The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  She was thirsty, dehydrated from the flight. In the cupboard, there were two glasses that a wealthy, impractical family friend had given to her and Clarke as a wedding present more than a decade ago. Fabulously expensive, they were paper-thin crystal highball glasses that shattered at a sideways glance. They started out with twelve, and after more than ten years of living and moving and children, two remained. She got one, filled it with cold Pellegrino from the fridge, and gulped down the cool, refreshing, salty bubbles. Bubbly water, an acquired adult taste, she thought.

  Suddenly the relief she had let herself feel only in small dribbles came crashing in. Her tension, her worry, her relief, and still, of course, her sadness, made her unable to stand, and she made her way to the table, supporting herself with the hand that was not holding her water. She collapsed onto a chair, letting herself feel the immensity of what she had avoided on the vacation. She had avoided something that would have destroyed her as surely as if she had stood in front of a bus. How could she live, knowing that one more thing would have sent her sailing straight over the edge? One fragile child, two fragile children, three . . . The infinite variety of things that can go wrong with one life, multiplied by five.

  They had gone to Bangkok after leaving Phuket, for a few days in the city, and they had gone to Chatuchak Market, the big weekend market. Philip wanted to buy toys, and Daisy was interested in a rattan bag. In another life, Margaret might have wanted a brass lamp or candlestick holders. There was so much humanity in that market—so many people, so many stories—that Margaret felt overwhelmed from the moment they got out of the taxi. It was hot and loud, and she was clutching a colored map that detailed odd sections, like the location of the “Crime Suppression Police.” Whenever they left the safe confines of the hotel, she felt uneasy, as if she were swimming in the ocean. She preferred to take small, measured outings and come back to the safety of the known, but the children and Clarke were antsy after five days on the beach and wanted to get out into a city.

  The buzz in her head grew louder as they got out of the cab and walked to the entrance of the market. Clarke walked ahead, looming over the locals with a straw hat he had acquired on Kamala Beach. The kids found a food stand selling satay. “Can we have some?” Daisy asked. Margaret hesitated; it looked dirty. Cholera, malaria, typhoid—fatal diseases crowded her mind. “Sure,” Clarke said, short-circuiting her paranoia, and bought four chicken satays. She ate one, because if everyone else died of food poisoning, she didn’t want to be left behind. Then later she regretted it, because if everyone got sick, who was going to take care of the sick children? This was how she thought.

  They bought bottles of water and walked on. She was always the one consulting the map and trying to find out where they were. “Just follow the clock tower,” Clarke had said easily. As if it were that simple. She looked at wood carvings and silk sarongs and ugly T-shirts, all the while keeping an eye on Daisy and Philip, and the map, so she would know where she was. She was carrying her large handbag, with all of Clarke, Daisy, and Philip’s extra items that they just handed off to her without thinking, including the half-full water bottles, and her shoulders hurt, and she wanted to scream. Sometimes it was just about the bag, she thought. Men strolled through life with a wallet in their pants, and women were saddled with children, the map, the bag, the half-empty water bottles. Resentment fired up through her body, flushing her cheeks, suffusing her with sudden rage.

  Was it that men were heartless? Or without imagination? How could Clarke tell her that she needed to move on? How could he say that life should go on? It is unimaginable, but because she cannot lose him and Daisy and Philip, she has to pretend to agree, to try to do this thing that seems as ludicrous as flying. And sometimes it feels like flying, or walking on water, as if she is doing something so against the laws of nature, so against the very reality of being a human being, that if she looks down, or up, or anywhere but a spot a very short distance ahead of her, she will fall, and fall, and there will be no bottom to where she can go.

  And then, surfacing from her thoughts, she realized: She could not see Philip. She could see Daisy and Clarke ahead, looking at some bags, but she could not see Philip. Her hair stood on end, and she felt electrocuted.

  Calm down, she told herself. Calm down. You’ll see him in a few seconds.

