Never Enough by Joe McGinniss Read Free Book Online

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