Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (12 page)

They shuffled past Phoebe as the lift neared the ground floor, their shoulders and arms jostling her. She watched the numbers light up on the counter, and as she did so she felt as though her life was also descending—4, 3, 2, 1. Soon it would be zero. As the lift doors opened, she saw that it was tiny and filled with cigarette smoke, so she decided to take the stairs instead. She had only her small bag with her—she had learned to travel light. Even so, she was soon out of breath, because the stairs were steep and
the windows that lined the stairwell were open and let in the dust and pollution from outside. There were pipes everywhere, and some of them were leaky. Where they dripped onto the floor, there were crusted brown patches that looked like mushrooms sprouting from the concrete.

As she climbed the stairs she could see more clearly out the windows, could gaze down at a giant construction site taking shape right next to the apartment block. Huge steel columns jutted out from the hole being dug for the foundations. Beyond it there was a shopping center, painted in coral pink and blue. In the daytime, its neon signboard looked like scaffolding, and it was hard to read what it said:
SHANGHAI LITEFUL FASHION SHOPPING MARKET
. The signboards that covered its entire length advertised cheap clothing brands that Phoebe had never heard of before, the colors gold and bright green and yellow. Nothing matched. The streets below were dark with a mass of people waiting for buses or emerging from the shopping center—it must have been a wholesale market, where you could buy anything from skirts to electronic goods to dried food very cheaply. Even from where she was, she could hear the thumping of music and the cries of advertisements from loudspeakers. She paused and looked at the scene—at the thick wriggling river of bodies so dense and colorless that it was hard to make out each human being. She could be anywhere in China, she thought. In fact, she could be in any no-value town in Asia. She had known so many of them, and they all looked like this.

But maybe her room would be nice. Maybe her view would not be of this no-place city that she was now staring at; maybe she would look out at the river instead and wake up every day to views of Shanghai.

She reached the top floor. The corridor was long and stretched into the gloom—she could not see the end of it. There were dozens of doors, each one a separate room. She walked along the corridor, counting down the numbers until she found the right one.

Why are you always so doubtful? Phoebe Chen Aiping, do not allow yourself to be dragged down by your childish fears
.

The door was protected by a metal grille, just like all the others. Phoebe reached between the bars and knocked on it, but there was no answer. She knocked again and waited. Perhaps Yanyan had unexpectedly been called out to an important meeting, even though she had said it was her day off. It was often like this with busy people who had important jobs; they had to respond to unexpected events at short notice and be flexible—they
were successful because they were able to deal with stressful situations by using their skill and talent. The door opposite opened and an old woman peered out, glaring at Phoebe and looking at her from head to foot. Phoebe wondered how she appeared to the old woman, whether she looked acceptable, a decent upstanding person paying a visit to a friend, or whether she looked like someone with shady intentions, a potential criminal. She reached into her handbag for her phone and rang Yanyan’s number. She heard a phone ring on the other side of the door, and a few moments later she heard the locks being undone from the inside, three of them, heavily bolted.

“Why didn’t you call out and say who you were?” Yanyan mumbled as she opened the door. “I thought you were the man coming for the gas bill again.” She seemed sleepy, and her hair was a mess, as if she had just woken up, and she was dressed in her pajamas even though it was nearly midday. She let Phoebe in and went to sit on her bed. Phoebe thought maybe she was very tired from working very hard at her important job. She was wearing fluffy slippers in the shape of smiling puppies, and her pajamas were printed with sunny flower faces that grinned at Phoebe. There was only one small bed in the room and a small chair piled with clothes.

“I’m so tired,” Yanyan said, kicking off her slippers and leaning back against the wall with her knees drawn in to her body.

It was true: She looked haggard. “You must be working very hard,” Phoebe said. She did not know what to do, whether to sit on the bed or not, so she just stood in the middle of the tiny room. When she looked around, she saw a small cooker on one side of the door and a washroom cubicle on the other, so small that she was not sure there was enough space to stand and have a shower between the toilet and the wall. There were no decorations in the bedroom, apart from a small TV balanced on some shelves that held cooking utensils and a jar of pumpkin seeds. On the wall hung one of those calendars that fast-food chains give away free of charge at the end of the year if you are lucky and are there at the right time. The pages were open at June, four months ago.

Yanyan shook her head and laughed. “I got fired. That’s why I need someone to share the rent.”

