The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  Mercy walks home, pleasantly drunk in the crisp December air, swaying a little, dreaming of a higher authority—one that sees all the injustices meted out to her, that sees all the good things she tries to do, no matter if they don’t work out or no one notices—and that she will be found to be correct: Everyone will see that she has suffered more, been given less. How unfair, they will say. There will, finally, be justice.

  Margaret

  SHE IS OUT of the bath now, skin moist and flushed, wrapped in a Portman Ritz-Carlton bathrobe from an old trip to Shanghai. A trip from another life. She has wrapped her hair in a turban, so it can dry slowly and comfortably, the heat from her head trapped and steamy inside. The small space heater in the corner is sputtering out some warmth, and she is making a cream-cheese-and-olive sandwich. She takes out the cream cheese from the small box refrigerator she bought a few weeks ago, which reminds her of college days. The cream cheese is thick and white and comforting as she slides her knife out of the container. She spreads it across the thick multigrain bread. She slices the olives and studs the cream cheese with the bits, fingers slippery with oil. Her mouth is watering. What a marvelous combination, the smooth creaminess and the salty oil, paired with the heartiness of the bread. Food is good. She has to remember the good things, the small good things.

  And tonight, a dinner party. She has to get home, to make sure the kids are packed for vacation and to get ready. It’s at Hilary and David Starr’s. She knew Hilary as a child back in California. Their mothers were friendly. Hilary was very chubby, one of those flaxen-haired girls with porcelain cheeks, a rotund Dutch doll of a girl. Then suddenly one fall, maybe sixth grade, she came back to school with her cheeks caved in in a funny way, her arms and legs still largish but her waist tiny. Margaret remembers going to Hilary’s house one day, maybe in fifth grade, and seeing a schedule pinned up above the desk. In tidy, round letters, it spelled out a stringent schedule:

  3:30 Arrive home

  3:45 Snack and unpack

  4:00 Homework

  5:00 Outdoor time

  6:00 Dinner

  7:00 Finish unfinished homework

  8:15 Shower

  8:30 Reading in bed

  9:00 Lights out

  Margaret came away with a deep sense of wonder that someone her age could be so methodical and disciplined. She didn’t admire it—already she knew the beauty in ease, the greater cachet in sprezzatura—but the disconcerting sense never left her that Hilary was a deeply formidable person, one who would win over her genetics (she would have liked to see that diet and exercise plan) and whatever else stood in her way and never look back. There was something unnatural about the way she looked, like a fat person turned skinny, never natural, but she had won. She was no longer the chubby girl.

  Hilary went on to do well at school, but she never was able to shake that plodding image, that of a workaday bee. She and Margaret were never good friends, just nodding acquaintances who were polite to each other.

  Margaret hadn’t seen her in years, maybe decades, until they ran into each other at the airport. They had both been going to Thailand, and they ended up at the same resort as well. Their mothers had lost touch, so they hadn’t known the other also lived in Hong Kong.

  She had been amazed at how quickly she could summon memories, pictures of them together, once they recognized each other. It reminds her of when she was going to her high school reunion and looking through the names of the attendees, and thought bubbles sprang up unbidden—old reputations, the gossip about someone: “pretty blonde, short legs, though,” “brainy, chess club, Stanford,” “opportunist,” or “comes too quickly,” the last the malicious gossip about a handsome football player who had killed himself when he was thirty. Could everyone be summed up in a few words like that? Hilary was “fat girl turned thin, type A.” She supposed she was something like “pretty, easygoing, lucky,” or had been.

  She and Clarke had drinks with the Starrs during the trip but didn’t really keep up afterward in Hong Kong, and then it became a little awkward when they saw each other in town, or at parties, as they had both accepted they wouldn’t go any further with the friendship. But then after what happened, a phone call. Hilary called to say how sorry she was about G and wanted to see her. They had lunch, and now they had a passing sort of friendship where they saw each other and made polite noises about doing it again and sometimes coming through.

  So, tonight.

  She cleans up her snack and gets ready to leave.

  Back at home, Clarke has returned early, is there before her. He kisses her.

  “Good day?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. They are still always careful around each other. She wonders when that will end, if ever. They’ve both read the literature—the majority of marriages break up after the death of a child or something like what’s happened to them. It’s too painful. But they have the other kids, and the memory of what it used to be like. Maybe that is enough.

  “We have that dinner,” she says. Before, she would call his assistant and have her remind him, or send an e-mail, but she never bothers anymore.

  “Yes, it’s on my calendar,” he says. “David and Hilary.”

  “Right.”

  Clarke gets along with everyone, but they both don’t love David. Hilary is fine.

  They both remember when they first met them together, on that trip to Thailand. There was a New Year’s Eve party at the resort, and after the children went to bed, things got a bit wild, with a lot of drinking and middle-aged people going crazy on the easily available drugs. David was on something and started grinding with some man. It wasn’t even that she thought David was gay or that she cared; it was just a little factoid about him that she kept with her. Just a little thought bubble in her head when she saw him put a jacket over his wife’s shoulders as they left a party or if she saw him swimming at the club. It was not unkind, more of a “people contain multitudes within them” feeling.

