13 Mar 2013 12:02:52
Shanghai values are the values of a new age. Nobody wants to change the world – they only want to get out of it what they can, whatever it takes. With her "good fake" designer bags, stolen ID and forged early life in Guangdong, Phoebe's transformation is the most extreme. Before Gary became a Taiwanese pop star, he was just a poor kid from rural Malaysia with a bullying stepfather. Yinghui's drive masks a shameful family secret and a broken heart that has never quite healed. In Shanghai you can be whoever you want to be.
Some connections are rooted in a shared history: Justin knows Yinghui's story and her shaming past. But mostly the characters nudge and slide past each other, without knowing it. Phoebe keeps a picture of Gary on her wall and chats to him in a cyber room, unaware of his real identity. Phoebe gets a job managing Yinghui's spa. Justin encounters Phoebe's flatmate on one of his aimless evening strolls and finds in her someone else who is giving up on the dream of Shanghai. Soon Walter Chao is dating Phoebe and proposing a new business idea to Yinghui, a venture remarkably similar to the one that failed when she was a young woman in love. They celebrate in the same bar where Gary's drunken brawl was recorded on a dozen mobile phones. How many of these encounters are coincidental isn't always clear, but gradually the possibility of something new is offered to each person. To Gary, a new career. To Phoebe, a wealthy husband. To Justin, freedom from his domineering family. To Yinghui, a chance to make good on her youthful ideals.
Aw is a master storyteller and Five Star Billionaire can be read as The Way We Live Now for our times, for with the global triumph of capitalism, New York and London pale in comparison with the financial behemoth of Shanghai. Like Trollope's Augustus Melmotte, the mysterious Walter Chao has moved his base of operations to the new city: Phoebe, Yinghui, Gary and Justin stand in for the speculators and wealthy families ensnared by his plotting. At 400-plus pages, Five Star Billionaire is only half the length of Trollope's masterpiece. Still, it's a long book; and if there's a criticism to be made it is that the pace is too unvarying. Even where the narrative takes a dramatic turn, it is delivered in Aw's spare, fresh, cool, almost dispassionate prose, which though it succeeds in many ways somehow never quite leaves the page. Instead the characters drift towards their various destinies, caught in the whirlpool of Shanghai. There's more than a hint of fatalism in the air. Even when Yinghui is warned about her new business partner, she fails to conduct the most basic credit check on Walter Chao; she is too desperate, her dream too fragile.
Behind it all, perhaps rather predictably, is a tale of ruin and revenge. But it matters little, because by the time you work out that what you thought was going to happen is indeed going to happen, you realise that Five Star Billionaire is a gentler story than at first appeared: one of lives lost and found, of the transience of material success and the courage required to hope and to trust again, to forgive oneself and to believe in the possibility of love.
