How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

by Shannon Young

  "But you need to come up to Subic and sail her back,” he says.

  *

  A few weeks later, I arrive in Subic Bay, having sent Dante the boatman ahead to prepare the boat for the two-day, 105-nautical-mile sail.

  This will be my first voyage as captain and I’m nervous. I don’t want to be in charge—I much prefer being first mate. Will I be able to navigate correctly? Will I be able to find tomorrow night’s anchorage before nightfall?

  Watching Edward in his new element is hurtful. He introduces me to a few of his friends and we all go out to a floating bar, where girls sit on his lap, laughing and drinking the expensive "ladies’ drinks” that he buys them. I cannot believe that this is my husband. At one point a girl asks who I am and he answers, "Oh, she’s just a friend.” Just a friend? Later, we go back to his house, where I smash a framed picture of his girlfriend. I hadn’t wanted to behave badly and feel ashamed as I pick up the shards of broken glass. Edward stares at me, disgusted.

  The night before we leave, Dante and I sleep on the boat. I toss and turn and wake up at 5:00 am with a head full of doubts. Do I really want the responsibility of taking care of this boat? Can I handle the expense? It’s not too late to change my mind.

  I’ve never sailed Feisty Lady without Edward on board, and it feels like he has died. It feels wrong to be sitting at his navigation table, punching waypoints into the GPS. He should be here. I didn’t expect to feel so much grief. I want to tell Dante that I’ve changed my mind, that we’ll take the bus back to Puerto Galera, but he pops his head through the hatch, cheerfully announcing that everything is ready up on deck. Though the sun is barely up, I am wearing sunglasses to cover the tears leaking from my eyes.

  "Just a few more minutes, Dante,” I say, and his head disappears.

  If I’m going to take charge of my life, I need to do this. I can’t be afraid anymore. At forty-one, it’s time to grow up. Edward is not coming back to me. I’m an experienced sailor and I know how to manage this boat. I walk up the companionway steps into the cockpit outside.

  "Okay, Dante,” I say, starting the engine and taking the helm. "Throw off the dock lines.”

  We maneuver out of the marina and I don’t look back.

  After seven years and two adventurous crossings of the Pacific Ocean on a ten-meter yacht, Canadian India Harris sailed into the Philippines in 2001, fell in love with the country, and became a landlubber. When not at her seaside home which she shares with a menagerie of pets, India can usually be found in some other exotic part of the world with her camera. She has also lived in Tokyo, Paris, and Hawaii.

  CROSS

  By Saffron Marchant

  September 2007

  Hong Kong

  Skyscraper city: roads snaked with stone-wall trees; buildings clad in yellow, pink, green tiles, baking in the heat or sleek with rain. City-state hemmed by the busy waters of the South China Sea, immured by the jade-greenery of the mountains, immobilized by the concrete poured over the foothills so that the land won’t slide.

  A city of refuge. From war, famine, revolution. People have raced here through paddy fields in the black of night, swum through icy rivers with their children on their backs. They have boarded trains in Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Beijing, or boats in Saigon or Hanoi, with their money sewn into their clothes, no certainty they would get here.

  I arrive in Hong Kong in the business-class section of a British Airways 747, on a one-way ticket bought by somebody else.

  The air I step into from the air-conditioned frigidity of Chek Lap Kok is Irish to look at—misty, drizzly—but warm to the touch and deadly on the hair. The humidity is a damp skirt swishing around my legs, warm in my throat, hot across my chest and thighs. But by the time we’ve crossed the concourse to get the car to Central, the tropical sultriness has gone. It’s sweat sliding through the crack in my buttocks, down my legs, out of my armpits and into my handbag.

  Now, there are oceans and continents and seven hours between me and London and all those "when will you and Dave start a family” questions, or "you’ll get there keep trying” from all those I-just-need-to-stand-next-to-him-and-I-fall women.

  So far, at least, I’m not barren in Hong Kong.

