In more youthful days, the tycoon in question had as a favourite recreation long finishing trips in the South China Sea. He and family and senior managers in his business would go off for days at a time. On these voyages, the putative godfather was much taken with a man who had a tiny shop on the beach of an island where he and his crew would stop for provisions. This person, an ethic Chinese, worked all hours of the day and was regularly woken in the middle of the night by local fishermen wanting diesel and other necessities before they set out for the fishing grounds at daw. Often the fishermen were without money and demanded credit, which was invariably given. 

The storekeeper was an individual of unrelenting personal generosity. He married a single mother (hardly the done thing), a Hainanese woman, and took on responsibility both for her and for the daughter she already had. Over the years, the godfather and this man became good friends. The only difference between them, the tycoon observes, was that he was already rich by birth and superbly educated and went on to be a multi-billionaire, while the storekeeper never made any money from his ceaseless endeavour and dropped dead at young age. ‘And that’, concludes the godfather matter-of-factly, ‘is the real story of south-east Asia’.

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Surely, the book ending is one of the best I've read (I only remember Sungai Mengalir Lesu's currently). Furthermore, the paragraphs preceding to the above is so exciting, it entails a reread.