This is the story of a man who left his family home and ended up spending five years hiding in Chungking Mansions.

He’d fallen in love with a prostitute there, and after many years he decided to leave home for her and became a missing person. His wife had no idea where he’d gone, but through friends she heard that her husband was seriously ill. She was plagued with questions and turned to private detectives to seek answers.

A well-earned reputation for sin and vice has been difficult to live down, in fact it seems to have carried on. Photo: SCMP Pictures

But it’s also a story about the search for him. The woman turned to Philic Man, a director of a private investigations firm that only uses women to track its targets.

“Women will pick up the small hints much faster or easier compared to men,” Man says via a staffer, Janice Roe Cho-ying, acting as an interpreter.

A man may be physically stronger, she explained, but may miss a flicker in the eye that exposes a clue.

And women have more options to blend in, more outfits to use as camouflage and can find ways to simply be in more situations without raising alarm, she added.

Man said her agents can simply knock on a door to verify who’s on the other side, and with a simple excuse like ‘whoops, wrong button’, she can raise less suspicion in her targets.

Man is not your archetypal detective in a trenchcoat. She’s a slight, confident woman with a crew-cut who wears shirts monogrammed with her family name. Her watch is enormous and we joke about whether it’s hiding a camera ­ but her spread of qualifications in counselling tell a story of a woman who cares more about finding a solution to the problems that led her targets astray than simply finding people.

So as we’re speaking about this runaway husband, we’re not in a film noir style PI’s room, no smoking cigarette in an ashtray.

There’s a massage chair next to Man’s desk, the walls are freshly painted and the room is a perfectly clean, modern office, despite the arrangement of awards and knickknacks festooning walls and surfaces.

No one had searched for this man at Chungking Mansions, she continued, and the case required sensitivity.

“That husband was intentionally trying to hide or avoid contact with her [his wife],” she said.

Chungking Mansions is a perfect place to hide [she says. It has food, clothes and cheap accommodations, all making it easy to stay inside the building.

And once inside, there’s no trouble in hiding in its towers or making a quiet getaway via its many exits into the Tsim Sha Tsui crowds. “We managed to know his habits, like where he had breakfast in the morning,” she said.

The man was working odd jobs in kitchens and wasn’t easy to pin down. Even though eventually the investigators discovered his living situation they didn’t want to bring about a confrontation.

“We try to make it a coincidence that they [he and his wife] bump into each other,” she said.

Investigations like this account for just a portion of the cases Man’s agency deals with. Compensated dating and teenagers doing drugs form the other major segments of the firm’s work. Man said Chungking Mansions is the site of about 10-15 per cent of all their investigations.

“For compensated dating, Chungking Mansions is one of the most popular places,” she observed.

“For compensated dating, Chungking Mansions is one of the most popular places”

Hong Kong teenagers offer themselves on social media and through agencies to go on dates with men and women, husbands and wives, and are compensated through money or gifts. Sometimes the dates lead to sex.

Anywhere else but Hong Kong this practice might be called prostitution or escorting.

As Man explained, parents who were worried about their children come to her agency to have their teenager’s movements tracked.

Couples on dates don’t go to Chungking’s basic and cramped rooms for their romantic vibe. When asked about this, Man laughed.

One of her assistants quipped: “I’m not sure how much you know about Chungking Mansions.”

Compensated dating is often carried out in secret, and rooms at Chungking Mansions are sought out for intimacy and privacy.

“You don’t need to show a lot of ID,” Man said. “You just pay in cash and when you’re done you hang your keys on the back of the door. Everything is low profile.”

The stairwells and apartments of the complex are also utilised so that drugs like marijuana and cocaine can be consumed in relative privacy. Drugs are also on offer at the building’s entrance, where dealers flock to new arrivals and announce in hushed tones the name of the substance they’re selling.

Once inside, the groups head to the rooms for parties and taking drugs, according to Man’s experiences.

Many of Man’s clients are of middle-class backgrounds or from families with below average incomes, and that may often mean the parents work long hours.

“The purpose of compensated dating or taking drugs these days is not because of money,” she said. “It’s just because they’re feeling alone or not being loved as much. They’re doing something to compensate their feeling of loneliness.”

But it’s not always loneliness or feelings of neglect that lead teenagers to drugs and compensated dating, Man said. Teenagers from relatively poor families can be motivated by the lure of quick and easy money to buy expensive clothes and accessories to show off to their friends.

“They need the money to compensate their inferior feeling and to show off as well,” she said.

A decade ago, Chungking Mansions was a place where missing people were more often found, Man said, but these days it was decreasing. “If you still want to hide in Chungking Mansions it’s still possible.”

These days hotels in Mong Kok and Jordan are popular for the same reasons as Chungking Mansions, and the introduction of CCTV at Chungking has lowered the incidence of serious crimes like kidnapping and sexual assault.

Hongkongers were historically wary of Chungking Mansions and its reputation for nefarious activities, but it seems the colourful collection of buildings continue their reputation of having whatever people need. Teenagers and parents alike seem able to find their private place there.