Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

“What are you staring at?” she said, looking up at him.

“Nothing. Is that your cat?” Justin said.

“No, I don’t know who it belongs to. It comes every night at the same time as I do. We keep each other company. Sometimes I feed it.”

Justin watched as the cat arched its spine and rubbed itself against her. “You shouldn’t touch stray cats like that — you never know, they might be dirty.”

The girl shrugged and continued to cuddle the cat, circling her arms around it and lowering her face to allow it to rub the top of its head against her chin. When it finally stepped off her lap, it landed on a large notebook that lay on the ground next to the girl. She picked the book up and held it to her chest protectively, though Justin wasn’t sure if she was protecting it or herself. Her eyes were red and puffy from oversleeping — something that Justin recognized at once — and her skin was dry and brittle.

“What are you studying?” Justin asked.

“Nothing,” the girl said, before standing and walking away. She went to the lift door and pressed the call button. The lift was waiting, and its flickering fluorescent bulb bathed her in harsh white light, making her seem very small, barely more than a child.

The next night Justin went downstairs at the same hour, hoping to see the girl again, but she wasn’t there, nor on the night after. Her karaoke singing had stopped too, but Justin did not feel relieved; instead, he worried that something had happened to her. He went up to her room and rattled the grille, but already he knew that there would be no answer. He began going for a nightly walk, always leaving just before midnight, feeling the first hints of summer infuse the breeze coming off the river.

Then one night she was there again, sitting on the front step, dressed in her pink pajamas, reading the notebook. She closed it when she saw him approaching.

“Where have you been?” he asked; the urgency and relief in his voice startled him. “I thought you said you came here every day.”

“Sometimes I sleep. What’s it to you?”

He sat down on the step next to her, and she did not move away.

“Why do you sit out here to study at midnight? Isn’t that sort of a weird thing to do?”

“I’m not studying. Anyway, why do you go walking after midnight? Isn’t that a weird thing to do too? Seriously, Shanghai is so full of weird people.”

A movement startled Justin — the cat, padding its way silently toward them, easing itself swiftly into the girl’s embraces. He drew away slightly. “You really shouldn’t touch stray cats in that way,” he said.

The girl laughed. “You’re scared of cats! That’s so funny.” She cradled the cat with both hands, lifting it off her, and thrust it toward Justin. “You’re weird. Even a sweet baby cat can spook you. Wah , you really have big problems, mister. Go on, try touching it.”

“No.”

“Okay, then, let it touch you a bit — see how affectionate it is!”

“Please just take it away.”

The girl giggled as she returned the cat to her lap. A gust of wind caught the pages of her notebook and blew it open. On the front page, in boxy handwriting, someone had written: “Journal of My Secret Self.”

“Is that your diary?” Justin asked.

“You are so rude and nosy,” the girl said, pulling the book away. “It’s not mine. It’s my roommate’s.”

“You’re one to talk — why are you reading your roommate’s secret diary?”

The girl shrugged. “She has an exciting life. She goes out all the time. Now she even has a rich boyfriend. When I read her diary I feel excited too, as if her life is mine. I used to go out a lot, to the cinema, music concerts. But it’s been so long, and now I am scared. I don’t dare go out anymore. This is as far as I want to go.”

Justin noticed a cut on the cat’s paw; where it had rubbed against the girl’s pajamas, there were small dark streaks of blood.

“Hey,” the girl said, as if remembering something important. “Do you have any ice cream? You live here, don’t you? I don’t know why, but I feel like some ice cream.”

Justin shook his head. He did not want to admit that he had nothing in his fridge but a lump of rancid Australian butter. “But I could get some for tomorrow. If you’re here again, that is.”

“Really? Promise?” When she smiled, her face seemed to change shape entirely, an effect that disconcerted Justin. It transformed her from a young woman into a child, not even a pubescent teenager but a shiny-faced, unquestioning child. And suddenly it felt important to keep the promise he had just made. He did not know why he was providing a solemn undertaking to buy ice cream, why he was taking the trouble to ask what kind of flavors she liked, why he was pretending to share her love of red-bean ices when he didn’t even like ice cream, why he cared about what was written in that diary or if her roommate’s life was heading for disaster, why he was concerned that there were two hapless girls from the provinces who thought that the rich men they were going out with were going to leave their wives and marry them. These girls knew nothing; they had not seen the world. They were so young that they thought the world was made of pop concerts and ice cream and baby cats and pink pajamas, but now they were beginning to taste the bitterness that life offered. He did not want that to happen, but he could not prevent it.

“Okay, then, I will get red-bean ice cream,” he said.

The next evening, they sat eating ice cream, still in the same spot on the front step of the building. She told him her name — Yanyan — and when he said his name, she repeated it several times, delighting in the novelty of the English sounds. Just- ying was how she pronounced it, the two syllables infused with rise-and-fall tones of Chinese, transforming his name into something unfamiliar and wonderful. He had never thought of his name as anything but perfunctory, never thought anyone would find it amusing. He listened as she told him about herself, patiently taking in the details of her life. He was a good listener. Often, he had found himself deep in conversation, enjoying what was being said, and suddenly the other person would stop and say, “You know what? You’re such a good listener.” He was never quite sure that it was a compliment — he had often taken it as a euphemism for “being boring,” for being someone who absorbed rather than illuminated. And yet now it did not seem to matter. Yanyan needed to talk; she needed him to listen; she did not require him to participate.

And so on this and many subsequent nights, sitting on the front step of the building, he learned that she was from a village in Fujian province, that she had worked in the office of a company producing health-food supplements until she got fired a year ago. It wasn’t her fault, she hadn’t done anything wrong, but the company had started exporting to the United States, and the authorities there had found some contamination in their products and the whole company had to shut down. She did not know why, but she had taken it really badly—“broken confidence” was how she put it. She had always been a delicate person, even as a child; she was too much of a dreamer. She’d read an article about alien abductions in Hunan province and, for a while, she was convinced that it had happened to her in her childhood — it was the only way she could explain the white light that came to her in her sleep sometimes or the feeling that she had left part of her body in another place far, far away. Now she couldn’t face going out of her room; some days she didn’t even get out of bed. The outside world scared her; just sitting on the front step of the building like this was a big deal. Life had become much better since her roommate arrived — she paid the rent and bought nice food. But.