Five Star Billionaire
They shuffled past Phoebe as the lift neared the ground floor, their shoulders and arms jostling her. She watched the numbers light up on the counter, and as she did so she felt as though her life was also descending: 4, 3, 2, 1. Soon it would be zero. As the lift doors opened she saw that it was tiny and filled with cigarette smoke, so she decided to take the stairs instead. She only had a small bag with her – she had learnt to travel light. Even so, she was soon out of breath because the stairs were steep and the windows that lined the stairwell were open and let in the dust and pollution from outside. There were pipes everywhere, and some of them were leaky. Where they dripped onto the floor there were crusted brown patches that looked like mushrooms sprouting from the concrete.
As she climbed the stairs she could see a giant construction site taking shape right next to the apartment block. Huge steel columns jutted out from the hole being dug for the foundations. Beyond it was a shopping centre, painted in coral pink and blue. In the daytime its neon signboard looked like scaffolding, and it was hard to read what it said: Shanghai Liteful Fashion Shopping Market. The signboards that covered its entire length advertised cheap clothing brands that Phoebe had never heard of, the colours gold and bright green and yellow. Nothing matched. The streets below were dark with a mass of people waiting for buses or emerging from the shopping centre – it must have been a wholesale market where you could buy anything from skirts to electronic goods to dried food very cheaply. Even from where she was she could hear the thumping of music and the cries of advertisements from loudspeakers. She paused and looked at the scene – at the thick, wriggling river of bodies so dense and colourless that it was hard to make out each individual human being. She could be anywhere in China, she thought. In fact, she could be in any no-value town in Asia. She had known so many of them, and they all looked like this.
But maybe the apartment would be nice. Maybe her view would not be of this no-place city she was now staring at; maybe she would look out at the river instead, and wake up every day to views of Shanghai.
She reached the top floor. The corridor was long, and stretched into the gloom – she could not see the end of it. There were dozens of doors, each one a separate apartment. She walked down the corridor, counting down the numbers until she found the right one.
Why are you always so doubtful? Phoebe Chen Aiping, do not allow yourself to be dragged down by your childish fears.
The door was protected by a metal grille, just like all the others. Phoebe reached between the bars and knocked on it, but there was no answer. She knocked again and waited. Perhaps Yanyan had unexpectedly been called out to an important meeting, even though she had said it was her day off. It was often like this with busy people who had important jobs; they had to respond to unpredictable events at short notice and be flexible – they were successful because they were able to deal with stressful situations using their skill and talent. The door opposite opened and an old woman peered out, glaring at Phoebe and surveying her from head to foot. Phoebe wondered how she appeared to the old woman, whether she looked acceptable, a decent upstanding person paying a visit to a friend, or whether she looked like someone with shady intentions, a potential criminal. She reached into her handbag for her phone and rang Yanyan’s number. She heard a ringing on the other side of the door, and a few moments later she heard the locks being undone from the inside, three of them, heavily bolted.
‘Why didn’t you call out and say who you were?’ Yanyan mumbled as she opened the door. ‘I thought you were the man coming for the gas bill again.’ She seemed sleepy, her hair was a mess, as if she had just woken up, and she was dressed in pyjamas even though it was nearly midday. She let Phoebe in and went to sit on her bed. Phoebe thought, maybe she was very tired from working hard at her important job. Yanyan was wearing fluffy slippers in the shape of smiling puppies, and her pyjamas were printed with sunny flower-faces that grinned at Phoebe. There was only one single bed in the room, and a small chair piled with clothes.
‘I’m so tired,’ Yanyan said, kicking off her slippers and leaning back against the wall with her knees drawn in to her body. It was true, she looked very haggard.
‘You must be working very hard,’ Phoebe said. She did not know what to do, whether to sit on the bed or not, so she just stood in the middle of the tiny room. Looking around, she saw a cooker on one side of the door and a washroom cubicle on the other, so small that she was not sure there was enough space to stand and have a shower between the toilet and the wall. There was almost nothing in the main room apart from a small TV balanced on some shelves that held cooking utensils and a jar of pumpkin seeds. On the wall hung one of those calendars that fast-food chains give away free of charge at the end of the year if you are lucky and are there at the right time. The pages were open at June, four months ago.
