Janice Lee - The Expatriates

Hilary and her friends have all sat next to a sheepish father introducing his children to his sexy young fiancée in the safe, public, but judgmental environment of a restaurant. He is worried, solicitous of both his children and the woman but usually more of the latter. He is also proud and newly virile. He pulls out the woman’s chair, asks if she likes her food, hands her her dropped napkin as if demonstrating to the children that this is the proper way to treat the new person who has ripped their lives apart. Sometimes the woman is nervous, smiling too much and asking loudly about what the children like to do and saying how she would love to do it with them. Other times the woman is removed, arms crossed, sunglasses, skimpy dress. They’d better learn, these brats, that he belongs to me now. This is what I have to offer. You can’t compete. This kind of woman is usually very young and attractive and so very foolish. She thinks that the battle is a matter of weeks or months and that a victory is a victory forever. If the children are adolescent, the girls are defiant and silent, the boys more approachable. The young ones are heartbreaking, that is all. If you were to feel bad for the man, and the expatriate housewife usually emphatically does not, you would feel bad only because you would know that he knew, on some level, what he was doing to his children.

Of course, there are always two sides to every story. Sometimes the woman who’s been left is crazy, or horrible, or mean, and everyone understands why. But it does seem that she is always left worse off and the man just starts his life anew, with a younger model of a wife, sometimes a slightly smaller apartment, but that his new life pretty quickly looks like his old one. While the woman often starts working again, depending on what kind of financial arrangement they’ve come to, and has the kids and her work, and usually soon comes to look harried and gray-haired, so that when her ex-husband comes to pick up the kids, he can see the stark contrast between what he’s left and what he has now and congratulates himself that he’s made the right decision. To add insult to injury, in his fervor to not mess things up again — because it was so painful and he never wants to go through that again or put anyone else through it again — when he has more children, he vows to really do things right this time, so he pitches in to an unimaginable extent, does more with the kids, since he was always working before and now he knows that he needs more work/life balance, so the new family gets the benefit of this new and improved man, and the old family gets to see it all. It’s terrible.

In the eight years she’s lived in Hong Kong, Hilary has seen this happen to at least ten women she knew pretty well. She counts them on her fingers: Manda King, Tara Connelly, Kathleen Li, Padma Singh, Sheryl Wu, Jenny Harrison, Lorraine Greenspan… there are more, but she can’t think of them. A ghostly procession of marital destruction. Of course, marriages break up back home as well, but because Hong Kong is such a fishbowl, you view the carnage from a front-row seat. There’s Jim with the new wife at the American Club! There’s poor Sylvia waiting for the elevator at her new office with a lunch box — she had to take a job and can’t afford to eat lunch out anymore. Some women move back home, but that’s a struggle, because the husband won’t usually let them take their children so far away. Some enter into the strange netherworld of clubs and unsavory older men, who usually prefer their women younger but will entertain an older one the later the hour. Some migrate to the outlying islands, to Truman Show —like Discovery Bay or hippie Lantau, and change accordingly.

Once Hilary was approached by a heavyset woman with long, frizzy hair at IFC Mall. “Hilary!” the woman trilled, happy to see her.

“Hi,” Hilary said, reflexively.

The woman understood but was still taken aback. “I look different,” she said sheepishly. “I’ve gained some weight.”

And then the woman’s face shifted, and Hilary recognized a vestige of Tammy from the tennis team. She had been the captain of the A team, a five-year veteran of Hong Kong, when the newly arrived Hilary first met her. She had her husband, Garth, and two children, Mark and Melissa. Two years later, it turned out that Garth had another family in Shenzhen, the mainland city that neighbored Hong Kong, with a former club hostess, who had borne him two additional children, and that he was living a double life, shuttling between the two on his commute from Hong Kong to China. Mainland women had the reputation of doing anything to secure their futures and to have the opportunity to marry an American and move to Hong Kong or even — oh, the glory! — to the United States. The whole affair came out when the doorman of the apartment building Tammy lived in rang up to say there was a Miss Chan there to see Mrs. Brodie. Tammy, not expecting anyone but used to deliveries, was going through her e-mail when their helper, Gina, came to the bedroom saying that the woman was asking to see her.

She emerged to see a pretty young Chinese woman in her twenties with a fierce look on her face. She was wearing red plastic shoes and a fake Hermès scarf. She had come on the train from Lo Wu, then the MTR to Admiralty, and then a taxi to the South Side. Gina later told her helper friends, who told their employers, that the girl showed Tammy pictures of Garth with her and their children, in their apartment and at restaurants in Shenzhen, and demanded that she be able to move to Hong Kong. It seemed that Garth had been putting her off, and she was sick of it. She had been waiting for three years, and she wanted her children to be educated in Hong Kong — her oldest would soon be three — and she wanted to have the life that was due to her and her children as the family of an American citizen and resident of Hong Kong. She had finally managed to get a visa to Hong Kong — mainlanders were not allowed unlimited entry — and now she was here to settle matters.

Tammy’s initial response was not duly recorded, as the Chinese woman quickly became very aggressive and threatening. Her English was not very good, and translated through the grapevine through a Filipina maid, her words and the events that transpired were not crystal clear. There were some broken items, as the woman declared that everything in Tammy’s house also belonged to her. She demanded to know how many bedrooms they had and how much the rent was. She wanted to know what kind of car they had and what Garth’s salary was, as she suspected he had been lying to her.

Tammy, who had been an alpha-expatriate woman, a sort of middle-aged mean girl in tennis whites, heading up school parent committees and chairing charity balls, did not know what to say to this woman who was walking around the house inspecting all her things, but when the woman started going through her closet to see her jewelry, she wrapped her arms around her and tried to restrain her. Thrilled, Gina — who had never seen such drama, even back home in the Philippines — screamed as the two came wrestling out of the master bedroom and did the one sensible thing she could think of: She called the driver, who was downstairs washing the car. He came up and saw three shrieking women scratching and pulling one another’s hair and, terrified, called his employer, Garth, who was having a coffee at Cova in Prince’s Building with a colleague. Garth took a taxi home.

Apparently — this had entered into expatriate lore — he separated the two women (who must have been tired by that point) and sat them both down on the sofa. Tammy demanded that her high school boyfriend turned husband, whom she had known for more than thirty years, kick this woman out of their house and out of their lives. For God’s sake, this is where she and their children lived, and this woman had trespassed on their private property. He looked at her and said, anguished, “I can’t.”