The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  “That’s not how I imagined it,” Hilary says. “I didn’t expect him to be so . . . uncaring, or mean, even.”

  “Imagine where he is,” Olivia says. “He’s had to cut you off in his mind to be able to leave. Of course, he’s not going to want to do the adoption.”

  “I just thought . . .”

  “I know,” Olivia says. “I’m sorry.”

  Mercy

  ONCE SHE CROUCHES DOWN, she starts to plot her escape. She’ll tell her mother she doesn’t feel well, and she’ll go down and get a cab home. But then everything stops for the kids’ song and Clarke’s speech. She listens to it all, feeling sicker with every word. When it’s over, the crowd starts to buzz again, and she knows they’re going to start the dinner service soon. It’s buffet style, with open seating.

  She gets up, then spots David.

  Great. It’s getting even better. She starts to walk and keeps her head down. He doesn’t notice her, but then she bumps into someone.

  “Oops,” says a man in a tan suit. Mercy cannot breathe.

  “Hey, you okay?” He looks at her, concerned.

  She nods and keeps walking. Only ten feet to the kitchen now. She sneaks a look right and sees Margaret, looking right at her. She keeps walking, swings the kitchen door open, lets it close behind her.

  Blessed cacophony of heat and activity inside. She needs to find her mother.

  Margaret

  SHE COULD HAVE SWORN she saw Mercy, walking to the kitchen, but it was out of the corner of her eye. Must have been someone who looked like her. What on earth would Mercy be doing at Clarke’s party? She shakes her head as if she’s seen a ghost and continues talking to Frannie Peck, who’s had a few and is encouraging Margaret to do the same. They flag down a passing waiter for another glass of wine, which seems like a good idea at the time.

  Hilary

  A CIGARETTE. That’s what she needs. She doesn’t really smoke, but she could use a break. Olivia has a pack, and they take the industrial elevator down and walk through the parking garage to the street.

  They light up in the street like teenage girls playing hooky. The smoke sweeps into her lungs, clarifying the moment.

  “Why is smoking so bad if it feels so good?” Hilary asks. She feels light-headed, removed.

  Outside, Aberdeen blinks and twinkles. It’s an industrial warehouse zone, with a truly apocalyptic waterway running through it that is filled with a mysterious murky liquid. Around them, buildings encased in scaffolding emit ghostly light.

  “It feels like a Batman movie out here,” she says.

  The elevator doors open again, and a young woman comes out. She looks pale and a bit unhealthy. She looks at them warily and then passes by.

  “Do you want to leave?” Olivia asks. “It’s kind of boring.”

  “I don’t think we can,” Hilary says. “It would be rude, wouldn’t it?”

  “No one cares,” says Olivia.

  “Cynic.”

  The young woman stands, waiting for a taxi. Hilary can tell, in that strange way that one can always tell, that she is listening to their conversation, which is odd, because she is dressed in a waiter’s uniform and is probably local.

  “So sad, isn’t it?” Hilary says. “I don’t know how you go on after something like that.”

  “If anything happened to Dorothy, I would kill myself, and I’m not being melodramatic,” says Olivia. “She’s the only thing I’m living for.”

  “We have to find more to live for,” Hilary says.

  “You’re going to become a mother,” her friend replies. “You’ll understand. It’s the only thing that matters.”

  Hilary ruminates on this, rolls it around her head, finds the thought pleasing. “I would like that to be true,” she says. “I would like that very much.”

  Mercy

  SHE FINDS HER MOTHER, tells her she’s feeling unwell and has to leave. There’s a flash of disappointment in her mother’s face (Mercy, flaking again, if there’s a verb for flaking in Korean), but it passes in an instant, and she nods her head and says, of course, go home.

  Mercy grabs her purse and exits through the staff door. In the hallway, she jabs the button for the elevator, willing it to come quickly. Inside, a musty fan circulates dusty air in the fluorescent light. There’s an old mirror on the wall, and she looks at herself. She looks normal. She looks fine. She’s dodged a bullet. Margaret may have seen her, but she might not have recognized her.

