Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (36 page)

He never mentioned the words “saving face,” but I knew, for him, the birds’ nests had become an exercise in avoiding shame. None of the people who had lent him money were rich; they were village folk, just like him, scraping by with little to spare. There was no turning back for him.

T
HE WEEK BEGAN WELL FOR PHOEBE, JUST AS THE ASTROLOGER SAID
it would. It had cost Phoebe 400
yuan
to have a full assessment of her prospects, including detailed advice on how to maximize the chances of meeting a suitable partner and gaining a promotion at work. At the time, Phoebe thought it was a scandal to pay so much money, but now she could see it was worth every
mao
.

On Monday morning, she received an email from Boss Leong informing her that, in recognition of her excellent performance, she was being promoted to the position of manager of the spa. Boss Leong was opening another two branches of the beauty spa elsewhere in the city and needed someone reliable to look after the original establishment. Phoebe was the first person who came to mind. Her salary would increase nearly threefold and she would be required to wear a smart suit or at least a jacket, replacing the Chinese silk dress she wore as a receptionist.

Two days later, while she was still floating on a tidal wave of happiness, she received an email from a dating site she belonged to, from a man who proposed a dinner date with no obligations to take things further if they did not like each other. It was a proper matchmaking website for professional people, expensive to join, so she was naturally more optimistic when men sent her messages on this site. Of course, she had long since
learned that the appearance of classiness in Shanghai was no guarantee of truthfulness, and she treated all approaches from men with the same caution as she would when shopping for counterfeit luxury goods. China was full of copycat products and people. She was now experienced enough to tell from one simple message whether a man was serious or not, whether he was just looking for sex, whether he was a married man in search of a mistress, or if he was indeed in need of a future wife. She could tell if a man was lying about who he was, about his job and income, where he was from. She could tell if he was from Beijing or if he was a Pakistani pretending to be from Beijing. All those scam marriage proposals from Indian, Nigerian, and Arab men—she was aware of them all; she did not even know what they wanted from her, but she made sure she stayed clear of them. She had become an expert in the courtship rituals of the Internet; no one could trick her with flowery words or insincere promises. To Phoebe, Internet dating had become like a book written in a language that she had mastered, just as she had conquered the rocky path to employment in Shanghai.

She had struck up several online relationships with men—two in Shanghai and one in Beijing—but she knew that none of them would lead to anything serious. All of them were hiding something; she could sense that they were not telling the full truth. She laughed and shared her life with them, sometimes even opening up her troubled heart and allowing her frustrations to spill out onto the computer screen, but she continued to hold back her deepest thoughts, disguising her true identity just as she disguised herself at work. These men would see only what she wanted them to see; they would never know the real Phoebe Chen Aiping. She could see that they were not serious, and so, in keeping with the wise advice gained from her books, she, too, kept her distance.
Being open and honest with a man is like asking him to drive over you with a bulldozer!

From the moment the new message came through, however, she sensed that there was something interesting about this man. He did not make comments about her physical beauty but said simply that she struck him as someone who could make him laugh, with whom he could share long conversations on many subjects. The photo of her that he liked the most was the one she had forgotten to delete, taken in the park in Guangzhou. He made no mention of the sophisticated fashion-style images shot by a
professional photographer in the spa. As usual, she suggested chatting on QQ or MSN, but he declined, saying that he preferred meeting in real life. He also refused to send a photo, saying he did not want her to judge him by how he looked but that she would have every right to leave the moment she saw him if she really didn’t like him. He gave her a phone number and a list of dates on which to meet, all in the following week.
I am just looking for a companion who can understand me, someone I can have sweet, peaceful times with
. At first, the serious tone of his message made Phoebe doubtful of his sincerity. No man had been so earnest and straightforward with her since she came to China. He must surely be a sexual pervert, she thought. But each time she reread the message, her fears subsided. She checked the piece of paper on which the astrologer had written the details of Phoebe’s romantic prospects: The dates the man had suggested coincided perfectly with those in the window marked
Time of Perfect Meeting with Lifelong Soul Mate
.

She emailed back, accepting a date for the following Sunday evening.

Yanyan helped her choose her outfit. Together, they laid out the various combinations of clothing on the bed and contemplated them while sipping tea. It was just like looking at the sea, Yanyan said.

“The sea?” Phoebe asked.

“Yes. When I was small, my parents took me to the coast on holiday. I thought we were going to play and have fun, but all we did was look at the sea. It was so boring at first, but then I found it very beautiful. Nothing ever changed with the sea. There were waves, it moved, but it didn’t change. I liked it.”

Phoebe looked at Yanyan. They had been sharing a tiny room for so many months now, but still Yanyan would sometimes say things that Phoebe could not understand, things that made her think that she would never be able to understand the life that Yanyan had lived before they met. She simply smiled and nodded.

They consulted several of Phoebe’s books for advice on how to approach such a date, paying special attention to a chapter called “Dress for Sex-cess,” which recommended showing off as much of her feminine attributes as possible.
Men care about only one thing, and we all know what that is
.… In the end, they decided that Phoebe should wear a long-sleeved shirt buttoned close to her neck for a demure look, balanced by a short
skirt to suggest sexual availability. “Anyway,” said Yanyan, reading from another book, “your beauty comes from your inner confidence; it does not matter what you wear.”

