“I have no idea what that means,” she says, trying not to sound combative.
“Americans are so involved in small, meaningless details. Asians are practical. I thought you were more practical, but when I hear you talking about organic salmon and stuff like that, I see you are a lot more American than I thought.”
“Oh,” she says. Of course he said organic salmon, which was missing the entire point. “Does it bother you? Do you like it or not like it?”
He throws his hands up. “I don’t like it or not like it. I prefer not to spend time thinking about such stupid things!”
Stung, she asks, “What do you prefer to think about?”
He sips his drink. “Things like work, if I’m doing well. Whether I should stay in this field or whether I should do something else. I’d like to find a girlfriend who could become a wife”—his gaze is steady on hers—“stuff like that, which is important, which will impact my life. Not whether the salmon is the organic or not.”
“Do you think about stuff like that all the time?” she asks, wonderingly. “You have to have some moments of silly thoughts.”
“I guess,” he says, in a tone that means he doesn’t.
“You live in a world without irony,” she says.
“You are always bringing up that word,” he says with exasperation. “Irony. Or meta. You are always saying things are meta. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
This is not going the way she planned. She thought that tonight she would tell him about G. Not about the baby yet. Baby steps. Ha ha.
“Sorry,” she says. Time to reset.
He is exasperated, she can see. Not the best way to start.
They order. He orders the salmon, without any apparent irony. She orders the pesto pasta. He gets a bottle of wine, although she says she will just sip at her glass.
“You don’t drink much,” he says.
“No,” she says.
Silence.
“How is work?” she asks.
“I had two almost all-nighters this week,” he says. “One for a Chinese electronics company that’s about to IPO and also a Malaysian food company. I got home at four in the morning and had to be back at the office by eight.”
“Ouch,” she says.
“It’s like this for everyone when they start,” he says. “You work hard and pay your dues.”
“So I hear,” she says.
“Are you looking for a new job?” he asks.
“Yes, and my mom is too,” she jokes.
He smiles. “That must be difficult,” he says. “I can’t imagine living with my mother, although a lot of people here live with family until they’re married. That doesn’t work for me. Not with my parents. We’re too different.”
Mercy is reminded of those marriage manuals from the 1950s that get passed around via e-mail or Facebook every once in a while: “When your husband gets home from work, don’t nag him. Ask him about his day while bringing him a drink and his slippers.” The slippers part always reminded her of a dog.
“So I wanted to say,” she starts, then thinks she should wait a bit, maybe until the appetizers come, so stops.
“Yeah?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“Oh, come on. You can say what you want to say,” he says. “You should feel comfortable with me.”
“Except we just had a quite uncomfortable exchange.”
“That?” He looks surprised. “You think that is uncomfortable? That’s just us talking and figuring out who we are in relation to each other.”
Sometimes he is surprisingly fluent in English and in emotions.
“Oh, well, I’m glad you think that.”
His appetizer comes, asparagus spears drizzled with a reddish oil.
“Do you want some?” He pushes the plate to the center of the table and asks the waiter for two small plates so they can share. This small generosity makes her eyes fill.
“You are crying?” he says, incredulous. “What is going on?”
“I’m just . . . emotional,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” he says.
“ ’Cause there’s something I want to tell you.” I’m pregnant.
“Okay.”
“I don’t know if you heard what happened to me a year ago. Something bad happened. And it was my fault, and I’ve been trying to deal with it this whole time. Which is why I’m not working, and why I haven’t gone out or seen people in so long. But you probably don’t know, because we didn’t know each other back then, so you wouldn’t have noticed . . .” She’s blabbering out of nervousness.
He reaches over, takes her hand. “I know,” he says. “It’s a small world, and everyone hears about awful things like what happened to you with the child. In Hong Kong especially. It must be very hard.”
“Yes,” she says, relieved. “It’s so hard, and everyone is focused on Margaret and her family, as they should be, of course, but I feel like my life has been ruined too, and I’m not allowed to say anything or do anything, except be sorry and fade away. I don’t know why I haven’t moved back to the U.S., but I feel like that would be running away and I should suffer and . . . I don’t know.”
“I’m glad you told me,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, but I didn’t want to ask.”
“Thank you,” she says.
He doesn’t say, “What happened?” or “How did it go down?” or “Do you ever talk to the family?”—all questions she has been asked by other friends, not out of empathy but more out of an unseemly, almost prurient, interest. There are those advice columns that tell you to respond, “Why do you ask?” but that’s just such an aggressive thing to say to someone who is purporting to help you that she can never bring herself to say it.
“Terrible things happen all the time,” Charlie says. “You just got to keep living your life.”
“You are nice,” she says.
“I think Asian people are better at this sort of thing, suffering,” he says.
She almost laughs but realizes he is serious. “Oh?”
“Yes, of course,” he says. “Americans are very soft.”
“You like to make generalizations about Americans versus Asians.”