  *

  We are tourists in Hong Kong for our first few days as residents. Dave has relocated with his bank; I’m a recovering solicitor, taking time out, a would-be maternity leave. We arrive on a public holiday. The Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the full moon that brings the harvest. Lines of red lanterns are strung from the entrances to the apartment blocks; the supermarkets sell delicate mooncakes in red and yellow boxes. We puff our way around the walking trails on Lamma Island, pass the seafood restaurants, the fish morbidly swimming in the tanks, the tables packed with holidaymakers, scissoring chopsticks.

  We visit the Tea, Space, and Heritage Museums, go to the bar at the very top floor of the Peninsula to watch the Festival of Light with cocktails at Felix, go downstairs again to eat a cheese fondue in Chesa. I almost lose a shoe on the steep climb on the tram up to The Peak, clutch my toes, press hard into the paneled floor, strain something, walk with a limp that annoys Dave.

  We go to the Po Lin Monastery, take a cable car up high into the Lantau hills. "These things are always breaking down,” says Dave as we lurch into the clouds. "Or falling from their moorings.” I stare at the ground as we leave it behind and cross my fingers.

  We eat a vegetarian lunch at the restaurant in the Buddhist monastery. My period comes in the restrooms under the Big Buddha.

  October

  Dr. Chan squeezes my breasts and tells me to take my knickers off. In any other circumstances this would be a slap-able offence. Instead I clamber into the stirrups. The nurse places a pink nylon sheet over my splayed knees.

  "Well, you have a nice clean cervix and your notes tell me that your tubes are clear, husband’s sperm is fine. Come back to my office and we’ll discuss.”

  The wall behind Dr. Chan is covered in photographs of nature-defying parents and their babies. The wall opposite the window is papered with thank-you cards. There is a plastic pelvis on his desk. Dr. Chan attends the women in the hospitals on Hong Kong Island in the mornings, those who have just given birth. He runs his clinic in Central from ten to two. After two, he performs the IVF procedures in the Sanatorium Hospital in Happy Valley. Frequently he is called away to a woman in labor. You would think this schedule would fall apart given the unpredictable nature of harvested eggs and at-term babies, but Dr. Chan is an acrobat, spinning through the air on the point of a needle.

  "Let’s do intra-uterine insemination. We will give you hormones to stimulate your ovaries to make eggs,” says Dr. Chan. "Then we will monitor for ovulation, and when the eggs are just about to be released, we will pass the sperm into the uterine cavity. It’s a very gentle procedure. The hormones are easier on the body than IVF because we don’t want many eggs, just three or four. We’ll do a couple of cycles, see where we are.”

  I’m grinning. I’m mentally writing the thank-you card. He has a calm authority and a plan.

  "So, we’ll just take some blood and start the hormones tomorrow. I’ll need you to come in every day for an ultrasound so I can check your ovaries are not hyper-stimulating.”

  "I’m going to Vietnam tomorrow,” I say. "It’s our wedding anniversary.”

  Dr. Chan throws down his pencil, eyes flashing. "We have to abort this procedure unless you cancel your holiday.”

  "At the London clinic, I was tested five days into the hormone treatment.”

  "You hyper-stimulated at the London clinic.”

  We abort. I start to cry.

  "A month’s wait isn’t so bad,” says Dr. Chan softly.

  He’s wrong about that. A month is very long when you can’t get pregnant. Every missed cycle is a step towards other options—donor eggs and surrogacy and adoption. I walk miserably past the paper offering shops of Sheung Wan, gifts for ancestors in their afterlife.
Paper microwaves, paper cars, paper televisions. It’s our second wedding anniversary. I thought I’d be a mother by now. Rock-paper-scissors.

  I am going to Vietnam. When I’m ovulating. This could be it! It won’t work it never—Get over yourself you stupid cow and go shopping. I buy two dresses from Vivienne Tam and tell Dave that I only bought one.

  November

  We make new friends, go on tentative first dates with couples who are friends of friends or colleagues of Dave’s. We gossip in the cab home. Did she seem really unhappy to you? Why was he constantly going to the toilet? I liked him. I liked her. Do you think they liked us?

  I like my new home, Hong Kong. The bauhinias are fuchsia lanterns strung through the trees on Victoria Road, or, once fallen, crimson streaks in the minibus tires, flattened to paper. There is so much nature here, slithering through the dark green hills or careening past my window with a mouse in its beak. Living in this heat means that nature gets indoors too. I jump in fright at the cockroach in my sink (the size of my elbow and levitating) or the scattering silverfish in my tea drawer. A dusk walk to the supermarket brings an ankle chain of insect bites, bruised and raised and dotted.

