How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

FOUR AVOID IDEALISTS

SURELY IDEALS, TRANSCENDING AS THEY DO PUNY humans and repositing meaning in vast abstract concepts instead, are by their very nature anti-self? It follows therefore that any self-help book advocating allegiance to an ideal is likely to be a sham. Yes, such self-help books are numerous, and yes, it’s possible some of them do help a self, but more often than not, the self they help is their writer’s self, not yours. So you’d do well to stay away, particularly if getting filthy rich tops your list of priorities.

What’s true of self-help books is equally, and inevitably, true of people. Just as self-help books spouting idealism are best avoided, people so doing should be given wide berths too. These idealists tend to congregate around universities. There they find an amenable environment of young, impressionable, malcontented, and ambitious individuals, individuals who, were they legends of yore instead of still-pimply and poor-personal-hygiene-sporting men and women in contemporary Asia, would be dashing off to slay dragons and triumph over genies, individuals, in other words, who give corporeal form to the term sucker.

You have, as was perhaps to be expected, fallen in with university idealists yourself. You sit at this moment on a narrow, lumpy bed in a hostel entirely appropriated by members of your organization, like a city block by a gang. Your hostel leader packs as you speak. He is a big man, tall as well as broad, with luxurious facial hair gone prematurely gray and the flattened features of a boxer.

“Where?” he asks you.

“Behind the space sciences building.”

“How many of them?”

“Four. First years, I think.”

“And you’re sure it was hash?”

“I’m sure.”

“We’ll deal with it when I get back.”

Sweat drips from you both. The electricity is out, and deprived of a fan the normally stifling room bakes in the heat like a charcoal-fired clay oven. Mosquitoes are rampant, having entered through the unrepaired mesh that now only partially covers the windows. You slap one feasting on your forearm as the hostel leader puts a pistol in his duffel bag and zips it shut.

Your father was adamant that you complete secondary school, even though you struggled to wake in the mornings after nights spent delivering DVDs. He recognized that in the city manliness is caught up in education. Burly though he is, your father had spent a working lifetime in the service of employers who, were the world a festival of unarmed banditry, he would have beaten, bound, and relieved of their possessions in a few quick minutes. He understood that his employers benefited from two things he lacked, advanced schooling and rampant nepotism. Unable to give his children the latter, he did all he could to ensure that at least one of you acquired the former.

Yet university is no easy proposition for a young man from a background such as yours. Nepotism is not restricted to swaggering about in its crudest, give-my-son-what-he-wants form. It frequently assumes more cunning guises, attire, for example, or an accent. Despite your previous academic results, and your familiarity with a wide range of personal styles and affectations from film, there was no hiding from the fact that you were the son of a servant. No soiree invitations awaited you, no rides in shiny new cars. Not even a cigarette shared among a half-dozen old friends on the university steps, for none from your school gained entry here save you.

State-subsidized though it may be, your university is exquisitely attuned to money. A small payment and exam invigilators are willing to overlook neighborly cheating. More and someone else can be sat in your seat to write your paper. More still and no writing is needed, blank exam books becoming, miraculously, a first-class result.

So you have grown a beard and joined an organization. As you speed away from the meeting with your hostel leader, other students avoid your gaze. No curious glances greet the sight of you and your bicycle, unusual on a campus where almost everyone without personal motorized transport travels by bus. The heat of the city, and its sprawl, have conspired to throw pedal power into disfavor among university types. But you are accustomed to it from your former job, and you value the exercise.

Compared with most of your comrades, you are more serious about your studies. You are also more sturdy and less easily frightened, and therefore better than most in a scrap. Many of your organization’s leaders are in their late thirties, having ostensibly been students at the university for almost as long as you have been alive. In that respect, it is not your intention to follow in their footsteps. But you do relish the nervousness the sight of you now instills in wealthier pupils and corrupt administrators.

Your organization is, like all organizations, an economic enterprise. The product it sells is power. Some thirty thousand students attend your university. When combined with those at other institutions around the city, the street-filling capability of these young people becomes formidable, a show of force in the face of which unwanted laws, policies, and speech must tremble. Political parties seek to harness this with on-campus offshoots, of which yours is one.

