Janice Lee - The Expatriates

“I’m sick,” she says, in case Puri has missed this fact. “I’m going to sleep. Please answer the phone and the door and don’t get me. And please bring me up a pitcher of water and a glass.”

She goes upstairs and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When she wakes up, she is surprised at how quiet the house is. Usually Puri is wrestling with the vacuum in some corner of the house or listening to tinny music through earphones. It’s past ten, and she feels much better, the Advils having kicked in. She gulps down a glass of water and wonders whether David has made his way home and gone out again while she was sleeping. There are no clothes strewn on the floor. She feels his toothbrush. It’s dry. So he never came home. This is new.

She calls him. There’s no answer, so she texts and e-mails him: “Where are you?” An even tone: no reproach yet, leaving the door open for fury. She’ll decide the tenor of her response when she sees him, based on the level of his dishevelment, drunkenness, remorse. Such are the negotiations of marriage.

She walks into the kitchen to see Puri at the stove making chicken soup and is filled with gratitude.

“Thank you, Puri!” she says.

“Yes, ma’am,” Puri says without turning around. “You are sick.”

When she is spooning up soup and sweating, she looks at the clock and sees it’s just past eleven. She dials her mother, who should be in the car.

“Did you get in okay and the pickup was okay?”

“Yes, all fine. How are you doing, dear?”

“I have a fever, but I took Advil, so I’m okay right now.” As she goes through the expected questions and responses, she wonders if she should tell her mother that her husband went out last night and didn’t come back. If she doesn’t, of course, her mother will find out, and it’ll be worse than if she had told her. Then again, if she tells her now, it will cast a pall on the beginning of her mother’s visit. She decides to stall.

“Okay, I’m here. Can’t wait to see you.”

She has an hour or so until her mother arrives, so she goes upstairs to her room and gets into bed and logs on to her laptop.

She found this other, online world by accident when she was looking for a way to get rid of some old furniture she was throwing out. A website for expatriates in Asia: www.expatlocat.com. The name was a bit confusing, but the site was marginally helpful. She posted a message on “Odds and Ends” saying that people could come and take pieces that she described: an old coffee table, three lamps, an ottoman. She was taken aback by the aggressive responses. People demanded photos, demanded to know where she lived, asked if she would deliver the items to their homes. She wanted to respond, “These are free!” but instead she never replied to any of the messages. She told Sam to get rid of the furniture instead, and it all disappeared without a fuss.

Poking around the site, she found advertisements and a tab labeled Message Boards. When she clicked on it, a list of topics popped up: “Dating,” “Friendship,” “Moving to Hong Kong.”

She is not at all current, but current enough to know that online forums, in the age of all that is possible online, are almost laughably antique. Still, that is why she likes them. This website has something quaint and old-fashioned about it, in the context of all this Internet insanity. The graphics are nonexistent, just lines of text, some underlined, some indented, some bold, and that’s as complicated as it gets.

She posts on two communities: expatlocat.com and citypeople.com, which is based in Los Angeles and is more lively, because people all over America post on it. There they talk about popular TV shows and current events, household income, and BMI. The tone is more ironic; people are feistier, less provincial. People often post their height, weight, and HHI and ask, “Do you hate me?” But the Hong Kong one is more relevant, and she’s there most often.

She is always astonished by how loose people’s networks are, how they are so trusting and willing to meet strangers based on a few electronic exchanges. People who have just moved to Hong Kong post on these boards and arrange social get-togethers. They seem to have no compunction about the fact that the only connection they have with these people is through the Internet. She knows that her mother would be horrified; in her world, it’s families, schools, workplaces. She also knows that no one in her world would ever be caught dead on an online forum. So it’s perfect.

She pores over the forums and has become familiar with people who post frequently, whose handles are JamesBond and taiwanmum. People complain about their help, or wonder whether to leave their boyfriends, or ask where to buy an air-filtering machine. No question is too personal or inane or random for this place. Anonymity is so comforting.

When she registered, she filled the blanks with fake information. Her online name is HappyGal, something that would set her teeth on edge in real life, but online, she figures, she could, she should, be a different person. In her bedroom, with her laptop on her bed, she signed up to become someone else, a gray, amorphous collection of 0s and 1s traveling through space to join a virtual community that has become a large part of her day.

HappyGal is younger than Hilary, twenty-seven, and she is originally from Oregon, although they used to live in California. Her husband works at an accounting firm. She likes to run and hike the country trails, which she’s had fun discovering. She is blond. This is important. Hilary has always wanted to be blond.

HappyGal has a helper they just hired, whom they pay HK$2,000 over the minimum wage, and the helper works only five days because they value their couple privacy. She and her husband live in the Mid-Levels. It’s like a smaller, scaled-down version of Hilary. Someone she might have been, in a different life, or maybe even this one, if she had made some different decisions.

Hilary has read a lot of the archives, so she knows the history of a lot of her fellow posters, and she has become one of the regulars. Taiwanmum is shrewish but clever. Texas4Eva is one of those irritating, newly arrived Americans who take umbrage at everything that is not shiny and happy, as she thinks everything ought to be. She complains about the injustices in Hong Kong — how helpers are underpaid, how the minimum wage is outrageously low, how pollution is ever-present. Her outrage is not shiny and happy, though, which many other posters have pointed out to her. Hilary wonders if she knows Texas4Eva in real life, if she’s had lunch next to her at the American Club. Still, they have formed a sort of community, a society of people who recognize one another and know one another’s personalities and quirks. They are merciless to newcomers but chummy with one another.

The etiquette of the online forum has to be learned through weeks, probably months, of lurking. Also, the tone. Hilary read thousands of messages before attempting to post one of her own. People were very extreme, punctuating their sentences with exclamation points and bobbing yellow smiley faces that winked or stuck out their tongue. It was like on Facebook, which Hilary goes on sometimes, and whenever someone posts a photo of themselves, all their friends post profuse compliments, say utterly ordinary women are “gorgeous!!!!” or “stunning!” On the flip side, people become enraged easily and insult one another with a vehemence that would never exist in a face-to-face encounter. There are dozens of posts where people try to explain why they are right and the other is wrong. Whenever Hilary sees this type of exchange, she wonders at the futility and hopefulness of these people, that they actually think they can change someone else’s mind, that others will acknowledge their correctness. They must be young. She was that way too when she was young. If only it is explained enough, they think, surely everyone will understand, everyone will come around to their way of thinking. It is exhausting, being so hopeful. She remembers.