  One afternoon Dave and I go to the beach at Deep Water Bay. It is a warm Sunday in November but the shore is deserted. Then a family appears, noisily settling close by. Blanket. Parasol. Deck chairs. Sun cream. They are all blonde. Dave smiles as he watches the toddler with the pale halo of curls and the crossbow smile. "He looks like us. He looks like he could be—”

  "Jesus, there’s no peace now that bunch have turned up,” I say.

  I’m cross because I’ve been diagnosed with ovarian cysts, common in women undergoing fertility treatment. The news is crushing: another delayed cycle. I haunt the Internet chat rooms, lurk and read the cysts threads silently, a non-contributor, tears on my cheeks.

  December

  The day of the IUI treatment. After two months’ delay, I have Dave’s sperm in a little pot between my boobs and am on my way to have it "washed.” How quickly I have become used to Hong Kong: you don’t drive to a doctor’s surgery, you take an elevator. Dr. Chan does not provide the sperm-washing facility so he sends me to a clinic that does.

  A man comes into the clinic and places a vial of white froth on the counter. "Here is my sperm!” he booms in a voice straight out of Hong Kong’s colonial past. He is irritatingly proud of his specimen. I stare at his sperm with a flare of anxiety: he has produced way more than Dave.

  *

  I’m in the stirrups. The sperm is loaded into a catheter. It’s done. A smear test is more painful.

  "Take it easy. We’ll test on Day 25.”

  *

  My period comes on Day 24. I don’t get out of bed.

  Dave comes home from work to find me, curtains closed, bedroom humid. "Do you, do you think you’ve got depressed again? Shall we find you somebody in Hong Kong?”

  We go out for dinner. I wear my nightshirt but put on a bra and jeans; comb and put up my hair; long, dangly earrings. Then there’s the anti-pregnancy diet. Vodka martini with a coil of lemon peel, foie gras, steak medium-rare, goblets of Pinot Noir, and a blue cheese oozing mold and listeria. "I’m not going to bother with the turkey-basting business. I’m fat and flatulent from the hormones as it is.” My vowels are slow, but my consonants rushed, a mouthful of gobstoppers.

  Dave nods. "You’re the one who has to go through the hormones.”

  The end of dinner. I’m drunk and we’re going to tell Dr. Chan it’s time to move to IVF.

  *

  I also give Traditional Chinese Medicine a try, availing myself of everything that Hong Kong has to offer. Tony Wong slips needles into my ears, between my eyes, across my belly, down my legs, and into my toes. He does this with a sleight of hand: he’s a conjurer, a magician who can pull a baby out of a hat, turn hostile uteruses into cozy nests, an alchemist who can tweak cervical mucus with his herbs. He puts a heat lamp over my tummy, tells me to relax, and leaves the room.

  Tony is a traditional Chinese doctor, hence his alchemy, borne of his heritage, his glass pots of dried sea horse, scorpion, and willow bark.

  Borne.

  Why does the B word creep into everything?

  Baby, born, belly, bump.

  Barren.

  *

  At a Spanish restaurant on Elgin Street, a heavily pregnant woman sits at a neighboring table. She is slow on her feet, her smile directed inward towards the watery home of her child. Pregnancy has puffed out her ankles and freckled her nose. I want all of the above. The retching and the aversion to smells and the gravitational shift, it’s all real to me. I can taste it in the tapas.

  *

  I learn new beliefs. The Chinese believe in auspicious numbers. Two of anything is lucky; the word for the number three (saam) sounds like the character for birth and is considered lucky. The number four is inauspicious because it sounds like the word for death. I’d love to have a child, or three, a shape like my own family. I guess four eggs could be unlucky here. Is luck based on geography? Should I be more wary of four in Hong Kong than I was in London?

