The two brothers reacted as they had since childhood. Rob gamely endured it, while Andrew replied with bitter insults of his own as soon as they all sat down to dinner. For Andrew, the difference was that alcohol and cocaine now dulled his feelings and sharpened his tongue.
Little sister Jane opted out of the wasp’s nest as soon as possible by marrying a gentile and moving west. Rob and Nancy and three-year-old Isabel and a second child, six-month-old Zoe, left for Hong Kong in June 1997. Nancy was looking forward to a surge in Rob’s earnings and to the opulent lifestyle described by Goldman Sachs wives who’d returned from their tours of duty in Hong Kong. Rob was looking forward to these also, but equally to having half a world’s worth of insulation from the corrosive bickering that seemed the only way of life the Kissels knew.
6. HONG KONG
THROUGH MOST OF ITS HISTORY, HONG KONG PERCHED ON the southeast coast of China like a diamond at the edge of a rice paddy. Even now, with China in the midst of the most explosive economic growth in world history, Hong Kong continues to dazzle.
Hong Kong is a city, an island, and, as of 1997, a special administrative region of China. SAR status means the Chinese government can allow Hong Kong’s rampant capitalism to flourish unfettered without feeling that they’ve spit on Mao’s grave. The SAR consists primarily of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon on the mainland (a seven-minute ferry ride across Victoria Harbor), and beyond Kowloon, the New Territories (which were new to Hong Kong more than a hundred years ago when England acquired them). The New Territories stretch north ten miles to the Shenzhen River, which forms the border with mainland China.
Hong Kong’s population is almost seven million, of which more than 95 percent are Chinese, almost all of them Cantonese. The urban core has a population density of more than 100,000 per square mile, which makes it the most densely populated area in the world. In Hong Kong, nobody lives on the ground floor. Of its 8,000 buildings, 7,500 are high-rises. A small percentage are luxury apartment towers. The rest, stretching to the horizon in all directions, are featureless, identical blocks of concrete jammed so close together that you could reach out your window and eat your neighbor’s dinner. Nine months a year the humidity has the kick of a horse. Twelve months a year the air is so polluted it could choke the horse that just kicked you.
But there is another Hong Kong: the Hong Kong of legend and postcards. This is the Hong Kong built by billions of dollars of foreign investment. This is the Hong Kong whose wealth is incalculable, the Hong Kong with the most spectacular skyline in the world.
In the last decades of the twentieth century multinational corporations flocked to Hong Kong, in part because of its location���half the world’s population can be reached by a flight of five hours or less—but more because its government not only lets them have their cake and eat it but assures that they don’t have to pay for it.
Hong Kong imposed no financial restrictions on corporations. All the world’s money was welcome there and encouraged to turn itself into more. There was a laughably low tax on corporate profit and no limit on what that profit could be. Taxes taken for granted elsewhere in the world—on capital gains, for example, or on interest earned—were nonexistent. There wasn’t even a sales tax, and individual income was taxed at only 15 percent, no matter how large the income was. For expat citizens of countries such as the United States and England, employment in Hong Kong was the gift that kept on giving.
Hong Kong became, in the words of writer P. J. O’Rourke, “a stewing pandemonium: crowded, striving, ugly, and the most fabulous city on earth.”
The grandest offices in the most spectacular of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers were occupied by the mercenaries whose efforts produced the highest return on the investments their companies made in posting them to Hong Kong in the first place: in other words, investment bankers.
Throughout the 1990s, these bankers descended on Hong Kong by the thousands, bringing with them their Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes, their Rolexes and Movados, their Gucci shoes and cuff links, their Zegna and Armani suits, their Versaces and Valentinos, and, if they had them, their wives and children. What they did not bring they bought, for the only pleasure in an investment banker’s life that can rival the thrill of making money is the orgiastic joy of spending it.
