We can’t say no to the press conferences and guest appearances at malls. You have to look good, Little Brother. To be honest, at the moment even our make-up artists are saying it’s hard to disguise the shadows under your eyes. If we send you out wearing too much make-up these Shanghainese will laugh out loud. They’re haughty and not easily impressed like provincial Chinese, you know. Hey, Little Brother, are you paying attention? Shanghai is at your feet. You can be one of the biggest stars in China, you’re almost there! We have two days to charm them before your concert.’
As his agent spoke Gary knew that sleep would be impossible that night. He tried to remember when he had last slept through the entire night and woken up feeling refreshed and free of worries. It did not seem as if there had ever been such a time. He could fall asleep easily on planes and in cars, and have uncomfortable fifteen-minute naps, but night-sleep was unattainable.
That evening, when he had finished the last round of press obligations, Gary went back to his hotel. He promised his agent that he would have a bath and a massage and go straight to bed, but of course he turned on his laptop instead and began to search idly for sites that did not load properly. He did not feel like drinking on his own while continuing a frustrating search for internet porn, so he took a cab to the Bund, where he knew the high-end Western bars were located. Going out in public, unaccompanied, just before a concert, was contrary to all the advice he had ever received, but he thought that if he went to a place frequented only by Westerners he might not be recognised. His guess proved to be correct. He found a place with a view of the wide sweep of the river and the skyscrapers of Pudong. Although the music was loud and the bar was evidently popular, it was large enough to have plenty of darkened nooks and comfortable chairs from which Gary could sit and watch the crowd of foreigners, some of whom were dancing in the spaces between the tables. They were heavy-footed and big-thighed, their buttocks clattering into chairs and occasionally upsetting the drinks of passers-by. He ordered several unfamiliar cocktails that turned out to be too sweet, and then changed to vodka. He kept his baseball hat on, having decided that the sunglasses would be too ostentatious. It was a relief for him to be away from his hotel room, to hear music that he did not have to perform to. For at least two hours he sat near a window, quietly sipping his drinks. He felt his cheeks flush with the alcohol and his temples begin to throb, but it did not matter – at least he was not alone in the oppressive silence of his hotel room.
His discomfort began when he noticed a few of the Chinese waiters huddling together and whispering. They were trying to hide their curiosity, but could not resist glancing at him. He did not want to leave the bar. It was not yet one o’clock and there were too many hours of darkness left ahead of him. And then the pleasant Australian couple sitting near him – who had just been holding hands and kissing – left, and their place was taken by a sweaty Western man who tried to engage Gary in conversation. The man was drunk, but Gary did not feel like moving from his spot. Soon the man would grow tired and leave him alone.
‘What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Don’t feel like speaking, eh? Jeez, you Chinese are so goddamn unfriendly. Hey, look at me when I talk to you.’
Gary looked around. The bar was full and there was nowhere to move to.
‘Hey, I’m talking to you.’
Gary turned and said, ‘Fuck off.’
The reports that began to appear the following morning were full of inaccuracies as usual, and there were conflicting accounts from bystanders as to who had started the ensuing altercation, what it had been about, who had taken the first swing. What was in no doubt was that Gary had swiftly lost control and knocked the other man off his feet, even though he was heftily built. The internet was full of photos taken with camera phones – grainy and badly lit, but clearly showing Gary standing over the man with his fist raised. The now-infamous video – again captured on a mobile phone and freely available on YouTube the next day – shows Gary swaying and unsteady on his feet, then bouncing up and down like a boxer ready for a fight before stumbling towards the man on the ground and aiming a casual kick to his midriff as if toe-poking a football. When the man shouts out an inarticulate insult, Gary attempts to pick up a bar stool, presumably to attack him with it. But the stool is fixed and doesn’t budge, so Gary turns his attention to a signboard that says WOW! and rips it off the wall. When some of the waiters attempt to restrain him he fights them off and shouts, Don’t touch me. Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? The camera wobbles and cuts out, and when it begins to play again Gary is seen surrounded by a group of consoling strangers. The rest of the bar is emptying and the music has stopped. His head is in his hands and his shoulders are heaving up and down as he sobs. In the grey-pink half-light of the video, he is briefly seen in profile, silhouetted against what seems to be a curtain made from shimmering glass beads that look almost electric in the way they sparkle. Although it is dark and his face is not properly lit, his features are unmistakable – the perfect straight nose that ends in a delicate point, the soft angle of the jaw, the hair that falls over his brow. His head is bowed, his shoulders hunched and defeated. It is this image that graces the cover of all the tabloid newspapers the following evening.
4
Forget the Past, Look Only to the Future
That morning’s emails bore no shocks, only positive developments. These days there were no longer any brutish demands from creditors or feeble excuses from non-paying clients, and the daily ritual of replying to emails each morning had become a pleasurable affair for Yinghui, to be carried out at an almost leisurely pace over a cappuccino. There were, amongst other upbeat messages, an invitation to the opening of a new hotel on the river in Shiliupu and an interesting proposition from someone wanting to build a carbon-neutral cultural centre in the middle of town. New contacts and possibilities revealed themselves nowadays without her even having to seek them out. What a change, she thought, as she finished her coffee.
Business was going well for Yinghui. The two upmarket lingerie stores she’d established were flourishing, and in little more than a year she had broken even and was now watching the profits accumulate, week by week, the spreadsheets filling out with handsome-looking figures bursting with promise. Occasionally, when she glanced at the documents her breathless accountant showed her, she ceased to take note of the substantial numbers, for their trajectory was so steep that she had difficulty imagining where they would take her twelve months hence. And yet she was not a person with a modest imagination – quite the opposite.
Her ad campaigns had been striking and wildly successful. She had used only Chinese models, never mixed-race ones, and they never flaunted their bodies in an overtly sexual way. Although they did display a good deal of bare skin, the models were styled beautifully, and the overall aesthetic was classy rather than trashy. The catchy taglines were mysterious and playful, like the images themselves.
Elegant Outside, Passionate Inside
Secret Exciting
Amazing Beautiful You
Although she had originally thought that the shop would cater mainly to the wives of high-ranking party officials and low-profile billionaires who wanted a discreet custom service, Yinghui soon found a huge demand amongst ordinary professional women who were willing to spend upwards of four hundred yuan for the simplest bra. The low lighting and shadowy spaces of the stores, together with the women-only entry policy and touches of luxury such as the Venetian chandeliers created an ambience that proved incredibly popular, with many clients lingering on the plush sofas, and leafing through the glossy magazines and catalogues as they chatted and decided what else to purchase. Before long Yinghui had taken over the adjoining shops and added a coffee bar in one store and a wine bar in the other, extending the opening hours and turning both venues into destinations in their own right. The lingerie was all but removed from the store itself and transferred into specially designed semi-private ‘modelling rooms’, and the newly vacated space was now filled with stylish mannequins, artwork, and giant floral displays.
The income and publicity generated by the two stores made it possible for Yinghui to seek business partners for new ventures on a much larger scale, and her financial projections were such that banks were suddenly willing to listen to her requests for loans. Her plans for expansion included a chain of small shops in metro stations, which would sell the basic Amazing Beautiful You range; twelve shops selling clothes for teenage girls called FILGirl (Fly in Love Girl); an internet-based cosmetics brand called Shhh … aimed at women over the age of forty; and a luxury spa modelled on a northern Thai village, the construction of which was nearing completion.
These exciting ventures made people in the retail industry take notice of Yinghui, and the expatriate community was especially interested to learn that a foreigner was able to negotiate the complex world of Chinese retail. She began to give talks to the various foreign Chambers of Commerce, speaking to budding entrepreneurs about the pressures of being a foreigner and a woman in a male-dominated world. As she became more visible she did an interview with the Shanghai Daily – a brief article, nothing more – in which she was asked to reveal the key to her success at a time when many businesses were experiencing difficulties due to the global recession.
‘I smile every day while coolly evaluating my business model,’ she replied, smiling coolly. ‘I remain 100 per cent optimistic even in a crisis while being decisive enough to act as required.’
Was she ruthless? the interviewer asked.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You have to be tough to succeed.’
Even as she said it she regretted the way she sounded – matter-of-fact, unthinking, as if nothing bothered her. She tried immediately to laugh and find common ground with the interviewer, a young woman in her mid-twenties. But as Yinghui joked about things in the news – celebrity gossip, cute pop singers, the latest films – she could feel the journalist withdrawing behind the safety of a polite smile, the gulf between them widening. She felt old, her laugh sounded fake and robotic; the girl merely smiled and listened as Yinghui’s jokes became more and more risqué.
That interview sealed her growing reputation in more ways than one. Her image hardened into this: a bold businesswoman, certainly; but also a super-efficient, humourless automaton who would coldly plunge a knife into you, but she wouldn’t bother to do it in your back, she’d stick it in your chest. She saw this written in a ‘joke’ email circulating in her office, copied to her by mistake. Ultrawoman, Dragon Queen, Terminatress, Rambo – these were some of the nicknames she discovered as she scrolled down the email chain, which was full of comments on her boring suits and severe hairstyle – ‘like a rural Party official dressed for an interview with Hu Jintao’, someone joked. Some months later, at a cocktail party thrown by an American law firm, she heard one Western man say to another, ‘Hey, look, there’s that Chinese lesbian.’