As the first warm winds of spring began to sweep through Shanghai and the light shone brighter, chasing away the gray of winter, the memory of snow began to melt away. People hurried through the streets, busy but calm, the excitement of Spring Festival now forgotten. The red lanterns that hung in the trees had finally been removed, replaced by colorful globes of blue and green and white, and now the branches were full of buds too, green flecks already bursting into leaf here and there. Phoebe got off the subway one stop early. She liked this part of town, the wide clean streets lined with modern buildings and expensive shops whose windows glowed jewellike even at night. Outside a parade of luxury stores, on a street corner where the pavement was smooth and broad and flat, there was a man with a cart selling homemade CDs of romantic songs. He played Spanish-sounding music through the single loudspeaker mounted on the back of his motorbike, the singer’s voice filling the air with a sound that was soft and melancholic and sensual. The rhythms of the song were delicious, Phoebe thought; they made her feel so beautiful and elegant, even though she could tell it was a sad song. She felt strong; she enjoyed being able to recognize sadness without being crushed by it.

As she entered the sudden darkness of Jing’an Park, excitement began to creep into her heart. Her neck felt warm, her hands were cool. She allowed herself a moment of doubt, a few seconds to wonder whether she was making a big mistake. Maybe the man would be so ugly that she would not even be able to look at him; maybe he had physical deformities, and that’s why he did not want to send a photo of himself. But then she thought: She had wasted so much time with men in Shanghai already, one more meeting would not matter. She had to press on until she could find someone who would make her life easier. It had long ago ceased to be about love; it was about usefulness.

Trapped between a stretch of elevated highway and the shiny high-rise buildings, the park offered a respite from the light and noise. It was small but shadowy, and Phoebe could not see the faces of the couples walking arm in arm until they were close to her. She followed the snaking paths that led her to a pond fringed by tall reeds. The surface of the water was still and black and flat, glinting here and there with the reflection of oil
lamps that lit a large wooden deck on the far side of the pond. A small bridge led from the deck to a timber house that rose to two levels, the eaves of its roof decorated with wooden carvings. Phoebe could feel her breath quicken. She blinked, smiling. She could hardly believe she was in Shanghai. It was a scene so familiar to her, from so long ago. As she made her way to the house, she could see waitresses dressed in sarongs made from batik and tunics of dark-colored lace. A woman wearing a frangipani flower behind her ear greeted Phoebe at the door, then led her out to the wooden deck, where, at the farthest table, a man was sitting. His head was turned away from the entrance, toward the pond. He did not look happy to be waiting for a beautiful date—to tell the truth, he looked as if he was thinking about something else altogether. Phoebe thought that this man had more important things to do in his life than spend an evening with her. The fortune-teller must have been wrong. This guy did not look like a soul mate.

“Hi,” said Phoebe as she settled into her chair.

“Oh, hi, sorry,” said the man. “I was just daydreaming.”

“But it’s nighttime,” Phoebe said. By habit and training, she placed her handbag on the table, before realizing that she no longer had her super-A-grade fake bag, just a cheap one that she’d had for a long time. She didn’t dare carry an expensive-looking bag now, after what had happened to her.

The man laughed. “True. In that case I was night-dreaming, with my eyes open.”

He was not young but not yet an old man. Phoebe guessed that he was about twenty years older than she was. His face was not easy to read—his features were boyish, almost babyish, with ears that stuck out like bat wings, but his skin was tanned and leathery, with lines around his eyes and mouth and a deep groove forming between his eyes. Sometimes he appeared young, sometimes ancient. She studied him carefully without letting him know that she was doing so; she was very skilled at doing this—no one could get the better of her. His clothes were expensive and quite stylish, even though they were a little plain: blue shirt, light-gray jacket, nothing too flashy. His mobile phone lay on the table; it was an expensive model with a slide-out keyboard and other functions frequently used by businessmen. There were car keys too, but Phoebe did not recognize the make of car—it wasn’t BMW or Mercedes; she had seen those before.

She thought, No, her soul mate was around the corner. This guy, he was just someone she could use.

“So, Mr. Chao, what do you do in Shanghai?”

He laughed. “Wow, straight to the point. Do you want to know how much I earn too?”

“Only if you want to tell me, but most guys lie about salaries.”

“First of all, could you call me Walter? And I will call you Phoebe. This isn’t a business meeting, is it?”

“Okay, Walter,” Phoebe said, pouring herself some San Pellegrino water. “What do you do in Shanghai? You seem evasive.”

He opened the menu and looked down at it. “I’m one of those people known to the rest of society as ‘an entrepreneur.’ Whenever anyone says it, it seems like a dirty word. No one’s sure what entrepreneurs do, except make money. Have you had a chance to look at the menu? I don’t know if you like this kind of food. It’s supposed to be Balinese, but it’s not really—just generic Indonesian and Malaysian food. There’s good curry, but Chinese people usually don’t like curry. I should have asked. I thought, though, the setting is so nice that even if we didn’t eat anything, we could enjoy the little lake, the plants, the sound of frogs in the middle of the city. It’s quite romantic, I think. Don’t you?”

Phoebe looked at the pond. The surface of the water was calm and still, the flames of the oil lamps reflected like the uncertain glimmer of stars in the night sky. She remembered the lake on the outskirts of the small town deep in the heart of the countryside where she had grown up, thousands of miles from here. The lake was deep and dark, and in the rainy season its waters rose and flooded the fields and scrubland around it. Many of the bushes would be half submerged, so you would see only clumps of vegetation here and there, as if it were floating in the water. When Phoebe and her friends walked to school through the fields that bounded the overflowing shores of the lake, they would let the floodwaters wash through their rubber slippers, warm and silty between their toes, stained with the color of red earth.