“Americans like to say things like that, tell people about themselves,” he says with a smile.
“Whoa, this is so meta.”
“Like that,” he says. “This meta thing is so American, and I don’t really get it.”
They laugh, and she thinks, Can it really be that easy? Then remembers the other thing. And feels sick again. What would it be like, she thinks, to live life without guilt, without worry, without feeling fraudulent? What is it like to be like Philena, to traipse through life protected by attentive parents and endless bank accounts? She wishes she could have that, just for a little bit, maybe just to see her through this time in her life when everything is going wrong, and even the things that are going right are going to veer off course at some point because of the other things. How fast will this guy flee when he knows everything? She would guess pretty fast.
“What did you do today?” he asks.
Today she tried to make an appointment at a public hospital, but since she’s not a permanent resident of Hong Kong, they told her that she will have to pay the nonlocal rate. Since the local rate is around HK$100 a visit and the nonlocal rate is ten times that, this is a big deal for her. She hadn’t known that only permanent residents got the cheaper rate, since everyone always talked about how cheap health care was in Hong Kong. She also found out that the birth was going to cost HK$100,000 or almost US$12,000, at least as a nonlocal. Since all this is unsayable, she smiles and says something about updating her resume and browsing online.
She actually finds the whole thing weird. The fact that Charlie is willing to put up with a girl who
is unemployed, ostracized, and odd just because she happens to be rather pretty and compatible with him in bed makes her question everything about the world. Why does it work this way? Is this the way everything works? What sort of value system exists that that’s okay?
“Do you know Eddie Lai?” he asks. “He’s from Columbia as well.”
“Name rings a bell,” she says.
“Do you want to have dinner with him and May next week? You know they just got married. They’re having people over to their house, like a dinner party,” he says.
She sees it happening, this coupling, how she is being presented to society as Charlie’s girlfriend. She has been witness to it, all through college and after, but it’s never really happened to her. She’s always been the girl to hook up with at parties, to go out with a few times, but never anything lasting. Is it really this easy? How is it that she’s never been privy to it before? It’s seductive, this image of newlywed bliss, the starter apartment in Mid-Levels with the IKEA furniture and the expensive groceries from the gourmet supermarket. Acting at being real adults, having dinner parties with other couples. It is so close she can practically smell the California cabernet and the chicken with garlic cloves roasting in the oven—the beginner meal for young couples playing house.
She’s been with boys who are cheating on their girlfriends. She can tell the affair is even more amazing for them, the forbidden making everything heightened, double the pleasure, like a drug they snort and then fall back, hit over the head with ecstasy. In the morning comes remorse, but still, the intense pleasure is worth it for them. Damn couples, she used to think, even the illicit sex is better for them than for single people.
So if this is what it’s like, she wants to enjoy it, but she can’t. Because she’s Mercy Cho. Because things never go right for her.
“There are a couple of long weekends coming up,” Charlie says. “Do you have any plans?”
“My whole life is kind of a long weekend,” she says.
“True.” He grins.
“It’s Buddha’s birthday, right?”
“Yeah, and May Day, and a few before,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about going away.”
“Oh, yeah?” she says. “Where?”
“I don’t know. I want to go to a beach and drink cocktails with umbrellas on them.”
“That sounds nice,” she says.
“Want to go with me?” he asks.
“Oh!” She is surprised. This she had not expected.
“I just thought . . .” He is embarrassed, a little shy.
“That sounds great,” she says. She cannot even go on to say “but . . .” as she intended, because he beams and grabs her hand.
“Good,” he says. “My treat.”
Later she wonders what she should have said. “But I’m pregnant.” “But my mother is here.” “But why me?” All things she is thinking. Anyway, she will have several weeks to mess things up with him, so it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes she lets herself imagine what would have happened if she had met Charlie before she met David. Would her life have spooled out in this wonderful, unimaginably effortless way? Girl meets boy, boy likes girl, boy pulls girl out of her awful life. But then she reminds herself that’s a fairy tale, and of all people, she should be the last to believe in fairy tales.
Part V
Hilary
HOW IS IT already May? May and June are going-away-party season and pack-up-for-summer season. The expatriates have renewed or not renewed their contracts. They have quit or found something back home. The factory has closed, or HQ has downsized the office. Elderly parents are ailing, and they are needed. Some have just become fed up with life in Hong Kong and decided to pack it up and leave. There are homesick wives who tell their husbands they’ve had it with the air pollution and the unsafe food standards and take off with the kids, leaving their spouses to work and send money home. This sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t: The wife comes back to Hong Kong, or there is a divorce, or the man returns home and finds another job.
If the expats are staying for another year or two, the moms take the kids and go on home leave, staying at their parents’ or in-laws’ houses, camping out at others’ homes through the summer.
So in May or June, when the kids are finishing up with school, the packers are called, tram parties are booked, and many, many boozy lunches and dinners are had at the American Club or the China Club or some fancy Italian restaurant in Central.
