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    Five Star Billionaire
    Five Star Billionaire
    Five Star Billionaire
    Audiobook15 hours

    Five Star Billionaire

    Written by Tash Aw

    Narrated by Robertson Dean

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job-but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn't exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family's real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel's characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.

    Five Star Billionaire is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel that offers rare insight into the booming world of Shanghai, a city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams. Bursting with energy, contradictions, and the promise of possibility, Tash Aw's remarkable new book is both poignant and comic, exotic and familiar, cutting-edge and classic, suspenseful and yet beautifully unhurried.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 30, 2013
    ISBN9781452686653
    Five Star Billionaire
    Author

    Tash Aw

    Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, and brought up in Malaysia. He moved to England in his teens and now lives in London. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Map of the Invisible World. His most recent novel, Five Star Billionaire, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.

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    Reviews for Five Star Billionaire

    3.5/5

    147 ratings38 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Five Star Billionaire is the soon-to-be-released novel by Tash Aw, the award winning author of Harmony Silk Factory and Map of the Invisible World. This is a novel of the new China, specifically Shanghai. Aw was raised in Asia and has a gift for capturing life in China today. This novel centers on five characters who have come to Shanghai for different reasons, but their lives intersect in unexpected ways.The first character we meet is Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the title. Walter grew up poor in rural Malaysia, but was determined to become a wealthy man. Next we meet Phoebe, an illegal immigrant to Shanghai. Phoebe's road to Shanghai also began in a rural village. Phoebe's hope is to raise herself up, and also her family. She is uneducated, but willing to learn from her mistakes and work hard to achieve her goals.Justin Lim is the eldest son from a wealthy family in Kuala Lumpur. He has been groomed from birth to manage the family's immense real estate holdings. He is in Shanghai to cement the Lim family's interests in China. Yinghui is a businesswoman who began her rise by establishing a chain of up-scale lingerie shops. She is also from a well-off Malaysian family; she and Justin share a history, but it was not always a pleasant one.Gary is a pop star. He sells millions of record and performs concerts to thousand of screaming teenage fans. Gary also is from an impoverished Malaysian family. After winning a singing contest, he began a meteoric rise to stardom, yet he remains deeply unhappy.It took me a few chapters to become accustomed to the style of this novel. Aw jumps around from one character's story to another. The chapters are short, each one focused on the perspective of a single character. It takes much of the novel for the relationship between the characters to become clear.Of course the sixth character in the book is the city of Shanghai. It is constantly being built and re-built. It is crowded and noisy. Shanghai is a magnet for immigrants, legal and illegal. Finding work is difficult-there are so many people willing to do anything to survive and send money to their families back home. The city is cruel to its inhabitants, yet it remains a beacon of hope throughout Asia.Aw has set the stage for an interesting story, and Five Star Billionaire does not disappoint. I highly recommend this novel. Many thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program for sending this on to me.
    • 4/5
      I've never thought of migrant workers in quite this way before. This is a modern world in which the new migrant workers in Asia are those young people leaving the small villages in the provinces and turning their hopes toward the lights in the big cities of China. And Shanghai is the biggest and brightest of all. Tash Aw's book centers around four young people and the author of a self-help book who end up in the dazzling lights of Shanghai, each with their own idea of success. What they didn't know was that "the city held its promises just out of your reach, waiting to see how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted, how long your were prepared to wait...The city was teasing you, testing your limits, using you. You arrived thinking you were going to use Shanghai to get what you wanted, and it would be some time before you realized that it was using you..." (257)I really wanted to like this book because my husband has been singing the praises of the new China for several years. Unfortunately, I didn't like what I saw through the eyes of these characters. They were willing to do whatever it took to achieve their particular goal even if it meant following someone else's idea of success through the pages of a self-help book. The chapter headings could have been bullet points in the book with titles such as "Reinvent Yourself" and "Pursue Gains, Forget Righteousness." The author, Walter Chao, took his own words to heart and was able to follow through on his game plan without remorse. Maybe the primary characters got what they deserved. Or maybe not. I didn't have enough sympathy for them to care all that much, but I do think that this is a book that begs to be discussed and would be a good choice for a book group.
