How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia Read Online Free Page A

truck. He carried them with great care, in small hop-like increments because of their weight, through the tea stall, out into the courtyard, and back into the entrance of the painter’s shed. He taped plastic sheets to the corrugated ceiling, forming curtains to prevent paint particles from drifting onto the surfaces of other objects already painted and awaiting collection. He taped newspaper around the halogen lighting fixtures and the brushed-metal electricity switches that were built into the built-in bookshelves. He lifted cans to the painter’s instructions, mixing paint and primer. He located extension cords to power up the compressor for the air gun. He then stood behind the painter, sweating in unventilated, infernally hot conditions, as the painter held the gun and proceeded to make hundreds of straight-line passes across the wood of the bookshelves, like a robot in an automotive assembly plant, but with slightly less precision and considerably more swearing, your brother dashing off every few minutes in response to grunted commands to clean a spill, move the ladder, get some water, get some bread, or reconnect exposed wires with electrical tape.
    Your brother’s work is in some senses like being an astronaut, or slightly more prosaically, a scuba diver. It too involves the hiss of air, the feeling of weightlessness, the sudden pressure headaches and nausea, the precariousness that results when an organic being and a machine are fused together. Then again, an astronaut or aquanaut sees unimaginable new worlds, whereas your brother sees only a monocolor haze of varying intensities.
    His occupation requires patience and the fortitude to withstand a constant sense of low-level panic, both of which out of necessity your brother has acquired. In theory it also requires protection in the form of goggles and respirators, but these are clearly optional, as your brother and his master have neither, placing thin cotton rags over their mouths and noses instead. Hence, in the near term, your brother’s cough. Over the long term, consequences can be more serious. But a painter’s assistant is paid, the skills he learns are valuable, and in any case over sufficiently long a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.
    As your mother prepares dinner that evening, a lentil stew thickened with chunks of onion, not because onions are her favorite ingredient but because they appear to add substance to a meal and today in the market they were cheap, it may not seem that you are a lucky child. Your wounded ear is, after all, more visibly painful than the expression in your sister’s eyes or the residue of paint on your brother’s skin. Yet you are fortunate. Fortunate in being third-born.
    Getting an education is a running leap towards becoming filthy rich in rising Asia. This is no secret. But like many desirable things, simply being well known does not make it easily achieved. There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter’s assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.
    Your father comes home after you have eaten. He has his meals with the other servants at the house where he cooks. All of you crowd around the family television, a sign of your urban prosperity. It is powered by a wire of communally stolen electricity that runs down the front of your building. It is archaic, a black-and-white, cathode-ray-tube device with an excessively curved and annoyingly chipped screen. It is narrower than the distance between your wrist and your elbow. And it is able to capture only the few channels that broadcast terrestrially. But it