How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

SIX WORK FOR YOURSELF

LIKE ALL BOOKS, THIS SELF-HELP BOOK IS A COCREATIVE project. When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo “Mama” looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo “Mama.”

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It’s in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it’s approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you’ll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading. And therein, as well, lies a pointer to richness elsewhere. Because if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, as we appear to have established that you do, then sooner or later you must work for yourself. The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.

In your case you’ve set up a small business, a workhorse S in the thunderous economic herd of what bankers and policy makers call SMEs. You operate out of a two-room rented accommodation you once shared with your father. Two rooms struck you as a well-earned luxury when he was alive. Now, were it not for the needs of your firm, they would have struck you as wasteful, and disconcerting besides, for even though you are a man in his mid-thirties, you have only recently been introduced to the types of silences that exist in a home with one occupant, and emotionally you stagger about this new reality like a sailor returned to land after decades at sea.

It is shortly before dawn. You sit alone on the edge of a cot that used to sleep your parents, rubbing the dreams from your skull as you listen to an oversexed neighborhood rooster crowing in his rooftop cage. You breakfast at a kiosk festooned with the logos of a global soft-drink brand, sipping tea and dipping your fingers into a plate of chickpeas. You are known to many of the men around you, and they nod in greeting, but you are not beckoned into any of the conversations taking place. No matter. Your mind is on the day’s work ahead, and as you chew and swallow you barely notice the tethered goat at your feet, with its jaunty, peroxide-bleached forelock, or the battle-scarred, toe-long beetle winding its way to a promising cat carcass.

You have used the contacts with retailers you forged during your years as a non-expired-labeled expired-goods salesman to enter the bottled-water trade. Your city’s neglected pipes are cracking, the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling, with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that, while for the most part clear and often odorless, reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery, and typhoid. Those less well-off among the citizenry harden their immune systems by drinking freely, sometimes suffering losses in the process, especially of their young and their frail. Those more well-off have switched to bottled water, which you and your two employees are eager to provide.

Your front room has been converted into a workshop-cum-storage depot. There, in sequence, are a pipe bringing in tap water, a proscribed donkey pump to augment the sputtering pressure from outside, a blue storage tank the size of a baby hippopotamus, a metal faucet, a lidded cooking pot, a gas-cylinder-fired burner to boil the water, which you do for five minutes as a general rule, a funnel with a cotton sieve to remove visible impurities, a pile of used but well-preserved mineral-water bottles recovered from restaurants, and, finally, a pair of simple machines that affix tamper-resistant caps and transparent safety wrapping atop your fraudulent product.

You are leaning over your technician as he conducts an experiment.

“It stinks,” you say.

He shrugs. “It’s fuel.”

“It’ll make our water smell like a motorcycle’s wet fart.”

He lowers the flame. “Now?”

“Too much soot. Turn it off.”

You look at the portable petrol stove he has borrowed, dull brass and round as the base of an artillery shell. A shortage of natural gas has yet again brought your operation to a standstill. Petrol, had it worked, might have been an affordable stopgap. But it has not worked. So you try to think of other options as you play with the thread around your neck, fingering the key to your bedroom, where sit your client list and register, a modest pile of cash, and an unlicensed revolver with four chambered rounds.

Your technician scratches his armpit pensively. “Maybe we skip the boiling today,” he suggests.

“No. We don’t boil, we don’t sell.” You know quality matters, especially for fakes. Shops would stop buying if their customers began falling sick.

Your technician does not question your decision. He is a bicycle mechanic by background, untrained in the nuances of business, which is why he works for you, and also because, as the father of a trio of little girls and the youngest son of a freelance bricklayer who died of exposure sleeping rough at too advanced an age, he values a steady income.

Were, uncharacteristically, your technician to press you to reconsider, you would likely respond by falling silent, waiting for the pause to grow uncomfortable enough for him to glance in your direction. You would then meet his gaze, holding his eyes until he flicked them floorward and increased the curvature of his spine, gestures which, among teams of humans as among packs of dogs, signify one mammal’s submissiveness to another. Mercifully, however, you probably would not sniff his anus or inspect his genitals.

Your runner arrives, announcing the good news that a nearby depot will be refilling gas cylinders for an hour later this afternoon, and also bringing with him the aroma of food, fried-bread lunch rolls sweating translucent their newspaper wrappings. The three of you eat together in fellowship, chatting among yourselves like siblings, which in a way you are, since these two are your clansmen, distant relatives bound by blood, and so yes, like siblings, except of course that when you tell these siblings to finish quickly, they must and do obey.

