Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

middle of town. New contacts and possibilities revealed themselves nowadays without her even having to seek them out. What a change, she thought, as she finished her coffee.

      Business was going well for Yinghui. The two upmarket lingerie stores she’d established were flourishing, and in little more than a year she had broken even and was now watching the profits accumulate, week by week, the spreadsheets filling out with handsome-looking figures bursting with promise. Occasionally, when she glanced at the documents her breathless accountant showed her, she ceased to take note of the substantial numbers, for their trajectory was so steep that she had difficulty imagining where they would take her twelve months hence. And yet she was not a person with a modest imagination – quite the opposite.

      Her ad campaigns had been striking and wildly successful. She had used only Chinese models, never mixed-race ones, and they never flaunted their bodies in an overtly sexual way. Although they did display a good deal of bare skin, the models were styled beautifully, and the overall aesthetic was classy rather than trashy. The catchy taglines were mysterious and playful, like the images themselves.

       Elegant Outside, Passionate Inside

       Secret Exciting

       Amazing Beautiful You

      Although she had originally thought that the shop would cater mainly to the wives of high-ranking party officials and low-profile billionaires who wanted a discreet custom service, Yinghui soon found a huge demand amongst ordinary professional women who were willing to spend upwards of four hundred yuan for the simplest bra. The low lighting and shadowy spaces of the stores, together with the women-only entry policy and touches of luxury such as the Venetian chandeliers created an ambience that proved incredibly popular, with many clients lingering on the plush sofas, and leafing through the glossy magazines and catalogues as they chatted and decided what else to purchase. Before long Yinghui had taken over the adjoining shops and added a coffee bar in one store and a wine bar in the other, extending the opening hours and turning both venues into destinations in their own right. The lingerie was all but removed from the store itself and transferred into specially designed semi-private ‘modelling rooms’, and the newly vacated space was now filled with stylish mannequins, artwork, and giant floral displays.

      The income and publicity generated by the two stores made it possible for Yinghui to seek business partners for new ventures on a much larger scale, and her financial projections were such that banks were suddenly willing to listen to her requests for loans. Her plans for expansion included a chain of small shops in metro stations, which would sell the basic Amazing Beautiful You range; twelve shops selling clothes for teenage girls called FILGirl (Fly in Love Girl); an internet-based cosmetics brand called Shhh … aimed at women over the age of forty; and a luxury spa modelled on a northern Thai village, the construction of which was nearing completion.

      These exciting ventures made people in the retail industry take notice of Yinghui, and the expatriate community was especially interested to learn that a foreigner was able to negotiate the complex world of Chinese retail. She began to give talks to the various foreign Chambers of Commerce, speaking to budding entrepreneurs about the pressures of being a foreigner and a woman in a male-dominated world. As she became more visible she did an interview with the Shanghai Daily – a brief article, nothing more – in which she was asked to reveal the key to her success at a time when many businesses were experiencing difficulties due to the global recession.

      ‘I smile every day while coolly evaluating my business model,’ she replied, smiling coolly. ‘I remain 100 per cent optimistic even in a crisis while being decisive enough to act as required.’

      Was she ruthless? the interviewer asked.

      ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You have to be tough to succeed.’

      Even as she said it she regretted the way she sounded – matter-of-fact, unthinking, as if nothing bothered her. She tried immediately to laugh and find common ground with the interviewer, a young woman in her mid-twenties. But as Yinghui joked about things in the news – celebrity gossip, cute pop singers, the latest films – she could feel the journalist withdrawing behind the safety of a polite smile, the gulf between them widening. She felt old, her laugh sounded fake and robotic; the girl merely smiled and listened as Yinghui’s jokes became more and more risqué.

      That interview sealed her growing reputation in more ways than one. Her image hardened into this: a bold businesswoman, certainly; but also a super-efficient, humourless automaton who would coldly plunge a knife into you, but she wouldn’t bother to do it in your back, she’d stick it in your chest. She saw this written in a ‘joke’ email circulating in her office, copied to her by mistake. Ultrawoman, Dragon Queen, Terminatress, Rambo – these were some of the nicknames she discovered as she scrolled down the email chain, which was full of comments on her boring suits and severe hairstyle – ‘like a rural Party official dressed for an interview with Hu Jintao’, someone joked. Some months later, at a cocktail party thrown by an American law firm, she heard one Western man say to another, ‘Hey, look, there’s that Chinese lesbian.’

      She had got used to having her hair short – it had been her style for almost twenty years, ever since university days. There was a time when people found the look charming and gamine, like Jean Seberg in À Bout de Souffle, from which Yinghui first got the idea. She didn’t think she’d changed much since then – she didn’t look very different from the Yinghui she saw whenever she looked at her college photos – but she wondered if she was getting a bit old for the hairstyle now. No woman in Shanghai had short hair – they all seemed to have long glossy locks that fell to their shoulders or were gathered in a dramatic pile on their heads in the style of air hostesses. She began to grow her hair out, but was frustrated by how long it took. At first it became thin and shabby, like a scarecrow’s, then thicker but still messy, like a schoolboy’s. When, finally, it reached a decent length, her hairdresser said, ‘Don’t expect me to perform miracles.’

      She began to dread the social functions that were becoming an increasing necessity in her professional life: a thrusting entrepreneur had to go out and be seen, but a single, always unaccompanied woman of thirty-seven was, in Shanghai, an invitation for people to comment. The locals had names for women like her, whom they considered sadly past their prime. Shengnü, Baigujing – that sort of thing. Sometimes she wondered if she really was that: a leftover woman, the dregs; or a shaggy monster waiting to be slain by the Monkey God.

      ‘Style issues.’ That was the phrase her friends used to describe what her new priorities should be. She needed to find a look that projected an image: someone effortlessly successful, who had accomplished all that she had while remaining gentle and feminine – a real Chinese woman. She wanted to ask what a real Chinese woman was, whether in some way she differed from a real Indian woman or a real American woman. And if she wasn’t a real Chinese woman, what was she – a fake one?

      These new concerns – style issues – were not a welcome addition to her list of considerations. She woke every morning at 6 a.m., had a glass of fruit juice, then went for a forty-five-minute run on the treadmill. After a breakfast of soy protein and mixed berry fruitshake she would head down to the office and begin to deal with phone calls and emails before the first meetings began to force their way into her day. In a city where lunch breaks began religiously at 11.30 a.m., she rarely had lunch unless she had arranged a business meeting at a restaurant. Most of the time she would work through midday and simply forget to eat. Afternoons were reserved for visiting her various businesses, spending time chatting to the staff in the stores, gauging their morale and energy levels – the little human touches that made her a good employer. The evenings were nowadays taken up with entertaining or being entertained, which she neither enjoyed nor disliked. She would get home at eleven and answer any outstanding emails on her BlackBerry while in bed, in the few moments other people might have spent reading glossy magazines to ‘wind down’. At precisely midnight she would put the light out and swiftly fall asleep, rarely allowing the thoughts of her day to overspill into her slumber.

      Three times a week she went for Power Yoga at a studio in Xintiandi, never speaking to the other women who had time