Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (5 page)

These were some of the things the
Business Times
said of him just before he arrived here. His father had had the article cut out, mounted, and framed, and had sent it to him gift-wrapped in paper decorated with gold stars. It arrived two days after his birthday, but he was not sure if it was a present. There had never been presents on his birthday.

From the start of his time in Shanghai, he was invited to the best
parties—the numerous openings of the flagship stores of Western luxury brands, or discreet private banquets hosted by young local entrepreneurs with excellent connections within the Party. He could always get a table at the famous Western restaurants on the Bund, and because people soon knew and liked him—he was easy, unshowy company—he was rarely on his own and was increasingly in the public eye. At one party to launch a new line of underwear, held in a warehouse in the northern outskirts of the city, he found himself unconsciously trying to shrink away from the bank of flashbulbs that greeted the guests, so that when the photographs appeared, his head was cocked at an angle, as if he had recently hurt his neck in an accident. There were a dozen hydraulic platforms suspended above the party, each one occupied by a model clad only in underwear, gyrating uncomfortably to the thumping music; every time he looked up at them, they threw confetti down on him, which he then had to pick out of his hair. The event organizer later sent him copies of the photos—he was frowning in every one, stray bits of confetti clinging to his suit like bird shit.
Shanghai Tatler
magazine photographed him at a black-tie charity event a few weeks after he arrived, his hair slickly swept back in a nod to the 1930s, a small white flower in his buttonhole, and a young Western woman in a
qipao
at his side. The caption read,
Justin C. K. Lim and companion;
he hadn’t even known the woman. He bid on a guided tour of the city by Zhou X., a local starlet just beginning to make a name for herself in New Wave art-house films. It cost him 200,000
yuan
, which was donated to orphans of the Sichuan earthquake. The men at the party nudged him and whispered slyly, “Maybe you’ll get to see the most secret sights of Shanghai, like she showed off in her latest movie.” (He’d heard of the film, which was set in a small village during the Cultural Revolution and already banned in China;
The New York Times
review of it called Zhou X.
the intellectual man’s Orientalist fantasy
.)

If he felt a frisson of excitement, it wasn’t because of his glamorous tour guide but because it was his first proper outing in Shanghai, his first sight of the daytime streets at close quarters, unencumbered by briefcases and folders. If anything, he felt resentful of Zhou X.’s presence; she sat in the car, idly sending messages on her BlackBerry, her only commentary being a recital of a list of projects her agent had sent her. “Wim Wenders—is he famous?” she asked. “I don’t feel like working with him—he sounds boring.”

They stopped outside a tourist-class hotel on a busy thoroughfare lined with midrange shopping brands in what seemed to be a fairly expensive part of town (low occupancy, medium yield: unrealized rental potential)—a strange place to start a tour of Shanghai, he thought, as they walked through a featureless archway into a narrow lane lined first with industrial dustbins and then, farther on, with low brick houses. These were the famous
longtang
of Shanghai, she explained, the ones foreigners fell in love with—though personally she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a lane house. “Look at them, they’re so primitive and cramped and dark and … old.”

He peered into an open door. In the gloom, he made out a staircase of dark hardwood and a tiled kitchen with a two-ring stove-top cooker. He stepped into the house—its quiet half-light seemed welcoming, irresistible.

“What are you doing?” Zhou X. cried.

But he was already up the stairs, treading across the uneven floorboards, the deep graining of the wood inviting him to bend down and trail his fingers over the smooth worn surface. There were signs of life—pots of scraggly herbs and marigolds, towels draped on banisters, lines of washing strung up across the small square rooms. And yet there was a stillness that settled heavily on the house, as if its inhabitants had recently abandoned it, as if the present was already giving way to the past. The small windows on the landings allowed in little light, but Justin could nonetheless see that there was dust on the surface of some cardboard boxes that lay stacked in the corner of the room and also on the handrails of the staircase. He could not decide whether the house was decaying or living. He retreated and joined his companion outside. In spite of her huge black sunglasses, she was squinting, shielding her face from the sun with her handbag.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “You can’t just go poking your nose into other people’s houses like that.”

