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

by Shannon Young

  Zeny helps me carry the desk from the bedroom into the living room. It’s an attractive piece, much like an architect’s drawing table in a dark, glossy wood. I think it could work as a buffet in the dining room or a credenza behind the sofa. We try it both ways and agree it looks best against the wall as a buffet. I place some decorative items on top. A gold-and-white porcelain elephant from Thailand, a tribal man in stone from the Philippines, and a brightly painted wood carving of a Japanese girl. I’m pleased, briefly pondering a career in home decoration until one of my kids walks through the door.

  "Hey, what’s Dad’s desk doing in the dining room?” she asks.

  "It’s a buffet table now,” I say.

  "Whatever,” she says.

  Minutes later her sister comes in with more helpful commentary. "The desk looks weird there,” she says.

  The next morning, I’m up earlier than usual, eager for the kids to head off to school so I can get ready. I haven’t mentioned my meeting. I’m not ready to field questions about it or, more particularly, about me. The meeting’s not until 10:30 a.m. but I leave the house at nine, just to be safe. I drive my car, the master of my own destiny. After parking at IFC, I’m still forty-five minutes early, so I window-shop along Queen’s Road Central. Catching my reflection in a shop window, I realize my blouse puffs out from the top of my skirt, making me look like I’m growing a bubble. I tuck it back in but a few steps later, the bubble’s back.

  Not wanting the blouse to stand between me and my future, I stride into a shop and browse the racks, locating a form-fitting grey sweater. I try it on and it fits nicely. I move around in the small dressing room, raising and lowering my arms. The sweater’s like glue. It adheres to my skin without bubbling. The sales clerk snips the tags and I emerge from the shop feeling great. I’m on the cusp of a professional life in this new city of mine. Goodbye tai-tai lunches and monthly shopping bazaars. My future awaits me.

  Checking my watch, it’s time to make my way into the building. My heels click against the white marble flooring. The musty scent of law, finance, and insurance fills the air. This is a serious building for people with serious lives. This is where I belong. I enter the elevator, confidently punching the button for the seventeenth floor. Scores of people file in after me, packing the elevator car. When it reaches the seventeenth floor, everyone files out. It seems we’re all going to the same place, and though I was the first in the car, I now find myself the last in a long line of people checking in with the receptionist. Stacks of brown clipboards sit on her desk, and she dispenses them like a Vegas card dealer. When I finally reach her, she flings one toward me. I put my hand up and explain that I have an appointment. The young woman thrusts the clipboard into my hand.

  "Everyone must first fill out the form,” she says.

  I begrudgingly take it from her and squeeze myself onto the sofa between two others who are studiously filling out their form. I put my handbag on the floor and root around it to locate my glasses. Application for Employment, the form says in large block letters. I flip through its six pages containing all manner of questions about my prior work experience. I rise from the sofa, explaining again that Yuki is expecting me.

  "You want a job, we need the form. That’s how it works,” she says, forcing a smile.

  I retreat, reclaiming my spot on the sofa. My neighbors appear to be nearly finished with their forms. Fifteen minutes later, I’m done and am now the only one still in the reception room waiting to be called. When the reception girl finally calls me, I jump up and follow her down the hall, past rows of thin cubicles, each containing one of my elevator friends in the midst of a sales pitch about their background. At the end of the hall, I’m deposited into one of the very same cubicles with walls rising three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. A cacophony of voices fills the air.

  "I am most definitely interested in a sales position, preferably in the automotive field,” one says.

  "The financial sector is where I’d like to focus,” says another.

  Laughter comes from the cubicle across the hall. "Not reflexology,” a woman says, "kinesiology.”

  I’m alone in the room for what seems like an eternity before a young woman strides in, ponytail swinging side to side. She takes a seat behind the small desk opposite me. "I’m Yuki,” she says, offering me her hand.

  I take it. It’s ice cold and rock hard. "Hello,” I say.

  Yuki reviews the pages on the clipboard. I remind her that Helen invited me to come in to discuss the legal training job for the UK law firm.

