How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (3 page)

Your brother's work is in some senses like being an astronaut, or slightly more prosaically, a scuba diver. It too involves the hiss of air, the feeling of weightlessness, the sudden pressure headaches and nausea, the precariousness that results when an organic being and a machine are fused together. Then again, an astronaut or aquanaut sees unimaginable new worlds, whereas your brother sees only a monocolor haze of varying intensities.

His occupation requires patience and the fortitude to withstand a constant sense of low-level panic, both of which out of necessity your brother has acquired. In theory it also requires protection in the form of goggles and respirators, but these are clearly optional, as your brother and his master have neither, placing thin cotton rags over their mouths and noses instead. Hence, in the near term, your brother's cough. Over the long term, consequences can be more serious. But a painter's assistant is paid, the skills he learns are valuable, and in any case over sufficiently long a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.

As your mother prepares dinner that evening, a lentil stew thickened with chunks of onion, not because onions are her favorite ingredient but because they appear to add substance to a meal and today in the market they were cheap, it may not seem that you are a lucky child. Your wounded ear is, after all, more visibly painful than the expression in your sister's eyes or the residue of paint on your brother's skin. Yet you are fortunate. Fortunate in being third-born.

Getting an education is a running leap towards becoming filthy rich in rising Asia. This is no secret. But like many desirable things, simply being well known does not make it easily achieved. There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter's assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.

Your father comes home after you have eaten. He has his meals with the other servants at the house where he cooks. All of you crowd around the family television, a sign of your urban prosperity. It is powered by a wire of communally stolen electricity that runs down the front of your building. It is archaic, a black-and-white, cathode-ray-tube device with an excessively curved and annoyingly chipped screen. It is narrower than the distance between your wrist and your elbow. And it is able to capture only the few channels that broadcast terrestrially. But it works, and your family watches in a state of hushed rapture the musical variety show it delivers to your room.

When the show is done, credits roll. Your mother sees a meaningless stream of hieroglyphs. Your father and sister make out an occasional number, your brother that and the occasional word. For you alone does this part of the programming make sense. You understand it reveals who is responsible for what.

The electricity to your neighborhood cuts out on the hour, and with it the light from your single naked bulb. A candle burns while you all prepare to turn in, and is then extinguished by your mother with a squeeze of her fingers. In the room it is now dim but not dark, the glow of the city creeping in through your shutters, and quiet but not silent. You hear a train decelerate as it passes along the tracks. You tend to sleep deeply, so although you share a cot, your brother's cough does not disturb you even once during the night.

THREE

DON'T FALL IN LOVE

MANY SELF-HELP BOOKS OFFER ADVICE ON HOW TO
fall in love or, more to the point, how to make the object of your desire fall in love with you. This, to be absolutely clear, is not one of those self-help books. Because as far as getting rich is concerned, love can be an impediment. Yes, the pursuit of love and the pursuit of wealth have much in common. Both have the potential to inspire, motivate, uplift, and kill. But whereas achieving a massive bank balance demonstrably attracts fine physical specimens desperate to give their love in exchange, achieving love tends to do the opposite. It dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught upriver journey to the heart of financial success.

So it is worrisome that you, in the late middle of your teenage years, are infatuated with a pretty girl. Her looks would not traditionally have been considered beautiful. No milky complexion, raven tresses, bountiful bosom, or soft, moon-like face for her. Her skin is darker than average, her hair and eyes lighter, making all three features a strikingly similar shade of brown. This bestows upon her a smoky quality, as though she has been drawn with charcoal. She is also lean, tall, and flat-chested, her breasts the size, as your mother notes dismissively, of two cheap little squashed mangoes.

“A boy who wants to fuck a thing like that,” your mother says, “just wants to fuck another boy.”

Perhaps. But you are not the pretty girl's only admirer. In fact, legions of boys your age turn to watch her as she walks by, her jaunty strut sticking out in your neighborhood like a bikini in a seminary. Maybe it's a generational thing. You boys, unlike your fathers, have grown up in the city, bombarded by imagery from television and billboards. Excessive fertility is here a liability, not an asset as historically it has been in the countryside, where food was for the most part grown rather than bought, and work could be found even for unskilled pairs of hands, though now there too that time is coming to an end.

Whatever the reason, the pretty girl is the object of much desire, anguish, and masturbatory activity. And she seems for her part to have some mild degree of interest in you. You have always been a sturdy fellow, but you are currently impressively fit. This is partly the consequence of a daily regimen of decline feet-on-cot push-ups, hang-from-stair pull-ups, and weighted brick-in-hand crunches and back extensions taught to you by the former competitive bodybuilder, now middle-aged gunman, who lives next door. And it is partly the consequence of your night job as a DVD delivery boy.

