Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (25 page)

It was a relief of sorts when her parents died—first her father, then, a few months afterward, her mother. She had to move back up north to Kelantan to sort out their affairs, which involved living in their little house in Temangan. The place was barely more than a village; it was not far from where she had grown up, and she appreciated the air and the landscape, the feeling of civilization melting away into the wilderness. Ten years previously she had found the isolation stifling, but now it felt comforting. Her parents’ deaths gave her a reason to escape her life in KL. Everyone would understand why she had to give up all that she had had in the big city; all her ambitions had reached a legitimate end; she could even pretend it was a hardship to return to a rural existence.

By the time Gary was old enough to put a name to simple human emotions—fear, loneliness, joy—his mother’s life was already in retreat, its boundaries shrinking. In order to escape the feeling of being trapped by the confines of rural life, she surrendered to it. Her world was defined now by the rhythms of the market laid out along the dusty street every morning. She chatted with the old
makcik
who came in from the surrounding villages to sell vegetables and food from their own kitchens—she knew each one by name and sometimes even shared tea with the
dodol
woman. It was how she had grown up; she knew how to live like this. She tried to imagine that the roads leading out of town all headed north, to Kota Bharu and the other small towns in the no-man’s-land on the Thai border, or to the coast, where the long stretches of empty white-sand beaches were interrupted only by fishing villages; she wanted to imagine that she could no longer go south to KL or Singapore, or west across the
mountains to Penang, where there were cities and music and foreigners and ambition.

At that age—six, seven?—Gary would notice her watching him as he played in the dirt yard in front of the house, and on a number of occasions he found her sitting by his bed when he woke up in the morning. But she would never actually hold him or pick him up to cradle him in her arms or even rush over to help him to his feet if he fell over. The look in her eyes was empty, hollowed out by fatigue: The mere act of reaching out to him was too great an effort for her. She wanted to love him, he knew, but she had no strength to do so. The divide between them always remained, and before long he became aware that he no longer needed her touch.

She worked every day, including Fridays, when many of the shops were closed for prayers. By now she was washing clothes and cleaning houses for a living. In those days there weren’t any Indonesian maids, so it was still easy for a Chinese woman like her to find work. Occasionally she would mention the possibility of giving music lessons—often enough to make Gary remember that his mother had been someone whose life had been full of potential. But they both knew it was ridiculous—there was no one in a small town like theirs who would want or could afford piano lessons. It was not like down south, where Gary knew from his mother’s stories that there were concert venues that played host to foreign musicians dressed in tuxedos.

Once a month his mother would take the bus into Kota Bharu. “I have some friends—it’s our music evening. They sing and sometimes I play the piano. Traditional songs, like the ones I sing for you sometimes. You know,” she said, as she broke into song, “like ‘Sweet Little Rose.’ ” He liked the idea of his mother playing the piano and wished he could one day see her perform. For a few days after her music evenings, she would often smoke some cigarettes, usually Winstons out of a crushed pack. Gary never questioned this, even though she didn’t normally smoke; maybe a friend had given them to her. One day he noticed a box of matches she’d used to light her cigarettes. When she had finished the matches, she threw the box into the waste bin, where it grew damp from the vegetable peelings before he had a chance to salvage it. Every month she came back with the same matchbox, and he began to pay attention to the bright red lips printed against the black background. By now he was old enough to read the words easily:
ICHIBAN KARAOKE
.

It made him sad to think of his mother, who might have played in concert halls in Europe, in such a place as Ichiban Karaoke, with its red-lipped matchboxes, in Kota Bharu. He was just a child—it would be years before he would visit a karaoke bar himself—but already he knew that Ichiban Karaoke was not good enough for his mother, that she did not belong in a place like that.

People always say that their mother is beautiful, that she is the most amazing woman in the world. Now that Gary has seen hundreds and hundreds of pretty women all over Asia, he knows that his mother’s looks could never be considered exceptional. To be honest, she was on the plain side. All the same, when he remembers the way she looked back then, with red pinched eyes and the faint lines of age already beginning to show around her temples and her mouth, as she sat on the front step of the house singing old Chinese songs while watching him cycle round and round the dirt yard, he thinks: She should not have gone to Ichiban Karaoke Bar.

Every year, as he grew older, the dirt yard in front of his house seemed to grow wider. Trees were felled and the scrubby undergrowth was cleared, bringing the town out toward them. This was a good thing, his mother explained, for it made it easier for her to get work. There were more houses that needed cleaning, more people who needed their clothes washed and ironed, and now they lived close by. Had she lived for another few years, she would have lived—almost—among them. Things might have turned out differently for them both. Maybe the buses would have been more reliable, not so old and broken down. Maybe the roads would have been improved, with fewer potholes after the rainy season and the floods in November and December that always washed the tarmac away, leaving a patchwork of holes. Maybe she would not have had to catch a lift from a stranger on a two-stroke scooter when she was coming back from Ichiban Karaoke late at night; maybe there would have been fewer goats and chickens straying onto the road and into oncoming traffic. Maybe she would still be alive today, and Gary would be a bus driver, not a pop star. Maybe he would not be sitting here flicking through the TV channels once again; maybe he wouldn’t be on the Internet, waiting for someone interesting to log on to MSN.