  Outside, two women are smoking, talking. She waits for a taxi next to them as they talk idly about maybe leaving the party. Then they bring up the Reades and their situation.

  “You never get over something like that,” the Asian woman says. “Most of those marriages don’t make it.”

  “She was always perfect,” says the white woman, not unkindly.

  Mercy strains to hear. She wonders if they will bring her up, the guilty, the other, the never-mentioned. Before she can hear any more, a taxi passes, and she runs after it, arm aloft to flag it. She runs away and disappears.

  Margaret

  MARGARET IS DRUNK, for the first time since G was lost. Really drunk. It snuck up on her, like most drunken states, and by the time she realized, it was too late. Clarke keeps giving her sympathetic glances, and she feels ashamed before her in-laws.

  She escapes to the bathroom and sits down on the toilet. She puts her palms on the opposite walls of the stall to try to stop the spinning. She tries to catalogue, as if that will make her feel better. She had a glass of champagne, a glass of wine after, and then another with Frannie Peck. There may also have been a shot of vodka, pressed on her by Clarke’s colleagues, a hard-partying crew. She was feeling good, feeling buzzed, until all of a sudden she felt rotten.

  And there is something else, a niggling feeling that she’s missed something, or that something is wrong. She can’t put her finger on it.

  She gets up, stumbles as she tries to pull down her underwear. What a mess she is.

  She pees, thickly, hoping that at least some alcohol is leaving her body.

  What is the thing that is wrong? What is she missing?

  Mercy.

  She saw Mercy. Now she is sure of it.

  She has not thought about the girl in so long. She put her out of her mind, because what was the point? Now she remembers the girl walking fast, head down, going to the kitchen. She was in a waiter’s outfit, so she must have been working.

  The white-hot hatred she felt toward the girl has cooled over the past year. When she thinks of her now, she can have moments of empathy. What is it like to have caused such a seismic change in someone else’s life? What is she doing now? Has she moved on? She doesn’t feel sympathy, but she doesn’t feel an active enmity. She wished her dead for a long time, but Dr. Stein told her that was not a path forward.

  She wishes she weren’t so drunk.

  She rises and walks unsteadily out the door to wash her hands.

  Someone comes in.

  “Oh, hi,” she says, trying to speak clearly. It’s Hilary’s friend, the elegant Chinese woman.

  “What a wonderful party,” the woman says. “Thank you for having me.”

  “Not at all.” She wipes her hands on a paper towel and walks out to find Clarke. It seems imperative that she find him.

  “Clarke!” she calls when she sees him across the room. “Clarke!”

  He sees her and looks concerned. “Are you okay?” he says. “You should drink some water.”

  “I saw her,” she says. “I saw her!”

  “Who?”

  “Mercy! I saw Mercy!”

  “Mercy?” Clarke doesn’t recall, and then his face changes when he realizes whom she is talking about. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Mercy was here! She was working! She went into the kitchen!”

  �
�What?” he says. “No, not possible. What would she be doing here?”

  “I don’t know, but I saw her! Do you think I should find her?”

  “Why would you do that?” he asks.

  “I don’t know! I just want to know why she’s here!”

  Around them, people are listening with great interest. It’s not often one gets a front-row seat to a full-blown family drama.

  Clarke notices, takes her by the arm, and leads her away.

  “You’ve drunk too much,” he says. “I think you should sit down with my mother and drink some water.”

  “NO!” she shouts. “I’m going to find that girl and see why she’s here!” She shakes him off and runs to the kitchen and flings open the door. “Mercy!” she shouts. “Mercy! Are you here?”

  Hilary

  PERFECT MARGARET READE is creating a spectacle. Hilary has never seen anything like it. She has clearly had too much to drink and is causing a commotion in the kitchen, yelling out the name of the girl, Mercy, the girl who was watching G when he disappeared. People have stopped talking and are watching Margaret scream and shout.

