How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“You embody one of the great changes of your time. Where once your clan was innumerable, not infinite but of a large number not readily know, now there are five of you.” 

When the family lived in their small town, everyone was known—and in many cases, related to—to them. Once they arrive in the city, the narrator realizes that things have changed. There are strangers everywhere he looks. This can be a threat, but it can also be an opportunity. The family will have to rely on itself in this sea of strangers, but the strangers also represent an opportunity for connections and new business. 

“Time is the stuff of which a self is made.” 

The narrator classifies the reading of enjoyable knowledge as another contradiction in self-help. A book that one reads for pleasure is still classified as self-help because that pleasure serves as a distraction: an improvement over circumstances worth escaping from, if only temporarily. It is an escape from one’s self and a loss of one’s time, and therein lies the contradiction: it is self-help that reduces time, the stuff of which a self is made. 

“Like many desirable things, simply being well known does not make it easily achieved.”

The narrator writes about education as a necessity for becoming rich. But he points out that this is not a secret. It is well-known that education improves one’s chances of financial success, but not everyone in the narrator’s world has the chance to go to school. His father knows this, which is why it is so important to him that his son attend the university—it is what all of his bosses did. The poor in the novel know what would help them, but rarely have the means to pursue it. 

“As far as getting rich in concerned, love can be an impediment.”

The narrator says that getting rich requires constant ambition and desire. The person who aspires to be wealthy must also be hungry for the wealth. When a person is in love, the object of affection will now siphon off some of that ambition, which is finite and must be deployed into various objectives strategically. For most of the novel, while the narrator is growing rich, he is not in love, which allows him to use most of his effort on making money. 

“There are times when the currents leading to wealth can manage to pull you along regardless of whether you kick and paddle in the opposite direction.” 

The day after he has sex with the pretty girl for the first time, the narrator is consumed with thoughts of her, but she has disappeared. He still wants to get rich, but for a time, she is all he can think about. This seems to prove his point from the previous quote, which appears in the same chapter. She has taken some of his focus, even though that was not his (or her) intention. 

“Any self-help book advocating allegiance to an ideal is likely to be a sham.” 

The narrator presents the thought of ideals as similar to Platonic forms: they are perfect in their existence, regardless of what people do or think. Ideals transcend humans and exist outside of human selves. Ironically, this is the chapter in which the narrator joins the organization that requires him to grow a beard and enforce anti-drug policies among the student body. But his temporary adherence to ideals is unsustainable because he realizes he does not care enough to go through the motions of the organization without feeling a real commitment. When he shaves his beard and returns to making money, his actions show that this is his real commitment. 

“For our collaboration to work, in other words, you must know yourself well enough to understand what you want and where you want to go.” 

The narrator reminds the reader that they are co-collaborators in this book. In order to begin the work of self-help by using a book, the person must already have some understand of their desires and aspirations. The narrator is not here to simply offer some generalized notion of help, or improvement, but movement towards a specific goal. 

“You are like a living memory and she, who is implacably resistant to remembering, is unsettled by you.”

After seeing the narrator at the fashion party, the pretty girl is unsettled by him. First, because she is surprised to realize how much fondness for him she feels, despite their infrequent contact. Second, because he thwarts her efforts to forget her past and her home village. He also reminds her that not everything about her past was bad: he was a product of it as well, and she enjoys him. 

“It’s in being read that a book becomes a book.”

Without a reader, a book is an object made of paper and ink. Once it leaves the author’s mind, until it reaches a reader, it is simply a rectangular object whose ideas are of no use to anyone who does not read the book. The narrator goes on to state that each book is different for each reader. A book with a million readers can become a million books and wield a different amount of influence over each reader. Through the act of reading, the reader of this novel creates a new book and brings the book to life. 

“Diversion is, after all, what you seek.” 

The night that he signs the lease for the land upon which he will expand his bottling operation, the narrator is agitated and restless. The chance for new successes makes him anxious, not excited, so he watches talk shows late into the night. He tries to divert himself from the idea of the very thing he is chasing: more property, more opportunity, more money. He both seeks wealth and to distract himself from the fact that he seeks wealth. 

“Becoming filthy rich requires a degree of unsqueamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else.” 

