Janice Lee: The Expatriates

“I understand everything, but talking is hard. I grew up in Queens.”

“Have you gone to Korea while you’ve lived here? It’s so close.”

“Not yet,” said Mercy. “Soon.”

“I’ll take the both of you,” said Barbara. “It is so wonderful now, you cannot imagine. I grew up there, and it is so changed now!”

“We’re going soon,” Margaret said. “For school fall break, and Clarke needs to go see the office there.”

The conversation fizzed on in the hot summer sun. Mercy drank cold beer and listened in on the exchanges. She heard a woman slip up and say something about a helper’s “owners,” instead of “employers.” Then her husband, embarrassed, made things worse by trying to make it academic, saying that throughout history, humans have always enslaved other humans. There was a pause after that statement. Then, being adults, they moved on. Mercy, being not quite so adult, meditated on it for a while, realizing that she would never view that woman in the same way again when she ran into her at the prepared-food counter at Oliver’s or in the taxi queue in Central.

Jenny’s husband, Bill, noticed that she wasn’t speaking and kindly tried to pull her into conversation. He was interested in shamanism, he told her, having studied anthropology in university. He was telling her about shamanism and the place it had in Korean culture. “Why is it,” she said with a smile, “that it’s always the white person telling the Asian person about their culture?”

When his smile faltered, she persisted.

“No, really,” she said. “It’s funny, and I don’t mean to be obnoxious, but haven’t you noticed?”

“Not really,” he said.

“I think it’s because of the study of anthropology,” she said. “It’s a Western construct.”

As she spoke she knew she was off-putting to him, that she could not engage in the simple interchange most people lived and died by, that the casual, nonmomentous observations were anathema to her. She could also tell, as if she were looking from high above, that her approach was detrimental to her, but she couldn’t help herself.

When she’d said this to a friend, he’d said, “Self-important much?”

But she couldn’t change. She couldn’t talk to people like they expected to be talked to.

“So what do you do, Bill?” she asked.

“I’m a lawyer,” he said. There was a brief silence. “And you?”

“I’m a friend of Barbara’s,” she said meaninglessly. “Oh, and I do a couple of things. I used to write for City Magazine , before it closed down, did some restaurant and music reviews, then I was the hostess for Il Dolce for a while, and now I’m looking…” She trailed off.

“How interesting,” he said. “That must be really fun. You get to go out for a living, right?”

“I guess.”

Barbara rescued her with a request for her to open another bottle of wine.

There were times when you were at odds with yourself, when you couldn’t carry on a conversation or when nothing you said came out right. This was one of those times, she told herself as she wedged the corkscrew in.

She opened the wine, got up, sat down next to Margaret, and asked her when she wanted her to come over and babysit her kids.

Then later, on the boat ride back, when everyone was on the top deck, wiped from the sun and the long day and the beer, she emerged from the bathroom to find the slavery-remarking man creepily, drunkenly waiting for her, then grabbing her butt and saying, “Your ass is so tight.” She looked at him and pushed past. She’d given up wondering what vibe she gave off so men think it’s okay to do that to her, but she knew she was always going to be blamed. That was her life.

IT ALL HAPPENED because they had planned a trip to Korea that year. For the kids’ fall break, and to meet some of her father’s relatives for the first time, and also for Clarke to see some of his people in Korea. He told her she was expected to come to a lot of these lunches and dinners, and she was wondering what to do with the children. She didn’t really trust hotel babysitters and had been told that most of them wouldn’t speak fluent English and wouldn’t know what to do in an emergency.

And then she met Mercy on the boat trip.

It seemed incredibly extravagant to bring a babysitter on a family trip, but she was finding that nothing in Hong Kong seemed extravagant. No one cared; that was the other thing. Raising her children in California, she and her fellow new moms had discussed ad infinitum how long to nurse, why women would hire nannies when they were at home, or why children needed their mothers around them all the time, but here those sorts of conversations tended to go nowhere, and women looked blank. She was learning that everything was contextual. Here, as in most of the world outside America, there was widely available help for the more privileged — and mostly every expatriate she knew was privileged — and those sorts of discussions were not interesting, like talking about sliced bread, because it was so taken for granted. It had taken her a while, but now she didn’t feel guilty for having a girls’ dinner with Daisy’s class moms once a week, or going out for dinner with Clarke instead of doing a family meal.

The travel was one of the reasons they had come, after all. To get their kids more international exposure, in an increasingly global society. The Christmas before, they had gone to India, to Rajasthan. There, at the maharajah’s palace in Jaipur, they saw a pair of enormous silver urns, which a former prince had used to transport his own water when he sailed across the ocean to attend the wedding of the queen of England. (He had never drunk or bathed in anything but the water from his beloved Ganges.) Later that day, the children perked up when they went to the firearms section of the museum. It had weapons to crush an enemy’s skull, huge poles with spiky iron heads, giant, weighty swords, an archery set. The dusty museum dwelled in shades of ochre and tan, the dust motes floating slowly in the refracted sunlight through the high windows. Philip stood in front of a scratched glass case and read “blunderbuss” from a label about a bronze weapon that Indian soldiers had used — a magical moment when she heard him utter the word and then recollected the term from some childhood book, perhaps Lewis Carroll? “Blunderbuss” echoing through the past and into the present, where they stood, the Reades, with their three children, and they went through the halls, looking at all the artifacts and clothes, including a pair of pants six feet wide for a particularly fat maharajah. Then they went out into the courtyard, none of the children complaining, with this new knowledge inside them, with the bright sunshine, a sun that had looked down on them in California, in Hong Kong, and now in India, and G ran into a flock of birds and they lifted off, flapping their wings, with him behind, mouth open with happiness. She loved him so much, this little man, with his small shoulders and tiny elbows and feet, his stomach still jutting out in the way of toddlers. Her son looked up in wonder at the life swirling and lifting around him, and she remembered thinking, This is life, too good to be true.

Margaret knows now that is not true. She knows that those moments are all false. They are just harbingers of disaster, as if they are there to remind you of all that you have to lose.

Mercy had seemed perfect. Young, but not too young to be responsible. A college graduate with a flexible job. Margaret hesitated to bring it up, not wanting to offend, but Mercy leapt at the opportunity.

“You’ll have to share a room with the children,” she said, but Mercy didn’t care.

“I love to travel!” she said. “And I haven’t been to Seoul since I was a baby. I’m sure I’ll have the chance to take great photographs. I’ve been learning how to shoot.”