Janice Lee - The Expatriates

She is not beautiful; she is sophisticated looking, with good bones, matte skin, perfectly arched eyebrows, long, thin fingers that are always buffed and filed, nothing as vulgar as nail polish. “I do think all those women who spend all that time getting manicures are insane,” she once said to Hilary, who burst out laughing. “But you spend so much time on grooming!” she said. “Your haircuts, your clothes, tailoring your clothes.”

Olivia just blinked, unmoving. “I do not,” she said simply. “That is different.”

Hilary admires her a great deal. Olivia’s very presence seems to suggest that alternatives exist.

“So I went to Burberry this morning because I had to pick up something that had been altered, and a shopgirl was there who used to help me at another boutique — you know the salesgirls move around a lot. She had just done a stint over at Tsim Sha Tsui at the Louis Vuitton, and she told me the most screamingly funny stories!”

This was another Hong Kong peculiarity. Olivia is Chinese, local-born and bred, went to a Cantonese girls’ school and then to the American school before college in California with Hilary. Yet she has English mannerisms and speech.

“Like?”

“You know, no one we know ever shops over there, it’s all for the mainland people. Have you ever been over there? Nathan Road, Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, with all the big luxury boutiques?”

“No, I barely buy that stuff over here.”

“But she said it’s like a zoo. There are children having tantrums, eating McDonald’s, licking the mirrors! She said once she went in to clean a dressing room and someone had peed on the floor! Peed! They’re really animals!”

Hong Kong people are like the landed gentry in England, beset by pesky, redolent immigrants, Hilary thinks. People like Olivia are disdainful of their mainland counterparts, who sweep over the border in overwhelming numbers with their fat wallets and arriviste ways. She makes fun of how they buy up baby formula and Ferrero Rocher in enormous quantities — these have become currency in the mainland for some reason — and thinks of them as not quite people.

But it seems Olivia wants to talk to her about something else.

“So I wanted to ask you something,” she says, bringing the cup of tea up to her lips.

“What?” Hilary asks.

Olivia puts the cup down.

“If you knew something about a friend, something that was important, would you tell her, even though it might hurt her?”

Hilary looks at her. Olivia is fiddling now with the fork, unable to look up. It is odd to see the unflappable Olivia visibly nervous.

“What kind of thing?” she says slowly.

“You know, important stuff. Stuff that might change their lives.”

“Is it,” Hilary says slowly, “to do with me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” Hilary says. “I don’t know.”

There is a pause.

“I think you should know,” Olivia says gently.

Hilary looks away, at the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. She makes a decision and looks up at the kind eyes of her friend.

“Not today, please,” she says, making the kind of statement that makes her wonder if she knows who she is anymore. “I can’t hear anything life-changing today. I have a dinner party tonight.”

When she gets back home, the salad she somehow managed to eat a jumble in her stomach and mind, Julian is gone, and Puri is furiously chopping something in the kitchen, and the table is already set, ready for the caterer. She is having a dinner party, but she doesn’t really have anything to do. She thinks of the tired jokes that Hong Kong housewives make, when complimented on their food at dinner parties: “Thank you, it’s homemade — meaning made in my house,” or “Thank you, I’m a great supervisor.”

She wants a drink, but it’s only three in the afternoon. Puri is in the kitchen, so she goes in and makes herself a vodka tonic, trying to seem like it’s perfectly normal to mix yourself a cocktail in the afternoon.

The fact is, the helpers see everything. They see the fights, they see the messiness. They hear the arguments, are witness to the silent, toxic aftermath as they pour the coffee and clear the breakfast plates. They know which vase got thrown, because they clean it up in the morning. They know when sir gets a call from a strange woman with an unknown, hesitant voice, or comes in at 3:00 a.m. when the ma’am is in America, or when the teenage children throw a party when their parents are out of town and hand them $500 to “clean up” and keep their mouth shut. They know so much.

So why does she care? Hilary ponders this as she goes to her desk and takes her first sip. Ah, that warm thrum of the alcohol traveling down your body and hitting your stomach. She doesn’t care so much, it’s just that you can’t walk around naked or eat peanut butter standing in front of the fridge in front of someone who’s not your family. That’s the price you pay for having live-in help. Boo hoo. Poor her.

Hilary sips at her drink and wonders how many calories she is taking in. It’s not the alcohol she’s worried about: It’s that she is always looser, more lenient with herself after a few drinks. A small bag of potato chips, a slice of cake out of the fridge. It all adds up.

Her body, her body, her body. This is what she thinks about at night, lying on the sheets, after David has gone to sleep and she can hear him breathing. She imagines her old fat distributed uncomfortably over her, lying, puddlelike, on her bones.

She is thin now, but in an unnatural way, with pudgy arms and thighs that would not slim down no matter what she did. But she has kept off the weight for thirty years, something her mother praised her for. After her childhood episode with being the fat girl, she made herself be uninterested in food. Ate to live, didn’t live to eat. Nothing tastes as good as thin feels — isn’t that what the ads said? David once came across photos of her as a child, and he couldn’t believe how big she had been, even though she had been a little girl and still cute, though she could tell he didn’t think so. In college, she read a story by Andre Dubus about a fat girl who lost weight, got married to someone who worked for her father, and got fat again, and then the husband found her disgusting. She read it fast, furious, her face hot. She threw it down as soon as she finished, as if it were pornographic. In class, she didn’t participate in the discussion, as if to do so would let others see what she had been. She saw herself in that story but didn’t like to think about what that meant. Of course, she would never let herself get fat again.

The thing was, she and David had never fit. They were mismatched. She had never known why he asked her out. When she saw photographs of his ex-girlfriends, they were sharp-cheeked blondes with shallow blue eyes, mean-looking brunettes in small, tight dresses. She asked him once, early on in their relationship, “Am I a different kind of girl for you?” and he replied, not without affection, “You’re the kind of girl I marry.”

He was handsome, in a seamless sort of way, especially in a suit. He was better looking than most of the other guys she had dated. She had not had a very serious boyfriend before him. Everything had just fallen into place. Right time, right guy, right age. And now they have been married for ten years.

They are having the dinner tonight for a new person at David’s firm, someone who just made partner in San Francisco and then was relocated here. David told her that the promotion had been contingent on the understanding that the man relocate his family to Hong Kong for at least three years. Having been here so long, Hilary doesn’t understand why anyone is reluctant to come to Hong Kong, with all its advantages. There’s also an old friend of David’s, from California, who is passing through with his wife, another couple from Tai Tam, and the Reades. A comfortable mix of people.