This is one of the points in the book where the phrase “filthy rich” is more pointed. The narrator could have used many words instead of “filthy.” But filthy connotes negativity, and those who acquire wealth in the novel are driven to unethical actions, including conning customers, bribes, stealing from relatives, physical intimidation, and even killing. To become “filthy” rich means to risk the consequences of filthy actions. 

“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.” 

The narrator becomes neglectful of his wife. He takes it for granted that he will always have her affection, or at least the appearance of it. This is not an ignorant assumption on his part, considering that she was given to him as part of an arranged contract marriage. But he has become so susceptible to fear after the killing of the gunman that he is even more distant that usual. He will only learn that he cared for her after she withdraws her attention later in the novel. 

“States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.” 

In Chapter 8, the narrator’s business has grown to the point where it requires government support in order to secure its contracts. He is surprised at how difficult the bureaucrats can make his expansion unless he bribes them. This is his first lesson into the idea that no matter how independent entrepreneurs might feel, the scale of their success is ultimately at the mercy of whichever state apparatus they are subject to. 

“It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.” 

The narrator changes after the birth of his son. The boy represents a renewal of his hope and a potential for a future that will be happier than the past. This is an echo of the pretty girl’s realizations that the narrator reminds her of home, which unsettles her. Her potential future with him is always uncertain because of the degree to which he reminds her of things she wants to forget. 

“We do know that information is power. And so information has become central to war, that most naked of means by which power is sought.” 

Once the narrator wishes to expand beyond what the politicians can help with, he must begin working with military members, who have the ability to cut through red tape at a level no one else does. The more that an entrepreneur can learn about prospective buyers, the better a business plan can be tailored to their needs. The drone gives a disturbing example of just how badly military surveillance could be abused. 

“Focus on the fundamental. Blow through the fluff. See the forest for the trees.” 

Once the narrator has lost his fortune and suffered his heart attacks, he urges the reader to concentrate on the foundational aspects of success. Despite his need for distraction in the novel, he urges the reader to tune out distractions and to focus only on what matters most to the goal. He realizes this only after having attained his fortune, lost it, and then found that it had never made him happy. 

“You are nearly relieved to have been already separated from your fortune.” 

When the narrator goes outside as an elderly man, the youth confuses him. They do not seem to know their identity, but they know that they are angry. Their anger is directed at the rich, who have so much more than the poor, and who live in plain sight, constant reminders of the wealth gap. The narrator is almost glad that he lost his money in time to avoid becoming one of their targets. 

“She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire to be less lonely.” 

As the pretty girl and the narrator connect in their 80s, she realizes that she has been lonely, which surprises her. She is interested in how observant the narrator is of the world and wonders if that is what makes him lonely. She formerly describes him as a “cane-propped mirror” (212), signaling that she sees herself in him, which is part of her awareness of how lonely she has been. 

“It is the best and warmest laugh either of you has had in some time.”

After having sex but failing to reach climax, the narrator and the pretty girl laugh together. It is a moment of genuine tenderness and understanding, and they experience it not in the aftermath of a success, but of thwarted desires and the reality of advanced age. But they are together, and that is what allows them to laugh. 

“This book, I must now concede, may not have been the very best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia.” 

Now that he has little money, the narrator admits that the guide has not turned out the way he had planned. But part of understanding wealth is understanding debt, knowing when to leverage it, and knowing when it is time to pivot towards new goals. He spends most of Chapter 12 discussing the art of leaving a venture gracefully and of knowing when you cannot win. 

“You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.” 

When the narrator’s son comes to visit him near the end of his life, he is overcome by the intensity of his feelings. He does not try to express his love for his son because it is something the son will only be able to understand when he is old enough to share the same perspective. The narrator realizes that his parents felt the same way and never could have conveyed the knowledge to him. 

“The city beyond is an increasingly mythological place.”

As the narrator and the pretty girl venture out less frequently, the city takes on the quality of myth. Technologies arise that the narrator does not stay abreast of. There are politically motivated attacks whose causes he is unsure of. He is less interested in what happens outside the townhouse, and more content to focus on his inner life, and his time with the pretty girl. They are more real than the city outside. 

“You are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human.” 

Death is the end result for everyone, and the narrator makes a point of showing that there is no such thing as a man facing death differently than a woman. There is only life and the end of life. There is being ready to die, or not. The man is ready because he is with people he loves, he knows he has done his best to live a good life and he feels no fear.