    • 5/5
      Tash Aw’s new novel is a great story of five unique characters drawn to the vibrant city of Shanghai for fulfillment of their perceived destinies. They are all drawn by the idea of the Chinese city but are not fully prepared for the reality of the teeming metropolis. The five people, Phoebe, Gary, Justin, Yinghui, and Walter Chau, arrive in Shanghai independently but readers begin to see the connections between them as they pursue their dreams. Phoebe is a young worker from a rural area of Malasia. She works in factories and keeps her eyes open for opportunities to advance. She succeeds in earning enough money to move to Shanghai to take a new job. Gary is also from Malaysia, raised in a poor family like Phoebe. He is a singer taught by his mother, rises to stardom, and makes his move to the lucrative China music market via large venue concerts. Justin is the son of a wealthy real estate family in Malaysia, who travels to Shanghai to work on a real estate acquisition as a family “fixer” of business/political problems. Yinghui is the artistic daughter of a Malaysian low level government administrator involved in regulating business construction. She moves to Shanghai to develop a her own business of personal beauty. Walter Chao is a writer of self-help motivational books for people who want to develop and maintain successful professional work strategies. All of these characters make personal choices related to economic success, and the results are not predictable. Shanghai is a city that fundamentally changes people and forces them to make life changing decisions. The relationships of the five people are complex and reach varied levels of intimacy. They must decide to continue their determined paths to success or salvage some of their personal characteristics that they sacrificed by making commitments to the very challenging but potentially highly rewarding Shanghai society. Readers will connect emotionally with all 5 of the “Five Star Billionaires” because of their interesting character development and their realistic situations in Shanghai. The vibrant depiction of Shanghai is like Murakami’s description of Tokyo in his novels, 1Q84 and Norwegian Wood. Five Star Billionaire is one of my favorite novels of 2013 so far.
    • 3/5
      The premise of this book sounded interesting, but it didn't work for me. I didn't care about any of the five main characters. Actually, there are six main characters. Aw does a great job of making Shanghai a character, but a rather unsavory one. Although the way the stories comes together in the end is clever, the effect was somewhat muted by having guessed what one of the characters was up to. It is well-written, it just didn't capture my imagination.
    • 3/5
      Tash Aw came to BCLT to speak. I'm always amazed by people who write in a language other than their native tongue.Started reading it before we left for Boston, finished it after we got back. Needed to run through the chapters afterwardsto piece together the characters and their relationships. Some were clear to me, others hard to recall. Enjoyed readingabout Asian mentality in viewing western 'lifestyles'. Good read, though a bit confusing at times for me.
    • 4/5
      This book is set in modern-day China, and aside from a couple of mentions of internet pages being censored, it could be happening in any Western (and by that I mean capitalist) country. Forget all those communist stereotypes - Shanghai is clearly a modern-day hotbed of money making and entrepreneurship. The story follows five people, immigrants (all from Malaysia if I'm not mistaken), trying to make it big in China. The story is detailed, forensic in its analysis of some of the characters' back-stories, but the writing style is pleasantly readable and it never drags. At the end connections have been drawn between all the characters, and I was surprised by how little sympathy I had for most of them, compared with my attitude towards them at the beginning of the story.
