Book Review – Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw | Isabel Costello

“I’m struggling to think of more than two books I’ve read set in China and I suspect they’re the same two everyone else has read: Wild Swans (1991) by Jung Chang and Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) by Arthur Golden, both historical masterpieces, international bestsellers and published a good while ago.  So much about China has changed since then including global perceptions – it’s opened up considerably and far more Westerners have travelled there, but to me it was still a huge and incomprehensible place I knew very little about.   Last autumn I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of Five Star Billionaire precisely because it’s contemporary and forward-looking.  Its bluntly unromantic portrayal of life in Shanghai taps into an unprecedented level of interest, curiosity and even fear of what China is and will become – I didn’t hesitate to include it in my Fiction Hot Picks 2013.

Tash Aw’s literary credentials are impressive and likely to be further enhanced by the release of this high-profile third novel.  No doubt his cosmopolitan background has played a part:  born in Taipei, China, to Malaysian parents he was brought up in Malaysia, moved to England to study law at Cambridge and now lives in London.  The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) won The Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Prize for First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year.  A second novel, Map of the Invisible World followed in 2010.

Five Star Billionaire charts the fate of five economic migrants of Chinese Malaysian origin as they pursue their ambitions in Shanghai (already the world’s largest city with a population of ca. 23 million and predicted to reach 30 million by 2020).  Phoebe is young, naive and materialistic, hooked on self-help books one of which is the Five Star Billionaire of the title.  Gary is a popstar who has fatally tarnished his image at the height of his fame.  Yinghui is a businesswoman who has sacrificed a lot to get where she is; Walter is a bigshot entrepreneur who’s not what he seems and Justin is a property magnate whose professional and personal life are in ruins.”

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Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw – review | Adam Mars-Jones | The Guardian

Tash Aw's tale of five migrant workers carving out lives in a modernising Shanghai is the stuff of a hit TV miniseries

“Shanghai, a city ‘with a heart as deep and unknown
as the forests of the Amazon’.” Photograph: Alamy

“At one point in Tash Aw's fine new novel about what people call "the new China" a young woman is trying to photograph herself on her mobile phone in a park in Guangzhou, hoping to enliven her internet dating profile with an image that doesn't make her look like an immigrant factory worker (which she is). An old man who sells tickets for the rowing boats on the lake offers to take the picture for her. He looks uncertainly at her phone. She wonders if he understands how to work it. Then he says: "This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school." This is the world of the book, where traditional societies seem to have leapfrogged their way into a modernity without signposts, where the past isn't solid enough to build on but too substantial to be ignored.

The five main characters, three men and two women, all come to Shanghai (by some definitions the world's largest city) from Malaysia, though their backgrounds range from old money to rural deprivation. As a title, Five Star Billionaire is close to brash, and the book's storyline could persuasively be pitched to a producer in search of a blockbuster miniseries, but the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing – with elements of frustrating evasion – rather than propulsive. Tash Aw doesn't exactly kill plot momentum or the emotional impact of the situations he creates, but he certainly keeps them in check. Narrative hints are often indirect, like clues in a detective story, as when a passing reference to a character having written an article deploring the architecture of Gaudí suggests that a conversation almost a hundred pages earlier wasn't in fact spontaneous.

It's possible to reach the book's final stretch without being sure that this is a story of revenge. If it is, then revenge is being eaten very cold indeed, from the chiller cabinet if not the freezer.”

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Review: Five Star Billionaire, By Tash Aw: The loneliness of five long-distance foreigners | The Independent

Shanghai Skyline (Photo credit: Keith Marshall)

“If the authorities in Shanghai ever want to ask a prize-winning writer to pen poetic phrases to attract visitors and investors to China's (and the world's) largest city, they would do best not to call Tash Aw. For this, his third novel, paints a dark picture of an endless metropolis to which many come to seek their fortunes but instead risk losing, or at the least deadening, their souls.

Like his first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2005) and his second, Map of the Invisible World, Five Star Billionaire is connected to Malaysia, where Aw grew up. And he is unmatched at evoking the smells and sounds of the land and cityscapes, the figures of speech and shifting cultural mores of that finger-like peninsula that pokes into the South China Sea; a warm, wonderful land, but one where many fortunes were made too quickly and which discarded much of its history carelessly in the rush to develop.”

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Kris Aquino as Massacre Queen and other 1990s Philippine inside jokes in Linmark’s new novel, Leche

“The winner of the Mr. Pogi Hawaii 1991 finds the opportunity to visit the Filipino communities in the United States mainland.

