Welcome back to the shimmering necrotropolis of Hong Kong, a vertical labyrinth where the pursuit of wealth is only eclipsed by the absolute refusal to actually raise one’s own children. In our latest installment of ‘Humanity is a Failed Experiment,’ we find ourselves looking at the Tai Po district, where the police have recently interrupted the domestic bliss of a household that thought it could purchase peace of mind on the cheap. The result? A four-month-old infant in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage and a sixteen-month-old brother sporting the kind of bruises that don’t come from a fall in the nursery. It’s a tragedy, certainly, but in the eyes of Buck Valor, it’s also a predictable byproduct of a society that treats human beings like interchangeable components in a productivity machine.

Let’s look at the facts, as dry and depressing as they are. Two domestic helpers, aged twenty-eight and forty-five, were taken into custody. One now faces a holding charge of ill-treatment. Chief Inspector Tam Ching-shan of the Tai Po district crime unit—bless his bureaucratic heart—had to stand before the cameras and explain that a four-month-old baby has been diagnosed with injuries consistent with ‘shaken baby syndrome.’ Think about that phrase for a moment. It is the clinical, sanitized term for the sound of a human nervous system being rebooted by someone who has reached the terminal limit of their sanity. It is what happens when the ‘service provider’ you’ve imported to perform the messy work of child-rearing realizes they are trapped in a cycle of underpaid labor and over-privileged demands.

On one side of this disaster, we have the helpers. The twenty-eight-year-old and the forty-five-year-old. A generational bridge of shared misery. They were hired to be the biological proxies for parents who, presumably, were too busy attending meetings or optimizing their portfolios to notice that their infants were being physically dismantled in the next room. The industry of domestic labor in Hong Kong is built on a foundation of polite, systemic cruelty. We import thousands of women, tuck them into ‘helper rooms’ that are effectively ventilated closets, and then act shocked—truly, performatively shocked—when the pressure cooker whistles. If you treat people like appliances, do not be surprised when they malfunction in ways that are catastrophic to your ‘assets.’

On the other side, we have the parents. Oh, the parents. I can already hear the collective gasp of the affluent middle class, clutching their designer handbags in horror. ‘How could this happen?’ they wail. It happened because you tried to outsource the one thing that cannot be delegated: the grueling, soul-sucking reality of infant care. You wanted the status of a family without the inconvenience of the labor. You bought a service and expected the devotion of a saint for the price of a monthly coffee habit. You invited strangers into your home to do the work you found beneath you, and now you’re surprised that they didn’t possess the infinite patience of a martyr. It’s the ultimate expression of the capitalist delusion—that everything, including the safety of your offspring, can be purchased and managed through a contract.

Chief Inspector Tam Ching-shan’s report is a masterclass in the banality of evil. He mentions the injuries to the sixteen-month-old brother, ensuring that the horror is a matched set. It wasn’t a one-off moment of frustration; it was an environment. And while the legal system will do what it does—filing charges, scheduling hearings, and ultimately tossing these women into a different kind of cage—nothing will change the fundamental rot. The ‘holding charge’ is a bureaucratic Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. It allows the public to feel that ‘something is being done,’ while the underlying culture of exploitation remains entirely untouched.

This is the world we’ve built. The Left will cry about worker rights while simultaneously hiring their own helpers to maintain their ‘work-life balance.’ The Right will demand harsher penalties and more surveillance, as if a camera in the living room can prevent the inevitable explosion of a person pushed to the edge. Both sides are equally complicit in the fantasy that we can live in a world where we don’t have to deal with the consequences of our own choices. We want the skyscraper, but we don’t want to see the bodies buried in the foundation. We want the career, but we don’t want to hear the baby cry. And when the baby stops crying because someone shook it into a coma, we point our fingers at the help, oblivious to the fact that we were the ones who handed them the child and walked out the door. It’s not just a crime in Tai Po; it’s a indictment of a species that has forgotten how to be human in its rush to be productive. Sleep well, Hong Kong. Your secret is safe with me, even if your children aren’t.