How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

ELEVEN FOCUS ON THE FUNDAMENTALS

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD CONSIDER AT THIS STAGE CONFESSING to certain false pretenses, to certain subterfuges that may have been perpetrated here, certain of-hands that may have been, um, sleighted. But I won’t. Not just yet. Though filthy richness is admittedly gone from your grasp, this book is going to maintain a little longer its innocence, or at least the non-justiciability of its guilt, and continue offering, through economic advice, help to two selves, one of them yours, the other mine.

As luck would have it, this advice is unaffected by the loss of your wealth, since it applies to those of modest means too. And the advice is this. Focus on the fundamentals. Blow through the fluff, see the forest for the trees, prioritize what’s core to your operation. Right now, in your case, that means cutting costs to the bone.

You have done so admirably well. At the two-star hotel that is your residence, you have negotiated a long-term, month-by-month room rental for less than half the standard rate, taking full advantage of both your willingness to pay cash and the fact that you once gave a job to the hotel manager’s late father, who described you with undying, referring of course to the sentiment, not the man, veneration. You also eat sparingly, your metabolism having slowed enough for you to make do with a single meal a day, you scrimp on transportation by using taxis instead of bearing the expense of owning and operating a car, and you avoid being saddled with hefty phone bills by conducting your weekly conversations with your son from an internet cafe. Thus the majority of your limited savings remains untouched, available for doctor’s visits, tests, and medications, and it seems not improbable that in the race between death and destitution, you can look forward to the former emerging victorious.

Your one indulgence is the serving of tea and biscuits you provide to your supplicants, without fail, in the cramped lobby of your hotel. The building itself is perhaps ten years in age, though it could equally easily be thirty, pressed between two other structures of similarly four-storied height, malnourished width, and indeterminate date of construction, on what was formerly an access road to a quiet market but now lies within the ever-expanding boundaries of a bustling and amorphously amoeba-shaped zone of commerce. Nearby, animals are slaughtered, pastries baked, high-fidelity speaker crossovers tweaked, fake imported cigarettes distributed, and blast-resistant window film retailed, the last with promises of free installation, a not insignificant plus, given that precise and labor-intensive squeegeeing is needed to expel unsightly air bubbles.

The clansmen who come to you are often, but not always, recently arrived from their villages, unskilled or semi-skilled hands in search of jobs in construction or transport or domestic service, and so they look around at the worn common areas of your hotel with awe, taking the mechanical door and steel buttons of its non-functional elevator and the daintiness of its teacups and saucers as confirmation that you are, as they have been told, an important man, an impression further reinforced by the fine tailoring of your clothes and the distinguished bearing that you, despite your age and setbacks, have mostly managed to retain. You help them as best you can, making calls, putting in a good word, and answering in painstaking detail their many questions.

But not all of your supplicants are rural youngsters. Some are city boys, first generation, as you once were, or second, with jaunty haircuts and savvy, quick-moving faces. Others are older, professionals, managers even, on occasion dressed in suit and tie. For these more urbane callers your abode is something of a disappointment, but their misgivings usually abate in conversation, when it becomes clear you are a man who speaks knowledgeably, and a generous listener too, albeit one slightly hard of hearing. They are eager to mine your network of business and government contacts, a diminishing vein you are nonetheless content to prospect on their behalf, and it is not altogether infrequent that you turn up a nugget of assistance.

You accept no financial reward for your contributions, no placement fees or referral tokens, nor do you hunger after the expressions of gratitude bestowed upon you. Your motivations stem from different sources, from lingering desires to connect and to be of use, from the need to fill a few of the long hours of the week, and from curiosity about the world beyond, about the comings and goings and toings and froings of that great city outside your hotel, in which you have passed almost the entirety of your life, and of which you once knew so much.

You hear reports that the water table continues to drop, the thirst of many millions driving bore after steel bore deeper and deeper into the aquifer, to fill countless leaky pipes and seepy, unlined channels, phenomena with which you are intimately familiar and from which you have profited, but which are now contributing in places to a noticeable desiccation of the soil, to a transformation of moist, fertile, hybrid mud into cracked, parched, pure land. Meanwhile similar attempts, both official and non, seem to be under way to try to desiccate society itself, through among other things creeping restrictions on festivals and the public pursuit of fun, with a similar result, cracks, those widening fissures evident between young people, who appear to you divided as never before, split into myriad, incomprehensible tribes, signaling their affiliations with an automobile sticker, a bare shoulder, or some arcane permutation in the possibilities for facial hair.

You often do not know, when you venture forth into the streets on your errands, who among them stands for what. Nor is it at all clear to you that they themselves, beneath the poses they strike, really know what they stand for either, any more than you did at their age. But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms. At times, watching the stares that follow a luxury SUV as it muscles its way down a narrow road, you are nearly relieved to have been already separated from your fortune.

