Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (40 page)

Yet, in spite of its dereliction, the New Cathay continued to screen films every day of the week, as if refusing to acknowledge the changes taking place around it. Audiences had dwindled, of course, and when Justin stopped by early one Friday evening to see for himself how dire the situation was, he found only one other person in the audience: an old Indian man, who had fallen asleep despite the pounding music of the Bollywood film that was showing. Justin stayed for fifteen minutes, watching the colorful images dance across the screen, before wandering back out into the street. Office workers dressed in smart gray slacks and white shirts were hurrying to dinner, high-spirited in anticipation of the weekend; teenagers in uniforms were rushing to catch their buses home after an afternoon of hanging around the shopping malls. No one showed any interest in the New Cathay.

It had not always been like this. Justin could still remember when, once a month, his parents would take C.S. and him to the New Cathay to see a film on a Sunday afternoon—that rarest of treats: a family outing. Even as recently as the late seventies, the New Cathay would show the newest films, despite the establishment of big modern cinemas elsewhere in town. Justin remembered watching
King Kong
and—could this be right?—
Star Wars
at the New Cathay, in addition to the numerous Chinese classics in the great tradition of the Shaw Brothers studios. But the films were immaterial. What he loved was sitting in the best seats—in the middle of the front row—his newspaper cone of steamed groundnuts in one hand, a bottle of Fanta in the other; his parents silently staring at the screen, as if they were young lovers; a sense of togetherness, away from the silent disputes; the old Indian
jaga
who would give him bags of rambutans from his
garden after the movie. Those evenings represented for Justin an illusion of stability, of ordinariness. It was not long, of course, before Justin was old enough to see these outings for what they were, a temporary relief from the unvoiced unhappiness that lay underneath, but still he would go along with the pretense; each time, he would gratefully accept the bag of rambutans, even though he didn’t especially like them, for they were part of this small ritual of normality.

His family had acquired the cinema in the late 1940s, when postwar fatigue had not yet been replaced with pre-independence fervor, when nerves were still raw and money scarce. There had been rumors that the New Cathay had been used for Japanese propaganda films and now no one wanted it. The owner had fled to Thailand during the war and did not want to come back, and the only person who had any money to buy the place was Justin’s grandfather, one of the few Chinese to have survived the war with his fortune intact, if not—this was always said in hushed tones—actually increased. Once bought, the cinema was smartened up, its fine masonry restored and repainted, the seats inside replaced with vinyl-covered ones from America. For a decade, maybe more, from the mid-fifties until just after Justin’s birth, it enjoyed a second heyday, with audiences streaming in nightly to watch Technicolor films in modern comfort. But by the time Justin was old enough to be taken on those family outings, the cinema was past its prime, and, throughout the eighties and into the nineties, the huge multiscreen cinemas in the giant shopping malls ensured the demise of the New Cathay.

“We can’t hang on to it just for sentimental reasons,” his father said one day at a family meeting convened to discuss it.

“Yeah, I agree,” said Sixth Uncle. “It hasn’t made a single
sen
since 1971. No kidding, not one bloody
sen
. We’ve been subsidizing it for too long. For what?”

“For the sake of heritage,” Justin said. “For tradition. It goes back a long way in our family.”

“Tradition my foot,” Sixth Uncle said. “Who gives a damn about history in this town?”

“All right, all right,” Justin’s father said. “Son, you are right; it is valuable in that regard. But we have to face the facts—the cinema is right in the middle of town. If you were to look at a map of KL and mark its epicenter,
it would be directly where the New Cathay is. It’s the most valuable real estate in the country.”

“So what? Do we need the money that badly? Who’s going to buy it, anyway?”

His father exchanged glances with Sixth Uncle, and their tiny interaction did not escape Justin. In his family’s unspoken/spoken way of communicating, he knew that something significant would soon follow.

“Consider this, son,” his father continued calmly. “No one might be interested in buying the cinema itself—there are modern cinemas everywhere now. But the land value is tremendous. The cinema can always be torn down.”

“But do we need the money that badly?” Justin repeated.

“It’s the last parcel of land in town that does not have a premium development on it. Sooner or later, it will happen. What if, say, the government makes a compulsory purchase order? They did that with our Pudu land just last month, remember? And we didn’t get the right price for it. It’s much better to act while we can still control the situation.”

“But, Father, this is one of the few remaining heritage buildings in KL. Surely the government can’t destroy it for another office block.”

Sixth Uncle snorted.

“And what about the people who have worked there for forty years? The old Indian
jaga
was still there the other day. It’s, like, his home.”

“For goodness’ sake,” Sixth Uncle said, “we’re not a damn charity.”

“But—” Justin began to say, and then he stopped, for he knew that the decision had been made.

“We thought that you should be in charge of the site. We have a couple of people interested in buying it, but we are thinking of developing it ourselves too. You need to … explore the options.”

Sixth Uncle looked at Justin as he remained slumped in his chair. “The boy isn’t up to it,” he said. “He doesn’t want to do it. Guess it’s too big a job for a kid.”

Justin’s father said, “He isn’t a child anymore; he’s twenty-six years old. It’s high time he assumes responsibility for important matters.”

“He’ll be okay,” Sixth Uncle replied.

And Justin thought: It was strange that people spoke about him in the third person, as if he did not exist.

What made the situation worse for Justin—what made him feel physically sick—was how he would explain his family’s plans to Yinghui. She had already started to work part-time for a charity set up by friends of theirs, Friends of Old KL, which campaigned to preserve the few remaining historic buildings in KL—the once-grand colonial mansions and the handsome Chinese shophouses that were being bulldozed to make way for the tower blocks that she described as “pathetic phalluses.” Justin had, on several occasions, been present when she and her conservation-minded friends had discussed their work. They’d called people of their parents’ generation “mindless vandals” who had happily deprived future generations of their rightful heritage: Prison would not be an overpunishment for such crimes. He had felt guilty by implication, as if he belonged to that older generation—part of an unfeeling establishment that kicked aside all that stood in their way.

