The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  Is it any wonder, she thinks, that expats become like spoiled rich children, coddled and made to feel as if their every whim should be gratified? These trips to islands where the average annual wage is the cost of a pair of expensive Italian shoes cast the Western expatriate in the role of the ruler. The locals are the feudal servants, running to obey every whim. These small empires, these carefully tended paradises of sand and palm, shelter the expatriates from the brutal realities just outside the guarded gates.

  The woman softly asks her to turn over onto her back. She drapes the towel decorously over Margaret’s torso, all the while looking away. Margaret wonders where she lives, probably in some disheveled bunkroom in a hotel dorm with other staff. What must she think of the cool, stiff hotel rooms she visits for her work, with their Bose stereos and private plunge pools? They must seem a strange, alien fantasy land. Margaret saw staff quarters in another hotel once, when she went for a tour of the organic garden, and there through a fence, where the foliage had not grown quite thick enough, she saw some ramshackle buildings with laundry hanging out to dry. She asked what those buildings were and was given an abashed answer by the gardener, suddenly embarrassed after proudly showing off his work. Do you live there? she asked before she could stop herself, and he crumpled into an impoverished island native, transformed from the career horticulturist he had just been. She was ashamed, of course. What else could she have been—an apologist for the way things were and how she could not change them.

  She drifts off into a light sleep and is wakened by the sound of the woman getting her things together.

  “Finish,” she says softly. Margaret sits up and wraps a towel around herself, hair falling disheveled around her face. She is drowsy and disoriented.

  “Thank you,” she says. “That was wonderful.”

  She moves to the bed and dozes until she hears Clarke and the children at the door.

  They come in with excited stories of crabs and sandcastles—they are still young, these children, these remaining children of hers. They are tentative with their happiness, as if afraid it will upset her equilibrium. It makes her sad that their emotional calibrations are so accurate and so attuned to hers. Any overt happiness immediately tips over into guilt and anger because G is not here, and what right do they have to any happiness? Still, she cannot ruin their lives as well. She smiles and listens to their stories, absently patting Philip’s head as she urges him to shower so they can get ready for dinner.

  Frannie Peck is one of those small, pert blond women who get married, have two children, and, essentials accomplished, then proceed to live their lives with maximum efficiency, going to Pilates and Zumba on alternating weekdays and running bake sales and school fund-raisers with cheery aplomb. Margaret would think no more of her, except that she remembers driving past her one day going in opposite directions on Repulse Bay Road, when the traffic was slow, and seeing Frannie behind the wheel, shoulders shaking as she sobbed. She was alone. This one image gives Frannie unexpected depth for Margaret. When they meet down by the beach, she is wearing a white sundress on her compact body, freckled shoulders rosy from the sun. They send the children to the beach to play while they order dinner.

  “Did you have a good day?” Frannie asks. She has one of those unexpectedly raspy voices.

  “Really relaxing,” Margaret replies.

  Frannie’s husband, Ned, kisses Margaret on both cheeks, a European custom that has, for some reason, been hijacked by every American expatriate in Hong Kong. Margaret is quite certain that none of these people ever did the two-cheek greeting prior to stepping on Asian shores, and it’s funny that they all adopt it without question.

  Is it cynical of her to think this way? As she’s grown older, Margaret has developed the bad habit of sizing people up immediately and passing judgment. This person is a small person, she can tell from the wrinkled brow when the person asks about a mutual acquaintance, worried whether she has been one-upped without knowing. This one seeks validation and so is always rushing about doing a million things that don’t add up to anything. Another person doesn’t understand why she’s not relevant. With the exception of that one weeping moment Margaret witnessed, however, Frannie Peck remains a cipher. She seems like a wide, shallow plate, holding nothing except the reflection of others.

  Frannie tells an amusing story about a previous vacation, in Sri Lanka with another family, where the villa had been so remote there was no Internet and no cell signal. The husbands all went nuts without access to their e-mail, but the wives refused to let them leave, so they compromised by hiring a driver to drive the two hours into the city with a bag full of phones they had turned on so they would pick up the e-mails when in reach of a signal.

