The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  They submitted in a way that frightened her. They didn’t want to, but they did, because they knew it was important to her and that it would be futile to say no. They seemed a little bit like abused children. She was causing them more trauma.

  But. She couldn’t help herself. So, a catalogue of moles.

  She had been thinking about if she found G two or three years later and he had changed a lot. What if she was unable to know for certain if it was him? Yes, of course, DNA, but in the immediate sense, the first moment when they showed him to her. She wanted to know right away. Children change so much. How to be sure? She came up with this. A mole catalogue.

  She stood Daisy and Philip in the bathroom in their underwear and took photographs of their arms, their inner thighs, anywhere they had a birthmark or irregularity or mole. And then she labeled and filed them on the computer she had had Essie send to Seoul. Daisy had a large mole on her left inner thigh, and two close to one another on her right back shoulder. Philip had a scattering of them on his right arm, above his elbow. He had a scar above his right eyebrow. She had the photos on her computer, backed up, and in hard copies.

  Of course, the ones she needed, she didn’t have. She couldn’t remember the details of G’s body. He must have had moles, but who noticed those kinds of things on a third child? She pored over old photos on her computer, trying to see what spots he had on his face, things that would not change even after years and years. But everything seemed so mutable, so temporary: eyebrows, hair, even the shape of his face. He could get fat, he could be unrecognizably skinny, depending on what type of environment he was in. He might be with a family who had just wanted a child and got him off the black market and spoiled him rotten. Or he might be in some terrible place, a surly street urchin or worse. She can only bring herself to read snippets of what happens to children who disappear, glancing off the terrible surface of what might be. Her therapist tells her to stop thinking about it.

  But sometimes she’ll read in the paper that in China and India, children are kidnapped and maimed so that they become more compelling and effective beggars. In other countries, kids are taken for their organs, but those are usually the older ones, older than G. There’s the sex trade, of course. This is what she has to digest. G, her one-eighth Asian child, who actually could pass for Asian. They would never have taken light-haired Daisy, who looks white. Too much trouble, a foreigner’s child, too much media attention, potential for international conflict. But Daisy and Philip look white. G looks Asian. Only G had that one recessive gene pushed to the fore, that stubborn Asian DNA strand that burst when he was made, so that while he’s recognizable as her child—only one person has ever asked her if he’s adopted—he looks quite recognizably Asian. So he has dissolved into the fifty million other Korean people on the peninsula.

  After she photographed Daisy and Philip and they went to bed, quiet and submissive, she realized that she was damaging them further and they needed more normalcy. She booked a flight for them to go back to Hong Kong the next day with her mother so they could go back to school. She and Clarke stayed on.

  That was when she weaned herself off the anxiety medication. The Korean doctors had been liberal with prescriptions, but she wanted to stay sharp, be ready for whatever came her way. She only took an Ambien when it was two in the morning and she couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Then, after six weeks, Clarke went back to work. She couldn’t believe it, but he said, “You’ll be here. I’m not doing anything that you can’t do. And we need to see our other children. Make sure they have a parent there, even though your mother’s there. They are suffering as well.”

  And he left her, fuming, in the hotel room. What was it about men? They didn’t feel things the same way. How could he leave the country where his child was lost? Now the person she saw the most in the world was Mr. Park, a gentle man with glasses who handled her with extreme delicacy.

  She remembered sitting with him in the police station, as she did almost every day. It was getting cold, November, December, and the building was not well heated. He apologized for the temperature and said the government saved money on heating.

  “At home,” he said, “we have the floor heating, the ondol. It is very effective, and we eat and sleep close to the ground.”

  She wondered what he went home to every night, whom he lived with, if he had children. She asked him once about his family, and he told her in a way that indicated he was making a sacrifice by telling her, so she didn’t delve into the personal again.

  They shared coffee every day. Once, sick of the terrible brew they had at the station, she made an impulsive purchase at Hyundai Department Store on the way to the station. When she came in bearing the espresso machine, the policemen were struck dumb and then all in unison said they could not accept the present, government regulations and all. She insisted, said it was for her as well, as she was there every day, and then she set it up and made everyone a cup, foaming the milk she had brought and stirring it into paper cups. She and the policemen sipped the good coffee together in silence, each lost in his own thoughts.

  The police were very polite and concerned but completely ineffective. She didn’t go ballistic on them, because she didn’t think it would help her or G. But it was incredibly frustrating. Every day brought new leads: phone calls, e-mails from people who thought they’d seen G. But they never led anywhere. Seoul was blanketed with closed-circuit televisions, but there was a blind spot where they had been, and when they studied the adjoining ones, they couldn’t see G anywhere. One store’s camera had been broken for a week and was getting fixed that day, so the whole system had been down. This is the direction where they thought G must have been taken. They told her of another case where a boy had been taken and they had been able to trace his path with different security cameras. It had taken them a few weeks, but they had traced him to a village an hour outside Seoul, reachable by bus, where a mentally disturbed woman had taken him as her child. He had been shaken but healthy when they found him. She had treated him well, he said, but had insisted that she was his mother. He was seven years old, so he knew it wasn’t true but was frightened of challenging her, so he had played along and stayed with her in her house, afraid, but even more afraid of what lay outside.

