Five Star Billionaire: A Novel by Tash Aw Page B

porcelain-white. She reached for it with her chopsticks and prodded it slightly without great enthusiasm. “I’m too busy for a relationship,” she said.
    “Listen, where do you want to be in ten years’ time? Still hustling panties to rich women?”
    Yinghui could not hide her annoyance, but nonetheless she allowed herself to be persuaded to go on a couple of blind dates—friends of friends of friends. The first was held in a Mexican restaurant near Tianzifang, the next in a Xinjiang restaurant at the far end of Hengshan Lu. On both occasions the men were polite, professionally successful, and dull. Toward the end of the second date, Yinghui decided that it would be her last. As she watched the man (Michael? Mark? A nice American lawyer) pull the leathery pieces of lamb off the skewer, she realized that she wasn’t able to summon any energy to be witty or flirtatious, to behave as she knew she should on a first date with a perfectly okay man. It wasn’t, as her friends claimed, that she was out of practice: She doubted she had ever known how to do so. The small talk left her feeling bewildered and exhausted, and she was constantly afraid that the conversation would turn toward more-personal things, toward the past: how and why she had first come to Shanghai—the normal things foreigners asked each other. She tried to seize control of the conversation, filling it with lengthy explanations of how each dish was prepared, what bizarre Xinjiang ingredients each one contained. The man listened politely and asked questions with the requisite level of cultural awareness, which made the transaction less painful for Yinghui. At one point, as she felt the evening slipping dangerously into the “tell me about your family” territory, Yinghui changed the subject abruptly by turning to the waitress, who had fortuitously arrived with more tea. She began to engage her in idle chat, hoping to glean insights on her exotic homeland, which she would then translate as conversation fillers, which would make it impossible for Michael/Mark to ask more-personal questions.The waitress’s name badge read ALIYA . Such a beautiful Xinjiang name, Yinghui remarked; tell us about where you are from. The waitress giggled and shrugged—she was actually from way down south, Fujian province; she wasn’t an exotic Muslim at all. Mercifully, the lights suddenly dimmed for the entrance of the Uighur dancers. Yinghui was pleased that the music was loud and that the dancers yelped and shrieked all the way through their performance, for it meant that no further conversation was necessary. She smiled at Michael/Mark, and he smiled back.
    She really did not need a man to be successful.
    THAT EVENING, YINGHUI LEFT work early to get dressed for an evening function. Hours before the event, she began to feel anxious; even thinking about what dress to wear and how to style her still too-short hair made her nervous, which in turn filled her with a self-loathing for having allowed such trivial concerns to enter her life.
    She had been nominated for the Businesswoman of the Year awards, in the Breakthrough category, in which she was the oldest person. The ceremony was held in the ballroom of a hotel in Jing’an, decorated with huge bouquets of pink flowers and banners bearing quotes from Sunzi’s
The Art of War:
OPPORTUNITIES MULTIPLY AS THEY ARE SEIZED. A LEADER LEADS BY EXAMPLE, NOT FORCE . The other nominees looked the same to Yinghui—pretty, sylphlike, twenty-something local women, their hair effortlessly long, curling featherlike toward their collarbones. Yinghui wished she had been nominated in the Lifetime Achievement category, which was made up almost exclusively of older Western women; she might have looked more delicate and feminine lined up next to them when the group photographs were taken. Instead, surrounded by women ten years younger than herself, she looked square-cut and boxy. She did not win the award (which went to a girl of twenty-four who