Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  “My God, you are very practical in your thinking! The end product might be the same. But imaginatively there is a difference—how you reach the end result is really important. All the building work—every screw and nail, every coat of paint—has to be underpinned by a certain philosophy. Without it, the building has no soul.” He stopped and smiled sheepishly, looking into his cup and finding only the remnants of a foamy coffee. “Sorry, I get carried away sometimes.”

  “No, please don’t apologize. What you’re saying makes complete sense. It’s just—well, I’m not used to businesspeople in Shanghai talking in such terms. Usually they only want to know how much, how fast.”

  He signaled to the waiter for another coffee. “I agree. People nowadays are concerned with the bottom line—nothing else matters. What would you like for breakfast, by the way? I had noodles in soup and some guotie—really good. I saw the pancakes go past and they looked nice too. But maybe you prefer fruit and yogurt. With a figure like yours, I suspect you eat very healthily.”

  Yinghui blushed. “Well, I try, but I don’t always succeed.” She had woken up starving and had been hoping for bacon and eggs, but now she felt she couldn’t have them. Walter Chao was obviously someone who observed what other people ate and drank. She needed to make a good impression, she thought, and so ended up ordering a continental breakfast, which she enjoyed.

  As they chatted about the project they were embarking upon, Yinghui felt parts of her brain, for so long dormant, begin to reignite. It was strange, hearing words and expressions that she had not used for more than a decade trip off her tongue easily: “imaginative space”; “mimetic desire”; “empirical needs of architecture.” But soon they began to drift onto other topics—musings on cities they had visited, nostalgic recollections of past holidays, tiny incidents that remained etched in their memories. They discovered a shared liking for all that was offbeat—places, people, books, and music that others considered bizarre; they admired simplicity and spurned the flamboyant; they prized the unexpected, everything that was unannounced and discreet, and couldn’t care less for the kinds of things that other people thought of as majestic. She laughed out loud in agreement when he expressed a hatred for Gaudí’s Barcelona—too obvious, too obviously weird; he couldn’t stand it that people who liked Gaudí thought of themselves as “offbeat.”

  “I totally, totally agree!” She laughed. “You know, I never thought I’d meet anyone else who hated it as much as I do.”

  They went for a walk along the banks of West Lake, tracing its shoreline without bothering to plan an itinerary. It seemed immaterial where they were headed or where they might end up. They continued to talk about shared experiences and, as they progressed, shared desires: places they’d like to visit, things they’d like to achieve. None of these was related to money or career advancement.

  “Hey,” she said, giggling as they stood at the top of an arcing stone bridge. “Shouldn’t we be talking about work?”

  It had begun to drizzle—the faintest of droplets filling the air, barely more than a mist. Along the water’s edge, the branches of the willow trees drooped and touched the surface of the lake.

  “This is work,” he said. “Sort of.”

  She looked at him as he leaned with his elbows on the stone parapet. He was smiling, but a faint frown had settled on his brow and his gaze was distant. She wondered if something she had said had made him recall a past event—a moving or maybe even troubling chapter in his life. They had spoken so much about themselves, so suddenly, that they had not bothered to filter anything they’d said. She felt guilty at having interrupted their flowing conversation with a suggestion as crass as work. What had she become? On a pretty spot in one of the most scenic places in Eastern China, with a man who might be interested in her, all she could do was to think of work.

  A group of tourists walked past, chattering noisily in a southern dialect Yinghui could not understand; they carried yellow umbrellas emblazoned with the name of a travel agency in red letters. The violent splash of color cut through the muted gray-green hues of the lakeside landscape, and even when they had crossed another bridge and reached the far bank, Yinghui could still spot them in the mist-shrouded distance.

  “It’s good that we’ve had this opportunity to talk, find out about each other,” Walter said, as they began to walk vaguely in the direction of the hotel. “You’re going to be a key person in this deal, the one coordinating day-to-day matters. It’s such a sensitive job that I think it’s important that we get to know each other well—especially since we will be working so closely together.”

