Tash Aw: Five Star Billionaire

Then she realized that it was a DVD of an inspirational life teacher, a woman who talked about how she had turned her life around and now wanted to show the rest of us how we, too, could transform our lowly invisible existence into a life of eternal happiness and success. Phoebe liked the way the woman looked straight at her, holding her gaze so steadily that Phoebe felt embarrassed, shamed by her own failure, the complete lack of even the tiniest achievement in her life. The woman had shimmering lacquered hair that was classy but not old-fashioned. She showed how a mature woman, too, could look beautiful and successful even when no longer in her first springtime, as she put it herself, laughing. She had so many wise things to say, so many clever sayings and details on how to be successful. If only Phoebe had a pen and paper, she would have written down every single one, because now she cannot remember much except the feeling of courage that the woman had given her, words about not being afraid of being on one’s own, far from home. It was as if the woman had looked into Phoebe’s head and listened to all the anxieties that were spinning around inside, as if she had been next to Phoebe as she lay awake at night wondering how she was going to face the next day. Phoebe felt a release, like someone lifting a great mountain of rocks from her shoulders, someone saying, You are not alone, I understand your troubles, I understand your loneliness, I am also like you. And Phoebe thought, The moment I have some money, the first thing I am going to buy is your book. I would not even buy an LV handbag or a new HTC smartphone; I am going to buy your words of wisdom and study them the way some people study the Bible.

The book was called Secrets of a Five Star Billionaire . This is something Phoebe would never forget.

One tip that did stick in her mind was the diary, which the woman did not call a diary but a “Journal of Your Secret Self,” in which you write down all your black terrors, everything that makes you fearful and weak, alongside everything you dream of. It was important to have more positive dreams than burdensome fears. Once you write something in this book, it cannot harm you anymore, because the fears are conquered by the dreams on the opposite page. So, when you are successful, you can read this journal one last time before you discard it forever, and you will smile to see how afraid and underdeveloped you were, because you have come so far. Then you will throw this book away into the Huangpu River and your past self will disappear, leaving only the glorious reborn product of your dreams.

She started the journal six months ago, but still her dreams had not canceled out her fears. It would happen soon. She knew it would.

I must not let this city crush me down .

Phoebe looked around the café. The chairs were mustard-yellow and gray, the walls unpainted concrete, as if the work had not yet been finished, but she knew that it was meant to look like this; it was considered fashionable. On the terrace outside, there were foreigners sitting with their faces turned to the sun — they did not mind their skin turning to leather. Someone got up to leave and suddenly there was a table free next to the Brazilian music lover. He was with a girl. Maybe it was his sister and not a girlfriend.

Phoebe sat down next to them and turned her body away slightly to show she was not interested in what they were doing. But in the reflection in the window — the sun was shining brightly that day; it was almost Mid-autumn Festival, and the weather was clear, golden, perfect for dreaming — Phoebe could see them quite clearly. The girl was bathed in crystal light as if on a stage, and the boy was cut in half by a slanting line of darkness. Every time he leaned forward, he came into the light. His skin was like candle wax.

As the girl bent over her magazine, Phoebe could see that she was definitely a girlfriend, not a sister. Her hair fell over her face, so Phoebe could not tell if she was pretty, but she sat the way a pretty person would. Her dress was a big black shirt with loads of words printed all over it like graffiti, no-meaning sentences such as PEACE $$$ PARIS, and honestly it looked horrible and made her body look formless as a ghost, but it was expensive, anyone could see that. The handbag on the floor was made of leather that looked soft enough to melt into the ground. It spread out at the girl’s feet like an exotic pet, and Phoebe wanted to stroke its crosshatch pattern to see what it felt like. The boy leaned forward, and in the mirrored reflection he caught Phoebe’s eye. He said something to his girlfriend in Shanghainese, which Phoebe couldn’t understand, and the girl looked up at Phoebe with a sideways glance. It was something that Shanghainese girls had perfected, this method of looking at you side-on without ever turning their faces to you. It meant that they could show off their fine cheekbones and appear uninterested at the same time, and it made you feel that you were not important at all to them, not worthy even of a proper stare.

Phoebe looked away at once. Her cheeks felt hot.

Do not let other people step on you .

Sometimes Shanghai bore down on her with the weight of ten skyscrapers. The people were so haughty; their dialect was harsh to her ears. If someone talked to her in their language, she would feel attacked just by the sound of it. She had come here full of hope, but on some nights, even after she had deposited all her loathing and terror into her secret journal, she still felt that she was tumbling down, down, and there was no way up. It had been a mistake to gamble as she did.

SHE WAS NOT from any part of China but from a country thousands of miles to the south, and in that country she had grown up in a small town in the far northeast. It is a region that is poor and remote, so she is used to people thinking of her as inferior, even in her own country. In her small town, the way of life had not changed very much for fifty years and would probably never change. Visitors from the capital city used to call it charming, but they didn’t have to live there. It was not a place for dreams and ambition, and so Phoebe did not dream. She did what all the other young boys and girls did when they left school at sixteen: They traveled across the mountain range that cut the country in two to find work on the west coast, moving slowly southward until they reached the capital city.

Here are some of the jobs her friends took the year they left home: Trainee waiter. Assistant fake-watch stallholder. Karaoke hostess. Assembly-line worker in a semiconductor factory. Bar girl. Shampoo girl. Watercooler deliveryman. Seafood-restaurant cleaner. (Phoebe’s first job was among those listed above, but she would rather not say which one.) Five years in these kinds of jobs — they passed so slowly.

Then she had some luck. There was a girl who’d disappeared. Everyone thought she was in trouble — she’d been hanging out with a gangster, the kind of big-city boy you couldn’t tell your small-town parents about, and everyone thought it wouldn’t be long before she was into drugs or prostitution; they were sure of it because she’d turned up with a big jade bracelet and a black eye one day. But from nowhere Phoebe received an email from this girl. She wasn’t in trouble; she was in China. She’d just decided that enough was enough and left one morning without telling her boyfriend. She’d saved enough money to go to Hong Kong, where she was a karaoke hostess for a while — she was not ashamed to say it, because everyone does it, but it was not for long — and now she was working in Shenzhen. She was a restaurant manager, a classy international place, not some dump, you know, and she was in charge of a staff of sixteen. She even had her own apartment (photo attached — small but bright and modern, with a vase of plastic roses on a glass table). Thing is, she’d met a businessman from Beijing who was going to marry her and take her up north, and she wanted to make sure everything was okay at the restaurant before she left. They always needed a good waitstaff at New World Restaurant. Just come! Don’t worry about visas. We can fix that. There were two smiley faces and a winky one at the end of the email.

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