Each morning, swift, silent elevators whisked these predators to their hushed offices and sacred conference rooms, from which they plotted their assaults on the summits of capitalism. A thousand feet below them, hundreds of restaurants and gleaming fast-food stalls dotted the air-conditioned lobbies and the stunningly modern shopping malls that adjoined their palaces. A maze of elevated and air-conditioned walkways permitted them to go weeks on end without ever setting foot on a Hong Kong street, without ever hearing the din, feeling the humidity, or choking on the filthy air.
The expat investment banker in Hong Kong—and more of them came from the United States than from anywhere else—could indulge himself in feelings of superiority every bit as grandiose as those displayed by England’s colonial masters of the nineteenth century. Plus, the modern banker had air-conditioning.
The highest priority of his employer was to assure that none of the untidy business of actually living in a foreign country would distract him from the avid pursuit of riches. He was in Hong Kong to work at least a hundred hours a week. He was there to make gargantuan sums of money—fantastic, outlandish, inconceivable gobs of money—for his company. In the process, he could expect to enrich himself even beyond the limits of socially acceptable greed, while living like the sultan of Brunei.
He could also shield himself from contact with those who might not recognize his primacy. In Hong Kong, this meant the 95 percent of the population that was Chinese. In their eyes, no matter how much power you wielded in your own world, no matter how much wealth you had accumulated, you were and always would be a gweilo.
Literally, the term meant “white ghost,” but usage had expanded the definition to “foreign devil.” It was not dissimilar to farang in Thai. There was no way to construe it as a compliment. Gweilo, in fact, was one of those wonderful words that conveyed a host of complex and subtle attitudes but that, at the end of the day, left the individual to whom it had been applied feeling ever so slightly diminished. That was not the way a master of the universe was supposed to feel.
It was much in the employer’s interest, therefore, to make Hong Kong seem, insofar as possible, to be simply a postcard. You could gaze upon the panorama from a skyscraper window and marvel at the human energy being expended down below, but you wouldn’t have to hear it, smell it, taste it, or have it undermine your absurd but indispensable sense of self-worth. For what good to the firm was an investment banker with an inferiority complex?
Rob and Nancy and their two children arrived in Hong Kong in June 1997 and moved into a 3,500-square-foot apartment in the most grandiose of all the expat banker havens: Parkview. Parkview was an eighteen-tower residential complex set high atop a hill in the green and leafy Tai Tam district on the more verdant south side of Hong Kong Island. It didn’t have the tallest towers in Hong Kong, nor did it boast the newest, but it sat in the middle of a 3,000-acre park in which no other construction had been or would be permitted.
“All things are possible here,” promised Parkview’s advertisements, and the claim seemed only slightly overstated. The complex, which had opened in 1989, contained more than a thousand apartments. Only a fifteen-minute drive from the skyscrapers of Central that housed the brain trusts of Hong Kong’s multinational corporations—the Goldman Sachs offices were on the sixty-eighth floor of the Cheung Kong Center on Queens Road—Parkview offered unpolluted air above the toxic brown sheet that covered the island.
Parkview was not so much a luxury apartment complex as it was a self-contained world. Within its walls were a hotel, eight restaurants, four tennis courts, three squash courts, two swimming pools, two driving ranges, a three-story health club with personal trainers and nutritionists on hand, a preschool, a children’
s playground, and daily supervised activities for children, as well as a theater, an art gallery, a beauty salon, a supermarket, a formal garden, and a “Lifestyle Shop” that sold everything from paperweights to silk slippers branded with the Parkview logo. Its parking lot was so chock-full of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Mercedeses, and Porsches—with even the odd Lamborghini—that it at first appeared to be the world’s most expensive used car lot. But what put Parkview furthest over the top were its Roman baths. These, said an illustrated brochure, “reflect the luxury and debauchery of the Roman Empire perfectly.”
The towers themselves—as graceless from the outside as concrete fire hydrants—formed an oval that suggested a circling of the wagons. This backside-to-the-world arrangement sent an unmistakable message: at Parkview you could live as if the world outside did not exist.
