She took her expensive new phone to a Sichuan girl who traded things in the dorm, and sold it for a nice sum of cash. She washed her hair and tied it neatly before going to Boss Lin’s office. She was wearing her tightest jeans that she usually reserved for her day off. They were so tight that she could not sit down comfortably without them cutting into the tops of her thighs.
Little Miss, it’s highly irregular for us to hand out salaries before payday, he said, but he was already looking for the number of the accounts department.
Come on, it’s almost the end of the month, only a week to go. Phoebe twirled her hair and inclined her head the way she noticed other girls doing when they talked to the handsome security guards. Anyway, she laughed, our relationship is a bit irregular, don’t you think?
Foshan, Songxia, Dongguan, Wenzhou – she was going to bypass them all. Her bar was going to be raised all the way to the sky. There was only one city she could go to now, the biggest and brightest of them all.
The girl at the next table was still reading her magazine, her boyfriend sending messages on his iPhone. Sometimes he would read out a message and laugh, but the girl would not respond, she just continued to flick through her magazine. He looked up at Phoebe, just for a split second, and at first she thought he was scowling in that familiar look-down-on-you expression. But then she realised that he was squinting because of the light. He hadn’t even noticed her.
The girl’s mobile phone rang and she began to rummage in her handbag for it, emptying out its contents on the table. There were so many shiny pretty things, lipstick cases, keyrings, and also a leather diary, a pen, stray receipts, and scrunched-up pieces of tissue paper. She answered the phone, and as she did so, stood up and gathered her things, hastily replacing them in her bag. Her boyfriend was trying to help her, but she was frowning with impatience. A 5-mao coin fell to the floor and rolled to Phoebe’s feet. She bent over and picked it up.
‘Don’t worry,’ the boy said over his shoulder as he followed his girlfriend out. ‘It’s only 5 mao.’
They had just left when Phoebe noticed something on the table. Half hidden under a paper napkin was the girl’s ID card. Phoebe looked up and saw that they were still on the pavement, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross the road. She could have rushed out and called to them, done them a huge favour. But she waited, feeling her heart pound and the blood rush to her temples. She reached across and took the card. The photo was bland; you couldn’t make out the cheekbones that in real life were so sharp you could have cut your hand on them. In the photo the girl’s face was flat and pale. She could have been any other young woman in the café.
Outside, the boy was leading the girl by the hand as they crossed the road. She was still on the phone, her floppy bag trailing behind her like a small dog. The skies were clear that day, a touch of autumn coolness in the air.
With a paper napkin, Phoebe wiped the breadcrumbs off the card and tucked it safely into her purse.
2
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