She had got used to having her hair short – it had been her style for almost twenty years, ever since university days. There was a time when people found the look charming and gamine, like Jean Seberg in À Bout de Souffle, from which Yinghui first got the idea. She didn’t think she’d changed much since then – she didn’t look very different from the Yinghui she saw whenever she looked at her college photos – but she wondered if she was getting a bit old for the hairstyle now. No woman in Shanghai had short hair – they all seemed to have long glossy locks that fell to their shoulders or were gathered in a dramatic pile on their heads in the style of air hostesses. She began to grow her hair out, but was frustrated by how long it took. At first it became thin and shabby, like a scarecrow’s, then thicker but still messy, like a schoolboy’s. When, finally, it reached a decent length, her hairdresser said, ‘Don’t expect me to perform miracles.’
She began to dread the social functions that were becoming an increasing necessity in her professional life: a thrusting entrepreneur had to go out and be seen, but a single, always unaccompanied woman of thirty-seven was, in Shanghai, an invitation for people to comment. The locals had names for women like her, whom they considered sadly past their prime. Shengnü, Baigujing – that sort of thing. Sometimes she wondered if she really was that: a leftover woman, the dregs; or a shaggy monster waiting to be slain by the Monkey God.
‘Style issues.’ That was the phrase her friends used to describe what her new priorities should be. She needed to find a look that projected an image: someone effortlessly successful, who had accomplished all that she had while remaining gentle and feminine – a real Chinese woman. She wanted to ask what a real Chinese woman was, whether in some way she differed from a real Indian woman or a real American woman. And if she wasn’t a real Chinese woman, what was she – a fake one?
These new concerns – style issues – were not a welcome addition to her list of considerations. She woke every morning at 6 a.m., had a glass of fruit juice, then went for a forty-five-minute run on the treadmill. After a breakfast of soy protein and mixed berry fruitshake she would head down to the office and begin to deal with phone calls and emails before the first meetings began to force their way into her day. In a city where lunch breaks began religiously at 11.30 a.m., she rarely had lunch unless she had arranged a business meeting at a restaurant. Most of the time she would work through midday and simply forget to eat. Afternoons were reserved for visiting her various businesses, spending time chatting to the staff in the stores, gauging their morale and energy levels – the little human touches that made her a good employer. The evenings were nowadays taken up with entertaining or being entertained, which she neither enjoyed nor disliked. She would get home at eleven and answer any outstanding emails on her BlackBerry while in bed, in the few moments other people might have spent reading glossy magazines to ‘wind down’. At precisely midnight she would put the light out and swiftly fall asleep, rarely allowing the thoughts of her day to overspill into her slumber.
Three times a week she went for Power Yoga at a studio in Xintiandi, never speaking to the other women who had time to hang around and chat in the corridors. At the end of her session, when she lay briefly on her mat blinking at the pistachio-green ceiling, her mind would still be racing, energised by the thought of all the things ahead of her. Empty your mind and be still, her teachers would say, enjoy being in the present: Let go of all that has happened in the past. Do not think about what lies ahead but stay in the stillness of this moment. But this was not possible for her. There was too much for her to do, too many thoughts spinning and clashing in her mind. She needed to look ahead, map out her future, every minute of the day – like a constantly moving ocean creature that would drown if ever it stopped swimming, forward, forward.
She could never stand emptiness, and stillness was even worse.
She had a small group of friends, a mixture of local and expat women, with whom she tried to meet up for dinner once every other week – the last semblance of her dwindling social life. They usually met at a Hunan restaurant on the top floor of a Japanese department store on Nanjing Lu, not far from Yinghui’s office. Recently, she had begun to notice during these get-togethers that the other women would casually mention male friends of theirs, all of whom seemed to be single or divorced and in their late thirties or early forties. Discussion of these men seemed innocent enough at first; Yinghui tried to shrug it off as merely catching up on gossip. But after a while she could no longer ignore the fact that her (securely married) friends were taking pity on her, particularly as the men in question were almost exclusively Western – for everyone knew that once a woman was past thirty-five, there was little point in even trying to hook up with a local guy: Westerners were so much more accepting of age.
‘Are you trying to matchmake me?’ she challenged them jokingly one day as the double-chilli fish head arrived. She expected them to be embarrassed by the exposure of their scheming ways, but instead they were upfront about it. ‘Let’s face it,’ one of them said, beginning to pluck the meat from the fish cheeks with her chopsticks, ‘you can’t be happy in a place like Shanghai if you’re single. We’re all feminists, blah blah blah, but this is not London or New York, you know, this is China. Without a husband, you won’t be successful in your work. You can’t expect to work the hours you do and come back to an empty apartment. Besides, if you want children, you have to get moving. We know it sounds cruel, but … get real.’
Yinghui stared at the dull-eyed fish, its eyes opaque and porcelain-white. She reached for it with her chopsticks and prodded it slightly without great enthusiasm. ‘I’m too busy for a relationship,’ she said.
‘Listen, where do you want to be in ten years’ time? Still flogging panties to rich women?’
Yinghui could not hide her annoyance, but nonetheless she allowed herself to be persuaded to go on a couple of blind dates – friends of friends of friends. The first was in a Mexican restaurant near Tianzifang, the next in a Xinjiang restaurant at the far end of Hengshan Lu. On both occasions the men were polite, professionally successful, and bland. Towards the end of the second date, Yinghui decided that it would be her last. As she watched the man (Michael? Mark? A nice American lawyer) pull the leathery pieces of lamb off the skewer, she realised that she wasn’t able to summon any energy to be witty or flirtatious, to behave as she knew she should on a first date with a perfectly OK man. It wasn’t, as her friends claimed, that she was out of practice: she doubted she had ever known how to do so. The small talk left her feeling bewildered and exhausted, and she was constantly afraid that the conversation would turn towards more personal things, towards the past: how and why she had first come to Shanghai – the normal things foreigners asked each other. She tried to seize control of the conversation, filling it with lengthy explanations of how each dish was prepared, what bizarre Xinjiang ingredients they contained. The man listened politely and asked questions with the requisite level of cultural awareness, which made the transaction less painful for Yinghui. At one point, as she felt the evening slipping dangerously into ‘Tell me about your family’ territory, she changed the subject abruptly by turning to the waitress who had fortuitously arrived with more tea. She began to engage her in idle chat, hoping to glean insights on her exotic homeland, which she would then translate as conversation fillers, making it impossible for Michael/Mark to ask more personal questions. The waitress’s name badge read ‘Aliya’ – such a beautiful Xinjiang name, Yinghui remarked; tell us about where you are from. The waitress giggled and shrugged – she was actually from way down south, Fujian province; she wasn’t an exotic Muslim at all. Mercifully, the lights suddenly dimmed for the entrance of the Uighur dancers. Yinghui was pleased that the music was loud and that the dancers yelped and shrieked all the way through their performance, for it meant that no further conversation was necessary. She smiled at Michael/Mark, and he smiled back.
She really did not need a man to be successful.
One afternoon Yinghui left work early to get dressed for an evening function. It had not been a particularly stressful day, but she was fidgety and distracted. Hours before the event, she had begun to feel anxious; even thinking about what dress to wear and how to style her still-too-short hair made her nervous, which in turn filled her with self-loathing for having allowed such trivial concerns to enter her life.
She had been nominated for the Businesswoman of the Year awards, in the ‘Breakthrough’ category, in which she was the oldest person. The ceremony was held in the ballroom of a hotel in Jing’an, decorated with huge bouquets of pink flowers and banners bearing quotes from Sunzi’s Art of War: ‘Opportunities Multiply as They are Seized’; ‘A Leader Leads by Example, Not Force’. The other nominees all looked the same to Yinghui – pretty, sylphlike, twenty-something local women, their hair effortlessly long, curling featherlike towards their collarbones. Yinghui wished she had been nominated for the ‘Lifetime Achievement’ award that was made up almost exclusively of older Western women; she might have looked more delicate and feminine lined up next to them when the group photographs were taken. Instead, surrounded by women at least ten years younger than herself, she looked square-cut and boxy. She did not win the award (which went to a girl of twenty-four who sold recycled toilet paper to Europe), but her work gained considerable publicity.
Among the guests were a few people she knew well, including one or two she considered friends, some business associates, and many others who were mere acquaintances. A man caught her eye but she couldn’t figure out which category he belonged to. He had a familiar gait – stiff at the joints, the way a marionette might walk, like an arthritic soldier. He was about her age, well-groomed, impeccably dressed, deliberate in his movements: the way he shook hands, firmly, or held chairs back for women, or leant forward to kiss them on both cheeks in a courteous but professional manner – every gesture seemed elegant yet practised. He carried an air of privilege, but he was certainly not Shanghainese. He was well packaged, Yinghui thought, the right age too. The right age: she hated how she had come to assess men this way, the way they assessed her – it was a way of seeing people that had seeped into her thinking unconsciously, as if by osmosis. Right age. Good match. A real woman. Style issues. That was what happened when you lived in Shanghai. She couldn’t escape it now.
She circled him from a distance, trying to work out whether she really knew him. He was wearing a light-grey suit made of a fabric with a faint herringbone pattern, a pale-blue shirt and a dark tie. His jawline was just turning from sleek to heavy. She eased her way through the throng, dodging precariously held champagne flutes, keeping him on the edge of her field of vision all the time. He was on his own now, reading a brochure, wandering away from the crowd, slowly circling the room. She moved closer, making sure he could not see her. Then, when the time was right, she turned and caught his eye. She felt a tightness in her throat, a quickening knot that threatened to turn swiftly into panic.
‘Sorry – Chee Keong? Justin?’
‘Yes. Leong Yinghui!’ He made a movement towards her, his head leaning forwards; but then he corrected himself and extended his hand. ‘Hi. My God, it’s been years. I’d never have thought I’d meet you at a business event.’
‘Justin Lim Chee Keong. What a surprise.’ She shook his hand as firmly as she could, with a brisk up-and-down movement. She wondered if her voice sounded artificially confident, over-bright. ‘How long has it been – ten years? More, perhaps.’
