Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (27 page)

As they chatted about the project they were embarking upon, Yinghui felt parts of her brain, for so long dormant, begin to reignite. It was strange, hearing words and expressions that she had not used for more than a decade trip off her tongue easily: “imaginative space”; “mimetic desire”; “empirical needs of architecture.” But soon they began to drift onto other topics—musings on cities they had visited, nostalgic recollections of past holidays, tiny incidents that remained etched in their memories. They discovered a shared liking for all that was offbeat—places, people, books, and music that others considered bizarre; they admired simplicity and spurned the flamboyant; they prized the unexpected, everything that was unannounced and discreet, and couldn’t care less for the kinds of things that other people thought of as majestic. She laughed out loud in agreement when he expressed a hatred for Gaudí’s Barcelona—too obvious, too obviously weird; he couldn’t stand it that people who liked Gaudí thought of themselves as “offbeat.”

“I totally,
totally
agree!” She laughed. “You know, I never thought I’d meet anyone else who hated it as much as I do.”

They went for a walk along the banks of West Lake, tracing its shoreline without bothering to plan an itinerary. It seemed immaterial where they were headed or where they might end up. They continued to talk about shared experiences and, as they progressed, shared desires: places they’d like to visit, things they’d like to achieve. None of these was related to money or career advancement.

“Hey,” she said, giggling as they stood at the top of an arcing stone bridge. “Shouldn’t we be talking about work?”

It had begun to drizzle—the faintest of droplets filling the air, barely more than a mist. Along the water’s edge, the branches of the willow trees drooped and touched the surface of the lake.

“This is work,” he said. “Sort of.”

She looked at him as he leaned with his elbows on the stone parapet. He was smiling, but a faint frown had settled on his brow and his gaze was distant. She wondered if something she had said had made him recall a past event—a moving or maybe even troubling chapter in his life. They had spoken so much about themselves, so suddenly, that they had not bothered to filter anything they’d said. She felt guilty at having interrupted their flowing conversation with a suggestion as crass as
work
. What had she become? On a pretty spot in one of the most scenic places in Eastern China, with a man who might be interested in her, all she could do was to think of work.

A group of tourists walked past, chattering noisily in a southern dialect Yinghui could not understand; they carried yellow umbrellas emblazoned with the name of a travel agency in red letters. The violent splash of color cut through the muted gray-green hues of the lakeside landscape, and even when they had crossed another bridge and reached the far bank, Yinghui could still spot them in the mist-shrouded distance.

“It’s good that we’ve had this opportunity to talk, find out about each other,” Walter said, as they began to walk vaguely in the direction of the hotel. “You’re going to be a key person in this deal, the one coordinating day-to-day matters. It’s such a sensitive job that I think it’s important that we get to know each other well—especially since we will be working so closely together.”

Yinghui nodded in agreement. “Absolutely. But there is one thing I need to discuss with you before we go any further.”

“Oh, dear, this sounds ominous. Are you going to pull out?”

Yinghui did not look at him at they continued walking along a snaking path that led them under some elm trees. “The capital that I’d have to put into the joint-venture company—well, you know that I don’t have such funds readily available. I’d need a bank loan to make that happen. Several bank loans, in fact. Several very big ones.”

“I thought that might be the case,” Walter said calmly, his voice carrying a hint of a question, as if mildly surprised by her statement.

“And I don’t know if I’ll be able to get those loans. I’ll be honest with
you: I just don’t have enough capital otherwise. Even if I sold everything I owned, it wouldn’t be enough to cover the amount I’d need to put in. So you see, getting those loans is sort of, well, essential if I’m to go ahead.”

They stood shaded from the drizzle for a few moments by the canopy of leaves. The paths that wound their way through the parks by the lakeside were empty now; people were in the teahouses and restaurants, sheltering from the rain.

“You’ve been worrying about this, haven’t you?” Walter said, turning to face her. “You shouldn’t. You’ll get those loans—easily, I’d say. Look at your recent track record; you’re someone so clearly on the up. That’s why I chose you out of all the people I could have chosen in Shanghai. Banks will be falling over themselves to lend you money. This is China. They know that people like you can make things happen.”

Yinghui nodded.

“You’re so daring and original in your thinking that I’m almost tempted to say, You know what? Forget the capital; you don’t need to put in any money, just come and work with me. But I don’t think you’d feel right about that—I don’t think it would be right for you to be a mere employee drawing a salary. I want this to be your project too. You need to feel as if you
own
it, right from the outset. I want you to be my partner. People like you are rare—trust me, I know.”

“So you think there’ll be no problem with getting the loans?”

He smiled and touched her on her forearm. “Remember what we spoke about at our first dinner. Business is about respect. And banks loans—they’re simply the modern world’s way of showing how much it values you. They’re like credit notes in respect. You
deserve
respect—it’s yours. You’ll get everything you want.”

“And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t, we will both shrug our shoulders and walk away from each other. Before long I’ll find another person to replace you. Maybe that new relationship will turn out to be as smooth as ours seems to be, maybe it won’t. You’ll move on too and find success and respect elsewhere.” He paused and looked at her briefly. “That’s the life of businesspeople like us. I will regret never having really known you, but that’s just how it is—you miss opportunities, you have to live with regret.”

