Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

cool wind was blowing, making the room feel airy. She looked across at Yanyan, whom she had not yet had a chance to scrutinise – a tall, thin girl, scrawny, most would say, who walked with a stoop, which was a shame because her height would have given her a striking appearance were she not rapidly turning into a young hunchback. She could be beautiful, but instead she was mediocre. Maybe she would watch Phoebe and learn how to stand upright and keep her hair neat and stylish. Phoebe looked at Yanyan’s long, unwashed hair, which shrouded her cheeks messily, making her look like a child who had recently awoken from a bad dream.

      ‘Come, come, eat,’ Yanyan said, and sat down next to her. She handed Phoebe a plastic bowl of instant noodles, spicy seafood flavour. She had not torn off the wrapping properly, and when Phoebe brought the bowl to her mouth little bits of paper tickled her lips.

      ‘Hey, look!’ cried Yanyan. She held up a cheap plastic toy – a keyring with a small blue plastic cat attached to it. When she pulled at the chain the cat lifted a pair of chopsticks to its whiskery snout, greedily slurping some plastic noodles. ‘It came free with the packet of noodles. Here, take it – it’ll be your good-luck charm in Shanghai. It will help you get the best job in the world.’

      Phoebe took the blue cat and put it in her handbag. She did not want it, but she did not want to hurt Yanyan. She stirred her noodles with her chopsticks, watching the little bits of freeze-dried vegetables slowly uncurling. They all looked the same – she couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. From the construction site below, heavy works were starting up, and the deep booming sound of piledrivers resonated in her chest.

      She wrote in her journal: Wind and rain are raging, I am shaking and swaying, but I must recover, I will rise up.

      She went to the fake-goods market at Zhongshan Science and Technology Park, even though she’d heard it was cheaper to buy counterfeit products on the internet. The thing about luxury high-style goods was, you had to see what they were like in real life before knowing whether they would suit you; even she knew this. She spent a long time going from shop to shop, expressing interest in certain items before walking away, knowing that the same things would be on sale a few shops away, and that the shopkeepers would be forced to come running out to the street after her to offer her lower prices than their competitors. First she selected a purse made from glossy red leather with a gold clasp buckle, which even came in a box with the logo printed in gold above the words ‘Made in Italy’. When she was bargaining with the shopkeeper, she said to him, You are so unscrupulous, you dare to say this is made in Italy when everyone knows it’s fake, and the shopkeeper said, Little Miss, it’s the truth! Don’t you know, Italy is full of factories owned by Chinese people, and those factories are full of Chinese workers producing large volumes of luxury goods! Phoebe did not fully believe this – she could not imagine entire towns and villages in Italy full of Chinese people stitching clothes and handbags and having nothing to do with the locals – but maybe it was true, maybe she now owned a genuine foreign-manufactured luxury item. Next, she hesitated over a scarf with distinctive checks and some large shawls made from pure 100 per cent pashmina, and since winter was just around the corner she thought about buying a fashionable down jacket too, something in a bright shiny colour that would make her look energetic and sporty, and even give the impression that she had just come back from a holiday in an expensive snowy place like Hokkaido.

      Finally she chose the most important item, a handbag. This is how people would judge her. From afar they would notice what kind of bag she was carrying, and would decide if she was a person of class or not. She knew which kind of bag she wanted: it was the most desirable brand, but also the most illegal of all the counterfeit products. Some of the shopkeepers thought she was a spy for the trading office, and asked her many questions before admitting that they kept it in stock. The difficulty in purchasing this bag made her feel excited, as if she was buying something very rare and exclusive, even though it was a fake. Eventually one shopkeeper pushed aside a wall lined with shelves to reveal a smaller room hidden behind it, and behind this smaller room, which was filled with ordinary bags, there was another, even smaller room, and it was here that the bag she wanted was kept. There were two other women in that tiny room, examining the high-quality stylish bags with care. They were both executive-looking women wearing business clothes and carefully applied make-up, and being in that private space with them made Phoebe feel equally important. There was only one brand of bag in that room – the coveted LV brand – but in many styles and variations, the famous pattern and coloured monogram repeating all over the walls and surrounding her like the very air she breathed, making her feel slightly giddy. Phoebe took a long time before selecting the one she wanted, for even the fakes were expensive, and in the end she had to settle on the most inferior model and style. But it was still beautiful, she thought, as she walked out of the shop with it already on her shoulder. She had transferred some of the contents of her old bag into the new one, and discarded all the unwanted items in a bin just outside the shop. When she looked at some of the things she’d thrown away – the cheap dried-up lipstick, a cracked mirror, a worker’s pass from one of her old jobs in Guangzhou – she wondered why she had carried those dead objects with her for so long.

      She went to an internet bar and made herself new profiles on QQ and MSN so she could chat with people online – so she could chat with men. Searching her email attachments, she found a nice photo of herself. It had been taken in Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou, but in the background there were only trees and lakes, so no one would look at the picture and make the link: Guangzhou, factory worker, immigrant. She remembered that day well – she had just left one job and was about to start another, but she had two days off in between and also some money saved up. She had dressed in nice jeans and a colourful T-shirt and taken the subway to the park as if she was having a day out with friends, only she did not have any friends. She bought red-bean shaved ice and ate it while strolling around the artificial lakes, watching the artists painting watercolours of goldfish and hilly landscapes and oil portraits of Hollywood actors. There were couples and families everywhere, and although she was on her own she felt that she was one of them, that she was someone who had a past and a future – and that life was only going to get better, just as it would for everyone around her. Near the boating lake she found a spot to sit under some bamboo trees. She was on her own, but it was OK, she was happy. She took out her phone and held it at arm’s length, holding it up slightly so that she could look at it with a raised chin – it was better that way, as it made her neck look thinner. She took a photo, but it wasn’t so good, since she was squinting a bit because of the sun. She tried it again, but it didn’t work this time either. One of the old men who sold tickets for the rowing boats called out to her, asked if she wanted him to help her take a photo. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I won’t ask you to marry me in return!’

      He peered into the narrow screen, and Phoebe worried that he didn’t know how to work the camera. But as he held it in front of her he said, ‘This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school.’ It made her laugh, and in the photo she appears sunny-faced and natural, full of the promise of the bounteous years ahead of her.

      As she looked at the photo on the computer screen she knew it was just the right kind to have on her profile – taken by someone else, a friend on an outing, maybe even a boyfriend. It made her appear desirable, unlike the kind of blurry self-shot images where the person was always looking up at the camera, which instantly told the viewer: I have no friends. She wrote a few lines about herself, a ‘professional career-oriented young woman with experience of foreign work and travel’. She gave her true age and stated that she wanted to meet respectable, successful men.

      Within minutes of posting her profile she began to get requests from men who wanted to get to know her better. She was overwhelmed; she never imagined she could be so popular. Suddenly the whole of Shanghai seemed full of friends and potential partners, thousands of them. She began typing replies to the men she deemed the most suitable, her fingers moving across the keyboard trying to keep up with several conversations at once, but it was difficult, she was not used to typing so much and she knew she was making mistakes. Sorry for the delay in my replies, she typed as some of the men began to get impatient. It was thrilling to chat