The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
—Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834)
KOWLOON WALLED CITY, CHINA. SUMMER1960.
5:30 P.M., HONG KONG TIME.
The boy, Xiao, tottered from one foot to the other. He had been standing in the water line for hours without a single step of progress. Hundreds of people were in front of him. Pain seized his ankles. The summer heat made him sweat, and he swatted at biting flies.
His breaths came shallow and fast. Dry. He’d not had a drink in almost twenty-four hours. No food either, but that wasn’t even on his mind. Other needs had to be fulfilled first.
Shoddy apartment towers littered Kowloon City. In contrast to the immodest skyline of Hong Kong, the precarious gray sentinels stood as a memento of hard times following the Japanese occupation during World War II, twisted obelisks teeming with the destitute and the depraved.
The new water main had been installed by Hong Kong’s Social Welfare Department the previous summer. It provided a critical resource, but exposed human behavior at its most ruthless.
As dusk fell, when the water was being shut off, the crowd began to push. The Welfare Department knew better than to operate at night. It was too dangerous. Dusk wasn’t much better. Several yards ahead of him, Xiao saw a commotion: a man pulling a blade from his belt; another man trying to wrestle it away. The fray morphed into a swarm of thirsty beasts, pulsing with energy. A riot. With only seventy-five pounds to his ten-year-old frame, Xiao didn’t stand a chance in the chaos. Gazing one last time at the queue ahead, he took his jug and ran.
Xiao caught his breath and walked home along the gutter stream, past the floating plastic bottles, bags of waste, and dead birds. These things made no impression on Xiao. It was the only world he’d ever known.
A few hundred yards from his family’s building, Xiao dunked the jug and retrieved a liter of greenish-brown water from the stream. It would have to do.
His family lived in a second-story room, separated from another clan by moldy plywood. When he arrived, his mother, Niu, was breathing but still feverish. Sweat dripped from her hair and onto the dust floor; in this heat she wouldn’t last long without water. His older brother, Shui, had been asleep, but woke upon Xiao’s entrance.
Shui took the jug and opened their mother’s mouth. She drank eagerly. Then she fell back onto her mat.
Shui grabbed their mother and shouted. “You have water, mama! You’ll be okay now!” Her face was pale and waxy. It showed no signs of life. Eventually, Shui gave up and sat down on his mat. He reached for the jug, looked at the dirty water, and then turned to Xiao.
Shui stood and backhanded his younger brother hard across the face. Xiao sat still for a moment, then picked up the railroad spike the family used for self-defense. He turned to Shui and stabbed his brother until he stopped moving.
“There’s never enough,” he said to his brother’s raw body.
Xiao took the soda bottle and guzzled the rest of the water.
* * *
Xiao sweated and vomited for three days in the stench of his family’s death. Mother and brother gone, and a father he’d never known. He wanted to die, yearned for it, but his fever subsided.
On the fourth day, he gathered every bit of strength he could and wandered outside. He remembered a building where his mother had said boys and girls went when they had no mother or father. So he went there.
Once he was showered and fed, they began the tests.