Never Enough (4 page)

IN THE 1990S, THE POACHING OF INVESTMENT BANKING
stars became the rule rather than the exception on Wall Street. Cadres of headhunters roamed the canyons like guerrilla bands. If you were an investment banker and you weren’t regularly offered a higher-paying job at a more prestigious firm, there was something you weren’t doing right.

Rob had been performing brilliantly at Lazard. And Lazard, though slowly sliding from the first tier of investment banks, remained a land of plenty for headhunters. In 1996, Rob’s was among the heads hunted and delivered to Goldman Sachs. If boys of an earlier era had dreamed of one day wearing a New York Yankee uniform, rookie investment bankers in the 1990s yearned for the day when they could hold in their hand a business card that said Goldman Sachs. By almost any standard of measurement, Goldman Sachs was the leading investment bank in the world.

“Money is always fashionable,” Henry Goldman, son of the bank’s founder, said late in the nineteenth century. For the next hundred years, Goldman set the standard for haute couture in the banking world. It achieved its preeminence by being, as senior partner Gus Levy said in 1969, “long-term greedy.” As a private partnership, Goldman did not have to answer to shareholders who expected spectacular earnings growth every quarter. Instead, the bank could formulate strategies that would play out over years.

The corporate culture at Goldman stressed teamwork. The slogan “At Goldman Sachs we never say ‘I’” was taken seriously. Nonetheless, the bank rewarded individual performance with salary and bonus packages that were stupendous even by the lavish standards of the industry. Rob was at the point in his career when promising young bankers were given three-to four-year tours of duty overseas. The world of finance was global, and banks wanted their rising stars to gain experience in nerve centers other than Wall Street.

In 1997, the most dynamic, hypersensitive financial nerve center in the world was Hong Kong. The myth of the “Asian miracle” still carried the force of doctrinal truth. For more than a decade, led by Japan, Asian societies had been honing their economic systems to the finest of points. The region had it all: the strong work ethic, the focus on education, the thrifty populace, and the ability to manufacture cheaply and export products that other countries were hungry to buy. Asia would own the twenty-first century—all the magazines and TV news shows said so. Everyone in the financial realm rushed to stake his claim. Banks loaned money, mutual funds bought stocks and bonds, investors built factories and office buildings, currency traders sold deutsche marks and dollars to buy baht and won and rupiah. On the receiving end, men who’d been driving motorbikes all their lives were suddenly debating the merits of various models of Mercedes-Benzes.

This
was
the future, the experts agreed. Asia ruled. The good times were rolling and they were here to stay. The first ones now would always be first. If it was already too late to get in on the ground floor, there was plenty of space on the mezzanine. The world’s leading financial journals spoke with one voice: any dollar not invested in Asia might as well stay under the mattress.

Hong Kong seemed the perfect place for a rising star like Rob Kissel to perfect his skills. He rejoiced when he learned he’d be heading there. “They only send winners,” he told friends. “This means I’m on the fast track to make partner. Hong Kong is the key to the mint.”

Hong Kong also offered temporary respite from the Kissel family’s intramural wars. Rob was ready to take a break. The extended Kissel family raised dysfunctionality to an art form. Family gatherings became emotional bloodbaths. Between engagements, members sharpened their elbows—and teeth—for the next.

In 1992, Andrew, who had graduated from Boston University and gone into the real estate business, married Hayley Wolff, a former world-class competitive skier whom he’d met at Stratton Mountain. She’d worked part time as an instructor, and Jane Kissel had been one of her pupils. Hayley was smart and tough and fashionably blond. She could turn from charming to acerbic on a dime. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she’d obtained her master’s degree in finance at Columbia and was advancing toward a position as an entertainment-industry stock analyst at Merrill Lynch.

Bill admired her accomplishments but was miffed that she’d married Andrew instead of Rob. It didn’t matter that Rob had never even sought to date her. Bill felt that Rob deserved the Ivy League heiress with the steel-trap mind, while “the waitress” would have been good enough for Andrew. Hayley, on the other hand, though she respected his intelligence and drive, thought Rob was a one-dimensional bore. She saw Andrew as a witty, wounded, vulnerable work in progress, battling bravely against the low self-esteem caused by his father’s contempt. She was convinced she could find his hidden better side.

But it was Hayley’s pedigree—her “heiress” status—more than her attitude or personality that first caused problems with Bill. She was the daughter of Derish Wolff—Phi Beta Kappa at Penn, MBA from Harvard, and since 1982 president/CEO of Louis Berger Group of East Orange. Louis Berger was an international engineering firm that had designed everything from Burma’s Mandalay Road and the Bangkok International Airport to the Trans-Amazon Highway, the East Pakistan Road in Bangladesh, and the Stockholm subway system, to name but a few. Louis Berger Group made Bill Kissel’s Synfax look like a high school chemistry experiment, and Derish Wolff’s wealth made Bill’s look like chump change. Bill’s envy and resentment were predictable. He was a man to whom wealth and worth were synonymous. And Hayley didn’t even have to say anything. The look in her eye said it all: my father’s is bigger than yours.

A new front opened in the intramural war in 1994 when Andrew borrowed $500,000 from Rob to launch his own real estate company, which would focus, he said, on buying small apartment buildings in what he called “under the radar” neighborhoods in Bayonne, Hoboken, and Jersey City. He called the company Hanrock: “h” for Hayley, “a” for Andrew, “n” for Nancy, “r” for Rob, and the “ock” at the end to make “rock,” which would show that the company was rock solid. To Nancy, who often referred to Andrew as a “lizard,” the only “rock” in Hanrock was the one he’d crawled out from under. “You give half a million to your slumlord brother, while I have to go without a nanny,” she groused to Rob.

Andrew had been working for W&M Properties, a midtown real estate firm that according to
The New York Times
specialized in “identifying and acquiring distressed but potentially profitable properties and renovating them in a style that attracts first-class tenants.” There was no shortage of “distressed” properties in Jersey City. The trick would be to make them profitable.

But Andrew had another trick. In 1992, he and Hayley had bought a one-bedroom condo at 200 East Seventy-fourth Street. Within three years, he became treasurer of the co-op board. He viewed the position as a license to steal. Starting in January 1996, he regularly wired funds from the building’s reserve account into personal and corporate accounts of his own. His early success as an embezzler made him both edgier and more arrogant than he had been.

Meanwhile, Hayley manufactured excuses to avoid socializing with Nancy and Rob. “I hate it when she comes here,” she told Andrew. “She walks around the whole apartment,
pricing
everything I’ve just bought.” At the same time, Nancy complained to Rob, “Their house at Stratton is twice as expensive as ours.”

Bill remained the catalytic agent. He and the lady friend from Florida who’d been living with him since soon after his wife had died would arrive for a holiday dinner. Invariably, Andrew and Hayley would be the hosts, because Nancy simply wouldn’t do it. Just as invariably, within the first five minutes, Bill would make a caustic remark. He’d say something snide or belittling, then take a drink into an adjacent room and close the door behind him. Neither Nancy nor Hayley could understand his behavior: why the need to hurt and humiliate? Andrew and Rob were not perplexed. They’d never known him to be any other way.

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.

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.