The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  There have been moments when she isn’t sure, but she plows on, filling in David’s name as the father, listing her academic and medical history. Maybe this is all it is. She does not think he will deny her this, after all he has done.

  After the lesson, she will take Julian on a walk. This is the second time they have done this. Sam drives them to Tai Tam, and they walk slowly through the park and talk to each other in stilted English.

  Miss Kim closes the music book and smiles. “Good job, Julian,” she says.

  Hilary looks at her, this woman with her lovely, always beaming face, and wonders what she makes of the situation. The orphan, the woman always alone at home, the piano lesson. A job where you go to other people’s houses all day must unearth some odd situations.

  Miss Kim takes her leave, and Hilary asks Julian if he’d like to go.

  They get in the car, equipped with water and some oranges, and ride out to the beginning of the walk. It is one she does often with Olivia.

  They get out, and she helps Julian on with his backpack, one she has given him. She grabs his hand, and they set out. It feels strange to hold his hand, but she keeps doing it. It will feel normal, she thinks, she just has to get used to it.

  A couple comes out and smiles at them, seeing what they see—a mother and her child. Hilary is suddenly giddy with happiness.

  “What is?” Julian asks, pointing at the road where there are splotches of white powder.

  “It’s snake poison,” she tells him.

  He shakes his head. She pulls out the notebook she has gotten into the habit of bringing and sketches a snake. “Snake.” She draws a skull and bones. “Poison.” Then she puts X’s in the snake’s eyes to signal its death.

  He nods.

  There is so much he needs to learn, it’s overwhelming. Immersion, she keeps thinking, she’s going to have to immerse him in English. She reads stories about immigrant children going to America at thirteen and having to go to a school where they don’t understand a word. They survive; some thrive. She knows it’s possible, but how to give a child a whole new world?

  “I’ll take you to the Botanical Gardens one day,” she says. “They have a few snakes there.” She draws a cage with snakes behind the bars. He seems to understand, but who knows.

  This planning for the future, this evocation of things to come, gives her a frisson, not unpleasant. She grows bolder. “And in California, in America, where I’m from, there are lots of zoos, and they have lots of animals. We’ll go see them together.” She squeezes his hand.

  “Do you know California?” she asks. She draws America, fails, pulls out her phone and finds a map of the United States.

  “Here.” She taps the West Coast. “That’s where I’m from,” and she points to herself. “We can fly there together.” She makes her arms wings and bobbles them back and forth.

  She has not explicitly told him that she is going ahead with the adoption, but he knows. When she goes to pick him up, his fellow orphans crowd around him, speaking rapidly in Cantonese. They give her the thumbs-up sign and grin widely. She usually leaves quickly, uncomfortable with the implicit longing in the other children.

  It’s odd, because he already feels like he’s hers, separate from the others, especially since they look so different from him, being Chinese. “Which one of these is not like the other?” is the refrain that goes through her mind when she sees him at his home.

  After the walk, she takes him to the American Club to have a snack. He has never been. On this warm day, she brings him by the pool and sees the scene through his eyes—these privileged kids splashing in the water outfitted in every possible contraption a diligent mother can strap or pull on: rashguards, water wings, water fins, goggles, colored zinc. There is so much much here. What is fifteen dollars for these women to spend on flippers or a safety vest for their beloved, the vessels for all their dreams and hopes? The children stagger in and out of the pool; the mothers hover over them, clucking from the side about rough play, calling out about one child hitting another with a noodle. The dizzying scene is rife with privilege.

  Hilary sits with Julian, their silence surrounding them like a bubble enclosing them from the chaos outside. The sound track of a pool filled with children: happy shrieks, a crying toddler, a mother’s shout of warning, splashes of water.

  Some boys Julian’s age come in through the side door, herded by one mother. Julian looks at them, all matching in their school uniforms on their way to get changed for their swim lessons. They chatter easily with one another, poking and cavorting like puppies.

  “Toilet, please,” Julian says.

  She takes him to the bathroom and waits outside.

  After a long while, he comes out, followed by the other children, changed into their swimsuits. They look at him and giggle. She feels hot anger surge up.

  “What’s funny?” she says to the boys.

  They ignore her and start walking to the pool.

  “Excuse me,” she says, and taps one boy on the shoulder. “Was something funny?”

  “No,” he says. “What?” He looks confused.

  “You were all laughing when you came out.”

  As she speaks, she knows she sounds crazy, that the boys don’t know what she’s talking about, that it’s likely it has nothing to do with Julian, but she cannot help herself.

  The boy shrugs and joins his friends. Next to her, Julian is looking down, his eyes brimming. She is stricken.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  He doesn’t reply.

  She leans down. She has read this is what you do with children, get down to their level so they can relate to you better, so that you’re not so giant and unreachable.

  “Julian,” she says, “you know you can tell me anything. And you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “You tell me anything,” she says slowly. Even as she says it, she feels the impossibility of what she is saying. Does she really think an hour here and there will forge a relationship where he feels he can tell her anything? They don’t even speak the same language. She has to hurry up. It has to happen soon. He looks at her, eyes wet, trying not to cry. She hugs him fiercely.

