Sam is waiting downstairs for her in the car. She gets in, and even in the cooler air, the interior is redolent of body odors. Humors, she thinks. The humors of the body, escaping through those tiny pores, roiling around the interior of the car.
Chinese or Filipino? everyone had asked when she said she was hiring a driver. Sam is Indian, an anomaly, but he grew up in Hong Kong, speaks fluent Cantonese, and knows every street in Hong Kong. She thought he would be happy to see Julian visit, but he is odd about it. Later she realizes that he thinks Julian is a street child, beneath him, a proper working man with a family. She realizes that everyone wants to find his own level.
Sam starts the car, and they go to the club.
Hilary sits, hidden behind sunglasses, waiting for her friend Olivia. Children are playing on the lawn while their mothers sip tea and gossip. A boy falls and cries. His mother goes to comfort him. She is a woman Hilary sees at the club every time she is there: a woman with three children, two girls, one boy. Today the woman is in dark jeans that show her wide hips and bottom and a white wool sweater that is stretched across her large breasts and hugs the shelf of flesh above the waistband of her jeans. The muffin top, Hilary knows it is called, the soft, doughy edge that tips over the waistband of your pants. The woman stands up and returns to her group of friends.
Hilary views the thickening torsos and thighs of her peers with a visceral disgust. How can they let themselves go like that, these women, as if it didn’t matter? Even if they did have children, surely it can’t be too much work to refrain from shoving éclairs and cream puffs down their throats for a few months? She was a heavy child, but she lost weight, and she kept it off. She looks at their arms, spilling out of their clothes like ham hocks, and the way their faces are cushioned in multiple folds, what she calls carb-face, and is nauseated. They have plates of food in front of them, chicken satay in congealing pools of oil, half-eaten grilled cheese sandwiches, glistening mounds of French fries with violent squirts of tomato ketchup.
They are so cheerful, the mothers, so enamored of themselves and their lives, as if the fact of bearing children earned them some unnamed right to sit in the dappled sun with their warm drinks cooling in the winter air and their disheveled hair and their ketchup-stained clothes. Hilary loathes them. She loathes them so much.
They are so lucky.
A year had passed before she thought anything wrong. She had gone off the pill, but it had been a casual event, after a dinner with a lot of wine, a lot of giggling about pulling the goalie, about whether they were really this old. They had not had a great longing for children; it was more of a maybe-it’s-about-time—they had been married two years. She supposed, they had both not been against it. The irony of their casual decision! She was thirty; they had just moved to Hong Kong. When it didn’t happen, month after month, she got nervous, figured out when she was ovulating by taking her temperature, made sure David was in town during her fertile time, as he traveled so much for his job. Sex became a chore, a baby-making effort. But nothing happened.
It has been eight years now, eight years during which she has seen friends have one or two or three children, or twins, a veritable frenzy of fertility, pregnancies, baby showers, births, and hospital visits, until they slimmed down and told her again, over lunch, apologetically, that they were pregnant again.
And yet she doesn’t want to go any further. The hormones, she has heard, make you fat, swollen, moody. She has been reading about the surrogate village in India—a friend forwarded the article—and the thought makes her feel faint.
So instead she waits. She thinks sporadically about going to a doctor, but then that thought is always drowned out by the thought that surely if it is to be, it will happen naturally. She is frightened by the thought of pregnancy, by the thought of her body changing. The body she knows so well and knows how to control so well. It is not the idea of being pregnant that moves her. She would like a child. She would like to be a mother.
David follows her lead, is amenable to what she wants. Their relationship has cooled in the meantime, cooled into politeness and well wishes, but she pushes that thought away, because how many difficult thoughts can one handle in one sunny afternoon? Perhaps a baby, a pregnancy, will save them from this gradual decline. But how to get there? She pushes the thought away again. She sits instead, wills her mind to go blank, sips at her iced tea, feels the smooth passage of it down her throat. She waits for her friend.
Hilary is from San Francisco, but not the San Francisco where everyone seems to be hiking or biking while chugging sports drinks, or doing some other sort of physical outdoor activity, and then talking about it endlessly. When people find out she is from the Bay Area, their eyes light up and they talk about this hike or that park, and she says, “Oh, I don’t know from that.” Or they talk about Napa Valley and the vineyards, and the cheese! “I like it,” she says. She is not effusive, the way people seem to want everyone to be, full of excitement and vim. She grew up just outside San Francisco, where her parents live still, and she moved to the city when she got her first job in PR.
She spent her early twenties working and then met David at a friend’s wedding. Everything according to plan. They married when she was twenty-eight, ten years ago. He was an associate at a law firm with offices all over the world, and he had always wanted to travel and live abroad. She said she would go with him anywhere.
