Re-invention in a globalized world: (Mis)reading and metafictional strategies in Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire

Abstract

In his third novel, Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw presents an account of globalization that ostensibly proclaims China's accelerating economic might and wealth in the new millennium with Shanghai as the global city par excellence as he traces the lives of five Malaysian Chinese characters seeking success there. Using metafictional strategies and a satirical play on the self-help genre however, Aw interrogates the possibility of re-invention as a fundamental implication of globalization. He undermines the idea of re-authoring one's identity by emphasizing instead the impossibility of total control due to the contingent nature of reading and the precarity of meaning. In this way too, Five Star Billionaire disrupts linearity and future-oriented subjectivities in favor of other temporalities that serve to counter the world of neoliberal globalization it deliberately invokes.