Five Star Billionaire

Shanghai is a beautiful place, but it is also a harsh place. Life here is not really life, it is a competition.

Shanghai is the world's largest city, with a total population of over 23 million. It can arguably claim to be the city of the 21st century, similar to 19th century London and 20th century New York, as it is a booming financial, commercial and entertainment center that attracts emigrants and visitors from every continent, and it is the leading symbol of the new China and its growing influence on Asia and the rest of the world.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei to Malaysian parents, grew up in Kuala Lumpur, was educated in the UK, and lived in London before he moved to Shanghai after he was chosen to be the first M Literary Writer in show more Residence in 2010. In this superb novel, he portrays five Malaysian Chinese who have moved to Shanghai to seek the wealth and prestige that the city seems to offer to each of its newcomers.

Phoebe is a naïve and uneducated young woman from the Malaysian countryside, who emigrates illegally to China on the suggestion of a friend, but soon after she arrives she finds that the dream job she was promised has suddenly vanished. Justin is the eldest son of a wealthy real estate tycoon, charged with purchasing a property in Shanghai that will save his family from ruin in the face of the Asian financial crisis. Gary is a pop mega-star who performs in front of thousands of adoring fans, while battling internal demons that threaten to destroy his career. Yinghui is the daughter of a prominent family in Kuala Lumpur who transforms herself from a left wing political activist into a hard nosed and successful businesswoman. Finally, Walter is a secretive and shadowy figure who has risen up from the ashes of his father's ruin to become a prominent developer and the anonymous author of the best selling book "How to Become a Five Star Billionaire". The first four characters are all interlinked with Walter, the only person given a voice in the first person in the book, in an intricately woven web that slowly tightens around each of them.

Through these characters, Tash Aw provides a fascinating internal glimpse into modern Shanghai, a city filled with ambitious but often lonely and desperate people from all over Asia whose singular focus on material goods and wealth outweighs love and personal happiness. Anything and anyone is fair game for exploitation and deceit, and the widespread availability of counterfeit watches, purses and clothing mimics the superficiality of the city's high stakes capitalist culture. Self help books such as the one written by Walter are the bibles of the young up-and-comers, and traditional Chinese culture is viewed as outdated and stifling to young people like Phoebe.

Each one attains some degree of success, but several meet with sudden and spectacular failure, in the matter of a climber that reaches the summit of a mountain only to be blown off of it entirely by a sudden gust of wind.

The city held its promises just out of your reach, waiting to see how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted, how long you were prepared to wait. And until you determined the parameters of your pursuit, you would be on edge, for despite the restaurants and shops and art galleries and sense of unbridled potential, you would always feel that Shanghai was accelerating a couple of steps ahead of you, no matter how hard you worked or played. The crowds, the traffic, the impenetrable dialect, the muddy rains that carried the remnants of the Gobi Desert sandstorms and stained your clothes every March: The city was teasing you, testing your limits, using you. You arrived thinking you were going to use Shanghai to get what you wanted, and it would be some time before you realized that it was using you, that it had already moved on and you were playing catch up.

Five Star Billionaire is a captivating work about Shanghai and the new China, and the lives of five talented and determined people who seek wealth and fulfillment but find loneliness and misery instead. I read nearly all of this novel in a single sitting, and I was quite sorry to see it end. I also loved Tash Aw's previous novel Map of the Invisible World, and I look forward to reading The Harmony Silk Factory later this year. show less

With a quick wit and sharp irony, the novel lays bare a culture obsessed with money and self-reinvention that so characterizes life in today’s global cities, where the yoga clubs are frequented by overworked wanna-be millionaires seeking to ‘live in the moment’, rich superstars spend their evenings mindlessly scrolling hard-core porn sites, and young people desperately searching for their ‘true identity’ methodically copy the overpriced fashion and lifestyles of others. Content and form come beautifully together in the novel’s format as a self-help book, teaching its readers how to become successful and rich. As we follow the intertwined lives of five Shanghai residents, we discover that if you live your life as fast as the show more city you’re living in, you’re actually standing still.

While the themes of materialism, disappearing cultural heritage, self-reinvention, and a search for human connection in the anonymous urban crowds are universal, I highly recommend the novel for those who want to get a sense of the daily lives in the ever-changing spectaculair urban landscape of Shanghai. Above all, this is a novel on Shanghai and the dreams and fears of the people that try to make this city their home. show less

I am about a third of the way through Five Star Billionaire and I have deeply mixed feelings about this book. On the plus side, it paints an evocative picture a seething and relentlessly ambitious atmosphere in 21st Century urban China. Not having any special understanding of the region, I cannot comment on its accuracy but I can attest to the sense of place that Aw creates. On the negative side, however, I do not find that location to be a very pleasant place to spend time. I feel sympathy for many of the characters, even as I feel sorry for the vacuum of meaning that they are attempting to fill with material success. The relentless drive to get ahead, however, exhausts me and doesn't make me eager to keep reading. It makes me want to show more run away. show less

The tale of the up-and-down fortunes of five people trying their luck in Shanghai may not make the Booker Prize shortlist, but Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire is an entertaining tale that sheds light on the universal human desire to be countedl.

