How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

The narrator has set up a small business in the bottled water trade, using his contacts from his days of selling expired goods. The pretty girl calls and invites him to meet her at her hotel while she is in town. The hotel—the most expensive in town—was nearly destroyed by a truck bomb, and most of it is temporarily closed. He visits her in the new wing: “Her modeling career has plateaued, or perhaps peaked is a better world” (105). She is trying to transition into television.

Over dinner, she asks him what he thinks of the hotel, and he says he has never seen anything like it. She takes out a bottle of wine from her purse. A waiter appears and wraps it in a cloth so that only the neck is visible, then leaves. He asks her what else she has seen, such as “amazing things regular people don’t get to see” (107). She tells him about snow, which she saw in the mountains. He tells her about how he managed to put together a business bottling his own water, and that he is able to sell just like the big companies. 

She says he is the only one she has kept in touch with from their old life. He has only tried alcohol twice before and has never been drunk: “Warmth and a craving, a consciousness of your proximity, build within you” (110). She invites him to her room, where she says she has another bottle.

He meets her upstairs a few minutes later, where she kisses him and says she actually does not have another bottle: “Sex with you seems transgressive, which heightens her desire, although she is too fully preoccupied fully to enjoy the act. There is a whiff of home about you” (111). This is the first year in several years in which she earned less than the year before. He career is beginning to wane. She thinks about her future as they lie together, and does not let him stay the night. After he leaves, she wonders “[if]f there will ever arrive a day she is not repelled by the notion of binding herself permanently to a man” (112).

That weekend he takes his brother’s sons to the zoo. When his brother picks them up, the narrator gives him some money. It used to shame him, asking his younger brother for money, but as prices have risen, he has been unable to provide for his sons and now feels gratitude that his brother is able to help him. He tells the narrator that he should find someone to marry. When he says that he is fine alone, his brother replies: “No person is fine alone” (113).

Weeks later, with money he has saved, the narrator buys a plot of land with a crumbling farm and shed on it. Here, he intends to expand his bottling business, preparatory to owning his own home. 

The narrator now offers readers a caveat: “Becoming filthy rich requires a degree of unsqueamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else” (119). The narrator says he must now discuss the topic of violence. He is in a car, looking for the address of a building that has been hit with petrol bombs. The structure of the building is intact, but what worries him is the “delivery truth in the service lane in front, lying on its side, its engine and undercarriage smoldering. A total loss” (120). He now has a factory, office, and storage depot on the city’s outskirts. As he visits his office, he is proud to see what he has built, but discouraged over the destruction of yet another truck.

He talks with his accountant, who has just had a stroke and does not expect to live long. The narrator is married to the accountant’s daughter. They discuss the destroyed truck and how to make payroll. On the way home, at a red light, a boy on a motorcycle approaches and pulls out a pistol. He takes the narrator out of the car and makes him kneel, pushing the barrel of the gun into his head. He says this will be his only warning. The ultimatum “comes from a wealthy businessman, part of the city’s establishment, who among other things own a rival bottled-water operation, and onto whose turf you have begun to expand” (124). The narrator is both frightened and furious.

At home, his wife—who is only 20—asks him what happened. When they married, she required that he allow her to complete a lengthy law degree, and that she not be required to bear children during her studies, to which he agreed. When he texted the pretty girl to tell her of his wedding, she was surprised “by the strength of her sadness” (126), because they rarely communicated anymore. She now works on a popular cooking show and lives alone in a bungalow by the sea. The narrator’s wife is one of her biggest fans, although she does not know their past relationship.

The next day, he meets with the leader of an armed faction that provides protection for a price. The leader provides an armed guard and a promise of retaliation on the narrator’s behalf if the situation escalates. His guard is close to him in age and stays at their house each night, outside. He does not like having the guard so close to his wife. She knows that something is bothering him, but does not ask, even about the guard.

The threat of violence has worn on the narrator: “You tell yourself that you will not give in to fear, but despite this you begin to cancel visits even to those corporate customers with which your firm has its most lucrative cooler-replenishment contracts” (131). His sister dies of dengue fever in their ancestral village, and he travels to her home by bus with his brother and nephews. After the funeral, as he travel home, he is “reminded again of the yawning gap that exists between countryside and city, of the intensity with which here eyes follow a goat, the sole survivor of its swept-off herd, while there existence remains largely unchanged” (133).

At an intersection weeks later, the boyish gunman has been instructed to kill him. The narrator’s guard shoots through the windshield and hits him. The guard gets out and shoots the fallen boy several times in the face, then takes a picture of the body with his phone: “You wonder what will happen now, if you will suffer violent retribution, a prospect made much more concrete by your vivid recollection of the gunman’s slaying” (134). The leader of the armed faction tells him soon that the photo has been transmitted to many people and the rival businessman has agreed to stop the hostilities. The narrator remains distant from his wife and tries to compensate for being unable to satisfy her physically by buying her gifts: “It does not occur to you that your wife’s love might be slipping from your grasp, or that, once it is gone, you will miss it” (136). 

After many bribes, the narrator sits in a bureaucrat’s office to make his pitch:“In rising Asia, where bureaucrats lead, bankers tend to follow, and so it is on befriending the right bureaucrat that your continued success critically depends” (140). As he has tried to expand his business into the “mass market of the piped municipal water game” (141), his efforts have been thwarted by red tape, missing contracts, and denied permits. The bureaucrat has been at the center of the resistance. He writes two words on a piece of paper: “How much?” (142), and they begin negotiating.

Weeks later, the bureaucrat sends the narrator to the home of a politician, where the man approves the deal and sends him away. When the narrator gets home, his son is “delivering an address on the lawn” (145), modeled after a political speech he saw on TV. He chases his son inside, where his wife is talking with a dozen other women. She smiles at her song, but ignores her husband. The boy is 5, and she has not had sex with the narrator since the birth: “You have changed with the birth of your son. Medicalized, bloody, and enacted to the sound of screaming and the smell of disinfectant, his birth was like a death” (148). Afterwards, he felt tenderly towards his wife and made attempts to woo her, only to find her uninterested in his attention. She is kind to him, but they have separate beds and she avoids conversations that are not practical. She spends most of her time with her son, and with the women, her “group of religiously-minded activists” (149).

Months earlier, hoping to improve their relations, he hired one of her brothers, who distinguished himself to the point where the narrator is considering “grooming him as a potential deputy” (150). He travels with his brother-in-law to the coast to clear his equipment through customs, after the deal with the politician. He does not know it, but the pretty girl lives near the hotel in which they will stay.

When he meets with a freight executive, he sees a picture of the man with a group of celebrities, including the pretty girl. He asks if he knows her and he tells the narrator that she now runs a high-end home furnishings boutique and is the lover of a prominent architect. Weeks later the executive sees her at a party and says that he met the narrator. She is glad to hear that he is doing well.