Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  As soon as they arrived at the ballroom of the five-star hotel, she drifted away from him, shepherded by her manager toward the crowd of photographers hovering by the entrance. She beckoned Justin over for a few photographs, hanging on to his arm while she posed for the cameras. He stood rigidly, trying not to blink before the brilliance of the flashbulbs. He felt like a tourist monument—a statue beside which she was striking amusing poses, the photos soon to be posted on her Facebook page or sent home to friends and family. Before long, thankfully, she began to drift away again, seeking brighter, more-useful people than Justin.

  Left alone, Justin wandered among the tables, looking at decorations and place names. The chatter in the ballroom, the glittering smiles, the crowds milling aimlessly, the camera flashes, the banners, the music—all this made him feel anxious and claustrophobic, and he withdrew toward the edge of the room. Memories of teenage awkwardness came back to him with startling clarity—endless parties at which he had spoken to no one and merely lurked in the shadows on his own, much as he was doing now.

  He found a brochure on a table and pretended to read it, so that his isolation would appear less noticeable. It was about foreign companies in Shanghai and was full of phrases such as “deepening ties” and “bridgebuilding.” He walked around the room as he read, looking at the nominees for the evening’s awards—young women with battle-hardened faces, their eyes already bearing the scars of disillusionment and disappointment. They were only in their thirties, some of them even younger, but already they had a world-weariness that he recognized only too well, a hardened edge that announced that life could no longer surprise them, that the only route to happiness lay in the accumulation of more—of more and more and more.

  A face gazed up at him from the pages of the brochure; he stopped and allowed his brain the time to process the image, affixing it to his consciousness: the close-set eyes that seemed to focus intensely on whatever they were looking at, the small mouth that could appear either delicate or ready for an argument, depending on her mood. At first he assumed he had made a mistake—the small studio portrait was overlit, making the woman’s features look blander than he remembered. Her hair was different—longer, but strangely more severe than the short gamine style that had once been her trademark (if it was indeed her). The cheekbones seemed more angular now, her eyes expressionless. He really wasn’t feeling well, he thought; maybe he was genuinely going mad—she had always dismissed business as an immature game played by boys who refused to grow up. But here she was, nominated for an award, her name printed in capital letters under the photo, the distinctly non-Mainland spelling announcing her foreignness: LEONG YINGHUI. He looked back at the shape of her face. It was definitely her. He looked around the room but could not see her; surely she would be here. Suddenly he became aware of his every movement—the way he placed one foot in front of the other, the way he smiled at passersby, the way he breathed. And then, when he turned around, she was there, as if waiting for him.

  “Hello, Yinghui,” he said.

  “Justin Lim Chee Keong. What a surprise,” she said. Her tightly held mouth relaxed into a smile, but she seemed neither surprised nor happy at this chance meeting; she seemed annoyed, as if he were an unexpected inconvenience.

  They chatted for a few moments, with all the awkwardness of friends who have not seen each other for many years, each hoping (he thought) to recapture past intimacy; but then he remembered that they had never really been friends, despite his longing to be so. He answered her polite questions monosyllabically, which frustrated him, because he had always wanted to be witty and expressive with her but was never able to be. He had once thought that it was a question of youthful shyness on his part, that when he was older and successful he would chat with her with greater ease, but things had not changed.

  Zhou X. suddenly appeared at his side again, clutching his arm as if it were a pole. More cameras, more smiles; people crowding in on him. Amid the bank of camera flashes, he looked for Yinghui and feared that she had disappeared. But no, she was reaching toward him, holding out her business card, and then, as he took it, still blinking from the glare of the lights, she escaped. He posed for a few more photographs, but all at once he began to feel exhausted, his limbs weighing heavily, his joints aching. His head felt cloudy and his mouth dry. Music was playing through the loudspeakers, signaling the arrival of a local dignitary, but he made his way to the door, crossed the hotel lobby, and headed straight to the cabstand to hail a taxi home.

  Now he sat before the Rolodex with her card staring at him—a link to all that he had once wanted but now feared. Too much stood between them, and the passage of time had not made things better. He hesitated for a while before flipping the cardholder all the way to the end, where he began working through the Mainland surnames beginning with Z. He had left the windows open all day and the apartment smelled of cooking fat, which had drifted in from the kitchen above.

  He simply couldn’t call Yinghui; she would have nothing but contempt for him.

  15.

  A STRONG FIGHTING SPIRIT SWALLOWS

  MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS

  AS GARY STEPS ONTO THE STAGE, HE IS STRUCK, FIRST OF ALL, BY how small it is. It has been years since he performed on a stage this small. In a second, the backup dancers are going to appear, and he has no idea how they are all going to fit on a platform measuring eight by five meters, covered in a green Astroturf-like material with pots of plastic flowers at each of the front corners—the only decoration there is. The stage feels flimsy under his feet, little more than a big hollow box made of plywood, ready to collapse at any moment. The papers are always full of stories of freak accidents in public places, roofs falling down on cinemas, whole ice rinks being swallowed up into the ground. Maybe this will be one of those sad, bizarre stories.