  The police were very proud of this case, but it didn’t seem that they were having the same luck with her child. They apprised her of all their work, but nothing ever panned out.

  Clarke flew back every ten days or so, but there was never any progress to show him. He brought the kids with him the first few times, but they got upset when they had to leave her, so they decided it was better to let them stay in Hong Kong.

  After three months, he took her by the hand while they were eating dinner at the hotel. “Come back home,” he said. “We have to live our lives. We can return whenever they find something. We can’t destroy four more lives. Philip and Daisy deserve a chance.”

  She felt a white-hot hatred for him then that swept through her so violently she felt it physically. She snatched her hand back and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the night. He left the next morning in silence.

  In Korea by herself, Margaret got into a rhythm. She’d wake up in the morning around six and go to the hotel gym for an hour. She’d run on the treadmill, watching the television. She got to know the other regulars at the health club, as many locals used the hotel facilities as their gym. An old white-haired man stretched with his young trainer every morning, a few businessmen in their forties, a few pretty young housewives. They nodded to each other in the morning. Afterward she went upstairs and showered and put on comfortable clothes to go to the police station. She walked over—it took about fifteen minutes—and checked in with the police. Initially they had asked her to stay at the hotel and they would contact her with any leads, but she had been politely persistent, and now they let her stay around the police station with her laptop and access the Wi-Fi. How could the
y say no to someone like her? It was sterile, with white linoleum floors and fluorescent lights and that peculiar Korean smell she now recognized, from the accumulated smell of a thousand bygone boxed lunches. It was comforting to her now.

  She would ask for any updates. They would show her a few badly translated e-mails or phone messages that had come in during her absence—“I know kidnapped child in Suwon!”—and say they were following up. That she was allowed to stay was against all protocol, but they found a way as long as she didn’t ask too many questions or interfere with their work. They knew it was hard for her to stay at the hotel.

  Lunch was at one of the many small restaurants in the neighborhood. She learned that one o’clock was the regular lunch hour, so she went at noon so there was no wait. She ate ddukbokki, bibimbap, naengmyun, trying all the different foods by pointing to the menu pictures and what other people were having. She felt as if she were connecting to her Korean roots a little bit, having a tiny taste of what it must be like to live in Korea and be Korean. She ate salted sprouts brushed with sesame oil, cold marinated crab—although she got food poisoning so bad she thought she might die later that day, lying on her bathroom floor—the gelatin-like mook, the kkagduki kimchi, the endless warm soups. She came to crave room-temperature barley tea with her food. It helped her digestion and soothed her stomach.

  After lunch she would go back to the police station for a few hours. Around four, she would head back to the hotel and do laps in the pool. It was important to be physically active so that she could sleep at night. She usually ate dinner at the hotel, where all the staff knew her by now, watched TV, answered e-mails, and surfed the Internet, and was usually in bed by ten. Her life shrank down and became ascetic, which meant that she felt like she was focusing all her energies on finding G.

  But he remained lost. The police shook their heads and complained about the dissolution of Korean society.

  “Before,” Mr. Park said, “it was a good society. But now too much money and the Western values have come, and the children want to eat hamburger, and the adults only interest themselves. They don’t care for the other people.” He told her amazing stories: of people who were sick of taking care of their elderly parents with dementia and drove them out to the countryside and abandoned them, knowing they could never find their way back; of young parents neglecting their baby to go play a computer game in which they nourished a virtual child, only to come back to their apartment to find that their actual child had starved to death. “This society is no good now,” he told her. He recommended that she watch Korean television dramas. They were very popular around the world, and she could begin to understand the problems of modern Korea. He gave her the names of a few and also where she could download them. He highly recommended one drama in particular and underlined it, with exclamation points surrounding it.

  She started watching and, despite the melodramatic acting and bad lighting, found herself quickly sucked in. Winter Sonata was the story of a young man in search of his father who falls in love with a girl in a small town. The girls in the show were always running after buses and scolding their love interests in a coy, flirtatious way, and the men were unnecessarily brooding, but there was something viscerally compelling about the people and their interactions. She watched episode after episode in a trance. She downloaded the entire series onto the Korean smartphone she had bought and watched it at the police station, on the subway, at the gym. Even now, whenever she hears the piano music of the opening credits of the series, she is transported back to those months in Seoul, cold mornings on the subway, the intense monotony of those days, the sick feeling she had the whole time.