  “You should have seen these men,” Frannie says. “When the car returned, they rushed it like tweens at a Justin Bieber concert.”

  So the dinner goes on, with lazy gossip and glasses of wine to soften reality. The children eat satay and pad thai, and the adults eat spicy prawns with basil and marvel that they are on a beach on the Andaman Sea doing such a thing.

  The hotel has set up paper lanterns on the beach, maybe a Thai custom, maybe something they do for tourists. It doesn’t matter, because they are beautiful. A hotel staff girl is with Daisy and Philip, helping them light their wicks and puff up their lanterns. Daisy and Philip stand on the sand, backs to their watching parents. They each hold a lantern and hold it up high, as if it were an offering. Soon the lanterns float off their hands and sail toward the dark night. There are dozens of lanterns in the sky now, burning off their tiny light, drifting away until they are no longer visible.

  Daisy turns around with a bright face. “I made a wish, Mama!” It’s uncharacteristic, her use of the babyish “mama,” and it makes Margaret suddenly tear up, not wanting to guess what that wish might have been. She thinks, Where is G now? His family is here, in this burnished pocket of paradise, on this sandy beach, lighting lanterns, without him. If he could see them now, would he feel betrayed? She looks at Daisy and Philip standing, watching their lanterns soar, and feels dizzy from the hole in her heart.

  Hilary

  HER HUSBAND’S GONE AWOL. And her mother is here. Could there be a more awkward set of circumstances? Phone calls to his cell go unanswered—she’s been trying for an hour. She’s also been checking expatlocat.com to see if anyone else posts to “Should anyone be able to adopt?” and refreshing her e-mail box. She is thinking about calling the police—there has been a spate of crimes where bar hostesses spike drinks and clean out ATMs—when an e-mail from David blinks up on her computer screen.

  “I need some time to think things through,” he writes. “Will be in touch.” Then, as an afterthought, “Not sure I will make it to Bangkok.”

  After she gets this e-mail, like a bomb, like a bad joke, in her inbox, she sits at her desk, tapping her forefinger on the matte metal of her laptop like a nervous metronome. Her mother is taking a shower—she can hear the water running—but she’ll be out soon, and Hilary’s going to have to say something.

  It occurs to her that it’s odd she’s more worried about what she’s going to say to her mother than about what has happened with her husband.

  It’s not as if they have had the most loving relationship lately. More . . . cordial. Definitely platonic, except when she tells him the time is favorable, and they dutifully have intercourse. She has felt his waning interest in her as a person, but coming as it did with her own diminishing engagement with his life, she hadn’t really minded.

  But this is bold! He has written an e-mail, with words that cannot be taken back, words that are a proclamation! She hovers, her hands over her keyboard, waiting. But of course, nothing happens. She does not reply.

  The feeling she has is most unexpected. The oddest thing. She feels no distress or worry. Instead, she senses a dim, faint feeling that rises from some unknown place in her heart, rising slowly and blossoming in
to something that she might call relief.

  The shower stops running. She hears the door open and close. Her mother will be in her doorway soon, asking what the plan is, what they will do. What will she say? What will she do?

  Part IV

  Hilary

  IN THE SPRING, the odors come. The outdoor tiles are wet in the morning with accumulated moisture, and when you sniff, there is a sharp, moldy tinge to the air. It means the heat is coming. The early hours are cool and wet; the sun burns through by midday, and you can practically see the steam rising from the sidewalks. And through it all, a pungent, damp smell of rich, rotting soil, the plants growing at a furious rate, the insects cricking and mating loudly, the very atoms in the air whizzing about, suffused with new heat energy after being dormant all winter.

