Free Five Star Billionaire: A Novel by Tash Aw Page B

pace over a cappuccino. There were, among other upbeat messages, an invitation to the opening of a new hotel on the river in Shiliupu and an interesting proposition from someone wanting to build a carbon-neutral cultural center in the middle of town. New contacts and possibilities revealed themselves nowadays without her even having to seek them out. What a change, she thought, as she finished her coffee.
    Business was going well for Yinghui. The two upmarket lingerie stores she’d established were flourishing, and in little more than a year she had broken even and was now watching the profits accumulate, week by week, the spreadsheets filling out with handsome-looking figures bursting with promise. Occasionally, when she glanced at the documents her breathless accountant showed her, she ceased to take note of the substantial numbers, for their trajectory was so steep that she had difficulty imagining where they would take her twelve months hence. And yet she was not a person with a modest imagination—quite the opposite.
    Her ad campaigns had been striking and wildly successful. She hadused only Chinese models, never mixed-race ones, and they never flaunted their bodies in an overtly sexual way. Although they did display a good deal of bare skin, the models were styled beautifully, and the overall aesthetic was classy rather than trashy. The catchy taglines were mysterious and playful, like the images themselves.
                             
Elegant Outside, Passionate Inside
                             
Secret Exciting
                             
Amazing Beautiful You
    Although she had originally thought that the shop would cater mainly to the wives of high-ranking Party officials and low-profile billionaires who wanted a discreet custom service, Yinghui soon found a huge demand among ordinary professional women who were willing to spend upwards of four hundred
yuan
for the simplest bra. The low lighting and shadowy spaces of the stores, together with the women-only entry policy and touches of luxury such as the Venetian chandeliers, created an ambience that proved incredibly popular, with many clients lingering on the plush sofas and leafing through the glossy magazines and catalogs as they chatted and decided what else to purchase. Before long, Yinghui had taken over the adjoining shops and added a coffee bar in one store and a wine bar in the other, extending the opening hours and turning both venues into destinations in their own right. The lingerie was all but removed from the store itself and transferred into specially designed semiprivate “modeling rooms,” and the newly vacated space was now filled with stylish mannequins, artwork, and giant floral displays.
    The income and publicity generated by the two stores made it possible for Yinghui to seek business partners for new ventures on a much larger scale, and her financial projections were such that banks were suddenly willing to listen to her requests for loans. Her plans for expansion included a chain of small shops in metro stations, which would sell the basic Amazing Beautiful You range; twelve shops selling clothes for teenage girls, called FILGirl (Fly in Love Girl); an Internet-based cosmetics brand called Shhh, aimed at women over the age of forty; and a luxury spa modeled on a northern Thai village, the construction of which was nearing completion.
    These exciting ventures made people in the retail industry take noticeof Yinghui, and the expatriate community was especially interested to learn that a foreigner was able to negotiate the complex world of Chinese retail. She began to give talks to the various foreign chambers of commerce, speaking to budding entrepreneurs about the pressures of being a foreigner and a woman in a male-dominated world. As she became more visible, she did an interview with