The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  Olivia pauses from applying foundation. “Oh?” she says. “That’s great. How about David?”

  “I’m going ahead without him, but I think I’m going to list him as a father. I think he won’t mind.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I was going to have an agreement that he’s not responsible at all for Julian. I just need him so they look favorably on the application.”

  Olivia raises an eyebrow. “You seem to have a surprisingly good opinion of David, considering all that’s happened.”

  Hilary can’t explain it, but she feels certain that he won’t make a fuss. He’ll yield to her on this.

  “Are you ready for it?” Olivia asks. “He’s not a baby, so it won’t be the crazy change that is, and you won’t have all the hormones, but it’s still going to turn your world upside down. And schools! You have to get him into school! He’s going to have to get fluent in English very fast!”

  The talk of Hong Kong schools always turns rational women into hysterics.

  “That’s a ways down the road,” Hilary says mildly.

  “Oh, you don’t know,” Olivia says. “Everyone wants ‘the best’ for their child.” She makes imaginary quote marks around the phrase. “You get crazy. People get crazy.”

  “Well, I have to make sure it goes through first. There’s a lot that needs to happen.” Hilary looks at Olivia. “Are there websites you go on?” she asks. “Like websites where people ask questions or for advice, stuff like that?”

  Olivia considers. “Not really,” she says. “There are a few groups on Facebook, if that’s what you mean, and there are a few local sites where people go, but I don’t spend much time on that stuff.”

  Hilary hesitates. “It’s funny,” she says. “I’ve been spending a lot of time online, because, you know, nothing to do, and I’ve been on these expat-forum sites. People talk about their helpers or their jobs or other things.”

  “Why on earth do you read about strangers’ lives?” Olivia asks.

  “It feels a little bit like living vicariously,” Hilary says, embarrassed. “Like having a conversation with someone, and you don’t even need to go out.”

  “You could be at a lunch but be in your pajamas.”

  “Exactly! It can be kind of addicting. But the weird thing is that someone on one of these forums knows about me and Julian and wasn’t so kind about it.”

  “About you? Really? Hong Kong is too small. It’s disgusting. What did they say?”

  “That I was trying him on like a dress. That I was shopping for a child.”

  Olivia turns to Hilary. “Hilary, there are always going to be trolls. Especially on an Internet forum! What do you care what some anonymous coward says about you?” She turns back to the mirror, sweeps on blush. “The best thing about getting older,” she says, “the absolute best thing, is that I don’t give two hoots what anyone thinks about me.”

  “Come on!” Hilary protests.

  “Okay,” she allows. “I am working toward not caring one bit. I am on that path, and I am getting far along. I know you are too.” Olivia’s eyes meet Hilary’s in the mirror. “Who cares?” she says. “It’s all about them, not about you. They’re motivated by jealousy or spite or their awful lives. It has nothing to do with you. Nothing.”

  “I guess,” Hilary says doubtfully. “It seemed very personal.”

  “They’re awful. The best thing anyone can do is just live her own life. You do that, and they should do that.”

  “It made me feel bad,” Hilary says, almost childishly. Her eyes tear up.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” Olivia says. She sits down. “What can I say? There are awful people in the world.”

  “I know,” Hilary says.

  They sit in companionable silence.

  “Well,” Olivia says, “I’m with you. I’m here to help you. Whatever you need.”

  “Thank you.”

  They continue to get ready. Hilary remembers what her mother once said: You feel one age, and you see another in the mirror. She recalls nights in college, getting ready with her girlfriends before a frat party—not so different. What’s staring back at them, two middle-aged women, is somehow foreign to her, although she thinks they might look better than they did when they were chubby college coeds.

  “So who’s going to be there tonight?” Olivia asks.

  “The usual,” Hilary says. “The TASOHK crowd. I’m sure there’s very little overlap.” TASOHK means ultra-American, soccer mom and corporate dad.

  “Oh, good,” Olivia says. “No one I know.”