    • 3/5
      While China has enjoyed double-digit economic growth for nearly two decades, set at an average rate of 10 - 11%, much of that development was centred in the cities, where it may have been closer to 17% growth overall. Particularly in the period 2003 - 2008, the Chinese economy went supernova. This tremendous boom created tremendous wealth, in a country with very loose legal contraints and hardly any regulation. The harsh reality is that China is governed by the rules of the jungle, and that to many people survival means survival of the fittest. China's ancient classic The Art of War means that one should not shun to take advantage of any means to achieve one's ends. Conceit, double-dealing and deceit are all part of the game. In some sense life in China resembles a computer game, not in vitual reality but in the flesh-and-blood.Shanghai is the commercial capital of China, and with its history of being a world capitalist city in the years leading up to the war, its creation a miracle on the scale of the rise of Hong Kong, created out of mud, the early Twenty-first century saw Shanghai arise again, like the Phoenix from its ashes, to engage in a wild dance with the dragon. It appears to be an excellent stage for a novel of greed and capitalism of the new century. In that sense, one might compare Five Star Billionaire by the Malaysian author Tash Aw with the novel of the 1990s, Money by Martin Amis. Unfortunately, Tash Aw as an author lacks the skill to pull it off.For a start, Five Star Billionaire has a weak structure. The story is told in alternating chapters on a rotation of five, as the plot or rather five plots are centred round five characters, each telling a story in turn. Five, maybe the five points of the Red Star, is too many, and the structure of the novel seems contrived, rigid and mechanical. None of the characters is fully developed, and although interactions between the characters are suggested, this more surprises the reader than anything, and the relations do not become transparent. The plot as a whole remains obscureThe story told for each of the characters consists of a roping together of all the cliches that are written about China in popular media in the world's newspapers the year around. The characters are charicatures lacking a human dimension, and as a result they remain two-dimensional card board figures.Being a Malaysian author, Tash Aw has created several characters who are Malaysian, and although there are many Malaysians of Chinese ethnic origin in Malaysia, the story's premise that they illegally immigrate into China and there compete with native Chinese employees seems implausable. Some of the characters in the novel speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin, and to engage the reader in this foreign-language environment, some words and exclamations are rendered into English. Now, in Mandarin this rarely poses a problem, but readers may wonder how aware either the author or his editor were of rendering "Hey" ("Hei") from supposedly Cantonese into English. Better not read that part aloud to prudish ears with an understanding of Cantonese!Although Five Star Billionaire seemed interesting and exciting during the first 80 pages, the story becomes cliche, mechanical, and ultimately boring. Perhaps it tells us more about Malaysians than about China.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book through the first three quarters. I liked that the different characters stories were starting to come together and the reader was going to find out how five different people were connected in the large city of Shanghai, China. This did not happen as this is a sad story of revenge. Revenge may be a great motive to move a plot though, in the case of this book it falls a little flat. The ending is not satisfactory and leaves the reader wondering what the purpose was anyway. The central character is an author writing how-to novels to make money to destroy a family who he believed stolehis father's life. When he meets the children of the two men who he believed took his fortune he takes theirs. He uses another character to destroy a would be partner's main business solely to exact revenge from when he was nineteen. This is a sad way to end what started out to be such a promising novel.The book is well-written and so it can have four stars. There are a few f-bombs so those who like zero swearing may e disappointed. Shanghai sounds like a brutal place to have grown up or to live in currently and for all these Malaysians it must have been quite a culture shock.Phoebe is a young girl following the advice in the self-help books of the author which will steal everyone's money although they may rebuild after the novel is over. I hope so because I would like to see a deeper ending than the one that I read.
    • 4/5
      his mystery is set in a childrens' group foster home near Oslo. The director has been killed and the focus seems to be on a troubled child who has disappeared. Those Norwegians are a caring and kind bunch of folks, so this is hardly a gritty crime novel, but is an enjoyable read.
    • 3/5
      This novel didn't really work for me. I thought that the basic premise was clever, and I found the early chapters appealing, but that initial appeal palled fairly quickly.The story takes the form of five narratives relating the experiences of separate Malaysian émigrés who have relocated to Shanghai. These five include:·a young woman struggling to make a life in the big city who thinks that her greatest chance for advancement lies in finding a wealthy man,;·a member of an immensely rich family which has made its wealth through selling insurance and is now looking to cash in on the property boom in Shanghai as it becomes increasingly westernised;·a successful pop star in his early twenties who, after having a meteoric career seems to have fallen foul of the tabloid papers that had previously eulogised his every act;·a successful businesswoman who has created an extensive commercial empire but worries that she has sacrificed her private life; and ·a personal development guru who has developed a life plan that can make the most unlikely candidate become a billionaire.Unfortunately, as the novel progresses each of these characters seemed to become more rather than less two-dimensional, and the plot simply seemed too contrived to be rally plausible.