In exchange for membership, you are given a monthly cash stipend, food and clothing, and a bed at the hostel. You are also given protection. Not only from other students, but from university officials, outsiders, and even the police. Pedaling down the streets of the city now, you know that you are not an isolated and impoverished individual, weak prey for the societally strong, punishable with a slap for being involved through no fault of your own in an accident between your bicycle and a car. No, you are part of something larger, something righteous. Something that is, if called upon to be, utterly ferocious.

As you ride you see the pretty girl on a billboard. She is modeling jeans. She poses as one of three young people, two female and one male, the others leaning their backs against each other and presenting their sides to the viewer, and so giving the impression to you of being a couple, while the pretty girl walks alone, perhaps signifying that she is single. This giant image creates conflicting emotions in you. You are struck, as always, by her beauty, and you are glad to be able to see her. You have heard through neighborhood rumor that she has split from the man she ran away with, and this composition, which creates the sense that she is available, is pleasing to you. But you also feel a stab of loss. The mobile number you had for her was immediately disconnected upon her departure, and you have not spoken to her, or seen her in person, since.

The pretty girl has finally succeeded in securing a place of her own, a room in an apartment she shares with a singer and an actress, both women in circumstances not dissimilar to hers. The marketing manager has been left behind, and she is now in an on-and-off relationship with a photographer, a long-haired fellow with an expensive motorcycle, who is thought by some to be bisexual. The pretty girl makes a modest living off print and runway work, having yet to establish what is known in her business as a name. At this very instant, recently awoken, and after skipping her lunch, she stands up in her lounge and takes a drag on a menthol cigarette, gazing out her window at scattered clouds bloodied by dust.

Beneath those clouds you dismount. You have been summoned to your home by your father because your mother is unwell. Your sister is again pregnant, so she cannot be here, but your brother and his wife have come. The unsightly bulge at your mother’s throat upsets and shames her.

“If it weren’t for my tits,” she says, “everybody would think I’m a frog.”

Despite her condition, the forcefulness in her eyes is undiminished. Unfortunately, much time has been wasted. Her normally robust health predisposed your mother to ignoring her symptoms. A neighborhood peddler of powdered herbs then fed her his concoctions for months, to no positive effect. The so-called doctor thereafter retained began a course of treatment that was halted only when it was discovered by you, chancing one day to watch him actually administering it, to consist entirely of saline injections and analgesic pills.

Your father has supplicated the matriarch of the family that currently employs him, a formerly tight-fisted widow who after her husband’s passing has begun to engage in a measure of philanthropy, and she has agreed to intervene by arranging a trip to a private hospital.

The matriarch arrives outside your home in her car. She does not step out or open her door. She does not roll down her window. Your mother and sister-in-law are borne beside her on the rear seat, your father in front with the driver. You and your brother travel separately by bus, rejoining them in a hospital waiting room.

“Why are they here?” the old lady asks your father.

“These are my sons.”

This seems to have little impact.

Your father adds, “This one’s at university. He’ll understand what the doctor says.”

The old lady scrutinizes you, taking in your beard, your attire. She addresses your father again, “Only one of you will come inside.”

“Him,” your father says, indicating you.

The doctor is a plump, serious woman your mother’s age. Her diagnosis upon examination, confirmed by test results at your second visit a week later, is papillary thyroid cancer. She explains that it is eminently treatable if dealt with early and appropriately. In your mother’s case the opportunity to treat it early is long past, but surgical removal of the thyroid still carries hope.

“How much will this cost?” the matriarch asks.

“Including medicines, anesthesia, and recovery?”

“In a communal ward.”

The doctor specifies a figure greater than your father’s annual salary.

“And without the surgery?” the matriarch asks.

“She’ll die.”

The matriarch considers. You watch your mother. She stares fixedly ahead.

“Very well,” the matriarch says.

The doctor silences a ringing mobile in the pocket of her smock. “Then there’s ongoing treatment. Hormones, radiotherapy.”

“That will be her family’s responsibility. Is it likely the surgery alone will cure her?”

“It’s possible.”

“Good.”

“But this is an advanced case. We’d normally expect to administer radioiodine a few weeks later, then…”

“Please explain all that to her family.”

The doctor comes outside and does so. Your father looks at you repeatedly, and each time you nod. He is tearfully grateful to the matriarch for agreeing to pay for the surgery. He smiles and blinks and shifts his weight. He bows at the neck to her, again and again, a gesture like a nervous tic. You have not seen him in the presence of one of his employers since you were a child. To observe him like this disturbs you.