But maybe it would not have changed a thing. His mother might have lived to become a fat happy old woman and he would have been a failed
pop star anyway. He changes the channel—he’s tired of watching lions savage zebras—and finds the pop channels. Before long he sees the latest of his music videos. It includes arty black-and-white footage of his last concert, which everyone hailed as a huge success. As he watches himself being lowered onto the stage in a messianic pose, surrounded by a twenty-strong dance troupe dressed as half-naked aliens, or in the middle of a complex dance routine, there is one thing he cannot fail to notice: the vacant expression on his face, the absence of any enthusiasm. And he remembers how difficult it was for him during those performances to feel present onstage. His body and voice did what they were trained to do, but he imagined himself elsewhere. It is so obvious now that he sees images of himself. Perhaps it is something he inherited from his mother, this absence of expression—her sole legacy to him.

This is why, when he sings love ballads—rather, when he sang love ballads (he must get used to speaking of his career in the past tense)—he often closed his eyes. Fans used to say that was because he felt so much pain, so much love, that it hurt him too much. But the truth is that he felt nothing, which is why he had to close his eyes—so that they would not betray him.

As he contemplates this emptiness once more, a text bleeps on his phone. It is his agent:
Hv to leave hotel tmrw. Hv fixed rental apt 4u. Taxi at 11am. Some work is coming thru. Will call u soon
.

Where r u

Taipei

Shd I come back

Better stay in Shanghai. Many journalists here. No work
.

He looks at his room. Most people would panic at the thought of packing all their things overnight. But he has nothing to pack, no possessions at all, so he goes back to the chat rooms on the Internet. The girl he saw earlier is still online, still searching for someone. Her messages are not so bright and courageous anymore:
Looking for any nice friend. I am alone tonight
.

Gary draws his laptop to his knees and begins to type a reply.
Hi … so am I
.

T
HANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN WORKING WITH ME, BUT I AM AFRAID I
am otherwise engaged and will be unable to commit to any new business venture for at least six to twelve months. I am grateful for your inquiry and wish you great luck and success. Leong Yinghui.

She did not pause too long to consider the tone of the message before sending it out as a standard response to the many proposals that she was receiving. Every week since the awards ceremony, the number of people interested in developing a business with her, or hiring her in some capacity or another, was growing exponentially, it seemed. At first she responded fully and personally to each request, carefully considering the pros and cons of each proposal before dictating an email to her PA. Although many of the projects were vague and flimsy or downright ridiculous, there were more than a few that struck her as being potentially interesting, such as the proposal from a young woman who wanted to start a chain of tiny shops called Great Sunrise, selling socks and undergarments in the dead spaces in metro stations all across the city. But as the number of requests multiplied, her patience diminished, until eventually the banal outnumbered the intriguing, and, in refusing most, Yinghui began to find it easier to refuse them all. She knew that among the rubbish she was also throwing
out possibly fascinating, life-changing opportunities. Not so long ago she would have pursued every faint trail to its end, but now things were different. Since meeting Walter Chao several weeks ago, she no longer had to worry about finding that single perfect project that would change her life. Besides, there were only so many times that one could revolutionize one’s life. Sooner or later the frantic somersaults of fortune have to end and the restlessness of desire fades. It was time—so all her friends said—that she started settling down. Such a strange expression, she thought:
settling down
, as if she were silt in a warm river, sinking slowly to the muddy bed. Still, it was an inevitable process, and mysterious too. Yinghui had never known how it would happen, until now.

“It’s like love,” one of her girlfriends said at dinner at their usual Hunanese restaurant (a rare occurrence, due to Yinghui’s massively increased workload, it was remarked).

“What do you mean?” Yinghui said, nibbling on a cumin-grilled lamb chop.

“The moment you’re in a relationship, guys start flocking to you. Before that, when you’re single, you search and search and wait and wait, but no one wants you. Guess business is just the same. Must be some law of the universe that makes people behave like that.”

Yinghui smiled. There was something poetic about the way recent weeks had developed—so dramatic that it seemed almost comical to her, as if life was playing a little joke, she thought. After years of struggling to mold her fortunes, fortune itself had taken hold of her life and sorted it out in one swift maneuver. Two weeks after their first meeting over dinner—an agonizing wait, which made Yinghui wonder whether he was deliberately keeping her on tenterhooks—when she received the file of documents from Walter (a slim leather folder containing not more than half a dozen sheets of paper), she sat in bed reading and rereading it late into the night. It was as if he had managed to access the furthest reaches of her memory, all her long-forgotten yearnings, and condensed his findings on a few pages of concise, matter-of-fact prose. At first she thought it was a joke or maybe she had been working too hard and, on the verge of a hysterical exhaustion-related breakdown, had begun to imagine things. But, no: She reread it, and it was not a joke. He was not a mind reader; it was just chance, pure and simple. All her messy ambitions had resurfaced,
repackaged now in sophisticated, adult form: the hyper-businesslike version of her vague ramblings over a decade ago.

She turned back to the beginning of the folder, marked
STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
. It read like something she might have written herself fifteen years ago, when her interests extended beyond how to extract the most favorable terms of credit from textile suppliers: