The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  He swipes on his own phone, but not before she sees a photo of him with his girlfriend. They are wearing matching furry white hats. A glimpse into another person’s life—and all the attendant love and heartache therein.

  “If you get the new number, you get the cheaper price for the phone,” he tells her helpfully. “Can start the new contract.”

  But she can never even think about altering anything about her cell phone account. She remembers teaching her children her telephone number. “Six two eight eight . . . ,” G would say, as if it were a magic incantation, so pleased with himself. She imagines him chanting the number now, in a small, windowless box, remembering it for when he can call it, for when he is older and can do something about his situation. She told him about country codes, but how much can a child be expected to know? Still, she cannot ever give up this phone number.

  She worries sometimes that her inability to move on is just narcissism, that she cannot imagine her child not needing her. Everyone always talks about the resilience of children, how they adjust to new lives, how they survive, and she sees this sometimes, has seen it, in small moments: when Daisy was lost for a few minutes when she was five, and how she hadn’t cried out, how she had slipped her hand into another woman’s, believing she would take care of her; or how they settle into new situations so quickly and don’t look back once their parents are out of sight. This is how you can tell the survivors, she supposes. But while she wishes G is happy, she cannot imagine such a thing.

  She thinks about what she would say to him if he came back. She knows that the children who come back talk about how they are afraid their parents don’t want them anymore, that they are defiled, or that what they had to do to survive will be held against them.

  “I love you,” she would say. “I love you no matter what happened, what you said, what you did, what you thought. I understand. I understand. Mommy loves you no matter what.”

  Her eyes fill whenever she thinks these thoughts, and she feels secretly ashamed, as she is being indulgent or maudlin, definitely, or again, narcissistic somehow.

  Jingo comes back from ringing up the sale on her new phone. She thanks him and leaves.

  The mall fills up with office workers looking for lunch. She is hungry but leaves the mall so she can go to her favorite Vietnamese place on Stanley Street for pho. Margaret lines up with everyone else and is given a number. Soon she is led to a table already occupied by three other people. She sits down, points to what she wants on the menu, and waits.

  Around her, people chatter away in Cantonese. This is a local place, and she is the only nonlocal. The food is good and cheap, and she loves coming here. When the pho comes, she dumps in the tiny red peppers and the sprouts, inhales the pungent steam of the broth. She eats quickly, sweat beading on her temples as the peppers fire up in her sinuses and her mouth starts to burn. Simple things: taste, smell, heat. She takes a sip of water, sits back, her hunger sated. She is sitting with a twenty-something man and two women, who must work together. They chat animatedly, dropping in an English word here and there, taking no notice of her. It feels good to be totally anonymous. She pays the bill and leaves.

  It’s time to go home, to be there for when Daisy and Philip return from school. As they come in the door, shedding their backpacks and scuffed sneakers, she hugs them, gets them a snack, and watches them drink milk and eat, her babies.

  Daisy gets up and surreptitiously signals to her mother to follow.

  “Mom,” she says, “I think I got it.”

  “What?” Margaret says. “Got what?”

  Daisy huffs with frustration. “You know, the thing. Remember the tea?”

  Oh. Margaret vaguely remembers going to a tea for mothers and daughters the previous spring, at which adolescence and sexuality were discussed. She had still been reeling and barely functional, but she had gone for Daisy, so she could be there with her mother.

  “You mean your period?”

  “Yes! I have this kind of brown stuff coming out.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” she says. “Does your stomach hurt at all? Like cramps?”

  “A little last night, but I didn’t know why.”

  Margaret pulls her into her bathroom. “Here.” She reaches down to the drawer and gets out pads and liners. “Why don’t you start with these? You can let me know if you want to try tampons, but try these first.”

  Daisy takes the packages and, looking uncomfortable but relieved, hugs her mom.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she says.

  “Go experiment with them,” Margaret tells her.

  Her daughter leaves.

  Margaret remembers when she was fully engaged with everything, before everything happened. Moms talked about everything and gave one another advice on what to do, what stage was coming up for their kids. She realizes now she has no idea what is going on with sixth-grade girls, what other things are going on.

  When Margaret first got her period, she remembers, her mother showed her the pads and told her to rip the outside part off, wrap it in tissue, and then flush the cotton down the toilet. She did that for a while before she realized that no one else did. These are all our little mysteries, she thinks.

  Her phone buzzes on the counter. Her messages are coming in now on her new phone. There’s an e-mail from Mr. Park of the Seoul police.

  “Please call,” he writes. “I need some information from you. There is new development.”

  Her heart stops.

  Hilary

  HILARY IS LIVING her life more and more online. With the message boards, Facebook, and e-mails, she doesn’t need to go out for social interaction. And if she needs anything physical, she sends Puri and Sam out to get it, often with photos printed from the Internet of the exact kind of coffee or the brand of bread she wants, so they don’t bring back the wrong thing. She pores over adoption boards, infertility boards, expat boards; it is as if she wants to hear advice only from people she has never met and knows nothing about. Maybe she will migrate her life to a virtual world, where she will exist only as finger taps on a keyboard, a ghostly being made up of pithy comments and occasional snapshots. Anyway, she only really ever goes out to see Olivia now. Without work, without a husband, she has faded into the background. She never realized how much of her life was lived through David, through being married and being a couple. When she thinks of whom she would want to see, she cannot think of anyone, save Olivia. And apparently no one is very interested in seeing her either, as her phone remains silent and her e-mail inbox fills up only with sale notifications and reminders of club dinners.

  She has heard of people being dropped after divorce or separation, but it’s still surprising to her. It’s not as if she thought she had so many friends, but it is shocking to realize that the world she thought she had constructed around her was so tenuous. Perhaps it’s because she doesn’t have children. She’s seen the close bonds that women with children form with one another, and that’s something she’s been shut out of completely. What is left? she wonders. Family. Is that it? And hers is so small. Her mother calls her dependably, in between taking care of her father, who descends ever further into dementia. And also, she’s been thinking about what a husband is. David used to be family, but now he’s the enemy. She understands now the thin line between love and hate. Casual bonds are flexible, can be attenuated without destruction. Not so the fierce close ones.

  When she got on Facebook for the first time, she was struck by how these hordes of middle-aged people had taken on this medium that seemed to be for the young, and made it their own. They posted photos of their thickening, graying selves with self-deprecating comments, boasted about their work achievements, introduced babies and grandbabies, corralled people to reunions. Scrolling through her two hundred friends, she is amazed by the affection she feels for all these people who represent so many different times in her life.

  Is this a sign that
you’ve given up? When you spend all your time thinking of the past? She’s made the mistake of contacting people after going through their photo albums and feeling a brief, unreal intimacy. She writes inappropriately close things like “Remember in high school when we skipped science third period and went to Union Square?” and she gets back a puzzled, reserved response like “Hilary Krall, I haven’t seen you in so long. You look great.” And she deletes the entire exchange out of embarrassment, because, of course, they hadn’t spent hours remembering shared time and feeling close and they probably think . . . what do they think? The truth, most likely. That she’s in a bad relationship and in a bad place and looking for something, anything, that might get her out. People post pictures of their best times, but it’s not so hard to see past the smiling faces.

  Funny how people really don’t change that much. She sees one woman who was always quirky and alone, even in high school. A misfit, to use an unkind high school word. This woman’s loneliness and her growing madness are so palpable it’s uncomfortable. It’s all there in her page full of unanswered questions to friends and family, reminiscences of past injustices, unfocused shots of her pet birds, her disheveled bedroom. Hilary clicks through a photo album, tries to compile an acceptable life for this woman, cannot.

  How is it that life is so fragile? It’s not just life itself, and mortality; it’s more how a perfectly conventional-seeming life can collapse in a few short weeks. Several months ago, Hilary felt she was leading a normal life, and while she isn’t really mourning the loss of what was, after all, an imperfect life, there is still grief for the person she once thought she was. She feels vulnerable, a newborn trying to fashion a new life in the wake of all that has happened. She is moving toward the future but uncertainly, and without grace, she feels.

  A moth blunders onto her screen.

  She freezes.

  “MOTHERFUCKER!” she screams, so loudly she surprises herself. It feels good. “MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKER!”

  She remembers that Puri has gone out, to “market,” as she likes to say, using the word as a verb. Hilary is alone at home. She can scream as loudly and as long as she wants.

  She screams it one more time, slamming down her laptop on the beastly, wormlike insect, smushing it between the screen and the keyboard. Then she puts her head down on her arms and starts to cry, big, gulping sobs that shake her body and wrench her lungs, wet the desk beneath her elbows. Has she cried before this? Of course, she hasn’t. It was a point of pride between her and her mother over Christmas break in Bangkok. Their family didn’t show feelings like that. They were stoics, proud in their impassivity.

  She sobs on. Has something been taken from her? She doesn’t know. Was it a life she wanted? Did she want the husband, the child? Or was it something she had just been programmed to think?

  Something showy about crying like this, alone. She starts to feel foolish, crying so loudly, and tries to stop. She succeeds, sits on her chair, feeling the stillness, feeling her body heave up and down as her breath regulates.

  Julian.

  She wants to see Julian. She is a better person when she’s with him. She’s thinking of others. He gets her out of herself. Julian.

  She opens the computer, wipes off the remains of the moth with a tissue. Then she clicks her way back to the thread about her and Julian and begins to write. HappyGal to the defense.

  Mercy

  BEING WITH HER MOTHER makes her thirteen all over again. But her mother has changed too. Their relationship keeps teetering and swinging back and forth, unsteady, reshaping itself with every awkward exchange.

  This is not a normal visit. Her mother has not left the United States for at least twenty years. Mercy thinks she probably had to get a passport to come here. So some planning happened.

  Her mother has left her father, it seems. Something about gambling debts, and the theft of her nest egg, her gae-don, the Korean women’s tradition of lending money to one another at monthly meetings, and also something, muttered darkly, about other women.

  What a mess. This is what she comes from.

  That first afternoon, when she gets out of the taxi, her mother asks where she has been. But that is just one small blip of maternal concern, a flare struck and gone, it seems, forever. If it’s possible, her mother seems even more lost than she is.

  They go up together in the tiny, rickety elevator with her mother’s suitcase.

  “This is where you live,” her mother says in Korean, standing uncomfortably close to Mercy, because the suitcase is taking up half the elevator.

  “I know, it’s not nice,” she says.

  “When we immigrated to Queens, our apartment was very small, and we didn’t have our own bathroom,” her mother says. The elevator doors open, and she leads her mother down the tiny, narrow hallway lit by fluorescent lights. She takes out her keys and unlocks the door.

  “Ta-da,” she says as she swings it open to her studio, her messy bed, with clothes strewn all over it—remnants of her rejected dressing choices before meeting David this morning.

  “Very small,” her mother says without emotion.

  “Only one bed,” she points out.

  “It is big enough. We can share,” her mother says, with finality.

  Over coffee later, after her mother has showered and changed and they have made their way to a little café down the street, Mercy asks, tentatively, how long she is here for.

  “I don’t know,” her mother says. “Things are strange at home.”

  She sips at her plain coffee. She never ordered latte or cappuccino, or the fancy drinks.

  “I flew through Seoul,” she says. “On Korean Air. Incheon Airport is so modern!”

  “I know,” Mercy says. “It makes JFK look third world.”

  “Things have changed so much in Asia,” her mother says. “I wonder what it would be like if we had stayed in Korea. Before, America used to be the best place, but now I think it is not so good.”

  “I miss America,” Mercy says. And she realizes it is true. That there is no reason for her to be here in Hong Kong, with her married lover—Can he even be termed a lover? The implied constancy is not there—and a baby, or, rather, an embryo and all the messiness in her life. But she can’t go back now.

  “I bought the ticket through Mrs. Choi at church,” her mother says, putting down her cup. “And she says I can set the return date whenever I want. It is very flexible. And I can stop in Seoul on the way back. But I wanted to rush to see you. You are never home, and you never return my phone calls.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” Mercy says.

  “So, do you have a job?” her mother asks.

  Mercy’s silence is her answer. Her mother rips off a piece of the almond croissant they are sharing—powdered sugar is sprinkled on her chin. How disappointing for her mother, she thinks, to have a daughter like her, but how used to it she must be. Just as Mercy is used to men being disappointing, having had her father as a model. She and her mother—they are lost in these patterns, unable to kick out into another, freer, better life.

  “Hong Kong is very expensive, isn’t it?” her mother asks.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I’m staying for some time,” says her mother, “so I help you with the rent.”

  When Mercy went to college, she met not only those wealthy aliens; she also met other Korean Americans from different parts of the country. She understood the Queens Koreans, how most of them came from struggling families, dry cleaners and deli owners and ministers, but there was a whole other breed, like the Korean American kids from Beverly Hills or Bloomfield Hills, or the wealthier suburbs of Long Island. Their parents were doctors or real estate developers or just businessmen more successful than her dad. It wasn’t the wealth that bothered her, though; it was the fact that their parents seemed so normal, and they assumed that other Koreans were just like them. They complain
ed about overbearing mothers, fathers who were disappointed that they hadn’t gone to Harvard, grandmothers who were a pain. It was this assumption that her family was like theirs, that her parents were together, a team, and that they had the time or the inclination to care about where Mercy went to school or how she led her life.

  It wasn’t that her mother didn’t love her but that she didn’t know how to help her, being in a terrible relationship herself.

  “Do you think I can get a job here?” her mother asks.

  She feels a panic open up inside her. The world she has so carefully been trying to hold together, the fragile bubble, seems on the verge of collapsing.

  “I don’t—” she begins, but someone is tapping her shoulder.

  “Hey,” says a young man behind her.

  She twists around, looks at his face, trying to place him.

  “Charlie,” he says. “From Columbia. We saw each other a while back at the Conrad?”

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “Great to see you.” The day she met David.

  He looks expectantly at her and then her mother.

  “Oh, this is my mom,” she says. As they shake hands and exchange pleasantries, she gets the feeling she often does, where she floats away, above herself, and observes the scene. She feels a deep pleasure at the fact that this scenario, this snapshot, is so normal. Here is a girl who lives in Hong Kong, whose mother is visiting, who is introducing her mother to another acquaintance, an old college friend she has run into. She sees it happening all over town, all the time, and always feels on the outside, like that will never be her, and all of a sudden, here it is, happening, although everything on the inside is so very different. She’s so different, and marked, but this instant makes her feel normal. In a sudden moment of insight, she wonders if everyone feels this way.

  “Maybe I’ll see you around,” Charlie says. But he lingers.

  Her mother sees the look on his face and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. After all, this is a boy/man with a suit and a briefcase. A man with a job.