Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (11 page)

But she knew, as one always does in these situations, that he would not call her.

As she sat in bed that night, she allowed herself one minute to remember how Justin C. K. Lim and the rest of his family had looked all those years ago, how they had behaved.

Just one minute, and then she would put them out of her mind.

She checked her BlackBerry, replying to the emails that had come in earlier that day—all the fascinating projects she was going to begin in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

W
hen I was thirteen, I was sent away to live with relatives in the far south of Malaysia, at the opposite end of the country from where I had been born. Do not be alarmed—this sort of displacement is quite normal among underprivileged rural families. My mother had died a few years earlier, and my father, unable to care for me properly, decided to ask my great-aunt to take me in. He had to move away from our village to seek work in Kota Bharu, where he lived in one room above a tire-repair shop. It made sense for him to be free of me.

My great-aunt lived and worked on a small pineapple farm about thirty miles north of Singapore. The peaty soil of the region was famous for producing the best pineapples in the country, but ours were an exception to the rule, being meager in size and acidic in taste. Nothing I did seemed to improve them—not the addition of buffalo manure or even the chemical fertilizers I found on a lorry parked by the road one day (there was no one about and far too much fertilizer for any one person to use, so I helped myself). Even at that age I found the lack of a satisfactory solution very frustrating. Why couldn’t I make those pineapples big and sweet? I worked on the farm every day after school—it was my way of earning my keep and it kept me out of mischief, said my great-aunt. I do not have fond memories of this period, because it involved failure: the only failure I have encountered in my life thus far. To this day, even a brief encounter with hard unripe pineapple (of the kind one routinely encounters on airplanes) is enough to send me into quite a rage.

Life in the south was not a thing of beauty. It lacked the soul of the north, the wilderness, the poetry. It is surprising how one’s childhood days can be troubled by the finer concerns of the spirit, filled as they are with the anxieties of youth. I was picked on at school, teased for my accent, which I was never fully able to lose—the unconscious warping of “a”s to “e”s or “o”s, the dropping of the ends of words, the addition of unfamiliar emphatic words. My speech marked me as foreign and, unsurprisingly, I became known as a quiet boy who said very little. I spent much time lurking in the background, so to speak, watching from the sidelines and never thrusting myself into the spotlight. By remaining in the shadows, I learned to observe the workings of the human spirit—what people want and how they get it. Everything that I was to achieve later in life can be traced back to this period, when I began my apprenticeship in the art of survival.

All that earnest study of the cut and thrust of life meant that I did not have time to miss home at first. I did not suffer from any longing for my homeland in the north, with its strange, warm dialect and melancholy coastline scarred with brackish streams that ebbed and flowed with the tide. It is only now, when I have the luxury of time and rich personal accomplishment, that I can sit back and appreciate a certain sentiment for the village in which I grew up. This does not, however, mean that I am someone prone to nostalgia. I am certainly not encumbered by the past.

Like most people in our position, we lived an industrious but precarious existence. My great-aunt had worked part-time in a factory on the outskirts of Johor Baru that produced VHS players for export, but, being in her fifties, she was soon laid off and had no work other than to tend to our farm and we were therefore forced to be inventive in the way we made our living. Nowadays I hear liberal, educated people refer sympathetically to such ways of life as “hard,” or even “desperate,” but I prefer to think of it as
creative
. I had just turned thirteen and thought that if we had more money I would be able to return home.

I began to sell pineapples on a disused wooden stand by the side of the road that led to the coast, hoping to ensnare day-trippers from Singapore on their way to Desaru. Knowing that our pineapples were sour, I sold them cheaply, and in the first few weeks I managed to make a little money. But even this began to trickle away as people realized the low quality of my wares. So one day I bought a supersweet pineapple in the market and cut it up in pieces, offering it as proof of my own fruit’s tenderness. A number of
people fell for it, and only one couple complained on their way back from the coast. I feigned innocence—I couldn’t guarantee that every pineapple would be sweet. They showed me a pineapple cut in half, and I recognized its dry pale flesh as one of mine. They insisted I give them five pineapples for free, and when I refused, the woman called me names and her companion ended up hurling the pineapple at my head. I ducked, but it caught me on my ear, making my ear swell like a mushroom. Soon afterward, I abandoned the stall and got a job waiting tables at a local coffee shop.

I did not see my father for nearly four years. I received news from him occasionally, when a letter would arrive via my great-aunt. He would talk about the Kelantan River bursting its banks in the monsoon season, the kiteflying contests that year, the secondhand scooter he had bought, things he had eaten in the market—uninteresting news of daily life. Once he told me he had bought me a large spinning top, which awaited my return, but when I finally went home there was no further mention of it.

There was never any news of jobs or money—the very reason we had to move away from home. There was no indication of how he was planning our future, no sense that he was aware of the passage of time. I had never been aware of this myself, but now, hundreds of miles from home, I could almost hear the seconds of an invisible clock ticking away in my head. I had gone to live with my great-aunt thinking that it was a temporary event and that I would soon be back home—just until my father “got settled.” That is what he told me. After a year I realized that my residence in the dull flatlands of the south was not going to be as fleeting as I had hoped. One learns quickly at that age. Like all children, I had never before appreciated what
time
meant—the years stretched infinitely beyond me, waiting, impossibly, to be filled. But all of a sudden I began to feel the urgency of each day. I counted them down, saddened by how much I could have been doing with every sunrise and sunset, if only I had been at home.

