How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

EIGHT BEFRIEND A BUREAUCRAT

NO SELF-HELP BOOK CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT taking into account our relationship with the state. For if there were a cosmic list of things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up and into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

You might therefore assume that the most reliable path to becoming filthy rich is to activate your faster-than-light marketing drive and leap into business nebulas as remote as possible from the state’s imperial economic grip. But you would be wrong. Entrepreneurship in the barbaric wastes furthest from state power is a fraught endeavor, a constant battle, a case of kill or be killed, with little guarantee of success.

No, harnessing the state’s might for personal gain is a much more sensible approach. Two related categories of actor have long understood this. Bureaucrats, who wear state uniforms while secretly backing their private interests. And bankers, who wear private uniforms while secretly being backed by the state. You will need the help of both. But in rising Asia, where bureaucrats lead, bankers tend to follow, and so it is on befriending the right bureaucrat that your continued success critically depends.

You sit before him now, in his government office, spacious yet dowdy, as such offices often are, with dusty windows, framed portraits of a pair of national leaders, one dead and one alive, and chunky wooden seating in need of reupholstery, which, if reconfigured, could easily accommodate twice as many visitors, and communicates through its weightily inefficient refusal to do so a loud and clear signal of intent. Many bribes were paid to enable this meeting, most importantly to the bureaucrat’s personal secretary, without whose assent slots in his calendar seem never to open up, and so here you are, with the head honcho himself, finally able to make your pitch.

The bureaucrat, in violation of nonsmoking regulations, lights an exquisitely expensive gifted cigar from his well-appointed humidor without offering you anything but a cup of tea. He knows your type, self-made, on the rise, and because of his education, family background, and temperament he regards you with disdain, but also with satisfaction, for there is usually more money to be had from supplicants who seek to challenge the status quo than from those who seek merely to maintain it.

You were delivered to him by a sticky web of red tape. Permits denied, inspections failed, meters improperly read, audits initiated, all these scams and hassles you have over the years surmounted by greasing junior and mid-level palms. But you have reached an impasse. Your firm has become fairly aboveboard, at least as far as product is concerned, sterilizing mostly to the accepted standard and bottling under your own name. Yet your expansion into the big leagues, into the mass market of the piped municipal water game, has been stymied. Only state-licensed providers can bid for municipal contracts, and your application for such a license has been turned down. So you have pursued the rejection to its source, this man seated in front of you.

He puffs away, the fingertips of his free hand resting on a file containing your recently dismissed proposal. You drone on about the technical soundness of your candidacy, your capital and expertise, your many satisfied customers. The bureaucrat lets you expend your energy, punch yourself out, presentationally, and when you inevitably fall silent he writes two words on a sheet of paper in the indigo ink of his gold-nibbed fountain pen and pushes them towards you. They are, “How much?”

You are relieved. A hurdle has been crossed and the negotiation can now begin. But you pretend otherwise.

“Sir,” you say, “we meet the conditions…”

“Have you previously been a municipal vendor?”

“We’ve been in the water business almost twenty years.”

“Have you previously been a municipal vendor?”

“No.”

“Are you authorized to be a municipal vendor?”

“Not yet.”

“No.” He propels a perfect smoke ring with an unhurried flick of his jaw.

“All your requirements have been satisfied.”

“All our quantifiable requirements. It is my duty to ensure our unquantifiable requirements are also met. Reputational requirements, for example.”

“Our reputation is that we’re friendly.”

“Good.”

You observe him. He is nearer sixty than fifty, and so less than a decade your senior, but with the velvet-cushion newborn grip of a man who has eschewed not merely manual labor and racket sports but even carrying his own briefcase.

He directs, with a tap of his finger, your attention to the piece of paper between you. These days, regrettably, it is difficult to know when a conversation is being recorded. He prefers to keep impropriety inaudible. You make a show of pausing in consideration before inscribing a sum you feign is impressive. The bureaucrat rejects it with a curt shake of his head, scribbling a vastly greater, but reduced, figure. You feel a glow of satisfaction. In not dismissing you out of hand he has slid off his viceroy’s throne and into a salesman’s stall. You are his buyer, and though you must not squeeze, you have him by his enormous, greedy, and extremely useful balls. You haggle, but magnanimously.

