‘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;