The Expatriates (24 page)

S
HE
’
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.

T
HEY
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.

O
LIVIA
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.

T
HE
KITCHEN
is so hot she feels she’s about to faint. Her mother sees this and hurries over.

“Do you need to sit down?” she asks.

“No, I’ll be okay,” she says.

“Get out of the kitchen, too hot!” her mother scolds, then hands her a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Pass these if you are okay.”

Mercy emerges out of the heat into a cool, temperature-controlled wonderland. Is there anything more than this party, right here, right now, that decisively underscores her jaundiced understanding of the world? There are the servers and the served. She knows this so well. As a waitress at her aunt’s restaurant, in America, in an immigrant neighborhood, it was less stark, but here, oh, a wide, wide chasm divides the two. She thought an Ivy degree would help her bridge it, but here she is, in black pants and a white shirt, hair pulled back, wandering among the privileged, offering them a small, exquisite taste of cheese or prosciutto, being rebuffed as the women all give a slight shake of their head when she approaches, the men more welcoming, interested in her wares, as she proffers the tray.

She remembers the pastor at church laughing at her teenage self listening to Janis Joplin, the tinny music coming out of the speakers. “You want Mercedes, yes?” he asked. “Don’t ask the Lord. You marry rich man!” Ever the callow teenager, she tried to explain to this sixty-year-old Korean man that Joplin was counterculture, singing about materialism, but he just laughed and joked that she had to be pretty to catch a good man.

It had been so close. She had almost gotten there. Charlie would have brought her to a party like this in ten years. She would have a modest diamond ring, a designer bag, a haircut from a junior stylist at an expensive salon—hard-won prizes but hers. David lives in this world, she’s sure. Most of her friends are on a sure route to this place, this destination. The women are coiffed, their hair blown into silky waves. Their outfits are sparkly and shimmery; their skin is moist and toned. They radiate well-being and prosperity, the knowledge that someone cares about them enough to take care of them while they take care of the family. She doesn’t want this exactly—she’s never been purely materialistic, and money has never been her goal—but she wants something like it, maybe just an assurance that she won’t fall by the wayside, that she won’t become invisible.

She crosses the room, going from cluster to cluster, casting an anthropological eye on the crowd. Mostly American, 85 percent white, expats, most of whom will be here for less than ten years. Still, while they are here, Hong Kong is their oyster. She hears snatches of conversation about the best resort in Hoi An, the best airline to fly to Dubai, how someone had to fire her second helper for theft. These conversations are light and airy, buoyed by an unassailable sense of their place in the world, assured, secure in their corporate jobs and housing allowances.

A woman says loudly to her, “May I have a glass of sparkling water, please?” Mercy can tell that the woman thinks she’s a local who can’t speak English, and is speaking loudly and slowly so Mercy can decipher the foreign words. She tamps down the urge to reply, merely nods her head.

In the idealistic confines of college, she thought that all people had the same opportunities, but to be here, one of a throng of Asian servers serving a bunch of white people, is severely messing with her head. She knows that it’s not the case, that in the media everyone is talking about Asian money and power and that everyone is rushing to get a piece, but today, this hour, this minute, when she has on a waiter outfit, with
her bastard baby in her belly, and she’s serving goat cheese puffs to some indifferent blonde from Charlottesville, she feels so despairing she thinks, why is she even considering bringing another girl into this world? For she knows her baby is a girl. She just knows. How could it not be? Given the arc of her mother and Mercy, of course she’s going to have another luckless female. Isn’t that some Korean folktale? To bring into the world another girl to suffer, carry on the story?

She’s noticed too how she can tell that some women have only sons and some have only daughters. The women with boys are rangy and attractive, as if all that exposure to testosterone has honed them into a lithe, goddesslike receptacle for male worship. Women with girls look a little more beleaguered, as if already psychologically worn away. It’s clear to Mercy, in the unspoken way in which some truths reveal themselves, that this girl will be her only child, another reason she’s determined to keep it.

Crossing the room, she sees the banner for the first time.
HAPPY 50TH, CLARKE!

An electric jolt goes through her body. Jesus.

She almost drops the tray.

It can’t be.

Hong Kong is small, but it can’t be that small. In the kitchen, no one mentioned the party’s hosts. Her mother just said it was an American’s fiftieth birthday and marveled at how dressed up the women were. She keeps walking, numbly, because she doesn’t know what else to do, but now all the groups of people seem menacing, as if they might house one of the Reades, which they probably do. Her head expands in and out. White lights press in on her temples.

Of course, Hong Kong can be this small. For someone like her, with an excellent memory for faces and names, Hong Kong can be dizzying and claustrophobic. She will read about someone in
Time Out
or the
South China Morning Post
and meet them the next week or see them going up the escalator at the Landmark. It is a small, small pond.

Then, there, she spots a Reade. Philip, the middle child. He doesn’t
see her, because he’s sitting down, playing with an iPad. She walks on. Again. There’s Daisy. She scans the room. And there’s Margaret.

Mercy retreats into a dark corner, puts the tray down and tries to calm the pounding of her heart, which threatens to beat right out of her chest. She puts her right hand on her chest to try to calm it.

Where is the other? Where is the other? Her mind repeats this phrase like an insane refrain. She is the other. She is the one who caused the injury, not the injured. She is the invisible. She’s the one not mentioned in the magazine pieces and newspaper articles. She is the unforgiven, the unforgivable.

Mercy sinks down into a crouch. She hides.