Never Enough (5 page)

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 exhilarating, 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.

In the summer of 1998, at the start of Rob and Nancy’s second year in Hong Kong, Nancy’s mother, Jean, had cancer surgery. She lost half a lung but received a favorable prognosis. By fall, she was well enough to fly to Hong Kong with her new husband, a travel agent. Jean had two days to visit Nancy before boarding a cruise ship bound for Singapore. She was taken aback—very aback—by her first glimpse of Parkview. Nothing had prepared her for its scale, nor for its vulgar excesses, its ostentatious opulence.

The thought of her daughter living in such a place worried Jean. She feared that Nancy would lose herself amid the pretension, would vanish into Parkview’s sumptuousness only to reappear as a stranger dripping baubles, unrecognizable even to herself.

But Jean knew better than to say this. She knew how Nancy reacted to anything she perceived as criticism even in the best of times, which Jean sensed these were not. Nancy spoke of Rob only to complain about him. He was almost never home. When he was, all he did was criticize. He was constantly scolding her for not paying enough attention to the children.

On the second and last day of Jean’s visit, Nancy was in the middle of explaining how unreasonable and demanding Rob was when two-year-old Zoe, who had been playing on the floor nearby, began to scream. Zoe was more temperamental than Isabel. She would melt down at the slightest provocation, sometimes apparently for no reason at all.

Jean was full of grandmotherly love, but screaming children had always set her teeth on edge.

“Can’t you make her be quiet?” Jean said.

“Connie will deal with it. If she ever gets out here.
Connie! I need you right now! Hurry up!
”

Still screaming, Zoe started to punch and kick at her mother.

“Can’t you control her?”

“Stay out of this, Mom.”

Zoe was now writhing on the living room floor. Connie raced in from another part of the apartment. She carried Zoe to her room and closed the door. Slowly, the screaming subsided.

“Nancy,” Jean said, “I think it’s time that you learned to take care of your children yourself.”

Nancy gasped.

Then—and even years later Jean didn’t know another way to say it—Nancy went berserk. She charged at Jean and grabbed her and yanked her off the couch. Never robust, Jean had been especially frail since her surgery. Screaming even louder than Zoe had—and using language that Zoe wouldn’t learn for years—Nancy propelled her mother down the hallway.

“Don’t-you-ever-tell-me-how-to-handle-my-own-children!”

She squeezed Jean’s shoulders and pushed her up against the door.

“Get out! Get out! Get out of my house! I never want to see your fucking face again!”

Nancy opened the door and gave Jean a shove hard enough to make her stumble into the hallway and slammed the door in her face.

Jean pounded on the door, begging Nancy to let her back in. There was no response. She pounded and begged until she was too exhausted to continue. She took a taxi to the cruise ship in tears.

She let an hour pass, then phoned the apartment. Nancy picked up. The instant she heard Jean’s voice she was possessed by another fit. She yelled things into the phone that Jean could not imagine a daughter ever saying to a mother. Jean hung up but called again an hour later. This time, Connie answered. She said Nancy was lying down and did not want to be disturbed.

Jean was still crying when the cruise ship left the harbor in late afternoon.

THE MORE MONEY ROB MADE, THE MORE NANCY SPENT. SHE
bought clothes, jewelry, and perfume. Then more clothes, jewelry, and perfume. Then scarves and shoes and cosmetics. It was so easy to spend vast sums of money in Hong Kong, where shopping was the national pastime. In fact, if it weren’t for the 6.5 million Chinese who lived there, Hong Kong could have become Nancy’s kind of town.

She shopped out of boredom. She shopped out of anger at Rob. She shopped so she could talk about her shopping. She shopped because the stores were open. She shopped because she never felt she had enough.

While she shopped, Connie took care of the children. That’s what Connie was for. Connie had turned out to be smart, conscientious, and caring—the perfect
amah.
But even with Connie, Nancy felt oppressed by motherhood. It never stopped. There were no fixed hours, there were no days off. Children needed to be clothed and fed and cleaned and cleaned up after; they needed to be entertained and educated and disciplined. Nancy was perfectly happy to get down on the floor and play with them when in the mood—she delighted in her children then—but not even Connie’s round-the-clock service spared her the burden of responsibility. She loved to be a third child with her children; it was parenting she found so hard to cope with.

Nancy brooded about her body. She’d always known her looks were something special, but she would turn thirty-five in the spring of 1999, and it alarmed her to think—and of this she was convinced—that in terms of physical attractiveness she would soon enter an irreversible period of decline. She’d look so much better, she thought, if only she hadn’t had children. Her two pregnancies had taken a toll. It galled her to see her breasts begin to sag, to see the slight padding on her hips, to spot incipient cellulite on her thighs. That was the main reason she didn’t want to have the third child that Rob had begun to insist on. He wanted a son. Easy for him to say, she told her friend in San Francisco, Bryna O’Shea, it wouldn’t cost him the last of his looks.

