Five Star Billionaire: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

York Times
review of it called Zhou X.
the intellectual man’s Orientalist fantasy
.)
    If he felt a frisson of excitement, it wasn’t because of his glamorous tour guide but because it was his first proper outing in Shanghai, his first sight of the daytime streets at close quarters, unencumbered by briefcases and folders. If anything, he felt resentful of Zhou X.’s presence; she sat in the car, idly sending messages on her BlackBerry, her only commentary being a recital of a list of projects her agent had sent her. “Wim Wenders—is he famous?” she asked. “I don’t feel like working with him—he sounds boring.”
    They stopped outside a tourist-class hotel on a busy thoroughfare lined with midrange shopping brands in what seemed to be a fairly expensive part of town (low occupancy, medium yield: unrealized rental potential)—a strange place to start a tour of Shanghai, he thought, as they walked through a featureless archway into a narrow lane lined first with industrial dustbins and then, farther on, with low brick houses. These were the famous
longtang
of Shanghai, she explained, the ones foreigners fell in love with—though personally she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a lane house. “Look at them, they’re so primitive and cramped and dark and … old.”
    He peered into an open door. In the gloom, he made out a staircase of dark hardwood and a tiled kitchen with a two-ring stove-top cooker. He stepped into the house—its quiet half-light seemed welcoming, irresistible.
    “What are you doing?” Zhou X. cried.
    But he was already up the stairs, treading across the uneven floorboards, the deep graining of the wood inviting him to bend down and trail his fingers over the smooth worn surface. There were signs of life—pots of scraggly herbs and marigolds, towels draped on banisters, lines of washing strung up across the small square rooms. And yet there was a stillness that settled heavily on the house, as if its inhabitants had recently abandoned it, as if the present was already giving way to the past. The small windows on the landings allowed in little light, but Justin could nonetheless see that there was dust on the surface of some cardboard boxes that lay stacked in the corner of the room and also on the handrails of the staircase. He could not decide whether the house was decaying or living. He retreated and joined his companion outside. In spite of her huge black sunglasses, she was squinting, shielding her face from the sun with her handbag.
    “You’re crazy,” she said. “You can’t just go poking your nose into other people’s houses like that.”
    Justin looked at her and smiled. “I’ve paid for this, haven’t I? I need to get my money’s worth.”
    At his insistence, they drove from
longtang
to
longtang
, her SUV cruising through the narrow streets lined with plane trees, the balconies of the old French-style villas occasionally visible over the tops of stone walls. Some of the larger houses had shutters that were tightly closed, and in their gloom these mansions reminded him of the house in which he hadgrown up, full of silence and shadows and the steady ticking of grandfather clocks. He remembered the hallway and staircase of his family house, the ceiling rising so high that it created a cavelike gloom.
    As the car crawled through the traffic, he began to notice the number of people on foot: a group of middle-school kids, spiky-haired and bespectacled in tracksuits, rushing to beat one another to the head of the queue to buy freshly made
shengjian
, exclaiming gleefully as the cloud of steam billowed from the pan; an elderly couple crossing the road just in front of the car, walking arm in arm, their clothes made from matching brocade and velvet, worn but still elegant; and, at an intersection, about fifty construction workers sitting on the pavement, smoking on their break, their faces tanned and leathery, foreign-looking—Justin could not place where