But Vincent “Vince” de los Reyes, the first runner-up and an honors graduate of University of Hawaii in Manoa, gets to visit the Philippines for a week, including a live interview with Kris Aquino.

De los Reyes’ return to his homeland after 13 years takes place in 1991, when the country is beset with power blackouts, the specter of the return of Marcos, and the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo after 600 years.

“Leche” is Vince’s account of his stay in the Philippines at that time, complete with tourist tips, snippets from a book (“Decolonization for Beginners: A Filipino Glossary,” written by his UH teacher Bonifacio Dumpit), his bangungot journal and vintage postcards bought from National Bookworm.

The novel “Leche” (355 pages, published by Coffee House Press) is by Filipino-American R. Zamora Linmark, who holds a dual citizenship. It is a fitting follow-up to “Rolling the R’s,” his 1997 novel about the young Vince, his siblings and classmates as they adapt to Hawaii after living in a town in the North. Now Vince has gone out of the closet and supposedly wizened up to the world. But not Manila, as Vince’s misadventures will show us in the novel.”

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High five for Ninotchka Rosca's new novel Gang of Five | Joel David

“Assertive, impatient with detractors, firm in her convictions, unsparingly self-critical, she would nevertheless surprise everyone with a graciousness that could only come from a first-hand familiarity with people-oriented service – from gestures as casual as sharing pictures (of her home, or her past) that made her happy, to helping an infirm neighbor abandoned by everyone else, to offering assistance to anyone devastated by natural calamity.

My “Gang of 5” copy will never leave my personal book shelf, mainly because of the author’s signature affixed to a handwritten quotation from Conrad Aiken – and also because of the text, “Limited Edition,” affixed above the title.

In an exchange, Rosca said that the book will be available to a general readership by mid-year, and however one cuts the argument, it would be a major loss for readers of Philippine literature if it weren’t.

For this, out of all the several anthologies of English-language Pinoy short fiction ever put out, will satisfactorily serve as the all-purpose single-volume introduction to local writing that anyone will ever need.

None of the five pieces is less than inspired, each one represents a writing challenge distinct from the rest, and everything builds up to the larger anticipation of greater pleasures awaiting in the output of other Filipino authors – final proof of Rosca’s generosity of spirit in honoring her colleagues by providing evidence of how equal they are, as she is, to the challenge of literary excellence.”

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Andrea Hirata's The Rainbow Troops

“WHEN it comes to learning about Indonesia from fiction, most Australian readers won't have gone much further than Christopher Koch's 1978 novel, The Year of Living Dangerously. It is a wonderful and important book, but part of its point is that it presents an outsider's view. The Rainbow Troops, written in Indonesian and first published in 2005, is very much the view from inside: it's an autobiographical novel in which Andrea Hirata recalls his childhood on the island of Belitong, where he attended the village school.

The Rainbow Troops has become a cult novel in its own country and is the first Indonesian novel to find its way into the international general fiction market. Hirata has written three sequels, and in 2008 the first novel was made into an award-winning film.

The troops in question are the 10 children - ''Belitong-Malays from the poorest community on the island'' - who attend Muhammadiyah Elementary School: ''It, too, was the poorest, the poorest village school in Belitong.'' They are taught by the dedicated but ageing Pak Harfan and his offsider, Bu Mus, a 15-year-old girl on her first day of teaching. From this day, which is when the story starts, the school is in constant danger of being closed down, and is always being compared unfavourably with the prosperous school run by the company that owns the island's tin mines.”

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Poetry Day in Vietnam: focus on youth

“The year’s most-anticipated poetry festival takes place at the Temple of Literature in Ha Noi this weekend, when the 11th National Poetry Day coincides as usual with first full-moon of the year with the theme Tuoi Tre Voi To Quoc (Youth and Nation).

Visitors at last year's Poetry Day

“This year, youth will be the main focus of the poetry festival,” said Huu Thinh, chairman of the Viet Nam Writers Association, organiser of the festival. “This is a chance to honour the creativity of youth and encourage their enthusiasm.”

In addition to the participation of poetry clubs from Ha Noi and surrounding areas, this year’s event will also include the participation of students from 11 colleges and universities in Ha Noi and the northern province of Thai Nguyen, including Ha Noi Culture College, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, the University of Technology, and Thai Nguyen University.””

