Janice Lee - The Expatriates

That was when she weaned herself off the anxiety medication. The Korean doctors had been liberal with prescriptions, but she wanted to stay sharp, be ready for whatever came her way. She only took an Ambien when it was two in the morning and she couldn’t stand it anymore.

Then, after six weeks, Clarke went back to work. She couldn’t believe it, but he said, “You’ll be here. I’m not doing anything that you can’t do. And we need to see our other children. Make sure they have a parent there, even though your mother’s there. They are suffering as well.”

And he left her, fuming, in the hotel room. What was it about men? They didn’t feel things the same way. How could he leave the country where his child was lost? Now the person she saw the most in the world was Mr. Park, a gentle man with glasses who handled her with extreme delicacy.

She remembered sitting with him in the police station, as she did almost every day. It was getting cold, November, December, and the building was not well heated. He apologized for the temperature and said the government saved money on heating.

“At home,” he said, “we have the floor heating, the ondol . It is very effective, and we eat and sleep close to the ground.”

She wondered what he went home to every night, whom he lived with, if he had children. She asked him once about his family, and he told her in a way that indicated he was making a sacrifice by telling her, so she didn’t delve into the personal again.

They shared coffee every day. Once, sick of the terrible brew they had at the station, she made an impulsive purchase at Hyundai Department Store on the way to the station. When she came in bearing the espresso machine, the policemen were struck dumb and then all in unison said they could not accept the present, government regulations and all. She insisted, said it was for her as well, as she was there every day, and then she set it up and made everyone a cup, foaming the milk she had brought and stirring it into paper cups. She and the policemen sipped the good coffee together in silence, each lost in his own thoughts.

The police were very polite and concerned but completely ineffective. She didn’t go ballistic on them, because she didn’t think it would help her or G. But it was incredibly frustrating. Every day brought new leads: phone calls, e-mails from people who thought they’d seen G. But they never led anywhere. Seoul was blanketed with closed-circuit televisions, but there was a blind spot where they had been, and when they studied the adjoining ones, they couldn’t see G anywhere. One store’s camera had been broken for a week and was getting fixed that day, so the whole system had been down. This is the direction where they thought G must have been taken. They told her of another case where a boy had been taken and they had been able to trace his path with different security cameras. It had taken them a few weeks, but they had traced him to a village an hour outside Seoul, reachable by bus, where a mentally disturbed woman had taken him as her child. He had been shaken but healthy when they found him. She had treated him well, he said, but had insisted that she was his mother. He was seven years old, so he knew it wasn’t true but was frightened of challenging her, so he had played along and stayed with her in her house, afraid, but even more afraid of what lay outside.

The police were very proud of this case, but it didn’t seem that they were having the same luck with her child. They apprised her of all their work, but nothing ever panned out.

Clarke flew back every ten days or so, but there was never any progress to show him. He brought the kids with him the first few times, but they got upset when they had to leave her, so they decided it was better to let them stay in Hong Kong.

After three months, he took her by the hand while they were eating dinner at the hotel. “Come back home,” he said. “We have to live our lives. We can return whenever they find something. We can’t destroy four more lives. Philip and Daisy deserve a chance.”

She felt a white-hot hatred for him then that swept through her so violently she felt it physically. She snatched her hand back and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the night. He left the next morning in silence.

In Korea by herself, Margaret got into a rhythm. She’d wake up in the morning around six and go to the hotel gym for an hour. She’d run on the treadmill, watching the television. She got to know the other regulars at the health club, as many locals used the hotel facilities as their gym. An old white-haired man stretched with his young trainer every morning, a few businessmen in their forties, a few pretty young housewives. They nodded to each other in the morning. Afterward she went upstairs and showered and put on comfortable clothes to go to the police station. She walked over — it took about fifteen minutes — and checked in with the police. Initially they had asked her to stay at the hotel and they would contact her with any leads, but she had been politely persistent, and now they let her stay around the police station with her laptop and access the Wi-Fi. How could they say no to someone like her? It was sterile, with white linoleum floors and fluorescent lights and that peculiar Korean smell she now recognized, from the accumulated smell of a thousand bygone boxed lunches. It was comforting to her now.

She would ask for any updates. They would show her a few badly translated e-mails or phone messages that had come in during her absence—“I know kidnapped child in Suwon!”—and say they were following up. That she was allowed to stay was against all protocol, but they found a way as long as she didn’t ask too many questions or interfere with their work. They knew it was hard for her to stay at the hotel.

Lunch was at one of the many small restaurants in the neighborhood. She learned that one o’clock was the regular lunch hour, so she went at noon so there was no wait. She ate ddukbokki, bibimbap, naengmyun , trying all the different foods by pointing to the menu pictures and what other people were having. She felt as if she were connecting to her Korean roots a little bit, having a tiny taste of what it must be like to live in Korea and be Korean. She ate salted sprouts brushed with sesame oil, cold marinated crab — although she got food poisoning so bad she thought she might die later that day, lying on her bathroom floor — the gelatin-like mook , the kkagduki kimchi, the endless warm soups. She came to crave room-temperature barley tea with her food. It helped her digestion and soothed her stomach.

After lunch she would go back to the police station for a few hours. Around four, she would head back to the hotel and do laps in the pool. It was important to be physically active so that she could sleep at night. She usually ate dinner at the hotel, where all the staff knew her by now, watched TV, answered e-mails, and surfed the Internet, and was usually in bed by ten. Her life shrank down and became ascetic, which meant that she felt like she was focusing all her energies on finding G.

But he remained lost. The police shook their heads and complained about the dissolution of Korean society.

“Before,” Mr. Park said, “it was a good society. But now too much money and the Western values have come, and the children want to eat hamburger, and the adults only interest themselves. They don’t care for the other people.” He told her amazing stories: of people who were sick of taking care of their elderly parents with dementia and drove them out to the countryside and abandoned them, knowing they could never find their way back; of young parents neglecting their baby to go play a computer game in which they nourished a virtual child, only to come back to their apartment to find that their actual child had starved to death. “This society is no good now,” he told her. He recommended that she watch Korean television dramas. They were very popular around the world, and she could begin to understand the problems of modern Korea. He gave her the names of a few and also where she could download them. He highly recommended one drama in particular and underlined it, with exclamation points surrounding it.