Free Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews by Lionel Barber Page A

legitimacy, their reconciliation is sealed over a bowl of noodles. In
To Live
, the mute and starving daughter is unable to protest in a desperate struggle over a single sweet potato.
    Those days created demons as well as dramas. Shuffling his chopsticks, Yu Hua reveals that he writes for self-restoration as well as for his readers. ‘I don’t write to cure other people’s souls. I write to cure my own soul. There are problems with my own soul, and I need to work on them.’
    As the dim sum dessert arrives, and the warm and surprisingly potent Shaoxing Chiew wine takes effect, this soul is in good spirits. ‘Sometimes I eat for the past. But today’s meal is fantastic,’ he exclaims. ‘I feel I am eating for my present life.’
    YUNG KEE RESTAURANT
    Central, Hong Kong
    ------------
    1 x fish maw with mushroom soup
    1 x pigs’ livers with yellow wine
    1 x beef brisket in superior soup
    1 x lobster ball in black bean sauce
    1 x garoupa with bean curd
    1 x lobster with rice in soup
    1 x dim sum dessert
    1 x Shaoxing Chiew wine
    ------------
    Total HK$2,480 (£170)
    ------------

Business



2 DECEMBER 2005

Prince Alwaleed
Royal subjects
    Between diet tips and investment philosophy, the world’s fifth-richest man explains why he is uniquely placed to bridge the divide between east and west
    By Simon Kuper
    When would Prince Alwaleed like to have lunch? At 6.30pm. Where? At his hotel, the George V. Does he always stay there when he’s in Paris? Actually, he owns it.
    The world’s fifth-richest man, worth an estimated $21.5bn, tends to own things. There are his chunks of Citigroup and News Corp, not to mention EuroDisney, Canary Wharf, Hewlett-Packard, Time Warner, and so on. Though one of his grandfathers founded Saudi Arabia and the other was independent Lebanon’s first prime minister, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is considered practically a self-made man. He has even been called the Saudi Warren Buffett, chiefly for having turned an $800m purchase of Citicorp stock into a stake worth $10bn. Not content with being rich, the prince also believes he has a divinely ordained role to bring together ‘east and west’.
    I wait in the George V’s lobby while the prince hangs with his buddies, Richard Parsons, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sandy Weill, chairman of Citigroup. Then he goes to pray.
    When I am eventually led to his regular nook in the lobby, I discover that lunching with him is not exactly a tête-à-tête. It takes a while to identify him – moustachioed, bushy-haired and extremely thin – amid his entourage of aides. A cameraman slaps a microphone on mylapel: our ‘lunch’ is to be filmed. To complete the multimedia experience, a television is playing a tape of BBC World on fast-forward.
    Noticing my surprise at the crowd, the prince’s private banker, Mike Jensen, jokes, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not paying for this!’
    ‘Only for three people,’ corrects the prince. I had said the
FT
would buy him lunch, and the prince has decided to slap an aide on to our bill. ‘I’ll have my salad,’ he tells the waiter. It’s a rucola salad with tomatoes that is not on the menu.
    The prince, 50, is observing the optional six-day fast after Ramadan, a doddle for him as he rarely eats in daytime anyway. Speaking in double-pace English, which he more or less mastered during a stint at Menlo College in California, he explains, ‘I was very fat before. My peak weight was – do you want pounds or kilos? – 89 kilos. Then we went down to 60. No spaghetti, no bread, no butter, no meat. Complete moratorium. I eat only one meal a day.’
    He has stuck to this regime for 15 years, although ‘one meal a day’ doesn’t mean he never otherwise eats: he says he broke his fast ‘just an hour ago’ and his printed schedule for today lists dinner at 2am.
    Prince Alwaleed doesn’t just want you to think he is thin, however. He wants you to think he is a statesman. When his salad arrives, he