Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

      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