Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (30 page)

Phoebe listened to their stories. She listened and thought, I am not going to go home. She could not go home, not yet, maybe never. She did not even know where she would go back to. She thought of her mother,
living alone in that small town in the north of Malaysia, a town that was shrinking, becoming less and less alive as each year passed. It was the opposite of the villages of China that these girls spoke of, which grew and grew with the money they earned in the big cities on the coast, the fields of rice and wheat slowly turning into industrial parks and high-tech factories, the villages becoming towns, the towns cities, because the girls who left would, one day, go back and get married, as certain as the seasons passed. No, the town where Phoebe had grown up was smaller now than it had ever been, and soon it would be dead. Her mother had never moved, and soon she, too, would be gone. Phoebe had left; she had gone out. But she could not go back.

She stayed late at the spa, past midnight, after everyone had left, and used the fast new computers to upload the best photos of herself on her Internet profiles. She joined every dating site she could find, concentrating on upscale ones that charged a fee for joining. She changed her age from twenty-four to twenty-two and made sure she responded only to men of quality who offered her excellent long-term prospects. Some nights she slept only four or five hours, because she chatted late into the night. It didn’t matter; she was young and didn’t need sleep.

In her “Journal of My Secret Self,” she wrote:
Phoebe Chen Aiping, every second of the day offers a beautiful opportunity to achieve success. Therefore, you have 86,400 chances to change your life every day
.

H
E HAD BEEN EXPECTING HIS OFFICES TO BE DARK WHEN HE ARRIVED
, certain of an atmosphere of mourning or at least mild depression at his prolonged absence. But instead Justin found it quietly busy, filled with the sounds of clacking keyboards and the soft rhythmic
ke-chunk
of the photocopier. Even his own office was lit—as soon as he stepped out of the lift, he could see the conical Alessi light shades glowing brightly against the mahogany-lined walls.

The office manager was sitting in his chair when Justin walked into the room; the man was on the phone, using one of Justin’s fountain pens to scribble notes on a pad in front of him. He signed off quickly when he saw Justin. “Hello, boss,” he said, putting the phone down; he did not stand up. “What are you doing here? Your family said you were … ill.”

“I’m all right now.”

“Yes,” the office manager said, “you look … just the same.”

Justin looked around the room and noticed that all his files had been rearranged; the leather-bound directories and coffee-table books of chic hotels had been cleared away, as had the framed photographs of his family and himself. They had been replaced with brightly colored plastic trays bearing stacks of paper that were too large for the custom-made hardwood shelves. There were piles of cardboard boxes in the corner of the room, as if excess stock from a small warehouse had spilled over into his
office, and everywhere he looked he saw plastic jars filled with tea, the olive-colored leaves sitting at the bottom. There was nothing of Justin’s left on the desk, except the penholder that had been emptied of its contents and a paperweight he had been given at the launch of an Italian fashion label on his arrival in Shanghai. His desk diary was gone, as was the miniature sandstone carving of a dancing Hindu celestial his brother had bought him from the Met museum shop some years before.

“The thing is,” the office manager said, “we didn’t think you were going to come back. Your brother said you were no longer in charge of affairs, and we were to await further instructions, but then he never gave us any. We waited and waited. Meanwhile, people here were getting restless, and the landlord wanted to renegotiate the lease and increase the rent. I read on the Internet about your family’s troubles in Singapore—you know, about the collapse of the stock market. So I had no choice.”

A young woman came into the office. She was dressed in shin-length acid-washed jeans and a silvery T-shirt that said
SMILE
in English. “Boss Wu, the bottled-water distributor is here for your meeting.”

“Who’s that girl?” Justin said once she’d left the room. “And why are we now selling bottled water? We are a property-investment firm.”

“She’s a new girl I hired. Jenny left because we were slow paying her salary. Anyway, she was too expensive. Shanghainese nowadays earn so much money. That girl is from Hubei—she’s a friend of my sister’s from back home. You won’t believe how much I save on her salary! As I said, I thought your business was finished, so I let the landlord terminate the lease. But we still had three months here before we got kicked out, so I thought I should change the direction of the business to try to make some money.”

“Change the direction,” Justin repeated blankly. He noticed that the cartons stacked around his office were marked
ALL-NATURAL BABY FOOD
.

“Yes, I’m now trading in domestic consumables—business is great! Excuse me, but I have a meeting now. Is there anything I can do for you?” He stood up and gathered a few pieces of paper and a hardcover book that resembled an old-fashioned ledger.

Justin shook his head. Outside, the skyscrapers of Pudong were clad in a cobalt-blue glass that reflected the sky, warping the shapes of the clouds so that they looked like streaks of oil on tarmac, brilliant and purple; when
they shifted in the wind, the sun burst through, blinding Justin for an instant.

“Your personal items are in that box over there, I think. No, that one over there. The girls cleared everything away before they left. Okay, I’ve got to go now. Goodbye.”

A translucent blue plastic crate sat on the leather sofa, surrounded by samples of health-food supplements with bizarre names that Justin had never heard of—cat’s claw, dong quai, fo-ti, horny goat weed. He lifted the lid on the crate and looked at its contents—his desk diary and three silver-framed photographs lay inside, together with his personal organizer and the two mobile phones he used when in Malaysia and Hong Kong: the sum total of his life, barely able to fill a single packing crate. Another person might have had a painting or two, or colorful crayon drawings by their children, he thought, or else postcards sent by friends from sunny places, maybe a flag from their hometown or souvenirs of travel to foreign countries. He looked at his possessions: hard-edged, cold, functional; black and silver, plastic and metal. Even the photographs of his family were posed studio images. He looked at them for a while, wondering if he should take them. Eventually he slipped them into his briefcase, leaving everything else behind.