  Yinghui nodded in agreement. “Absolutely. But there is one thing I need to discuss with you before we go any further.”

  “Oh, dear, this sounds ominous. Are you going to pull out?”

  Yinghui did not look at him at they continued walking along a snaking path that led them under some elm trees. “The capital that I’d have to put into the joint-venture company—well, you know that I don’t have such funds readily available. I’d need a bank loan to make that happen. Several bank loans, in fact. Several very big ones.”

  “I thought that might be the case,” Walter said calmly, his voice carrying a hint of a question, as if mildly surprised by her statement.

  “And I don’t know if I’ll be able to get those loans. I’ll be honest with you: I just don’t have enough capital otherwise. Even if I sold everything I owned, it wouldn’t be enough to cover the amount I’d need to put in. So you see, getting those loans is sort of, well, essential if I’m to go ahead.”

  They stood shaded from the drizzle for a few moments by the canopy of leaves. The paths that wound their way through the parks by the lakeside were empty now; people were in the teahouses and restaurants, sheltering from the rain.

  “You’ve been worrying about this, haven’t you?” Walter said, turning to face her. “You shouldn’t. You’ll get those loans—easily, I’d say. Look at your recent track record; you’re someone so clearly on the up. That’s why I chose you out of all the people I could have chosen in Shanghai. Banks will be falling over themselves to lend you money. This is China. They know that people like you can make things happen.”

  Yinghui nodded.

  “You’re so daring and original in your thinking that I’m almost tempted to say, You know what? Forget the capital; you don’t need to put in any money, just come and work with me. But I don’t think you’d feel right about that—I don’t think it would be right for you to be a mere employee drawing a salary. I want this to be your project too. You need to feel as if you own it, right from the outset. I want you to be my partner. People like you are rare—trust me, I know.”

  “So you think there’ll be no problem with getting the loans?”

  He smiled and touched her on her forearm. “Remember what we spoke about at our first dinner. Business is about respect. And banks loans—they’re simply the modern world’s way of showing how much it values you. They’re like credit notes in respect. You deserve respect—it’s yours. You’ll get everything you want.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “If you don’t, we will both shrug our shoulders and walk away from each other. Before long I’ll find another person to replace you. Maybe that new relationship will turn out to be as smooth as ours seems to be, maybe it won’t. You’ll move on too and find success and respect elsewhere.” He paused and looked at her briefly. “That’s the life of businesspeople like us. I will regret never having really known you, but that’s just how it is—you miss opportunities, you have to live with regret.”

  The drizzle was turning to rain, falling heavily on the leaves overhead. Yinghui thought for a second that Walter might kiss her, but he did not. He merely looked up at the trees, his palms turned upward to gauge the rain. They walked to the road and hailed a taxi back to their hotel. Once in her room, she ran a very hot bath and lay in the vast cedarwood tub, looking out the window across the rain-washed landscape, thinking about what Walter
had said—about regret. She did not want to live with regret; she would never do so. An image of Walter sitting at a table discussing business plans with another woman—someone sleek and well groomed, who didn’t suffer from style issues—flashed into her mind; the clarity of that possibility made her feel anxious and slightly panicked.

  She closed her eyes and thought: She had to get those loans. All the respect that was due to her, accumulating over the years—she was going to cash it in, very shortly now.

  HOW TO STRUCTURE A

  PROPERTY DEAL

  (FOR TOTAL BEGINNERS)—

  CASE STUDY, CONTINUED

  My father had a friend in the land-registry office, someone he’d known in primary school. He’d been to see this friend who, at the time, was a lowly clerk, but his humble administrative post gave him valuable information: He knew which parcels of land were being sold on the cheap, which areas were going to be redeveloped, which houses were soon to be auctioned. (As an aside, I noticed this man’s name in the newspapers just after the financial crisis in 1997—he’d been sentenced to a length of time in prison after having embezzled twenty million ringgit from state funds. The poor idiot: He’d allowed himself to get caught. For this reason, I will have to change his name and call him “Nik K.”)