She learned she was pregnant in February 1999. The baby was due in October. Ultrasound showed it was a boy. Rob was delighted. Nancy was not.

By the spring of 1999, the East Asian financial crisis was starting to wane. There were signs of stabilization, if not recovery. For Rob, it had been a hell of a ride. He had established himself as one of the distressed-debt stars of Hong Kong. Because he was at Goldman, he couldn’t say “I,” but everyone who counted knew he’d become a powerful force.

He was a natural. He had a nose for big game and the ruthlessness to chase it until it dropped. He could spot a company in dire straits in the Philippines from as far away as the Strait of Malacca. And he had a jeweler’s eye for discerning the hidden strengths and weaknesses in a bankruptcy filing or annual report.

He and Nancy celebrated his success like true children of Parkview: they uptowered. They went, in fact, all the way up to tower 17, the most coveted and expensive of Parkview’s residential buildings.
Tower 17!
For two years, Nancy had dreamed of tower 17. She’d seen the wives who lived there flaunting their self-importance—as if they had gotten there on their own. She’d marveled at their ability to patronize and condescend. She’d observed the cars they drove and the clothes and jewelry they wore. She’d envied them. Every woman in Parkview envied the wives of tower 17. Now she would be one of them, pregnant or not.

Nearly a year had passed since Nancy had thrown her mother out of the apartment. Jean and her husband lived in Sebastopol, California, an hour and a half north of San Francisco. One day in late spring of 1999, Bryna O’Shea called her from San Francisco to say she was about to fly to Hong Kong to visit Nancy. Jean asked her to deliver an heirloom necklace that she knew Nancy coveted almost as much as she did the lead statuette she had gotten from Ira’s mother.

“Frankly, Bryna, it’s a peace offering. Maybe you could let her know how hurt I am that she still refuses to have anything to do with me.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Bryna said.

When she got back from Hong Kong a week later, Bryna called to say that Nancy and the children were fine and that Nancy was delighted to have the necklace.

“Did she say anything about me?” Jean asked.

Bryna hesitated. “She did give me a message to pass on, but I don’t think I should.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to tell you, Jean. It’s only going to hurt.”

“Never mind that. What did she say?”

Bryna took a deep breath. “She said it’s a shame you’ll never get to see your grandchildren again.”

In October 1999, Nancy gave birth to a son. He was named Ethan. Rob was thrilled. Nancy went into what her tower 17 friends said was postpartum depression. Rob had his doubts. To him it looked suspiciously like an excuse to be lazier than ever and to neglect her duties to their growing family. No matter how hard he worked, no matter how much he traveled, Rob remained concerned about his children. He had great respect and admiration for Connie, but he wanted the children raised by their mother.

He told Nancy to start preparing nutritious food instead of letting Isabel and Zoe stuff themselves with fast food day and night. She could also teach them some table manners. And some manners in general. And she could teach them to clean up after themselves instead of hollering for Min to come do it.

At an even more basic level, she could start to take an interest in her children. She could give them their baths once in a while instead of letting Connie do it. She could put them to bed at night instead of letting Connie do it. She could read to them and encourage Isabel to read on her own and get Zoe started. She could make sure Isabel did extra arithmetic, instead of assuming that the Hong Kong International School was doing enough. She could get Zoe away from the television set and start teaching her about numbers, instead of assuming
Sesame Street
would suffice. Rob had high expectations for his children and he didn’t want them undermined by his wife. And it wouldn’t hurt if she took a bit more of an interest in him.

He didn’t like arriving home from Taiwan late on a Friday night, knowing he’d have to fly out again on Sunday night or Monday morning, and being treated as if he were an uninvited guest. But when he tried to talk to her about performing the duties of a wife and mother—and, yes, on occasion he might seem impatient, or even annoyed—she would erupt. Connie and Min could hear her from the other end of the apartment.

“Don’t you
dare
talk to me like that, you fucking five-minute father. You’re the one who turns this household into chaos. You come in late, the girls are asleep, you wake them up and get them all excited and then you lose interest and sit in your armchair and drink your fucking single-malt scotch and leave me to pick up the pieces. Don’t you
dare
tell me how to raise my children. Don’t you
dare
tell me how I should be spending my days.”

Rob couldn’t understand it. The more money he made, the less happy she was. That seemed illogical, and Rob was a logical man.

But they made it a point to show no trace of discord in public. Expat life was all about façade. At the United Jewish Congregation, at the Aberdeen Marina Club, at Goldman Sachs functions, and at Parkview, Rob and Nancy had appearances to maintain. He was the brilliant banker, devoted husband and father. She was the loyal wife and energetic mother with the sparkling smile and the look of mischief in her eye. To others, they seemed the perfect couple. “We all envy you,” a Parkview neighbor told them one day. “You two have the best marriage in Hong Kong.”