Five Star Billionaire: A Novel by Tash Aw Read Free Book Online

familiar, almost reassuring. It was always like this: Whenever a bigproject was on the table, he would slip easily into the grinding nature of this routine, finding comfort in the constancy of his fatigue. When he woke up each morning, he could feel the puffiness of his eyes, knew that they would be bloodshot; his breathing would already be desperate, the air feeling thin in his lungs. His limbs would be heavy, but after a shower and a double espresso he would feel better, though he would never satisfactorily shake the mild headache that was already descending on his skull, already escalating into a migraine. He would work through it; it wasn’t a problem.
    Besides, he didn’t have a choice. There was a problem with the deal. All the arrangements that had been slotting obediently into place just before Christmas were now looking shaky. Someone was refusing to take a bribe—an official in the municipal urban-planning department, a mid-ranking engineer who had found an irregularity in the paperwork, a discrepancy, it seemed, between the proposed project and the preliminary drawings. More buildings would have to be demolished than had been declared in the proposal, and this was a problem because many of those buildings were of the local vernacular style. This engineer—a glorified technical clerk—was resisting the pressure placed on her by her superiors, most of whom were sympathetic to the Lim family venture. It was awkward when someone acted out of principle; it would take more than money to solve the impasse. And now the delay was leading to further complications: Another party was interested in the piece of land, and there was talk of an imminent bid to rival theirs.
    He pressed for emergency meetings with high-ranking officials for whom he had bought Cartier cigarette lighters and weekend trips to the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. There was nothing they could do for the moment, they claimed: His project had to work its way through the system; there was a formal procedure, which they couldn’t alter, it would just take a bit of time. Each official he spoke to reassured him gently without committing; they were all sure the other bid would come to nothing. They said this in a way to suggest that they would do something to prevent it, but now he was not so sure. He was not sure about anything in Shanghai anymore.
    In the meantime, his secretaries began to speak of an Internet campaign—a blog site entitled “Defenders of Old Shanghai.” They showed him pages and pages of angry commentary under the discussion thread:
Save 969 Weihai Lu from destruction by foreign companies!!
It was full of accusations that wildly exaggerated the effect of the project on the existing buildings, so, using the pseudonym “FairPreserver,” he personally wrote replies to the most outlandish claims. It was not true that the Lim family company was made up of uncaring capitalists wanting to take advantage of China, he said; he had heard from insiders that they cared greatly about history and would do everything they could to preserve what they could. They had a long record of restoring heritage buildings and would never dream of destroying anything the city deemed to be important. They were concerned about the lives of the common people and always sought to be considerate and fair when dealing with property belonging to people of modest means, never forcing anyone to move against their will and always providing compensation where necessary.
    HAHAHAHA
, came the first reply, within minutes of his post.
What a joke, are you paid by the Lim family to say these things???
    Everything he argued was met with contempt, but still he battled on. No, it was not true that the Lim family had made their money by kicking people off their land in Malaysia; no, they were not going to do the same here. He began to spend hours each day posting replies on the blog site, rushing back from meetings to check what had been said in response to his posts and to write