    • 3/5
      I loved Tash Aw's previous novel, "Map of the Invisible World", and I was eager to read this one given its backdrop: the big dreams and harsh reality of today's China. New wealth is being created, but it's being distributed more unevenly than ever before, and the author drills down into the experiences of a range of characters from all parts of the spectrum -- migrant workers, real estate developers -- to illustrate this.But... the narrative bogs down under its own weight. Before I was 100 pages into it, I felt as if I was slogging through waist-deep molasses. It's perhaps too ambitious: the pacing and tone certainly don't make it easy even for someone as curious as I about the topic to become immersed in the novel. I think it has taken me a record nine attempts to make it 300 pages into the book, and I'm not deriving much pleasure from the process. I think by now I've reached the point where I can write at least a basic review, but it can't be an enthusiastic one. There's a lot of repetition -- this is, by and large, a novel about disillusionment and ambition, with all the ugly underside that you'd expect -- and what was completely missing for me is the kind of energy that is palpable when you are actually in Shanghai, a kind of energy that somehow is twinned with the darkness behind the boom. So, reluctantly, this is going to end up as a 3 star read for me. I don't feel any real compulsion to finish it. In fact, if I were forced to choose between this and the dentist, I might choose the dentist, if only because he offers nitrous oxide.
    • 4/5
      Similar in theme to Great Expectations a desire for the riches in another world, the search for comfort most often leads to fantastic motivated characters.In a sense a metaphor and warning about what Asian Capitalism is leading towards I enjoyed the read!
    • 3/5
      I can’t seem to finish [Tash Aw]’s book, [Five Star Millionaire], an ER read. The writing is good, and I get interested in the characters while I’m reading it, but when I put it down it’s weeks before I pick it up again. Too bad, because I enjoyed [The Harmony silk factory]. 2.75 stars
    • 3/5
      It's hard to imagine a more spectacular cityscape than the one that has thrust skywards in China's second largest city over the last few decades. The result is a fantastical array of glass and steel that at night lets Shanghai put on a lightshow which wouldn't be out of place in Las Vegas.Hardly surprising that millions of people have gravitated to the city with the dream of making a new life for themselves. Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire introduces us to just four of the city's twenty-seven million inhabitants, all Malyasian Chinese immigrants trying to ride the wave of China's economic boom.Poor, naive Phoebe arrives in the city full of hope in the form of a dream job but soon discovers that the job, like so much of Shanghai, is simply smoke and mirrors. Rich, sophisticated Yinghui has become a wealthy businessman by opening chains of spa salons and upmarket underwear shops to cater for the new upwardly mobile city dwellers. Justin is even more wealthy and successful as the brains of his family's powerful property development business but he's in personal meltdown, weighed down by the relentless pressure to seal the next deal. And finally there is rich but unsophisticated Gary whose angelic voice helped him escape from his rural backwater home to become a mega pop star. His career is now in freefall as a result of one too many alcohol-induced altercations in nightclubs.There is a fifth character, the shadowy figure of the five star billionaire Walter Chao who touches and disrupts the lives of these individuals. Phoebe religiously follows the advice from the pages of Chao's self help manuals on how to be successful while Yinghui can't resist the lure of a fantastic new business opportunity he puts her way. Walter Chao is the only character who speaks directly to the reader, his first person narration an early warning sign that he is perhaps just too good to be true.The novel starts with a lot of promise. This is where the characters are introduced and their moments of crisis are laid out. It's here that Tash Aw's wonderfully fluid style is at its best. By the time we reach the half way mark however it seems to loses its momentum. There are just too many coincidences of connections between the characters to be believable: Justin just happens to live in the same apartment as Phoebe; she gets a job working for Yingui who knows Justin from her younger days. Phoebe becomes chat room friends with Gary though she doesn't know he is the pop star she adores so much she had posters of him on her bedroom wall etc etc.Five Star Billionaire is an ambitious attempt to convey the mult-facted nature of this burgeoning city and the tension created by the race to wealth. The city Justin sees from his apartment is vibrant and flamboyant, each skyscraper trying to outdo its neighbour in height, splendour and luminescence.