The bureaucrat cannot, however, act without the approval of his political masters, and therefore, the following week, after another meeting with you to fill in the specifics of your arrangement, he dispatches you to the home of a politician familiar to you from TV and newspapers. You are driven by your driver in your hulking and only slightly secondhand luxury SUV. Positioned beside him is a uniformed guard normally employed by you to open and shut the gate of your house. You sit in the back, ostensibly browsing e-mails on your computer, hoping to make a substantial impression.

Fears of terrorism have led the politician to take measures to secure his residence, strong-arming his neighbors into selling him their properties, erecting a razor-wire-topped boundary wall far in excess of permissible heights, and placing illegal barricades at either end of the street. Police officers mill about on foot, and a heavily armed rapid-response unit idles in a pickup truck, ready to accompany him on the move. You are allowed to proceed, but without your vehicle and retainers, much to your disappointment, and you are frisked twice on your way in.

The politician’s working environment is structured in the manner of the courts of princes of old, namely with one set of waiting rooms for commoners, another for those of rank, and an inner sanctum occupied by him and a contingent of his advisers. Your transaction is conducted simultaneously with multiple unrelated strands of endeavor, some public, some personal, and some apparently without purpose, or rather with no purpose other than amusement. An extended lunch is under way, and so everything happens to the sounds of chewing and with repeated gestures that look like multi-fingered snaps but are in reality attempts to dislodge grease, rice, and bits of edible residue without the use of water or tissues. None of this surprises you or throws you off, the bureaucrat having prepared you well, and in any case your dominant feeling is one of achievement at being with people of such importance.

Your deal is concluded in an uncomplicated, if seemingly whimsical, fashion, the politician asking one of his henchmen for an opinion with a laugh and raised eyebrow, much as he might ask him to assess the desirability of a mid-priced prostitute. A number is thrown out. This is accepted by you with obsequious murmurs and bows of the head, precisely as you have been instructed to do by the bureaucrat. And that is that.

As you drive off, under a beautiful, orange, polluted sky, riding high in your SUV above lesser hatchbacks and motorcycles, you start to hum, only the presence of your employees preventing you from bursting into full-blown song. What a long way you have come. Your offices loom ahead, the entire second floor of a centrally located emporium, atop a bustling array of shops. Security men and parking attendants salute you, elevator doors spring apart for your arrival, and your nods to a select few of your managers, as you stride by their desks, spark a buzz of chatter. Yes, your meeting was a success.

Your son is delivering an address on the lawn when you get home. It is twilight, a moment adored by mosquitoes, and he wears shorts and a T-shirt, the sight of his bare brown flesh worrying you until he runs over and into your arms, granting you the pleasure of lifting his solid little form, his vertebrae clicking softly as gravity tugs them apart, and sniffing on his skin the synthetic lemon-lime aroma of insect repellent. Your son is a big-cheeked, bowl-haircut-sporting, navel-high orator, and this evening he has assembled about him not just his nanny but the cook and bearer as well, all of whom become markedly more formal in your presence. The boy is subjecting them to a political speech modeled after one he must have seen on TV.

“When I am your leader…”

You watch and listen, wishing as always that you had more time with him, that you could take him with you to work or, even better, stay here with him and his toys, and also thinking of your parents, realizing that they must have experienced, half a century ago, the same emotions you feel now, except in their case with more trepidation, for while disease or violence could of course strike down your son, the probability of his early death has, through your attainments, been reduced dramatically.

Interrupting his performance, you charge at him with a roar. He flees into the house, squealing, and you yell that you will eat him up, but you quieten as you pass inside, parked cars on your street having alerted you to an ongoing meeting. Your wife sits with a dozen other women, their heads covered and in several cases their faces too, engaged in heated debate. Your greeting elicits a verbal response from her, but her eyes rest upon your son, and it is he alone she favors with a smile as the two of you proceed upstairs, followed, scooter in hand, by his nanny. The conversation around your wife subsides at this sudden claim on her attention, but resumes with equal vigor when she tilts her head and gestures to her collaborators with upraised palms, as though marshalling some unseen but weighty force, or communicating a deep and shared sense of exasperation, or otherwise supporting a pair of invisible breasts.

It has been five years, the age of your son, since you last entered your wife’s body. Intercourse between you had already been infrequent, and only a lucky roll of the biological dice explains why she conceived so quickly after completing her studies and removing her contraceptive coil. Childbirth, however, was less easy. A severe third-degree perineal tear damaged your wife’s anal sphincter. With reconstructive surgery and endless hours of physiotherapy, she defeated the resulting incontinence, and she is now free of the diapers she was forced to wear, galling for a woman so young. But you were almost entirely absent from this process, clumsily semi-aware, at best, of the details of her condition. Consumed by your work, made hesitant by your upbringing and gender, and in any case pining for that other woman beyond your reach, you readily paid for whatever needed paying for, but did no more.