Yanyan shook her head and laughed. ‘I got fired. That’s why I need someone to share the rent.’
Phoebe looked out of the window and saw the same view she had seen from the stairs, the deep hole of the construction site, the broad avenue cut by concrete bridges, the multicoloured Liteful shopping centre, the masses of people dragging heavy black bags full of cheap goods – a nowhere, could-be-anywhere place.
‘I know the room’s a bit small,’ Yanyan said, ‘but we can shift that chair and the TV and roll out the mattress.’ She reached underneath the bed and attempted to drag something out. Phoebe could see that it was a thin mattress rolled up and stuffed under the low bed.
‘It’s OK,’ Phoebe said. ‘We don’t have to do it now.’ She calculated that with the mattress rolled out, there would be about a handbag’s width between it and the bed. She wondered how long ago Yanyan had lost her job, how long she had spent her days waking up at midday, how long she had let her hair get greasy and go unwashed, but it did not seem the right time to ask such questions.
Imagine your new splendid life and it will soon come true!
Phoebe thought, it would be so easy to walk out of this tiny room. She could make up an excuse and say, I’m late for an appointment, but thank you for showing me the room, I’ll call you later once I’ve decided. But she remained standing in the middle of the room, still clutching her bag. She did not know where else to go.
‘Hey, are you hungry? It must be lunchtime now,’ Yanyan said, looking around at the walls as if hoping to find a clock, but there wasn’t one.
Phoebe shook her head. ‘Don’t worry, please don’t go to any trouble. I’ve just arrived, I don’t want to inconvenience you.’
‘I’m starving – let’s have a simple lunch!’ Yanyan insisted, and went to the cooking area. Phoebe wondered what kind of meal she would prepare. Just thinking about lunch made her realise she had not had breakfast, and suddenly she felt so hungry her stomach began to swell with an ache she had never experienced before. As she listened to the sounds of Yanyan busying herself by the stove – water from the tap drumming against the bottom of an empty kettle, the clang of steel against steel, the click-clack of chopsticks, Yanyan humming a little tune – Phoebe felt tired and in need of rest. She tried to think of the number of times someone had cooked a meal for her since she came to China, the number of times she had sat in someone’s home eating a meal – but not a single instance came to mind. She sat down on the bed and found the mattress thin but firm. The window was open and she could hear the noise of the traffic, the non-stop beeping of scooters and the growl of buses. A 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 to people she barely knew, and she began to imagine what some of them might be like – rich, handsome, successful.
But very soon she realised that many of them were just high-school and college kids who were having some online fun – they said so themselves. They had no intention of ever meeting up. She became angry that they were wasting her time, so she learnt how to block them from contacting her. Young boys were no use to her; she needed to meet successful adults, she was not interested in spotty adolescents. Some men seemed OK when they first started chatting, but gradually Phoebe would discover something wrong with them.
To tell you the truth, I am married, so I am just looking for casual fun.
Actually, my age is 61, not 29, but I am still very energetic and strong.
Honestly, I really do drive a Ferrari and I live in a luxurious penthouse apartment, but you cannot visit me because my grandmother lives with me and she is disapproving of the girls I meet – you should not suspect me of being a factory worker!
My internet business is going so well at the moment but I have cashflow problems, could you lend me 2,000 yuan and I will pay you back on our first date?
I am not so interested in knowing what your favourite ice cream flavour is. Right now I am imagining lifting your skirt and touching your thighs higher and higher until …
Some men became angry when she didn’t reply immediately. They were pushy and said impolite things to her. But she couldn’t type very fast, and it was hard to keep so many chats going at once. She soon learnt to tell which men were educated, because they were the ones who typed their answers very quickly, but she also discovered that educated men often used the most obscene words. And then there were men who seemed nice at first, but soon it was clear that they were just out to trick her. Even though she did not know what they could possibly cheat her out of, she sensed that they were bad people who were up to no good. She heard stories all the time, tales of swindlers and liars – bamboozlers. She did not want to be one of those poor victims who got bamboozled.
