Praise for Em’s Awful Good Fortune
“Em’s Awful Good Fortune takes its reader across the world and deep into the heart of its trapped, privileged, suffering, and, ultimately, invincible narrator. Equally funny and brutal, this novel breathes vivid life into a much maligned and little understood “type”—the expat wife. Maxfield poured her heart into the writing, and it shows: the pages crackle.”
—Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Drown and This Is How You Lose Her
“A fast-paced, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it whirlwind of a book capturing the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a ‘tagalong’ expat wife. Marcie Maxfield will take you on a global ride—and personal journey—in this funny, poignant novel.”
—Stephanie Suga Chen, author of The Straits Times bestseller Travails of a Trailing Spouse and Disunited Nations: International School Mums at War
“Em’s Awful Good Fortune is ferocious and hilarious, with a writing voice so unique it will knock your socks off. This breathless story of a woman’s attempt at balancing love with self-love as she navigates the few joys and many pitfalls of the tagalong life will keep you reading until the wee hours, and might even change the way you view marriage, travel, and feminism.”
—Corine Gantz, author of Hidden in Paris and the trilogy The Curator of Broken Things.
“Maxfield calls Em’s problems those of ‘tagalong wife privilege,’ but the novel isn’t just about that; there’s something here that’s more universal, which women in different circumstances are sure to find familiar: the notion of abandoning the care of one’s own health and happiness in the name of love of family and marriage.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Copyright © 2021, Marcie Maxfield
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-142-7
E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-143-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021902924
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Richard, Jade, and Jordan
MAAAYYYBEEE
Sometimes I wish he would hit me. Not that I would ever let anyone hit me upside the head. I’m just saying—it would be easier to make a decision if he were an abusive husband, clear-cut. My girlfriends would say, “That guy is no good; you’re better off without him.” But my girls are all drooling over Gee, and not just because his pretty-boy baby face is becoming mannishly handsome. No, they’re solidly in Camp Gee because he delivers the fantasy. “Em,” they say, “you get to quit your job and live a jet-set lifestyle.”
What’s the problem? They wanna know.
It’s just that it wasn’t my dream, that’s all. I had a different fantasy: best friends, equal partners. You cook; I do the dishes. Then we curl up on the couch with our books (mine new, his noir), both of us exhausted from work. Maybe I get a foot rub. That’s why lately I’ve been thinking it would be a whole lot easier if he just hit me, instead of stomping on my dreams. Okay, maybe “stomping” is too violent a word. He doesn’t stomp; he steps over my life in the pursuit of his career.
We’re on a look-see for an expat assignment in China. Mind you, Gee already accepted the post. This trip is all about me. The only question on the table is, will my husband move to Shanghai alone, or will I tag along? Hence the term “tagalong wife,” also known as “trailing spouse,” which always makes me think of a snail carrying its home on its back. Not literally, not lugging around pots and pans—more like the sense of home. Because that’s my tagalong job: to provide a sense memory of home. Gee insists that I can say no. That I can stay in Los Angeles. Although that doesn’t feel like an option. It feels like the plane has taken off and there’s no turning back.
We clink champagne flutes in business class, and Gee toasts to another adventure. Then he puts on noise-canceling headphones, leaving me to peruse the menu, inspect my goody bag, and pick out a movie. I can’t help but wonder if this will be a metaphor for the next three years of our lives. Once again, I’m weighing the pros and cons: no interest in moving to China versus not wanting to lose my husband.
My husband. As if I own him, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The company owns him. France. Japan. Korea. It’s hard to keep our story straight. Here’s a cheat sheet: If it’s Daejeon, Ruby and Rio were toddlers. If it’s Tokyo, the kids were teens. If it’s Paris, me and Gee were fighting. In between posts, I live with the kids in Los Angeles. With or without him. If it’s without him, odds are we’re still fighting.
“Em,” he always promises, “it’ll be an adventure.”
But this—this is China, and it’s three years, and even Gee’s employer knows it isn’t an adventure; it’s a hardship post. That’s why they’re bankrolling this jam-packed look-see weekend in Shanghai. They want to make sure I can wrap my head around living there.
The flight attendant hands me a wet washcloth to clean my hands before meal service. It’s warm too. My cuticles are ragged from where I’ve been picking at them. Gee’s been talking about moving to China for months, and I’ve been tuning it out, picking my cuticles until they bleed. But business class on the company dime, that’s something you don’t want to tune out. That’s how Gee’s company reels you in—with cloth place mats and real silverware. The sleeper pod is like a flying cocoon, mad comfy. You get good swag on international flights, not just throwaway socks and eye masks. They give you samples of Philosophy’s Hope in a Jar skin cream and Hope in a Stick lip moisturizer. I smear some hope on my mouth and try to engage Gee in conversation, but he’s deep in his own private pod. Gee has this travel thing down to a science: what to pack in his carry-on, when to sleep, how to shut out noise and avoid jet lag.