One of Parkview’s idiosyncrasies was that social status was determined by tower: the higher the number, the loftier the resident’s standing inside the walled city. (Within a given tower, of course, the higher the floor, the higher the status.) If a man failed to deliver the results his company expected, his housing allowance was cut, necessitating an embarrassing move to a lower-numbered tower. This was known as “down-towering,” and those who had to do it soon learned that their uptower friends no longer had much time for them.
Rob and Nancy started on the sixteenth floor of tower 14, which pleased Nancy immensely—until she learned that everybody who was anybody lived in tower 17.
She quickly hired the requisite live-in Filipina nanny, or amah, Conchita Pee Macaraeg (Connie) and live-in Filipina housekeeper, Connie’s cousin, Maximina Macaraeg (Min). They lived in a converted pantry behind the kitchen and worked six days a week.
With Rob working sixteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, and traveling frequently to Taipei, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, and mainland China, and with Connie taking care of the children and Min taking care of the apartment, Nancy found herself with nothing to do. Every expat wife in Hong Kong faced the same situation upon arrival. No matter how grand her lifestyle, she was suddenly both redundant and isolated. Her husband didn’t need her except for sex, and he was usually either too tired or too busy for that, or possibly enjoying it in more exotic fashion with the bar girls who flocked to the investment banker hangouts in the section of Central called Lan Kwai Fong.
She had no friends or family within reach. The city at whose edge she found herself was home to a society that seemed not so much exotic as impenetrable. Not to mention suffocating, nerve-jangling, and entirely indifferent to her presence. For the adventurous woman, the resourceful and imaginative woman with a richly textured inner life, the woman who committed herself passionately to social or environmental causes, Hong Kong was a challenge to be met. These women could survive and even flourish. But for those who, like Nancy, had little within themselves to fall back on, Hong Kong often proved destructive. Consumed by his work, the man would thrive. Disabled by the difficulty of adjustment, the woman would founder. Not for nothing did expats call Hong Kong “the graveyard of marriages.”
For Nancy, these stresses were compounded by knowing that she’d lost control of her life. Control—of both people and situations—had always been essential to her. No matter the proximate cause, the worst of her fights with Rob had been fundamentally about control: who set the agenda, who dictated the terms of the relationship. With the move to Hong Kong, Rob had trumped her. Suddenly she was a stranger in a strange land, controlling only two Filipina domestic helpers. She could no longer shape circumstance, she could only be shaped by it.
There was no way Nancy would adjust to that.
Rob and Nancy had arrived in Hong Kong only days before the most epochal moment in its history. At precisely midnight on June 30, 1997, upon expiration of the ninety-nine-year lease that had made the territory a British colony since the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, England ceded control of Hong Kong to China. The event had been anticipated, debated, longed for, dreaded, and obsessed over since 1984, when the British and Chinese had agreed on the change in sovereignty. The handover was accompanied by an emotional elegy from Chris Patten, the last British governor of the colony, a few stilted words from Prince Charles, and the most spectacular fireworks display of the twentieth century.
At the stroke of midnight, the Scots Guards band played “God Save the Queen” for the last time on Hong Kong soil and the Union Jack was lowered to make way for the Chinese flag. For millions of Chinese and British citizens, not only in Hong Kong but around the world, the peaceful transition was a historic event of vast significance that they would remember for the rest of their lives.
But investment bankers view the world through a different lens, one shaped by the prism of profit. For Rob, the change in sovereignty was not the big news. The big news came two days later when the government of Thailand allowed the baht to float freely in currency markets. It sank like a stone, triggering one of the most sudden and dire economic collapses in the history of modern Asia. The Asian currency crisis of 1997–98 (also known as the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, the East Asian financial crisis, the Asian economic crisis of 1997, the East Asian economic collapse, et cetera) had begun.