  "Oh, yes,” she says. "That position is no longer available, but—”

  "Excuse me?” I say.

  "They called last week and pulled the listing. Too bad, because it was a nice position and a good salary, but we’ll try to find you something else. Now, are you only interested in the legal profession?” she asks. "Because I have a lot of sales positions.”

  I wonder if she can hear me deflating.

  "Why didn’t you call me?” I ask, straining to keep my nostrils from flaring.

  Yuki tilts her head to the side, her twenty-something Eurasian skin smooth and unblemished.

  "Why would I have called you?” she asks.

  "To tell me not to come in, that the position you called me about was no longer available,” I say.

  "I didn’t call you,” she says.

  "I mean that Helen called me about,” I say.

  "Look,” Yuki says, "do you want a job or not, because I have other people waiting to see me?”

  A simple question, I know, but I can’t seem to form any words. It’s complicated, I want to say but Yuki won’t understand. Tears begin to sting my eyes.

  "Well?” she says.

  "No,” I say. "I’m sorry but there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  Yuki’s speechless as I mumble a goodbye. She’s probably never had someone come to her office and say they don’t want a job. I mean, what a waste. Why bother coming in at all if you don’t want a job?

  I jam my finger at the elevator button repeatedly, hoping the lift comes before anyone else joins me on the landing. Once outside, I curse my way down Queen’s Road Central, my new sweater now unbearably tight, restricting my breathing. I retrieve my car from the car park at IFC, clenching the wheel, my red fingernails—so perfectly painted the day before—now taunting me.

  It’s nearing the lunch hour and traffic is thick. I fidget in my seat, dying to peel off this suit. How did I ever wear one of these things, day after day, week after week? It seems like a lifetime ago. I signal to cross right, making my way across Gloucester Road towards the Happy Valley turnoff. One more lane to go when a loud noise startles me. A police van’s behind me, its siren light flashing. I can’t move. Traffic’s at a standstill in my lane. The van approaches on my right, inching toward my window. I roll it down as the van door opens, four, maybe five heads vying for a good look at me. The one closest, his hand on the door handle, says something I can’t understand before the lot of them burst out laughing, me clearly the punch line to some joke about expat or blonde drivers.

  "You crossed lanes in a no-cross zone,” the officer finally says.

  "Sorry,” I say.

  The group breaks out in laughter once again. I’m a regular comedian, it seems.

  "Don’t do it again,” the officer says before pulling the door closed.

  My lane is moving again and I accelerate forward. Happy Valley lies ahead, the hills of Tai Hang and Mid-Levels East rising above it. I’m teetering on an emotional cliff, unsure which way I’ll go. I’m in the tunnel now, and I begin to laugh. Tentatively at first but then I can’t restrain it. Laughter pours out of me, filling the car. I’m my own punchline now.

  I pay the $5 toll and glide past Ocean Park, a smile on my lips as a nascent thought begins to take shape. I’ve got an unclaimed desk in my dining room and some good stories to tell. Maybe I’ll write them down.

  Coco Richter is from the US,
where she practiced law for 18 years. She moved to Hong Kong in 2008 with her family and now writes fiction. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Hong Kong in 2011. Her writing has previously appeared in multiple editions of Imprint, the Annual Anthology of Women in Publishing Society Hong Kong.

  CHARTING KOENJI

  By Kathryn Hummel

  Sometimes there are moments that catch in the flow of the everyday like a taped-up tear in a reel of film. Afterwards, there is an almost imperceptible change in the tension and projection of life, when I feel more than I see that Koenji is not my place. While I am closer than a stranger, I am still at a distance: this I measure from the inside out, since I can’t get far enough away to see it as an onlooker, detached but still interested in how the scene rolls on. For the past two years, the everyday scenes of my life have had Japan as a setting: most of these have been concentrated in the district of Koenji-minami, Suginami Ward, Tokyo. During my first weeks here, I intoned that address so many times it became a mantra, a verbal talisman to guard against losing myself in the city. Although being an expatriate—a collection of syllables I don’t often apply to myself—places me in a position of being both inside and outside, when I hear the wooden heels of my shoes clip the now familiar walkways of my neighbourhood, I am reminded only of this place, my present.