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 scattering into a million fragments before regrouping.In contrast the city Phoebe experiences is one of sweatshops which churn out cheap clothing for Westerners. Where Justin sees buildings, Phoebe's viewpoint is at the human level:"... she looked at the scene — at the thick wriggling river of bodies so dense and colourless that it was hard to make out each individual human being.....old age pensioners dressed in revolutionary clothes, stern paded jackets and shapeless trousers that matched their expressionless faces which seemed to have crumpled inwards. No light shone from their eyes, no feeling sprang from their gazes....Tash Aw paints a dark picture of Shanghai, a city that represents a beacon of hope for those who want to make their fortune but find instead that it robs them. They lose perspective, lose their sense of who they really are , lose their feeling of being in control. For Aw, this is a city that tantalises and teases with the prospect of success but only delivers at a cost to the individual.The city held its promises just of of reach, waiting to see how far you wr willing to go to get what you wanted, how long you were prepared to wait. And until you adjusted your expectations to take account of that,you would always be on the edge for despite ....... the feeling of unbridled potential, Shanghai would always seem to be accelerating a couple of steps ahead of you, no matter how hard you worked or played. .... You arrived thinking you were going to use Shanghai to get what you wanted, and it would take time before you realised it was using you; that it had already moved on, and you were playing catch up.If Shanghai is a tease, then so is Tash Aw's novel for setting up such a strong premise but ultimately letting it fizzle out.
    • 4/5
      This is a story of a metropolitan city Shanghai told from the perspective of five individuals have come to this city for various purposes. Some come to better their lives and some come to escape. Their lives intertwine and sometimes just brush each other. Some fall, some triumph, some fail and soar to great heights. Some struggle on and some leave. The metropolitan is a hard mistress and she is exacting. There are no short cuts or getting around her.This is a beautifully written book. The author perfectly captures the vibe of the city. The narrative is  pacy and does not slack at any point. A good read.
    • 4/5
      The tale of the up-and-down fortunes of five people trying their luck in Shanghai may not make the Booker Prize shortlist, but Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire is an entertaining tale that sheds light on the universal human desire to be countedl.Phoebe is a young woman who has recently arrived in bustling Shanghai to try her luck. Things appear to be going her way when a rich woman drops her ID card at a coffee shop. Between that and the self-help advice she reads, such as the adages in a book called Five Star Billionaire, Phoebe just knows she’ll make it.Justin is already near the top. His family has been rich for generations, owning and developing property. He’s the one picked in his generation to be the fixer, the one who makes sure things get done. His whole life is work -- meetings, society appearances, travel, paperwork. Not like his brother the hipster and his girlfriend, who owns a cafe but doesn’t even know how to read a ledger.Yinhui has worked hard as well, and is now a successful businesswoman with several ongoing ventures. Her life revolves around work as well, and she is poised to become even more successful.Gary has come from nothing and nowhere to be a huge pop music sensation. Winning a talent show and then going on to make hit after chart-topping hit, his life is controlled every minute in service to his career and those screaming girls who adore him.Walter is the Five Star Billionaire author and a character who lives in the shadows. He is the cog in this story that sets things going and, as his story is eventually revealed, his reasons are made clear.Written much in the style of a Kate Atkinson multiple narrative, the connections among the characters draw them into each other’s stories. Propelling them all is the other main character in the novel -- Shanghai. It is sprawling, it is tightly packed, it rewards the ruthless and robs the trusting. Stopping to smell the roses is not recommended in a cutthroat, fast-paced world.Shanghai is as mysterious and unforgiving in Aw’s novel as it is in Bo Caldwell’s Distant Land of My Father, a brilliant story of sophistication and survival that encompasses WWII, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, a flawed but fascinating novel with settings that include the International Settlement in Old Shanghai and a fantastical city that could not exist in reality, but which seems to be mirrored in Five Star Billionaire.In Aw’s novel, Shanghai is not just the exotic locale it often is to Westerners. This ultra-competitive world is recognizable to anyone who sees the way that financial success is deemed the ultimate goal for so many in today’s world. The goal of making money for its own sake, for respect and to get even with anyone who tried to hold you down is as much a part of American society as it is in Shanghai.The grace of Five Star Billionaire is that the human motives behind the drive to succeed, and the wanting to connect with other human beings even if it takes time away from a business meeting, underlies the story arc of each character.
