The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  “What are you doing this weekend?” he asks suddenly.

  “Oh,” she says. “Um, well, my mom just got here, and that was a bit of a surprise, so I have no idea.”

  “There’s this party at my friend’s house,” he starts.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “A bunch of kids from Yale are throwing it, but they’re pretty cool.” She has almost forgotten that this is how people her age talk, having sequestered herself for so long.

  “Great,” she says.

  “Wanna go?”

  A party for twenty-somethings. This is what she should be doing. Not hiding out from having been implicated in a hideous crime and getting impregnated by a detached married man. She feels the gap sharply, suddenly. Maybe this is why she says yes. Maybe this is why she gives Charlie her e-mail address and phone number. He walks away smiling, and she remains, feeling that she has duped him and it is all going to come crashing down. Her mother comes back, smiling, saying that he looked like a nice boy. “Chinese men,” she says, “are better than Korean men. They treat their women well.” And Mercy is back to where she started, feeling like a fraud, that she is the architect of her own awful destiny.

  But it’s as if fate helps her to make bad decisions. Because her mother is here, it is easy (and truthful) to tell David that she can’t see him for a bit. After the news, he clearly needs a bit of a break as well.

  “She didn’t come because . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.

  “No,” she says. “She has no idea. Just a coincidence.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Buzz me when she leaves.”

  And she hangs up and suddenly feels, can it be? Free. She feels a bit freer. She’s burst from one situation into another.

  So then she’s free to go to this party with Charlie, which delights her mother, because even with her track record, she is still Korean enough to think that a man can save a woman. Especially someone with Mercy’s destiny, who needs so much saving.

  So Charlie wants to pick her up, which is really nice, but her mom is staying with her, so she meets him downstairs in the lobby at nine.

  “You look nice,” he says.

  “Thanks,” she says. “So do you.”

  “Do you want to get something to eat before we go?”

  So they go to a bistro nearby and get a table outside, because the night is not too cool, and start with cocktails. The chairs are tippy, and the table’s marble top is stained with red wine. She’s been here before, with David, and feels awkward, but none of the waiters recognize her, and she begins to relax.

  She thinks just for a minute if, if, she should drink, but this baby, this tiny accumulation of cells inside her, is so minuscule and so easily ignored, such a thought and nothing else, that after the first sip of Tanqueray and tonic, she manages to forget about the whole thing entirely.

  From then on, it’s a typical twenty-something date. Lots of cocktails to get loose and happy, a big meal, he pays, no awkwardness, and they get into a cab at eleven and go to the party, which is at some guy’s parents’ place, which means it’s an enormous apartment with lots of rooms with pictures of the absent parents, who have gone to Colombo for the weekend. There is a strobe light strung up and a rooftop where people are dancing with lit cigarettes in one hand and beer bottles in the other. Lots of her friends are there, and they scream with happy drunkenness to see her.

  “Haven’t seen you in sooooo long,” they say, and hug, giddy with alcohol. They are so drunk they forget to ask how she is, which she likes very much.

  After this happens for the fourth time, Charlie pulls her aside. He doesn’t know her situation. “You’re popular,” he says, his face flushed and happy.

  “You’re handsome,” she says.

  And then they kiss.

  The night flashes by, in corners of rooms with beds with multiple couples making out, staggering to bathrooms to fall on the toilets, spilling vodka as she pours some more. When she looks at a clock, it says 1:00 a.m., then it says 3:00, and they’re at another club, Charlie by her side.

  “Where were you?” she tries to ask.

  “I’m here,” he says. But he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. She’s saying, “Where were you before all this other stuff happened, where were you when you could have saved me?”

  But then she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, she’s in his apartment, and it’s ten in the morning.

  Luckily, her clothes are all still on. And his are too. He lies, disheveled, snoring lightly.

  She gets up and almost throws up. There was a shawarma pit stop at some point last night, and the garlicky meat stink in her mouth is nauseating. She goes to the bathroom and finds some mouthwash. Gargles. She looks at herself in the mirror, mottled pale skin, sunken eyes, greasy hair. The bathroom is small and humid and messy, a boy’s bathroom, with hairs stuck to the shower wall and mold in the grout. She sits down on the toilet and pees. It smells sweet, like fermented juice, residue of all the alcohol.

  Bad decisions.

  She wipes and gets up to look at herself in the bathroom mirror while she’s washing her hands. Poor, pregnant, hungover Mercy.

  So many bad decisions.

  Margaret

  MARGARET IS DREAMING. G is nuzzling her, she can feel the solid, sweet shape of his head on her arm, rubbing as he used to. She used to call him her kitten, the way he would purr up to her and rumble with the simple pleasure of being near his mother. She would press his temples with her two palms while kissing his forehead, squeeze his butt cheeks, rub his chubby, perfect stomach with its adorable knot of a belly button. There is nothing like children to bring out the animal in you.

  She picks him up and hugs him, smelling him, then wakes up, with the hard plastic wall of the airplane on her cheek. There is a little drool on her mouth.

  It is a dream, and she is awake, and she is on an airplane, although Mr. Park said she shouldn’t come yet, that it might all be nothing, but of course, as soon as she heard there was anything, she had to go to the airport right away.

  Clarke had come to the phone after his assistant got him out of a meeting, and she had been sobbing. He hadn’t been able to understand her.

  “They think, they think, maybe . . . ,” she had managed to say. “Maybe, a boy, the right age . . .”

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “When can we go?”

  She had told him she would go first, because Mr. Park had said it would take a few days to get the boy to Seoul, but he had needed some more information from her, and he shouldn’t have called her so early, but he knew she would want to know, even if it turned out to be nothing. A rural village, a single woman who suddenly had a child, a nephew she was raising, she said, because her sister had died. A suspicious neighbor had finally called the police, and it turned out the child wasn’t the woman’s and that she didn’t have a good explanation as to how he had come to her house. He was the right age, around five or six, and his Korean wasn’t too good, and his English was much better.

  She had booked the black-eye, the flight that left Hong Kong at 1:00 a.m. and got in at 5:00 Korea time. Clarke would be on the first morning flight. Luckily, the plane had been half-empty, and she got a window seat with no one next to her. She had left a message at the police station that she would be arriving the next day, so Mr. Park would expect her. He had told her to wait in Hong Kong, but how could she have?

  The Hong Kong airport at that midnight hour had been spooky, with carpet-cleaning machines whirling and dark, empty shops. She had nursed a cup of tea in the food hall, waiting for the flight to board. Around her, tired travelers checked e-mails, read newspapers, drank beer. She moved to the gate area and sat down. When the call came, the travelers all gathered up their things and traipsed to the gate, almost zombielike in their slow, sleepy gait.

  Her body is awake now, immediately, when she realizes where
she is. She is tingly, alive, painfully so. Her son might, might, be on the other side of this flight. She will fly across this ocean, go to this different country, check into the hotel and take up vigil again, so that she might feel his body nestle against hers, smell his sweet breath.

  The cabin is dark. They switch off all the lights after takeoff, and most passengers are sleeping before the plane even gets off the ground. She was so wired that she thought she would never fall asleep, but it happened without her knowing. She is grateful for the rest. She looks at her watch: 3:00 a.m. She slept for a couple of hours and now has a few more hours of flight time.

  It’s been seventeen months. Seventeen months since October break when they went to Seoul and G was lost. Seventeen months since she has seen her baby.

  When they land, she and her fellow travelers are regurgitated, rumpled and disheveled, into a giant hallway. She goes through immigration and out into the still-quiet arrivals hall, it being a mere six in the morning. Outside is freezing—early spring can still be cold in Seoul—and her breath puffs out as she walks to the cab line. This city is the color of smoke—all gray concrete, cinder-block buildings, and morning sky—but turns into neon frenzy at night, with pulsating lights and the red and white streaks of passing cars. She gets a taxi to the hotel and lies back, exhausted, against the vinyl seat, seeing the flat gray of the Han River, the billboards announcing new electronics, and pretty girls advertising Korean shampoo. Stripped trees line the banks of the river, bare silhouettes until suddenly she sees one with a nest on it. She allows herself to imagine the return trip, with G beside her, surely looking a little bit different, certainly quiet, subdued, but back with her, back next to her. Will this vision come true? Will this gift be given to her? She doesn’t pray. She has prayed so much she is exhausted and not sure if she wants to believe in it, just as she doesn’t want to say she doesn’t believe in it just in case God is vengeful. How many bargains has she struck with the world in these past seventeen months? How many deals has she made with the devil or whoever she thinks might sway destiny? Too many that have come to nothing.

  Mercy

  MEETING CHARLIE FOR sushi at a small place on Jervois Street the next day, he is cheerful, ebullient, a puppy eager to please.

  “I thought you were one of those girls who only like to go out with white guys,” he says, grinning. He assumes all is well, can’t read her hesitation. She is out with him, hence she must be into him. He is that young. When do boys catch up to girls? she wonders. Maybe never.

  “I don’t really have a policy,” she says.

  “But you dated mostly white guys in college, right?” he asks.

  “I didn’t date all that much,” she says. “More like hook up. Nothing serious.”

  This boy is earnest and sweet. He wants a girlfriend. “You’re not drinking,” he says.

  “I’m hung over,” she says, which is true. She wonders if she’s already scrambled the cells of her unborn child.

  “Did you have fun last night?” He pours himself some more sake from the small porcelain flask. He knows enough to order it cold.

  “Yeah,” she says. She spent the day with her mother, making Korean banchan from the groceries her mother had bought from the Korean market in Tsim Sha Tsui.

  “What did you do today?”

  Parrying his questions is so easy it’s like child’s play. “Such a boring topic!” she declares. “How’s work?”

  And instead of saying, “And that’s not boring?” he starts telling her about work.

  She listens. It is not unpleasant, being here with Charlie, having small pieces of fish set in front of them at intervals. This is another life, one she should be having.

  But still, Charlie is so . . . unsophisticated. He didn’t hang out with her crowd in college and is so unknowing it makes her cringe sometimes.

