Gotham Diary:
Chinese
11 July 2013
My Hitchcock jag came to a full stop last night, in the kitchen. I had been watching North by Northwest on and off since the middle of the afternoon. That’s when I set the video boombox on the counter and slipped in the DVD, as entertainment for the day’s project, clearing the kitchen for this weekend’s party. Clearing the kitchen was something that I’d been meaning to do for months, and now I had to do it. The work produced several dishwasher loads, and while the dishwasher ran, I sat in the bedroom (the coolest room in the apartment) and read Five Star Billionaire, by Tash Aw. Shortly before five, Kathleen called from the airport in Portland. Her flight had been delayed. Then it was canceled. Happily, the friend with whom she had been staying could come pick her up and take her back for the night. (She is still in Maine, booked on a flight for late this afternoon, but she is also looking into buses and trains.) Once it was clear that I’d be alone for dinner, I ordered a trio of appetizers from Wa Jeal, our go-to Chinese restaurant (come-from, really; we’ve never actually eaten there). When they arrived, I set up a tray table in the kitchen and pulled up a dining chair. It was cosy, to say the least, but the timing was good: by the time I’d gobbled up the food, the train was plunging into the tunnel.
Not a very rigorous way of watching a movie, you may say. Indeed, North by Northwest wasn’t on the list; as foreseen, the experience of watching Hitchcock’s films of the Fifties was complete with Vertigo. We’ll not quibble. It’s possible that I have seen North by Northwest as many times as I’ve seen all of Hitchcock’s other movies combined. Watching it is something of a default setting. Having it on, I should say, while I’m doing something else. I don’t know when I last sat down and gave it my undivided attention. I’m thinking of scheduling a Hitchcock series from Rebecca to Family Plot. (Someday, I hope to see them all in order.) Because I was in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, and often had my back turned to the screen, I didn’t notice anything new, as I had in all the other Fifties movies.
Before going to bed, I read what Donald Spoto had to say about North by Northwest, in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. Nobody is better at unpacking the recursions on which Hitchcock films are founded, but there’s no need for me to paraphrase any of that. Spoto sees North by Northwest as a remake of The Thirty-Nine Steps, which, while perfectly plausible, only emphasizes how very different the two movies are to watch. I wish that I could say that the following passage had dated, instead of becoming more apt than ever:
On this journey, governments are, of course, as fraudulent as advertising or spies: the Capitol, seen behind the scheming intelligence men, offers no sure safety. At the United Nations, chaos easily erupts, and the symbol of national order and tradition embodied in Mount Rushmore is ominously dangerous. All these solid institutions are powerless to save Thornhill from metaphysical absurdity and human perversity. … Like advertising (the crowded chaos of Madison Avenue veils deception and disruption), and art (the African statue camouflages the secret microfilm), the “ordered” life of the nation has been penetrated by fraud.
Regardless of when it was actually made, North by Northwest is as much a movie of the Teens as anything that will open this year, and I expect that it will be movie of the Twenties as well.
***
I want to call Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire a Chinese novel, but I don’t really know what I’m talking about, as, aside from Dream of the Red Chamber, I haven’t read any Chinese novels — novels, that is, written for Chinese readers, bearing little sign of Western influence. Five Star Billionaire is written in fluent English (and quite perfectly edited and printed, so far as I could tell), but it still seems Chinese to me. Its compelling stories are dominated by ambitious objectives, moral crises, and fateful accidents. There is very little irony and a great deal of sincerity, even when the action is duplicitous. The characters know their own minds, even when they don’t — they may be undecided at times, but they are never, as so many characters in Western fiction are, torn. And the narrator eschews understatement, that detached countersuggestiveness that keeps us smiling through Jane Austen’s pages. The third-person point of view is decidedly uncritical. It may seem that I am deprecating Five Star Billionaire, but I don’t mean to do so. I’m trying, rather, to appreciate a different kind of novel, one that fully addresses the reality of a different culture.
Five Star Billionaire gleams with assurance, and observes an almost Horatian economy. It is a “literary” novel in tone if not content. This is where it differs most sharply from popular beach books and thoughtless quickies. Five Star Billionaire is not a guilty pleasure but its opposite, a pleasure to read. If there is no understatement, there is no excess, either. Saying that, it suddenly occurs to me that there might be one note of irony: in the title itself. There is a book by (almost) the same title in the novel, but there is no five star billionaire. There are four strivers and one con man. Guess which one of them wrote that book.
