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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