  The music is already playing loudly in the atrium of the shopping mall, a bright, breezy tune with uplifting guitars over a simple melody and a heavy drumbeat—the kind of music that makes teenagers want to get to their feet and sing along while bouncing up and down on their heels. He hasn’t sung this tune in years—it is from an earlier time in his career, when he was so young and malleable that he would sing anything he was told to sing. The shopping mall is decorated with huge plastic banana trees in plastic pots, and there are banners streaming down from the upper floors, announcing, OPENING CELEBRATION, BIG DISCOUNT. Now he understands why his agent had said, “It’s the perfect song for the setting.”

  A cry goes up from the small crowd—about a hundred people—as he walks to the middle of the stage. It feels strange to be up here again, in front of an audience. Even though he still cannot fully understand why he has bothered to come all the way out here and has not rehearsed at all for this gig, he begins to sway in time with the music as soon as he steps onto the stage. He is a professional—his body knows what to do, even if his spirit is absent. In a few moments he will lift the microphone to his mouth and his voice will emerge, bright and clear, without him even commanding it to do so. Just like driving a car, he thinks, even though he doesn’t know how to drive.

  It has now been more than four months since news of Gary’s various misdemeanors were splashed over the cheap newspapers and glossy magazines and Internet gossip pages. In the intervening time, Gary has spent long periods at home in a rented apartment in Zhabei, which has two bedrooms, a modest sitting room, and a small kitchen that looks out onto the five other tower blocks that make up the condominium complex. In the middle of these thirty-story towers, there is a swimming pool, bright blue in color and shaped like a gourd, two circles joined together, one plumper than the other. From the twenty-eighth floor, where Gary lives, the pool looks fake, like a detail in an architectural model, fringed with palm trees; and because it is shielded from the sun by the high buildings around it, the water is cold and there is never anyone in it, even now that spring is slowly turning to summer. But it is the only view there is, apart from the one into the other apartments in the adjacent tower b
locks.

  During his first few days there, Gary hated it and felt homesick for his apartment in Taipei, but then he realized that it was the first time in years that he had been able to spend a whole day and night without closing his curtains. There were no paparazzi trying to take photos of him with a lens the size of a rocket launcher, no one rummaging through his rubbish bins, no one dressing up as a gas inspector pretending to read the meter. With the curtains wide open, he was the one doing the looking. He could see right into other people’s apartments and watch them eating dinner under harsh fluorescent lights. Later, the children would settle down to do their homework while their parents sat in front of the TV—dozens and dozens of families doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. He could see what TV programs they were watching and even the colored circles of the PowerPoint presentations they were preparing on their computers, and sometimes he would sing along to their karaoke sets. It made him smile when they sang one of his own hits that had become karaoke classics, such as “Sunshine After Rain,” or “Y-O-U,” or his rendition of Leslie Cheung’s “Bygone Love,” distinguished by his own arrangement for strings and piano.

  No doubt they, too, could look into his apartment, and he is sure that they cast casual glances across from time to time, but all they would see is yet another bored single man, of whom there are plenty in Shanghai, strumming his guitar or playing on an electric keyboard or idly zapping through the channels on his forty-two-inch TV while chatting on the Internet. He is just like hundreds of other young people in this apartment complex, and because there are so many people living so close to one another, no one ever looks into the next person’s life very closely. Everyone is busy preparing for tomorrow; no one has time for him.

  He likes it here.

  Gary begins each day full of hope, optimistic that his agent will ring and give him news of a new record deal or a small concert somewhere, maybe in Thailand or Indonesia, where he is still quite popular, because not many people have access to the constant barrage of negative publicity in the Chinese-language press. But his agent has not rung much, barely once a week, if that. At first Gary rang her often, chasing down possible leads; he began to realize how much he missed singing, how keenly he felt the loss of his stage personality, the rush of adrenaline he felt when performing. Soon, however, he stopped calling, because it was embarrassing to chase after her, awkward to keep reaching her answering machine and leaving messages in which he merely mumbled pleasantries because he did not really know what to say. It was, to be truthful, humiliating to know that not so long ago, if he rang anyone in the record company, his call would have been answered immediately, with great enthusiasm. He knew the way the business worked. If you are a success, you wish that everyone would leave you alone; when you are no longer a success, you lose the right to wish for anything.

  For his part, Gary has been concentrating on his music. He has been writing a few songs and rearranging some traditional melodies in a more modern style. (He imagines that in interviews later in his life, when journalists ask him where he got the inspiration to write and reinterpret these songs, he will say, “It all goes back to that dark period in my life, when I was all alone, listening to these songs on other people’s karaoke sets in the apartment block.”) He has been trying to remember why he loves music, trying to forget about performing. It is not easy. He is happy because he is writing music after a long pause, but he is sad because he knows that he might never perform again.