The drizzle was turning to rain, falling heavily on the leaves overhead. Yinghui thought for a second that Walter might kiss her, but he did not.
He merely looked up at the trees, his palms turned upward to gauge the rain. They walked to the road and hailed a taxi back to their hotel. Once in her room, she ran a very hot bath and lay in the vast cedarwood tub, looking out the window across the rain-washed landscape, thinking about what Walter had said—about regret. She did not want to live with regret; she would never do so. An image of Walter sitting at a table discussing business plans with another woman—someone sleek and well groomed, who didn’t suffer from
style issues
—flashed into her mind; the clarity of that possibility made her feel anxious and slightly panicked.

She closed her eyes and thought: She had to get those loans. All the respect that was due to her, accumulating over the years—she was going to cash it in, very shortly now.

M
y father had a friend in the land-registry office, someone he’d known in primary school. He’d been to see this friend who, at the time, was a lowly clerk, but his humble administrative post gave him valuable information: He knew which parcels of land were being sold on the cheap, which areas were going to be redeveloped, which houses were soon to be auctioned. (As an aside, I noticed this man’s name in the newspapers just after the financial crisis in 1997—he’d been sentenced to a length of time in prison after having embezzled twenty million
ringgit
from state funds. The poor idiot: He’d allowed himself to get caught. For this reason, I will have to change his name and call him “Nik K.”)

If my father’s ever-growing fantasies of quick riches were turning into addiction, Nik K. was his drug dealer. He told my father about the Tokyo Hotel and the small piece of land that accompanied it: nothing to look at now, he said, overgrown and marshy as it was, but all my father had to do was cut down the trees and drain the earth—a simple procedure—and lay a mixture of concrete and hardcore on top of it; then it would be ready to be finished with tarmac, which would create a fine parking lot for the hotel. The building was, frankly, in a bad state, but imagine what might be achieved with a bit of investment: A solid three-story building with a parking lot was virtually impossible to find at this price these days, and, what’s more, Nik K. had heard
from friends of his in other government departments that more offshore oil fields had been discovered and would be operational in only a few years’ time. When that happened, just think of the number of people coming up to work in all the support industries, all the seasonal workers from KL and beyond. Nik K. himself had bought a few run-down buildings in the area, for next to nothing—including the Tokyo Hotel, which he would let my father have for the same price he had paid.

They all had to think big and think ahead, said Nik K.; that was the future of this small town.

My father had virtually no money, but, fired up by the prospect of turning handsome profits in no time at all, he set about finding a lump sum with which to pay Nik K. He wrote to his distant relatives in Machang and Kuala Krai and cousins of cousins in Gua Musang and Kuantan—people he had never met but had heard of through the intricate spiderweb network of rural Chinese families. The note he sent was a cross between a begging letter and a financial prospectus, appealing to both their sense of pity and their greed. He got on his scooter and made long trips south to visit them in their villages to explain that the only way out of his predicament was to make a fortune; the only way he could be saved from ruin was to turn everyone into rich men. Double or quits; the only way was up.

Before long, he had enough money to pay Nik K. for the Tokyo Hotel, and the deeds were transferred into his name. But immediately there was a further problem: He needed money for the renovation works. He drew up a list of basic repairs: replacing a section of the roof; securing the windows; replacing the wiring; restoring the water and electricity supplies; clearing the tangled mess of shrubs and trees from the small plot of land at the back. The amount of money needed for these works was nearly double what he had paid for the building. His despair did not last long, for Nik K. again came to the rescue: He had contacts in the property world, people who owed him favors because he’d given them valuable tips on where to buy and sell pieces of land. He could arrange a loan for my father, he said, no questions asked—the sum of money my father needed was peanuts for these people. And so my father entered into a speedy, seamless arrangement with a Chinese merchant on 17 percent interest. I remember the figure well because it seemed a strange number, stranded between 15 and 20, as if someone had made an unreasoned compromise. To my father, this figure would have meant very little. His lenders could have asked him for 0.1 percent or 98 percent, and he would
have cheerily agreed. When he was in one of these moods, riding on a high of optimism and desire, he would have said yes to anything. The number was also memorable to me because, as it happened, I was about to turn seventeen—an event of which my father was blissfully ignorant.

He began work on the Tokyo Hotel not long before I arrived back from Johor, but even by the time I returned to Kota Bharu, it was clear that the renovation works had run into problems. He had started to clear the scrubby forest from the quarter-acre plot of land behind the hotel, but, alone and equipped only with a
parang
and an ax, he was easily defeated by the dense vegetation. At the end of a long day, the huge pile of branches and tree stumps he had cut seemed to make little difference to the immensity of unyielding foliage that remained. Without a bulldozer or a team of men with chain saws, he could not overcome the jungle. So he turned his attention to restoring the electricity and plumbing in the hotel. He’d always been good at this sort of thing, having worked as a handyman at various building sites in the past (he said). He began digging channels in the floors for the laying of new wires and pipes, knocking down some walls and scraping the plasterwork off others—better to make a mess at the start, he had said in a letter to me, just before I abandoned my technical studies to join him. Although I had completed only one year of my electrician’s course, I had already learned enough to know that he had no clue what to do.

Fortunately, his shoddy wiring was never allowed to progress to a point where it might endanger his life and that of others. Alerted by news of building work at the Tokyo Hotel, two officials from the town council arrived at the site to find out what was going on. They found my father stripped to the waist, surrounded by piles of broken masonry and half-mixed mortar and coils of electric cable. “I’m going to start running a hotel,” he blithely informed them. “As soon as I get the works finished.”