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Poet E. San Juan publishes 4th book of poems in Filipino

“US-based Filipino scholar E. San Juan, Jr., emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature and Ethnic Studies, has just published his fourth book of poems in Filipino, "Bukas Luwalhating Kay Ganda," sponsored by the Philippines Cultural Studies Center.

His previous collections include "Alay sa Paglikha ng Bukang-liwayway" (Ateneo U Press), "Sapagkat Iniibig Kita" (U.P. Press), "Sutrang Kayumanggi" and "Mahal Magpakailanman" (LuLu.com).

San Juan is currently a fellow of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas. He was a fellow of the W.E.B. Institute, Harvard University, for which he is completing a monograph on “African American Internationalism and Solidarity with the Philippine Revolution.” A part of the research has been published in Socialism and Democracy, July 2010, and in the e-journal Cultural Logic.”

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Tan Twan Eng on Kuala Lumpur

“Its name means “Estuary of Mud,” and it started life as a tin-mining frontier town in the 1850s. Perhaps that is why Kuala Lumpur has always been reinventing itself. Since independence in 1957, the capital of Malaysia has been striving to rise, like a lotus flower, above its murky, terrene origins. And it has succeeded. Today, one of the most spectacular sights in the city—or anywhere in the world—is the 88-story Petronas Twin Towers. Lit up at night, they glitter like a pair of diamond-encrusted ears of corn. But whenever I see them, I think also of Bok House, a mansion 10 minutes’ walk from the Twin Towers.

The Bok House, home to Le coq d'or restaurant, which Tan's
family patronised in his childhood. The building has been
demolished. As noted in the article: “As Kuala Lumpur has
modernized, parts of its history have been forsaken.”
According to the Wikipedia article on Bok House, the plot of
land where it once stood is now used as a temporary car park.

Chua Cheng Bok built the mansion in 1929. He started out poor, but became one of the richest men in the country and constructed his home in the Renaissance style, incorporating Chinese and Anglo-Indian elements into its design. In 1958 it was leased to a restaurant called Le Coq d’Or. In the early 1980s, when I was 10 or 11, my parents used to take my sister and me for dinner there once a month. Le Coq d’Or’s menu was Western: fish and chips, chicken chop, steak, but Malaysianized (the chicken chop came soaked in a mushroom gravy; the vegetables were steamed but still crunchy). The staff was Hainanese, of the kind much sought after as cooks by the English during colonial times.

On every visit I would wander around the poorly lit mansion. The lobby was tiled in squares of black and white. Italian marble statues covered in a skin of dust posed on heavy traditional Chinese blackwood furniture. A grand staircase with art nouveau cast-iron railings rose from the center of the lobby into the darkness of the closed-off second floor. The dining room smelled of starched tablecloths and stale frying butter. Oil paintings, murky with age, hung on the walls. Part of the thrill of exploring the house was my suspicion that it was haunted. Going to the washroom on one of my first visits, I turned down the wrong corridor and came to a room furnished with only an immense Chinese blackwood opium divan. The mother-of-pearl decorations on its headboard were elaborate and eerie, giving the divan a malevolent air.”

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Poet Recites Ode to Sihanouk, as Cambodia Weeps

“Thousands poured onto the streets of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh for the royal funeral procession carrying the casket of former King Norodom Sihanouk. He will be cremated Monday in a Buddhist ceremony. Cambodians old and young mourned the revered Norodom Sihanouk, who passed in Beijing in October at the age of 89. His casket moved through six kilometers of central Phnom Penh streets, departing the Royal Palace and arriving at the nearby cremation ground. They wept. They chanted. They prayed. Among them was a 59-year-old farmer from Kampong Cham province named Tia Tha. In tribute to the late King, Tia Tha chants a poem he wrote when he learned of Sihanouk's death. VOA Khmer's Say Mony reports from Phnom Penh.”

Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets – review | Guardian

“Long faced by the permafrost of dictatorship, Burma’s poets have deployed metaphor to ingenious effect

The modernist phase of Burmese poetry, known as khitsan (meaning “testing the times”), emerged in the 1930s from Rangoon University and was associated with opposition to British colonial rule. Since then, poetry in Burma has retained a political significance unthinkable in the west. The odd dim schoolteacher aside, who would seek to censor poets in Britain, for example? When the military seized power in 1962, Burma became in many respects a closed country, culturally as well as politically – “a Stone Age cave sealed by stones”, in the words of Maung yu Pi in ‘The Great Ice Sheet’, leaving “a great culture, dilapidated and yellowing”. Poetry, with a long and distinguished history in Burma, is a form to which the country’s readers naturally turn. Under the permafrost of dictatorship, poets needed ways to write without finding half the words inked out. They proved as ingenious in metaphor as the times required.

