Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

When Yinghui arrived, it was already late; the initial excitement of the party had petered out and people were beginning to settle down in little cliques. Justin saw her making her way up the snaking Balinese-style stepping-stone pathway, her taut calves illuminated by the garden lights housed in low stone pagodas. She wore Bermuda shorts and walked with a slouchy gait, her body held loosely, as if she were bored and did not really want to be there. Her hair was cut on the short side, messily finished, and made her head look square; across the front of her body she wore a small cloth bag on a strap, a Himalayan-type pouch decorated with colorful beads.

“She’s going to London, right?” a girl said to her friend as they saw Yinghui arrive.

“Yes,” said her companion, “she’ll be able to buy lots of lesbian clothes there.”

She stood in the middle of a square of lawn next to the swimming pool, looking around and scanning the thinning crowd. Her eyes caught Justin’s for a half second before she turned away; then she made her way to a small group of people and eased her way next to C.S. He exclaimed theatrically in a high-pitched look-at-me voice, fueled by oversweet rum punch, and leaned in to kiss her on both cheeks. Justin did not know where or when C.S. had learned this affectation; he’d never seen anyone else do it in real life.

Over the next few years, she and C.S. would come home during the vacation, each visit more splendid in their coupled isolation than the last, as if every term abroad had brought them closer to each other and more divorced from the rest of the world. Justin would often come home from work to find them slouched on the sofas, reading the papers, occasionally commenting to each other on a news item — always in a bored, mildly disaffected manner. Once, Justin had just sat down with a can of Coke and turned on the TV when Yinghui let the papers fall to the floor with a sigh. She lay back, gazed at the ceiling, and sighed again. “It’s all so shit,” she said.

“What is?” Justin said.

C.S. was stretched out on the same sofa as Yinghui, his ankles entwined with hers. He did not look up from the book he was reading. “You know that’s what it’s like in this country, sweetie, you’re never going to change it.”

“Look,” Yinghui said, staring at the news on the TV. Justin had been about to change the channel but now he paused, the remote control resting discreetly by his side. “Watching the news is like reading a novel — it’s pure fiction. Look at him, that fat-ass minister, behaving as if he really cares about the floods. That check he’s handing over is to buy votes, not pay for a new bridge.” She looked briefly at Justin, as if he were somehow implicated in it all. Floods, corruption, suffering: It was his fault. He changed the channel and found the football.

“Don’t know why you stress about these things, babe,” C.S. said. “It’s not as if any of this is new, is it? You grew up in this shit; you of all people can’t say you’re surprised by it.” The book he was reading had the words Western Aesthetics on the cover, but Justin could not make out the whole title.

Yinghui sighed again and turned on her side, scrunching up a cushion to make a pillow under her cheek as she gazed idly at the TV screen. “Yeah, I guess. It seems worse now, that’s all. People don’t give a damn anymore. All they do is make money, hang out, and watch sports.”

They spoke as if Justin weren’t there; they barely looked at him.

They traveled widely, in Europe as well as in Asia, each time coming back with a fund of stories, the dizzying wealth of which they would hint at by keeping silent. When asked what the newly unified Berlin was like, they would simply say, “Just … amazing,” without elaborating, leaving Justin taut with anticipation. Rome? “Has issues.” St. Petersburg? “Beautiful but … complicated.” Occasionally they wrote articles about their travels — Yinghui had a piece published in the New Straits Times which detailed her views (mainly negative) on the architecture of Gaudí and her general dislike of Barcelona; C.S. contributed an essay to The Star titled “Schopenhauer in a Bangkok Brothel,” which all their friends read but did not understand.

They had started going to India — voyages that swelled even further their already considerable air of mystique. They came back wearing interesting clothes made from colorful printed cotton, which they had bought in a village in Rajasthan and transformed into fantastic flowing kurtas in Delhi. C.S. carried a goatskin satchel given to him by a man they had helped with a punctured tire on the road to Jaipur; Yinghui had an amulet given to her by a local soothsayer. Everything had a story; nothing was ever just bought in a shop. Even their ailments seemed exotic, with names no one had heard of before — when, once, they came back twenty pounds lighter after a bad bout of food poisoning, they shrugged and said, “Oh, only a little Campylobacter jejuni .” On more than one occasion, Justin heard people ask them what India was like, whether it was poor and dirty, or else exotic and colorful, to which they merely sighed and shook their heads without deigning to reply. They also started doing yoga and sometimes made references to “when we meditate.” Every time Justin saw them, their faces glowed with the satisfaction of being perfectly and utterly together.

Whenever he was in Yinghui’s presence, Justin felt nervous and unintelligent, which frustrated him because, in the rest of his life, he was neither — he knew that much about himself. Conversation with her was difficult; his views and observations on life seemed not worth mentioning. If she asked him a question, she would fix him with a firm stare, holding his gaze as she awaited a response. Any thoughts that he might have formulated would begin to feel flimsy, and he would hesitate; but she would not fill in the silence the way more sociable people did, would not alleviate his awkwardness with giggly platitudes. Instead, she would merely wait, looking him patiently in the eye, until he managed to stammer out some banality. She said little by way of small talk — everything was aimed at acquiring information.

“What do you think of this latest scandal involving the Port Authorities? All that land being sold to government cronies at cut-rate prices?”

“Um, it’s really bad, I guess.”

“ Bad . Hmm. I see.”

He got used to being witness to the intellectual intimacy she and C.S. shared, a closeness so intense that it cut them off from the rest of the world, as if only they knew the words to the elaborate song they were singing; even if Justin managed to learn the words and the rhythms, they would always be ahead of him.

“Corruption is quite comforting, really,” C.S. once said as they drove down to the coast. “I mean, it suits us, suits the Asian temperament. Westerners aren’t comfortable with it, not just because they have stricter rules in place but because something in their nature prevents them from appreciating it. They’re more, hmm, how shall I say … rigid. Less malleable. Do you know what I mean? It’s got nothing to do with being more principled or honorable. It’s a question of, like, souplesse —blowing with the wind. I’m not saying it’s right, and I definitely don’t agree with it, but, let’s face it, it’s part of our nature.”

“Yeah, I guess I would go with that,” Yinghui added, reaching across and idly stroking C.S.’s hair. Justin could see them in the rearview mirror, their heads thrown back to catch the breeze fluttering through the half-open windows. “It’s like the Chinese and gambling. We can’t get rid of that character flaw. There’s a certain beauty in living that way — quite poetic, I think, to live with something that you despise and to know that it will destroy you, but at the same time recognizing that it’ll always be part of you. Don’t you think, Justin? Hello, anyone there?”