Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw
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– 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