Beyond your neighborhood is a strip of factories, and beyond that is a market at the edge of a more prosperous bit of town. The market is built on a roundabout, and among its shops is a video retailer, dark and dimly lit, barely large enough to accommodate three customers at the same time, with two walls entirely covered in movie posters and a third obscured by a single, moderately packed shelf of DVDs. All sell for the same low price, a mere twofold markup on the retail price of a blank DVD. It goes without saying that they are pirated.

Because of splintering consumer tastes, the proprietor keeps only a hundred or so best-selling titles in stock at any given time. But, recognizing the substantial combined demand for films that each sell just one or two copies a year, he has established in his back room a dedicated high-speed broadband connection, disc-burning equipment, and a photo-quality color printer. Customers can ask for virtually any film and he will have it dropped off to them the same day.

Which is where you come in. The proprietor has divided his delivery area into two zones. For the first zone, reachable on bicycle within a maximum of fifteen minutes, he has his junior delivery boy, you. For the second zone, parts of the city beyond that, he has his senior delivery boy, a man who zooms through town on his motorcycle. This man's salary is twice yours, and his tips several times greater, for although your work is more strenuous, a man on a motorcycle is immediately perceived as a higher-end proposition than a boy on a bicycle. Unfair, possibly, but you at least do not have to pay monthly installments to a viciously scarred and dangerously unforgiving moneylender for your conveyance.

Your shift is six hours long, in the evening from seven to one, its brief periods of intense activity interspersed with lengthy lulls, and because of this you have developed speed as well as stamina. You have also been exposed to a wide range of people, including to women, who in the homes of the rich think nothing of meeting you alone at the door, alone, that is, if you do not count their watchful guards and drivers and other outdoor servants, and then asking you questions, often about image and sound quality but also sometimes about whether a movie is good or not. As a result you know the names of actors and directors from all over the world, and what film should be compared with what, even in the cases of actors and directors and films you have not yourself seen, there being only so much off-time during your shifts to watch what happens to be playing at the shop.

In the same market works the pretty girl. Her father, a notorious drunk and gambler rarely sighted during the day, sends out his wife and daughter to earn back what he has lost the night before or will lose the night to come. The pretty girl is an assistant in a beauty salon, where she carries towels, handles chemicals, brings tea, sweeps hair off the floor, and massages the heads, backs, buttocks, thighs, and feet of women of all ages who are either wealthy or wish to appear wealthy. She also provides soft drinks to men waiting in cars for their wives and mistresses.

Her shift ends around the time yours begins, and since you live on adjacent streets you frequently pass each other on your ways to and from work. Sometimes you don't, and then you walk your bicycle by the salon to catch a glimpse of her inside. For her part, she seems fascinated by the video shop, and stares with particular interest at the ever-changing posters and DVD covers. She does not stare at you, but when your eyes meet, she does not look away.

Every so often it happens that you don't pass her on your way to work and also don't see her when you walk by the windows of the salon. On these occasions you wonder where she might have gone. Perhaps she has a rotating day off in addition to the day the salon shuts. Such arrangements are, after all, not unheard of.

One winter evening, when it is already dark, and the two of you approach each other in the unlit alley that cuts through the factories, she speaks to you.

“You know a lot about movies?” she asks.

You get off your bicycle. “I know everything about movies.”

She doesn't slow down. “Can you get me the best one? The one that's most popular?”

“Sure.” You turn to keep pace with her. “You have a player to watch it on?”

“I will. Stop following me.”

You halt as though at the lip of a precipice.

That night a video is quietly stolen from your shop. You carry it under your tunic the following day, but there is no sign of the pretty girl, neither on the way to work nor in her salon. You next see her the day after, her shawl halfheartedly draped over her head in a disdainful nod to the accepted norms of your neighborhood, as it always is when she is out on the street. She walks awkwardly, burdened with a large plastic bag containing a carton for a combination television and DVD player.

“Where did you get that?” you ask.

“A gift. My movie?”

“Here.”

“Drop it in the bag.”

You do. “That looks heavy. Can I help?”

“No. Anyway you're like me. Skinny.”

“I'm strong.”

“I didn't say we weren't strong.”

She continues on her way, adding nothing further, not even a thank-you. You spend the rest of the evening in turmoil. Yes, you have spoken to the pretty girl twice. But she has given you no sign that she intends to speak to you again. Moreover, the strong-versus-skinny debate has been raging in your head for some time, so her comments cut close to the bone.

When asked why, despite your regular workouts, your physique looks nothing like his in photos of him at his competitive prime, your neighbor, the bodybuilder turned gunman, blames your diet. You are not getting enough protein.