This is not a new story: eastern Europe was the same before 1989 (and eastern European poets were among those read by Burmese writers). We must wait to see if the same price – the collapse of the literary audience – is paid for liberty in Burma, although the deeply embedded traditions of Buddhism, which appear frequently in the poems, might arrest that process. Zeyar Lynn‘s introduction to <i>Bones Will Crow</i>, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry, sketches various contemporary positions that have grown out of the movement away from the traditional poetic form of the internally rhymed, four-syllable line. There is a broad church approach, as well as 1970s innovation (khitpor) and the contemporary postmodern (does this sound familiar?). It sets the scene for future disappointment without directly invoking the possibility.”

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A new anthology of Thai short fiction brings out the best of 2012 in English translation

“Translation is a time-consuming, arduous and often thankless task. Literary translation also involves suppressing some natural impulses to interpret, edit and impose a personal style, while remaining in the background and allowing the tale to take root in another language.

Marcel Barang, 67, is not just a translator but active in the literary sphere, promoting the talents he feels merit it. In 12 Thai Short Stories _ 2012 he collated a dozen of last year's finest short fiction by Thai writers into an accessible and absorbing e-book. The styles and subjects are a study in contrasts, pointing to increasing depth and nuance in new Thai fiction. They are the ones, out of the hundreds Barang reads each year, that he feels stand on their own on merit.

This collection features a past SEA Write winner (Ussiri Dharmachoti) and nominee (Watn Yuangkaew), a prominent film critic (Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa) and the 'Pink Man' poet and artist (Sompong Thawee) _ authors from the up-and-coming to the established.

Here the supernatural features prominently, with a three-eyed child, a village drowning in dog excrement, a ghost of a bygone revolution, a false pregnancy. There are also more prosaic slice-of-life pieces, with an excellent story on family funeral politics by Kajohnrit Ragsa, and on psychological disorders such as social phobia and madness. Murder also makes an appearance. In some stories, a poetic style takes precedence over narrative.

The anthology works well as a whole, but is inconclusive in terms of trends or what direction Thai fiction might be headed in 2013. In an interview, Barang told Brunch that the breadth of subject matter Thai writers work with continues to widen.”

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Playwright Bonifacio Ilagan and other Philippine dictatorship victims to be compensated

“Almost four decades after he was arrested and tortured and his sister disappeared into a maze of Philippine police cells and military houses, playwright Bonifacio Ilagan is finally seeing his suffering officially recognized.

A writer for an underground communist newspaper, Ilagan and thousands like him were rounded up by dictator Ferdinand Marcos' security forces after he placed the Philippines under martial law in 1972. Detentions, beatings, harassment and killings of the regime's opponents continued until Marcos was toppled in 1986.

Even though democracy was restored, it would take another 27 years for the Philippine Congress to vote on a bill awarding compensation and recognition to martial law victims. The bill was ratified Monday and will be sent to Pres. Benigno Aquino III for signing into law, said Sen. Francis Escudero, a key proponent.

"More than the monetary compensation, the bill represents the only formal, written document that martial law violated the human rights of Filipinos and that there were courageous people who fought the dictatorship," said a statement from SELDA, an organization of former political prisoners that campaigned for the passage of the bill.

Ilagan's story is more of a rule than exception among leftist activists of his generation.”

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Leeds Book Club: Interview with Tan Twan Eng

Both your books deal with the relationships between students and teachers. Have you had an inspirational teacher and what was the greatest lesson they taught you?

My teachers are all the writers I’ve ever read and still read: Vladimir Nabokov, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Somerset Maugham, and many, many others. They taught me the different ways one can view and describe the world.

I felt when reading your books very ignorant about the part of the world you come from; do you feel that your books are helping to educate people around the world about the history of Malaysia? What sort of responses have you had from Western readers and how do they compare with readers in your country?

They seem to be helping to educate people around the world, although that isn’t my main purpose or intention when I write. Western readers have more questions about all aspects of my novels, from the setting and factual background to the characters. Readers in Malaysia are more interested in the characters than anything else, because they’re already familiar with the setting of my novels.

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