Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

Speculatively built in the late 1960s upon rumors of vast, soon-to-be-discovered offshore oil fields, the Tokyo Hotel anticipated an influx of itinerant low-skilled workers that never quite materialized. It had not been designed to be anything but functional: a three-story concrete block with small windows and a flat roof on which rainwater collected, breeding mosquitoes and dripping down the leaky gutters to form rivulets of black moss that scarred the building’s façade. When the rumors of the oil fields turned out to be untrue, the hotel quickly fell into disrepair — and, soon, disrepute too, offering cheap rooms by the afternoon or even by the hour for those in a hurry. It was mainly Chinese girls who hung around the Tokyo Hotel; sometimes Thai girls came from across the border with their traveling-salesman boyfriends. One of the tales often told about the hotel — perhaps apocryphal, but who knows? — was that the rooms were limited strictly to the hour, and that each had an alarm wired to a clock that started ticking the moment you entered the room and sounded right on sixty minutes. It was said that the clocks were the only appliances that worked in the rooms — none of the sockets seemed to be wired, which made the kettle and plastic table fan redundant. Sometimes the ceiling fans worked but spun so languidly that they raised no breeze at all. Your hour there would be stifling, sweaty.

These were details I picked up from older teenage boys, some of whom claimed to have visited the hotel. They said that the partition walls were so thin that they could hear everything from the next room — local radio dramas, Thai news from across the border, sports commentaries: always the radio, to drown out the moaning and breathy cries. And there were noises you simply couldn’t recognize — the sharp slapping of a hand on bare flesh, but delivered with metronomic regularity so that it began to sound machinelike; or a coconut grater, almost like a dentist’s drill, applied to soft rubber; or people speaking in strange harsh languages that sounded like nothing you ever heard on TV, that not even the villains in Hollywood films spoke. Someone said he’d heard the voices of extraterrestrials; one boy even said he’d heard his own dad.

Sometime in the mid-seventies, the Tokyo Hotel began to be raided by the religious police — once, twice, then every month. They’d heard that Malay girls from out of town had been seen there; one or two had even become regulars. No one really cared when it became obvious the place would close down. It didn’t seem exotic or exciting anymore, just run-down and filthy. Everyone secretly hoped it would be torn down, but it wasn’t. Without the new oil fields that people hoped for, there was no money in town even to demolish a lousy building like that.

Left abandoned, the Tokyo Hotel became a hangout for local junkies, increasing in number with the easy availability of Burmese heroin filtering across the border from Hat Yai and Songkhla. Whereas prepubescent boys might once have happily cycled past in the hope of catching sight of a scantily clad girl, they now shied away from the needles and broken bottles and general unsavoriness that hung over the area. The entire street leading to the hotel slowly began to look shabby too — never one of the more bustling streets in town, it now looked decrepit, the shutters on the few remaining shops permanently pulled down. All the business had moved to the other side of town, closer to the market, where there were now modern department stores and an open-air plaza for food stalls, cooled in the evening by balmy sea breezes, its perimeter decorated with hanging neon lightbulbs. The contrast was almost laughable: Why would anyone want to go to that side of town, where the air was fetid and stagnant, the land becoming swampy and mosquito-ridden as it stretched toward the riverbank? The roads were ravaged by the floods, and, as newer routes into the center of town were built, the lanes in the area became overgrown with weeds and small trees sprouted in the gaps between the buildings.

From both a commercial and lifestyle point of view, a derelict hotel in a rapidly degenerating part of town did not seem to offer any possibilities at all — any prudent entrepreneur would have avoided it, any business manual would have warned against it — but it was at precisely this point that my father took over the Tokyo Hotel.

PHOEBE FELT THAT HER LIFE WAS AWASH WITH GOOD FEELINGS. SHE WAS dressed according to the rules of fashion that she had picked up from observing Shanghai women: Wear the biggest sunglasses you can find; carry the smallest handbag possible. The new attitude she had been cultivating was filling her with a magnificent confidence.

Already she could tell that she was making a good impression on the man she had just met. His eyes were wandering up and down her tight-fitting dress — he was making no attempt to hide that he found her sexually attractive.

Good, she thought.

Even though the weather was already turning cold and the light was not as bright as before, it was important for her to look as glamorous as possible, as if she were going to a fancy evening function, because this was the way women of style carried themselves, whether on the streets of Xintiandi or on billboards or in magazines. On this day, going to have coffee with a man she’d met on the Internet, she felt certain that she had finally attained the level of sophistication she aspired to. Her life would now surely change for the better.

For a few weeks now, she had been planning a new approach to finding a man, which was also the key to finding success in Shanghai. She had invested a lot of time and money in observing the different methods of accomplishing this. To begin with, she spent many evenings in bars where she knew men and women gathered to meet one another. In one place in Hongqiao, which she had heard was favored by foreigners, she saw that the local women were dressed provocatively, with figure-hugging dresses that showed off a lot of flesh, the very opposite of how Chinese girls were supposed to dress, with modesty and respect. Phoebe had always thought that nice girls could attract men with their demure charm, but now she could see that she was wrong. That was such an old-fashioned and outdated way of thinking; she had to change her whole attitude. The black satin dress she had worn specially for such evenings out seemed dull and overprotective now, with its long sleeves and strip of see-through lace over her collarbone. She had thought it alluring, but now it made her feel like a Muslim wife, covered up so that no man could approach her.

She watched as a young woman flirted with a group of American men at the bar. The men were laughing and touching the woman on her arm, on her bare shoulder. They were drinking beer from bottles, Budweiser, and every so often they would touch the lips of the bottles together with a loud clinking noise as they made a joke. The bar was lit with neon lights set under the glass counter, and the colors that reflected in the faces of the men and woman seemed too bright, unreal, as if in an old movie. The woman’s heels were so high that her calf muscles were contracted and tense, which made her long legs look like an African warrior’s. She distributed her card among the group of men, and Phoebe could tell they were impressed by it. Before too long, the woman left the bar with one of the men, their arms linked like longtime lovers.

When the whole group had dispersed, Phoebe saw that the woman’s card had fallen to the floor. It had a name on it, and the nature of her business: PRODUCTS FOR THE BED. There was no address, just a QQ ID number for online chatting and a mobile-phone number. Yes, maybe she was a prostitute, Phoebe thought; maybe she was what people called kuaican— maybe, like so many other girls Phoebe had known in the past, she was just a cheap, quick snack. But tonight she had a man, and maybe by tomorrow she would have a boyfriend. And maybe in a few months’ time she would be married, and maybe she would have security for the rest of her life — maybe that was the last evening she would ever have to spend in a bar. And all because she dared to wear a short skirt and a top that showed off her too-skinny body.