  Hilary had thought she had spring down to a science. On a certain day in March or April, she would sniff the air, feel the towels in the bathroom, then say the words: “Spring prep.” Puri would know to bring out the dehumidifier units, pack the woolens in crinkly tissue and cedar, and switch the HVAC units to cool, a procedure that takes all day and is not easily reversible. The assault against the elements begins.

  But this year, there are moths—dozens, maybe hundreds of them, a new and disturbing development that Hilary has never experienced before. “They might as well be locusts,” she tells Olivia over the phone. “That would just make this year perfect. My annus horribilis.”

  The first one rolls out of one of her sweaters as she is pulling it out on an unseasonably cool day, causing her to shriek loudly, although no one else is in the room with her. It is large and very much dead, with a body that is fat and inelegant, so unlike a butterfly’s. She panics. So much cashmere, so much wool at stake! But as she pulls them out, Puri’s meticulous work undone in a matter of minutes, her sweaters are, oddly, unscathed. It reminds her of that scene in The Great Gatsby where Daisy is covered in Jay’s shirts and she starts weeping because they are so beautiful. Instead, Hilary sits in her humidity-controlled walk-in closet, surrounded by expensive knits, and wishes she felt like crying instead of the constant dry pricking behind her eyeballs that feels like torture.

  Soon she grows used to the moths, or as used to them as she ever will. They just blunder around, blind in their mindless fecundity, reproducing like mad, feeding on what, she doesn’t know. She finds them on the carpets, in the bathrooms, in the kitchen cupboards. Puri sweeps them up without emotion and deposits them in the trash can in the kitchen, so when Hilary goes to throw away her used coffee filter or an empty carton of juice, she steps on the pedal and is given a small heart attack when the lid opens and she sees the layer of dead insects on the bottom.

  She has, of course, called the exterminators, but unless she is willing to move out for a week, all they can do is recommend mothballs and giant planks of cedar, which she buys from them in great quantities, and now her house smells like a chemical factory and she has a headache when she wakes up every morning.

  This is the salient fact: She is alone. She is alone in a king-size bed in an enormous house, with no husband and no children and, instead, a domestic helper and a driver.

  David is still off on what she likes to think of as his petit midlife crisis, although there’s nothing petit about it. It’s been more than three months. Why she thinks of it as petit or grand mal, with the attendant link to seizures, she doesn’t know, but whenever it balloons up in her consciousness, which it does actually less and less frequently these days, it comes in those words, sometimes italicized: petit midlife crisis. Will it evolve into grand mal? Will this be permanent, will their lives be forever changed? Would she be willing to take him back?

  More important, does she get to have her own midlife crisis? she wonders. When does she get to go completely off the rails? But the thing is, he’s beaten her to the punch. If she does it now, who will be the one left behind, to witness, to suffer? There’s no one—a tree falling in the woods with no sound. For this, for making it impossible for her to do what he has done, she hates him.

  And yet, all this has brought David into sharp relief, made him into a real person, full of jagged edges and surprises. She had thought of him as someone or, if she’s honest, something, a husband, who would always be there, and the fact that he has changed what she had thought of as an immutable fact brings her, sometimes, an ineffable, odd and painful pleasure. Good for you, she thinks, before it cuts into her again, the knowledge that her life is changed in some irreversible way. You were the brave one, she thinks, the one to make the bold, life-changing move. You rejected the life we had, the tepid approximation of happiness. You thought you deserved more. You did something. She is envious of that.

  Her mother was a surprise. She took the news with aplomb, did exactly the right things. She didn’t try to comfort her with anodyne words or hug her or tell her everything would be all right. Instead, she moved forward with a brisk practicality that was perfect.

  They went ahead to Bangkok, without David, and they decided to share a room and upgrade to the Joseph Conrad Suite in the old wing of the Oriental. They had stiff drinks by the Chao Phraya River, watching the fat catfish surface, looking for bread crumbs. They meandered through Chatuchak Market and bought rattan baskets and brass tableware, fingered dusty ruby beads, and otherwise pretended that life was normal. Hilary managed to breathe through it, survive the trip, and come back to a cold, empty house. Her mother left the day after they returned to Hong Kong, although she had offered to stay longer. Hilary knows that leaving her father for long periods of time makes her mother nervous. She pities her mother now, having to take care of her husband, worry about her daughter, worry about the fact that she might never have grandchildren.

