Five Star Billionaire

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.