“You're also young,” he says, leaning against his doorway and taking a hit of his joint while a little girl clings to his leg. “You won't be at your max for another few years. But don't worry about it. You're tough. Not just here.” He taps your bicep, which you flex surreptitiously beneath your tunic. “But here.” He taps you between the eyes. “That's why the other kids usually don't mess with you.”

“Not because they know I know you?”

He winks. “That too.”

It's true that you have earned a savage reputation in the street brawls that break out among the boys of your neighborhood. But the issue of protein is one that rankles. These are relatively good times for your family. With one less mouth to feed since your sister returned to the village, and three earners since you joined your father and brother in employment, your household's per capita income is at an all-time high.

Still, protein is prohibitively expensive. Chicken is served in your home on the rarest of occasions, and red meat is a luxury to be enjoyed solely at grand celebrations, such as weddings, for which hosts save for many years. Lentils and spinach are of course staples of your diet, but vegetable protein is not the same thing as the animal stuff. After debt payments and donations to needy extended relatives, your immediate family is only able to afford a dozen eggs per week, or four each for your mother, brother, and you, and a half-liter of milk per day, of which your share works out to half a glass.

For the past several months, your one secret indulgence, which you are both deeply guilty about and fiercely committed to, has been the daily purchase of a quarter-liter packet of milk. This consumes ten percent of your salary, the precise amount of a raise you neglected to inform your father you received. Per week, your milk habit is also roughly equivalent to the price your employer's customers are willing to pay for the delivery of one pirated DVD, a fact that alternately angers you in its preposterousness and soothes you by putting your theft from your family into diminished perspective. The daily sum of money involved is, after all, worth a mere thumb's-width slice of a disc of plastic.

You are thinking of your complicated protein situation when you spy the pretty girl the next evening. This time she stops in the alley, produces the DVD you gave her, and thumps it without a word against your chest.

“You didn't like it?”

“I liked it.”

“You can keep it. It's a gift.”

Her face hardens. “I don't want gifts from you.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Do you have a phone?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me.”

“Well, the problem is it's from work . . .”

She laughs. It is the first time you have seen her do so. It makes her look young. Or rather, since she is in fact young and normally appears more mature than her years, it makes her look her age.

She says, “Don't worry. I'm not going to take it with me.”

You hand over your phone. She presses the keys and a single note emerges from her bag before she hangs up.

She says, “Now I have your number.”

“And I have yours.” You try to match her cool tone. It is unclear to you if you succeed, but in any case she is already walking away.

Because of the nature of your work and the need to be able to reach you on your delivery rounds at any moment, your employer has provided you with a mobile. It is a flimsy, thirdhand device, but a source of considerable pride nonetheless. Paying for outbound calls is your own responsibility, so you maintain a bare minimum of credit in your account. Tonight, though, you rush to buy a sizable refill card in anticipation.

But the call you are waiting for does not come. And when you try calling the pretty girl, she does not answer.

Deflated, you go about the rest of your deliveries without enthusiasm. Only at the end of your shift, after midnight, does she ring.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

“I want another movie.”

“Which one?”

“I don't know. Tell me about the one I just saw.”

“You want to see it again?”

She laughs. Twice in one night. You are pleased.

“No, you idiot. I want to know more about it.”

“Like what?”

“Like everything. Who's in it? What else have they done? What do people talk about when they talk about it? Why is it popular?”

So you tell her. At first you stick to what you know, and when that runs out, and she asks for more, you say what you imagine could be plausible, and when she asks for even more, you venture into outright invention until she tells you she has heard enough.

“So how much of that was true?” she asks.

“Less than half. But definitely some.”

She laughs again. “An honest boy.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Why?”

“Just that they let you speak on the phone at this time.”

“My father's out. And my mother's asleep.”

“She doesn't wake up when you talk?”

“I'm on the roof.”

You consider this. The image of her alone on a rooftop makes you somewhat breathless. But before you can think of anything appropriate to say, she speaks again.

“I'll take another tomorrow. You pick. But a popular one.”

Thus begins a ritual that will last for several months. You meet on the way to work. Without stopping or exchanging a word, you either hand her a DVD or receive one she has just seen. At night you speak. Initially you feel like a professor of a subject in which you are barely literate, but because you give her only movies you have already partly seen, you are at least able to offer opinions of your own. Soon you find that she is helpfully filling in gaps in plot for you, telling you entire story lines, in fact. And your debates grow richer, and sometimes more heated. Your phone charges ought to be considerable, eating up most if not all of your tips, but she insists on being the one to call you, and so you spend nothing. She also insists the two of you do not discuss yourselves or your families.