  Clarke goes over and grabs Margaret and brings her to a chair, calming her down. She’s crying and wailing quite loudly. He gestures to his mother to get the children away, as they are running toward their mother. He sits down next to Margaret and covers her with his jacket, talking to her quietly.

  Hilary looks at Olivia, nods, and quietly they make their way out.

  Part VI

  Mercy

  VISIBLY PREGNANT NOW, Mercy is the darling of all the elderly people she sees on the street. People coo at her, try to touch her belly, give her unsolicited advice in elevators. She never knew what a pass pregnant women get in society.

  Her mother has been feeding her, both with home cooking and out at restaurants. She has been eating spicy naengmyun, mung-bean pancakes, plenty of kimchi, and she has developed an intense craving for the braised sea cucumbers at a small Szechuan restaurant in Causeway Bay. Her mother funds all this eating with the revelation of a second nest egg, kept hidden from her father. “I’m not stupid,” she says. “I hide a lot.”

  Mercy looks down at her belly with wonder. She can feel the flutters now, small touches from inside her that are growing stronger. Apparently the baby will also hiccup and somersault in the womb.

  Her mother has been here for a few months and has acclimated to Hong Kong life. She has found a Korean church and has been trying to get Mercy to go.

  “You want me to go like this?” Mercy asks, pointing to her stomach. “Your unmarried daughter?”

  “I don’t care,” her mother says. “God is for everyone.”

  Which is how she finds herself one Sunday attending a church that has set up in an office building in North Point. Most of the people her mother introduces her to are welcoming and nice.

  “Columbia joropseng,” says her mother proudly to everyone they see. Columbia graduate. Ivy League. Understandable in any language.

  The place is filled with tacky calendars from small Korean businesses and cheap ugly chairs, and while Mercy would have scoffed at it a year ago, it appeals to her now. It’s so comforting. They sit down and listen to the sermon. Mercy’s Korean is good, and she can understand most of what the minister is saying. Today his sermon is about forgiveness. She looks around at all the Koreans in the room. She has spent so much time with the young American crowd it’s a relief to see her other kind of people here. She recognizes these people—the middle-aged women with the perms and sensible shoes, the stylish young moms, the salaryman bankers. She knows them. They know her.

  After the service, people gather for refreshments. She also knows this—the big urns of coffee and tea, the bowls of Coffee-mate and sugar cubes, Kjeldsens Butter Cookies in their white fluted paper cups. This could be a Korean church gathering anywhere on the globe. Exhausted from her time in the expatriate world, she eats biscuits and revels in the homely acceptance implied in this space.

  Until a woman with a pinched face asks her where the baby’s father is. It’s a normal way in Korean to refer to one’s partner, so she could be asking innocently, but Mercy’s not so sure.

  “Not here,” she says, smiling.

  “Is he working? What does he do?” The nosiness of Korean ajumma is unparalleled.

  “Law,” Mercy says. Nothing she has said has been a lie, although nothing is constraining her from lying either.

  “Oh, lawyer. Great!” says the woman.

  “How long have you lived in Hong Kong?” Mercy asks. The woman is short, and Mercy can see her scalp through the thin strands of hair she has dyed a purplish-black.

  “Ten years,” she says. “Have a daughter. She at Berkeley now.”

  “How wonderful,” Mercy says. “Congratulations.”

  “She maybe become the dentist.”

  Mercy’s mother appears by her side.

  “Heemduro?” she asks. Are you tired? “Come sit down.” She leads Mercy away. “Don’t like that woman,” she says. “Mrs. Lee. She always brag.”

  They sit by themselves, drinking hot tea with milk and sugar, surrounded by fellow Koreans in a foreign land. It’s not so bad.