  “You’ll be slumming it with the suburbanites.” Hilary laughs.

  “Any handsome ex-football players?” Olivia muses. “I knew I should have married an American.”

  “Be prepared. There are going to be hundreds of them tonight.”

  “I’m ready,” Olivia says.

  Mercy

  SHE’S WITH HER MOM at the gourmet supermarket in the basement of a big mall. Her mother’s boss, Shirley, had texted, asking her to pick up a few last-minute things for the party, so they have big bunches of parsley for garnish, many lemons to cut into pretty shapes for used toothpicks from the canapés.

  “I’ve only lived here a few months, but Shirley crazy to come to this market,” her mother says. “The price here so high!”

  “She just knows that if one of her customers complains, she can say she gets everything at the best supermarket. She can charge way higher prices this way, you know. Most of her food comes from wholesalers, but she gets the small stuff here.” It drives Mercy crazy how her mom just doesn’t get it.

  Her mother shakes her head at the wasteful woman running a business this way. “This one lemon is eight dollars!”

  “But it’s a big one, from Tasmania. At the local market, they’re small and not good. Anyway, it’s not your money.”

  “Mercy, I want to help her,” she says. “She is losing herself the money.”

  There are some seven or eight people ahead of them in the line. Late-afternoon Saturday is a busy time, with people picking up groceries for dinner.

  There is a gradual commotion, in the way that minor disturbances come about. One, then two, then three people start to look at a woman, around forty, who is talking loudly in the way of the mentally ill.

  “She’s Korean,” her mother whispers.

  The woman is speaking Korean to the cashier, loudly and without stopping, even though the cashier is trying to respond.

  “She must be crazy,” her mother says. The cashier, who is Chinese, waves her hands and shakes her head, but the woman keeps talking.

  “Sometimes when you are too lonely, you get like that,” says her mother, who should know.

  “There are a lot of Korean people from Korea here,” Mercy says, using the peculiar way Koreans identify each other—Koreans from LA, Koreans from Queens, Koreans from Korea.

  “Yes, I see them,” her mother says. “Many in Taikoo Shing.” A neighborhood with malls and lots of apartment buildings.

  The cashier keeps ringing up the woman’s items, items that suddenly look like the property of the insane: two oranges, a box of chocolates, a cabbage, and a six-pack of Japanese beer.

  “Gananhae,” her mother says clinically. The woman is poor.

  “How can you tell?” Mercy asks, curious for the first time.

  “I can tell,” her mother says. “Look at her shoes.”

  Mercy looks at the woman’s shoes, a simple black pair of pumps with sensible two-inch heels, and considers, possibly for the first time, that her mother might have her own value system in which she lives and judges other people, namely Koreans. This makes Mercy feel adult.

  “That’s interesting, Mom,” she says, and smiles. Her mother gives her a shy smile back. They both turn back to watching the woman and stand, listening, as she
goes on and on, her manic delivery punctuated by her putting the items into a cloth bag. She pays, all the while chattering, signing the credit card slip, and walks out. The woman looks boldly at everyone, her gaze sliding over Mercy and her mother, stopping for a second. Koreans always recognize one another. Mercy looks away. The woman walks out, still talking.

  People in the line exhale, shuffle their feet. The tension seeps out from the room.

  “There was a crazy woman at church,” her mom says. “Remember her? Haeri’s mom, Mrs. Kim?”

  “What happened to her?” Mercy remembers Haeri, quiet and studious, until ninth grade, when she came back from a summer program in Korea with permed hair dyed a startling orange, a predilection for blue eyeliner, and an equally changed attitude toward life. Her mother, a housewife, rarely left the house except to go to church, where she would sit and rock in the community room after service. The other women steered clear of her as her husband tried to talk to some of the other men. He was an unsuccessful import-export man, like her father. Haeri went wild after the Korean program, from which apparently three of the girls had gone home pregnant. Sent to improve their Korean and understand Korean culture, the teenagers had instead discovered that local bars would sell them anything and had hooked up with one another all summer long. This is what Haeri told the other girls at church after Sunday school.

