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Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself

Every building has its own sparkle, its own identity. At night, their electric personalities flicker into life and they cast off their perfunctory daytime selves, reaching out to each other to form a new world of ever-changing colour. It is tempting to see them as a single mass of light, a collection of illuminated billboards and fancy fluorescent strips that twinkle in the same way. But this is not true; they are not the same. Each one insists itself upon you in a different way, leaving its imprint on your imagination. Each message, if you care to listen, is different.

From his window he could see the Pudong skyline, the skyscrapers of Lujiazui ranged like razor-sharp Alpine peaks against the night sky. In the daytime even the most famous buildings seemed irrelevant, obscured by the perpetual haze of pollution; but at night, when the yellow-grey fog thinned, he would sit at his window watching them display boastfully, each one trying to outdo the next: taller, louder, brighter. A crystal outcrop suspended high in the sky, shrouded by mist on rainy days; a giant goldfish wriggling across the face of a building; interlocking geometric shapes shattering into a million fragments before regrouping. He knew every one by heart.

Buildings were in his DNA, he sometimes thought. They had given him everything he had ever owned – his houses, his cars, his friends – and even shaped the way he thought and felt; they had been in his life right from the beginning. The years were rushing past, whatever he had left of his youth surrendering to middle age, yet bricks and mortar – real estate – remained a constant presence. When he revisited his earliest memories, trying to summon scenes of family life – his mother’s protective embrace, perhaps, or praise from his father – the results were always blank. They were present in his memories, of course, his parents and grandmother, hovering spectrally. But, just like in real life, they were never animated. All he could see and smell was the buildings around them, the structures they inhabited: cold stone floors, mossy walls, flaking plaster, silence. It was a world from which there had been no escape. A path had been laid down for him, straight and unbending. He had long since given up hope of departing from this track, indeed could not even remember any other option – until he came to Shanghai.

The summer of ’08 had been notable for its stillness, the unyielding humidity that lay trapped between the avenues of concrete and glass. He had arrived in Shanghai expecting a temperate climate, but summer had stretched far into September and the pavements were sticky with heat, the roads becoming rivers of exhaust and steam. Even in his gated compound in Pudong, with its American-tropic-style lawns and palm-filled gardens, the air felt lifeless.

He had known little about Shanghai, and assumed that it would consist solely of shopping malls and plastic reproductions of its history, its traditional life preserved in aspic as it was in Singapore, where he went to school, or inherently Third World, like Malaysia, where he grew up. It might be like Hong Kong, where he had begun his career and established his reputation as an unspectacular but canny businessman who would hold the reins steady as head of the family’s property interests. Whatever the case, he had assumed he would find it familiar – he had spent his life in overcrowded, overbuilt Asian cities, and they were all the same to him: whenever he looked at a tower block he saw only a set of figures that represented income and expenditure. Ever since he was a teenager, his brain had been trained to work in this way, calculating numbers swiftly, threading together disparate considerations such as location, purpose and yield. Maybe there was, in spite of everything, a beauty in the incisiveness of his thinking back then.

But during those initial few weeks it was not easy for him to get any sense of Shanghai at all. His driver picked him up at his house and drove him to a series of meetings punctuated by business lunches, each day finishing with the soon familiar flourish of a banquet. He lived in a development called Lisson Valley, which was owned by his family. This, together with a more modest development in Hongqiao and a condominium block in Xintiandi, were all that they owned in the largest city in China, and they had decided that they needed to expand, which was why he had been sent here. They had spent a hundred years in Malaysia and Singapore, and now they needed to branch out in a serious way – like the great Jewish families of Europe in the nineteenth century, his father had explained, as if the decision needed to be justified. On the annual Forbes list of billionaires his family’s business was described as ‘Henry Lim and family – Diversified Holdings’ – it always made him wince, the term ‘diversified’: the lack of specificity carried with it an accusation, as if the source of the wealth they had amassed was uncertain and, most probably, unsavoury.

‘You’re too sensitive,’ his father had chided him when he was young. ‘You need to grow out of it and toughen up. What do you care what other people think?’

It was true: what other people thought was entirely irrelevant. The family insurance firm, established in Singapore since 1930, had not only survived but prospered during the war, and was one of the oldest continuous companies in South-East Asia. By any reckoning his family now counted as ‘old money’, one of those overseas Chinese families that had risen, in little over a century, from dockside coolies to established billionaires. Every generation built on the achievements of its predecessor, and now it was his turn: Justin CK Lim, eldest son of Henry Lim and heir to the proud, vibrant legacy of LKH Holdings, established by his grandfather.

Property clairvoyant. Groomed from a young age to take over the reins. Steady hands. Wisdom beyond his years.

These were some of the things the Business Times said of him just before he arrived here. His father had had the article cut out, mounted and framed, and had sent it to him gift-wrapped in paper decorated with gold stars. It arrived two days after his birthday, but he was not sure if it was a present. There had never been presents on his birthday.