  Margaret

  EXPAT HONG KONG has emptied out in a long, wistful exhale. The families go back for home leave to see their parents and siblings, grill hot dogs, and drink beer on verdant lawns, experiencing the best of America.

  There are several waves of migration. There’s the mass exodus that happens as soon as school lets out, when eager mothers have all the bags packed and ready so that when the kids get home from their last day at school, they give them a quick snack, and then it’s off to the airport for the flight to JFK or LAX and connecting on. There’s another wave of people who have their kids do an immersion program in China or a session of summer school before heading out in mid-July for a month. Still others, mostly dual working parents, just carve out a week or two, fly home quickly, and come back again.

  The American Club becomes a ghost town, lounge chairs sitting empty as a lone swimmer does laps, when just a few weeks ago, it was bustling with children taking tennis lessons, birthday parties, farewell dinners. On a Sunday, Margaret and Clarke sit, nursing coffees. Clarke has exercised in the gym this morning, and Daisy and Philip are in the teen area, watching movies and playing air hockey with the few remaining stragglers.

  Margaret and Clarke stayed all last summer because she couldn’t fathom leaving, but Clarke has broached the subject of going home to California for two weeks in July this year.

  “You could see all your old friends,” he says. “And we could see your mom and my parents. The kids haven’t been back in a long time, and it’s important for them to stay in touch with their old friends.” This is what expats do, because they’re always preparing for the inevitable return.

  This is all out of the question for Margaret. She cannot leave Asia any more than she would ever think of giving up on G. How could he ever find her if she moves half a globe away? She feels guilty enough being a three-and-a-half-hour plane ride away.

  But, her other children.

  She doesn’t say yes to going back for this summer, but she doesn’t say no.

  She’s preoccupied with her dream, the one she keeps having, the one that woke her up this morning again, jittery. The apocalypse is coming. They have to get out. She has to pack. She has to think of everything her family might need and put it in backpacks. Water, food, blankets, can openers. What is necessary? What will help them survive? What shoes should they wear? In the dream, she is packing and packing, but her backpack keeps getting bigger and heavier, and she realizes she cannot carry it. So she takes things out. Then puts them back in. Considers what is important. Makes decisions and unmakes them. Packs and unpacks. A repetitive and anxious and crazy-making dream.

  So she looks up what to store at home in case there
is an earthquake or a nuclear bomb, and then buys everything. She has candles and gas ranges with extra fuel cans, water-purifying tablets, Cipro, containers of water, canned foods, a flint stone. There is a community of people she has found online who are preparing for the apocalypse, and they call themselves preppers. She has bought books off the Internet, and they come in brown paper packages tied with red twine, her address written in a shaky, unclear hand, an address that ends “Hong Kong, China, Japan,” all three included for good measure. The books are often self-published and, unsurprisingly, not well-written, penned by paranoid recluses in rural areas. But the dream seems a sign. She doesn’t want to leave anything to chance.

  Besides, it feels good to have a project. And what better project than to maximize the chances of her family’s survival in the case of an apocalyptic event? Clarke doesn’t know, but she secretes everything in a closet off Essie’s room, so Essie sees the growing supplies, grows fearful that something is happening that she doesn’t know about. Margaret has a separate stash in her room in Happy Valley as well.

  “I don’t know,” she says, noncommittal about going back to the United States. “Maybe.”

  After Clarke’s party, she had woken up with a hell of a hangover and that dreadful shame that comes after a colossal bout of drunkenness.

  She kept asking Clarke who saw her do what and what she had said, and he kept telling her to forget about it. She apologized to him, and he brushed it off, saying she deserved to tie one on, and then she had to go down for breakfast and face his parents. It took her a week to stop blushing involuntarily when she thought about what had happened.

  But Mercy! She could remember that. Now she can’t stop thinking about Mercy either. What she is doing, if she has a job, a boyfriend, a life. At her last session with Dr. Stein, she asked if it would be okay to contact Mercy, and the doctor asked why she wanted to.