How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

The narrator is now almost 80 years old:“We must hurry, we are nearing our end, you and I, and this self-help book too, well, the self in it anyway, and likewise the help it offers, though its bookness, being bookness, may be definition yet persevere” (179). His wife has left him and his siblings are dead. His son lives in North America. He is speaking with his former brother-in-law, who is asking him to take on more debt: “If we don’t borrow, we’ll die” (180). He says the number of water firms is dwindling and they’ll be out of business in two year if they don’t make changes. The narrator finds that he is not passionate about any outcome in particular, but he acquiesces.

A deal is created that will probably save the company in the coming months, but the narrator contracts coronary artery disease and has a heart attack. A second heart attack occurs while he is in the ICU at the hospital. He wakes, connected to machines. His nephews are there, along with his ex-wife and her new husband. The doctor tells him that that the prognosis is not good, but he wants them to remain optimistic: “You understand this advice as a coded instruction to prepare to die” (187).

A “renowned world expert” (188) in coronary artery disease visits him a few weeks later. He says that a surgery installing stents in his arteries could help him. While he is recovering from the surgery, his ex-wife tells him that her brother “has absconded abroad with the funds your company raised for its planned acquisition” (189). His company is bankrupt. Over the next few days he pools money he has secreted away and hires a criminal lawyer to help him plan his course.

He sees that he will have no outside help: “In the months that follow you receive anonymous death threats and meet with politicians you thought were allies but prove barely able to conceal their gloating” (190). He stays in a hotel and spends most of his time watching the street through the window. One day he visits an internet café, and his son appears on his computer screen. They talk through the video app. He tells his son to call his mother because she misses him. They make small talk for a few minutes and say goodbye.

Elsewhere, the pretty girl is studying her sales figures with her assistant. They cancel their spring trip because of how much their numbers are dropping. That night, the assistant is closing the shop when three armed robbers enter. When she pushes the alarm, one of them hits her in the head with the butt of his gun. The pretty girl comes after the police have arrived and takes the assistant to the hospital. She dies of her head injury, which did not look as severe as it proves to be. The pretty girl decides to leave the city and to return to the city where she was born. 

The narrator admits that he has been dishonest in some of his statements, but is not ready to explain yet. The book will “continue offering, through economic advice, help to two selves, one of them yours, the other mine” (201). His advice is to “focus on the fundamentals” (201). He has begun living frugally and is proud of how far he can stretch his money. Many people who are interested in starting businesses visit him, asking for mentorship and advice. He helps whenever he can.

When he goes outside, he sees young people who do not know what they stand for, but he feels an undercurrent of anger in them all, often directed towards the divide between rich and poor. He says he is “nearly relieved to have already been separated” (206) from his fortune.

He does not know, but the pretty girl is less than 30 minutes away, living in a small townhouse where she is the landlady. She is not nostalgic and does not often think of the past. She sees the narrator at a pharmacy and they recognize each other. They go to a coffee shop nearby, where they recount their histories for each other. Over the next few weeks they see each other frequently, going on dates to the zoo and to restaurants. When she looks at him, she often thinks of him as a “cane-propped mirror” (212). She also “sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires […] the desire to be less lonely” (213).

One night, after going to the movies, she invites him to her place, where they have sex. However, they are each too old to reach climax. As they lie together, he begins to laugh: “She joins you, and it is the best and warmest laugh either of you has had in some time” (215). 

The narrator reflects on his dispensed advice: “This book, I must now concede, may not have been the very best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia” (219). He goes on to say that “we are all refugees from our childhood. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write or read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees” (219).

He and the pretty girl have moved in together in her townhouse. They do not share a room, and they do not feel pressured to spend all of their time together. His son comes to visit him: “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” (222). He leaves after a month.

The pretty girl dies of cancer, only six weeks after being diagnosed. She tells the narrator she does not want him to be alone, and he says he won’t. Weeks later, he wakes in a hospital bed, once again connected to monitors. His ex-wife and son are there. He sees the pretty girl enter behind them, and she is young. He realizes that he is dying, or has already died. He thinks of all the people he has loved and tells himself that “[y]ou have been beyond yourself” (228), and this gives him courage and dignity as he passes. The narrator closes the book by saying that it is through each other’s stories that we “may all confront the end” (228).