Back at his apartment, he ran through his contacts list, briefly considering each name—how well he knew the person, whether he could ring them after so long, how awkward it would be. He felt a sense of urgency as he scrolled down each page, a feeling he could almost describe as strength, which he had not felt for many months. But as he worked through the list of names, the sense of fortitude began to turn to panic, and he realized that it was not in fact strength but desperation that drove his actions. Each time his eyes alighted upon a name that seemed hopeful, there was always a reason not to ring that person—an unbridgeable distance. The truth was, he now knew, he had no friends.

He found one business contact, someone who had never been a proper friend but whom he had known since school days, a fellow Malaysian who owned a number of factories in Wenzhou that made the tiny clips on bra straps—60 percent of the world’s supply of bra-strap clips, he had once claimed; local businessmen admiringly called him “Bra Button King.” Justin had lent him 1,000
ringgit
when they were both nineteen years old,
when he was starting his first business buying and selling used office furniture.

“
Justin
. Hey, man. I didn’t know you were still in Shanghai. I thought, all that stuff going on at home, surely you’d be back in KL. Must be tough there, huh? Ei, sorry, man, I’m quite busy at the moment. Can I call you back? Still the same number, right? Let’s have lunch soon, ya? Of course, I promise. Call you soon.”

He rang two or three other people, but it was the same every time: They’d heard the news, were sorry to hear about his family, and, yes, they’d of course love to meet up but things were so busy in China these days, you know what things are like, just nonstop. They promised to call, but their voices were full of a fake cheeriness that signaled to him that they would not, of course, call back. He had done the same so many times in the past; he never thought he’d be on the receiving end of it.

This was what life was like in China, he thought: Stand still for a moment and the river of life rushes past you. He had spent three months confined to his apartment, and in that time Shanghai seemed to have changed completely, the points of reference in his world permanently rearranged and repositioned in ways he could not recognize. Just as he had lost his car and driver, he was also navigating his way through life without a map—as if the GPS in his brain had been disconnected, leaving him floundering. Everyone in this city was living life at a hundred miles an hour, speeding ever forward; he had fallen behind, out of step with the rest of Shanghai.

He was arriving at the end of the Rolodex, the cards flipping over hopelessly toward the “X, Y, Z”s without a sign of anyone who might help him. He was speeding through the “Y”s when he stopped, reaching for the card printed with a feminine, scrolling typeface:
Leong Yinghui
. It was not filed under her surname, but he knew that it had not been an error; he had done so by pure instinct, for he could not think of her in any other way than simply
Yinghui
. It was familiarity and habit that misplaced the card, not carelessness.

He thought he had lost her card, and maybe a part of him had even wanted to do so, uncertain and possibly afraid of what a reunion with her would involve. Throughout his winter solitude, when his thoughts had been blank and his body numb, he sometimes wondered what he had done with her card. Images of her came to mind, but even the prospect of getting
in touch with her again was not enough to get him out of bed to search for it. All the yearning and regret that might once have stirred him into action was now gone; he couldn’t feel anything for her. That was when he had known that he was really ill, that it was not some passing cold-weather virus but something darker, something he would not be able to shake off easily.

He had met her in what he now recognizes as the first stages of his breakdown, when he was already in a state of permanent distraction, his mind always cloudy, his vision and thoughts unfocused. He had been dragged to an event by Zhou X., the actress whom he had met at the charity auction at the start of his time in Shanghai. “I need someone to accompany me to an awards ceremony tomorrow evening,” she had said brightly on the phone. “Some female-business-award thing. No one wants to go with me; everyone says it’s too boring! I don’t want to go either, but my agent says it’ll make me appear serious and hardworking.
Please
come.”

On the way to the event, Zhou X. spoke constantly; she had recently returned from Europe, where she had been filming in Berlin and Paris and sound-editing in London. She had opinions on everything: European food is awful, meat, meat, meat, always in huge burned lumps, often not even cooked. She went to a Chinese restaurant in Paris; the rice was like little plastic pellets. German people are fat. Dutch people are tall. French people are elegant but rude. English people dress very messily. London is dirty but they have nice parks. The hotels are old. People are lazy and always on strike. But she bought a nice handbag in Paris—limited edition, not available in China. Europe is good for luxury items, not so good for life.

As soon as they arrived at the ballroom of the five-star hotel, she drifted away from him, shepherded by her manager toward the crowd of photographers hovering by the entrance. She beckoned Justin over for a few photographs, hanging on to his arm while she posed for the cameras. He stood rigidly, trying not to blink before the brilliance of the flashbulbs. He felt like a tourist monument—a statue beside which she was striking amusing poses, the photos soon to be posted on her Facebook page or sent home to friends and family. Before long, thankfully, she began to drift away again, seeking brighter, more-useful people than Justin.

Left alone, Justin wandered among the tables, looking at decorations and place names. The chatter in the ballroom, the glittering smiles, the
crowds milling aimlessly, the camera flashes, the banners, the music—all this made him feel anxious and claustrophobic, and he withdrew toward the edge of the room. Memories of teenage awkwardness came back to him with startling clarity—endless parties at which he had spoken to no one and merely lurked in the shadows on his own, much as he was doing now.

He found a brochure on a table and pretended to read it, so that his isolation would appear less noticeable. It was about foreign companies in Shanghai and was full of phrases such as “deepening ties” and “bridgebuilding.” He walked around the room as he read, looking at the nominees for the evening’s awards—young women with battle-hardened faces, their eyes already bearing the scars of disillusionment and disappointment. They were only in their thirties, some of them even younger, but already they had a world-weariness that he recognized only too well, a hardened edge that announced that life could no longer surprise them, that the only route to happiness lay in the accumulation of more—of more and more and more.