From the start of his time in Shanghai he was invited to the best parties – the numerous openings of the flagship stores of Western luxury brands, or discreet private banquets hosted by young local entrepreneurs with excellent connections within the Party. He could always get a table at the famous Western restaurants on the Bund, and because people soon got to know and like him – he was easy, unshowy company – he was rarely on his own, and increasingly in the public eye. At one party to launch a new line of underwear, held in a warehouse in the northern outskirts of the city, he found himself unconsciously shrinking away from the bank of flashbulbs that greeted the guests, so that when the photographs appeared, his head was cocked at an angle, as if he had recently hurt his neck in an accident. There were a dozen hydraulic platforms suspended above the party, each one occupied by a model clad only in underwear, gyrating uncomfortably to the thumping music; every time he looked up at them they threw confetti down on him, which he then had to pick out of his hair. The event organiser later sent him copies of the photos – he was frowning in every one, stray bits of confetti clinging to his suit like birdshit. Shanghai Tatler magazine photographed him at a black-tie charity event a few weeks after he arrived, his hair slickly swept back in a nod to the 1930s, a small white flower in his buttonhole, and a young Western woman in a qipao at his side. The caption read, ‘Justin CK Lim and companion’; he hadn’t even known who the woman was. He bid for a guided tour of the city by Zhou X, a local starlet just beginning to make a name for herself in new-wave art-house films. It cost him 200,000 yuan, the money donated to orphans of the Sichuan earthquake. The men at the party nudged him and whispered slyly, ‘Maybe you’ll get to see the most secret sights of Shanghai, like she showed off in her latest movie.’ (It was a film he’d heard of, set in a small village during the Cultural Revolution and already banned in China; the New 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 at 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 mid-range shopping brands in what seemed to be a fairly expensive part of town (low occupancy, medium yield: unrealised 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, further 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 through an open doorway. In the gloom, a staircase of dark hardwood; 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 little light in, but Justin could nonetheless see that there was dust on the surface of some cardboard boxes that lay stacked in a 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, their 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 had grown 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 each other 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 they were from. He wondered why, in the many weeks since arriving, he had not noticed how densely populated the city was. All that time driving around in his limo, he thought, he must have been working on spreadsheets or reading reports.

‘You’re so easy to please,’ Zhou X said, tapping away on her phone without looking at him. ‘All I have to do is show you old houses.’

They stopped the car because he had seen a small lane of nondescript houses that seemed derelict at first glance. It was the property developer’s instinct in him that spotted the lane, he thought, for it was barely distinguishable from the dozens of others they had seen, and in fact a great deal less attractive. Tucked behind a row of small fruit and vegetable shops, the low brick houses had not long ago been rendered in cheap cement and now looked, frankly, ugly: low residential value, ripe for development. Wires sagged along the façades of the buildings, competing for space with lines of washing hung up to dry; a small girl came out of a doorway carrying a basin of grey-hued water, which she splashed into the street. There was something about the way of life here – families living at close quarters, spilling into one another – that reminded him of the slums not far from where he used to live: hundreds of identical, flimsy houses, thousands of lives that seemed to blend into one. Sometimes they would catch fire and the entire area would be razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt a few months later. He had never known any of the people who lived in that world, and even before he became an adult, the shanties were cleared to make way for a shopping mall.

He’d remembered to bring his little digital camera, and began photographing the narrow, sunless alley and the shabby shops that surrounded it; as he did so, an old woman emerged from one of the houses, carrying a few plastic bags bulging with clothes. On the LCD screen of his camera she appeared smiling, gap-toothed, spontaneously lifting her bags to the camera as if displaying a trophy.

‘Hey, people don’t like you interfering with their lives,’ Zhou X called from inside the car. ‘Can you hurry up? I’m late for my next appointment.’

For days afterwards he looked at the picture of the old woman, even putting it on his laptop so that every time he turned it on she was there, smiling at him. There was something about her thin hair, dyed jet-black and set in tight curls, that reminded him of his grandmother – the attempts at vanity making her seem frailer, not younger. He remembered his grandmother’s room: the chalky smell of thick white face powder and tiger balm interlaced with eau de cologne. He would sit on the bed and watch her undo the curlers from her hair; she liked having him around, liked talking to him, even though he could not yet understand all of what she said. He must have been no more than five or six and she was already in her eighties, already weak. And he was surprised by the glassy clarity of these memories, the way they settled insistently on his waking days like a thin, sticky film that he could not shake off. He had never even been close to his grandmother.

With the photo enlarged, he could make out the colour of some of the clothes through the translucent plastic bags the old woman was carrying: a jumble of cheap textiles proudly displayed to the beholder. Her cheeks were red and coarse, her remaining teeth badly tea-stained. He wanted to go back and try to find her, maybe take more photographs – and who knows, on further inspection (and without a nagging actress on his back) he might get a clearer view of those small houses and the neighbouring shops. A thought flashed across his mind: maybe he could restore them, save them from further degradation by thinking of some clever scheme whereby the residents could continue paying low rent and the shops could be run on a cooperative basis. The entire site would become a model for modern urban dwelling in Asia; young educated people would want to come and live cheek by jowl with old Shanghainese.

He jotted down a few rough figures, arranging them in neat columns: how much financing such a scheme might take to work – nothing serious, just the vaguest estimate, and yet, as always, the moment he thought about money, the project began to feel real, crystallising into something solid and attainable. He kept the piece of paper on his desk at work so he would not forget it.

But the whole of the next week was taken up with meetings with bankers and contractors, dinners with Party officials, preparing a presentation to the Mayor’s office; the following week he had to go to Tokyo, and then Hong Kong, then Malaysia. When he finally made it back to Shanghai it was turning cold and damp with the onset of winter, and he did not feel like venturing out much, did not have the energy to track down the old woman and her little lane, for he did not know where it was exactly – maybe somewhere between a highway and a big triangular glass building? He barely had any time to himself these days. Most evenings he was so tired it felt too much of an effort even to shower and clean his teeth before he went to bed; all he wanted to do was fall asleep. His limbs ached, his mouth was dry all the time, and his head felt cloudy, as if set in thick fog on a muggy day, a headache hovering on the horizon. He got the ’flu and was laid up in bed for over a week, and then bronchitis set in and he couldn’t shake it. His bathroom scales showed he had lost nearly ten pounds, but he wasn’t too worried – he was just overworked; it had happened to him before. Whenever he worked too much he got sick. But still he got up every morning, put on his suit, went to meetings, studied site plans and financial models.