  Her mother found her a shrink from San Francisco she could talk to on Skype. Dr. Stein and Clarke seemed to be on a team, trying to get her to move forward, but she couldn’t. She didn’t tell them about the hours she spent on eBay, trying to find the sandals G had been wearing. This mindless searching for an artifact that was without value to anyone else was what made the hours go by as she sat in her hotel room at night, searching the Internet for anything that might help her find her child. She regretted not learning Korean, regretted that the most important parts of the Internet were off-limits to her. Koreans were the most plugged-in society in the world, and they had many, many more forums like the ones she read in English about missing children. They were the relevant ones, but she was stuck reading about missing children in Maryland or California when her child was missing on another continent.

  She checked in with the embassy once a week, talking with a nice woman, Gerry, from Atlanta, a divorcee with two children, who tried to be helpful. Gerry moved every two or three years for her job with the State Department and had lived in Morocco and Shanghai as well. Gerry invited her over for dinner one weekend night, and Margaret went, because she couldn’t stand another night in the hotel room watching television and scouring the Internet forums or eBay. Gerry lived in an old neighborhood, a far cry from the windowed skyscrapers of downtown, where Margaret was. Gerry’s apartment was one of four in a two-story house, and spacious. But when you stepped inside, it was like stepping back into America. Everything was from the United States, courtesy of the State Department courier, which shipped things for free regardless of size or weight. Whereas most people who lived overseas had local-brand strollers or televisions, Gerry had everything straight from Amazon. It was the oddest experience, having dinner in a house in Seoul and being served Crystal Light and Duncan Hines chocolate cake, as if they were sitting in Atlanta, two miles from Target.

  “People expect me to be so international,” Gerry said, “but to be honest, I get so homesick, I just want American stuff around me.”

  She was not in touch with her ex-husband, and he didn’t keep up with the kids or pay child support.

  “I’m here, carting his children around the world, and he has e-mailed me twice in two years,” she said. “You’d think he’d care a little more.”

  She was abashed, then, remembering why Margaret was in Seoul, and tried to apologize.

  “No need,” Margaret said. “It’s just nice to have a normal conversation sometimes.” And it was. This was her odd, staccato life in Seoul—the weird, empty evenings, the blank spaces—while she was waiting, waiting.

  Korea turned cold in the winter, a vicious cold she had never before encountered. The wind sliced against her face and went into her bones, even as she bundled up in a newly bought winter coat, scarf, hat. She bought wool long johns and undershirts. She thought of G in his T-shirt and shorts, and her blood froze inside her.

  This was when she developed a taste for being alone. She could glimpse her life as it might have been, if she had not married, if she had not had children, if she had been an entirely different person. She could see how your life came together, how you cobbled a life out of moments and routines. She started eating the same lunch at the same restaurant, a beef broth with a bowl of rice and a cup of barley tea. She ran five miles every morning. She watched television alone at night. She could see doing this for a long time. And that was when she decided she had to go home.

  There were Daisy and Philip. They cried when they Skyped on the computer. They stopped short of pleading with her to come back to Hong Kong but wondered aloud when G would be found, when they would come home together. They told her about their days at school, the projects they were doing, the sports they were playing. She had two children trying to live a life in Hong Kong, and she was in Seoul, Korea, searching for a child who had disappeared. She was doing nothing in Korea. All the leads had dried up. The media were no longer interested in her story. She was like a hamster on a wheel, running, running, running, with no end in sight.

  So she took a flight home one cold January day, having the concierge book her the ticket, because she didn’t want to talk to Rosalie, the travel agent, telling the police she’d be back every two weeks, and making them promise to e-mail her every day (which they did, religiously, and if
they didn’t, she’d e-mail them until they replied), and then she went home, without G, something she had sworn she would never do, something that had been unimaginable five short months ago. She sat on the plane for the four-hour flight, alone, and ate the chicken and drank ginger ale and felt her eyes dry out in the airless cabin.

  She hadn’t told the children or Clarke she was coming, so she came inside the house, strangely the same after all this time away, saw Essie, who started weeping the moment she opened the door for her, left her suitcase on the floor in the hall, and went upstairs to see her children: Daisy getting ready to go to soccer, Philip doing homework. They saw her and ran up to her, and she hugged them as they clung to her side. She dug her fingers into their hair as if to anchor herself. They didn’t ask about G; they didn’t want to hear the answer. She didn’t have an answer to give them. She didn’t even know what the question would be. So she did the only thing she could. She just wrapped her arms around the children she had, pulling them toward her with as much strength as she could muster, and tried to feel as happy as she could to be back home with them.

  And time keeps flowing. Here she is, in Phuket, Thailand, on Christmas vacation about a year after her baby disappeared, sitting by the pool. Here she is, reapplying sunscreen on her daughter’s face and reading a magazine in a beach chair. This is what she has learned in the past year: You go through the motions of life until, slowly, they start to resemble a life.

  Hilary

  SHE WAKES UP with knives in her throat, hot with fever. Pops three Advils, boils water, adds salt and cold water, gargles, staggering from bed to kitchen to bathroom to achieve all this, while Puri stands there as still as an Easter Island statue, staring at her employer, completely useless. It hurts to speak, so she doesn’t. Finally Hilary lies down in her bed, towel under her head for the sweat.