Janice Lee - The Expatriates

She went to the bathroom, an institutional affair that smelled strongly of bleach and urine, and closed the stall door. When she pulled down her pants, they were stained with blood. Her period, again. The earthy, rich smell rose and sickened her. Her stomach dropped.

She sat in that stall, her head in her hands, for ten minutes, listening to people come in, urinate, pull on the toilet paper, flush, wash their hands — the mundane sounds of the lavatory. She breathed carefully, modulating the sound so that people knew someone else was there but not so loud as to disturb them. Someone from the tour came in to check on her, and she said to go on without her, she would find them.

She looked at her bloody underwear. This had to be a sign, she told herself. Just like the signs other people are always going on about of when they recognized their child. Getting your period in an orphanage had to be a sign.

She had taken a class in college about feminism and medicine. In it, she learned that the whole terminology around menstruation — a failure to conceive, a shedding of the lining — was negative and misogynistic and old-fashioned, teaching women that their sole purpose in life was to have children. The lining of the uterus was not shed; it was cleansing itself to make way for a new lining. Back then, so far away from the idea of having children, the whole premise had seemed impossibly academic and precious. Now she wants to find that book again and read it. She wants to find a way to redefine what is happening to her, to own it.

And then she saw Julian.

Of course, his name was not Julian then. She decided to call him Julian after all the arrangements had been made. That seemed an enormous encroachment into his life, already, naming him.

The group went on from the child-care center to what was called a group home, a smaller institution that housed only eight boys. Here, their guide explained, they had a smaller setting. The government outsourced child care, so children would end up in a child-care center, a group home, or foster care.

Julian was doing homework in a room with older kids. He stood out because he was not Chinese but, instead, that beautiful brown mix. She tried to talk to him, and the guide told her that he was wonderful at music. Sick with the knowledge that she was not pregnant, she rushed into something impulsive. “I’ll find him a piano teacher,” she said. Belle Liu nearly had a conniption, what with all the regulations that would violate, but Hilary simply kept talking, and the kindhearted woman finally could not bear to see Julian miss a chance at something he would never otherwise get.

“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “I don’t know.”

And she didn’t say anything more, and Hilary knew to just shut up and come back and do it later. Julian’s paperwork had recently come through — a small miracle, the woman said — and he had been released into the adoption pool, but his chances for adoption were close to nil because of his age and because of his mixed race. Normally-developing babies had a 100 percent chance of being adopted if their paperwork was done, but after a year or two, the children’s chances dropped steeply. Julian went to school near the group home and walked there and back. He had already started on the life he would lead if no one were to intervene.

He has been coming to her house for just a month. She usually picks him up early, so that they can have a snack. The first time, she made him lasagna herself, Puri clucking over the mess Hilary made in her own unfamiliar kitchen, spilling tomato sauce on the countertop, opening every cupboard door in search of the Pyrex pan. But he barely ate it, pushing it around the plate until it became a huge, gloppy mess that looked unappetizing even to Hilary.

Puri stood over him with a satisfied expression on her face. The ma’am was not supposed to go in the kitchen. That was her domain.

“ Sik mae? ” Puri asked him, motioning to her lips with an imaginary spoon. She spoke some Cantonese, from her time with a local Chinese family.

“ Chow faan ,” he said. He liked fried rice. Even Hilary knew what that was.

So now Puri makes him the food he likes, that she knows how to make from her previous job. She makes pork fried rice, spring rolls with shredded carrots and turnips, vinegary chicken wings; once she made an entire steamed fish with head on. The house smells like a Chinese restaurant on Julian’s days, all soy sauce and deep-fried Mazola, but she does not say anything, because he devours the food while Puri looks on, gratified. This is a child who does not know what to do with a carrot stick, or celery filled with peanut butter, or a cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich. She might as well give him hay.

Hilary usually sits opposite him, always, stunned by the silence in her, unable to say anything but the most cursory social greeting. He has to learn English, she says to herself, he has to learn English. But who will teach him? She has given him an English name. What next? What next? Isn’t there some sort of manual?

But he doesn’t make it easy either. He is usually reserved, but sometimes, suddenly, clownishly friendly, as if the women at the group home have told him he has to close the deal, although she knows that must just be her own projection. She does not know how to handle him when he is like that; she is too close to his desperation and confusion and is overwhelmed. But she does not even know if it is desperation that drives him. She has no way to read what he thinks, what he feels. She has nothing in common with him except what she has the will to build, and that will, it seems, is not strong enough.

This complete flouting of all common adoption wisdom — that she is allowed to take a child home, a “test-drive” she thinks of it sometimes, the thought bubbling up in her head before she can suppress it with horror — is an incredible, under-the-table thing that has somehow happened because everything is personal and the head of the AWA really, really likes her because they went to the same university and so she vouched for Hilary to the department head, whom she has known for sixteen years. It is terrible, it is scandalous, and yet Hilary cannot come to a decision. She can tell herself that she is giving her time to a child who needs it, a volunteer sort of thing, and that she doesn’t have to go the whole way.

It is also, she tells herself, because she finds herself already too surrounded by people who depend on her. Given fifteen minutes in the same room, Puri will tell her of her family in the Philippines and their various medical ailments, their debts, their divorces, all of which Puri — and, by implication, Hilary — is responsible for. Puri will weep and all but rend her clothes. Their lives in that country are operatic: epic tales of affairs and jail time and abandoned children and mistresses and sickness and thirteen-hour bus rides. Hilary adjusts her bangles and makes sympathetic noises, but she cannot understand what Puri is talking about. She pays Puri triple the usual rate and hopes that recuses her from further responsibility. Puri is short, squat, with a farmer’s build. She is not honest, but she is clever, and from what the expatriate women say, you cannot have both.

Puri bangs around when Hilary is in the kitchen, asks loudly what she is looking for. She cannot stand to have intruders on her territory. She inhales sharply over Hilary’s cooking, signaling her complete disbelief that someone can have so few skills. The ma’am is not supposed to cook.

And Sam. Sam, the driver. Sam is a trial: proud and angry and a ruinously bad driver. He has dented their car twice, parking, and rear-ended someone at a red light. But she cannot fire him. He has not done anything really bad, she tells David, who shakes his head at her indecision. If I ran my office the way you run this house, he says before he leaves for the morning. The statement lingers. What would happen? she thinks. What would happen?