The Devil's playground

AS YOU drive from Central to Tuen Mun the tourist emblems of Hong Kong disappear one by one. First go the syringe-skyscrapers, the five star hotels and polished shopping centres. Then you lose the designer shops, the boutique cafes, the cavernous restaurants and their blazing neon signs. Finally even the old style tenements, their colourful markets and bustling streets fade away and you are left, as you complete the journey of between two and five hours, amid a clinical arrangement of brutal, sodium-lit, concrete tower blocks, shrivelled trees and broken playgrounds.

Tuen Mun slid from a governmental drawing board into the far east corner of the New Territories in the late 1970s - a brand new satellite town for 480,000 souls with its own leisure facilities and industries. It was supposed to be self-contained with most residents working locally. But when China's cheap labour dragged manufacturers over the border, Tuen Mun's residents found themselves having to make the arduous journey into Kowloon and Hong Kong for work. Today the satellite town's most famous local products seem to be broken families, latch-key and home alone children.

Here, money is scarce and boredom an art form. Truancy and juvenile crime are among the highest in the territory. On any given day lethargic youths clog the shopping centres and playgrounds high on prescription drugs and bottles of cough mixture bought from Tuen Mun's notoriously lax chemists. Heroin, 'ice' and other narcotics are also available. The Sun Yee On triad has a powerful grip on Tuen Mun, running building sites, drugs, vice and loan-sharking. They recruit in the schoolyard. In 1992 Ip Kin-mei, a 13-year-old boy, was beaten to death by his schoolmates for refusing to join.

The sense of community planners envisaged never happened. At night, along the raw concrete corridors there is a sense of siege. Every iron door is bolted shut. Televisions blare. Family arguments rage. Gambling addiction, particularly among mahjong-playing housewives, is commonplace and Sun Yee On's many loansharks exploit them with ready loans. Standards of literacy and education among adults is low. Child abuse is the worst in Hong Kong. According to Action Against Child Abuse, Tuen Mun's problem is 'inadequate parenting skills and social isolation'.

This is Hong Kong minus the money. A dormitory town for shampoo boys, karaoke girls and building site labourers. A Hong Kong of stone-washed denim jeans, of knapsacks, tattoos, white socks, mainland haircuts and plastic shoes.

And it was here that Lam Kwok-wai spent his formative years. His father, already 60, stepmother and four siblings were the first residents in a 450- square-foot flat of Tai Hing House. When they arrived in 1980 the block was new and the planners' delicate dreams still intact. But over the next 14 years their new home would decay inexorably. The paint in the corridors would peel away and be replaced by graffiti and brown spit stains. Adverts for 'quick and easy' loans would appear on the lift walls and, in a desperate bid to stem the number of suicides, the management would lock the roof and brick up the upper storey communal windows.

For the young Lam, however, life was already miserable. His biological mother had left the family to live with another man when he was three. His father, a hawker, was drinking a catty of rice wine a night, his new stepmother was miserable and his relationship with his brothers and sisters was loveless. Crammed into their tiny one-bedroomed flat, the young Lam quickly learnt the classic Chinese strategy for communal living - silence.