  The Chinese believe in wind and water, feng shui, the correct orientation of a building to bring the best of luck. If your office has poor feng shui, you will not make money. Even those who don’t believe will err on the cautious side and subscribe anyway, the same just-in-case mentality that prompts me to hang rosary beds above my bed. Thus a feng shui master decrees that the escalator in the new HSBC building has poor geomancy and the architect moves the stairwell. There are many gods here: gods of the sea and the kitchen, monkey gods, earth gods, gods of mercy and affluence, happiness, justice, long life. Spirits can be evil and the mirrors around doorways ward them off. Incense purifies the air on street corners, and rice and fruit are offered to gods outside the temples. Joss sticks burn on the ground in small red shrines, and at the festivals great feasts are eaten at the gravesides so that the whole family—the dead and the living—can dine together. Cars or microwaves or cigarette boxes made out of paper are burnt so that the deceased can enjoy them in the afterlife.

  I have a new god.

  The old God was wrathful; He punished the wicked. My old God made me barren. He punished me for my sins, whatever they might have been. Now I believe in the god of the embryo, of the welcoming womb, the Gonal F god.

  I ward off the bad god, the period god, the god of the miscarriage and the cold womb, with science and alchemy. I move the mirror out of our bedroom because it’s bad feng shui.

  January

  My sister, to my mother’s despair, is moving to Melbourne and is taking the scenic route, through the Philippines. We meet her and Pete in Boracay.

  Annie and I use our flip-flops as mini floats and swim amongst the diaphanous jellyfish. Annie asks about egg retrieval: does it hurt? How many eggs do they take? What about the anesthetic, is it general or local?

  Then she says: "Pete and I were talking. If it comes to it, Saff, you can have some of my eggs.”

  I put my head under the water to muffle her voice. My thoughts scatter as my hair plumes out behind me. Then I focus. I am both enraged and touched. But more enraged. Even my family has given up on me.

  March

  The egg harvest. I go under to the sound of gentle Cantonese, Dr. Chan chatting to the nurses and the anesthesiologist, my left arm held out straight on a plinth, taped down, a needle in a vein, knickerless, my legs pulled apart by the stirrups.

  I come round in the hospital ward. The curtains around my bed are closed. The woman opposite me, post anesthesia, is vomiting. We are the IVF "patients”: we are not sick, but we are in hospital. We have had surgery but we have not been cut. We are here for different and varied reasons—blocked tubes, poor sperm quality, advanced age, unexplained infertility—but for each of us to be lying in these beds means that we have pretended, lied, bartered, and bargained, given something essential up, and, eventually, offered ourselves at our o
wn cost to science.

  Dr. Chan is surprised to find me sitting up and reading an Anne Enright novel, the one she won the Booker for, with the family of twelve shaped like my own Irish Catholic mother’s. I look at Dr. Chan and think, twelve? He puts his hand on my leg. "Ten eggs. That’s about right for your age. We’ll see how they go.”

  The woman in the bed next to me has had twenty-two eggs extracted and crows about it to her partner. I look out at the racecourse of Happy Valley. A lone runner pounds the track.

  *

  Dave and I rush through a series of small victories. All ten of our eggs fertilize. I am glued to the Internet chat rooms; I read all the remarks without contributing, a cyber-ghost. It is rare for all of the eggs to fertilize. We are lucky.

  We get luckier. The cells multiply.

  All of the embryos make it to day five and are given a new name: blastocysts. They look like tiny cabbages.

  We have left our future offspring across town. I dispatch my four dead grandparents to stand guard over the test tubes. I envision my impassive grandfathers shaking hands across the racks of test tubes, bewildered by the science of it all, fearing it ungodly. My grandmothers beam with excitement and peer at their genetic material in the vial marked Marchant.

  *

  I go back to the hospital in Happy Valley. The day of the embryo transfer. I put on the uniform: disposable knickers, a checked gown that is open at the back, white knee-length socks, and plastic slippers.

  "Please drink lots of water. Your bladder must be full so that Dr. Chan can see the womb on the ultrasound,” says the nurse.

  Dave sits beside my bed. His thumbs move across the buttons on his BlackBerry. He looks up at me. "What?”

  I ask him to refill my water bottle. He leaves the BlackBerry on my table. I think about smashing it on the floor or flushing it down the toilet or hiding it in the bedclothes but I decide not to. Dave needs to work to pay for the treatment.