  If my father’s ever-growing fantasies of quick riches were turning into addiction, Nik K. was his drug dealer. He told my father about the Tokyo Hotel and the small piece of land that accompanied it: nothing to look at now, he said, overgrown and marshy as it was, but all my father had to do was cut down the trees and drain the earth—a simple procedure—and lay a mixture of concrete and hardcore on top of it; then it would be ready to be finished with tarmac, which would create a fine parking lot for the hotel. The building was, frankly, in a bad state, but imagine what might be achieved with a bit of investment: A solid three-story building with a parking lot was virtually impossible to find at this price these days, and, what’s more, Nik K. had heard from friends of his in other government departments that more offshore oil fields had been discovered and would be operational in only a few years’ time. When that happened, just think of the number of people coming up to work in all the support industries, all the seasonal workers from KL and beyond. Nik K. himself had bought a few run-down buildings in the area, for next to nothing—including the Tokyo Hotel, which he would let my father have for the same price he had paid.

  They all had to think big and think ahead, said Nik K.; that was the future of this small town.

  My father had virtually no money, but, fired up by the prospect of turning handsome profits in no time at all, he set about finding a lump sum with which to pay Nik K. He wrote to his distant relatives in Machang and Kuala Krai and cousins of cousins in Gua Musang and Kuantan—people he had never met but had heard of through the intricate spiderweb network of rural Chinese families. The note he sent was a cross between a begging letter and a financial prospectus, appealing to both their sense of pity and their greed. He got on his scooter and made long trips south to visit them in their villages to explain that the only way out of his predicament was to make a fortune; the only way he could be saved from ruin was to turn everyone into rich men. Double or quits; the only way was up.

  Before long, he had enough money to pay Nik K. for the Tokyo Hotel, and the deeds were transferred into his name. But immediately there was a further problem: He needed money for the renovation works. He drew up a list of basic repairs: replacing a section of the roof; securing the windows; replacing the wiring; restoring the water and electricity supplies; clearing the tangled mess of shrubs and trees from the small plot of land at the back. The amount of money needed for these works was nearly double what he had paid for the building. His despair did not last long, for Nik K. again came to the rescue: He had contacts in the property world, people who owed him favors because he’d given them valuable tips on where to buy and sell pieces of land. He could arrange a loan for my father, he said, no questions asked—the sum of money my father needed was peanuts for these people. And so my father entered into a speedy, seamless arrangement with a Chinese merchant on 17 percent interest. I remember the figure well because it seemed a strange number, stranded between 15 and 20, as if someone had made an unreasoned compromise. To my father, this figure would have meant very little. His lenders could have asked him for 0.1 percent or 98 percent, and he would have cheerily agreed. When he was in one of these moods, riding on a high of optimism and desire, he would have said yes to anything. The number was also memorable to me because, as it happened, I was about to turn seventeen—an event of which my father was blissfully ignorant.

  He began work on the Tokyo Hotel not long before I arrived back from Johor, but even by the time I returned to Kota Bharu, it was clear that the renovation works had run into problems. He had started to clear the scrubby forest from the quarter-acre plot of land behind the hotel, but, alone and equipped only with a parang and an ax, he was easily defeated by the dense vegetation. At the end of a long day, the huge pile of branches and tree stumps he had cut seemed to make little difference to the immensity of unyielding foliage that remained. Without a bulldozer or a team of men with chain saws, he could not overcome the jungle. So he turned his attention to restoring the electricity and plumbing in the hotel. He’d always been good at this sort of thing, having worked as a handyman at various building sites in the past (he said). He began digging channels in the floors for the laying of new wires and pipes, knocking down some walls and scraping the plasterwork off others—better to make a mess at the start, he had said in a letter to me, just before I abandoned my technical studies to join him. Although I had completed only one year of my electrician’s course, I had already learned enough to know that he had no clue what to do.