‘I’d say at least fifteen years. Though at my age I try not to keep count. You haven’t changed at all – I mean, not one bit.’
‘You too,’ Yinghui lied. Up close, she could see the lines drawing down on either side of his mouth, the dark circles that shadowed his slightly bloodshot eyes. His skin seemed dry and brittle. When he smiled she saw vestiges of the person she had known – a young, physical man with a full, open face. The same features were now touched with a certain hollowness, a glimpse of what he might look like as an old man. ‘So what brings you to Shanghai – don’t tell me, family business?’
‘What else is there in my life?’ His laugh was rehearsed, mechanical, and it made him seem tired, not happy. He looked at her with a neutral expression; she searched for traces of shock or surprise in his reddened eyes, but could discern nothing. ‘It’s a real surprise seeing you here. I was just looking at the list of nominees for the awards, and when I saw your name I thought, “No way, that can’t be the same person I knew.” A businesswoman? I never thought that was possible. Amazing.’ Yinghui thought he was going to follow up with questions about her life – how she had arrived in Shanghai, the nature of her business – but he merely continued to stare at her in a blank, awkward manner, exactly the way she remembered from all those years ago.
‘Stranger things happen in life,’ she said, filling in the silence at last. ‘It’s not exactly the Virgin Birth, you know. Anyway, how is, um, how is your brother?’ she asked. ‘I read about CS’s wedding about five, six years ago – it looked very luxurious. I knew the bride at school. She was in the year above me. And your parents, still glamorous as ever?’
‘I believe all is well with them.’
‘I read about your family’s business in the papers – not that I was looking out for it or anything, I just read an article by chance. Things must be tough.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a global crisis, isn’t it? It’s tough for everyone – though you seem to be doing pretty well.’
A young woman appeared at his side and slid her hand around his waist, inviting him to do the same; but she was looking away from him, towards something behind Yinghui’s back. There was a sudden burst of camera flashes around them, two or three photographers taking pictures of the couple. Yinghui stepped back and watched them strike poses as they faced the cameras – he stiffly, his new companion sinuously and expertly. Yinghui recognised her from magazines she’d read in the hairdressers – a local actress on the verge of stardom. She certainly did not have style issues. From a distance they made a handsome couple, Yinghui thought, and she could already envisage the photos in the magazines: a perfect union of modern Chinese beauty and old overseas Chinese money. The lines of his drawn, tired face would not be visible, and the readers would only see his good cheekbones, his perfect bearing and casual elegance – the sort of thing that could only have been produced by generations of good breeding.
He turned to look at Yinghui, mouthing the word ‘Sorry,’ and she mouthed back, ‘No problem.’ She hung about for a while, wondering what to do. Should she slip away in a dignified manner without a proper goodbye, or continue waiting for him, the feeling of being superfluous mounting with every second? She had just about decided on the former when she was suddenly seized by a need to talk to him – to tell him things. She felt a rush of unaired grievances welling up in her chest, pushing up into her throat; the need to vocalise them took her by surprise, shocked her. She wanted to sit him down, face to face, and speak at him. She didn’t need him to reply, she merely needed him to be physically present while she said her piece. He could listen passively, unabsorbingly, and she wouldn’t care, but she needed to catch hold of him.
This was ridiculous, she thought, just ridiculous. It was over fifteen years ago – what did it matter now? She was an entirely different person now. The quick flash of irrational hatred that she felt for him began to subside. He was a few years older than she was, a man slipping surely into middle age; he had his own problems. She hadn’t felt even the slightest bit of malicious pleasure when she had read in the financial press about his family’s business going bust. She had felt almost indifferent, her emotional detachment tinged with pity – much as she was feeling now. Look at him, taking up with a trashy actress fifteen years younger than himself. It was sad. He was sad. Yinghui had barely known him in the first place.
Never let the past affect how you perform. Every day is a new day. That was something else she’d said in that defining interview, so she ought to practise what she preached. She gathered herself to leave, and as she did so she dipped into her clutch bag for her business card – she was a consummate professional, and this was a professional setting. She reached across and handed it to him with both hands.
‘So sorry, but I have to rush off now. Good to see you again, a real surprise. Here’s my card if ever you need to get in touch.’
He accepted it, also with both hands, and she realised that the formality between them was entirely appropriate: they were strangers to each other now. ‘Wonderful,’ he said, slipping the card into his pocket. ‘Great. I will call you.’
But she knew, as one always does in these situations, that he would not call her.
As she sat in bed that night she allowed herself one minute to remember how Justin CK Lim and the rest of his family had looked fifteen years ago, how they had behaved.
Just one minute; and then she would put them out of her mind.
She checked her BlackBerry, scrolling through the emails that had come in that day – all the fascinating projects she was going to begin in the weeks, months and years ahead.
How to Manage Time
When I was thirteen, I was sent away to live with relatives in the far south of Malaysia, at the opposite end of the country from where I had been born. Do not be alarmed – this sort of displacement is quite normal amongst underprivileged rural families. My mother had died a few years previously and my father, unable to care for me properly, decided to ask my great-aunt to take me in. He himself had to move away from our village to seek work in Kota Bharu, where he lived in one room above a tyre repair shop. It made sense for him to be free of me.
My great-aunt lived and worked on a small pineapple farm about thirty miles north of Singapore. The peaty soil of the region was famous for producing the best pineapples in the country, but ours were an exception to the rule, being meagre in size and acidic in taste. Nothing I did seemed to improve them – not the addition of buffalo manure or even the chemical fertilisers I found on a lorry parked by the road one day (there was no one about, and far too much fertiliser for any one person to use, so I helped myself). Even at that age I found the lack of a satisfactory solution very frustrating. Why couldn’t I make those pineapples big and sweet? I worked on the farm every day after school – it was my way of earning my keep and it kept me out of mischief, said my great-aunt. I do not have fond memories of this period, because it involved failure: the only failure I have encountered in my life thus far. To this day, even a brief encounter with hard, unripe pineapple (of the kind one routinely encounters on aeroplanes) is enough to send me into quite a rage.
Life in the south was not a thing of beauty. The landscape lacked the soul of the north, the wilderness, the poetry. It is surprising how one’s childhood days can be troubled by the finer concerns of the spirit, filled as they are with the anxieties of youth. I was picked on at school, teased for my accent, which I was never fully able to lose – the unconscious warping of ‘a’s to ‘e’s or ‘o’s, the dropping of the ends of words, the addition of unfamiliar emphatic exclamations. My speech marked me out as foreign and, unsurprisingly, I became known as a quiet boy who said very little. I spent much time lurking in the background, so to speak, watching from the sidelines and never thrusting myself into the spotlight. By remaining in the shadows I learnt to observe the workings of the human psyche – what people want and how they get it. Everything that I was to achieve later in life can be traced back to this period, when I began my apprenticeship in the art of survival.
All that earnest study of the cut and thrust of life meant that I did not have time to miss home. I did not suffer from any longing for my homeland in the north, with its strange, warm dialect and its melancholy coastline scarred with brackish streams that ebbed and flowed with the tide. It is only now that I have the luxury of time and rich personal accomplishment that I can sit back and appreciate a certain sentiment for the village in which I grew up. This does not, however, mean that I am someone prone to nostalgia. I am certainly not encumbered by the past.
Like most people in our position, we lived an industrious but precarious existence. My great-aunt had worked part-time in a factory on the outskirts of Johor Baru that produced VHS players for export, but, being in her fifties, she was soon laid off and had no work other than to tend to our smallholding, and we were therefore forced to be inventive in the way we made our living. Nowadays I hear liberal, educated people refer sympathetically to such a way of life as ‘hard’, or even ‘desperate’, but I prefer to think of it as creative. I had just turned thirteen, and thought that if we had more money I would be able to return home.
I began selling pineapples on a disused wooden stand by the side of the road that led to the coast, hoping to ensnare day-trippers from Singapore on their way to Desaru. Knowing that our pineapples were sour, I sold them cheaply, and in the first few weeks I managed to make a little money. But even this began to dry up as people realised the low quality of my wares. So one day I bought a supersweet pineapple in the market and cut it up in pieces, offering it as proof of my own fruit’s tenderness. A number of people fell for it, and only one couple complained on their way back from the coast. I feigned innocence – I couldn’t guarantee that every pineapple would be sweet. They showed me a pineapple cut in half, and I recognised its dry, pale flesh as one of mine. They insisted I give them five pineapples for free, and when I refused, the woman called me names and her companion ended up hurling the pineapple at my head. I ducked but it caught me on my ear, making it swell like a mushroom. Soon afterwards I abandoned the stall and got a job waiting tables at a local coffee shop.
I did not see my father for nearly four years. I received news from him occasionally, when a letter would arrive via my great-aunt. He would write about the Kelantan river bursting its banks in the monsoon season, the kite-flying contests that year, the second-hand scooter he had bought, things he had eaten in the market – uninteresting news of daily life. Once he told me he had bought me a large spinning top which awaited my return, but when I finally went home there was no further mention of it.
There was never any news of jobs or money – the very reason we had to move away from home. There was no indication of how he was planning our future, no sense that he was aware of the passage of time. I had never been aware of this myself, but now, hundreds of miles from home, I could almost hear the seconds of an invisible clock ticking away in my head. I had gone to live with my great-aunt thinking that it was temporary, and that I would be back home as soon as my father ‘got settled’. That was what he told me. After a year I realised that my residence in the dull flatlands of the south was not going to be as fleeting as I had hoped. One learns quickly at that age. Like all children, I had never before appreciated what time meant – the years stretched infinitely beyond me, waiting, impossibly, to be filled. But all of a sudden I began to feel the urgency of each day. I counted them down, saddened by how much I could have been doing with every sunrise and sunset, if only I had been at home.