Phoebe is a young woman who has recently arrived in bustling Shanghai to try her luck. Things appear to be going her way when a rich woman drops her ID card at a coffee shop. Between that and the self-help advice she reads, such as the adages in a book called Five Star Billionaire, Phoebe just knows she’ll make it.

Justin is already near the top. His family has been rich for generations, owning and developing property. He’s the one picked in his generation to be the fixer, the one who makes show more sure things get done. His whole life is work -- meetings, society appearances, travel, paperwork. Not like his brother the hipster and his girlfriend, who owns a cafe but doesn’t even know how to read a ledger.

Yinhui has worked hard as well, and is now a successful businesswoman with several ongoing ventures. Her life revolves around work as well, and she is poised to become even more successful.

Gary has come from nothing and nowhere to be a huge pop music sensation. Winning a talent show and then going on to make hit after chart-topping hit, his life is controlled every minute in service to his career and those screaming girls who adore him.

Walter is the Five Star Billionaire author and a character who lives in the shadows. He is the cog in this story that sets things going and, as his story is eventually revealed, his reasons are made clear.

Written much in the style of a Kate Atkinson multiple narrative, the connections among the characters draw them into each other’s stories. Propelling them all is the other main character in the novel -- Shanghai. It is sprawling, it is tightly packed, it rewards the ruthless and robs the trusting. Stopping to smell the roses is not recommended in a cutthroat, fast-paced world.

Shanghai is as mysterious and unforgiving in Aw’s novel as it is in Bo Caldwell’s Distant Land of My Father, a brilliant story of sophistication and survival that encompasses WWII, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, a flawed but fascinating novel with settings that include the International Settlement in Old Shanghai and a fantastical city that could not exist in reality, but which seems to be mirrored in Five Star Billionaire.

In Aw’s novel, Shanghai is not just the exotic locale it often is to Westerners. This ultra-competitive world is recognizable to anyone who sees the way that financial success is deemed the ultimate goal for so many in today’s world. The goal of making money for its own sake, for respect and to get even with anyone who tried to hold you down is as much a part of American society as it is in Shanghai.

The grace of Five Star Billionaire is that the human motives behind the drive to succeed, and the wanting to connect with other human beings even if it takes time away from a business meeting, underlies the story arc of each character. show less

I loved Tash Aw's previous novel, "Map of the Invisible World", and I was eager to read this one given its backdrop: the big dreams and harsh reality of today's China. New wealth is being created, but it's being distributed more unevenly than ever before, and the author drills down into the experiences of a range of characters from all parts of the spectrum -- migrant workers, real estate developers -- to illustrate this.

But... the narrative bogs down under its own weight. Before I was 100 pages into it, I felt as if I was slogging through waist-deep molasses. It's perhaps too ambitious: the pacing and tone certainly don't make it easy even for someone as curious as I about the topic to become immersed in the novel. I think it has taken show more me a record nine attempts to make it 300 pages into the book, and I'm not deriving much pleasure from the process. I think by now I've reached the point where I can write at least a basic review, but it can't be an enthusiastic one. There's a lot of repetition -- this is, by and large, a novel about disillusionment and ambition, with all the ugly underside that you'd expect -- and what was completely missing for me is the kind of energy that is palpable when you are actually in Shanghai, a kind of energy that somehow is twinned with the darkness behind the boom.

So, reluctantly, this is going to end up as a 3 star read for me. I don't feel any real compulsion to finish it. In fact, if I were forced to choose between this and the dentist, I might choose the dentist, if only because he offers nitrous oxide. show less

Aw does a good job here dissecting consumer culture, business ethics, and the aura of celebrity. Unfortunately, for me the book never worked as a novel. He presents each character largely through narrative, using very little dialog, so I never got a sense of any character's voice. The one first-person narrative is self-consciously false, so while that deepened Aw's examination of artifice and facade, it didn't humanize the character.

I never cared about any of these people because I never knew them. One character is a pop star and part of his story involves the tension between his image and his real self. For me, though, even his real self came across as image, Aw never let me get any closer. In a way, then, the book might be the victim show more of the very superficiality it sets out to critique. show less

I've never thought of migrant workers in quite this way before. This is a modern world in which the new migrant workers in Asia are those young people leaving the small villages in the provinces and turning their hopes toward the lights in the big cities of China. And Shanghai is the biggest and brightest of all. Tash Aw's book centers around four young people and the author of a self-help book who end up in the dazzling lights of Shanghai, each with their own idea of success. What they didn't know was that "the city held its promises just out of your reach, waiting to see how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted, how long your were prepared to wait...The city was teasing you, testing your limits, using you. You arrived show more thinking you were going to use Shanghai to get what you wanted, and it would be some time before you realized that it was using you..." (257)

I really wanted to like this book because my husband has been singing the praises of the new China for several years. Unfortunately, I didn't like what I saw through the eyes of these characters. They were willing to do whatever it took to achieve their particular goal even if it meant following someone else's idea of success through the pages of a self-help book. The chapter headings could have been bullet points in the book with titles such as "Reinvent Yourself" and "Pursue Gains, Forget Righteousness." The author, Walter Chao, took his own words to heart and was able to follow through on his game plan without remorse. Maybe the primary characters got what they deserved. Or maybe not. I didn't have enough sympathy for them to care all that much, but I do think that this is a book that begs to be discussed and would be a good choice for a book group. show less