  But she didn’t. After ten long seconds, she screamed Clarke’s name so that he would stop. “Clarke! I can’t see Philip!”

  Clarke stopped and grabbed Daisy’s hand as he came back to her. “When did you last see him?” he asked, calmly.

  “Just now,” she said. “And I looked at the map, and when I looked up again, I couldn’t see him. I’ve been watching him like a hawk.”

  “I’m sure he’s just down one of these alleys,” Clarke said.

  Daisy was speechless, Clarke’s brow furrowed; all of them were frozen by the unsayable. But it wasn’t possible. But anything was possible. God wouldn’t let it happen again. But why would God let it happen the first time?

  They fanned out, shouting, “Philip! Philip!” Margaret found herself thinking that at least Clarke was here this time, that she wasn’t alone.

  They found him, of course, but it was a long six or seven minutes, and Philip was a mess, even though he tried to pull it together. Ten was still young. Found by a kind couple from Singapore, he had been crying and screaming, but it was amazing how far away from them he had gotten in that short time. In those moments of emergency, Margaret had felt her heart stop and start several times over, had to fight the urge to crumple to the floor and give up, had to remember to breathe, had to open her eyes extra wide, because she felt the world going black.

  Afterward they went back to the hotel, and Clarke got on the phone to book them on the next flight home. They ate dinner at the hotel restaurant and flew home the next day.

  So that was their Christmas holiday, the first without G, and that was how that went. Now school has been back in session for a few months, and she has been hiding at home, taking walks and escaping to her room in Happy Valley.

  She gets home from the lunch right before Philip and Daisy come home on the bus. She asks them about their day and asks to sit with Daisy for a bit while she has a snack.

  “I went to this lunch today,” she says, “and a lot of the moms were talking about computers and websites and how kids are getting onto the wrong websites.” She lets that sentence sit for a while.

  “I know there’s a lot kids want answers to, and it’s easy to Google everything these days, but talking to me or another adult is probably the best way to get accurate information. There are a lot of crazy people on the Internet. Just as you wouldn’t get advice from a random person on the street, you shouldn’t trust everything on the Internet. Anyone can say anything, you know.”

  Daisy looks uncomfortable, buries her face in a glass of milk.

  “I’m here, honey,” Margaret says. “I am. You can talk to me about whatever you want. Is there something you are curious about or want to know more about?”

  Daisy shakes her head, her face still in the glass.

  “I love you.” Margaret bends over and kisses the top of her head. “I’ll leave you alone now,” she says.

  She goes to her office and looks at menus that Priscilla has sent over for Clarke’s party. They have decided on a new private kitchen in Wong Chuk Hang that can fit 40 to 150, since Margaret has no idea how many people there will be. Priscilla has wisely gone ahead and reserved the space, having correctly gauged that she is not going to get a lot of answers from Margaret in a timely way. Margaret appreciates it, writes the check with a sense of relief that someone is taking charge and making decisions so that she doesn’t have to. After paying a few more bills, she picks up the paper.

  There’s a section that fascinates her. It’s called Mainland News, and it’s a column of brief news items that are maybe two or three sentences each. They are odd and
horrifying, gathered from regional newspapers, so she doesn’t know how reliable the reports are. Still, they are compelling and very peculiar. On any given day, there might be a report on a girl who was molested by her teacher, with the odd detail, such as a girl’s description of his “chalk-tainted fingers”; or a woman who had been held as a sex slave in a dog cage by a policeman and had escaped naked; or how job applicants were refused opportunities because they had pimples or were shorter than 160 centimeters; or other oddities of life in China. And of course there are many, many stories of child abductions. This morning, there is one of a woman being arrested for trying to sell a boy at a Nanping bus station, and another about a teenager being reunited with his family ten years after he was abducted and sold to a farmer in rural China. Whenever she reads these small blips of news, she thinks of the family behind the story, compressed into this one square inch of newsprint, and how it’s impossible to ever know the truth.