I waited for my father to think of a plan that would reunite us in our village, but, incapable of understanding that time was not on his side, he left me waiting.
You must appreciate that time is always against you. It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. Therefore, if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you.
Four years. They passed so quickly.
5
Reinvent Yourself
The first rule of success is, you must look beautiful. No one taught Phoebe this secret, but she could tell by simple observation that successful people always looked good. Just by looking at the women hurrying along Henan Lu, running for buses, or reading their magazines in the metro at rush hour, she could spot the few who were on life’s upward curve. At first she did not really think about the connection between appearance and achievement; she could not even imagine such a link. But then she kept noticing more and more women who looked immaculate in their dress, and what’s more, that they often carried bags that looked as though they contained serious life items instead of mere beauty accessories. Often, these impressive-looking women would take out papers or a book from their sleek bags and read them on the bus with an air of purpose, and even if they were reading mere novels, Phoebe could see that they were absorbing the words the way high-achieving people do. All the time working, working, in a way that was steely yet elegant. It reminded her of a girl at school who always came first in class, the way that girl read books with a determination no one else had. All the teachers said she would go on to great things, and sure enough, she got a job as a quantity surveyor in Kuantan. Gradually, Phoebe realised that the reason these women looked so beautiful was that they had good positions in life; she could not deny that the two things were inseparable. Which one came first, beauty or success, she did not know.
She started taking notes on the type of clothes they wore, how they styled their hair, even the way they walked. When she compared these to her own way of dressing and behaving, it became clear why she had not yet been able to find a decent job in Shanghai. No one would look at her and think, that woman is going to astound the world with her abilities, we should give her a job. No, she was not someone you would even look at twice on the bus, never mind give a job to.
She knew she was not a mediocre person, but she looked like one to the outside world. This was not her fault, she thought; it was also because of where she lived. Every day she was surrounded by mediocre people who dragged her down into their sea of mediocrity. She had found a room in an apartment block not far from the river, which she had thought would be beautiful and prestigious. A girl she had worked with in a mobile-phone keypad factory in Guangzhou had a childhood friend who had gone to work in Shanghai, and she had a good job working in an office. The girl’s apartment was just one room, but it had a small washroom and a space to prepare simple meals. Her name was Yanyan, and in her text message she said that Phoebe could stay there for free until she got a job – surely it wouldn’t be long before Phoebe found a good position. When Phoebe looked at the address she saw that it was close to the centre of town, a nice area near some famous attractions that foreign visitors loved, and by the bank of the river, about which people wrote love songs. The apartment was on the tenth floor, so she imagined magnificent views of this great metropolis that would inspire her with the spirit of high achievement. Every day she would wake up and breathe the intoxicating air of excellence.
But when she came out of the subway station she found herself in a low-class shopping centre full of small shops that sold everything in bulk – clothes, mushrooms, teapots, pink plastic hairclips, fake trainers. She stood for a minute trying to work out the right direction. In front of her was a row of shops with makeshift beds outside them – there were people stretched out on each one, getting tattoos. She walked past them, looking at the huge rose being tattooed on a man’s arm, its petals reaching around his biceps; an eagle on the nape of someone else’s neck; a manga kitten on a young woman’s ankle. Outside, the pavement was black with grease from the dozens of stalls selling skewers of grilled meat and squid. It was hard to walk properly because of all the discarded skewer-sticks, which made her feel unstable in her heels.
In the entrance hall to the apartment block there was a cramped wooden booth where two watchmen sat, drinking tea from plastic flasks. They did not even look up when Phoebe walked in; they did not care who came into the building. The floor was pale, with a covering of dust and streaked with black marks that Phoebe could not identify, and on the walls were patches of cement where the crumbling brickwork had fallen away and been hastily filled in. The wooden noticeboards and the metal pigeon-hole letterboxes were old and had not been changed for at least fifty years – their green paint looked almost black. The place was dirtier than some of the factory hostels she had lived in. As she waited for the lift to take her up to her new life, she felt the heavy weight of dread descend upon her shoulders. There were hundreds and hundreds of apartments in the building, and only one lift, and as she waited a crowd began to gather around her, everyone pushing forward. These people were not the sort of neighbours she had imagined. She had envisaged herself surrounded by the kind of women she saw on TV, well-dressed modern Shanghainese, but instead she found a crowd of old-age pensioners dressed in revolutionary clothes, stern padded jackets and shapeless trousers that matched their expressionless faces, which seemed to have crumpled inwards. No light shone from their eyes, no feeling sprang from their gazes, and when Phoebe looked at them she felt a shiver of fear run down her neck. It was like looking at an abandoned house where everything had been kept as it was in the past, the clocks ticking, the furniture clean and shiny, the plants watered, only there was no one living there; they had long since gone away. Even the younger people seemed old and worn down by unknown cares, their clothes as uninspired as their faces.
They shuffled past Phoebe as the lift neared the ground floor, their shoulders and arms jostling her. She watched the numbers light up on the counter, and as she did so she felt as though her life was also descending: 4, 3, 2, 1. Soon it would be zero. As the lift doors opened she saw that it was tiny and filled with cigarette smoke, so she decided to take the stairs instead. She only had a small bag with her – she had learnt to travel light. Even so, she was soon out of breath because the stairs were steep and the windows that lined the stairwell were open and let in the dust and pollution from outside. There were pipes everywhere, and some of them were leaky. Where they dripped onto the floor there were crusted brown patches that looked like mushrooms sprouting from the concrete.
As she climbed the stairs she could see a giant construction site taking shape right next to the apartment block. Huge steel columns jutted out from the hole being dug for the foundations. Beyond it was a shopping centre, painted in coral pink and blue. In the daytime its neon signboard looked like scaffolding, and it was hard to read what it said: Shanghai Liteful Fashion Shopping Market. The signboards that covered its entire length advertised cheap clothing brands that Phoebe had never heard of, the colours gold and bright green and yellow. Nothing matched. The streets below were dark with a mass of people waiting for buses or emerging from the shopping centre – it must have been a wholesale market where you could buy anything from skirts to electronic goods to dried food very cheaply. Even from where she was she could hear the thumping of music and the cries of advertisements from loudspeakers. She paused and looked at the scene – at the thick, wriggling river of bodies so dense and colourless that it was hard to make out each individual human being. She could be anywhere in China, she thought. In fact, she could be in any no-value town in Asia. She had known so many of them, and they all looked like this.
But maybe the apartment would be nice. Maybe her view would not be of this no-place city she was now staring at; maybe she would look out at the river instead, and wake up every day to views of Shanghai.
She reached the top floor. The corridor was long, and stretched into the gloom – she could not see the end of it. There were dozens of doors, each one a separate apartment. She walked down the corridor, counting down the numbers until she found the right one.
Why are you always so doubtful? Phoebe Chen Aiping, do not allow yourself to be dragged down by your childish fears.
The door was protected by a metal grille, just like all the others. Phoebe reached between the bars and knocked on it, but there was no answer. She knocked again and waited. Perhaps Yanyan had unexpectedly been called out to an important meeting, even though she had said it was her day off. It was often like this with busy people who had important jobs; they had to respond to unpredictable events at short notice and be flexible – they were successful because they were able to deal with stressful situations using their skill and talent. The door opposite opened and an old woman peered out, glaring at Phoebe and surveying her from head to foot. Phoebe wondered how she appeared to the old woman, whether she looked acceptable, a decent upstanding person paying a visit to a friend, or whether she looked like someone with shady intentions, a potential criminal. She reached into her handbag for her phone and rang Yanyan’s number. She heard a ringing on the other side of the door, and a few moments later she heard the locks being undone from the inside, three of them, heavily bolted.
‘Why didn’t you call out and say who you were?’ Yanyan mumbled as she opened the door. ‘I thought you were the man coming for the gas bill again.’ She seemed sleepy, her hair was a mess, as if she had just woken up, and she was dressed in pyjamas even though it was nearly midday. She let Phoebe in and went to sit on her bed. Phoebe thought, maybe she was very tired from working hard at her important job. Yanyan was wearing fluffy slippers in the shape of smiling puppies, and her pyjamas were printed with sunny flower-faces that grinned at Phoebe. There was only one single bed in the room, and a small chair piled with clothes.
‘I’m so tired,’ Yanyan said, kicking off her slippers and leaning back against the wall with her knees drawn in to her body. It was true, she looked very haggard.
‘You must be working very hard,’ Phoebe said. She did not know what to do, whether to sit on the bed or not, so she just stood in the middle of the tiny room. Looking around, she saw a cooker on one side of the door and a washroom cubicle on the other, so small that she was not sure there was enough space to stand and have a shower between the toilet and the wall. There was almost nothing in the main room apart from a small TV balanced on some shelves that held cooking utensils and a jar of pumpkin seeds. On the wall hung one of those calendars that fast-food chains give away free of charge at the end of the year if you are lucky and are there at the right time. The pages were open at June, four months ago.
Yanyan shook her head and laughed. ‘I got fired. That’s why I need someone to share the rent.’
Phoebe looked out of the window and saw the same view she had seen from the stairs, the deep hole of the construction site, the broad avenue cut by concrete bridges, the multicoloured Liteful shopping centre, the masses of people dragging heavy black bags full of cheap goods – a nowhere, could-be-anywhere place.
‘I know the room’s a bit small,’ Yanyan said, ‘but we can shift that chair and the TV and roll out the mattress.’ She reached underneath the bed and attempted to drag something out. Phoebe could see that it was a thin mattress rolled up and stuffed under the low bed.
