At Bangkok General Hospital the man selling snacks and soft drinks beneath the elevator is something of a survival legend. Some months ago, Siriwat Voravejvutkuth was a multi-millionaire property developer. "I used to fly at 10,000 metres above the ground," he says. That was before the crash of '97. "Now," he admits, "I have to stay on the ground and sell sandwiches."
In Hong Kong, Stella Wong (26) saw the cash she had invested for her parents on the stock market, the equivalent of £25,000, evaporate as shares tumbled last week. With it went her hopes of studying in the US. "I daren't tell them exactly how much I've lost," she told the South China Morning Post.
A Hong Kong university administrator in his 40s lost twice as much on the stock market, onethird of the money he was saving for his retirement. "I must say I'm really not feeling too good," he said after his shares took a nose-dive.
These are some of the hard-luck stories now common all across south-east Asia after the market collapse and currency turmoil which have brought two decades of runaway growth to a screeching halt.
For years ordinary Asian people, from barefoot Kuala Lumpur street hawkers to young Hong Kong businessmen in Ferragamo shoes, have been playing the market on credit.
"Black October" brought ruin to millions. For example, an office cleaner in Hong Kong who borrowed £1,000 on October 2nd to buy one lot of 400 shares in Hong Kong Telecom, a top stock in China's Special Administrative Re gion, today finds the share certificates worth only £650. And the interest rate on the loan has gone up.
The worst-affected country has been Thailand where in July the devaluation of the baht triggered the regional crisis which has "ended party time for those who were riding the tigers", as one metaphor-happy analyst put it.
In Bangkok the buy-now-paylater boom brought designer stores and sophisticated living. Now the malls are mainly for window-shoppers. Thousands of people who bought dream houses and luxury cars cannot make the repayments. Off-duty policemen working for repossession agencies seize cars at traffic lights. In the country which was the world's second-largest market for Mercedes, new car sales of all kinds have dropped by 70 per cent.
It all happened too fast. "The Bangkok yuppies haven't even had time to enjoy their wealth," said Charnchai Charnuvastr, the chief executive of a Thailand telecommunications company, in a Newsweek report of the calamity which has wiped billions from the holdings of prominent families throughout south-east Asia. "The car still smells new in the garage, the house is still wet with paint and now they are in danger of losing everything."
Money was so easy to come by in Thailand that retailers of expensive watches in Switzerland employed Thai-speaking shop assistants to cater to visitors from Bangkok. The interpreters' jobs are now at risk as Asian tourists cancel their European holidays.
It's not all doom and gloom - for some. Walter Kwok, of Sun Hung Kai Properties in Hong Kong, made roughly £1 billion on paper in six hours on Wednesday through infrastructure deals in mainland China, where the boom continues. That's the equivalent of 6,000 Mercedes S320 VIP saloons, five Pathfinder space missions or 500 Irish passports.
In Hong Kong four out of five people said the sharp fall in the stock market had not changed their personal economic situation, according to a University of Hong Kong poll. Seven out of 10 said they were still confident of the economic future of Hong Kong, only slightly down on three weeks ago.
But in Japan, which could be slipping back into recession as its export sales drop throughout the region, more than half the people believe the country is heading in a "bad direction", according to a report quoting government sources.
The rich are being hit hard. In Malaysia the wealthiest 12 men lost an average of $1 billion each in stock values. In Indonesia 16 tycoon-owned banks were closed down on Friday.
Indonesia's deepening economic woes could escalate into a run on banks, from which it would be only a short step to anti-Chinese riots, according to the Hong Kong Economic and Political Risk Consultancy. Tensions between the majority community and the Chinese minority could also surface in a struggling Malaysia, and political instability threatens to return in the Philippines.
A prominent Singapore businessman says Asians have only themselves to blame. The secret of their success was monopolies, sweetheart deals, pork-barrel politics and cronyism, wrote Ho Kwon Ping in the International Herald Tribune.
"Where American companies were going through a severe shakeout, re-engineering and down-sizing, Asian conglomerates were gorging on new businesses from condos to condoms, palm oil to power plants, finance to fast food. Now the shining stars of the Pacific century have had a rude wakeup call."
South-east Asia is still bursting with energy and innovation. It will recover with deregulation, liberalisation, and trimmed down economies and companies. But for the region's poor, millions of whom could not even afford Siriwat's sandwiches in Bangkok General Hospital, the shattering of the Asian miracle means an increasingly desperate future.