  When her children find her there, it is six, and dinner is on the table. An hour has gone by, and she doesn’t know how. They come and tell her that dinner is ready.

  When she gets to the kitchen, she feels even more removed, as if she is visiting her own home. The food there is unrecognizable in an odd way, as if her recipes have been refracted through a wavy glass, which they have, in a way, and come out into an alternate universe. Essie is wonderful, but she is from the Philippines and not native to spinach salads and grilled salmon, so they always come out a little tweaked, with too much honey in the teriyaki or not enough dressing on the salad, so it’s dry and tasteless. She is making approximations of the dishes. If Margaret lived in the United States, she would be cooking, her dishes would be her own, and her children would know how they were supposed to taste in their own home. She picks at the salad now, discovers a stray cocktail onion, randomly added, and puts her fork down in defeat. The children eat their salmon and chatter about the news at school, how someone is having a laser tag party, how a girl was giving away candy on the bus to make friends. Essie is telling her something about the washing machine. It’s all white noise. Clarke calls, Daisy answers, and he says he’ll be home by eight and to leave him some salmon. She floats above herself and sees herself, an American woman in Hong Kong with her two children in the kitchen, eating dinner. A phantom child, missing, hovers at the edges.

  Doesn’t every city contain some version of yourself that you can finally imagine? In southern California, near where she went to college, it was driving barefoot in some old station wagon through a cool, damp night, drawling surfer boy by your side, going to Ralph’s to buy beer and aluminum folding chairs for a beach bonfire. The feel of the car pedal ridged smoothly against your sand-buffed foot. In New York, where she was a young working woman, it was walking down a chilly fall sidewalk with a soft paper cup of hot coffee in your hand, multicolored scarf wound three times around your neck, on your way to work in a Midtown skyscraper with steel elevators. Paris, sitting knees-up on a windowseat with a glass of red wine, looking out at something very old and beautiful. That was the thing about this strange afterlife here in Hong Kong: She doesn’t have a version of herself without G. She doesn’t know what the image is of what she is supposed to be. She cobbles one together, enough to live out the day, but she needs a more permanent, whole version, one with a possible, all-encompassing life, a picture, so that she can begin to try living again.

  Hilary

  “LAVENDER,” her mother says.

  “What?” Hilary says, absentmindedly scrolling through the Examiner website, looking at local San Francisco news. She is on Skype with her mom.

  “Lavender is as good as cedar, and smells better.”

  “Oh, for the moths?”

  “Yes, apparently it’s the new thing, or maybe it’s the old thing.”

  “I’ll give it a try. Nothing else is working. In an oil or dried, like potpourri?” She clicks over to expatlocat. Clicks on Message Boards. Time to see if the troll is back.

  Her mother talks about lavender, and she scrolls down the headers: “Husband traveling too much?” “Looking for dog groomer,” “My baby prefers the helper to me!” All the usual travails of living in Asia. She finds the thread with her story, clicks through, sees no new posts, breathes a silent sigh of relief.

  “Mom, I have to go,” she says, glancing at the clock. “I’m supposed to go on a walk with Olivia.”

  She meets Olivia at the base of Tai Tam Reservoir Road, where they will perambulate through the country park. Hong Kong is full of these parks and trails, green and wooded, a surprise to newcomers. Olivia brings her two dogs, Xena and Filly, golden retrievers, unusual for Hong Kong because of their size. It is only because she has a garden at home that she can keep them. The air is crisp and sweet, a perfect March day.

  They kiss on the cheek. Olivia drinks elegantly from her water bottle, face shaded by an enormous visor. “So how are you?” she asks.

  “I feel beset by the world,” Hilary tells her. “I have these moths at home. It’s like a plague of locusts, and they’re constantly dying everywhere. And this thing with Julian. And David . . .”

  “Yes, what has become of our David?” Olivia raises an eyebrow. She has never mentioned the time she almost said something over lunch at the club, but her complete lack of surprise is a mild rebuke in itself.

