Janice Lee - The Expatriates

She started watching and, despite the melodramatic acting and bad lighting, found herself quickly sucked in. Winter Sonata was the story of a young man in search of his father who falls in love with a girl in a small town. The girls in the show were always running after buses and scolding their love interests in a coy, flirtatious way, and the men were unnecessarily brooding, but there was something viscerally compelling about the people and their interactions. She watched episode after episode in a trance. She downloaded the entire series onto the Korean smartphone she had bought and watched it at the police station, on the subway, at the gym. Even now, whenever she hears the piano music of the opening credits of the series, she is transported back to those months in Seoul, cold mornings on the subway, the intense monotony of those days, the sick feeling she had the whole time.

Her mother found her a shrink from San Francisco she could talk to on Skype. Dr. Stein and Clarke seemed to be on a team, trying to get her to move forward, but she couldn’t. She didn’t tell them about the hours she spent on eBay, trying to find the sandals G had been wearing. This mindless searching for an artifact that was without value to anyone else was what made the hours go by as she sat in her hotel room at night, searching the Internet for anything that might help her find her child. She regretted not learning Korean, regretted that the most important parts of the Internet were off-limits to her. Koreans were the most plugged-in society in the world, and they had many, many more forums like the ones she read in English about missing children. They were the relevant ones, but she was stuck reading about missing children in Maryland or California when her child was missing on another continent.

She checked in with the embassy once a week, talking with a nice woman, Gerry, from Atlanta, a divorcee with two children, who tried to be helpful. Gerry moved every two or three years for her job with the State Department and had lived in Morocco and Shanghai as well. Gerry invited her over for dinner one weekend night, and Margaret went, because she couldn’t stand another night in the hotel room watching television and scouring the Internet forums or eBay. Gerry lived in an old neighborhood, a far cry from the windowed skyscrapers of downtown, where Margaret was. Gerry’s apartment was one of four in a two-story house, and spacious. But when you stepped inside, it was like stepping back into America. Everything was from the United States, courtesy of the State Department courier, which shipped things for free regardless of size or weight. Whereas most people who lived overseas had local-brand strollers or televisions, Gerry had everything straight from Amazon. It was the oddest experience, having dinner in a house in Seoul and being served Crystal Light and Duncan Hines chocolate cake, as if they were sitting in Atlanta, two miles from Target.

“People expect me to be so international,” Gerry said, “but to be honest, I get so homesick, I just want American stuff around me.”

She was not in touch with her ex-husband, and he didn’t keep up with the kids or pay child support.

“I’m here, carting his children around the world, and he has e-mailed me twice in two years,” she said. “You’d think he’d care a little more.”

She was abashed, then, remembering why Margaret was in Seoul, and tried to apologize.

“No need,” Margaret said. “It’s just nice to have a normal conversation sometimes.” And it was. This was her odd, staccato life in Seoul — the weird, empty evenings, the blank spaces — while she was waiting, waiting.

Korea turned cold in the winter, a vicious cold she had never before encountered. The wind sliced against her face and went into her bones, even as she bundled up in a newly bought winter coat, scarf, hat. She bought wool long johns and undershirts. She thought of G in his T-shirt and shorts, and her blood froze inside her.

This was when she developed a taste for being alone. She could glimpse her life as it might have been, if she had not married, if she had not had children, if she had been an entirely different person. She could see how your life came together, how you cobbled a life out of moments and routines. She started eating the same lunch at the same restaurant, a beef broth with a bowl of rice and a cup of barley tea. She ran five miles every morning. She watched television alone at night. She could see doing this for a long time. And that was when she decided she had to go home.

There were Daisy and Philip. They cried when they Skyped on the computer. They stopped short of pleading with her to come back to Hong Kong but wondered aloud when G would be found, when they would come home together. They told her about their days at school, the projects they were doing, the sports they were playing. She had two children trying to live a life in Hong Kong, and she was in Seoul, Korea, searching for a child who had disappeared. She was doing nothing in Korea. All the leads had dried up. The media were no longer interested in her story. She was like a hamster on a wheel, running, running, running, with no end in sight.

So she took a flight home one cold January day, having the concierge book her the ticket, because she didn’t want to talk to Rosalie, the travel agent, telling the police she’d be back every two weeks, and making them promise to e-mail her every day (which they did, religiously, and if they didn’t, she’d e-mail them until they replied), and then she went home, without G, something she had sworn she would never do, something that had been unimaginable five short months ago. She sat on the plane for the four-hour flight, alone, and ate the chicken and drank ginger ale and felt her eyes dry out in the airless cabin.

She hadn’t told the children or Clarke she was coming, so she came inside the house, strangely the same after all this time away, saw Essie, who started weeping the moment she opened the door for her, left her suitcase on the floor in the hall, and went upstairs to see her children: Daisy getting ready to go to soccer, Philip doing homework. They saw her and ran up to her, and she hugged them as they clung to her side. She dug her fingers into their hair as if to anchor herself. They didn’t ask about G; they didn’t want to hear the answer. She didn’t have an answer to give them. She didn’t even know what the question would be. So she did the only thing she could. She just wrapped her arms around the children she had, pulling them toward her with as much strength as she could muster, and tried to feel as happy as she could to be back home with them.

And time keeps flowing. Here she is, in Phuket, Thailand, on Christmas vacation about a year after her baby disappeared, sitting by the pool. Here she is, reapplying sunscreen on her daughter’s face and reading a magazine in a beach chair. This is what she has learned in the past year: You go through the motions of life until, slowly, they start to resemble a life.

SHE WAKES UP with knives in her throat, hot with fever. Pops three Advils, boils water, adds salt and cold water, gargles, staggering from bed to kitchen to bathroom to achieve all this, while Puri stands there as still as an Easter Island statue, staring at her employer, completely useless. It hurts to speak, so she doesn’t. Finally Hilary lies down in her bed, towel under her head for the sweat.

That’s when she notices that her husband is still not home. And then she remembers that her mother is arriving today at 11:00 a.m.

She texts Sam the flight details and tells him to pick up her mother at the airport. Then types out an e-mail to her mom, explaining that she’s sick and won’t be able to go to the airport to pick her up. Then she realizes that Sam and her mother have very little chance of recognizing each other and, groaning, gets up and finds a piece of paper that Sam can use as a sign and writes MRS. MARJORIE KRALL. She’s writing with a regular pen, and it’s not dark enough. Cursing, she goes downstairs to find a Sharpie. Then she rewrites MRS. MARJORIE KRALL in thick black strokes and hands it to Puri to give to Sam when he gets in.