I waited for my father to think of a plan that would reunite us in our village, but, incapable of understanding that time was not on his side, he left me waiting.

You must appreciate that time is always against you. It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. Therefore, if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you.

Four years. They passed so quickly.

T
HE FIRST RULE OF SUCCESS IS, YOU MUST LOOK BEAUTIFUL. NO ONE
had taught Phoebe this secret, but she could tell by simple observation that successful people always looked good. Just by looking at the women hurrying along Henan Lu, running for buses or reading their magazines in the metro at rush hour, she could spot the few who were on life’s upward curve. At first she did not really think about the connection between appearance and achievement; she could not even imagine such a link. But then she kept noticing more and more women who looked immaculate in their dress, and, what’s more, she noticed that they often carried bags that looked as though they contained serious life items instead of beauty accessories. Often, these impressive-looking women would take out papers or a book from their sleek bags and read them in the bus with an air of purpose, and even if they were reading mere novels, Phoebe could see that they were absorbing the contents of the words the way high-achieving people do, all the time working, working, in a way that was steely yet elegant. It reminded her of a girl at school who always came first in class, the way that girl read books with a determination that no one else had. All the teachers said she would go on to great things, and, sure enough, she got a job as a quantity surveyor in Kuantan. Gradually, Phoebe realized that the reason these women looked so beautiful was that they had good positions in life; she could not deny that the two things
were inseparable. Which one came first, beauty or success, she did not know.

She started taking notes on the type of clothes they wore, how they styled their hair, even the way they walked. When she compared this to her own way of dressing and behaving, it became clear why she had not yet been able to find a decent job in Shanghai. No one would look at her and think, That woman is going to astound the world with her abilities, we should give her a job. No, she was not someone you would even look at twice on the bus, never mind give a job to.

She knew she was not a mediocre person, but she looked like one to the outside world. This was not her fault, she thought; it was also because of where she lived. Every day she was surrounded by mediocre people who dragged her down into their sea of mediocrity. She had found a room in an apartment block not far from the river, which she had thought would be beautiful and prestigious. A girl she had worked with in a mobile-phone-keypad factory in Guangzhou had a childhood friend who had gone to work in Shanghai, and she had a good job working in an office. The girl’s apartment was just one room, but it had a small washroom and a space to prepare simple meals. The girl’s name was Yanyan, and in her text message she said that Phoebe could stay there for free until she got a job—surely it wouldn’t be long before Phoebe found a good position. When Phoebe looked at the address, she saw that it was close to the center of town, a nice area near some famous attractions that foreign visitors loved, and by the banks of the river about which people wrote love songs. The room was on the tenth floor, so she imagined magnificent views of this great metropolis that would inspire her with the spirit of high achievement. Every day she would wake up and breathe the intoxicating air of excellence.

But when she came out of the subway station, she found herself in a low-class shopping center full of small shops that sold everything in bulk—clothes, mushrooms, teapots, pink plastic hair clips, fake sneakers. She stood for a minute trying to work out the right direction. In front of her was a row of shops with makeshift beds outside them—there were people stretched out on each one, everyone getting a tattoo. She walked past them, looking at the huge rose being tattooed on a man’s arm, its petals reaching around his biceps; an eagle on the nape of someone else’s neck; a manga kitten on a young woman’s ankle. As Phoebe crossed the
road toward the apartment block, the pavement was black with grease from the dozens of stalls selling skewers of grilled meat and squid. It was hard to walk properly because of all the discarded skewer sticks, which made her feel unstable in her heels.

In the entrance hall there was a small wooden booth where two watchmen sat, drinking tea from their plastic flasks. They did not even look up when Phoebe walked in; they did not care who came into the building. The floor was pale, with a covering of dust, and streaked with black marks that Phoebe could not identify. On the walls there were patches of cement where the crumbling brickwork had fallen away and been hastily filled in. The wooden notice boards and the metal pigeonhole letter boxes were old and had not been changed for at least fifty years—their green paint looked almost black. The place was dirtier than some of the factory hostels she had lived in. As she waited for the lift to take her up to her new life, she felt the heavy weight of dread descend upon her shoulders. There were hundreds and hundreds of apartments in the building and only one lift, and as she waited, a crowd began to gather around her, everyone starting to push forward. These people were not the sort of neighbors she had imagined. She had envisaged herself surrounded by the kind of women she saw on TV, well-dressed modern Shanghainese, but instead she found a crowd of old-age pensioners dressed in revolutionary clothes, stern padded jackets, and shapeless trousers that matched their expressionless faces, which seemed to have crumpled inward. No light shone from their eyes, no feeling sprang from their gazes, and when Phoebe looked at them she felt a shiver of fear run down her neck: It was like looking at an abandoned house where everything had been kept as it was in the past, the clocks ticking, the furniture clean and shiny, the plants watered, only no one lived there; they had long since gone away. Even the younger people seemed old and worn down by unknown cares, their clothes as uninspired as their faces.