  He is also spending a lot of time online, but not looking at the unedifying and frankly rather sordid porn sites he used to frequent, which are banned and difficult to access, anyway. No, it is because he has found himself in a sort of online relationship. Is she a “girlfriend”? Or a “soul mate”? Is he in love with her, or are they close friends who understand each other deeply? Of course he does not love her, but he finds that he does have feelings toward her. It’s just that he cannot put a name to these feelings. He knows that she feels the same, that she does not consider him to be a boyfriend or lover, but that she, too, is happy whenever she receives a message from him. He keeps his computer on all the time, waiting for her to log in. Even when he is practicing the piano, he has the computer propped up on a small table next to him, in case the familiar box with her smiling face pops up with a note saying: Little Cat is here!

  They chat every day, sometimes three or four times a day, and in the evenings they talk for up to two or three hours, way past midnight, and the following morning he will receive a message saying, So so so so tired but … so so so happy. Going to work now. Think of me and wish me success at work today!

  It is the first time in his life that he has been so close to another person. He has never had conversations lasting more than five minutes, unless they concerned music or work. He has never had the opportunity to chat about simple, silly things like what kind of food he likes, what his favorite animals are, what he thinks of the plight of migrant workers, or about the fate of children orphaned in the Sichuan earthquake. She asks him questions such as, Who causes more misery to the opposite sex, men or women? before offering opinions such as: Women seek to change men, men seek to educate women, and they end up making each other unhappy. When he first started chatting with her, he realized that he had no opinions on anything. Or, rather, he did have feelings and opinions on many subjects, but he never had the chance to articulate any of them. He has never been in a position to examine his thoughts about important issues in his life. Until now no one has ever asked him: How are you feeling this morning? No one has ever said, Is everything all right with you today; you seem a little sad. This girl has the ability to discern sentiments in him that he himself is incapable of noticing. But the moment she mentions something—you seem a little depressed today; you seem optimistic this evening—he realizes that it is exactly how he feels. Depressed. Optimistic. Brooding. Assured.

  And yet he has never met her in person or even heard her voice. On one or two occasions she has suggested swapping phone numbers so that she can text him while she is at work, but each time he changed the subject rapidly. He still cannot get rid of his manager’s advice, permanently recorded on his sixteen-year-old memory, saying: The first rule of self-protection is never to give your mobile number to anyone.

  In fact he divulges very little information about himself. He does not say what he does for a living, how it is that he lives in Shanghai, or which district he lives in. When she asked him where he was from, he said, simply, Taiwan, to which she replied, Yes, I know.

  How?

  Because when I asked you what your favorite fruit was, you said fengli instead of bolo, and only a Taiwanese would say that.

  For now she seems content with this lack of information. She says she does not want to pry—if he is married or holds an important public position, she understands and will not seek to know any more. All she knows is that he is nice to her, and that is what matters. If you are obese or deformed, I don’t care. I don’t care who you are in real life. I like you because … you are like me.

  She is open, trusting, and always willing to show him photos of herself in a variety of settings—in People’s Park, at the top of the WFC, looking down at the crystal spire of Jinmao, at the Star Ferry pier in Hong Kong. All of these photos are taken by her, always from the same angle, the camera held at arm’s length, slightly above her face; they are never taken by a friend or companion, from which Gary deduces she does not have any friends.

  What else does he know about her? Quite a lot, actually, because she loves to talk about herself, recounting every aspect of her life in some detail, describing not only her own emotional state but that of the people around her. Sometimes Gary feels that he knows these people personally and that he is part of her life. Her name is Phoebe Chen, and she is the manager of an upmarket spa in Jing’an—she told him the name and the street, but he’s forgotten the address now (though he figured out that if he were a normal person who wanted to visit her, there was a direct metro line tha
t would get him to her workplace in just over twenty minutes). She has always worked in the hospitality industry, in the luxury sector, such as five-star hotels and casinos, which is why she has lived in several countries across Southeast Asia. Her current workplace is not as high profile or glamorous as some of the other places she has worked, but it offers her numerous challenges and advantages, such as a share in the ownership of the business as well as control over her working hours. She works with a team of fifteen full-time and part-time therapists and beauticians; many of them are uneducated girls from the countryside—you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to manage them! Always in crises, always having problems. The other day, would you believe it, Little S. didn’t come in to work because she thought she was pregnant, and when Phoebe asked her why she thought she was pregnant, she replied, Because the fortune-teller told me that I would get pregnant on this date if I ate a herbal soup double-boiled with bird’s nest. How stupid—she pays so much money to someone who will tell her anything she wants to believe. But this is the sort of thing Phoebe has to put up with all the time these days.

  Phoebe is not from Shanghai, but Gary isn’t clear where exactly her roots lie—somewhere in the south, it’s complicated, she said. If he listens carefully, he imagines he can make out a Cantonese accent. She is very bright, but she has not had a great deal of formal education at a high level. He can tell because educated girls type very quickly and use words that only his lyricist and other clever songwriters use. On the few occasions he’d engaged in chats with girls, he hadn’t been able to keep up with the speed of the conversation. No sooner would he press the “send” button than a reply would come through. And they would also type complicated sentences that took a long time to read and digest, and finally they would be impatient and say, Why are you not responding, are you chatting with someone else? Also, professional women tend to ask him questions he cannot possibly answer: How much is your salary? How much are your car installments each month? Do you have promotion ambitions?