Book review: Five Star Billionaire, by Tash Aw

Tash Aw's latest novel opens with the titular billionaire admitting: "There has always been something inherently childlike in my pursuit of money."

It's also an apt comment on attitudes towards the torrent of wealth gushing through the new China, where the novel is set. It seems everyone diving into the fray to claim their share of the cash is driven by an idea of the good life that has yet to develop beyond apartments and chauffeurs.

Aw is sensitive to how abundant economic opportunity can be a vital outlet for reimagining the self. His leading characters are all Malaysian-Chinese who are quite frank about coming to Shanghai for the money, of course. Privately, though, they think the city offers existential possibilities denied them back home. It is the allure of the American dream, now ceded to China.

Aw, himself a Malaysian-Chinese, relocated to London as a university student a little more than 20 years ago when the West was still the most obvious destination for the young and ambitious. But during the past decade, young Malaysian-Chinese have begun to turn their aspirations northward and are choosing China in increasing numbers. As they complete a full turn of the circle begun when their ancestors left for Malaya beginning in the 19th century, they are also complicating notions of Chinese identity in the 21st.

Aw's first two novels plumbed the historical legacy of the region he grew up in. wove the perspectives of a son, wife and British best friend into a shifting portrait of a Chinese peasant who runs a textile store in the final years of British Malaya. The book garnered several awards, including the Costa (Whitbread) for a first novel, and established Aw as an important voice reworking the old haunts of Joseph Conrad and Anthony Burgess in the literary imagination.

In his second novel, , two Indo-Malay brothers search for their adopted Dutch-Indonesian father amid the political quagmire of 1960s Indonesia.