  “Do you want to get something to eat?” she asks.

  He nods, and they go inside to the restaurant.

  They sit down, and he looks around. All around, children are eating pizza, spaghetti, club sandwiches.

  “They have Chinese food,” she says. “Chow fan, wonton noodle?”

  “Maybe I have the pizza,” he says uncertainly.

  “Want to look at the buffet?” she asks. They walk over and look at all the dishes. There is the usual international spread: a curry, a roast beef, a baked fish, sushi.

  “Why don’t we do this, so you can try everything,” she says. They take plates, and she tells him to point at everything he wants. Soon his plate is laden with a smorgasbord of different foods.

  When they sit down, though, he picks at everything.

  “You don’t like?” she says.

  He shrugs.

  Just then, the boys from the swimming pool come through the door, hair wet, freshly changed from the pool. They swarm the buffet, grabbing plates before their mothers can even get a table.

  “I get dessert,” Julian says.

  He gets up so quickly she is behind him when she sees him stand next to one of the boys who is getting a piece of chocolate cake. In her mind, she is tut-tutting the fact that the boy is getting dessert before a main course when she sees Julian jostle him, quite deliberately. The plate teeters and falls, chocolate cake lies crumbled all over the floor. The boy lets out a wail and glares at Julian.

  “You pushed me!” he shouts.

  Julian painstakingly ignores him and takes a plate. He cuts himself a slice of the chocolate cake.
/>   “You pushed me!” the boy shouts again.

  Hilary is behind them, aghast and yet somehow exhilarated. She puts her hand behind Julian’s back to guide him back to the table. They walk back together, side by side, unhurried and deliberate, and sit down. She sees the boy run to his mother and talk to her excitedly, pointing at Julian. The woman rises and comes toward them, a pleasant-faced woman in her thirties.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Michael told me that your”—she hesitates—“your child? Pushed him? And that’s why he dropped the plate?”

  Julian looks down at the floor, face a mask.

  Hilary smiles at the woman. “I’m sorry?” she says. “What?”

  The boy has joined his mother now. “He pushed me!” he says, still indignant.

  “There must be some mistake,” Hilary says. “I don’t think Julian pushed you.”

  “I dropped the cake because of him!”

  The mother looks beleaguered. “Why don’t we just get another piece of cake?” she suggests. She takes her child’s hand. “Sorry,” she says with a backward glance. “You know kids.”

  Hilary sits with Julian and finally dares to look at him. He stares back at her, expressionless, waiting for her reaction.

  She blinks, then smiles, breathes.

  “Eat your chocolate cake, sweetie,” she says, heart beating fast, fast, faster. Is this what it means to feel alive?

  Mercy

  HER MOTHER has had a job of sorts for several weeks. She’s been helping out with a catering company run by an American. Her experience at Mercy’s aunt’s restaurant has come in useful, and she has been hired as a quasi manager, to communicate to the other mostly Chinese staff what is expected. Why they think she can do this when she cannot speak Cantonese at all is a good question, but she talks in her Korean-accented English and seems to be doing fine. She likes her coworkers and likes having a place to go.

  There is a big party this week that they are doing in some warehouse in Wong Chuk Hang, and her mother wants her to work. She moves around the tiny studio, getting ready to go.

  “Shirley pays a hundred dollars an hour, and I’m sure she’ll pay you more—Columbia graduate!”

  Her mother prattles on about the food and the preparation and the work to come—a kindness to her daughter, who she has recently come to realize has ruined her life.

  All that jazz, as it were, came to pass, just as predicted. Two weeks ago, Charlie commented on her burgeoning waist, saying she had gained weight. The thing was, he said it in the loveliest way possible, saying, “Look! I’m taking good care of you. You have gained weight!”

  She wasn’t able to quash the look of horror on her face.

  He misunderstood. “No, no,” he said. “It’s good. I like it. You were too thin before.”

  When she couldn’t speak, he said, “What’s wrong?”

  And then it all came out, inelegantly, spastically, horribly. She kept seeing his face, uncomprehending at first, then horrified, then, finally, finally—and she couldn’t forget this—disgusted. The memory of his look makes her insides curl with embarrassment and self-loathing. When she visualizes it, she makes an involuntary grunt of horror. This good man, this good guy, was disgusted with her. She kept apologizing and apologizing for not telling him sooner, but it didn’t matter. There was something so final about being pregnant with someone else’s child. It’s almost comical. Only the most evolved or self-aware or confident man would be okay with it, or someone who was infatuated beyond reason, and that would be someone who had aimed way above his station. Charlie was none of these, she knew, and so she could not blame him or fault him or even wish that he had acted differently. He had acted in an eminently reasonable way, and she had been a bloody, bloody fool to spool it out for even a week. Now she imagines him telling all his friends, the newly married Eddie Lais, with whom they had had a perfectly lovely dinner, with the new wife being super friendly to Mercy, the work colleagues, other Columbia people. Her news spreading slowly, sickly outward, like an oil stain on the fine cotton tablecloth of common decency. Now she is known for something else, other than having lost a child, and it is this. A new kind of pariah.

