Free Never Enough by Joe McGinniss Page B

addition to the group vitriol. Since returning to Hong Kong from Vermont, they’d waged a pitched battle for control. Each felt there could be only one person directing the relationship and heading the family. Rob’s criticisms of Nancy’s reckless spending and increasing irresponsibility in regard to the children were matched by her attacks on him for being both physically and emotionally absent from her life and for ordering her around like a servant whenever she was in his presence.
    On their third night at Whistler, Nancy left the table in the middle of dinner, saying she could not take any more acrimony. Rob went after her to tell her to come back. No one in the family knew what happened next between the two of them. Much later, Nancy would claim that Rob had hit her and had pushed her down a flight of stairs. But Nancy said a lot of things. At the time, she didn’t look like she’d been hit and pushed down a flight of stairs.
    In any event, on that third night she went to the room and got Ethan and had a Four Seasons limousine take her to the Vancouver airport, and she flew back to Hong Kong with her son. That was a serious breach of Kissel protocol: you weren’t supposed to run away from a fight.

11. SARS
    THE EASIEST WAY TO GET TO MAINLAND CHINA FROM HONG Kong is to take a KCR East Rail train from Kowloon to Shenzhen. The trains run from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. It’s a forty-minute trip. KCR stands for Kowloon-Canton Railway. Canton was the name of the capital of Guangdong province before the Chinese made everything harder to spell.
    Today, Canton is called Guangzhou. It’s still the province capital, but Shenzhen, a hundred miles closer to Hong Kong, has become Guangdong’s biggest city. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping turned Shenzhen from a fishing village into the fastest-growing city in the world by designating it as the country’s first special economic zone.
    Special economic zones are places within China where everybody is allowed to make as much money as they want. The population of Shenzhen went from about eleven in 1980 to almost ten million by the turn of the century. Its motto was “A new high-rise every day and a new boulevard every three.” It had its own stock exchange and its own skyline and it was the busiest port in China. Shenzhen was where iPods were made. In Shenzhen, people called Hong Kong a suburb.
    But there was more to Shenzhen than met the iPod.
    There was, for example, the Dongmenwai wet market, where local chefs browsed daily among the thousands of cages and crates containing the raw materials, so to speak, that gave Cantonese cuisine its special flair.
    At Dongmenwai it was possible to buy almost anything that could be cooked and eaten, from basics like dogs and cats and fresh fish intestine to monkeys, scaly anteaters, bamboo rats, and even—on certain days—rare delicacies such as the Deinagkistrodon acutus, the snake that was the main ingredient in Hundred-Pace Viper Soup.
    Year in and year out, however, Dongmenwai’s most popular item was the masked palm civet. This was a harmless and unprepossessing animal about the size of a weasel. Tens of thousands of them roamed the forests and brushlands of Guangdong province. In appearance they closely resembled the Chinese ferret badger, but as anyone who had eaten both would testify, the similarity ended there.
    In Shenzhen and Guangzhou and throughout Guangdong province, masked palm civet was a delicacy nearly as coveted as shark fin. The fresher the better, of course, which meant the chef would either have his civets killed in the market while he watched, or bring a few live ones back to the restaurant to kill in the kitchen himself as customers placed orders. Not infrequently, a group preparing to feast on civet would require the chef to bring to their table the live civets he’d be cooking for them.
    There was only one problem with the masked palm civet. As health officials determined only after the worldwide epidemic had run its