Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw
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