  And also, she thinks he had already bought their tickets to go away. So now she has cost him thousands of dollars as well.

  So she does what she always does when her life goes awry. After all, she’s an expert. She puts it out of her mind and tries to move forward. Her prenatal visits are ongoing. She e-mailed David, delicately, about the cost. He e-mailed back immediately that she should send him all bills, then after the first two, he said she shouldn’t have to submit forms like an expense report and then just transferred HK$75,000 into her account (almost US$10,000) and said she should let him know when she needed more. So there’s that. It sits in her account, more money than she’s ever had at one time. Maybe he sent it all at one go because he doesn’t want a lot of contact with her, although he always signs his e-mails saying he’d love to see her and hopes that she is feeling well. He never gives a date, though, or any other indication that he cares about what’s happening with her. That should be a sign in and of itself.

  She also told her mother, who took the news in the oddest way. She told her in halting Korean, and her mother took it in slowly. Then she hugged Mercy and, shaking a little bit, let her go to see the tears in her eyes. “I will have grandchild,” she said. “I am so happy.” Nothing about ruining her life or who the father is. She just let her be.

  Actually, no one has asked her what she’s going to do, whether she will keep the baby, any of the questions she would have thought natural. She knows it’s getting late now to have an abortion, and she’s felt no urge to have one. It’s funny how she and her mother have both assumed that she’s going to have the baby. It’s not that they’re religious about it, or because of any sort of dogma, other than she does feel like she’s having a child, and the idea of not having it seems wildly improbable. She is pro-choice, always was, but this, her own body, is making the choice for her.

  She hasn’t even Googled when the last possible date would be, although she has gone onto several pregnancy websites and looked at what babies look like at different months. At the last appointment at the government hospital, she asked when she could get an ultrasound, and the doctor said since she was young and healthy, she wasn’t lined up for one. That was when she decided to go private. After a little research, she ended up with an appointment at an obstetrician’s in Wan Chai. Her first one is today, and she didn’t tell her mother because she doesn’t want her to ask if she can come.

  “I’ll ask Shirley if she need extra help for the party,” her mom says.

  “Okay,” Mercy says, just to get her mother out the door.

  After the door shuts and she is finally, blessedly alone, she showers and lies down on her bed, wrapped in a towel. Looking down, she opens up the towel to see how her stomach rises in a gentle peak. She sees the up and down of her breath. She sucks in her stomach, sees it go flat, then suddenly lets go in a panic, feeling as if she is squashing her baby, although she knows that is not possible at this stage. The websites say you might feel little flutters inside at this point, as the tiny baby starts to move around. It might not even be a baby yet. It might still be an embryo. She hasn’t gotten all the terms straight.

  Her wet hair is warm against her scalp, and she feels water drops sliding off her face. Outside, a garbage truck beeps its slow retreat.

  She gets up, dresses, leaves the apartment, and finds her way to the doctor’s. In the lobby of the office building, a brass plaque, Wan Chai Obstetrics, announces the name of her new doctor, a Dr. Henry Leong. The elevator has fancy brass buttons covered by a sheet of plastic that is sprayed with disinfectant every hour, or so a notice claims. Hong Kong: still disinfectant mad, decades after SARS.

  The doctor’s office is pleasant, with fresh flowers and up-to-date magazines, althoug
h most of them are in Chinese. Private, public, private, public—the refrain keeps going through her head. Why does money have to make everything so much nicer? The receptionist hands her a clipboard to fill out and asks her to pee in a cup and weigh herself on the scale next to the desk. Mercy’s the only one in the waiting room until the door buzzes open again and a woman of about thirty comes in with her husband.

  Mercy fills out the form and eavesdrops on the new arrival, an Englishwoman who is discussing with her husband their upcoming babymoon.

  “Angie said Bali was great, but the food is terrible. I think Thailand is a better bet.”

  “Okay,” her husband says, scrolling through his phone.

  “And there’s a really lovely hotel in Phuket called the Andara. Bit expensive but think we should splurge since it’s our last vacation as a couple.”

  “Is it on the beach?”

  As they make their way through the inanities of travel, Mercy finishes up and places the clipboard on the desk, then weighs herself. The woman watches her and exclaims, “I can’t believe how they have you weigh yourself out here in front of everybody!”

  Mercy looks back and lifts an eyebrow, which she regrets instantly, as it then gives the woman a chance to talk to her.

  “Do you know what you’re having?” she asks, smiling, friendly. Perhaps she wants to make friends, mommy friends, and form a playgroup.

  Mercy shakes her head, unwilling to talk, unwilling to unveil herself as a fellow native English speaker for fear of further intimacies. Better the woman thinks she is local, unable to converse.

  But then the receptionist asks, “How much you weigh?” forcing her to speak.

  “A hundred thirty-two,” she says softly, so the woman can’t hear her, but of course she does, so when Mercy sits down, the woman pointedly starts talking to her husband again.