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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