Justin looked at her and smiled. “I’ve paid for this, haven’t I? I need to get my money’s worth.”

At his insistence, they drove from
longtang
to
longtang
, her SUV cruising through the narrow streets lined with plane trees, the balconies of the old French-style villas occasionally visible over the tops of stone walls. Some of the larger houses had shutters that were tightly closed, and in their gloom these mansions reminded him of the house in which he had
grown up, full of silence and shadows and the steady ticking of grandfather clocks. He remembered the hallway and staircase of his family house, the ceiling rising so high that it created a cavelike gloom.

As the car crawled through the traffic, he began to notice the number of people on foot: a group of middle-school kids, spiky-haired and bespectacled in tracksuits, rushing to beat one another to the head of the queue to buy freshly made
shengjian
, exclaiming gleefully as the cloud of steam billowed from the pan; an elderly couple crossing the road just in front of the car, walking arm in arm, their clothes made from matching brocade and velvet, worn but still elegant; and, at an intersection, about fifty construction workers sitting on the pavement, smoking on their break, their faces tanned and leathery, foreign-looking—Justin could not place where they were from. He wondered why, in the many weeks since arriving, he had not noticed how densely populated the city was. All that time driving around in his limo, he must have been working on spreadsheets or reading reports, he thought.

“You’re so easy to please,” Zhou X. said, tapping away on her phone without looking at him. “All I have to do is show you old houses.”

The driver stopped the car, because Justin had seen a small lane of nondescript houses that seemed derelict at first glance. It was the property developer’s instinct in him that spotted the lane, he thought, for it was barely distinguishable from the dozens of others they had seen and in fact was a great deal less attractive. Tucked behind a row of small fruit and vegetable shops, the low brick houses had not long ago been rendered in cheap concrete and now looked, frankly, ugly: low residential value, ripe for development. Wires sagged along the façades of the buildings, competing for space with lines of washing hung up to dry; a small girl came out of a doorway, carrying a basin of gray-hued water, which she splashed into the street. There was something about the way of life here—living in close quarters, families spilling into one another—that reminded him of the slums not far from where he grew up: hundreds of identical flimsy houses, thousands of lives that seemed to blend into one. Sometimes the houses would catch fire and the entire area would be razed, only to be rebuilt a few months later. He had never known any of the people who lived in that world, and even before he became an adult, the shanties were cleared to make way for a shopping mall.

He’d remembered to bring his little digital camera and began photographing
the narrow sunless alley and the shabby shops that surrounded it; as he did so, an old woman emerged from one of the houses, carrying a few plastic bags bulging with clothes. On the LCD screen of his camera she appeared smiling, gap-toothed, spontaneously lifting her bags to the camera as if displaying a trophy.

“Hey, people don’t like you interfering with their lives,” Zhou X. called from inside the car. “Can you hurry up? I’m late for my next appointment.”

For days afterward he looked at the picture of the old woman, even putting it on his laptop so that every time he turned it on she was there, smiling at him. There was something about her thin hair, dyed jet-black and set in tight curls, that reminded him of his grandmother—the attempts at vanity making her seem frailer, not younger. He remembered his grandmother’s room: the chalky smell of thick white face powder and tiger balm interlaced with eau de cologne. He would sit on the bed and watch her undo the curlers from her hair; she liked having him around, liked talking to him, even though he could not understand all of what she said. He must have been no more than five or six, and she was already in her eighties, already weak. And he was surprised by the glassy clarity of these memories, the way they settled insistently on his waking days like a thin, sticky film that he could not shake off. He had never even been close to his grandmother.