  “Apparently he’s been seen around town with a young girl.”

  “So unimaginative,” Olivia says. “Why are they always so predictable?”

  “Have you seen him?” Hilary asks.

  “Absolutely not! And I would freeze him out if I did!” Olivia is outraged at the suggestion.

  “I know he and Sebastian are friendly, and they have the work connection.”

  “I’ve told Sebastian he’s not allowed to speak to him.”

  They walk on in silence. Ahead of them, the dogs sniff a bush. The road becomes steep, and they breathe a little harder.

  “And this thing happened,” Hilary says. She hadn’t been sure she was going to tell anyone about it, but she wants to tell someone, to get the stone off her chest, to quiet the clanging in her head.

  “A thing . . .”

  “A text message.”

  “Oh, from whom?”

  “From David. But it wasn’t meant for me.”

  It had dinged into her phone at a quiet moment.

  “I came so hard I’m still jelly.”

  David has never texted or e-mailed her, except for that one e-mail when he said he wasn’t coming to Bangkok. It had been something of a principle. He always calls. Spouses should talk, not type, he had said. She had found it old-fashioned but kind of charming.

  So what kind of Freudian slip makes a man text something like that to his estranged wife, whom he never texts on principle? Does he hit the Write button and then type his wife’s name in by mistake because he has been thinking of her? Does his girlfriend’s name also start with an H? Do you try so hard to avoid doing something that you automatically do it? Does he even know what he’s done? Or is he such jelly he can’t even think straight. This, she thinks with sardonic distaste at his sudden discovery. A man, revitalized, with a new life found. Their sex had become dutiful when they realized having children was going to be a bit more difficult. He had always been game, but she had felt it hanging over them.

  The text had come in on a Saturday afternoon, so she had been left to conjure up an entire day for him and this woman. Breakfast, back to bed, lunch, then maybe he went to the gym and wrote that text from there?

  Olivia is suitably horror-stricken, and yet, she says with a little bit of admiration, “Jesus. I never knew David had it in him.”

  “I know!” Hilary knows exactly what she means. And the fact that she can feel this makes her think that the marriage was so over that what he did was not so bad.

  “Do you hate him?” Olivia asks. “ ’Cause I feel like you don’t. At least, not
enough.”

  Hilary hesitates, opens her water bottle, sips some water. “I don’t know,” she says. “I kind of hate him, but I’m envious of him too, in a way. If you know what I mean. It’s like the moment you decide to leap, you leave everything behind.”

  “I do know what you mean,” Olivia says, adjusting her hat. “You’re too kind, though.”

  They walk on, the only sound the panting of the dogs.

  “And what’s happening with Julian?” Olivia asks.

  “Nothing,” Hilary confesses. “But I think it’s going to happen. It’s time.”

  “That’s big!” Olivia claps her hands. “Have you told the orphanage anything about David?” She pauses. “Never mind. That’s one of those things that you realize are impossible once you think them through.”

  “So I haven’t,” Hilary concurred. “Because, yes, what would I possibly say?”

  “Awkward,” Olivia observes.

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s that,” Olivia says. “Onward!”

  They walk on, talking about idle gossip. Olivia tells her what’s going on in the local Chinese scene, where a scion of a wealthy family has been found having an affair with a pretty karaoke girl and he claims he’s really in love and wants to leave his wife and two daughters. “He bought the mistress Van Cleef,” Olivia says, “and the wife got Chow Tai Fook!” Chow Tai Fook is the less expensive local jeweler. And that was the outrageous thing, not the fact that he was having an affair.

  Hilary has always marveled at how locals talk so unromantically and practically about affairs, how the women tell one another that Angie Chan got an apartment for her fortieth birthday, that property was better than jewelry; that Melissa Wong made a million dollars last year day-trading. Olivia is one of them, but she is rare in that she goes outside their circle to be friends with someone like Hilary.

  When they reach the end of the walk, Olivia gives her dogs water and hugs Hilary.