  His parents are middle class, his father a math teacher at a high school and his mother a lab technician.

  “How’d you find your way to Columbia?” she asks.

  “Recruiters came to my local school. I never thought about going abroad, thought that was only for rich people, but this woman said I could apply for a scholarship. Some tycoon families in Hong Kong give aid to local students, and that’s what I got, because it’s hard to get financial aid for international students.”

  “You must have done really well in school,” she says. “Did you get a full ride?”

  “Yes, full scholarship. But we still have to pay some items, like the airplane and all the things I need for living.”

  His English is still a little bit foreign, with a bit of an accent that surfaces from time to time and grammar that can be off. He doesn’t get some jokes, doesn’t know anything about American television from the eighties and nineties, doesn’t understand colloquialisms but can speak pretty good English, so he seems like a blurred facsimile of an American.

  “And you are from New York, right?”

  “Queens,” she says. “Not Manhattan.”

  He’s not surprised. He doesn’t expect anyone he knows to be from Manhattan.

  “Big Koreatown there,” he says. “We used to go for Korean food sometime. Love the bulgogi.”

  She debates telling him about her aunt’s restaurant. Maybe he’s been.

  “And Chinese,” she says. “Lots of Chinese places. And Irish pubs.”

  He looks blank. “Irish?”

  She doesn’t explain. “But yeah,” she says. “My dad was in ‘business’”—she makes quotation marks in the air—“and my mom worked sometimes, so I needed a scholarship too.”

  He nods.

  “You know Philena, right?” she asks.

  “So rich,” he says, dunking sushi in the soy sauce. He puts the rice side down in the soy sauce, incorrectly. You’re supposed to put the fish side in. “Her family owns all the buildings in Causeway Bay.”

  “Did you know her before?”

  “No, no,” he says. “Just meet in the U.S. And sometimes see her here but not much.”

  “I was her roommate for a few years,” she tells him.

  “I know,” he says.

  So he knew of her then, even though she didn’t know about him. Her crowd was known at school as the fast crowd, the party crew, the cool ones. She remembers her old boss at the listings magazine telling her, “You may be twenty-five and think you know everything, but I am forty-three, and I am here to tell you that life is high school over and over again.”

  After dinner, she wants to go home, but he doesn’t want the night to end. He suggests a drink.

  “How about the Mandarin?” he says. It is not far, so they walk. She’s getting more and more antsy, not wanting to be there, walking next to the perfectly nice young man she can sense is wondering whether or not to take her hand. Thankfully, he doesn’t.

  They get to the bar, all smoky mirrors and dark velvets, and he orders a gin martini and she orders a club soda. The alcohol, mixing with the sake he’s already had, makes him voluble, and he tells her about his family and childhood.

  “My parents live in a three-hundred-square-foot apartment,” he announces. “I live in a flat that is twice the size of theirs.”

  “How does that make you feel?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” he says, wheezing. His eyes are glassy, and he is starting to slur. This is reason enough to drink, so you don’t have to see others being idiots and have to tolerate them.

  “They must be proud of you,” she says. “I think my parents are proud of me, and I don’t even have a job.”

  “Proud because of Columbia?” he asks. “You were at Columbia, right? Not Barnard?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And it’s not the same thing.” She expected him to join in as she said it, being such a familiar chorus, but he looks at her blankly. They teach a lot at Columbia, but what they can’t teach is irony and sophisticat
ion. What poor Charlie doesn’t realize is what potent currencies they are. All his hard work and intelligence are only going to take him so far.

  “My parents didn’t even dream I could go to college in America,” he says. “I had to make it happen. I had to tell them it was possible.”

  “And now you live in an apartment that’s twice the size of theirs,” she says.

  The bartender shakes the martini and uncaps the flask, pouring the clear liquid glinting with slivers of ice into a chilled glass. He sets the remainder down next to the glass and replaces their nuts with a fresh bowl.

  “Amazing service,” she says. She is starting to hate Charlie. It is a relief to feel this, as she has spent such a long time worrying that people hate her.

  He takes a sip. “My parents act like they are not as good as Americans or British,” Charlie says suddenly. “So when you ask how I feel about the fact that I live in a larger place than them at the age of twenty-seven, I guess I feel that you have to believe in yourself if you want to succeed.”

  Callow. The word floats into her head. Charlie is callow. Unknowing. Naïve. Earnest. And if she can see him for all those things, what does that make her?

  They end up back at his place, an enormous apartment complex of tiny flats in Pok Fu Lam, filled with young professionals, a dorm of sorts for the financial sector. After he paid for the drinks, they got into a cab, and she did not disagree when he told the driver his address. His building has a health club, a swimming pool, and a dining room you can rent out for dinner parties. He shows her all the facilities with pride, as if he owns them.

  He is starting to sober up.

  “Want to go swimming?” she asks.

  “The pool is closed,” he says.

  “That’s not what I asked,” she says. “I said, would you like to go swimming?”

  “Sure.” He nods. He tries the door. “It’s locked,” he says.

  “Who has the key?” she says. This is what she’s good at: breaking rules, behaving badly. She can take the lead.