If, while I write, I can’t be certain that you have had no inkling of your proximity to the pretty girl, still it stands to reason that this should be true. She resides about thirty minutes from your hotel as the crow flies, but since the urban crow tends to fly circuitously, and with many pauses, she may not be that far, or she may be much farther. She owns a small townhouse, of which she is landlady, renting her two spare rooms at below-market rates to a pair of women, one a singer, the other an actress, early in their careers and neither quite yet a success. Between her savings and this rental income, the pretty girl gets by.

Perhaps because of a persistent twinge in her hip, she ventures out less than she formerly did. She leaves most household chores to her factotum, a diminutive, middle-aged man who cooks, drives, shops, and occupies a servant quarter next to her kitchen. She does however make a daily round of her favorite park, walking slowly but erectly, in the evenings during summer and fall, and in the mornings during winter and spring, when she particularly enjoys observing the youthful lovers who gather there for hurried, furtive liaisons before they report to class or to work.

At home she watches movies and, especially, listens to the radio, often turning the volume high enough that it amuses her tenants, who might take a break from their busy lives to chat with her for a few moments as she nods her head to the beat and puffs along on her cigarette. Sometimes one of them will share with her their latest work, a video clip or demo of a song, but this is rare. She is never invited to a set or a studio. Her townhouse is at the end of a cul-de-sac, and from her upstairs lounge she can see all the way down her street, past a stretch of shops and restaurants, to a telecommunications center from which red and white masts soar mightily, towering above satellite dishes, like electromagnetic spars built to navigate the clouds. She bought her place for its view.

Hers is not by nature a temperament sympathetic to nostalgia, in fact the opposite. She refuses to visit the seaside metropolis where she spent so many productive years. Nor does she seek to scrape together the funds to retain, on a temporary basis, a new assistant who could translate and facilitate for her, making possible a final coda to her much-loved trips abroad. In her mind, her return to the region of her birth marked a decisive break from days gone recently by.

And yet, whether because of her advancing age or the strange echoes this city sustains through its associations with her childhood, she finds herself pulled into frequent and unexpected turns of thought, dampness on a fingertip used to wipe dew off a glass of water reminding her of a gentle and now-dead photographer, say, or a sudden breeze felt on her balcony conjuring up a beach party long ago. Present and alert in this moment, she, unaccustomedly, might well be lost to reverie in the next.

You reencounter each other at a pharmacy, a crowded micro-warehouse stacked with pallets not much bigger than matchboxes, mostly white, bearing text too minute to be legible, even while squinting, and, on occasion, iridescent seals of hologrammed authenticity that shimmer like fish in the light. You are progressing incrementally to the counter, buffeted by those who push forward out of line, reliant on strangers who acknowledge you and are good enough to wait. Ahead you see a figure turn after paying for her purchase, a figure you think you recognize, and you are seized by a powerful emotion. This emotion is akin to panic, and indeed you consider shoving your prescription back into your pocket and making for the exit.

But you stand your ground. As the figure approaches, she frowns.

“Is that you?” she asks, not for the first time in her life.

You lean on your cane and scrutinize the wizened woman before you.

“Yes,” you say.

Neither of you speaks. Slowly, she shakes her head. She rests her hand on yours, her skin smooth and cool against your knuckles.

“Do I look as old as you do?” she asks.

“No,” you say.

“I thought you were an honest boy.”

You smile. “Not always.”

“Let’s find a place to sit down.”

Near the pharmacy is a coffee shop, evidently part of a chain, and possessed of a franchise’s artificial quirkiness, its seemingly mismatched sofas and chairs and tables corresponding to a precise and determined scheme set forth in the experience section of a corporate brand guidelines binder. Its furniture and fittings evoke decades gone by. Its music, its menu, and, saliently, its prices are utterly contemporary. For affluent younger customers, the effect might be pleasant, transporting them from this street in this neighborhood to a virtual realm inhabited by people very much like themselves across rising Asia, or even across the planet. But for you, who remembers that a fruit seller occupied this particular property until a few months ago, the faux wornness of this establishment would be disorienting. Normally. Today you do not notice.

Over tea you and the pretty girl discuss what ex-lovers meeting again after half a lifetime usually discuss, namely your health, the arcs of your careers, shared memories, yes, this often while laughing, as well as your present whereabouts, and, in passing, so tangentially as merely to be grazed, whether you are currently single. Your waiter is courteous, seeing a pair of elderly people leaning forward, engrossed in conversation, which is, of course, what you see also, except that it is not all you see, for you see too, overlaid on the pretty girl’s diminished form, or perhaps rather flickering inside it, a taller, stronger, more zestful entity, happy in this moment, and able yet to dance in the moistness of an eye.