After the meal, you head to the depot to get in line. Your conveyance is a micro pickup truck older than you are, the side panels of its rear bed holed through in intricate, rusted filigree, but its noisy two-stroke engine rebuilt and reliable. You are at an intersection when your phone rings. Seeing who it is, you pull over, kill the motor, and answer.

“Are you free for dinner?” the pretty girl asks.

Her voice shifts your sense of place, rendering your immediate surroundings less substantial.

“Yes,” you say.

“You don’t need to know when?”

“Oh. When?”

“Tonight.”

You smile, hearing her smile. “Yes, I figured.”

“I’m in town. You can come to my hotel.”

That evening you get a haircut, opting for a buzz, which the barber claims is both the rage these days and guaranteed to flatter a man as fit as yourself. You purchase extravagantly priced tight jeans and a nylon jacket with the words “Man Meat” on the back from a boutique with impressive cars parked outside. At home you conclude the jeans are too short and you rush to swap them for a longer pair, but the assistant looks you over and, without pausing her online chat on the shop’s computer, refuses on the grounds that you have removed the tags.

You decide to wear them in any case, unfastening their top button, concealed beneath your belt, and pulling them lower on your hips. They squeeze up a small roll of your flesh, a mini-potbelly, and you wonder if it was a mistake to buy them. A fortnight’s wage outlay for two items of clothing does seem fiendishly unbalanced. But you are getting late, so now you must speed on to your rendezvous.

The hotel is the city’s most exclusive, its old wing temporarily closed and scaffolded since a massive truck bomb shattered windows and ignited fires inside, but its new wing, sitting farther from the street, already repainted and open for business.

After the attack, given the importance of the hotel as a meeting place for politicians and diplomats and businesspeople, and also because of its significance as the outpost of a leading international chain, a bridge with lofty, illuminated blue signage to the outside world, it was decided to push the city away, to make the hotel more of an island, insofar as that is possible in a densely packed metropolis such as this. Two lanes formerly intended for traffic have accordingly been appropriated on all sides. The outer of these is fenced with concrete bollards and filled with waist-high anti-vehicular steel barriers, like sharp-edged jacks from the toy room of some giant’s child, forming thereby a cross between a dry castle moat and a fortified beach meant to resist armored invasion. The inner lane, meanwhile, features gates, speed bumps, ground-mounted upward-looking CCTV cameras, and sandbag-reinforced wooden pillboxes the color of petunias.

Around this citadel, constricted and slow, traffic seethes. Bicyclists, motorcyclists, and drivers of vehicles with three wheels and four maneuver forward, sometimes bumping, sometimes honking, sometimes rolling down windows and cursing. Every so often their slow crawl gives way to a complete standstill as space is cleared for a bigwig to pass, and then looks of resignation, frustration, and not infrequently anger can be seen. It is from this snarled horde that, nearing the first checkpoint, you seek to detach yourself and enter.

The guard glances at your ride and asks what you want.

“I want to go inside,” you say.

“You? Why?”

“I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

“Really.”

He calls over his supervisor. The taillights of a sleek, gleaming chariot, bearing perhaps a senator or tribune or centurion, flash red as it navigates through the search stations ahead. The supervisor tells you to reverse. He is younger than you, shorter than you, and flimsier than you. But you bite down on your pride, flanked as you are by submachine guns, and plead with him. After a phone call to the pretty girl and a painstaking examination of your diminutive workhorse you are grudgingly permitted to proceed, but only to the secondary parking lot in the rear, from where you must walk.

It is said that in this hotel foreign women swim publicly in states of near nakedness and chic bars serve imported alcohol. You see no sign of such things, maybe because you halt in the lobby, or maybe because in your excitement you are focused on locating the pretty girl. She walks towards you now, high on her wedges, smiling coolly, her hair almost as close-cropped as yours.

She is a visitor to your city, having moved several years ago to an even larger megalopolis on the coast. Her modeling career has plateaued, or perhaps peaked is a better word, since even though the rates she commands remain good, her assignments are declining rapidly in frequency. She is trying therefore to transition to television, and has become a minor actress, minor for the reason that her acting is poor, with credits consisting mainly of bit parts in dramas and comedies. She could not normally stay at this hotel on a personal trip, but occupancy after the bombing has been so low that she secured a discount of fifty percent.