‘It’s OK,’ Phoebe said. ‘We don’t have to do it now.’ She calculated that with the mattress rolled out, there would be about a handbag’s width between it and the bed. She wondered how long ago Yanyan had lost her job, how long she had spent her days waking up at midday, how long she had let her hair get greasy and go unwashed, but it did not seem the right time to ask such questions.
Imagine your new splendid life and it will soon come true!
Phoebe thought, it would be so easy to walk out of this tiny room. She could make up an excuse and say, I’m late for an appointment, but thank you for showing me the room, I’ll call you later once I’ve decided. But she remained standing in the middle of the room, still clutching her bag. She did not know where else to go.
‘Hey, are you hungry? It must be lunchtime now,’ Yanyan said, looking around at the walls as if hoping to find a clock, but there wasn’t one.
Phoebe shook her head. ‘Don’t worry, please don’t go to any trouble. I’ve just arrived, I don’t want to inconvenience you.’
‘I’m starving – let’s have a simple lunch!’ Yanyan insisted, and went to the cooking area. Phoebe wondered what kind of meal she would prepare. Just thinking about lunch made her realise she had not had breakfast, and suddenly she felt so hungry her stomach began to swell with an ache she had never experienced before. As she listened to the sounds of Yanyan busying herself by the stove – water from the tap drumming against the bottom of an empty kettle, the clang of steel against steel, the click-clack of chopsticks, Yanyan humming a little tune – Phoebe felt tired and in need of rest. She tried to think of the number of times someone had cooked a meal for her since she came to China, the number of times she had sat in someone’s home eating a meal – but not a single instance came to mind. She sat down on the bed and found the mattress thin but firm. The window was open and she could hear the noise of the traffic, the non-stop beeping of scooters and the growl of buses. A cool wind was blowing, making the room feel airy. She looked across at Yanyan, whom she had not yet had a chance to scrutinise – a tall, thin girl, scrawny, most would say, who walked with a stoop, which was a shame because her height would have given her a striking appearance were she not rapidly turning into a young hunchback. She could be beautiful, but instead she was mediocre. Maybe she would watch Phoebe and learn how to stand upright and keep her hair neat and stylish. Phoebe looked at Yanyan’s long, unwashed hair, which shrouded her cheeks messily, making her look like a child who had recently awoken from a bad dream.
‘Come, come, eat,’ Yanyan said, and sat down next to her. She handed Phoebe a plastic bowl of instant noodles, spicy seafood flavour. She had not torn off the wrapping properly, and when Phoebe brought the bowl to her mouth little bits of paper tickled her lips.
‘Hey, look!’ cried Yanyan. She held up a cheap plastic toy – a keyring with a small blue plastic cat attached to it. When she pulled at the chain the cat lifted a pair of chopsticks to its whiskery snout, greedily slurping some plastic noodles. ‘It came free with the packet of noodles. Here, take it – it’ll be your good-luck charm in Shanghai. It will help you get the best job in the world.’
Phoebe took the blue cat and put it in her handbag. She did not want it, but she did not want to hurt Yanyan. She stirred her noodles with her chopsticks, watching the little bits of freeze-dried vegetables slowly uncurling. They all looked the same – she couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. From the construction site below, heavy works were starting up, and the deep booming sound of piledrivers resonated in her chest.
She wrote in her journal: Wind and rain are raging, I am shaking and swaying, but I must recover, I will rise up.
She went to the fake-goods market at Zhongshan Science and Technology Park, even though she’d heard it was cheaper to buy counterfeit products on the internet. The thing about luxury high-style goods was, you had to see what they were like in real life before knowing whether they would suit you; even she knew this. She spent a long time going from shop to shop, expressing interest in certain items before walking away, knowing that the same things would be on sale a few shops away, and that the shopkeepers would be forced to come running out to the street after her to offer her lower prices than their competitors. First she selected a purse made from glossy red leather with a gold clasp buckle, which even came in a box with the logo printed in gold above the words ‘Made in Italy’. When she was bargaining with the shopkeeper, she said to him, You are so unscrupulous, you dare to say this is made in Italy when everyone knows it’s fake, and the shopkeeper said, Little Miss, it’s the truth! Don’t you know, Italy is full of factories owned by Chinese people, and those factories are full of Chinese workers producing large volumes of luxury goods! Phoebe did not fully believe this – she could not imagine entire towns and villages in Italy full of Chinese people stitching clothes and handbags and having nothing to do with the locals – but maybe it was true, maybe she now owned a genuine foreign-manufactured luxury item. Next, she hesitated over a scarf with distinctive checks and some large shawls made from pure 100 per cent pashmina, and since winter was just around the corner she thought about buying a fashionable down jacket too, something in a bright shiny colour that would make her look energetic and sporty, and even give the impression that she had just come back from a holiday in an expensive snowy place like Hokkaido.
Finally she chose the most important item, a handbag. This is how people would judge her. From afar they would notice what kind of bag she was carrying, and would decide if she was a person of class or not. She knew which kind of bag she wanted: it was the most desirable brand, but also the most illegal of all the counterfeit products. Some of the shopkeepers thought she was a spy for the trading office, and asked her many questions before admitting that they kept it in stock. The difficulty in purchasing this bag made her feel excited, as if she was buying something very rare and exclusive, even though it was a fake. Eventually one shopkeeper pushed aside a wall lined with shelves to reveal a smaller room hidden behind it, and behind this smaller room, which was filled with ordinary bags, there was another, even smaller room, and it was here that the bag she wanted was kept. There were two other women in that tiny room, examining the high-quality stylish bags with care. They were both executive-looking women wearing business clothes and carefully applied make-up, and being in that private space with them made Phoebe feel equally important. There was only one brand of bag in that room – the coveted LV brand – but in many styles and variations, the famous pattern and coloured monogram repeating all over the walls and surrounding her like the very air she breathed, making her feel slightly giddy. Phoebe took a long time before selecting the one she wanted, for even the fakes were expensive, and in the end she had to settle on the most inferior model and style. But it was still beautiful, she thought, as she walked out of the shop with it already on her shoulder. She had transferred some of the contents of her old bag into the new one, and discarded all the unwanted items in a bin just outside the shop. When she looked at some of the things she’d thrown away – the cheap dried-up lipstick, a cracked mirror, a worker’s pass from one of her old jobs in Guangzhou – she wondered why she had carried those dead objects with her for so long.
She went to an internet bar and made herself new profiles on QQ and MSN so she could chat with people online – so she could chat with men. Searching her email attachments, she found a nice photo of herself. It had been taken in Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou, but in the background there were only trees and lakes, so no one would look at the picture and make the link: Guangzhou, factory worker, immigrant. She remembered that day well – she had just left one job and was about to start another, but she had two days off in between and also some money saved up. She had dressed in nice jeans and a colourful T-shirt and taken the subway to the park as if she was having a day out with friends, only she did not have any friends. She bought red-bean shaved ice and ate it while strolling around the artificial lakes, watching the artists painting watercolours of goldfish and hilly landscapes and oil portraits of Hollywood actors. There were couples and families everywhere, and although she was on her own she felt that she was one of them, that she was someone who had a past and a future – and that life was only going to get better, just as it would for everyone around her. Near the boating lake she found a spot to sit under some bamboo trees. She was on her own, but it was OK, she was happy. She took out her phone and held it at arm’s length, holding it up slightly so that she could look at it with a raised chin – it was better that way, as it made her neck look thinner. She took a photo, but it wasn’t so good, since she was squinting a bit because of the sun. She tried it again, but it didn’t work this time either. One of the old men who sold tickets for the rowing boats called out to her, asked if she wanted him to help her take a photo. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I won’t ask you to marry me in return!’
He peered into the narrow screen, and Phoebe worried that he didn’t know how to work the camera. But as he held it in front of her he said, ‘This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school.’ It made her laugh, and in the photo she appears sunny-faced and natural, full of the promise of the bounteous years ahead of her.
As she looked at the photo on the computer screen she knew it was just the right kind to have on her profile – taken by someone else, a friend on an outing, maybe even a boyfriend. It made her appear desirable, unlike the kind of blurry self-shot images where the person was always looking up at the camera, which instantly told the viewer: I have no friends. She wrote a few lines about herself, a ‘professional career-oriented young woman with experience of foreign work and travel’. She gave her true age and stated that she wanted to meet respectable, successful men.
Within minutes of posting her profile she began to get requests from men who wanted to get to know her better. She was overwhelmed; she never imagined she could be so popular. Suddenly the whole of Shanghai seemed full of friends and potential partners, thousands of them. She began typing replies to the men she deemed the most suitable, her fingers moving across the keyboard trying to keep up with several conversations at once, but it was difficult, she was not used to typing so much and she knew she was making mistakes. Sorry for the delay in my replies, she typed as some of the men began to get impatient. It was thrilling to chat to people she barely knew, and she began to imagine what some of them might be like – rich, handsome, successful.
But very soon she realised that many of them were just high-school and college kids who were having some online fun – they said so themselves. They had no intention of ever meeting up. She became angry that they were wasting her time, so she learnt how to block them from contacting her. Young boys were no use to her; she needed to meet successful adults, she was not interested in spotty adolescents. Some men seemed OK when they first started chatting, but gradually Phoebe would discover something wrong with them.
To tell you the truth, I am married, so I am just looking for casual fun.
Actually, my age is 61, not 29, but I am still very energetic and strong.
Honestly, I really do drive a Ferrari and I live in a luxurious penthouse apartment, but you cannot visit me because my grandmother lives with me and she is disapproving of the girls I meet – you should not suspect me of being a factory worker!