With the photo enlarged, he could make out the color of some of the clothes through the translucent plastic bags the old woman was carrying: a jumble of cheap textiles proudly displayed to the beholder. Her cheeks were red and coarse, her remaining teeth badly tea-stained. He wanted to go back to try to find her, maybe take more photographs—and, who knows, on closer inspection (and without a nagging actress on his back) he might have clearer views of those small houses and the neighboring shops. A thought flashed across his mind: Maybe he could restore them, save them from further degradation by thinking of some clever scheme whereby the residents could continue to pay low rent and the shops could be run on a cooperative basis. The entire site would become a model for modern urban dwelling in Asia; young educated people would want to come and live cheek by jowl with old Shanghainese.

He jotted down a few rough figures, arranging them in neat columns: how much financing such a scheme might take to work—nothing serious,
just the vaguest estimate. And yet, as always, the moment he thought about money, the project began to feel real, crystallizing into something solid and attainable. He kept the piece of paper on his desk at work so that he would not forget it.

But the whole of the next week was taken up with meetings with bankers and contractors, dinners with Party officials, preparing a presentation for the mayor’s office; the following week he had to go to Tokyo, and then Hong Kong, then Malaysia. When he finally made it back to Shanghai, it was turning cold and damp with the onset of winter, and he did not feel like venturing out much, did not have the energy to track down the old woman and her little lane, for he did not know where it was exactly—maybe somewhere between a highway and a big triangular glass building? He barely had any time to himself these days: Most evenings he was so tired it felt too much of an effort even to shower and clean his teeth before he went to bed; all he wanted to do was fall asleep. His limbs ached, his mouth was dry all the time, and his head felt cloudy, as if set in thick fog on a muggy day, a headache hovering on the horizon. He got the flu and was laid up in bed for over a week, and then bronchitis set in and he couldn’t shake it. His bathroom scale showed he had lost nearly ten pounds, but he wasn’t too worried. He was just overworked; it had happened to him before. Whenever he worked too much he got sick. But still he got up every morning, put on his suit, went to meetings, studied site plans and financial models.

After months of planning, his family had decided on their masterwork, a project that was to announce their arrival on the Mainland and define their intentions for the coming decades. All his groundwork—the endless days and nights of negotiations and entertaining—had finally unearthed a potential site befitting his family’s ambitions: a near-derelict warehouse built around the remains of a 1920s opium den, surrounded by low lane houses, between Nanjing Xi Lu and Huaihai Lu. It was an absolutely
chao-A
prime location. There had been other alternatives, such as a much bigger site in Pudong, large enough to accommodate a skyscraper—a genuine brash half-kilometer-high Asian behemoth—but his father and uncles had preferred the old-fashioned prestige of this address. “It’ll make more of a statement,” his father said, his voice noble and steady but tinged with excitement nonetheless. In the coming year they would make a bid for the site and decide what they would do with it—something outstanding,
of course, a future landmark. There was still the matter of greasing palms, identifying the officials who might need to be persuaded to allow the deal to go through, but he did not worry about that too much—it was something at which he had years of practice. It had become his speciality, some people said, making things happen this way.

One cold crisp morning, during a lull in proceedings—it was that dead time in January when the Westerners were still lethargic after their return from Christmas and the locals were beginning to prepare for the Spring Festival—he woke up to brilliant sunshine and a day off: the first of either that he could remember in a long time. His joints did not feel swollen as they usually did, and his lungs craved air. He called for a taxi and set off vaguely in the direction of the lane he said seen those months ago, and when he felt he was in the general vicinity, he alighted and continued on foot, strolling along the streets lined with handsome stone houses. The air was cold and sharp in his lungs, almost cleansing; the streets were busy with crisscrossing bicycles and electric scooters, merchants pulling carts of winter melon and oranges. The branches of the trees had been pruned heavily for the winter and stood sentinel-like before the handsome old European-built houses. On foot he noticed the stone ornaments and molded window frames that adorned the upper floors of these small buildings. It was impossible to see any of this from a car: All he usually saw was the ground floor, invariably occupied by a featureless shop selling down jackets or mobile phones. He stopped to buy a bag of oranges for the old woman, just in case he saw her again—he wasn’t far now; he recognized a few shops, a familiar curve in the road.