Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

THAT MORNING’S EMAILS BORE NO SHOCKS, ONLY POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS. These days, there were no longer any brutish demands by creditors or feeble excuses from nonpaying clients, and the daily ritual of beginning with emails had become a pleasurable affair for Yinghui, to be carried out at an almost leisurely pace over a cappuccino. There were, among other upbeat messages, an invitation to the opening of a new hotel on the river in Shiliupu and an interesting proposition from someone wanting to build a carbon-neutral cultural center in the middle of town. New contacts and possibilities revealed themselves nowadays without her even having to seek them out. What a change, she thought, as she finished her coffee.

Business was going well for Yinghui. The two upmarket lingerie stores she’d established were flourishing, and in little more than a year she had broken even and was now watching the profits accumulate, week by week, the spreadsheets filling out with handsome-looking figures bursting with promise. Occasionally, when she glanced at the documents her breathless accountant showed her, she ceased to take note of the substantial numbers, for their trajectory was so steep that she had difficulty imagining where they would take her twelve months hence. And yet she was not a person with a modest imagination — quite the opposite.

Her ad campaigns had been striking and wildly successful. She had used only Chinese models, never mixed-race ones, and they never flaunted their bodies in an overtly sexual way. Although they did display a good deal of bare skin, the models were styled beautifully, and the overall aesthetic was classy rather than trashy. The catchy taglines were mysterious and playful, like the images themselves.

                          Elegant Outside, Passionate Inside

                          Secret Exciting

                          Amazing Beautiful You

Although she had originally thought that the shop would cater mainly to the wives of high-ranking Party officials and low-profile billionaires who wanted a discreet custom service, Yinghui soon found a huge demand among ordinary professional women who were willing to spend upwards of four hundred yuan for the simplest bra. The low lighting and shadowy spaces of the stores, together with the women-only entry policy and touches of luxury such as the Venetian chandeliers, created an ambience that proved incredibly popular, with many clients lingering on the plush sofas and leafing through the glossy magazines and catalogs as they chatted and decided what else to purchase. Before long, Yinghui had taken over the adjoining shops and added a coffee bar in one store and a wine bar in the other, extending the opening hours and turning both venues into destinations in their own right. The lingerie was all but removed from the store itself and transferred into specially designed semiprivate “modeling rooms,” and the newly vacated space was now filled with stylish mannequins, artwork, and giant floral displays.

The income and publicity generated by the two stores made it possible for Yinghui to seek business partners for new ventures on a much larger scale, and her financial projections were such that banks were suddenly willing to listen to her requests for loans. Her plans for expansion included a chain of small shops in metro stations, which would sell the basic Amazing Beautiful You range; twelve shops selling clothes for teenage girls, called FILGirl (Fly in Love Girl); an Internet-based cosmetics brand called Shhh, aimed at women over the age of forty; and a luxury spa modeled on a northern Thai village, the construction of which was nearing completion.

These exciting ventures made people in the retail industry take notice of Yinghui, and the expatriate community was especially interested to learn that a foreigner was able to negotiate the complex world of Chinese retail. She began to give talks to the various foreign chambers of commerce, speaking to budding entrepreneurs about the pressures of being a foreigner and a woman in a male-dominated world. As she became more visible, she did an interview with the Shanghai Daily —a small article, nothing more — in which she was asked to reveal the key to her success at a time when many small businesses were experiencing difficulties due to the global recession.

“I smile every day while coolly evaluating my business model,” she replied, smiling coolly. “I remain one hundred percent optimistic even in a crisis, while being decisive enough to act as required.”

Was she ruthless? the interviewer asked.

“Sure,” she said. “You have to be tough to succeed.”

Even as she said it, she regretted the way she sounded — matter of fact, unthinking, as if nothing bothered her. She tried immediately to laugh and find common ground with the interviewer, a young woman in her mid-twenties. But as Yinghui joked about things in the news — celebrity gossip, cute pop singers, and the latest films — she could feel the journalist withdrawing behind the safety of a polite smile, the gulf between them widening. She felt old; her laugh sounded fake and robotic. The girl merely smiled and listened as Yinghui’s jokes became more and more risqué.

That interview sealed her growing reputation in more ways than one. Her image hardened into this: a bold businesswoman, certainly, but also a superefficient, humorless automaton who would coldly plunge a knife into you, except she wouldn’t bother to do it in your back, she’d stick it in your chest. She saw this written in a “joke” email circulating in her office, copied to her by mistake. Ultrawoman, Dragon Queen, Terminatress, Rambo — these were some of the nicknames for her that she discovered as she scrolled down the email chain, which was full of comments on her boring suits and severe hairstyle. Like a rural Party official dressed for an interview with Hu Jintao , someone joked. Some months later, at a cocktail party thrown by an American law firm, she heard one Western man say to another, “Hey, look, there’s that Chinese lesbian.”

She had gotten used to having her hair short — it had been her style for almost twenty years, ever since university days. There was a time when people found the look charming and gamine, like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle , from which Yinghui first got the idea. She didn’t think she’d changed much since then — she didn’t look very different from the Yinghui she saw whenever she looked at her college photos — but she wondered if she was getting a bit old for the hairstyle now. No woman in Shanghai had short hair — they all seemed to have long glossy locks that fell to their shoulders or gathered in a dramatic pile on their heads in the style of air hostesses. She began to grow her hair out and was frustrated by how long it took. At first it became thin and shabby, like a scarecrow’s, then thicker but still messy, like a schoolboy’s. When finally it reached a decent length, her hairdresser said, “Don’t expect me to perform miracles.”

She began to dread the social functions that were becoming an increasing necessity in her professional life: A thrusting entrepreneur had to go out and be seen, but a single, always-unaccompanied woman of thirty-seven was, in Shanghai, an invitation for people to comment. The locals had names for women like her, whom they considered sadly past their prime. Shengnü, baigujing —that sort of thing. Sometimes she wondered if she were really that: a leftover woman, the dregs, or a shaggy monster waiting to be slayed by the Monkey God.