Tash Aw was born in Taiwan but raised in Malaysia, and Malaysia is the homeland of his quintet of principals, all of whom are struggling, in one way or another, in Shanghai. Well-educated Malaysians are taught English, as happens in most South Asian remnants of the British Empire, and a curious side effect of this, at least for the Malaysians of Chinese extraction whom I’ve encountered, is that English is not so much a second language as it is another way of speaking Chinese.
What stopped him from ringing her now was the absence of achievement. He had done little with his life and had been reduced to absolute zero. On at least half a dozen occasions he had paused with his phone in his hand, her card on the table before him, the number already tapped into the little screen. All he had to do was to press the green button and she would be there. What would he say then? How would he fill the spaces in the conservation if not with tales of what he was doing in Shanghai, descriptions of success? He would have loved to be able to say, Didn’t you hear? Well, yes, I’ve been running an art gallery for five years now, showing a few avant-garde Chinese artists. Or, I moved into film production a few years back — yes, I gave up the family business completely.
In fact, Justin has been given up by his family’s business — and it was never really his family anyway. Taken in as an infant from a cousin so distant that she might not have been actually related to the grand family that adopted him, Justin has been raised to carry on a small but growing empire of property developments in Malaysia and China. Nearing forty, he is dying of asphyxiation at the beginning of the novel; his existence, outwardly successful — Justin is something of a genius at compromise — is starved of meaning. We eventually realize that he has been unable to replace his first true love, the woman he is now abashed to telephone. Her presence in the novel might be dismissed as “convenient” or “trite,” but it’s not, for the simple reason that Yinghui’s story is even more interesting than Justin’s. Back in Kuala Lumpur, when her father was a minister in the government, and Justin was silently adoring her, Yinghui was deep in a very Western-looking affair with Justin’s brother, the suave and good-looking but basically caddish C S, as he’s called. When that relationship ended, as it would have done even if her father had not been disgraced, Yinghui took off for points East, settling in Shanghai, and made a successful businesswoman out of herself — the very thing that Justin, inwardly at least, has never managed to do. Yinghui is mildly dissatisfied by her celibate lot, but she prefers it to being with a boring man. Then she meets Walter, a tycoon with a business proposition, and by the time she does, you’ve really no choice but to keep reading just to find out how badly her life will be upended. In due course of time, the catastrophe is related in a single sentence, and the dust settles quickly. Yinghui is still on her two feet, but she is ready to take Justin’s call.
The other two characters are Gary, a pop star shot straight from poverty to glittering celebrity, and Phoebe, a girl on the make. Neither of these characters is an empty as ambition requires. Gary has come to hate his millions of fans, without knowing why; and, when she arrives at the threshold of a lucrative relationship with a man, Phoebe has a few brandies and breaks every rule in her many self-help books. Phoebe is at least as interesting as Moll Flanders, and Gary turns out to be quite sympathetic as well.
As I read Five Star Billionaire, I began to have an eerie feeling. Each of the characters has at least one moment like this one, of Justin’s.
He rang two or three other people, but it was the same every time. They’d heard the news [about the collapse of his family’s business back in Kuala Lumpur], they were sorry to hear about his family, and, yes, they’d of course love to meet up but things were so busy in China these days, you know what things are like, just nonstop. They promised to call, but their voices were full of a fake cheeriness that signaled to him that they would not, of course, call back. He had done the same so many times in the past; he never thought he’d be on the receiving end of it.
This was what life was like in China, he thought: Stand still for a moment and the river of life rushes past you. He had spent three months confined to his apartment, and in that time Shanghai seemed to have changed completely, the points of reference in his wold permanently rearranged and repositioned in ways he could not recognize. Just as he had lost his car and driver, he was also navigating his way through life without a map — as if the GPS in his brain had been disconnected, leaving him floundering. Everyone in this city was living life at a hundred miles an hour, speeding ever forward: he had fallen behind, out of step with the rest of Shanghai.
I say that Tash Aw does not exaggerate, but there is something so lurid and catastrophic about this description of the loss of momentum, repeated, as I say, in each of the characters’ stories (except for that of the con man) that I was reminded of the histrionics, as I should call it, surrounding ghosts in Chinese culture. Ghosts there are not unsettled, sometimes benign presences. Rather they are heralds of malignancy, wielding curses like pathogens. There are no ghosts in Five Star Billionaire, but the despair with which Phoebe and Gary and Yinghui and Justin contemplate their momentarily stalled lives suggests the power of evil spirits. But the stalls are momentary, the spirits not so evil. The despair passes. Perhaps Shanghai is the problem. (Aw lived there for a while, but now he lives in London.)
Five Star Billionaire is not at all my kind of novel, which is why, enjoying it as much as I did, I felt that I’d had a two-day holiday. A holiday — not a vacation.