How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees.

This is the story of a poor farmers boy that becomes a business tycoon in an unnamed part of southeast Asia. It is disguised as a self help book. Each chapter starts with a theme and a satirical pre-amble that mocks the genre before continuing with the main story.

The story itself is narrated in the second person by the author. He tells you of the choices that he (you) would need to make in order to achieve wealth. Through these choices, the protagonist achieves wealth - but at the cost of the very things that said wealth was supposed to safeguard. This lesson is learned near the end of life after having already damaged the central relationships in his life.

Of late, you have had the impression of merely going through the motions of your life, of rising, shaving, bathing, dressing, coming in to work, attending meetings, taking phone calls, returning home, eating, shitting, lying in bed, all out of habit, for no real purpose, like the functioning of some legacy water meter, cut off from the billing system, whose measurements swirl by unrecorded.

In the final chapters, there is redemption. Stripped of wealth, the protagonist is able to attain a happiness that comes only after surrendering to fate and letting go of the never ending chase for more.  A question this raises is whether these lesson could have been learned in any other way. Is there a compression algorithm for experience? Or must each of us re-learn the hard lessons through lived in experiences?

Readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

rw-book-cover

Related

Created 2024-10-14T19:09:14.404000, updated 2024-10-14T19:35:04.614000 · History · Edit