She kisses you on the cheek and observes you closely as she leads you to the restaurant. She notices, yes, that you are uncomfortable in your newly purchased and over-the-top attire, but also, conversely, that you are no longer uncomfortable in your own skin, there being something more mature about you, a sense of confidence, even of mastery, which you have added along with a few pounds and the odd fleck of gray. You seem to her properly a man, not a boy, although pleasingly your eyes have retained their animation, which of course she cannot know, even if she does suspect, owes a great deal to being at this moment in her presence.

You are seated by the headwaiter, who recognizes her and selects a table that maintains a pretense of being out of the way while ensuring she will be widely seen. He is rewarded with a nod from the pretty girl, and he unfolds your napkins personally, handing her hers with a slight bow, not presuming, as he does with yours, the right to place it in her lap.

“You look good,” she says to you.

“So do you.”

Indeed she does. As with the sun, you have always found it difficult to gaze upon her directly, but tonight you control your instinct to glance away, attempting instead to balance on that crumbly ledge between staring and shiftiness. What you see is a woman little changed by the years, not, obviously, because this is true, your first meeting having been half your lifetimes ago, but rather because your image of her is not entirely determined by her physical reality.

Tonight she wears a yellow spaghetti-strapped top that accents her collarbones and the knuckled indentation of her sternum, along with a single bangle of polished mahogany. A shawl covers the rim of her bag, and she reaches below it to retrieve a bottle of red wine, which she twists open with a sound like the snapping of a twig. You note a hint of uncertainty in her expression, and then it is gone.

“Have you been here before?” she asks.

“No, it’s my first time.”

She smiles. “So?”

“It’s unbelievable.”

“I remember my first time. The knives were so heavy, I thought they were silver. I stole one.”

“Are they really silver?”

She laughs. “No.”

“What else have you seen like that, amazing things regular people don’t get to see?”

She pauses, surprised by the stance of your question, the almost-forgotten, for her, terrain of wonder and lowliness it squats upon.

“Snow,” she says, grinning.

“You’ve seen snow?”

She nods. “In the mountains. It’s like magic. Like powdered hailstones.”

“Like what’s inside a freezer.”

“When it’s on the ground. When it’s falling, it’s like feathers.”

“Soft?”

“Soft. But it gets wet. If you walk around in it, it hurts.”

You envision her sauntering through a white valley, a mansion in the distance. The headwaiter returns and ties a striped cloth around your bottle, discreetly hiding all but its neck from view.

“What about you?” she asks, refilling your glasses. “What is this business of yours, exactly?”

“Bottled water.”

“You deliver it?”

“That too. I make it.”

“How?”

You tell her, nonchalantly, omitting mention of the many wrinkles, such as incessant natural gas shortages or long periods when the water pressure is too low and your pump screams idly, unable to fill your storage tank.

“That’s brilliant,” she says, shaking her head. “And people actually buy it? Just like you were one of the big companies?”

“Just like that.”

“You’re a genius.”

“No.” You smile.

“At school everybody always said you were a genius.”

“You weren’t there often.”

“I went for long enough.”

You take a drink. “Did you stay in touch with anyone?”

“No.”

“Not even your parents?”

“No. They died.”

“I know. Mine too. I meant before that.”

“Some messages. From them, and later, when I started coming on TV, from relatives. Mostly abuse. Or asking for money.”

“So it’s just been me.”

“Just you.” She rests her long fingers on the back of your hand.

You have sampled alcohol only twice before, and never to the point of being drunk, so this sensation of flushed, relaxed glibness is new to you. The two of you eat and chat, occasionally guffawing at volumes disturbing to your fellow diners. Warmth and a craving, a consciousness of your proximity, build within you. But your meal is over too soon, as is the wine, and you are steeling yourself for the evening to end when she says, “I have another bottle in my room. Do you want to come up?”

“Yes.”

She tells you the number and asks you to wait a few minutes before joining her. You are confused how to get there exactly, and reluctant to attract the attention of security by asking for directions, but you reason that you must take the elevator, and from there you are able to follow signs in the halls. She opens her door when you knock, brings you inside, and kisses you hard on the mouth.

“I don’t have another bottle,” she says.

“That’s all right.”

You hold her, encompassing this familiar, unfamiliar woman, feeling her breathe, tasting the place her words are born. You caress her as you strip her naked. You smooth the curve of her hip, of her jaw. You cradle her pelvis with your palm. No, you are not strangers. You are where you should be, finally, and so you linger.

Sex with you seems transgressive, which heightens her desire, although she is too preoccupied fully to enjoy the act. There is a whiff of home about you, emotionally, but also physically, in for example your lack of deodorant, and for her home carries with it connotations of sorrow and brutality, connotations that elicit signals from her to you to be punishing, but these you misinterpret, and so they remain unacted upon.