“But there’s a question of practicality,” he had once ventured. “Old buildings aren’t practical. You can’t live in them easily; they’re hard to maintain.”

Yinghui had simply rolled her eyes and said, “You just don’t get it.”

But he
had gotten
it; he understood perfectly what the position was. For a week or two after the meeting with his father and Sixth Uncle, he avoided Yinghui, feeling as if she would see the guilt imprinted upon him, all those crimes against culture brewing within him. Whenever he came home after work and saw her lounging on the sofa with C.S., he did not stop, as he usually did, to share a Coke and a quick chat with them but headed straight upstairs instead. He decided he would not tell her; she would not know anything until it was too late, when a tower block was standing in place of the New Cathay. He would then vaguely lay the blame on his father, his family, the government—whomever. He would be no more to blame than the whole damn country.

He saw her and C.S. by chance one day at the Nasi Kandar place in Taman Tun. They had been looking at a small shop lot in the area, with a view to starting a business of some kind (she was actually going ahead with it, he thought, feeling slightly alarmed); he had just finished a round of golf with prospective business partners at the golf club nearby.

“Very busy these days?” Yinghui said as she sipped a cold rose syrup.

“Yes, kind of.”

“
Wah
, I’d like to have a job where playing golf counts as working.”

Justin shrugged.

“Or maybe you were paying homage at the family cemetery?” she continued. “Tell me, how difficult was it to keep hold of the cemetery when you sold the land to develop the golf course?”

“I don’t know. I was a teenager then; I wasn’t involved in any of that.”

“Must be hard selling off all that family land to big government companies. But I’m sure you guys didn’t do too badly out of it.”

Their food arrived. Justin had been hungry, but now he felt too hot and sweaty to eat it; he’d ordered too much, and he didn’t really feel like Nasi Kandar now.

“Explain to me how it works—how you deal with it, emotionally, I mean, when you sell off something that’s been in the family for generations. Is there, like, any sentimentality involved? Or do the billions you get from the sale compensate for the loss? When you go past a shopping mall with KFC and McDonald’s and all that, do you ever think, Wow, that was where my granddad started his first business? Or do you just think, I’d like a Big Mac?”

C.S. looked away, searching for a waiter. “Anyone want another soya bean drink?”

“I don’t know.” Justin shook his head. “I don’t run that side of the business.”

“Liar,” Yinghui said. Her face suddenly flushed; it was a very hot day, and she was sweating. “You are such a fucking two-faced snake. Sitting here in front of us and saying you don’t know anything about it. Hanging out with my friends and saying, Yeah, isn’t it terrible, all this mindless development going on around us, we don’t need it, it’s just to show the West that we are a rich, modern country, we should preserve our soul. And then you turn around and raze everything to the ground. You know what? Fuck you.”

“I have no idea why you are getting so worked up. Why are you suddenly attacking me? Calm down.”

“ ‘I have no idea why you are getting so worked up,’ ” Yinghui mimicked. “So you have no idea what’s going to happen to the New Cathay Movie Theatre? No plans to tear it down and sell the land to the highest bidder? Beautiful piece of land—prime location, isn’t it? Shame it happens to have the first Art Deco building in KL on it. Oh, well, too bad, just destroy it. You are such a ruthless bastard.”

“No one is supposed to know,” Justin said quietly, looking around them to see if anyone was listening. “How did you find out?”

“Luckily not every member of your family is as heartless as you.” As she said this, she reached across and held C.S.’s forearm; her hand rested on his skin, her grip light but firm. With his free arm, C.S. continued to eat, looking intently at his food without meeting Justin’s gaze. “Justin,” Yinghui continued, “you can’t let this happen. Don’t you have any sense of responsibility at all? To your friends? To your history? To … us?”

“But my father … my family—that’s what they want. You know it’s my duty. They need me.”

Yinghui paused for a moment. Her gaze rose slightly toward the ceiling, as if contemplating the infinite replies floating in the ether. She said calmly, “When will you ever be your own man, with your own life?”

As she and C.S. left the restaurant, their food unfinished, neither of them looked at Justin. He stared down at his barely eaten plate of food. Two flies had landed on the piece of sambal chicken next to the pile of rice; they lay unmoving, clinging to the piece of meat and blending in with the bits of charred skin. Yinghui’s words remained in his head, her question seeming increasingly rhetorical the longer he contemplated it.
When will you ever be your own man, with your own life? When will you be free?
He tried to eat but had lost all appetite. He asked for the food to be packed up in a takeaway bag, but as he walked to his car he thought of the curry seeping into the rice, making it mushy and unpleasant. It would quickly turn rancid in the heat, he thought, so, without thinking, he flung it into the monsoon drain before driving away.

T
he following scene takes place outside the Bottega Veneta store at the Golden Eagle shopping mall on Shanxi Bei Lu. I shall describe the situation and leave it up to you to decide how best to resolve it—a small test to see how much you have learned and observed thus far:

Two people, a man and a woman, have just met up for the evening and are idly wandering around the shops, killing time before going to dinner. From a distance, they look typical of a sort of couple that you see quite frequently in certain moneyed venues in Shanghai. He is older than she and obviously wealthy, dressed in a golf shirt, comfortable slacks, and leather loafers with tassels on the front, possibly a foreigner; she is in her twenties, slender, giggly. Sometimes she appears to behave much younger than her age, almost like a teenager; other times she seems harsh. Her eyes can look either watery and soft or firm and cold, like an old auntie who has been through a lot.