  I. Arrival

  Arrival is not signified by

  the unburdening of suitcases

  but the mechanics of realisation.

  This is where I am, will be:

  I have come now to the place

  where before I was going.

  Being present in a place means you inevitably paint yourself in the picture, draw the map around you. Slip outside these bounds and you are lost, or so I once thought. In 2004 I had stopped in Japan on my way from China to Australia and was delighted by my weeklong visit. I knew that living and working in Japan would be harder than traveling through, when my only responsibility had been to find the best way to be happy before my set departure date. Still, I had friends in Japan and their phone numbers to call; a Japanese language certificate and alphabet flashcards; a few tatami mats’ worth of rented space and a position, courtesy of an arts-exchange program, to write words for an intimate Koenji gallery wanting to commune with the English-speaking art world. If the present was a leafy bough, my future (as well as my literary imagery) would be heavy with the fruit of my Japanese incarnation.

  I arrived in Osaka and rested for a few days at the home of Quentin, a university friend who had spent the last three years of his life traveling back to Japan to teach English, a compulsion he would spend another three years satisfying. At Quentin’s suggestion, I made my way to Tokyo on a journey of acclimatisation and language practice. I took a slow train to Hamamatsu to go on a gyoza (dumpling) hunt and traveled on to Yaizu, where, walking to the beach to see the distant Fuji-san bathed in the light of sunset, I met and later made love to a fish-factory worker from Peru. Yet even this encounter had the day-seizing quality of one made on a transient journey only.

  When I reached Tokyo, the city was so miserably wet I thought it would never dry out. As arranged, I was met at Koenji station by my landlord, whose easy graciousness flickered warmth over my arrival, and accompanied to the building where my first studio apartment was waiting. After giving me a tour, which consisted of opening the bathroom door and indicating to the rest of the open-plan space, diminished by a folded futon and my wet bags, my landlord retreated with a bow. I was not delighted by Tokyo so far but wanted to be, so I gave my wool scarf a tighter wind, armed myself with an umbrella and ventured out. During my walk, I found that the compass on my Bleu Bleuet watch was only for show—an incidental discovery, since instinct is the direction I rely on above all. At that particular moment, I had none, and the rain didn’t help clarify my position. It leaked somehow through my umbrella and under my collar, where it remained without guiding me. As it usually happens when I walk the streets of a new place, I got lost.

  The houses lost me. Or I lost myself in them. Every grey, dun, or cream-colored structure fit together in a maze of reinforced concrete. Some homes were irregularly shaped to sit correctly on their blocks; others had strange additions that seemed the architectural equivalent to tusks and antlers; oddly shaped, overgrown bonsai sprouting various thicknesses of branch and colors of foliage mingled with low electrical wires; antennas, rubbish bins, sometimes just inexplicable but neatly arranged collections of junk, assembled to give the impression that it was still of use, awaited their purpose. There was an element of seediness that did not feature in my memory of Japan: paint peeled from wooden walls and bald light globes had been left burning after midday. In the alleys behind restaurants, I was met with cardboard boxes, broken brooms and wooden pallets, rusty machinery and empty cans of cooking oil. The rain blurred the scenes without actually softening them, making greyer what was already dismal.

  I told myself not to try to make sense of the maze. Tomorrow I would find my way to the gallery where I would be working and meet Kenzo-san, its owner, and all would be well if I believed all would be well. At the same time I thought, with naïveté or impatience, that I had to have a plan, that aimlessness would prevent me connecting to Koenji.

  Before I left Osaka, Quentin studied my face as if trying to read its meaning. "You should have a Japanese name,” he told me. "Kat-san isn’t so easy to say.”

  To me it didn’t seem as difficult as "Kassorin-san,” but I already had thought of a name that sounded appropriately Japanese. "What about Katsu?” I asked. "It’s a mixture of my first and second names: Kathryn Susannah.”