  They kiss Daisy and Philip good night. Their children sit, watching a movie, as Essie reads a book next to them. This used to be one of her favorite moments in life, leaving clean, fed, contented children behind as she and her husband went out to enjoy each other, but now nothing is easy, nothing is pleasurable. She can’t let it be—it would feel like a betrayal. How can she be sitting in an air-conditioned restaurant in a comfortable chair enjoying a grilled fish and a glass of wine, or lying on a beach chair with a good book, while G might be starving or worse in some barn in rural Korea? How can she let herself?

  They drive to the Starrs’ in silence. It is only fifteen minutes away, but she lets herself think that the silence is a friendly one, nonreproaching, comfortable. She touches Clarke’s cheek while he is driving, wonders what he is thinking. He looks over at her and smiles. They have learned to do with so much less.

  At the Starrs’, everything is perfect, the house warm and inviting with scented candles, lamps giving off muted light, jazz playing softly. Hilary achieves this by being stringent in everything in her life, from her diet to her house. There’s the usual mix: South Side investment bankers and regional company heads and Mid-Levels ad execs and their wives, all American. When she first moved to Hong Kong, she thought she might make friends with the different nationalities she saw all around her. Her children’s friends were Danish, Japanese, local Hong Kong. But after a few strained meals, she saw how it was easier to stay with your kind. So, although she loathed the concept, she embraced the reality and became friends with the same people she would have known back in America.

  She accepts a drink from the smiling bartender and turns to talk to a couple who are visiting from California, faces starry with jet lag.

  “You’re from San Francisco,” she says politely. And the conversation starts. Another night in Repulse Bay.

  Hilary

  AN ODD MIX that never gelled. The Reades, whom everyone knew. Poor
Margaret. They were trying to live, but how could they? She seemed tentative all the time now, as if she was trying to lead a normal life but had forgotten how. Hilary had never seen her cry, but she imagined that she must cry all the time. And the new couple, who were moving here. The wife, what was her name? Molly? She was asking about tennis, so she might be an addition to Hilary’s team. She would e-mail her about it.

  Then the couple from out of town, David’s college buddy, who was the most boring person she had ever met. She sat him next to her, because he was the visitor (and, of course, the newcomer was on her other side), but he tried to talk to her about basketball, and she had been so bored.

  She lies in bed, thinking about what transpired at the dinner. Nothing, really. Just the usual talk about children and families and where people were going for the upcoming holidays. It turned out that the Reades were going to Phuket the next day and coming back via Bangkok, and they would overlap with her in Bangkok when she was there with her mother. So they’d made plans to get together. Her mother would be glad to see Margaret. And all this not to think about the fact that David has disappeared. He said he wanted to go out with his friend, but the wife gave his friend the stink eye, and they declared they were going to hit the sack—jet lag and all. But David insisted, said he was meeting someone afterward. She was pointedly not invited, so she pretended she knew and was okay with it.

  So here she is, lying in her bed, with an almost empty glass of wine on the bedside table, teeth freshly flossed, Bio-Oil glistening unattractively on her face, slubby pink floral pajamas. Hardly a temptress who knows how to keep her man, let alone bring a child into her world.

  Because, of course, that’s what Olivia wanted to talk to her about. Hilary’s not an idiot. She knows, little bit by little bit, that David has changed here in Hong Kong. He is absent from her because he works so much and she has less and less to do with his life. She doesn’t know what his life is like when he leaves home, and home is where he spends two or three awake hours, max, getting into bed at night, showering in the morning. He’s been staying out later, smelling of booze when he gets home. (Oh, the irony! They could be drinking together.) Being evasive about where he’s been. It’s not like he is actively doing something wrong, like having an affair or nurturing a drug habit, but he is on the verge of tipping over. She can sense it. Olivia may not have seen him actually with some girl, but he’s probably been seen in bars in the company of other women, without his wife present, without a chaperone. There, that sounds about right, in a Jane Austen version of the world. Disporting himself inappropriately.

  This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he’s supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire—a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks—and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life. The rental buildings are littered with the ghosts of ruined marriages: a husband who left his wife and kids for his assistant, an ebony-tressed Chinese sylph who is already pregnant; a man who was lost to the seedy, red-light pleasures of Wan Chai and the paid hostesses who found his every utterance completely fascinating, or sometimes to a more interesting, engaged female colleague, a welcome relief from the woman he faces at home, complaining about his travel, his schedule, his lack of time with the kids. So why not change it up? Why not trade up? Or down, and have some fun?