  Fortunately, his shoddy wiring was never allowed to progress to a point where it might endanger his life and that of others. Alerted by news of building work at the Tokyo Hotel, two officials from the town council arrived at the site to find out what was going on. They found my father stripped to the waist, surrounded by piles of broken masonry and half-mixed mortar and coils of electric cable. “I’m going to start running a hotel,” he blithely informed them. “As soon as I get the works finished.”

  There were rules and regulations, they told him: He couldn’t just fix up a building and start running a hotel. It was the eighties now, there was a modern system of doing things, and, anyway, this wasn’t some kampung where everyone could do what they wished. He had to apply for planning permission for the renovation work; all the electricity and plumbing had to be done by someone with proper qualifications and would need to be inspected; then he would need to apply for a license to run a hotel; he’d need a certificate to show he had done a course in safety and hygiene. All that would take time—and money.

  In the meantime, the leaks in the roof were turning the loosened plasterwork to mud on the upper floors, and on the ground floor a flash flood lifted up the floor tiles my father had proudly laid not a few weeks previously, redistributing them in a kaleidoscope of cheap color. Not one to be easily defeated, my father channeled his optimism (and remaining money) into painting the façade of the building, on the grounds that a cheery exterior would give the hotel the beginnings of a new life and lead—somehow—to a turn in fortunes. Although he did not say as much in his letters, I knew that he was waiting for me to return to help him—to save him.

  I arrived to find the building clad in bamboo scaffolding, the top half mottled with patches of whitewash that accentuated the dirty gray background. My father had retreated to a small room at the rear corner of the ground floor, where he had erected a canvas camp bed and a two-ring table-top cooker attached to a gas canister. There were streaks of mud snaking faintly across the floor—traces of the flash flood he had mentioned—but otherwise the room seemed dry and sound and cool, and a faint breeze came in through the single glassless window.

  The rest of the building was a disaster. As I walked up the staircase that had long since
lost its banister, it was virtually impossible to imagine what the interior had been like when it was first built as a hotel (which must have been around the time of my birth—not all that long ago). Partition walls made of thin board lay half dismantled, uneven pyramids of bricks lay piled up in the middle of empty spaces, dried-up pools of not-quite-mixed cement crept across some floors, and there were gaps in the roof that afforded me a glimpse of the gray rain clouds that hung low in the sky. I could not bring myself to ask my father whether it was he who had created this mess or if it had already existed when he bought the building. Nor could I bear to tell him that there was nothing I could do to help him. It was hopeless, just as I feared it would be.

  Nonetheless, I spent two weeks with him, explaining how fuses and junction boxes worked, how to create intricate circuits with breakers and multiple switches. I drew designs on pieces of paper, which he admired and kept pinned to the wall in his room as if they were works of art. He learned quickly and praised my knowledge as if I were offering him great revelations; he spoke of how he would have a fridge in every room, and eventually air-conditioning too, how he would be so popular that people would have to ring days ahead to book rooms. I agreed and enthused; it was the best thing I could do for him: to make him believe that his dreams could come true. After a fortnight of playing around with lengths of wire and patching up holes in walls with flimsy plasterwork that wouldn’t quite stick, I made excuses as to why I had to leave to go back down to Johor. My course would teach me more skills that I could use to help him; maybe I could also learn masonry and plumbing, which would come in handy when the hotel was up and running.

  My father could not have been more delighted. Good idea, he said; those skills would be very useful, particularly since I would one day be the sole owner of the hotel, which I could take over as soon as I wanted. He spoke of a fully functioning hotel as if it already existed, as if it were not just a pile of damp rubble. I wondered whether he really believed what he told me or whether he was merely playing along, as I was, in the charade that had become his life.