Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

Birds on floor number 2 now too. Number of nests: 9 already! They are stuck to the ceiling like big cobwebs.

Birds on floors 2 and 3, but not descending to floor 1. Number of nests: 16.

Still no birds on floor number 1. Don’t know what I am doing wrong.

Number of nests: 28! Have bought heavy locks for the front and back doors. Uncle Yong told me that people will break in and steal the nests if I am not careful.

Number of nests today: 41! I read a book my friend Lee gave me, which says I can start harvesting the nests soon.

Some nests have disappeared. Maybe I miscounted before. Today only 34.

Number of nests: 21. I have not yet harvested any. I found 3 fallen on the floor. Maybe someone is stealing the rest. Yes, I think so.

Number of nests: 11. My friends say don’t worry, I am doing all the right things.

Number of nests: 6. I am sure they will build more nests soon.

I did not receive any further word from him for nearly two months. I’d been working as an apprentice electrician at that time, earning a lowly wage that I am now too embarrassed to reveal. (When I think of the sum of money nowadays, it seems hardly likely that a human being would be able to survive on so little, but indeed I did.) Fearing for my father’s safety, I took the bus up to Kelantan again, and when I arrived I found the hotel looking almost resplendent in its dereliction. With its windows sealed up and its front door shut against the elements, it looked like a sculpture, and had it been transported in time and place to a modern metropolis like Beijing or London, it could easily have passed for an art installation, its ghostly isolation making it seem almost beautiful. But it was not in one of the world’s great cities; it was on the shabby side of a shabby town, bordering marshy scrubland that served as a breeding ground for dengue fever, and so it looked only sad. I went around the back, where I found my father sitting in the shade of the porch, piercing an old rubber hose with a large needle over and over again.

He looked up at me and said, “It’s my new humidifier system.” He spoke to me as if I had popped out to the shops for a packet of cigarettes and had come back after an absence of ten minutes, not four months. “I think it’s because it’s too dry in the house. Birds like moisture; otherwise they get mites in their feathers. Don’t know why, but Lee’s house down the road has got many, many birds. Last week he harvested over eighty nests. Sold them to a dealer from Hong Kong. Know how much he got? Thousand-plus ringgit . People in Hong Kong going crazy for birds’ nests. Don’t know why my house got no birds.”

“Ba,” I said, “what if the birds never establish themselves here?”

“They will! I know they will. I just need a bit of luck. They are everywhere — look.” He pointed to the sky, and in the fading light of that warm, still afternoon, right before the skies turned purple with dusk, I could see tiny birds wheeling and swooping in the air.

“I just need a bit of luck,” he said again.

In the days to come, I tried, gently, to persuade him to give up on his venture. We might be able to sell the hotel and cut our losses. We had debts to repay, I reminded him: If we sold the building, we’d be able to pay everyone back and maybe have enough left over to buy a small place somewhere, and he could get a job, nothing special, maybe help out at a garage or a shop, or as a rice merchant or anything, and now that I was old enough to work too, we would be okay, we could live a simple life, just like before.

But he laughed away my suggestions, smiling benignly as if I, not he, were the fantasist. On more than a couple of occasions, he simply walked away from me as if I had not even been addressing him — as if I were mad. He could not abandon his project, he said, as if explaining a rudimentary idea to a small child: His friends and relatives had given him money as an investment, and it was his duty to see that their investment bore fruit. They had placed more than money in his hands; they had invested trust in him. Profits take time to accrue, my son, he said, and trust — trust takes a lifetime to repay.

He never mentioned the words “saving face,” but I knew, for him, the birds’ nests had become an exercise in avoiding shame. None of the people who had lent him money were rich; they were village folk, just like him, scraping by with little to spare. There was no turning back for him.

THE WEEK BEGAN WELL FOR PHOEBE, JUST AS THE ASTROLOGER SAID it would. It had cost Phoebe 400 yuan to have a full assessment of her prospects, including detailed advice on how to maximize the chances of meeting a suitable partner and gaining a promotion at work. At the time, Phoebe thought it was a scandal to pay so much money, but now she could see it was worth every mao .

On Monday morning, she received an email from Boss Leong informing her that, in recognition of her excellent performance, she was being promoted to the position of manager of the spa. Boss Leong was opening another two branches of the beauty spa elsewhere in the city and needed someone reliable to look after the original establishment. Phoebe was the first person who came to mind. Her salary would increase nearly threefold and she would be required to wear a smart suit or at least a jacket, replacing the Chinese silk dress she wore as a receptionist.

Two days later, while she was still floating on a tidal wave of happiness, she received an email from a dating site she belonged to, from a man who proposed a dinner date with no obligations to take things further if they did not like each other. It was a proper matchmaking website for professional people, expensive to join, so she was naturally more optimistic when men sent her messages on this site. Of course, she had long since learned that the appearance of classiness in Shanghai was no guarantee of truthfulness, and she treated all approaches from men with the same caution as she would when shopping for counterfeit luxury goods. China was full of copycat products and people. She was now experienced enough to tell from one simple message whether a man was serious or not, whether he was just looking for sex, whether he was a married man in search of a mistress, or if he was indeed in need of a future wife. She could tell if a man was lying about who he was, about his job and income, where he was from. She could tell if he was from Beijing or if he was a Pakistani pretending to be from Beijing. All those scam marriage proposals from Indian, Nigerian, and Arab men — she was aware of them all; she did not even know what they wanted from her, but she made sure she stayed clear of them. She had become an expert in the courtship rituals of the Internet; no one could trick her with flowery words or insincere promises. To Phoebe, Internet dating had become like a book written in a language that she had mastered, just as she had conquered the rocky path to employment in Shanghai.

She had struck up several online relationships with men — two in Shanghai and one in Beijing — but she knew that none of them would lead to anything serious. All of them were hiding something; she could sense that they were not telling the full truth. She laughed and shared her life with them, sometimes even opening up her troubled heart and allowing her frustrations to spill out onto the computer screen, but she continued to hold back her deepest thoughts, disguising her true identity just as she disguised herself at work. These men would see only what she wanted them to see; they would never know the real Phoebe Chen Aiping. She could see that they were not serious, and so, in keeping with the wise advice gained from her books, she, too, kept her distance. Being open and honest with a man is like asking him to drive over you with a bulldozer!