My internet business is going so well at the moment but I have cashflow problems, could you lend me 2,000 yuan and I will pay you back on our first date?
I am not so interested in knowing what your favourite ice cream flavour is. Right now I am imagining lifting your skirt and touching your thighs higher and higher until …
Some men became angry when she didn’t reply immediately. They were pushy and said impolite things to her. But she couldn’t type very fast, and it was hard to keep so many chats going at once. She soon learnt to tell which men were educated, because they were the ones who typed their answers very quickly, but she also discovered that educated men often used the most obscene words. And then there were men who seemed nice at first, but soon it was clear that they were just out to trick her. Even though she did not know what they could possibly cheat her out of, she sensed that they were bad people who were up to no good. She heard stories all the time, tales of swindlers and liars – bamboozlers. She did not want to be one of those poor victims who got bamboozled.
One by one, Phoebe deleted her newly made friends, blocking them until her contact list showed only a couple of guys – guys who had just said hello, how are you, but had not yet had the chance to show how deceitful and black-spirited they were. She began to get random messages that didn’t even start with a greeting, just shameless suggestions for physical relations, most probably high-school students, but who knows, maybe they were frustrated middle-aged husbands and fathers. She knew it was because she had a nice profile picture, and decided she should replace it with something fake or a neutral image, like a cartoon character. A superhuman character with great strength, maybe. That would deter anyone with unsavoury intentions. She would become like so many other people in cyberspace, hiding behind an image of something other than themselves. But as she looked at the photo of herself she hesitated. Her eyes were glowing with laughter and promise, and the vegetation behind her was so lush it reminded her of her home. She could not bring herself to delete this image from her profile. When the rest of Shanghai looked at her, she did not want them to see just a grey shadow of a nobody; she wanted them to see her, Phoebe Chen Aiping.
She looked at her brand-new fake Omega watch. It was 6.55 p.m. She had not realised how late it was – she had spent nearly four hours in the internet café. She double-checked the time on the computer, just in case the watch she had been sold was a dud. It was still 6.55. She looked at the photo of herself one last time, just as another message popped up on screen. Little Miss, hello, I like your profile, would you like to chat? I think we might be compatible. She closed the page and signed herself off the computer.
When she got home the apartment was dark and Yanyan was asleep on the bed, wrapped in a thin blanket. The window was open and there was a slight chill in the room. Phoebe stood at the window and looked down at the blinking red and pale-gold lights of the cars below. The street stalls had their lights on now, the plumes of smoke from the little charcoal grills rising into the evening air.
‘Where have you been? You’re very late,’ Yanyan said quietly.
‘Trying to find work. Why are you in bed so early? It’s barely eight o’clock.’
‘I haven’t got out of bed all day.’
‘Oh, Yanyan,’ Phoebe sighed as she sat down on the bed next to her. ‘Not again. What are we going to do?’
As night fell, the giant hole in the construction site below the window looked black and infinite, as if it was ready to swallow up the cranes and bulldozers around it. Maybe she and Yanyan and everyone in their building would disappear into the hole too, Phoebe thought.
‘Come, I’ll make some dinner,’ she said.
Yanyan sat up and pulled her knees to her chest, shielding her eyes as Phoebe turned on the light. The single fluorescent strip bathed the room in a harsh white glow.
‘Only instant noodles again. Sorry,’ Phoebe said.
‘It’s better than eating a banquet on your own,’ Yanyan replied.
Later, once Yanyan had settled back in bed, Phoebe opened the Journal of Her Secret Self. She had not written in it for some days. She paused, knowing that Yanyan was not yet asleep – her breathing was even and almost soundless. Phoebe needed solitude when she wrote in her journal; she had become used to being alone when confronting her fears. It was easier that way, for she could be as weak and fearful as she wanted, and there would be no one to witness it. She turned off the light and waited in the darkness. When she heard Yanyan’s breaths turn heavy with dream sleep, she held her mobile phone next to her journal and began to scribble a few lines in the ghostly blue light.
Time is flying past you, Phoebe Chen Aiping, you know you are being defeated. You are a new person here in Shanghai, you must dare to do things the old you would not have done. Forget who you were, forget who you are. Become someone else.
6
Perform All Obligations and Duties with Joy
The weather turned colder and sharper as Spring Festival approached. Most days, Justin spent the morning staring at the ice that had formed overnight on the balcony, bizarre shapes hanging from the railings in jagged shards or clinging to the drainpipes like brilliant shiny fungus. The leaves of the potted plants were coated in ice – fat glassy bulbs that reminded him of Christmas decorations. On brighter days the sun would be strong enough to start shrinking the icicles, and he would stand at the window watching the water drip slowly onto the cement floor of the balcony. Most of the time, though, the ice would stay hard and unmoving, glinting ever so slightly despite the absence of light in the pale, snow-shrouded afternoon.
He had not left the apartment for five days, not even to walk to the convenience store at the end of the street to stock up on bottled water and instant noodles. The apartment felt too warm and cosseting to leave, and the weather outside too harsh. Realising he had stopped going out altogether, his ayi came every other day now, leaving him enough food and water to live on – more than enough, it turned out, for she worried about him – so he did not have to venture out, did not have to see or speak to anyone, which suited him. If he happened to be in the living room when he heard the ayi unlock the first of the heavy double doors, he would retreat to the dark safety of his bedroom, knowing that she would not enter his lair. He would lie in bed and chart her movements by the sounds she made: the breathy exclamation on entering the overheated apartment; the running of the tap in the kitchen; the expressions of shock and even mild revulsion when she discovered and disposed of leftover food festering on the kitchen counter; the clink of porcelain; the scrape of chairs on the wooden floor; the gentle tread of her feet as she dusted the coffee table. And, finally, the moment of relief when she left the apartment, pulling once, twice, three times at the door that always snagged on the rug as she closed it. Then he would be alone again.
Occasionally she would leave a note asking if he needed anything else, and he would scribble a reply – All still fine – and leave it with some cash on the kitchen table. He was thankful she came, but he could not bear the thought of interacting with anyone, not even someone as unobtrusive as a bespectacled middle-aged ayi.
All around him he could hear the sounds of families preparing for Spring Festival – children’s footsteps upstairs, the occasional burst of excited chatter, the rumble of wheeled bags heavy with treats being dragged along the corridor. He heard people singing along to their karaoke machines, sometimes a family singalong with croaky old voices mingling with cartoon-happy children’s voices, other times a lone female voice, surprisingly pure and sad, falling flat from time to time. He hated this voice; it wriggled into his head and cut into his innards, forcing its way into his space as if it wanted to be close to him. It was not like the other noises, which were impersonal and distant; this voice was intimate, intrusive, and he was thankful that it never lasted very long. He did not know where any of these noises came from, for they echoed strangely, rebounding in the walls and pipes.
He thought about what his own family would be doing at that precise moment – their New Year celebrations were a well-rehearsed ritual, comforting in their predictability. In the family mansion they would be taking delivery of inhuman quantities of food, and the caterers would be setting up for the open-house party that would take place over the first few days of the festival following the family dinner on New Year’s Eve. His mother would play at being stressed by the pressure of organising affairs, even though her distaste for physical work meant that she rarely performed any function more strenuous than making phone calls to the florist or the confectioners, leaving the servants to deal with the deliveries and the setting up of tables and chairs. In recent years the family had even taken to having the New Year’s Eve dinner in a hotel – the servants were getting old, his mother had said, and they simply couldn’t trust getting a young Filipina or Indonesian maid (she’d heard such horror stories: family heirlooms being stolen, phone bills full of calls to Manila, people being killed in their own homes). So they would book a private room in the Chinese restaurant of a fancy hotel, twelve of them sitting in near-silence around a big table laden with food that would remain half consumed at the end of the evening. ‘How lucky we are to have a family like this,’ his father would say at the conclusion of the meal. He’d said that every single year Justin could remember. But those extravagant banquets of bird’s-nest and shark-fin soups, whole suckling pigs, the finest New Zealand abalone, and strange sea creatures he hadn’t even recognised – perhaps they were all in the past, now that his family was ruined. He wondered if they were having more modest celebrations, or if they were celebrating at all. He imagined bitter recriminations: mother blaming father, brother blaming mother, grandmother blaming uncle – for the loss of their fortune, for the loss of their eldest son.
But he was deluding himself. They would not be blaming each other for their misfortune; they would be blaming him. He had disappeared, he had let them down, he would not answer their calls for help, he was selfish – that was why they were in this mess now. It was a line of reasoning he had heard many times before, so often that sometimes he too believed it. It was all his fault.
As he stood at the window and looked out at the strange frozen shapes of the city – the glass-ice trees, the streets scarred by snaking tracks of snow – he thought of the family holiday he had once had in Sapporo, when he was about thirteen, old enough to understand that the vacation was happening under a cloud of discontent; that it was not a holiday but an escape of sorts. It had taken place over the New Year period, the decision to leave for Japan made late in the day, when preparations for the usual celebrations were already well advanced. There had been no explanation for this hasty change in plan, which triggered a frantic search for the children’s woollen jumpers and down jackets in the store room, and the attendant anxiety as to whether or not they had outgrown them since their trip to Canada the previous year. His mother simply said, ‘I’ve always wanted to spend New Year’s in a snowy place.’ In the coded language of their family, full of unaired grievances, her firm statement of intent spoke loud and clear to Justin. Something was not right, and this something was compelling enough for them to leave home over the holiday.
