How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

The narrator begins: “It’s remarkable how many books (including novels) fall into the category of self-help” (19), despite their poor quality, bad fonts, and boring nature. Someone who is willing to slog through such a bad book must of necessity demonstrate a desire for self-help. But he believes that even books read for pleasure are self-help, because they take time to read, and time is the stuff “from which a self is made” (20).He also includes textbooks, and “it is with a textbook that you, at this moment, after several years in the city, are walking down the street” (20).

The narrator describes the city his family moved to. The public transport is poorly run, and the city is designed in such a way that the poor live near the rich. He arrives at his school and sits with the other 50 students in his class. The teacher helps them drill multiplication tables. As the students repeat numbers back to the teacher, the narrator accidentally gives a wrong answer. In a moment of rebelliousness, he tells the teacher—who has stopped the class to ask why he gave a wrong answer—that it was he who made the mistake. The teacher pinches the narrator’s ear with sand between his fingers as punishment.

When he gets home, his sister his crying. She is betrothed to her father’s second cousin, who is 10 years older than she. She begins singing a song “that mothers in your village sing to their newborns” (26). They go outside and play a game called River, in which they stand on either side of a sewage ditch and jab at it with sticks and metal. His sister removes her shawl for the game, and they notice a tall, bald man staring at her from a window across the street.

When they get home, their brother is there, coughing. He assists a painter he calls his “master” (30) for work and spends all day inhaling paint fumes. The family has dinner. After, they watch TV. When the credits run on the program, the narrator reveals that he is the only one who can read, and that “[g]etting an education is a running leap towards becoming filthy rich in rising Asia” (32). 

The narrator says this is not a book that offers “advice on how to fall in love or, more to the point, how to make the object of your desire fall in love with you” (37). He says love can be an impediment to getting rich, but in his late teenage years, he is infatuated with a girl. She is tall and he describes as having the attention of all the boys in the neighborhood, but also as flat chested and not traditionally pretty. He is working as a delivery boy for pirated DVDs, and she works at a beauty salon in the same building that is the front for the DVD pirating operation.

He has been doing an exercise regimen with the help of a neighbor who is a competitive bodybuilder, and he believes the girl has noticed his improved physique. One evening she asks him if he can get her the most popular movie. The next day, he hands her the DVD and she walks away without thanking him.

The bodybuilder says he needs more protein, and that he is tough, but protein is expensive. The narrator has “earned a savage reputation in the street brawls” (44) that break out among the neighborhood boys, but he is not growing the way he wants to.

The next day the girl returns the DVD and asks for his phone. When he gives her his mobile—provided by his employer—she gets his number and leaves. She calls after midnight, asking him to tell her more about the movie she watched, including everything else the actors have done. Then she asks for another movie to be delivered the next day, and “thus begins a ritual that will last for several months” (48). During the calls, she does not allow them to talk about themselves or their families. He knows that her father is a drunk and a gambler who is also a trained stenographer. He owes money to a loan shark and gambles every night, hoping to win it back.

Her mother has severe arthritis and her job as a sweepress is agonizing. The girl is planning to escape from her family. She gives her family the money she earns, but has been working as an assistant on photo shoots on the side, saving the money a marketing manager gives to her in exchange for sexual favors. He promises to get her on a shampoo ad as a model, but as the months pass she begins to doubt this.

The narrator writes of her perception of him: “In you she has made a friend, a person who renders her life in the neighborhood she hates more bearable” (51). One evening she calls and tells him to come over; she is on the roof of her building. They have sex on the roof, but do not kiss. After, she tells him she is leaving, and is gone the next day: “You are distraught. You are the sort of man who discovers love through his penis” (53). One night at dinner his mother refers to the girl as a “slut,” and he leaves the room in anger, “not hearing that in your mother’s otherwise excoriating tone is a hint of wistfulness, and perhaps even of admiration” (54). 

The narrator again comments on the nature of self-help: “Surely ideals, transcending as they do puny humans and repositing meaning in vast abstract concepts instead, are by their very nature anti-self?” (57). If this is true, the narrator says that any self-help book must be a fraud. More often than not, the self who is helped is the writer’s self, because the writer earns money.

The narrator writes that idealists should be avoided while getting rich. While at university, he says, “You have, as was perhaps to be expected, fallen in with university idealists yourself” (58). He is in a hostel talking to a tall man, telling him about a situation in involving hash, four blocks away. The narrator writes that his father wanted him to go to university because he himself never had. Once at university, it is hard for him to conceal the fact that he is the “son of a servant” (59). He has “grown a beard and joined an organization” (60). He says the organization sells power that makes corrupt administrators fearful. In exchange for becoming a member, he receives a monthly stipend, boarding at the hostel, food, and protection, even from the police: “You are part of something larger, something righteous. Something that is, if called upon to be, utterly ferocious” (61).

As he rides his bike he sees the pretty girl on a billboard, modeling jeans. She earns a living off of print ads and runway work, and she is in a relationship with a photographer.

He goes home because his mother is ill and has an enormous bulge in her throat. A woman known as “the matriarch” of his father’s company takes them to a hospital in her car, where a doctor says that despite the severity of the condition, “surgical removal of the thyroid still carries hope” (64). It will cost more than his father’s annual salary. The matriarch agrees to pay for it. He tells his mother that it won’t be painful: “You smile, but only briefly, because looking at her you realize she is certain for the first time that her ailment will kill her” (66).

His father disapproves of his beard and his organization, but he depends on the narrator for support for the next few days, after his mother’s surgery. She needs continued radiotherapy to sustain the success of the operation, and he goes to his organization’s leader to ask for money. He says that he can help, but she will have to go to one of “our clinics” (68). In the next few days, he makes a show of commitment to the organization: “You attend meetings, read the literature, and keep your eyes and ears open, as you have been instructed to do” (68).

Later in the week, he catches five students smoking hash behind a building. He tells the leader and they go to confront the students together. The leader hits one of them in the face and says, “These drugs are forbidden. They will make you weak” (69). They promise that it will not happen again.

The next day he takes his mother to an organization clinic on the bus. The building is in disrepair, without computers or air conditioning, and the doctor says they cannot help her. He says they should pray. His mother continues to experience headaches and muscle spasms. The matriarch says that she cannot intervene again, and the narrator understands the severity of the circumstances: “In the coming months your mother’s suffering is extreme” (71). When she dies, his sister is their holding their mother’s hands.

At university, his organization urges him not to mourn beyond the prescribed time, because doing so would “reject what fate has decreed” (72). The leader begins to watch him and is troubled by his “apathy and listlessness” (73). One day while riding his bike, the narrator sees the pretty girl in a car at a red light. He waves, but she does not see him. That night he visits a barber’s stall and pays an old man to shave his beard.