Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

Author:Tash Aw [Aw, Tash]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9435-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

16.

BEWARE OF STORMS ARISING

FROM CLEAR SKIES

YINGHUI THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT WALTER HAD SAID ABOUT BANK loans amounting to respect. It seemed an odd concept to begin with, but gradually she began to see how true it was—that a person’s entire value to society could be measured by how much bankers trusted and respected them. What she actually contributed to the world was irrelevant. It had taken her more than a decade to come to this simple conclusion. Maybe her father had been right all along: She would never understand the way money worked.

As she prepared her dossier for the meetings she had arranged with the banks, she thought about how her father had spent all his life working to amass respect. Money was—it was clear now—a secondary consideration for him, despite what the newspapers had said in the aftermath of the tangled mess that followed his death. Yinghui had not been able to bear all that was said about him during that time; after the funeral, she had fled, first to Singapore, which wasn’t far enough away, then to Hong Kong, which had been lonely, and finally to Shanghai, where she ran little risk of running into anyone from home.

Like most people who craved respect from others, her father had led a life based on caution. It was a value he had sought to inculcate in his daughter, who, as it turned out, showed little signs of prudence even at an early age. Like other poor people who had become middle-class, he was always careful; and like other people who were born middle-class, she wanted to be anything but. In the main, though, Yinghui was (more or less) dutiful, respectful, and good at school. She helped her mother prepare meals and do the shopping at the market, where her mother tried her best to teach Yinghui the value of thrift—another attribute much prized by the new middle class. Even after her father had acceded to the ministerial position in which he was to end his life, her family continued to make a virtue of thrift, as if to emphasize their disadvantaged rural origins in the face of their growing urban wealth.

Dinners were the primary showcase of their carefulness with money—elaborate spreads consisting of five or six dishes when it was just the three of them on a weekday evening, the number of dishes doubling on a Sunday when they had a couple of guests. Always, there would be discreet (and sometimes not-so-discreet) mention of how cheaply those delicious meals had been prepared—a blithe commentary on the state of food prices, even in the presence of guests: how cheap spinach was that month; how they would usually have used choy sum but didn’t because the floods had made it expensive; how the kembong fish was very inexpensive but underrated; how the judicious addition of Chinese black mushrooms could make nondescript vegetables seem luxurious; how the free-range village chicken they were serving that evening was a rare treat, seldom seen in their household.

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