Me, I drink too much wine and not enough water. I stay up the whole time watching movies—and ruminating. Worrying about how this is all gonna play out. What am I going to do all day? Three years is a long time to kill. Maybe I should become a yoga teacher. You can teach yoga anywhere. Even in China. Mina says Beijing has the bad air and Shanghai has the culture, and she’s head of Global Mobility for Gee’s company. So she should know. Will the kids be okay without us? Gee says they’ll be fine; technically they’re adults. That’s Gee—he thinks everything is always going to turn out better than you can possibly imagine. It never does. Not really. But by the time we figure out what went wrong, it’s too late. Done. Spilled that milk.
On a good day, I know Gee is doing his best to support our family and he’s my life partner; you don’t get more than one of those. There are lots of guys out there, but there’s only one father to my kids. Even though sometimes, like right now, him shutting me out with noise-canceling headphones, I worry there isn’t enough love between us to make this work.
<
br /> Stop! Push that thought out of your head, Em.
I remind myself that “embrace change” is my new mantra; it came to me in yoga class, washed over me like a tsunami when I was in child’s pose, forehead to the mat.
Gee emerges from his pod, hair all Flock of Seagulls, and I catch a glimpse of the guy I married. It makes me smile. I pop a breath mint and try to make myself presentable. They say expat assignments are more successful when the family stays together. No early departures, no breakups or burnouts. No screwing around. Absolutely no KTV girls! My role is to be the grounding force; the person my husband comes home to at the end of a long fucking day in a foreign country. And it helps if that person—me—is wearing a smile. Maintaining that smile, that’s what concerns me. I want this to be a good thing for us, but relocations can be tricky; they’re especially hard on the tagalong wife. We’re forced to create a whole new life from scratch. No office water cooler. No social network. No posse, no crew. No reason to get out of bed in the morning. Especially now that it’s just the two of us. This will be our first relo without the kids. It’s also the first time we’ve been required to take an advance trip merely to decide if we are willing to live somewhere. People call Shanghai the Last Frontier. It’s the Wild Wild West, they say. Except that it’s in the Far East, and instead of bandannas, everyone wears face masks. And this is before the pandemic.
We breeze through customs and are met by a driver holding a placard with our name. It’s April; the air is a hazy shade of particulate gray. The ride from Pudong airport to our hotel is flanked by miles and miles of dismal, same-same new construction; laundry climbing apartment buildings like textile scaffolding, red underwear waving from windows. There’s no whoosh of cars as we crawl through traffic, only the occasional hack and spit of our driver clearing his throat.
I’ve read that Shanghai is expat friendly, so my first thought is that it must be a mistake when the driver drops us at a hotel that is so Chinese, it doesn’t even have a Western name. Here’s what it does have: massive amounts of marble, excessively high ceilings, and ornate chandeliers. Train station cold. Every sound amplified. Hotel staff in shit-brown polyester, their voices echo and bounce in an acoustic assault of guttural sounds. There’s a huge open bar with tons of empty seating in garish red velvet. Not a single Westerner in sight.
“It’s all so Chinese-y,” I say.
I expected bright lights, big city. Internationally generic would have been okay. This hotel has a People’s Republic of China vibe that scares me. If the whole city feels like this place, I’m not sure I can do this. Back home, my clients are architects and designers, people who obsess over natural lighting, organic materials, and LEED certification; their design snobbery has rubbed off on me. Or maybe I’m just trying to hold on to some sense of me in the whole Gee-ness of yet another move.
As we check in, Gee asks for my travel papers. I shake my head no.
“Check your bag,” he insists, his jaw clenching. It does that when he’s aggravated.
“No way,” I mutter under my breath. I’m sure he’s thinking his careless wife has misplaced her passport. Her keys. Her phone. If her head wasn’t screwed on …
His passport is tucked securely in a zipper flap in his carry-on. When we get to the room, he’ll put it in the safe. He’s meticulous that way. Handing him my documents, I shake my head no again, trying to make it clear that I’m not talking about the passport. He turns away from me to give our papers to the clerk at the front desk; I sidle up to him and whisper into his ear, “No. Fucking. Way.”
No way am I going to live here.
A few minutes later, he turns back and grins knowingly. “I’ve upgraded our accommodations,” he says, handing me a key to our “best-quality” corner room.
My first lesson in basic China survival: Throw money at unhappiness.
While I shower, Gee searches Time Out Shanghai and makes reservations at a Spanish restaurant on the Bund. He’s much savvier than I am; I might have gone to the hotel bar, sat in the crushed red velvet chairs, and complained about the decor all night. We taxi to the restaurant, crossing the river from Pudong to Puxi. We might as well have flown to Barcelona for the evening: El Willy is filled with beautiful people, global expats, everyone speaking in a mishmash of foreign accents, Chinese women so slinky thin and stunning, you can’t not stare. The people-watching; the vibrancy; the view of the Huangpu River; that glorious, iconic skyline all lit up in cobalt blue, screaming green, and hot-pink-neon hearts.
So this is it—this is Shanghai. She pretty, I think. She flashy, like the Vegas strip, minus tacky tourists walking around in shorts, drinking rum and Cokes out of plastic Big Gulps. Shanghai has a night pulse that surges full force; it’s as if someone fed NewYorkParisTokyoMadrid into a blender, sifted it through an electric socket, and poured it into a martini glass.