  “The hottest Korean guys are from Texas. They’re so tall!” she had told them. “And there are no Asian girls in Texas, so they’re so psyched. They’re totally jealous that we live in New York, where there are so many Koreans.”

  At the program, there had been Koreans from Berlin, from Warsaw and the Canary Islands, and a few from South America and Africa. Their immigrant parents worried about their displaced children not knowing their homeland and sent them back through summer programs run by universities. Mercy’s father had pooh-poohed the whole idea and asked where the money would come from. But Haeri’s dad had come up with the money. Haeri said she was now called Hex—a new name for a new girl. It had stuck, strangely.

  “What is Hex, I mean, Haeri”—Mercy corrects herself; the mothers still know her as Haeri— “what is Haeri doing now?”

  “I don’t know. They move away,” her mother says. “Maybe Florida? I think she try to kill herself, the mom, and then they move.”

  They have a moment to consider the mentally disturbed mother, the wayward daughter, then they are called to the cashier and are shaken out of the reverie.

  Margaret

  THEY HEAD OVER in the car. Clarke’s parents came over beforehand, and they had Essie take a photo of the whole group before they left. Then they decided to take one of just their nuclear family. Margaret stood behind Daisy and Philip in front of Clarke—the perfect family unit, a man and a woman with their boy and girl, their replacements in the cycle of life, Clarke turning fifty, with his entirely appropriate and attractive wife, their beautiful children. Margaret looks at the photo on her phone.

  “So nice,” she says to Clarke, handing it to him. “What a great photo.”

  “Love it,” he says. He hands the phone to his parents. “Look, Mom.”

  “It’ll be fun,” Margaret says. A wish? A declaration? A vain hope, perhaps.

  Daisy is fiddling around with her phone. “Can I Instagram the party, Mom?” she asks.

  “Sure,” Margaret says, uncertainly. She’s seen Daisy’s Instagram account, follows it as she’s supposed to, and it still seems inexplicable to her—group pictures of girls flashing peace signs, photos of desserts.

  “What does that mean?” Clarke asks.

  “It’s this thing that all my friends do. We post pictures, and people can respond. I have three hundred followers!”

  “Nothing inappropriate, though, okay?” Margaret says.

  “I’ve heard that girls get into terrible trouble these days with those things,” Clarke’s mother warbles.

  Margaret and Clarke’s mother are answered by an epic rolling of the eyes.

  They get out of the car and ride up a creaky industrial elevator to find Priscilla rushing around clutching a clipboard, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She pauses to greet them and exclaim on how beautiful the children are. They look around and tell her what a marvelous job she’s done. And she has. There are a million twinkling tea lights, and she has rigged up paper lanterns all over so the rather uninspiring original warehouse space has the look of a cathedral. She has arranged for a band from Manila to play cover songs and get the crowd dancing, and they’re twanging through a sound check. There is a gorgeous long table set up and a mike in case anyone wants to make a toast.

  “You have a lot of friends,” Priscilla tells Clarke. “And such lovely ones.”

  What a pro, Margaret thinks, grateful.

  “Kitchen’s working hard,” Priscilla continues. “We’ll have some hors d’oeuvres for you soon. Want a glass of champagne?”

  “Why not?” Clarke says.

  It’s a little after seven, and guests have been asked to arrive at seven thirty, so there’s time to wander around. Daisy takes a few photographs of the family and herself against the backdrop of the party.

  “Those are called selfies, right?” Clarke asks.

  Daisy rolls her eyes again.

  “What’s with the eye rolling?” Margaret says. “Your eyes are going to roll up and never come down. I’m sorry we’re so embarrassing to you.”

  “Can I see?” Clarke says.