One by one, Phoebe deleted her newly made friends, blocking them until her contact list showed only a couple of guys – guys who had just said hello, how are you, but had not yet had the chance to show how deceitful and black-spirited they were. She began to get random messages that didn’t even start with a greeting, just shameless suggestions for physical relations, most probably high-school students, but who knows, maybe they were frustrated middle-aged husbands and fathers. She knew it was because she had a nice profile picture, and decided she should replace it with something fake or a neutral image, like a cartoon character. A superhuman character with great strength, maybe. That would deter anyone with unsavoury intentions. She would become like so many other people in cyberspace, hiding behind an image of something other than themselves. But as she looked at the photo of herself she hesitated. Her eyes were glowing with laughter and promise, and the vegetation behind her was so lush it reminded her of her home. She could not bring herself to delete this image from her profile. When the rest of Shanghai looked at her, she did not want them to see just a grey shadow of a nobody; she wanted them to see her, Phoebe Chen Aiping.
She looked at her brand-new fake Omega watch. It was 6.55 p.m. She had not realised how late it was – she had spent nearly four hours in the internet café. She double-checked the time on the computer, just in case the watch she had been sold was a dud. It was still 6.55. She looked at the photo of herself one last time, just as another message popped up on screen. Little Miss, hello, I like your profile, would you like to chat? I think we might be compatible. She closed the page and signed herself off the computer.
When she got home the apartment was dark and Yanyan was asleep on the bed, wrapped in a thin blanket. The window was open and there was a slight chill in the room. Phoebe stood at the window and looked down at the blinking red and pale-gold lights of the cars below. The street stalls had their lights on now, the plumes of smoke from the little charcoal grills rising into the evening air.
‘Where have you been? You’re very late,’ Yanyan said quietly.
‘Trying to find work. Why are you in bed so early? It’s barely eight o’clock.’
‘I haven’t got out of bed all day.’
‘Oh, Yanyan,’ Phoebe sighed as she sat down on the bed next to her. ‘Not again. What are we going to do?’
As night fell, the giant hole in the construction site below the window looked black and infinite, as if it was ready to swallow up the cranes and bulldozers around it. Maybe she and Yanyan and everyone in their building would disappear into the hole too, Phoebe thought.
‘Come, I’ll make some dinner,’ she said.
Yanyan sat up and pulled her knees to her chest, shielding her eyes as Phoebe turned on the light. The single fluorescent strip bathed the room in a harsh white glow.
‘Only instant noodles again. Sorry,’ Phoebe said.
‘It’s better than eating a banquet on your own,’ Yanyan replied.
Later, once Yanyan had settled back in bed, Phoebe opened the Journal of Her Secret Self. She had not written in it for some days. She paused, knowing that Yanyan was not yet asleep – her breathing was even and almost soundless. Phoebe needed solitude when she wrote in her journal; she had become used to being alone when confronting her fears. It was easier that way, for she could be as weak and fearful as she wanted, and there would be no one to witness it. She turned off the light and waited in the darkness. When she heard Yanyan’s breaths turn heavy with dream sleep, she held her mobile phone next to her journal and began to scribble a few lines in the ghostly blue light.
Time is flying past you, Phoebe Chen Aiping, you know you are being defeated. You are a new person here in Shanghai, you must dare to do things the old you would not have done. Forget who you were, forget who you are. Become someone else.
6
Perform All Obligations and Duties with Joy
The weather turned colder and sharper as Spring Festival approached. Most days, Justin spent the morning staring at the ice that had formed overnight on the balcony, bizarre shapes hanging from the railings in jagged shards or clinging to the drainpipes like brilliant shiny fungus. The leaves of the potted plants were coated in ice – fat glassy bulbs that reminded him of Christmas decorations. On brighter days the sun would be strong enough to start shrinking the icicles, and he would stand at the window watching the water drip slowly onto the cement floor of the balcony. Most of the time, though, the ice would stay hard and unmoving, glinting ever so slightly despite the absence of light in the pale, snow-shrouded afternoon.