Phoebe looked out the window and saw the same view that she had seen earlier, the deep hole of the construction site, the broad avenue cut by concrete bridges, the multicolored Liteful shopping center, the masses of
people dragging heavy black bags full of cheap goods—a nowhere, could-be-anywhere place.

“I know the room’s a bit small,” Yanyan said, “but we can shift that chair and the TV and roll out the mattress.” She reached underneath the bed and attempted to drag something out, and Phoebe could see that it was a thin mattress rolled up and stuffed under the low bed.

“It’s okay,” Phoebe said, “we don’t have to do it now.” She calculated that with the mattress rolled out, there would be about a small handbag’s width between it and the bed. She wondered how long ago Yanyan had lost her job, how long now that she had spent her days waking up at midday, how long that she had let her hair get greasy and go unwashed, but it did not seem the right time to ask such questions.

Imagine your new splendid life, and it will soon come true!

Phoebe thought, It would be so easy to walk out of this tiny room. She could make up an excuse and say, I’m late for an appointment, but thank you for showing me the room; I’ll call you later once I’ve decided. She remained standing in the middle of the room, still clutching her bag. She did not know where else to go.

“Hey, are you hungry? It must be lunchtime now,” Yanyan said, looking around at the walls as if hoping to find a clock, but there wasn’t one.

Phoebe shook her head. “Don’t worry, please don’t go to any trouble. I’ve just arrived, I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“I’m starving—let’s have a simple lunch!” Yanyan insisted, and went to the cooking area.

Phoebe wondered what kind of meal she would prepare, and just thinking about lunch made her realize that she had not had breakfast; suddenly she felt so hungry, her stomach began to swell with an ache she had never experienced before. As she listened to the sounds of Yanyan busying herself in the kitchen—the sound of water from the tap drumming against the bottom of an empty kettle, the clang of steel against steel, the click-clack of chopsticks, Yanyan humming a little tune—Phoebe felt tired and in need of rest. She tried to think of the number of times someone had cooked a meal for her since she came to China, the number of times she had sat in someone’s home eating a meal, but not a single instance came to mind. She sat down on the bed and found the mattress thin but firm. The windows were open and she could hear the noise of the traffic, the nonstop beeping of scooters and the growl of buses. A
cool wind was blowing and made the room feel airy. She looked across at Yanyan, whom she had not yet had a chance to scrutinize—a tall thin girl, scrawny, most would say, who walked with a stoop, which was a shame because her height would have given her a striking appearance were she not rapidly turning into a young hunchback. She could be beautiful, but instead she was mediocre. Maybe she would look at Phoebe and learn how to stand upright and keep her hair neat and stylish. Phoebe looked at Yanyan’s long unwashed hair, which shrouded her cheeks messily, making her look like a child who had recently awoken from a bad dream.

“Come, come, eat,” Yanyan said, and sat down next to her. She handed Phoebe a plastic bowl of instant noodles, spicy-seafood flavor. She had not torn off the cover properly, and when Phoebe brought the bowl to her mouth, little bits of paper tickled her lips.

“Hey, look!” cried Yanyan. She held up a cheap plastic toy—a key ring with a small blue plastic cat attached to it. When she pulled at the chain, the cat lifted a pair of chopsticks to its whiskery snout, greedily slurping some plastic noodles. “It came free with the packet of noodles. Here, take it—it’ll be your good-luck charm in Shanghai. It will help you get the best job in the world.”

Phoebe took the blue cat and put it in her handbag. She did not want it, but she did not want to hurt Yanyan either. She stirred her noodles with her chopsticks, watching the bits of freeze-dried vegetables slowly uncurling. They all looked the same—she never knew what vegetables they were supposed to be. Down in the construction site below, heavy works were starting up, and the deep booming sound of pile drivers resonated in her chest.

She wrote in her journal:
Wind and rain are raging, I am shaking and swaying, but I must recover; I will rise up
.