  Her mother asked, gingerly. She usually never did, but one late night, as they nursed coffees after Thai food, she asked how that all was going.

  “I mean, I know, now, it might be different. But what was the status before all this nonsense?”

  Hilary had thought that trying to have children would kill her, but this new wound, on top of the old one, was so painful she squinted as she tried to explain to her mother.

  “We have been trying, and also, you know, with Julian, who you know about.”

  “You have to do right by Julian,” her mother said. “But the situation is obviously different now.” She was never a supporter of the entire exercise to begin with, and now it lay in tatters. When Hilary asked if she wanted to meet Julian, she shook her head. “Only when you decide everything.”

  “I know.” Hilary didn’t know how she was going to begin to explain it to Julian and the administrators. Obviously, she wouldn’t, for a while, and he would continue coming.

  “You still don’t want to do fertility?” her mom asked. “You know, just if you want to have a baby, regardless of what happens with David. Melissa Bissinger’s daughter has these beautiful twin girls, and we know the doctor in San Francisco.”

  “No,” Hilary said. “I don’t know why I don’t, didn’t, want to. I just feel like it should happen on its own.”

  Her mother looked askance at her. “And it didn’t.” A pause. “And it’s not.” They both don’t know which tense to use.

  “I know.”

  “And you’re thirty-eight now.”

  “I know.”

  Her mother stirred her coffee.

  “It’s funny, you know, Hilary. Life happens, and sometimes it happens so slowly that you have the time to get used to it. That’s the mercy of it. You may wake up one day and be older and be fine with not having children. There’s no reason why you absolutely have to have them.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” she said, with no inflection, although she had not meant to sound ungrateful. It was so hard to speak when you didn’t know what you were trying to convey, let alone what you were feeling.

  “You were and are one of the great joys of my life,” her mother said.


  Hilary flushed. In the annals of her reserved family, this was tantamount to her mother throwing off her clothes and shouting her love for her child on the streets.

  “Thank you, Mother,” she said again.

  And that was how that holiday went.

  She has been seeing more and more of Julian, going to visit him as much as she can. She is lucky. The woman in charge of his group home is kind, wishes for him to be adopted, so turns the other way when Hilary shows up again and again. Hilary knows not to push it too much, but she is growing attached, longing to see his face, hear his accented English. Sometimes she goes like a stalker just to watch him get off the bus, carouse with his friends in Cantonese. Boys are like puppies, she realizes, climbing on one another, poking, scrambling around one another.

  He is here today, and after his lesson, she asks him if he’d like to go out for ice cream, even though it’s a cold spring day. They get in the car, and she tells Sam to go to Times Square, the vast mall in Causeway Bay. There’s an ice cream shop there.

  Once they arrive, and she’s walking through, holding Julian’s hand, she realizes she’s made a mistake.

  There is so much stuff. There is so much to look at, so much to buy—all the accouterments of a privileged life. There’s a luxury-handbag store with purses that cost a year’s pay for Puri; there are sneaker stores with hundreds of styles, electronics shops with phones and iPods and computers. Julian is seven, old enough to covet. He stares, wide-eyed, at all he doesn’t have.

  They order ice cream. He just wants chocolate, shies away from all the bewildering choices, and has to be pressed to order toppings or to get two flavors. Hilary has seen three-year-olds order complicated mixed concoctions—half bubble gum, half mint chip, with marshmallows and rainbow sprinkles—with the confidence that comes from being loved and cossetted, their desires listened to and often granted. Watching Julian eat his chocolate ice cream with the rainbow sprinkles she insisted on, she feels awful for him. She must, she must, make a decision, even without David.