Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

Then there was the Taiwanese man who came twice a week, once for a Balinese seaweed-wrap massage, the other for a Shanghainese pedicure. Phoebe had seen on his form that he was only twenty-six, yet he dressed in immaculate designer clothing and always engaged her in lively, amusing chats, often making daring jokes. He had a smooth, clear complexion, and Phoebe had to admit that the moment he walked in the door she felt happy and thought, This man would make a wonderful husband. One day he came in with another man who looked just like him, a local boy who laughed and joked in Shanghainese with the manicurist who had treated his friend. As he did so, he traced his fingers over the outlines of the Taiwanese boy’s hands, which were smooth and waxy and glowing after his manicure. Phoebe looked away as she handed them the credit-card machine; she did not want to look at them touching each other. “Phoebe fancies a gay guy,” the other girls teased later. “His boyfriend is more feminine than you!”

In a city of 20 million people, it was impossible to meet men — all the girls at the spa agreed. They came from all over China, they were all here to make money and find a partner, but they were beginning to realize it was hopeless. All they could do was concentrate on their work and send money home so their parents could build a nice house in their village that would attract a nice boy; then they would go home and marry him, a slow-witted son of a farmer who had never ventured outside their province, maybe had never even gone to the provincial capital. And the girls, they would give up their dream of getting married to a successful doctor or banker. Their adventure would last a few years, and then, when they gotten too old, they would just go home. “Going out”: That was something that belonged to their youth, a scary, thrilling ride that began in their late teens and lasted into their twenties; but they did not want to be thirty-five and unmarried, alone, childless. They looked at all these well-educated women in Shanghai who dressed well and had good jobs but were still single, unwanted— remaindered . What use was that? They had made a bit of money, their parents had a fridge and color TV, there was enough money for an extension in the house, and they could even afford to hire help during the harvest season. Soon they would go home, to Anhui or Hunan or Sichuan or the frozen Northeast. They had gone out, but soon they would go home.

Phoebe listened to their stories. She listened and thought, I am not going to go home. She could not go home, not yet, maybe never. She did not even know where she would go back to. She thought of her mother, living alone in that small town in the north of Malaysia, a town that was shrinking, becoming less and less alive as each year passed. It was the opposite of the villages of China that these girls spoke of, which grew and grew with the money they earned in the big cities on the coast, the fields of rice and wheat slowly turning into industrial parks and high-tech factories, the villages becoming towns, the towns cities, because the girls who left would, one day, go back and get married, as certain as the seasons passed. No, the town where Phoebe had grown up was smaller now than it had ever been, and soon it would be dead. Her mother had never moved, and soon she, too, would be gone. Phoebe had left; she had gone out. But she could not go back.

She stayed late at the spa, past midnight, after everyone had left, and used the fast new computers to upload the best photos of herself on her Internet profiles. She joined every dating site she could find, concentrating on upscale ones that charged a fee for joining. She changed her age from twenty-four to twenty-two and made sure she responded only to men of quality who offered her excellent long-term prospects. Some nights she slept only four or five hours, because she chatted late into the night. It didn’t matter; she was young and didn’t need sleep.

In her “Journal of My Secret Self,” she wrote: Phoebe Chen Aiping, every second of the day offers a beautiful opportunity to achieve success. Therefore, you have 86,400 chances to change your life every day .

HE HAD BEEN EXPECTING HIS OFFICES TO BE DARK WHEN HE ARRIVED, certain of an atmosphere of mourning or at least mild depression at his prolonged absence. But instead Justin found it quietly busy, filled with the sounds of clacking keyboards and the soft rhythmic ke-chunk of the photocopier. Even his own office was lit — as soon as he stepped out of the lift, he could see the conical Alessi light shades glowing brightly against the mahogany-lined walls.

The office manager was sitting in his chair when Justin walked into the room; the man was on the phone, using one of Justin’s fountain pens to scribble notes on a pad in front of him. He signed off quickly when he saw Justin. “Hello, boss,” he said, putting the phone down; he did not stand up. “What are you doing here? Your family said you were … ill.”

“I’m all right now.”

“Yes,” the office manager said, “you look … just the same.”

Justin looked around the room and noticed that all his files had been rearranged; the leather-bound directories and coffee-table books of chic hotels had been cleared away, as had the framed photographs of his family and himself. They had been replaced with brightly colored plastic trays bearing stacks of paper that were too large for the custom-made hardwood shelves. There were piles of cardboard boxes in the corner of the room, as if excess stock from a small warehouse had spilled over into his office, and everywhere he looked he saw plastic jars filled with tea, the olive-colored leaves sitting at the bottom. There was nothing of Justin’s left on the desk, except the penholder that had been emptied of its contents and a paperweight he had been given at the launch of an Italian fashion label on his arrival in Shanghai. His desk diary was gone, as was the miniature sandstone carving of a dancing Hindu celestial his brother had bought him from the Met museum shop some years before.

“The thing is,” the office manager said, “we didn’t think you were going to come back. Your brother said you were no longer in charge of affairs, and we were to await further instructions, but then he never gave us any. We waited and waited. Meanwhile, people here were getting restless, and the landlord wanted to renegotiate the lease and increase the rent. I read on the Internet about your family’s troubles in Singapore — you know, about the collapse of the stock market. So I had no choice.”

A young woman came into the office. She was dressed in shin-length acid-washed jeans and a silvery T-shirt that said SMILE in English. “Boss Wu, the bottled-water distributor is here for your meeting.”

“Who’s that girl?” Justin said once she’d left the room. “And why are we now selling bottled water? We are a property-investment firm.”

“She’s a new girl I hired. Jenny left because we were slow paying her salary. Anyway, she was too expensive. Shanghainese nowadays earn so much money. That girl is from Hubei — she’s a friend of my sister’s from back home. You won’t believe how much I save on her salary! As I said, I thought your business was finished, so I let the landlord terminate the lease. But we still had three months here before we got kicked out, so I thought I should change the direction of the business to try to make some money.”

“Change the direction,” Justin repeated blankly. He noticed that the cartons stacked around his office were marked ALL-NATURAL BABY FOOD.