❝We were distracted because we were all getting richer. I was only a teenager, but I knew something was not right.❞ — Tash Aw [on life in Malaysia in the late 70s and 80s]“If the American dream of the 21st century has relocated to China, Shanghai is today's New York. That, at least, is the vibrant impression created by Tash Aw's third novel, set in a frenetic megacity of 20 million people, where fortunes are made and lost with vertiginous speed against the highrise Pudong skyline. "When you're in Shanghai, you feel an energy so blinding that you get swept up," Aw says. "It's only when you leave that it feels unreal."
Five Star Billionaire depicts the Chinese dream in a snakes-and-ladders universe of opportunity and ruin, through the eyes of Chinese Malaysians â from tycoons to factory girls â trying their luck in the new China. For Aw, whose own ancestors made the reverse journey out of southern China to Malaya, and who moved to England as a student in the early 1990s, this novel is about the people he grew up with, and is his "most personal" book.
His 2005 debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, set in 1940s British Malaya on the brink of Japanese invasion, won the Costa (Whitbread) first novel award and a Commonwealth Writers prize. It was on various longlists, including the Man Booker and the International Impac Dublin prize, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. The Indonesian setting of his second novel, Map of the Invisible World, published four years later, marked Aw, now 41, as part of a rising generation of south-east-Asian-born writers who are remapping the region with little heed to existing national frontiers. Aw, who has a kinship with Tan Twan Eng, author of the Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists, casts one eye on the past in a place whose full-throttle growth leaves scant time for the backward glance. "I'm not naturally nostalgic for a cosy, bygone era," he says, "but a lot of my work is concerned with what we give up in the march forwards."”
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