Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

He seemed not to notice her labored movements or how heavy she had grown with the pregnancy. He rambled incoherently at times, and she remembered what her parents had said about him: an artistic temperament … unreliable. When he talked about politicians failing in their duties, she did not have the heart to say, Talk about letting down the people who need you the most. She could not explain why, during his brief stays, she continued to cook for him and lie down next to him at night, listening to his quick, shallow breathing, as if he were the one who needed looking after. Even when he left for good, she continued to worry that he was not eating properly, that he might not have anywhere safe to sleep at night, that he had lost his direction in life.

Not long after her baby was born, she heard that her husband had ended up in prison for organizing a political rally somewhere up north. He was in and out of jail for a while, and then she heard no more news from him.

For a time she gave music lessons to middle-class kids whose parents wanted them to become “rounded individuals.” As she watched her students bang through their pieces she wondered what being a rounded individual really meant. “If you want to go to Harvard,” one mother explained to her as her six-year-old son played “Chopsticks,” “you need to be a rounded individual. That means you have to play the piano, doesn’t it?” It was not what she’d imagined for her life, but it was okay — at least she was a teacher of music, even if she was teaching people who had no love of music.

But this did not last very long — eight months, a year maybe. Taking the bus to Bangsar and Damansara — all those smart suburbs, so far away — and then walking, always walking, through the wide lanes lined with split-level houses and decorative trees in the gardens: It meant she would travel for four hours for a lesson that lasted one hour, and all this time her small baby was at home. Sometimes she left Gary with a neighbor; sometimes she hired an Indonesian maid with glassy red eyes and a vacant smile, but this left her with very little money to spare at the end of each week. And then there was the worrying. So many things could happen to her and her baby in the city. The way men looked at her on the bus made her feel nervous and uncomfortable. She didn’t dare take taxis. She stopped working after dark. If anything happened to her, what would happen to her baby?

It was a relief of sorts when her parents died — first her father, then, a few months afterward, her mother. She had to move back up north to Kelantan to sort out their affairs, which involved living in their little house in Temangan. The place was barely more than a village; it was not far from where she had grown up, and she appreciated the air and the landscape, the feeling of civilization melting away into the wilderness. Ten years previously she had found the isolation stifling, but now it felt comforting. Her parents’ deaths gave her a reason to escape her life in KL. Everyone would understand why she had to give up all that she had had in the big city; all her ambitions had reached a legitimate end; she could even pretend it was a hardship to return to a rural existence.

By the time Gary was old enough to put a name to simple human emotions — fear, loneliness, joy — his mother’s life was already in retreat, its boundaries shrinking. In order to escape the feeling of being trapped by the confines of rural life, she surrendered to it. Her world was defined now by the rhythms of the market laid out along the dusty street every morning. She chatted with the old makcik who came in from the surrounding villages to sell vegetables and food from their own kitchens — she knew each one by name and sometimes even shared tea with the dodol woman. It was how she had grown up; she knew how to live like this. She tried to imagine that the roads leading out of town all headed north, to Kota Bharu and the other small towns in the no-man’s-land on the Thai border, or to the coast, where the long stretches of empty white-sand beaches were interrupted only by fishing villages; she wanted to imagine that she could no longer go south to KL or Singapore, or west across the mountains to Penang, where there were cities and music and foreigners and ambition.

At that age — six, seven? — Gary would notice her watching him as he played in the dirt yard in front of the house, and on a number of occasions he found her sitting by his bed when he woke up in the morning. But she would never actually hold him or pick him up to cradle him in her arms or even rush over to help him to his feet if he fell over. The look in her eyes was empty, hollowed out by fatigue: The mere act of reaching out to him was too great an effort for her. She wanted to love him, he knew, but she had no strength to do so. The divide between them always remained, and before long he became aware that he no longer needed her touch.

She worked every day, including Fridays, when many of the shops were closed for prayers. By now she was washing clothes and cleaning houses for a living. In those days there weren’t any Indonesian maids, so it was still easy for a Chinese woman like her to find work. Occasionally she would mention the possibility of giving music lessons — often enough to make Gary remember that his mother had been someone whose life had been full of potential. But they both knew it was ridiculous — there was no one in a small town like theirs who would want or could afford piano lessons. It was not like down south, where Gary knew from his mother’s stories that there were concert venues that played host to foreign musicians dressed in tuxedos.

Once a month his mother would take the bus into Kota Bharu. “I have some friends — it’s our music evening. They sing and sometimes I play the piano. Traditional songs, like the ones I sing for you sometimes. You know,” she said, as she broke into song, “like ‘Sweet Little Rose.’ ” He liked the idea of his mother playing the piano and wished he could one day see her perform. For a few days after her music evenings, she would often smoke some cigarettes, usually Winstons out of a crushed pack. Gary never questioned this, even though she didn’t normally smoke; maybe a friend had given them to her. One day he noticed a box of matches she’d used to light her cigarettes. When she had finished the matches, she threw the box into the waste bin, where it grew damp from the vegetable peelings before he had a chance to salvage it. Every month she came back with the same matchbox, and he began to pay attention to the bright red lips printed against the black background. By now he was old enough to read the words easily: ICHIBAN KARAOKE.

It made him sad to think of his mother, who might have played in concert halls in Europe, in such a place as Ichiban Karaoke, with its red-lipped matchboxes, in Kota Bharu. He was just a child — it would be years before he would visit a karaoke bar himself — but already he knew that Ichiban Karaoke was not good enough for his mother, that she did not belong in a place like that.

People always say that their mother is beautiful, that she is the most amazing woman in the world. Now that Gary has seen hundreds and hundreds of pretty women all over Asia, he knows that his mother’s looks could never be considered exceptional. To be honest, she was on the plain side. All the same, when he remembers the way she looked back then, with red pinched eyes and the faint lines of age already beginning to show around her temples and her mouth, as she sat on the front step of the house singing old Chinese songs while watching him cycle round and round the dirt yard, he thinks: She should not have gone to Ichiban Karaoke Bar.

Every year, as he grew older, the dirt yard in front of his house seemed to grow wider. Trees were felled and the scrubby undergrowth was cleared, bringing the town out toward them. This was a good thing, his mother explained, for it made it easier for her to get work. There were more houses that needed cleaning, more people who needed their clothes washed and ironed, and now they lived close by. Had she lived for another few years, she would have lived — almost — among them. Things might have turned out differently for them both. Maybe the buses would have been more reliable, not so old and broken down. Maybe the roads would have been improved, with fewer potholes after the rainy season and the floods in November and December that always washed the tarmac away, leaving a patchwork of holes. Maybe she would not have had to catch a lift from a stranger on a two-stroke scooter when she was coming back from Ichiban Karaoke late at night; maybe there would have been fewer goats and chickens straying onto the road and into oncoming traffic. Maybe she would still be alive today, and Gary would be a bus driver, not a pop star. Maybe he would not be sitting here flicking through the TV channels once again; maybe he wouldn’t be on the Internet, waiting for someone interesting to log on to MSN.