    • 4/5
      Five Star Billionaire is about five young people each dreaming of success and hoping to find it in Shanghai. Phoebe, a factory worker, reinvents herself by pretending to be an accomplished business woman to attract rich men. Gary is a pop star trying to reignite his failing career. Justin has been tasked by his family to manage their real estate empire, but finds it is more than he can handle. Yinghui is a successful business woman eager to expand into new and risky ventures. Walter Chao, the successful, elusive billionaire, touches the lives of each of them.The novel is written in alternating chapters about each of the five characters using a third person narrative for the four young people. Walter Chao’s story is written in the first person. Although these are mostly separate, loosely interconnected stories, it works well as a novel. The city of Shanghai is the real connection.The style of the novel is slow and reflective allowing the reader to gradually get to know each of these five complex characters. As the story builds, their lives begin to intersect and relationships, past and present, are exposed. Tying them together is the city of Shanghai, shifting and changing, a character in itself. Their stories felt real. There is no happily ever after although there are good times and bad. The characters are traveling through a period of their lives where they learn and grow, and we see hope for their futures.This was a thoughtful, enjoyable book outside my usual reading choices. A fascinating glimpse at booming New China and the allure of Shangahi.
    • 4/5
      Tash Aw is certainly ambitious in telling this involved tale of five Asian people who are either questing for or trying to maintain wealth in the contemporary Far East. It was well written and I was not bored in its 350 plus pages. However, my problem was that the story was all to familiar to me. In the past few years I have read about a dozen book written by third world authors and in about half of them the central theme is the quest for wealth. I know if you live in a place where you struggle to survive this would be very important to you but I just had the feeling while reading the book I had been there and done that. So, I recommend the book if this is not a concern and there are several interesting subplots so that aspect was nice.
    • 3/5
      I enjoy Tash Aw's writing about SE Asia, and this book is no exception. Using the voices of 5 different people, one realizes the variety of life and expectations in Shanghai. The connection between the people is only through the quiet intervention of the Five Star Billionaire in the title.
    • 4/5
      I don't know much about Shanghai and have never visitied, so I was eager to read this novel. I love how Aw depicts the immediacy and vibrancy of the city. Some of the overlaps between the characters strained credibility, but I really enjoyed reading about these characters and their lives.
    • 4/5
      It's amazing how spot on this novel is in the way Shanghai is portrayed. Tash Aw manages to make you feel like you're walking along those streets, lost in those crowds alongside Phoebe and Justin and everyone else. It is perhaps a little unbelievable how intertwined the characters' lives are, considering how huge Shanghai is, but it makes for a very interesting narrative.
    • 3/5
      Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw is a story that held my interest as it told of five individuals and their ambitions to succeed in the crowded, busy city of Shanghai. The rich individuals want to make even more money, and the poor individuals are avid to succeed and become rich as well as find love. I found the characters interesting but as the story wove back and forth and the people in the story sometimes changed their names, I was sometimes confused and had to backtrack to remind myself who I was now reading about. I got a view into the way of life in that part of the world. I found the final third of the book losing energy, and in the end, some stayed rich and some returned to their humble roots, but nobody was able to find the love they were seeking. For example, it would have been nice if Gary and Phoebe truly found each other.