Yet you have changed with the growth of your son. Medicalized, bloody, and enacted to the sound of screaming and the smell of disinfectant, his birth was like a death. It shook you. And, slowly, it unlocked forgotten capacities for feeling. Fatherhood has taught you the lesson that, even in middle age, love is practicable. It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past. And so, armed with this wisdom, you are attempting to woo your wife, to build a family on the strength of the bond that is your son, to win her joy and smiles and caresses, to entice her back to your side from her separate bed lying parallel to yours.

But when you began to turn to her again, to try to see her, as if for the first time, as an adult and a mother and indeed something wondrous, a warrior, striking in her maturing beauty and her indefatigable determination, and you sought to make conversation with her and to stroke her arm and her cheek and her thigh, you discovered your wife uninterested. She has never shouted at you in anger. In fact, she continues to exhibit a well-brought-up sympathy for your age, which, with your litany of minor ailments, ranging from your spine to your teeth to your knees, has started to seem further and further removed from her own. But she avoids discussions with you that are not practical in nature, finding troubling your attempts to engage in this manner, as though violative of the terms of your truce. The focus of her attention is elsewhere, on her son, and on her group of religiously-minded activists.

In their company, she conducts herself with a gravity that exceeds her years, enjoying an influential position despite the fact that many of them are her seniors. Her legal training and relative prosperity give her pertinent advantages, of course, but mostly it is her bearing, her self-sufficient fire and evident fearlessness, that others rally to, coupled with her disarming warmth, much sought-after and awarded only to a fortunate few.

You are aware, when she comes tonight, draped in her shawl, to read your son his bedtime story and put him to sleep, that you cling to him not just because of your feelings for the boy, which are powerful and true, but also because in this moment, with your arms around your child, you have something she wants, a precious sensation, and one you simultaneously desire to prolong while feeling sad, even ashamed, of engendering solely in this way.

Hoping it might positively impact your relations with your wife, some months ago you hired one of her brothers into your firm. He joined an already sizable band of kinfolk and clanspeople owing their paychecks to you, many without contributing notably to your enterprise. But from the outset his cleverness and education distinguished him from the others, so much so that you are considering grooming him as a potential deputy.

It is with him, after receiving from the bureaucrat your municipal vendor’s license and winning your first contract to augment the public water supply, that you travel to the coast to clear your equipment through customs. The two of you ride together to the airport. A new terminal sits across the runway from its predecessor, in what was formerly cropland but now lies within the ambit of the ring road, surrounded by housing developments, defense installations, slum-subsumed villages, golf courses, and the occasional hotly contested field, still free of construction and sprouting fronds of mustard, wheat, or corn.

Because of a hypertrophying middle class, bulging from the otherwise scrawny body of the population like a teenager’s overdeveloped bicep, there has been a surge in air traffic, demand the state carrier simply cannot meet. To get a flight at the time of your choosing you use one of several haphazardly regulated private operators. On board you find it difficult to ignore your jetliner’s probable military heritage, manifested among other things in its oddly shaped engine pods and rear-opening ramp, suitable perhaps for embarking howitzers or armored personnel carriers. You have always been fatalistic about flying, but as a father you dislike the idea of permanently leaving your son so soon, a possibility evoked in your imagination by juddering vibrations that roar through the fuselage as you ascend.

Your brother-in-law is visibly excited, pleased to be seated in business class and to be booked into a fancy hotel. He resembles your wife, albeit a plump, squat, mustachioed version of her. He is your wife compressed in height, expanded in depth and width, and masculinized, as though by a computer program in a science museum’s digital house of mirrors. He has the same pale complexion and sensuous mouth, the same verbal tics. Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.

As you exit the baggage-claim area at the other end, a blast of hot briny air hits your face, thrilling you, as always, this place being in your estimation linked with money, with the big time. Around you is a crush of people more diverse than those you see at home, their languages more varied, their skin and lips and hair testifying to wider geographic swaths of evolution. They have been pulled to this colossal city by the commerce linked to its port, which straddles the shipping lanes binding rising Asia to Africa, Oceania, and beyond, and also by its gravity, the force exerted by its sheer mind-boggling size.