The snow that blanketed Sapporo felt permanent, comfortably settled on the long straight avenues and the mountainous landscape around it. The freezing air raked the lining of his nostrils, burning its way down his throat and into his lungs; his lips and fingertips became sore and chapped, and his thin tropical blood felt powerless against the cold. And yet he was not unhappy; the omnipresent snow had a way of silencing the unspoken troubles that had arisen in his family, dampening them, making everyone calm. His younger brother did not take so well to the cold: he whimpered softly and became sullen and uncommunicative, refusing to venture out of the hotel room. Justin observed the way his mother and father avoided each other – she lavishing extra attention on the younger of her two sons while her husband worked on his papers even at breakfast, concentrating on indecipherable sets of accounts as he ate his rice porridge, rarely looking up at the rest of the family.
‘I’m going to take Mother out to dinner tonight,’ his father said one morning, without looking up from his paperwork, and Justin recognised this statement to be a sort of apology, or at least as much of an apology as his father was capable of offering. There was a cry from his brother, aged six – the start of a tantrum over being forced to finish his eggs; then he began to scrape a piece of burnt toast noisily, the black powder scattering on the cream-coloured tablecloth. No, his mother replied, that would be too much hassle – the young one needed looking after. Justin listened for signs of regret or gratitude in her voice, but could discern nothing other than the turbulent silence that descended on his family in times of anger and dispute. Outside the sky was clear, the winter light glassy, pale. He thought how fortunate he was to be in a foreign place, for somehow the problems of his family seemed easier to bear when they were far from home, in an unfamiliar land shrouded in snow.
With his mother clinging more and more to her younger son and his father disappearing to work for long stretches, Justin was left to discover the wonders of Sapporo with Sixth Uncle, who had come on holiday with them as he often did, partly to help with the children but mainly to organise the logistics of travelling in a foreign country – booking tickets, sorting out the best rooms in hotels, moving the family swiftly through airports, finding good restaurants. He always seemed to know people everywhere they went – contacts he’d met through business, or friends of friends of friends who were willing to help show them round or lend a car and a driver. He was ‘good with people’ – affable, insistent, often daring in his humour, occasionally foul-mouthed but always unthreatening in his chubbiness. He would flirt with hotel receptionists and sweet-talk directors of airline companies; he always got what he wanted. The youngest of the uncles, he was only twelve years older than Justin – barely in his mid-twenties at the time, though already very much a man, someone Justin recognised as inhabiting his father’s world, not his, in spite of the childish banter that passed between him and Sixth Uncle.
They visited the Snow Festival, just the two of them. It felt like an adventure, striding forth into the bitter cold, walking through the snow and feeling it seep through their boots, leaving behind the younger brother, who was too small and weak, and his parents, who were too old and slow. ‘I’m going to have my ass kicked for leading you astray,’ Sixth Uncle said, and laughed as they walked around the fantastic ice sculptures. ‘Your mother is going to bite my head off when she sees her dear little son frozen to the bone. Hey, look at that – remember that?’
It was the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which they had seen during a previous holiday, but made entirely of snow. Elsewhere there was a life-size Pyramid and a faithful reproduction of the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto; there were fearsome ogres and cuddly polar bears and a herd of long-necked dinosaurs; Mount Rushmore with different, unrecognisable heads; Eskimos and penguins; a tropical landscape of palm trees and a beach with sun loungers – all glowing with the pale white-blue of snow and ice. They threw snowballs at each other, as people who are not used to snow always do, and if they tripped and fell they just lay on the snow, feeling its strange powdery-crusty texture beneath them. Justin no longer noticed the cold; his fingers felt swollen and numb but impervious to the biting frost, and he felt a growing strength in his legs as he ran along the edge of a perfectly flat snow-canal that led to a Dutch windmill.
‘Little bastard, you’ve got a lot of energy,’ Sixth Uncle wheezed as he caught up. ‘Your grandmother keeps telling me I need to lose weight, but thank God I’m a bit fat because it protects me from this damn cold.’
They found a restaurant, a dimly lit place hidden down a nondescript alley – a tip from a local acquaintance, Sixth Uncle said, guaranteed to be the best food in the area. Out of the cold, the warmth of the small room felt delicious, the air humid and wood-scented. They ordered too much food, as was the custom of their family, and Sixth Uncle had a bottle of sake that seemed too big for one person.
‘What a great holiday this is,’ Sixth Uncle said as he refilled the tiny cup; he misjudged the size of it, and the sake spilled onto the smooth lacquered surface of the table. ‘Thank goodness you’re around, though, otherwise it would just be your shit-boring parents.’
Justin smiled; Sixth Uncle was the only person he knew who spoke of his parents in this way – irreverently, whatever respect he had for Justin’s father well hidden under layers of coarse humour.
‘How on earth did such boring parents bring up a happy, strong boy like you? If you were just a couple of years older I’d let you drink some sake while no one’s looking. Hey – maybe I could slip it into your teacup? No, no, that would be too bad of me. Not even I would do that to my favourite nephew – though you’ve always been very grown-up for your age, so I wouldn’t give a shit about getting you drunk. Only thing I’d worry about is your dragon-tongued mother. Oh my God, speaking of getting drunk, I think I’m already pretty wasted.’
Justin toyed with a piece of lamb that was drying out on the helmet-shaped griddle in front of him, slowly sizzling to a crisp alongside a charred piece of corn. Sixth Uncle had told him that the dish was called ‘Genghis Khan’ because the grill was modelled on the exact form of an ancient Mongol armoured helmet, but Justin had not believed him – Sixth Uncle was full of amazing, unbelievable stories. Often Justin had thought that they were Sixth Uncle’s way of livening the heavy atmosphere at the dinner table, for he was the only one who would ever say anything amusing (and Justin would be the only one to laugh); but recently Justin had begun to realise that Sixth Uncle’s anecdotes were aimed at him. He had sensed a growing connivance, Sixth Uncle reaching out to him tentatively, for reasons he was not able to fathom. He was glad of the jovial company, but troubled by the lack of clarity; in spite of Sixth Uncle’s almost comic façade, he too operated within the family’s unspoken language, in which one was somehow expected to understand all that was not articulated.
‘Do you know what I’m going to do when I retire?’ Sixth Uncle continued. ‘I’m going to buy a stinking huge farm in Tasmania and never come back. People tell me property is dirt cheap down there. I can get a massive ranch with sheep and cows and live happily ever after.’
‘But Sixth Uncle, you don’t know anything about sheep or cows.’
‘How difficult can it be?’ Sixth Uncle poured another overfilled cup of sake and looked at the clear beads of liquid on the table. ‘Must be easier than dealing in property.’
There followed a silence that made Justin anxious: one of those moments just before someone said something important. In his family’s unsaid-said ways, he understood that this was a preparation for an announcement of some kind, the delivery of news that would mark a turning point – perhaps something relatively minor, but a shift nonetheless.
‘Do you know what people in the business call me? “The Fixer”. Sometimes they call me “The Enforcer”, but I don’t really like to hear that. “The Fixer” sounds better. Even the family calls me that sometimes.’
Justin nodded. He had heard his father refer to Sixth Uncle’s pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to problem-solving, the way he could always untangle a sticky situation.
‘In every generation of our family there needs to be a Fixer. Before me there was my Third Uncle, who you never knew. Without him the family business would have gone bust several times over – your grandfather was a clever man, but he wasn’t streetwise at all. The family needed someone to look after the more practical side of things so the glamorous stuff could happen. The minor details are important too, that’s what Third Uncle told me. I learnt everything from him. And after me it’ll be your turn.’
The small window next to their table offered a view of the narrow alley; above the doorways, lamps had come on. Justin could not see the sky, but he guessed that the snow had made the evening draw in. A flag sign fluttered above an entranceway; amidst the Japanese characters he recognised the Chinese name for Hokkaido: North Sea Island, a place marooned in the cold north.
‘Your father says it’s not normal for the eldest son to do the work I do. He wants you to sit in a fancy office the way he does, or look after the money in Singapore. What a shit-boring job that is! But what choice do we have? Look at your brother – he’s a sweet kid, but already you can see that he’s too weak, spoilt rotten, he’ll never have what it takes to deal with the harsher things in life. At his age you were already much more mature, you were different. Remember a few years ago? When you fractured your ankle or leg or whatever and for a few days you were hobbling around? Your father got mad because he thought you were pretending. And then you just forced yourself to walk normally, and no one knew anything for months, until the doctor said, My God, I think he’s fractured his leg. I thought, wow, this kid is tough! No one said so, but everyone was so impressed by your bravery. And I guess it’s because of – OK, let’s just say it – your background.’
Justin nodded. He tried to read the signs above the doorways in the alleyway outside; some of them were written in traditional Chinese script, and it was fun trying to make out the names. White Birch Mountain Village. Brilliant Plum Teahouse.
‘But you know, you’ve been raised as the eldest son, you’ve never been treated as anything other than the Number One Brother, so whose blood you are exactly is not important. We’re not so old-fashioned that we care about these things. It’s just – like I said, it explains why you are different from your brother. And better than him, frankly. Yes, we should just say it! He’s going to become a lawyer or an accountant; maybe he’ll look after some small part of the business, like the tea or rubber plantations. Or maybe he’ll do what your dad does now – sit in the office and watch the money coming in and sometimes play with the accounts before going off to play golf. That’s for pussies. You’re different. You’re stronger. That’s why you’ll have to carry more responsibility.’
