Five Star Billionaire

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.