Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

one bit.’

      ‘You too,’ Yinghui lied. Up close, she could see the lines drawing down on either side of his mouth, the dark circles that shadowed his slightly bloodshot eyes. His skin seemed dry and brittle. When he smiled she saw vestiges of the person she had known – a young, physical man with a full, open face. The same features were now touched with a certain hollowness, a glimpse of what he might look like as an old man. ‘So what brings you to Shanghai – don’t tell me, family business?’

      ‘What else is there in my life?’ His laugh was rehearsed, mechanical, and it made him seem tired, not happy. He looked at her with a neutral expression; she searched for traces of shock or surprise in his reddened eyes, but could discern nothing. ‘It’s a real surprise seeing you here. I was just looking at the list of nominees for the awards, and when I saw your name I thought, “No way, that can’t be the same person I knew.” A businesswoman? I never thought that was possible. Amazing.’ Yinghui thought he was going to follow up with questions about her life – how she had arrived in Shanghai, the nature of her business – but he merely continued to stare at her in a blank, awkward manner, exactly the way she remembered from all those years ago.

      ‘Stranger things happen in life,’ she said, filling in the silence at last. ‘It’s not exactly the Virgin Birth, you know. Anyway, how is, um, how is your brother?’ she asked. ‘I read about CS’s wedding about five, six years ago – it looked very luxurious. I knew the bride at school. She was in the year above me. And your parents, still glamorous as ever?’

      ‘I believe all is well with them.’

      ‘I read about your family’s business in the papers – not that I was looking out for it or anything, I just read an article by chance. Things must be tough.’

      He shrugged. ‘It’s a global crisis, isn’t it? It’s tough for everyone – though you seem to be doing pretty well.’

      A young woman appeared at his side and slid her hand around his waist, inviting him to do the same; but she was looking away from him, towards something behind Yinghui’s back. There was a sudden burst of camera flashes around them, two or three photographers taking pictures of the couple. Yinghui stepped back and watched them strike poses as they faced the cameras – he stiffly, his new companion sinuously and expertly. Yinghui recognised her from magazines she’d read in the hairdressers – a local actress on the verge of stardom. She certainly did not have style issues. From a distance they made a handsome couple, Yinghui thought, and she could already envisage the photos in the magazines: a perfect union of modern Chinese beauty and old overseas Chinese money. The lines of his drawn, tired face would not be visible, and the readers would only see his good cheekbones, his perfect bearing and casual elegance – the sort of thing that could only have been produced by generations of good breeding.

      He turned to look at Yinghui, mouthing the word ‘Sorry,’ and she mouthed back, ‘No problem.’ She hung about for a while, wondering what to do. Should she slip away in a dignified manner without a proper goodbye, or continue waiting for him, the feeling of being superfluous mounting with every second? She had just about decided on the former when she was suddenly seized by a need to talk to him – to tell him things. She felt a rush of unaired grievances welling up in her chest, pushing up into her throat; the need to vocalise them took her by surprise, shocked her. She wanted to sit him down, face to face, and speak at him. She didn’t need him to reply, she merely needed him to be physically present while she said her piece. He could listen passively, unabsorbingly, and she wouldn’t care, but she needed to catch hold of him.

      This was ridiculous, she thought, just ridiculous. It was over fifteen years ago – what did it matter now? She was an entirely different person now. The quick flash of irrational hatred that she felt for him began to subside. He was a few years older than she was, a man slipping surely into middle age; he had his own problems. She hadn’t felt even the slightest bit of malicious pleasure when she had read in the financial press about his family’s business going bust. She had felt almost indifferent, her emotional detachment tinged with pity – much as she was feeling now. Look at him, taking up with a trashy actress fifteen years younger than himself. It was sad. He was sad. Yinghui had barely known him in the first place.

      Never let the past affect how you perform. Every day is a new day. That was something else she’d said in that defining interview, so she ought to practise what she preached. She gathered herself to leave, and as she did so she dipped into her clutch bag for her business card – she was a consummate professional, and this was a professional setting. She reached across and handed it to him with both hands.

      ‘So sorry, but I have to rush off now. Good to see you again, a real surprise. Here’s my card if ever you need to get in touch.’

      He accepted it, also with both hands, and she realised that the formality between them was entirely appropriate: they were strangers to each other now. ‘Wonderful,’ he said, slipping the card into his pocket. ‘Great. I will call you.’

      But she knew, as one always does in these situations, that he would not call her.

      As she sat in bed that night she allowed herself one minute to remember how Justin CK Lim and the rest of his family had looked fifteen years ago, how they had behaved.

      Just one minute; and then she would put them out of her mind.

      She checked her BlackBerry, scrolling through the emails that had come in that day – all the fascinating projects she was going to begin in the weeks, months and years ahead.

       How to Manage Time

      When I was thirteen, I was sent away to live with relatives in the far south of Malaysia, at the opposite end of the country from where I had been born. Do not be alarmed – this sort of displacement is quite normal amongst underprivileged rural families. My mother had died a few years previously and my father, unable to care for me properly, decided to ask my great-aunt to take me in. He himself had to move away from our village to seek work in Kota Bharu, where he lived in one room above a tyre repair shop. It made sense for him to be free of me.

      My great-aunt lived and worked on a small pineapple farm about thirty miles north of Singapore. The peaty soil of the region was famous for producing the best pineapples in the country, but ours were an exception to the rule, being meagre in size and acidic in taste. Nothing I did seemed to improve them – not the addition of buffalo manure or even the chemical fertilisers I found on a lorry parked by the road one day (there was no one about, and far too much fertiliser for any one person to use, so I helped myself). Even at that age I found the lack of a satisfactory solution very frustrating. Why couldn’t I make those pineapples big and sweet? I worked on the farm every day after school – it was my way of earning my keep and it kept me out of mischief, said my great-aunt. I do not have fond memories of this period, because it involved failure: the only failure I have encountered in my life thus far. To this day, even a brief encounter with hard, unripe pineapple (of the kind one routinely encounters on aeroplanes) is enough to send me into quite a rage.

      Life in the south was not a thing of beauty. The landscape lacked the soul of the north, the wilderness, the poetry. It is surprising how one’s childhood days can be troubled by the finer concerns of the spirit, filled as they are with the anxieties of youth. I was picked on at school, teased for my accent, which I was never fully able to lose – the unconscious warping of ‘a’s to ‘e’s or ‘o’s, the dropping of the ends of words, the addition of unfamiliar emphatic exclamations. My speech marked me out as foreign and, unsurprisingly, I became known as a quiet boy who said very little. I spent much time lurking in the background, so to speak, watching from the sidelines and never thrusting myself into the spotlight. By remaining in the shadows I learnt to observe the workings of the human psyche – what people want and how they get it. Everything that I was to achieve later in life can be traced back to this period, when I began my apprenticeship in the art of survival.

      All that earnest study of the cut and thrust of life meant that I did not have time to miss home. I did not suffer from any longing for my homeland in the north, with its strange, warm dialect and