How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
From the moment you read the very first page of Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, it is difficult to distance yourself from the book’s protagonist. The protagonist is, in fact, you, the reader, and the story that unfolds is the tale of your meteoric rise, the kind of miraculous reversal of fortune that many desperately dream of but only a lucky few achieve. Hamid’s latest novel, structured as a “self-help” book, mocks, with its deeply ironic tone and inescapable wisdom, this popular modern genre for a generation of do-it-yourselfers. With its immediacy and direct address, it propels readers into the very vortex of the aspirations of Asia’s millions. Pulsating with a compelling sense of urgency, the story begins by transporting you to your origins, a typical Asian village, described in pungent rawness, from which your escape is the very first step towards your journey to “filthy riches”.
The emphasis in the title is, after all, on “filthy” rich. The idea is not simply to survive or to make ends meet but to eventually supplant the bigwigs who are battening on the fruits of your labor. And this the book purportedly does. From humble beginnings—the son of a domestic servant—you rise, through fair means and foul, in an industry centered on that scarcest of natural resources in parts of Asia, water. The chapters of Hamid’s book, with headings like “Move to the City”, “Get an Education”, “Patronize the Artists of War”, guide you through this process fraught with pitfalls, your success as much a factor of your intelligence and hard work as it is of pure luck.
However, these simplistic chapter headings conceal within them a deep-set irony. For example, the chapter entitled “Don’t Fall in Love” describes your youthful infatuation with the ‘pretty girl’ in your impoverished neighborhood, a tough streetwise beauty who is as intent on escaping her bleak surroundings as you are. Known in the neighborhood as a slut, the pretty girl approaches you for DVDs, which you have ready access to as a DVD delivery boy. A friendship develops, fueled by late-night telephone calls. When your heart is broken by her sudden departure from the neighborhood in pursuit of a modeling career, the narrator emphasizes that this is for the best.
But is it really? How to Get Filthy Rich traces these parallel stories, yours and the pretty girl’s, and their repeated convergence over the course of your lives. It is this love story, in fact, which makes this pseudo instruction manual so compelling. The narrator’s advice, valuable though it may be, does not account for the promptings of the heart. The important relationships in your life—with your wife and son, for example—suffer as a consequence of your quest for wealth.
It comes as no surprise then that the final chapter, ironically titled “Have an Exit Strategy”, refers not just to business but to that ultimate of exits—death. The narrator concedes that this book “may not have been the very best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia” but that the events of the story are a lifelong “preparation” for our final exit. The structure of this “self-help” book collapses on itself, as the narrator expands further on the nature of literary activity:
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. Writers and 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.
Brutal entrepreneurial pragmatism and realpolitik give way to a transcendental wisdom that contemplates, in the end, the futility of all human endeavor.
As always, Hamid writes with irony and elegance on an issue which, like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, captures the pulse of the time. In How to Get Filthy Rich, the narrator, at times wily, at times wise, connects the story of this one “jaundiced village boy” to the global economy. On the back cover, the book has been hailed as a “preternaturally wise novel”, “the sincerest expression of our flawed, fragile humanity”. However, while there is compassion and empathy, one can’t help but wonder if this elegant exercise in literary artifice would be as well understood by those whose struggle it purports to describe. Its existential questioning and its suggestion that wealth doesn’t bring happiness are far less pressing than an empty stomach.