After moving, there was a new vocabulary to learn: “lifts” instead of “elevators,” “flats” instead of “apartments”—vestiges of the British colony Hong Kong used to be. Also, instead of a housekeeper, the province of only the rich in America, everyone in her new world had a live-in domestic helper from the Philippines or Indonesia, who took care of all the housework and babysitting for the astounding sum of US$500 a month. They live in a particularly homogeneous enclave of expatdom, Repulse Bay, where half the people they see are white, and more than that are not locals, be they Chinese American or Japanese or Filipino. In this particular corner of Hong Kong, newly arrived Americans bump into one another at the supermarket and talk of their sea containers, arriving soon with their belongings, how to find a travel agent, how to get a driver’s license. The husbands get up in the morning, put on their suits, and take taxi-shares or minibuses or are driven to work in the tall, shiny office buildings in Central, while the women putter around the house before getting ready for their tennis match or going in to volunteer at the library, since they mostly had to give up their jobs when they moved. It all feels a bit like The Truman Show.
Still, even within this sphere, Hilary soon came to see the very fine distinctions.
There were the new expats, who signed up for courses on Chinese cooking at the MacDonnell Road YWCA, took the train to Shenzhen to buy fake DVDs and cheap dinnerware, went to the Art Village to have paintings copied cheaply for their apartments (“A funny Lichtenstein for the bathroom is so cute, don’t you think?”), and did first vacations in Phuket. Then there were the intermediate expats, who went to Bhutan to trek and Tokyo to eat and eschewed the touristy. They had favorite hikes. They threw out the IKEA furniture and bought real antiques. They had some local friends, a Mandarin nanny, and preferred to eat at restaurants secreted away in office towers. They started small businesses, like children’s clothing or jewelry design, all made in China, and sold their wares at the holiday gift fairs that sprouted up in hotel ballrooms around December. And then there were the old Hong Kong hands, who had racked up ten, twenty years in the colony. They were mostly in Hong Kong for good, sometimes had given up citizenship in their former countries. They owned their homes, always bought on a dip in the property market, didn’t talk to newcomers, and smiled blankly when people brought up newbie topics like schooling and medical care, as if they had mentioned something as unspeakable as their bathroom habits.
Of course, there were the international lines as well. The Japanese were a discrete group and rarely mingled, playing baseball
and soccer together every weekend at the municipal athletic fields, with their neatly packed bento lunches and peculiarly named sports drinks. The French and Koreans were a bit more porous, the English perhaps a bit more, and the Americans most of all, although, after a few years of socializing strenuously with everybody, people tended to slip back into their national identities. It was just so exhausting to have to explain what a state school was, or how football and soccer were different. After a few years, even the most well-meaning Americans found themselves calling only other Americans and doing Super Bowl breakfasts (due to the time difference) and Thanksgivings at the club with other families. You found yourself somehow more American than ever.
Hilary has become firmly ensconced in her new life, one she slipped into frighteningly easily, as David’s career flourished in Asia over the past eight years. He is now one of the most senior attorneys at his firm. Hilary has servants—a domestic helper and a driver—a membership to a country club, where she plays tennis with other sun-visored ladies, and afterward, showered and dried and clad in cool summer shifts, they order Greek salads and salted French fries and sip pinot grigio as the sun sets and their husbands work and they gossip and complain and otherwise act as if life has always been this way.
And now there is Julian.
She first saw him a few months ago while on a tour with the American Women’s Association, which she joined back when she was new to Hong Kong. She had seen a flyer for the association at the American Club. There were photos of smiling women eating Chinese food, holding a bake sale, at a costume party. The aura of nonjudgmental acceptance drew her in. She stuck with AWA over the years, taking part in some of their activities, and was on their e-mail list. She decided to sign up for an introduction to Hong Kong Social Services, where they learned about different situations and how they might volunteer and be useful.
They saw an orphanage, or what they called a child-care center, as well as a small group home. The child-care center was in Kowloon, in a massive concrete building. Hilary found herself on a tour with five other well-meaning American women clutching Starbucks coffee cups. Amid the powerful scent of Dettol—disinfection was a religion in Hong Kong after SARS—Belle Liu, the bespectacled representative who sported the inexplicably mannish cut of so many local women, explained the different areas in the blunt, accented English Hilary often found startling, the locals not yet having adopted politically correct terminology.
“This for the retard children,” she said, gesturing to a padded room where two boys in helmets rocked back and forth while a woman read a newspaper in the corner.
“Sometimes mother will not come back for one year,” Belle said, “and we don’t know if the child is abandon or not.”
“Is there a cutoff date for when you would find the child a new home?” a woman asked.
Belle went into a lengthy explanation of government regulations and the forms the women were supposed to sign when they left their children. However, she said, very few complied. They were mothers, after all, and most could not bring themselves to give up their children if they weren’t made to. They imagined a future when they would be better off, have more, and reclaim their child. So then the children languished in legal limbo, unable to be put in the adoption pool, unable to go home. Like many locals in government administration, Belle was very excitable about rules and regulations and following them to the letter.
Another room had five baby swings and an equal number of foam seats for infants who could not sit upright yet. There were no children in that room—down for naps, Belle explained.
The women were kind, the furniture and equipment were clean, the endeavor was wholly adequate, and yet, of course, the whole building reeked of sad desperation. Hilary walked through the fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored hallways in a daze, looking at all the abandoned, luckless children.