She is passing through a fragile period. Gravity has begun to tug at the arc of her career, and for the first time she earned a fraction last year of what she did the previous. She is aware that her future is shaky, that she could well end up impoverished, aged, and solitary, an elderly lady in a single room, buying rice and flour in bulk once a season, or, no less frightening, the wife of some cocaine-snorting man-child too chronically insecure to appear in his father’s head office much earlier than eleven or to stay much later than three, prone to picking up teenage girls at parties in his muscular European limousine and to sobbing unpredictably when drunk.

Lying nude beside you, a used condom on the carpet and a lit cigarette in her hand, she strokes your hair tenderly as you doze. She does not let you spend the night, however. You ask when you will see her next and she is not dishonest, saying she does not know, but to your voiced hope that it be soon, she makes no reply. Afterwards she reclines alone in bed, recalling the comforting sensation of your figures pressed together. She imagines what a relationship with you might be like, whether you could possibly mix with her colleagues and acquaintances in the great city by the sea. She wonders also, as she inhales with shut eyes, the burrowing-termite crackle of paper and tobacco audible, if there will ever arrive a day she is not repelled by the notion of binding herself permanently to a man.

You drive off in a state of agitation, both happy and afraid. But it is the fear that has grown dominant by that weekend, when you take your nephews to the zoo. They long for their monthly outing with their prosperous uncle, for their ride in your truck and the sweets you give them, and on this occasion your longing for their company has been particularly intense as well. Your throat is thick when you collect them, and so you speak little, allowing them to chat among themselves. But in the presence of caged bears and tigers you relax, and you are able to talk normally when it comes time for their camel ride.

Your brother accepts their return with a handshake, and also, wordlessly, the rolled banknotes hidden in your grip. It shamed him initially to receive help from his younger sibling, but not so much anymore, and he no longer insists on telling you over and over the stories of his difficulties as a father in the face of runaway prices, even though those stories remain pressing and true.

Instead he sits you down on his rooftop and asks you about yourself, lighting a joint and sucking a series of shallow puffs into his scrawny chest. The evening sky is orange, heavy with suspended dust from thousands upon thousands of construction sites, fertile soil gouged by shovels, dried by the sun, and scattered by the wind. As usual your brother encourages you to wed, expressing by doing so an abiding generosity, for a family of your own would, in all likelihood, diminish your ability to contribute to the well-being of his.

“My business fills my time,” you say. “I’m fine alone.”

“No person is fine alone.”

Your discussion turns to your sister, whom he has seen on a recent trip to the village and describes as getting old, which does not shock you, though she is only a few years your senior. You are well aware of the toll a rural life exacts on a body. He says she complains often but fortunately her husband is terrified of her, and so her situation is not so bad. She could use some bricks, however, as the mud stacked around her courtyard keeps washing away. You say you will take care of it.

Weeks pass and the pretty girl does not call. You are surprised and unsurprised, unsurprised because this was surely predictable, and surprised because you permitted yourself to hope it might be otherwise. You have learned by now that she will call eventually, but you give up on guessing when that might be.

During this period you come to an important decision. You have amassed some savings, savings you intended to use to buy a resident’s bond on your property, not outright title, of course, that being far too expensive, but rather the right to live rent-free in your rooms for a set number of years, after which your landlord must repay your principal. Such an arrangement is a great aspiration for those of modest means, offering as it does security akin to home ownership, temporarily, for the duration of the bond.

In the world of cooks and delivery boys and minor salesmen, the world to which you have belonged, a resident’s bond is a rest stop on the incessant treadmill of life. Yet you are now a man who works for himself, an entrepreneur, and one smoky afternoon, as you pass along a road on the outskirts of town, a small plot for let catches your eye, the rump of what was once a larger farm, currently no more than a crumbling shed and a rusty but upon closer examination still functional tube well, and it occurs to you that with the money you have saved, you could instead relocate here and expand your bottled-water operation. Such a course would be risky, leaving you with no savings and no guarantee, should your business fail, of a roof over your head. But risk brings with it the potential for return, and, besides, you have begun to recognize your dream of a home of your own for what it is, an illusion, unless financed in full by cold, hard cash.

The night after you sign the lease, you lie by yourself on the cot that once slept your parents, waiting for exhaustion to push you beyond consciousness. Beside you is your unringing phone. You watch one after another of the ubiquitous, hyper-argumentative talk shows that fill your television, aware that in their fury they make politics a game, diverting public attention rather than focusing it. But that suits you perfectly. Diversion is, after all, what you seek.