7. MOMMY DEAREST
BOOKS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN, CONFERENCES HAVE BEEN convened, and opposing analyses have clashed like swords as researchers and theorists have sought to explain the East Asian crisis: what caused it, what exacerbated it, what finally brought it under control. Rob spent scant time pondering the abstractions. What he wanted to know was which companies among the dozens suddenly going belly-up could be resuscitated (and later controlled) by Goldman Sachs.
The crisis started in Thailand in late June when the government announced it was removing the props from under one of the country’s largest financial services companies, Finance One. This meant that creditors would face losses from which the government had previously protected them. Foreign money was sucked out of the country overnight. The government had no choice but to try to float the baht. Within days, a pandemic of what New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman called “bahtulism” swept across East Asia.
The Malaysian ringgit, the Indonesian rupiah, and the Philippine peso fell in tandem with the baht. Multinational banks yanked massive sums from the region as fast as their cursors could fly across their screens. There was no precedent for the crisis that ensued. Over the next twelve months the U.S. dollar value of most East Asian currencies fell by more than 50 percent and most regional stock market indices lost more than half their value.
Not in his wildest dreams could Rob Kissel have envisioned such a delightful scenario to greet him upon his arrival in Hong Kong. Cries of corporate anguish were music to his ears. The greater the pain, the greater his gain.
By the time of the ’97 collapse Rob had been a distressed-debt specialist for almost ten years. He’d learned to consider the field’s perverse mind-set not only rational but morally palatable, much as a military commander could speak of an “acceptable” number of casualties. Rob’s Hong Kong was one very long branch on which hundreds of vultures perched. They pushed and pulled and elbowed one another as they jostled for the best position from which to view the fresh carcasses below. When one flapped its wings to begin a descent, dozens followed. And there was no shortage of carrion to pick over. For a distressed-debt specialist based in Hong Kong, the East Asian financial crisis was the opportunity of a lifetime. Suddenly, there were trillions of dollars worth of distressed assets scattered all over the continent. It was a bonanza beyond belief.
Rob was constantly in motion, taking close-up looks at the companies he’d flagged as possible targets for Goldman’s ministrations. One week he’d be in Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore; the next in Jakarta, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. On occasion, he’d take a meeting in Shanghai or Beijing. No one counted the hours they worked, nor the far fewer hours per week that they slept. It was a vultures’ feeding frenzy. Rob had never experienced such e
xhilarating, exhausting times. He knew he was in the middle of something historic. He also knew that if he slowed down somebody else would beat him to the next pot of gold.
Rob and Nancy established a presence in the expat community. They joined the United Jewish Congregation, whose membership, a brochure said, consisted of “business and professional people who will be in Hong Kong for two to five years.” It was, in other words, an investment banker’s synagogue. They joined the Aberdeen Marina Club, which described itself as “a privileged haven” for expats. They sent Isabel to the Hong Kong International School—the most prestigious day school in Hong Kong—where she’d be surrounded by other wealthy expat children.
And still Nancy felt lost and isolated, reluctant to venture beyond the bars of her gilded cage. When she did, it was to shop at stores such as Gucci, Hermès, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, Versace: places that did not seem foreign, because she knew them well from New York.
One of her problems was transportation. Yes, Parkview was only fifteen minutes from Central, but how to get there? She had the Mercedes in the Parkview garage, but she was terrified of taking it on Hong Kong’s narrow, twisting secondary roads or on the spanking new urban highways where she so easily could get lost. Public transportation was not an option. Hong Kong’s public transportation system was considered among the world’s best: swift, safe, reliable, and clean. But there was no way Nancy was going to crowd onto a bus or subway car with all those jabbering Chinese who would look at her and see not the gorgeous, wealthy young wife of a Goldman Sachs investment banker, but merely a gweilo. Eventually, she worked up the courage to grit her teeth and drive. Until then, she spent almost as much on taxi fares as she did in the shops that were her destination.
Never Enough Page 4