  Daisy shows him her phone, and Margaret looks at their two heads bent over the device. As staff bustle around them, lighting more candles, adjusting chairs, Margaret sits down. A waiter offers her a plate of chicken satay, decorated with a sprig of rosemary.

  “No, thank you,” she says.

  The first guests come through the door, Charlie and Mel Gordon, and she gets up.

  “Welcome to Clarke’s birthday!” she says. “Thank you for coming!”

  “We’re so glad to be here,” Mel says. “I haven’t seen you in so long! You look well.”

  And so the party begins.

  Hilary

  OLIVIA INSISTS that they go early so she can get the lay of the land. It’s 7:40 when they walk through the entrance, decorated with shimmering silver tinsel. Margaret and Clarke are standing near the front, with three other early birds.

  “Hi, Margaret! This is my friend Olivia. I don’t think you’ve met.” They all cheek-kiss, bobbing back and forth. With them is a woman Hilary has seen around but doesn’t know.

  “I’m Hilary Starr,” she says, introducing herself.

  “I’m Melissa Gordon,” the woman says.

  “You look really familiar,” Hilary says.

  “Yes, I know! You do too!” They size each other up in a friendly way.

  “TASOHK?” Mel ventures.

  “No kids,” Hilary says. “I know! We go to the same physio! From a few years ago.”

  “Dr. Chan! Above Pacific Coffee.”

  “Yes!” Hilary recalibrates. “You look really good,” she says. Mel was much heavier then and less attractive.

  The woman blushes. “Yes, my mom says she can’t recognize me.”

  Some expat women thrive outside their native terrain. They are the trailing spouse, so they don’t have to work. And they arrive and realize they can have someone else vacuum and make the beds and the lunch boxes and do the laundry, and so they take that found time and use it to improve themselves. Some who were stay-at-home mothers before go back to work; some become fluent in Mandarin; some take up painting seriously, or whatever it was they used to want to do; and some become very fit and attractive.

  This Melissa Gordon is someone Hilary used to see in the waiting room of the physio, pudgy in the way of many comfortable American housewives, but the knife-sharp planes and sleek brunette waves of the woman before her now make her almost unrecognizable.


  “You lost a lot of weight,” Hilary says. When she comes across someone who has gone through the same journey she had as a child, she doesn’t feel kinship; she feels uncomfortable.

  “Yes,” Mel says. “I discovered CrossFit and Boot Camp!”

  So she’s one of the women down at Repulse Bay Beach weekdays, going through a circuit with an Australian trainer.

  “Well, you look great.” Hilary turns away. “This is my friend from college, Olivia.”

  Later Olivia will say that all the American people she met were unable to distinguish her from the waiters or other Chinese staff, a statement so patently ridiculous that Hilary is unable to stifle her bark of laughter, but for now Olivia graciously shakes Melissa’s hand and exchanges niceties about the loveliness of the occasion. All that Hilary appreciates about Olivia has no currency here. Olivia does not watch the latest network shows on Apple TV; she doesn’t go back to the United States every summer, or know what’s going on with the NBA or the NSA or NASA. Instead, she talks about LegCo or the West Kowloon Arts project or other things that concern people who will make their life in Hong Kong forever. There are no people like that here. Everyone here is temporary. They all think of their stint in three-year increments. They have never considered politics in Hong Kong or China or the implications of raising the local minimum wage. Olivia is heard politely, then dismissed as foreign, ironically.

  Now Olivia talks to Melissa, a light, meaningless conversation, and Hilary half-listens. Is it true that inevitably you end up with people like yourself? In college, everything is so idealistic, and you want to believe you can be anyone you want and be with anyone you want just because you both like early-twentieth-century French films or are both interested in cooking. When is it that you realize those are tenuous threads that are all too easily snipped by the stresses of daily life—work, money, children? She was someone different for David, and that wasn’t able to sustain them for so long. If she looks around, the crowd is so homogeneous she can easily believe that the young are foolish indeed.