We order squid and cocktails.
“Okay,” I say, sipping my mojito. Maaayyybeee.
And for a moment, I forget to worry.
LOOK-SEE
The look-see is a blur of sensory overload: apartments, hospitals, pollution, construction. China has used more cement in the past three years than the United States did in the entire twentieth century, Gee says.
He finds this statistic particularly interesting: the astonishing growth, the commitment to modernization, like it’s a twenty-first-century accomplishment and not the sign of a country careening toward a world health crisis. Jackhammers blasting rat-a-tat, like machine guns in a high school gym. Although that particular scary monster, gun violence, is totally American. Stuff like that doesn’t happen in China, or pretty much anywhere else we’ve ever lived outside the United States. It’s the upside of being an expat—not just kid safety, but also the ability to see America from the outside in, to get a global perspective. It’s the real carrot in the whole “it’ll be an adventure” proposition. You learn as much about your own country as you do about the world when you move overseas.
Gee and I take it all in, watching Shanghai unfold from the back of a van. Jake is up front in the passenger seat. Jake is our relocation consultant, hired by Gee’s company.
My eyes already sting from the pollution.
“Why can’t we go back to Paris?” I whisper to Gee. Or, better yet, I’m thinking, someplace tropical, like Belize. I could totally embrace change in Belize.
But of course we don’t end up in Belize. We end up at the expat health center, where the clinic manager greets us in the waiting area. She’s very professional, hair bobbed just above her shoulders, straight skirt just below the knee, British accent—the picture of international chic. It’s drizzling outside, and my hair is a frizzy mop on top of my head. My clothes are all wrong. I feel like a mess, and I’m not sure Shanghai is going to be a good look for me.
“Don’t just pack yoga pants,” Gee reminded me before we came.
So I packed jeans. Now I realize he meant that Shanghai is more stylish than Los Angeles. I forgot about that—how LA laid-back looks sloppy overseas.
While Brit Lady launches into her sales pitch, her staff scuttle a table, chairs, and medical equipment out the front door, scooting around us, carrying blood pressure pumps and thermometers, setting up what looks to be a makeshift exam area outside the entrance.
“It’s a checkpoint for bird flu,” Brit Lady explains matter-of-factly.
Jake and Gee nod their heads in understanding, as if this makes total sense. They’re like the Bobbsey Twins, in pressed jeans and button-down shirts, pale blue for Gee, white for Jake. No tie. Business casual. Blinders on. Good corporate soldiers. Whatever happens, no one do anything to stop the flow of money.
What? I’m thinking. Have you not seen Contagion! Gwyneth Paltrow hosts a dinner party at a restaurant in Hong Kong to celebrate some business deal. She shakes hands with the chef, who forgot to wash his hands before leaving the kitchen, hands that only moments before were deep inside the cavity of a raw chicken that ate some bat shit on the pig farm. Then Gwyne
th gets on a plane, flies back to the States, and hooks up with an old boyfriend on a layover in Chicago, and the next thing you know, everybody dies. China is ground zero for apocalyptic, end-of-the-world CDC superbugs. This is batshit crazy! I want to scream. My anxiety is on high alert, but all I can manage is an astonished whimper.
“Bird flu checkpoint?”
Brit Lady dismisses my concern. “It’s a precautionary measure,” she insists.
Jake smiles and nods, glancing at his watch to signal that the meeting is over. And we’re back in the van before any of us can process the health risk we just passed through. Jake’s name isn’t really Jake, of course. Everyone in China takes a Western name when dealing with lǎowài (slang for foreigners), because, the thinking goes, it would be chaos if they didn’t, since most of us are so linguistically challenged that we can’t even pronounce, let alone remember, someone’s Chinese name. This would be insulting if it weren’t so true. I ask Jake what his real name is, and I’ve forgotten it by the time we get to our next stop: Shanghai Hospital in Pudong.
Can I just say that if you’re trying to make someone feel comfortable about moving someplace, it might not be such a great idea to schedule back-to-back visits to a health clinic and a hospital as the first two stops on the win-them-over tour? It’s not making me feel safe. It’s like trying to prove you’re not crazy: The more you deny it, the crazier you sound.
Gee insists that living in China for three years won’t kill us. He bases this assurance on the fact that there are billions of Chinese people walking around, very much alive, and lots of them are old. He points to them out the car window.
“See, Em?” he says. “Old people.”
It’s true. You see them dancing or doing tai chi in Fuxing Park, babysitting the little emperors and empresses, playing mah-jongg on the sidewalk. Old guys strolling in makeshift mankinis, T-shirts rolled up, bare bellies exposed. You see the elderly everywhere. But also, you can’t help but notice how many people are hunched, stooped, limping, toothless, hacking, and spitting in the gutter. So, it’s a crapshoot. That right there is Gee and me in a nutshell: I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop, while Gee’s a glass-half-full guy. He doesn’t see shit coming until it hits him in the face. And sometimes, even then, he still doesn’t see it.
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