  Hilary and her friends have all sat next to a sheepish father introducing his children to his sexy young fiancée in the safe, public, but judgmental environment of a restaurant. He is worried, solicitous of both his children and the woman but usually more of the latter. He is also proud and newly virile. He pulls out the woman’s chair, asks if she likes her food, hands her her dropped napkin as if demonstrating to the children that this is the proper way to treat the new person who has ripped their lives apart. Sometimes the woman is nervous, smiling too much and asking loudly about what the children like to do and saying how she would love to do it with them. Other times the woman is removed, arms crossed, sunglasses, skimpy dress. They’d better learn, these brats, that he belongs to me now. This is what I have to offer. You can’t compete. This kind of woman is usually very young and attractive and so very foolish. She thinks that the battle is a matter of weeks or months and that a victory is a victory forever. If the children are adolescent, the girls are defiant and silent, the boys more approachable. The young ones are heartbreaking, that is all. If you were to feel bad for the man, and the expatriate housewife usually emphatically does not, you would feel bad only because you would know that he knew, on some level, what he was doing to his children.

  Of course, there are always two sides to every story. Sometimes the woman who’s been left is crazy, or horrible, or mean, and everyone understands why. But it does seem that she is always left worse off and the man just starts his life anew, with a younger model of a wife, sometimes a slightly smaller apartment, but that his new life pretty quickly looks like his old one. While the woman often starts working again, depending on what kind of financial arrangement they’ve come to, and has the kids and her work, and usually soon comes to look harried and gray-haired, so that when her ex-husband comes to pick up the kids, he can see the stark contrast between what he’s left and what he has now and congratulates himself that he’s made the right decision. To add insult to injury, in his fervor to not mess things up again—because it was so painful and he never wants to go through that again or put anyone else through it again—when he has more children, he vows to really do things right this time, so he pitches in to an unimaginable extent, does more with the kids, since he was always working before and now he knows that he needs more work/life balance, so the new family gets the benefit of this new and improved man, and the old family gets to see it all. It’s terrible.

  In the eight years she’s lived in Hong Kong, Hilary has seen this happen to at least ten women she knew pretty well. She counts them on her fingers: Manda King, Tara Connelly, Kathleen Li, Padma Singh, Sheryl Wu, Jenny Harrison, Lorraine Greenspan . . . there are more, but she can’t think of them. A ghostly procession of marital destruction. Of course, marriages break up back home as well, but because Hong Kong is such a fishbowl, you view the carnage from a front-row seat. There’s Jim with the new wife at the American Club! There’s poor Sylvia waiting for the elevator at her new office with a lunch box—she had to take a job and can’t afford to eat lunch out anymore. Some women move back home, but that’s a struggle, because the husband won’t usually let them take their children so far away. Some enter into the strange netherworld of clubs and unsavory older men, who usually prefer their women younger but will entertain an older one the later the hour. Some migrate to the outlying islands, to Truman Show–like Discovery Bay or hippie Lantau, and change accordingly.

  Once Hilary was approached by a heavyset woman with long, frizzy hair at IFC Mall. “Hilary!” the woman trilled, happy to see her.

  “Hi,” Hilary said, reflexively.

  The woman understood but was still taken aback. “I look different,” she said sheepishly. “I’ve gained some weight.”

  And then the woman’s face shifted, and Hilary recognized a vestige of Tammy from the tennis team. She had been the captain of the A team, a five-year veteran of Hong Kong, when the newly arrived Hilary first met her. She had her husband, Garth, and two children, Mark and Melissa. Two years later, it turned out that Garth had another family in Shenzhen, the mainland city that neighbored Hong Kong, with a former club hostess, who had borne him two additional children, and that he was living a double life, shuttling between the two on his commute from Hong Kong to China. Mainland women had the reputation of do
ing anything to secure their futures and to have the opportunity to marry an American and move to Hong Kong or even—oh, the glory!—to the United States. The whole affair came out when the doorman of the apartment building Tammy lived in rang up to say there was a Miss Chan there to see Mrs. Brodie. Tammy, not expecting anyone but used to deliveries, was going through her e-mail when their helper, Gina, came to the bedroom saying that the woman was asking to see her.

  She emerged to see a pretty young Chinese woman in her twenties with a fierce look on her face. She was wearing red plastic shoes and a fake Hermès scarf. She had come on the train from Lo Wu, then the MTR to Admiralty, and then a taxi to the South Side. Gina later told her helper friends, who told their employers, that the girl showed Tammy pictures of Garth with her and their children, in their apartment and at restaurants in Shenzhen, and demanded that she be able to move to Hong Kong. It seemed that Garth had been putting her off, and she was sick of it. She had been waiting for three years, and she wanted her children to be educated in Hong Kong—her oldest would soon be three—and she wanted to have the life that was due to her and her children as the family of an American citizen and resident of Hong Kong. She had finally managed to get a visa to Hong Kong—mainlanders were not allowed unlimited entry—and now she was here to settle matters.

  Tammy’s initial response was not duly recorded, as the Chinese woman quickly became very aggressive and threatening. Her English was not very good, and translated through the grapevine through a Filipina maid, her words and the events that transpired were not crystal clear. There were some broken items, as the woman declared that everything in Tammy’s house also belonged to her. She demanded to know how many bedrooms they had and how much the rent was. She wanted to know what kind of car they had and what Garth’s salary was, as she suspected he had been lying to her.