A limousine whisks you to your hotel, in a prestigious neighborhood, where cluster consulates and the offices of multinationals, united by colonial history and also by relatively easy access to naval evacuation should that be required. High in your room, you gaze out at the sea, mesmerizing to you, a man from the far-off plains, as you watch its fractured surface catch the light, scattered clouds repixelating its colors while speeding overhead. You nibble on tiny chocolates and an assortment of exotic berries, too delicate though to constitute much of a meal, and think, This must be success. In the distance you can make out the docks. There awaits your machinery.

At equal remove, but unknown to you, and in the opposite direction along the coast, is the residence of the pretty girl. She is sitting beside her lap pool, in the shade of a tree, wearing a fawn swimsuit and retro dark glasses while sipping a sugar-free cordial through a bendable straw. She has just returned from a journey through a series of peninsulas and archipelagos, the latest of the monthlong procurement trips she now embarks upon semi-annually, which typically require, for each week of travel, at least two in visa processing.

She and you reconnect on your visit, tangentially at least, through an executive who works in his family’s freight-forwarding business by day and is a fixture of the contemporary art and fashion scenes by night. In his office, as he tells you how lucky you are that your bureaucrat intervened with colleagues in customs to speed your goods through import inspections and minimize your demurrage charges, you see on his desk a photo of him at an award ceremony with a group of celebrities. You ask seemingly casually if he knows the pretty girl, and he says, why, yes, as a matter of fact he does.

Through him you learn, for she has not been on TV in some time, that she is well, and indeed busy, running a high-end home furnishings boutique, and also, since he has a keen eye for such things and knows at once your claim of being merely an old acquaintance is less than the entire truth, that she is the lover of a prominent and recently widowed architect.

For you these remarks bring her clearly into focus, even if that focus is a product only of memory and imagination, and you feel strongly, exactly what you are not sure, whether happiness or sadness or neither or both, but strongly, a breath-halting feeling, a sensation, like asthma, of being unable to empty your lungs. Her own response is not dissimilar, when, a few weeks later, the freight forwarder spies her at an afternoon seaside reception and glides up to her, eager to chat, certain she will be more than surprised at the name he is about to let slip, as by a gurgling fart during a passionate embrace.

So the pretty girl discovers that you are a father, the juxtaposition ironic, in a way, though she never desired children, for she has recently entered menopause, and also that your business is flourishing, and further that you continue to have a sexy little something about you, a rustic manliness, a touch of the uncouth, a hip-shaking coarseness common to people from your inland backwater, and so filthily hot and lacking around here. She smiles at this description and asks for more, but decides against divulging the details of her shared past with you, if for no other reason than that she has not discussed it with anyone before, and after all these years it seems unnatural to start. She says only that you and she had a thing, once upon a time.

She herself is tolerably content. Her transition from television chef to designer-kitchen showroom owner to retailer of one-of-a-kind international furniture and expensive bric-a-brac has not been without its moments of difficulty. But now her establishment is humming along nicely, she has an excellent assistant, a well-educated and divorced woman free to accompany and translate for her on her lengthy travels abroad, travels the pretty girl enjoys, seeing them as adventures, and as for her romantic entanglements, well, they may not have been especially fiery of late, but at least they do persist.

As she speaks of you with the freight forwarder, watching two traditionally clad waiters struggle to reposition a massive orchid sculpted of ice, you too are watching men toil away, standing at the construction site of your water-mining plant with your brother-in-law at your side. Despite the modest size of your project, he has had hard hats issued to your employees, an innovation you value because it adds a veneer of professionalism. Your scalp sweats under this plastic second skull, the sun bearing down mercilessly, and rivulets of perspiration sting your eyes and stroke saltily the corners of your mouth.

Below your feet is the ever-dropping aquifer, punctured by thousands upon thousands of greedily sipping machine-powered steel straws. Your installation is not the largest of its kind, but it is brighter than most others, shiny and pristine and new. Yet, standing there, for an instant you catch a whiff of something quite inexplicable, or at least you think you do, a scalding breeze carrying to your nose the blood-like aroma of rust.

Today your wife will doubtless be intervening with her women’s group to help another beaten spouse or homeless divorcee or disinherited widow, actions that are all for the good and have nothing to do with you, but contain a degree of implicit reproach. You shut your eyes, briefly seized by a strange regret, maybe for the delays to this project, or for the state of your marriage, or for becoming so late a father to your son, for being, in all likelihood, destined to overlap too limitedly with the span of his life. But the mood passes. You master yourself, spit a clot of parched sputum into the dirt, and carry on, exhorting your welding crew to make good time.