But you are struck most by your mother’s expression. She has until now utterly refused to believe that she will not soon return to health.

“It won’t be painful,” you whisper to her. “They’ll put you to sleep.”

“I’ve pushed four of you out between my legs,” she whispers back. “I can handle pain.”

You smile, but only briefly, because looking at her you realize she is certain for the first time that her ailment will kill her.

Relations between your father and you have been tense, disapproving as he does of your beard and the organization you have joined. But over the following days he comes to lean on you heavily. There is deference in the way he watches you listen to a nurse or speak to a pharmacist or fill out a hospital form. He has never been a talkative man, but when you were younger he could be expressive physically, and he reverts to that mode of communication. He puts his arm around you. He pats your back. He ruff les your hair. These gestures feel good, even though it is strange that the man performing them has become shorter than you.

Your mother is taken home from her surgery alive. She is perplexed by her wounded status, like a soldier who has been shot but as yet sees no blood. The trauma her body sustained in the operating theater leaves her weak, and because the extraction of her thyroid and her lymph nodes involved the disassembly of considerable portions of her neck, she finds it difficult to speak. She is thus doubly disarmed, of her physical vitality and of her powerful tongue, and when not exhausted she is baffled, and at times angry.

Your family insists on maintaining that all will be well, with or without radiotherapy. You pretend to agree, but you also decide to approach your hostel leader for funds. He has just returned, his whereabouts while away a secret, and you find him in his room, reclining in torn socks upon his sweat-stained mattress.

“I need money,” you say.

“That’s a funny greeting, little brother.”

“I’m sorry. My mother’s sick.”

“How much do you need?”

You name the figure.

“I see.” He strokes his jaw slowly.

“I know it’s a lot…”

“It is a lot. But I think we can help you.”

“Thank you.”

“You should take her to one of our clinics.”

“Our clinics?”

“Yes.” He watches you. He has what should be a benevolent smile but his face remains impassive. You have seen him smile this way after breaking a man’s nose.

“She’s been treated at a private hospital. It’s very good.”

“Our clinics are very good. What’s her illness?”

“Cancer.”

“I’ll make a few calls. Find out where she should go. Tell them to expect you.”

You know better than to argue.

In the evenings you ride your bicycle to your home, staying with your parents until it is time for them to attempt to sleep. You do not wish to burden them with the costs of your meals, so you continue to board at the hostel, and besides, your membership of the organization is an occupation for which you are paid, if modestly, and on which your performance is assessed. Now in particular it is important that you be seen to be doing your job well. You attend meetings, read the organization’s literature, and keep your eyes and ears open, as you have been instructed to do. But your thoughts wing their way to your mother.

Later that week you have the good fortune of again catching a group of students furtively smoking hash in a shed behind the space sciences building. You inform your leader, who tells you to accompany him to the scene. As you walk he looks around pleasantly at the plum-headed green parrots chattering in the treetops. You suspect he is carrying his gun.

He greets the smokers. There are five of them and two of you, but they appear very frightened.

“This is not good, my brothers,” your leader says.

“What, sir?” one of them asks. He is a lanky fellow with sideburns and a soul patch, his T-shirt suggesting an affinity for heavy metal.

Your leader cuffs him across the face and continues without raising his voice, “These drugs are forbidden. They will make you weak. You’re intelligent boys. You should know that.”

All five nod vigorously.

Your leader spreads his arms. “This won’t happen again?”

He is assured that it will not.

The following day your leader gives you the details of a clinic. It is just outside the city, or at least outside what is currently thought of as the city, even though roadside urbanization links its location to the metropolis like the arm of an octopus. You and your mother journey there by bus. The clinic is a low building, almost equal in footprint but not in height to the place of worship that sits beside it. Its clientele is poor, and it utterly lacks the computers and air-conditioning, or for that matter the clean walls and floors, of the private hospital.

The doctor you are taken to see examines your mother quickly, looks at her test results, and shakes his head. “We can’t help her,” he says to you.

“You don’t treat cancer?”

“Sometimes. Surgically. But we don’t administer hormones or radiotherapy.”

“What should we do?”

“You should pray. It’s out of your hands. The thyroid has been removed. She might be fine.”