She went to the bathroom, an institutional affair that smelled strongly of bleach and urine, and closed the stall door. When she pulled down her pants, they were stained with blood. Her period, again. The earthy, rich smell rose and sickened her. Her stomach dropped.
She sat in that stall, her head in her hands, for ten minutes, listening to people come in, urinate, pull on the toilet paper, flush, wash their hands—the mundane sounds of the lavatory. She breathed carefully, modulating the sound so that people knew someone else was there but not so loud as to disturb them. Someone from the tour came in to check on her, and she said to go on without her, she would find them.
She looked at her bloody underwear. This had to be a sign, she told herself. Just like the signs other people are always going on about of when they recognized their child. Getting your period in an orphanage had to be a sign.
She had taken a class in college about feminism and medicine. In it, she learned that the whole terminology around menstruation—a failure to conceive, a shedding of the lining—was negative and misogynistic and old-fashioned, teaching women that their sole purpose in life was to have children. The lining of the uterus was not shed; it was cleansing itself to make way for a new lining. Back then, so far away from the idea of having children, the whole premise had seemed impossibly academic and precious. Now she wants to find that book again and read it. She wants to find a way to redefine what is happening to her, to own it.
And then she saw Julian.
Of course, his name was not Julian then. She decided to call him Julian after all the arrangements had been made. That seemed an enormous encroachment into his life, already, naming him.
The group went on from the child-care center to what was called a group home, a smaller institution that housed only eight boys. Here, their guide explained, they had a smaller setting. The government outsourced child care, so children would end up in a child-care center, a group home, or foster care.
Julian was doing homework in a room with older kids. He stood out because he was not Chinese but, instead, that beautiful brown mix. She tried to talk to him, and the guide told her that he was wonderful at music. Sick with the knowledge that she was not pregnant, she rushed into something impulsive. “I’ll find him a piano teacher,” she said. Belle Liu nearly had a conniption, what with all the regulations that would violate, but Hilary simply kept talking, and the kindhearted woman finally could not bear to see Julian miss a chance at something he would never otherwise get.
“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “I don’t know.”
And she didn’t say anything more, and Hilary knew to just shut up and come back and do it later. Julian’s paperwork had recently come through—a small miracle, the woman said—and he had been released into the adoption pool, but his chances for adoption were close to nil because of his age and because of his mixed race. Normally-developing babies had a 100 percent chance of being adopted if their paperwork was done, but after a year or two, the children’s chances dropped steeply. Julian went to school near the group home and walked there and back. He had already started on the life he would lead if no one were to intervene.
He has been coming to her house for just a month. She usually picks him up early, so that they can have a snack. The first time, she made him lasagna herself, Puri clucking over the mess Hilary made in her own unfamiliar kitchen, spilling tomato sauce on the countertop, opening every cupboard door in search of the Pyrex pan. But he barely ate it, pushing it around the plate until it became a huge, gloppy mess that looked unappetizing even to Hilary.
Puri stood over him with a satisfied expression on her face. The ma’am was not supposed to go in the kitchen. That was her domain.
“Sik mae?” Puri asked him, motioning to her lips with an imaginary spoon. She spoke some Cantonese, from her time with a local Chinese family.
“Chow faan,” he said. He liked fried rice. Even Hilary knew what that was.
So now Puri makes him the food he likes, that she knows how to make from her previous job. She makes pork fried rice, spring rolls with shredded car
rots and turnips, vinegary chicken wings; once she made an entire steamed fish with head on. The house smells like a Chinese restaurant on Julian’s days, all soy sauce and deep-fried Mazola, but she does not say anything, because he devours the food while Puri looks on, gratified. This is a child who does not know what to do with a carrot stick, or celery filled with peanut butter, or a cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich. She might as well give him hay.
Hilary usually sits opposite him, always, stunned by the silence in her, unable to say anything but the most cursory social greeting. He has to learn English, she says to herself, he has to learn English. But who will teach him? She has given him an English name. What next? What next? Isn’t there some sort of manual?
But he doesn’t make it easy either. He is usually reserved, but sometimes, suddenly, clownishly friendly, as if the women at the group home have told him he has to close the deal, although she knows that must just be her own projection. She does not know how to handle him when he is like that; she is too close to his desperation and confusion and is overwhelmed. But she does not even know if it is desperation that drives him. She has no way to read what he thinks, what he feels. She has nothing in common with him except what she has the will to build, and that will, it seems, is not strong enough.
This complete flouting of all common adoption wisdom—that she is allowed to take a child home, a “test-drive” she thinks of it sometimes, the thought bubbling up in her head before she can suppress it with horror—is an incredible, under-the-table thing that has somehow happened because everything is personal and the head of the AWA really, really likes her because they went to the same university and so she vouched for Hilary to the department head, whom she has known for sixteen years. It is terrible, it is scandalous, and yet Hilary cannot come to a decision. She can tell herself that she is giving her time to a child who needs it, a volunteer sort of thing, and that she doesn’t have to go the whole way.
The Expatriates Page 7