Hilary sits at the kitchen table with her laptop, sipping coffee and going through her e-mails, finding out who is leaving.
It’s a bit like the end of college, when you bid farewell to the friends you’ve made before going on to the next stage of life. You might see them again, but never in the same normal, everyday kind of way. Hilary has gone to so many of these lunches she knows the format like the back of her hand. First a bottle of champagne and a toast to the departing friend, then the presentation of a group gift arranged by many, many e-mails sent around beforehand, a gift statistically most likely to be from Shanghai Tang—a frame or perhaps a wine stopper—but not before a card is surreptitiously handed around so everyone can sign. There will also most probably be a photo album compiled of many pictures of group outings to Shenzhen to buy fake DVDs and have clothes tailored, dinners at the China Club, girls’ nights out at Flow, family days on the American Club lawn, joint vacations to Bali beaches. It’s akin to a college yearbook, she supposes, a way to mark several years in one’s life, when one has inevitably changed and grown in ways that are hard to see until you find yourself back in the United States trying to explain to people what life was like in Asia and finding out that they care not one whit. But you will have this album to flip through, and a wine stopper. And that memory of the people who were there with you.
That’s the shock, and the surprise, to a lot of repatriates: No one back home cares. There’s an initial, shallow interest in what life is like abroad, but most Americans aren’t actually interested, at all. They’re back to talking about the divorces going on at work, or how the neighborhood pharmacy is going under, or how highway construction has added forty minutes to their commute. They don’t want to know about the trip to Hoi An and how Vietnam has changed immensely, or how Beijing’s pollution is so thick that when you were there, you had to wear a handkerchief over your face. America is so vast, and there is so much to see, just in the fifty states, these people tell you—it’s like you never have to leave. This insularity will seem shocking for the first year back, when reentry is difficult, when you miss the ease of Hong Kong, forgetting all your complaints from when you were there, remembering only the good winter weather, the amazing dumplings and cheap taxis, but all too soon most everyone slips into the warm comforts of America, so convenient, so uniform, forgetting there is anything outside its borders.
There’s a moment in all these farewell parties when the person leaving is alone, drying her hands in the bathroom, waiting at the bar for a drink, and she foresees a moment in her new old life. Perhaps it will be the still, frozen Thursday-night light of a mall refracting through the window of a TGI Fridays as she’s surrounded by old high school friends in this most American of venues, chosen out of what they choose to call nostalgia but is usually something deeper and more fraught, the uneasy push-pull of the giant frozen cocktail, the greasy blooming onion—the all-encompassing and smothering embrace of America. Or she’ll see another moment in her imminent future, when she’s looking back into the past: Washing dishes in the waning light of a Columbus, Ohio, kitchen, sudsy hands gripping greasy dishes, a woman will summon up a startling picture of herself, a moment in Hong Kong when she was walking across the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel in a fitted sheath and expensive stiletto-heeled shoes, the kind she has no use for anymore, on her way to meet a friend for lunch, or walking through the streets with her toddler on her hip while her helper, her servant, trailed behind, carrying the
diaper bag and various other accouterments of daily life she hadn’t had to bother herself with. What a life it was! What a life they had all had! While many of them had complained the whole time they were stationed in Hong Kong, it is only after they leave, when they are ensconced in their old lives with no change visible for decades ahead, that they will appreciate the wonder of what they had experienced.
At the farewell parties and back at home, they will take a moment to see themselves with their present friends, their old friends, their new friends, their new old friends, the past meeting the present, endlessly echoing back and forth, and they’ll see their future, so close, bumping into the moment, and frighteningly the same, and they’ll wonder if their past, their time away in the Far East, was just that, a dream.
As Hilary sits at the kitchen table, she hears the piano playing. She is waiting for Julian to finish so they can go out together. Miss Kim, the Korean lady she found to teach him, says she is happy with his progress, but Hilary has no idea whether he is good. She doesn’t care that much if he is. The tinkling melody, not unpleasant, soothes her.
She is going to adopt Julian.
It was not some big awakening, some blazing moment of truth. Like so many things in real, unromantic life, it came in a slow accumulation of small tasks, almost unconscious. She filled out some forms. She sent e-mails to the few people she will need recommendations or information from. She asked the accountant for copies of tax returns and the consulate for legal documents. In this way, she came to realize that she is adopting Julian. She has not told him, but she is clearing away the brush in front of her to see what lies ahead. The social worker has told her that while she cannot request a specific child, if she starts the application process and says she is okay with a mixed-race, older child, the odds are very good she will get Julian, as the adoption pool in Hong Kong is very small, under two hundred, and he is likely the only one who fits that description. The odds of his getting adopted are almost nil. In the last year there were fewer than three hundred adoptions in all of Hong Kong. Most were infants adopted by local families, a small percentage by foreign, and a very few are within families. Hilary wonders about the stories behind that last, small statistic.
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