Your mother is quiet throughout, as she tends to be in her interactions with medical professionals. They are unusual in their capacity to cause this behavior in her. Their power to kill in the future by uttering mysterious words today robs her of her confidence and she, a customarily confident woman, resents this. She longs to resist them but has no idea how to do so.

For a time, your mother’s condition seems neither particularly good nor bad. The wound of the surgery heals, darkening and puckering under its protective dressing of gauze. She endures headaches stoically, refusing for the most part to admit to them but unable entirely to mask in her eyes signs of the discomfort they cause. She also has muscular twitches, little spasms thrusting beneath her shawl like fish feeding below the surface of a pond. You recognize these from your online investigations at the university computer center as being symptoms of her thyroid hormone deficiency.

Eventually your father beseeches his employer for further assistance. But the matriarch explains to him that life is one long series of illnesses, that she has intervened to save his wife, successfully and at great expense, but cannot be asked to keep intervening, again and again, for where would it stop, she is not made of money, and in the end, as she knows only too well herself, certain things are up to fate, and we can struggle, but fate is fate, so it would be best for him and his family to do what they can, since it is after all their responsibility, and to accept that she has already helped them more than anyone could reasonably have expected that she would.

In the coming months your mother’s suffering is extreme, her cancer having metastasized to her bones and lungs. This is accompanied by a transformation in her appearance and personality. She is gripped by fear, surprised both by her unyielding attachment to life and by the failure of her imagination to conceive of a proud ending to it. Her death, in the absence of modern palliative care, is preceded by agony, only partially mitigated in her final fortnight by street heroin procured by your brother and administered by your father through slender, long-filtered women’s cigarettes, from which your mother, wheezing, attempts to inhale in tiny gasps.

Your sister arrives from the village to comfort her. Neither woman has previously thought of your sister as your mother’s favorite, that honor being yours, but it is to your sister that your mother turns most naturally at this time, perhaps because she is her eldest, or because they are both women, or because your sister is the only one of her children to herself be a mother, and in your sister your mother perceives echoes of her own mother, whom she last saw the same age your sister is now, when your mother was a little girl. In the moment she ceases to live, your sister is holding your mother’s hands, your mother like an infant struggling to take its first breath as it transitions from aquatic life to terrestrial, but in reverse, with her lungs filling with water, and the breath never coming.

As you and the men of your family carry her white-shrouded body on your shoulders to the open, dusty pit of her grave, you are struck by how light she is. The speed of her progression from solid heartiness to ephemeral fragility has been so strange as to be almost fantastic. Rose petals are thrown, incense lit, entreaties to the divine offered, and then those of you still living return to your lives.

At the university, members of your organization urge you not to mourn too much or for more than the prescribed period. They say that to do otherwise is to reject what fate has decreed. Instead they tell you to focus your energies on the tasks you are assigned, to recognize your comrades as your true family, and to act through the organization to fulfill your destiny as your mother has fulfilled hers. But these suggestions strike you as scripted and uncompelling, and moreover in your current introspective and melancholy state your appetite for the food, clothing, and belonging that the organization offers, and for the protection that it claims to offer, is significantly diminished.

Your leader begins to watch you, then tells those he trusts most among your comrades to watch you as well. He is troubled by your apathy and listlessness, by the note of cynicism you inject into conversations and meetings. You are careful never knowingly to provoke him, but he is aware of the negative influence you have begun to assert when you think him out of earshot. It does not take him long to gather evidence sufficient to issue you with a stern and possibly, given his volatility, painful reprimand, but when he dispatches his deputy to bring you to him, you are nowhere to be found.

Your father has taken your mother’s passing hard, but has refused to accompany your sister back to the village or to stay for a time with your brother. He instead continues with his job, traveling to the matriarch’s residence in the mornings and returning home at night. It is not your intention, when you move in with him, to stay permanently, yet as the days go by you show no interest in resuming your studies, and after a while you begin to hunt for a job.

One afternoon, as you ride your bicycle in pursuit of employment, you glimpse what you think is a familiar face in a small battered car stopped at a red light. You look closely and are certain that yes, it is the pretty girl. She rides in the driver’s seat, alone, her face covered with thick makeup from a shoot. You smile and wave, but she does not see you, or if she does, then she does not recognize you, and when the light changes she careens off on her way.

It is perhaps not that night, but certainly that week, that you sit yourself down at a neighborhood roadside stall and ask a wrinkled old man with hennaed hair and a cutthroat razor finally to give you a shave.