    • 4/5
      Five Star Billionaire is a novel that interweaves story plots and takes you back and forth in time. It does so well, and makes for an intriguing story. As much as I really liked to really like the book, however, I feel that it falls short of the target. The story does not really lead anywhere - there's nothing that ties up the bag. I think, still, that this is a good read that does lure me to read the author's other works.
    • 3/5
      I really wanted to like this, but it dragged. I know any time a book has multiple characters whose paths cross very briefly, it will be slow going in the beginning...but this never picked up.It's a story of 5 Malaysians, all from different walks of life, who are trying to create a fulfilling life in Shanghai. Each character exudes a sense of lonliness as none of them can communicate with those around them, yet they look to others and material things for happiness. They also are unaware of how their lives are intertwined. Aw kept having many of the characters pass each other or just miss what could be a dramatic moment/realization. Maybe it would have been to soap opera-ish to have the poor young girlfriend realize her boyfriend was dating her boss, the wealthy older, but not "polished" woman. But at least there would have been some excitement in the book.
    • 4/5
      interesting story about people who come to Shanghai. from poor to rich, every one has issues to survive. who can you trust? if you cannot trust the poor because they want to be rich, yiu for sure can trust the rich, or can you?characters are meeting during their lives but only as a side effect. i liked that it did not feel forced. good flow.
    • 4/5
      Tash Aw's Five Stare Billionaire starts off slow, and perhaps is slow its entire length, but that deliberate pace only increases the depth of his characters. Set in Shanghai, Five Stare Billionaire follows five transplanted Malaysians as they navigate the Chinese economy. Each one, from the migrant worker to the apparent tycoon, is deeply tied into their past, and old pains that they cannot escape. With simple, biting prose and deep rich characterization, Aw lets us live the struggle of embracing change in a world that gives no favors. A very solid novel and a worthy expenditure of 300 pages.
    • 4/5
      An intriguing window on modern Shanghai, a city where fortunes are made, and hearts sundered. By turns sardonic and tender, the author deftly weaves together the stories of dream seekers and plunderers, new money and old. A worthy book by a wise author.
    • 4/5
      This book was a bit difficult to get into. The beginning was a bit slow and I had a hard time staying interested. The story pick up pace slowly and steadily and bit by bit little pieces start to fall in place. A bit of butterfly effect going on in this story of five main characters trying to get ahead, get rich, famous, or just survive in Shanghai. There is so much disappointment and missed chances, it reads like real life and I guess I prefer my fiction to give me an escape from reality.
    • 4/5
      Shanghai is the star of the show in this novel by Tash Aw. It is glamorous, it is shabby. It is filled with successful people scrambling to get ahead while others lose all they have. Above all it is a city in constant change, and by the end of the novel, we learn it is a place to exact revenge against those who have broken the rules. The story of Shanghai is told through the lives of five main characters. First is Phoebe, a factory worker from Malaysia who seeks to experience what success feels like. Justin is the man his family is counting on to recover their lost fortunes. Business woman Yinghui is running from the shame of her past by becoming a success in an area where everyone expects her to fail. Finally Walter Chao weaves his way into their various lives in a mysterious and contradictory fashion.The author was quite skillful in his descriptions of these characters and how they were altered due to their changing circumstances. Also the ending was very clever and subtle showing how their stories were linked, but the novel did not always engage me successfully. It seemed to go on a little too long and I had a hard time sustaining interest in their lives. I do think readers who have enjoyed Aw's books in the past will probably want to read this one, and I am interested enough in his writing to want to read his other novels.
    • 3/5
      The book, as a whole was interesting. Though to call it 'enjoyable' would be difficult because it is not the most uplifting work and the characters are all rather flawed (to such a point that empathy does not develop towards them). On the plus side, the characters are developed rather well and you get to know them...you just do not like them.The story itself, structure wise, was done quite well. But for the structure, I might have given it two stars. Upon first glance, it is a tale with many, many strands but when one pulls back ever so slightly, you see that the author has weaved quite a tight knit tapestry of characters. As to what happens, again, not the most exciting things occur but as the characters are interesting (though I did not care what happened to them) I was able to continue reading this book with ease.