“How strange to be using the word retired,” the pretty girl says as she finishes her tea.

“We’re unemployed,” you correct her. “Sounds more alive than retired.”

“Are you looking for work?”

“No.”

“Retired, then.”

You pour two glasses of water.

“You should interview me,” you say, passing her hers. “And I’ll interview you. Then we’ll be unemployed.”

She takes a sip. “Only if neither of us gets hired.”

You call her the next day, and in the weeks that follow you spend time together, going to a restaurant for dinner one evening, on another converging in a park for a slow-moving stroll. You explore the city’s main colonial-era museum and its pungently aromatic zoo, attractions you last visited when your son was a schoolboy. At the zoo you are surprised by how inexpensive tickets are, and further by the size of the facility, which seems bigger than you recall, though you had expected the opposite to be the case. The pretty girl marvels at the aviary, you at hippopotamuses slipping daintily into a mud pool from the grassy banks of their enclosure. She draws to your attention the large number of young men who are here, their accents and dialects often hailing from remote districts. They call to the animals in amusement and wonder, or sit in clusters on plentiful benches, taking advantage of the shade. The zoo has signs listing the daily dietary intake of its most prominent residents, and occasionally a literate visitor is to be heard reading to his fellows the prodigious quantities of food required to maintain such and such beast.

In the pretty girl’s company, you give up a small degree of the physical isolation you had imposed upon yourself, venturing out into the city a little more, having, through the presence of a friend, greater reason to do so than you did before, and also, when part of a group of two people, being less afraid than when alone. Yes, the city remains intermittently perilous, in, for example, the slashing thrusts of its vehicles, the ferocious extremes of its temperatures, and the antibiotic resistance of its microorganisms, not to mention the forcefulness of its human predators, and particularly at your age you must stay on your guard. But you savor your tentative, shared reentry, and think that the city may not be quite so fearsome, that indeed, when gazed upon with the good humor that can come from companionship, significant swaths of it appear mostly navigable, at least for the present, while a measure of bodily vitality endures.

At times the pretty girl feels shocked looking at you, the shock of being mortal, of seeing you as a cane-propped mirror, of your frail and gaunt form’s inescapable contemporaneity to her own. These impressions tend to occur in the first moments of your encounters, when an absence of a few days has run itself like a soft cloth over her short-term visual memory. But quickly other data begin to accrue, likely starting with your eyes and your mouth, her image of you resolving itself into something different, something timeless, or if not entirely timeless, still beautiful, handsome to behold. She sees in the cock of your head your awareness of the world around you, in your hands your armored gentleness, in your chin your temper. She sees you as a boy and as a man. She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.

One night, after a movie in a theater that astonishes you with the size of its screen and the quality of its sound and the costliness of its popcorn, and also with the suddenness of the fight that breaks out among teenagers outside, in which you are knocked to the ground by mistake as a member of the crowd backs up, and you receive a bad bruise on your thigh, but nothing is broken, thank goodness, the pretty girl invites you over to her place. Her tenants grin as you enter, clearly delighted to see that their landlady has a gentleman caller, and with knowing glances make themselves scarce.

“Would you like a drink?” the pretty girl asks.

“I’m not supposed to,” you say.

“A half glass of wine?”

You nod.

She retrieves an opened bottle from the refrigerator. “Sit, sit,” she says, and pours for you both.

The two of you sip at your glasses. A silence descends.

“Should we just go to my room?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She leads you by the hand and shuts the door behind you. She does not turn on the light.

“One second,” she says, heading to her bathroom.

You worry about your balance in the darkness.

“Where’s the bed?”

“Oh, sorry.” She directs you with a palm at your waist. “Here.”

You sit down. The mattress is firm. You grope with your hand and, finding a wall, carefully lean your cane against it. A faint light emerges from beneath the door of the bathroom, and sounds emanate from within, scraping, running water, the flush of a commode. You need to use a toilet yourself, but you suppress the impulse. The pretty girl is gone for a while.

When she returns she sits beside you. You kiss. She tastes of mouthwash. She has changed into a nightie and through its fabric your hand can feel her ribs, her belly, the unbelievable softness of her breast like a second set of skin. She helps you undress. She tugs at you rhythmically, and fortunately you become hard, perhaps benefitting from the pressure of your full bladder on your prostate. She applies between her legs an ointment from a jar on her bedside table, and lies on her side with her back to your chest. You fumble a bit but are able to enter her. You move. She touches herself. You hug her with one arm.

Neither of you reaches your finish. You begin to deflate before that moment comes. But, I should add, you do reach pleasure, and a measure of comfort, and lying there afterwards, temporarily thwarted and a little embarrassed, you unexpectedly start to chuckle, and she joins you, and it is the best and warmest laugh either of you has had in some time.