FIXER CHAO, by Han Ong
New York, a city famously bought with beads and subterfuge, has long been a promised land for swindlers, charlatans and confidence men of all stripes. If you can fake it here, why try to make it anywhere else? (Though even that bead story, it turns out, is something of a misdirection.)
So perhaps you’ll give some grace to William Paulinha, the unmoored antihero of Han Ong’s jittery and darkly comic 2001 novel, “Fixer Chao,” republished this month by Doubleday’s new reissue series, Outsider Editions. William isn’t even the architect of his own grift; at the wised-up age of 30 he already considers himself a reformed hustler, no longer offering his sexual services to soft-bellied businessmen in the bathroom stalls at Port Authority.
But going legit has only led to a string of cubicle-based drudgeries: data clerking, answering the phones at an employment agency, transcribing Holocaust memoirs. (He has a vague idea of becoming a writer himself, though that dream seems as distant as the moon.) “Most days,” he confides in the book’s opening paragraph, “I can’t take a drink quick enough.”
It’s at his favorite bar, a dank Times Square watering hole populated by off-duty prostitutes and wastrels, that William meets his would-be Pygmalion, a smooth operator who calls himself Shem C. Shem is a man of mystery, if no great subtlety: By way of introduction, he quotes a passage from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” at William and then asks him point blank, “Are you Chinese?” (Though he uses a more inflammatory word.)
In fact William is Filipino, a recent-ish immigrant from Manila via Los Angeles. For Shem, that’s close enough. All he needs is a warm body he can pass off to wealthy Manhattanites as a master of feng shui, for semi-obscure reasons having something to do with a famous novelist father-in-law, a failed literary career and an elaborate revenge plot. Is William bored and/or drunk enough to play along? Provisionally, yes.
Fortified by a small pile of glossy home-décor magazines, a transformative haircut and a book called “Feng Shui: The Mystical Chinese Art and Science of Harmonizing With the Environment,” William Paulinha, now rechristened William Chao, is soon ready to meet his first client, an Upper West Side doyenne named Suzy Yamada who has been strategically chosen by Shem.
The visit with Suzy is a success and with surprising and frankly implausible ease, Master Chao soon finds himself the darling du jour of Manhattan’s ruling class, wealthy widows and Wall Street moneymen who are happy to pay handsomely (minus Shem’s cut, of course) for the honor of being told to tilt a hallway mirror 180 degrees or banish a family heirloom in order to preserve their chi.
Reading about rich fools being parted from their money rarely disappoints, particularly when the grift is a good one: a wayward rent boy in cater-waiter pants, randomly rearranging the armoires and Modiglianis of the 1 percent and getting paid for it.
But for all their privilege and park-view real estate, Chao’s customers often turn out to be pitiable figures, no less lonely and adrift in their luxury towers than he is in his light-starved hovel. They fret over premature bald spots and lost loves; they’re estranged from their families and chronically insecure about their place in the world. (Which is not to say they can’t still be imperious, oblivious jerks: casually racist, relentlessly self-regarding and classist to a fault.)
Ong, the recipient of a 1997 MacArthur “genius” grant who has mostly worked as a playwright, has an acerbic, breezy style that swings between blithe social satire and noirish intrigue. A more melancholy thread runs through it, the familiar ache of the displaced immigrant who doesn’t feel entirely at home in any hemisphere.
While William Chao holds court at cocktail parties and makes fashion-press hot lists, William Paulinha’s world remains small and shabby. Years of no contact, he insists, have “caused my parents to fade into washed-out carbons”; the closest thing he has to family is an older Filipina neighbor, a flamboyant failed actress named Preciosa for whom he runs errands and cherry-picks the most scandalous daily news items from The New York Post to read aloud.
Art, food and travel hardly figure into his new influx of cash and status, beyond the fact that he can now afford to buy as many movie tickets as he wants. Sex, too, has fallen by the wayside, though he finds himself electrically attracted to Suzy’s angry, beautiful son, a rebel in search of a cause called Kendo.
So when complications in his professional life compel William to pick up a pocketknife, readers may shift into high alert: Here comes karma, in some bloody form. But Ong is a less conventional writer than that, and a more generous one. His tone zigs and zags. Even when the final chapters tip into darker territory, there’s a crackle and fizz to William’s moral relativism.
Unlike so many of literature’s great pretenders — totems like Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley come to mind — William isn’t driven by monomania, romantic obsession or a criminal mind as much as a lack of anything to lose. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that he’s always escaping to the multiplex; “Fixer Chao” could be a Coen brothers movie in the way it mixes malevolence and antic absurdity. (Their films are often about offbeat outsiders, screwy American dreams and schemes that go sideways, too.)
It probably goes without saying that Shem’s mostly analog con wouldn’t really play in the chronically online late-stage capitalism bubble of 2026. One of the incidental pleasures of the book is its evocation of pre-9/11 innocence: Ong’s Manhattan, with its penthouse terraces and sticky-floored peep shows, is certainly divided into haves and have-nots, but it’s also a place where opportunity can still land whimsically, like pigeons on a Midtown lunch crowd.
Things eventually go awry, as they tend to do both in seriocomic farces and in real life; the environment becomes less harmonized. Surrounded by clout chasers, social vampires and prodigal nitwits, William longs for “a kind of wresting away of privileges to reveal the naked, fatty, vulnerable thing underneath.” By the novel’s end, he has picked up a notebook and a ballpoint pen, and started to write something new: the truth.
FIXER CHAO | By Han Ong | Outsider Editions | 396 pp. | Paperback, $22
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