Janice Lee - The Expatriates

MERCY SITS in the restaurant, sipping coffee. She had actually had something to do today. She remembered when she got up from bed to fix the salad she had been thinking about. On her computer, a reminder popped up: “Lunch with Sandra Parnells, Conrad hotel.”

Mercy avoids old friends, as they’re too concerned about her, or not concerned enough, and she can’t abide either. But this was a complete stranger, a friend of a friend, who e-mailed her a few days ago as she was new in town — a woman who followed her husband to Hong Kong and is now looking for a job. Pleasant enough, but Mercy watched the woman slowly realize that Mercy is not someone who is going to be helpful or useful or anything. Her face recalibrated; she was waiting for the lunch to end. So Mercy helped her out: She said she had to run, let Sandra pay for the salad Mercy had picked at, and then watched her leave.

Now she is sitting in the hotel lobby restaurant, nursing a coffee, loath to return to her rabbit warren of an apartment. When she does come out and see people, the outside world, it seems unbearably bright for the first fifteen minutes, and then she adjusts and can imagine herself living again. But this is dangerous to do too often, to imagine things changing. Suddenly she recognizes someone from across the room. He is a Chinese boy to whom she never spoke in college. He didn’t run in her crowd, was a bit FOB — fresh off the boat, as the immigrants call one another — but they had a few classes together. Nerdy, but would be handsome if only someone taught him how to dress. She can tell he recognizes her by the way he keeps looking over.

Finally he stops on his way out. He is tall, wears a double-breasted navy suit with a purple tie. Terrible, cheap shoes. He has a backpack. Still nerdy.

“Columbia, right?” His voice still carries a slight Chinese accent.

She nods.

“You had an interesting name. Not the usual Asian name…”

“I still have it,” she says. “Mercy. You’re…”

“Charlie,” he says. “Charlie Leung. I work here in Hong Kong. You live here now?”

“For a couple years.”

“What do you do?”

She hesitates. He sees it, rescues her. “Sorry, I shouldn’t ask.”

“No, it’s okay,” she says. But then can’t think of what to say.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” he says.

“Yes.” She waits, but he bows a little bow, formal, how odd, and turns to leave.

She has never seen him around in Hong Kong, which means that he must not go to the same places she and her friends do. Maybe more of a local. Hong Kong is so small that if you go out enough, you will run into every expat at some point in the same five restaurants that people frequent. The restaurants change, but the scene never does.

Next table over is a man at lunch with a redheaded woman, a business lunch that has seemingly stretched into something longer and more meaningful.

“I’m in a bit of a pickle,” the woman says cheerfully, sipping her coffee, and Mercy can almost see the man’s face soften, fall in love. It seems so easy, so ubiquitously available: love and happiness. It happens every day. Later she will see the man with his wife, a different woman, and realize, with a sense of relief that is almost palpable, that the world is complicated indeed. That everyone has secrets and despair and romance in them. It makes her feel better.

Another man comes and sits down at the bar and orders a martini. He is in a suit but somehow looks louche. Three thirty now, when all the responsible work people have long ago gone back to the office and the stragglers are the housewives who have had a second or third glass of wine, the freelancers who have no meetings, nowhere else to be. A man in a suit at the bar at three o’clock is a man to avoid.

He scans the room; his eyes alight on Mercy.

“Hi there,” he says. “Do you want a drink?”

Of course she says yes. Of course she sits down with him. She may not eat, but she drinks. Falling into another bad decision. It feels like coming home.

Men. Men are a disaster for her.

“You are a pig,” she said to one obnoxious man at a bar who had propositioned her in a particularly crude way.

“And you are a chick who loves bacon,” he said back. And she laughed, because she thought it was actually a pretty funny thing to say, and then she spent the night with him, which was a pretty stupid thing to do. She sees him sometimes in Central during the day and ducks her head or goes into a shop to avoid him. He never seems to see her. She doesn’t know if it would be worse if he pretended not to know her or actually didn’t remember her. Or if he tried to be nice.

Another guy once said, nodding toward his beer, “Do you know how to take the head off the foam?”

“No,” she said.

He swirled a finger around his ear and stuck it in the white foam. It dissolved instantly. He grinned.

“Am I supposed to be charmed?” she said. “Impressed?”

“The oil in the earwax makes it go away,” he said.

She got up and left.

But all too often, she didn’t.

Even when she was younger, she always liked the wrong men. In high school, all her crushes turned out to be gay or those boys who were unattainable. The one guy at college she had really, really been into had lately been in the news for being fired for writing an incredibly misogynistic e-mail, about his colleagues at the New York investment bank where he worked, that had gone viral. All this makes her very uncertain about her judgment.

She doesn’t understand why men seem to treat her as if she doesn’t matter, as if she’s someone to spend a few hours with. All around her, she sees her friends in relationships; boyfriends who call to see what the agenda is for the weekend, who plan trips, who want to get married. She meets the guy at the bar who wants to have sex for a few weeks.

And so, today, she sits down with David and proceeds to get very, very drunk.

They sit so long, they see a couple come in to have an early dinner with their three children. They look Indonesian or Malaysian, and the children range from five to ten or so. They have three maids trailing them, in matching uniforms. The mother, in head-to-toe designer wear of the most glittery kind, and the father, in a shiny Adidas tracksuit, sit down and both bring out their phones and start tapping on them. The five-year-old boy plays on an iPad that one of the maids holds up for him, like a human tripod. Another maid massages hand cream onto the hands of the middle girl. The maids stand up, as if they are not allowed to sit. Everyone in the restaurant is staring at them.

“Unbelievable,” says Mercy.

“Happens all the time in this part of the world,” David says.

They have ascertained that they are both American, both sarcastic, both a little bit bitter. She notices the ring on his finger but is careful not to ask. Nothing inappropriate has happened. They are just two strangers having a drink in the afternoon. It makes her feel grown up, this possibility of a married man, an opening into a world she has never contemplated before. They segue into flirtatious back-and-forth.

“Like, really, what kind of name is Tucker?” she asks. “Or Chet? Only white people have those names.”

“Korean names are odd too, like Yumi or Yuri.”

“Those are Japanese names,” she says.

“I knew a Korean girl named Yuri!” he says triumphantly.

“I’m sure you did,” she says drily.

“Hey, now,” he says.

“Hey, now,” she repeats, mocking him.

“Now you’ve hurt my feelings,” he says. “Don’t you feel bad?”