  Quentin shook his head. "No. It will make people think of tonkatsu (deep-fried pork). They’ll think it’s strange. Why not choose something that represents you—a tree, or an animal?”

  Quentin’s advice may have worked admirably for him in his various Japanese incarnations, but has never yielded the same results for me. I was then, and remain, "Kassorin-san,” a woman who navigates her own way. On that first afternoon in Koenji, I continued to walk until I at last saw something that indicated my flat was not far off: a secondhand bookshop I never have learned the name of, though I did eventually begin to buy books there that I hope to read, one day, with ease. The bookshop is recognisable during the day by its awning of green-and-white stripes, at night, by its security doors. Each of the three doors is painted with a face: one with running mascara and a Clara Bow hairdo, one with a sweat-beaded forehead and a guilty laugh, the last with an angry eye and an imperious-looking nose.

  These faces, which remain guarding the bookshop until 11:00 am each day, signal more than my location—they are signposts for my mood. Depending on whether my mind is full or empty as I walk past on my way to the gallery or language lessons or the house of a friend, I either ignore or sympathize with whatever I can read in their expressions: their moods always change. It seems charmingly whimsical to write that these faces were my first friends, though when I realised this, I knew it was time to stop observing and start finding my community in Koenji.

  II. Kindred

  If, during the day, you fit the streets indelicately

  and your shadow mattes the lustre of shop-shells,

  follow, at night, the curve upstairs.

  For those belonging to it, home does not float

  but is part of the scene for consumption.

  Tokyo had lost its delightfulness. It seemed to be less of a city than a train-station-shopping-mall hybrid of concrete-cold efficiency. In Koenji the bustle had a softer edge, but people still moved in and out of their doors, through the streets, enclosed. Their enclosures and yours coexisted without colliding. People were often kind when it was really necessary to step outside of their allocated spaces, but until those times there were few nods, few smiles, only a lot of glances (discreet, to be sure, but noticeable) at anything unusual. Everything that made up a comfortable life was in place, except for the unpredictable pleasure of spont
aneity. It was my task as the outsider to unfurl, to begin reaching out.

  In a society where every door I enter seems to shut in a private clubroom, I have learned that there are always people who quickly calculate that you are worthwhile and allow you access; with this first step over the threshold begins the faint glow of a polite but unwavering connection. This I know because it happened with Kenzo-san, my jou-shi (boss), and his wife Reiko-san. My first and oldest friends, they invited me to their home within a week of my arrival in Tokyo and said, "Come again,” with exactly that expectation. The crafting of the perfect moment is significant in the lore of Japanese hospitality, but as an outsider, I often upset this harmonious balance with a second entrance or invitation of my own.

  Kenzo-san and Reiko-san not only accepted my hospitality but, after our second dinner together, introduced me to the Flamingo. Where you drink in Japan is an important signifier of belonging and identity, though it’s not such an easy process to find a kindred resting place. The entrance of the Flamingo is marked by three beach pebbles lying at the bottom of a narrow flight of stairs. If you know enough to know about what lies at the top, that detail is your passport. The walls, floors, and shelves are inlaid with wood that makes the bar resemble a sauna. Laid over that are the small touches of personality that make the Flamingo like no other place: the candle holders and Polaroid snapshots crowding the bar, the paper flower taped to the outstretched hand of a plastic marathon runner. Plants flourish at the window, reminding me of my grandmother’s sitting room in Göteborg, though she never had fairy lights framing her panes. The decor of the Flamingo has a quirky daintiness rather like its specialty cocktail—a mixture of iced oolong tea and cherry liqueur—and is quintessentially Japanese even under its European influence. This combination creates the atmosphere of a salon, with the Flamingo attracting writers who leave behind copies of their books and articles and painters who donate miniature work to the barman, Ryo-san, a local celebrity who fronted a Koenji punk band in the 1980s. It was at the Flamingo that I met Kentaro-san, a retired book publisher, who joined me on a bar-hop of the district and shared the lovely, austere photographs he takes at his leisure—moving pictures of lace curtains in the wind, the tails of dogs, human forms shot through textured glass.