That he was different was undeniable, as was the fact that he was the eldest son. At times he wondered how someone who was not born of the family could be treated to its privileges – and now its responsibilities – but his family did not question it, and neither, therefore, did he. They had been clear about the situation from the start, had not lied or sought to protect him from the truth: they had taken him in, the infant son of a distant relative, a poor girl from the provinces who had been abandoned by her husband and could not cope with a baby. She was so tenuously related that she might not even have been part of the extended clan, though in the old Chinese way she was referred to as ‘cousin’, and in today’s terms, in a family more modern than his, the process by which he came to live in his new home would be called ‘adoption’ rather than just ‘taking in’. His birth mother had emigrated to Canada, and had he wanted to, Justin could easily have asked about her, perhaps even asked to see her. But he felt no filial curiosity; his bloodline offered no lure. His family had raised him as their own, and not just as their own but as the highest of the male cousins – the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son – a position not usurped even when his younger brother came along. His place within the family had always been indisputable, despite his provenance. And for that he would always be grateful. He would always obey the family and fight for them and never fail them; he did not need Sixth Uncle to tell him to do so.
‘You need to start hanging out with me, I’ll teach you a thing or two. Your dad wants you to start learning the business soon. With property, you have to begin with the basics. See that chef over there, slicing the fish as if he’s creating some fucking work of art? Well, he started life as a kitchen porter, collecting scraps of garbage and dumping them outside for the rats to eat. Our work is like that too. You want to build apartment blocks all over Vancouver and Melbourne? Want to reclaim a bit of Hong Kong harbour so you can build a new office tower? First you have to learn the shit that I have to deal with. All the goddamn shit.’
There was no one else in the restaurant, except for the chef-owner who was now cleaning his knives with a small white cloth folded into a little triangle; when he finished each one he would hold the tip level with his eyes and stare at it for a few seconds before putting it away.
Still seated, Sixth Uncle began to pull on his down jacket. His arms snagged in the sleeves and the collar twisted awkwardly against his neck. He sat at the table rubbing his eyes, the puffy jacket making him seem even more rotund than usual. ‘God, my head hurts,’ he said.
Outside, the afternoon had given way to a long northern twilight that tinged the snow-draped city a faint electric blue. They walked slowly back to the hotel along the long, windswept avenue. All around them, the branches of the cherry trees were clad in sleeves of frost studded with ice crystals. In a few months they would be covered in blossom again. They paused to look at a snow sculpture of a plump little cartoon cat with its paw raised in greeting. ‘Looks like me,’ Sixth Uncle said. When Justin glanced at his uncle he saw that his eyes were moist, and tears were streaming down his reddened cheeks.
‘Are you OK, Sixth Uncle?’ he asked, returning his gaze to the cat.
Sixth Uncle blinked and wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands. ‘It’s just the wind. I hate this damned cold.’
They continued walking and Sixth Uncle put his arm around Justin’s shoulders. ‘I swear to God, the moment you’re old enough to take over this damn family’s affairs, I’m going to buy that farm and piss off to Tasmania forever.’
How to be Gracious
I think we have already spoken of the value of education. Those of you who follow the cut and thrust of modern international entrepreneurship will be quick to point out that the majority of the world’s billionaires are not in fact highly educated in the traditional sense: all those Chinese property tycoons and coal-mining emperors, those Indian steel magnates – they skipped the glitter of Harvard and slid straight into life’s great river, thrashing about in the muddy waters until they learnt to swim smoothly. The more pedantic among you will say that they were educated too, only in a different way – all that nonsense about ‘the university of life’, &c, &c.
But that is not what I meant when I spoke of education, for to my mind, learning how to double-cross someone is not education. All those fancy things that men (yes, it is usually men, though increasingly women too) of high finance speak about, like takeovers, selling short, asset stripping – are these not rich people’s terms for bullying, gambling and cheating? I risk the wrath of my fellow entrepreneurial giants by saying this, but most tycoons I know are, frankly, not very gracious. What can you expect? Tycoon. Mogul. Magnate. Even the words these people use to describe themselves would indicate a certain mentality, for they are not kindly words, but ones designed to impress in the crassest of ways. They seek to dominate in that old-fashioned feudalistic way, to conquer, to destroy. And it is these base tendencies that you must resist if ever you are to become a gracious, generous billionaire. The time for that kind of old-fashioned accumulation of wealth is over. Indeed, part of the purpose of this book is to announce the end of this financial smash-and-grab and urge you to look away from the excesses committed by those who consider themselves the elite.
I say ‘they’. But maybe I should say ‘we’. Most of you who are aware of my reputation will have assumed that I belong to this band of brutal overlords, and I do not blame you for doing so. On paper, my ruthless credentials are impeccable: the swift mergers and acquisitions of well-known companies that take the markets by surprise, the penthouse living, the intercontinental first-class flights – certain elements of my life will not endear themselves to the casual observer. Sometimes when I read an article about myself even I recoil at the seeming callousness of my financial manoeuvring. I look at the unflattering photo of myself sitting in front of a microphone at some hastily arranged press conference, my face largely expressionless. What a dreadful life this Walter Chao must have, I think. Imagine being him. Often I forget that he is in fact me.
But then I remember my tireless charitable and educational projects, such as the construction of modern fibreglass bus shelters in rural areas of South-East Asia, which provide schoolchildren with respite from the downpours of the monsoon season, or the recent community centre built entirely of recycled plastic bottles – the first of its kind anywhere in the world, I think. I read with dismay a few ungracious accusations in the press that made it seem that my bus shelters were a sneaky way of marketing in hard-to-reach villages, simply because they happen to carry advertisements for the brand of soft drinks that I acquired several years ago. Next they will be saying that my carbon-neutral, waste-utilising community centre is a mere publicity stunt because it is made from the same soft-drink bottles.
Fortunately I pay little attention to these sorts of comments, just as I ignore the sneering that accompanies my self-help books. I write these not to make money, you understand, but to share the map of my success with ordinary people in need of inspiration. Nor are these books an outlet for vanity or a search for deeper recognition: most of them have been written under various pseudonyms, including the multi-million-bestselling Secrets of a Five Star Billionaire.
So those of you who think you know me – think again.
Shrugging off all ungracious thoughts, let us return to the concept of graciousness and education. Of giving and not expecting any return. I mentioned before that I am planning a long-lasting legacy to the world, and the ideas are accelerating as I write. My original proposal to build a fairly unassuming cultural centre has mushroomed somewhat since I began working on it. I was at dinner with one of the world’s leading avant-garde architects and urban planners (whose identity must remain secret until approval for the project is granted), who became terribly excited at my plans. This architect virtually leapt out of his/her chair as soon as I explained what I intended to do, nearly embarrassing our host (the cold hors d’oeuvres had barely been served). He/she called me a visionary – a compliment indeed, coming from someone responsible for some of the most arresting buildings in the world. He/she has flung him/herself with great enthusiasm at this project – the first set of drawings is in development right now: part charitable foundation, part cultural centre, part dreamscape. No municipal council in the world will be able to resist a work of such ground-breaking importance.
Annoyingly, I have been somewhat distracted from this noble project by developments elsewhere in my portfolio of interests – what the ungracious would call my ‘empire’. But as I am on the brink of a daring acquisition of one of the oldest, most famous companies in South-East Asia, I suppose it is hard to dispute accusations of bravado and entrepreneurial plundering. Yet I am only doing what others have done many times before me. It will hit the headlines in the next few days, so you will know all about it then – there’s no need to elaborate here. I will be a happier, more contented man once the deal is done and I can return to the work that really matters to me – the gracious business of giving.
I forgot to say that I have identified a site for my cultural centre. I will be travelling there very shortly to push matters along. The city? I said before that it should be one capable of showing off my legacy in all its twenty-first-century glory. That doesn’t leave many choices. So in a few weeks I shall move my base of operations to the chosen city: Shanghai.
7
Calmly Negotiate Difficult Situations
It seems that Gary has a history of misconduct which is impressive for someone so young. Readers of tabloid newspapers will not fail to be astounded by the unexpectedly long catalogue that is beginning to emerge. How the record company has managed to keep these incidents hushed up for so long is anyone’s guess – public relations people are so powerful these days.
Among the revelations on the front pages of the papers these days are:
The wrecked luxury suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Singapore after his much-lauded concert there last year (no comment was made by the hotel, which prides itself on its discretion, but everyone supposes that it was paid off by Gary’s record company).
A hotel chambermaid in Hangzhou who claims Gary exposed himself inappropriately to her last week. She says that he came out of the bathroom and let his towel fall to the ground before making an obscene suggestion to her. She did not report the incident because she felt no one would believe her.
An unpaid bill of US$12,000 in an upscale Kuala Lumpur restaurant, which included five bottles of Krug champagne.
And an altercation in a trendy drinking spot in the Soho area of Hong Kong, when Gary allegedly grabbed a barman by the throat and threatened to kill him.
Yes, it is clear that Gary has a drinking problem, no one can deny it. Like many young people, he certainly does not react well to alcohol. But is it right for a superstar with so many privileges to behave in this way in public, especially when his actions hurt other people? This is a tragic affair, and no matter how many innocent, ordinary people are harmed by his alcohol-fuelled madness, the ultimate victim is Gary himself: the Fallen Angel.
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Tash Aw
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: In this stunning new novel, Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.Phoebe has come to China buoyed with hope, but her dreams are shattered as the job she was promised seems never to have existed. Gary is a successful pop star, but his fans disappear after a bar-room brawl. Yinghui was once a poetry-loving activist and is not sure how she became a wealthy businesswoman. Justin works hard for his powerful family, but begins to wonder if his efforts are appreciated. And then there is the Five Star Billionaire himself, pulling the strings of destiny, his lessons for success unsettling the dynamics of these disparate lives.In FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE, Tash Aw charts the weave of their journeys in the new China, counterpointing their adventures with the old life they have left behind in Malaysia. The result is a brilliant examination of the migrations that are shaping this dazzling new city, and their effect on myriad individual lives.