SHE SPENT A FEW
days cleaning the apartment, wiping the black dust from the tops of the cupboards and scrubbing the lines of moss that were forming in the bathroom. She made sure that there was a good store of instant noodles and assorted biscuits in the kitchen, and when she was satisfied that her new home was in reasonable order, she began to think about her own appearance. She went to the fake-goods market at Zhongshan Science and Technology Park, even though she’d heard it was cheaper to buy
counterfeit products on the Internet. The thing about luxury high-style goods was, you had to see what they were like in real life before knowing whether they would suit you; even she knew this. She spent a long time going from shop to shop, expressing interest in certain items before walking away, knowing that the same item would be on sale a few shops away and that the shopkeepers would be forced to come running out to the street after her to offer her lower prices than their competitors. First she selected a wallet made from glossy red leather with a gold clasp buckle, which even came in a box with the logo printed in gold above the words
MADE IN ITALY
. When she was bargaining with the shopkeeper, she said to him, You are so unscrupulous; you dare to say this is made in Italy, when everyone knows it’s fake. And the shopkeeper said, Little miss, it’s the truth! Don’t you know, Italy is full of factories owned by Chinese people, and those factories are full of Chinese workers producing large volumes of luxury goods! Phoebe did not fully believe this—she could not imagine entire towns and villages in Italy full of Chinese people stitching clothes and handbags and having nothing to do with the locals—but maybe it was true, maybe she now owned a genuine foreign-manufactured luxury item. Next she hesitated over a scarf with distinctive checks and some large shawls made from pure 100 percent pashmina, and since winter was around the corner she thought about buying a fashionable down jacket too, something in a bright shiny color that would make her look energetic and sporty and even give the impression that she had just come back from a holiday in an expensive snowy place like Hokkaido.

Finally she chose the most important item, a handbag. This is how people would judge her. From afar they would notice what kind of bag she was carrying and would decide if she were a person of class or not. She knew which kind of bag she wanted—it was the most desirable brand but also the most illegal of all the counterfeit products. Some of the shopkeepers thought she was a spy for the trading office and asked her many questions before admitting that they kept stocks of it. The difficulty in purchasing this bag excited her; she felt as if she was buying something very rare and exclusive, even though it was a fake. Eventually one shopkeeper pushed aside a wall lined with shelves to reveal a smaller room hidden behind the shelves, and behind this smaller room, which was filled with ordinary bags, there was another, even smaller room, and it was here that the bag she wanted was kept. There were two other women in that
tiny room, examining the high-quality stylish bags with care. They were both executive-looking women wearing business clothes and carefully applied makeup, and being in that private space with them made Phoebe feel equally important. There was only one brand of bag in that room—the coveted LV brand—but in many styles and variations, the famous pattern and colored monogram repeating all over the walls and surrounding her like the very air she breathed, making her feel slightly giddy.

Phoebe took a long time before selecting the one she wanted, for even the fakes were expensive, and in the end she had to settle on the most inferior model and style. But it was still beautiful, she thought, as she walked out of the shop with the bag already on her shoulder. She had transferred some of the contents of her old bag into the new one and discarded all the unwanted items in a bin outside the shop. When she looked at some of the things she’d thrown away—the cheap dried-up lipstick, a cracked mirror, a worker’s pass from one of her old jobs in Guangzhou—she wondered why she had carried those dead objects with her for so long.

She went to an Internet bar and made herself new profiles on QQ and MSN so that she could chat with people online—so that she could chat with men. Searching her email attachments, she found a nice photo of herself. It had been taken in Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou, but in the background there were only trees and lakes, so no one would look at the picture and make the link: Guangzhou, factory worker, immigrant. She remembered that day well: She had just left one job and was about to start another, but she had two days off in between and also some money saved up. She had dressed in nice jeans and a colorful T-shirt and taken the subway to the park as if she were having a day out with friends, only she did not have any friends. She bought red-bean shaved ice and ate it while strolling around the artificial lakes, watching the artists painting water-colors of goldfish and hilly landscapes and oil portraits of Hollywood actors. There were couples and families everywhere, and although she was on her own, she felt that she was one of them, that she was someone who had a past and a future—and life was only going to get better, just as it would for everyone around her. Near the boating lake, she found a spot to sit under some bamboo trees. She was on her own, but it was okay, she was happy. She took out her phone and held it at arm’s length, lifting it up slightly so that she could look at it with a raised chin—it was better this way, as it made her neck look thinner. She took a photo, but it wasn’t so
good; she was squinting a bit because of the sun. She tried it again, but this one didn’t work either. One of the old men who sold tickets for the row-boats called out to her, asking if she wanted him to help her take a photo. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t ask you to marry me in return!”