Janice Lee - The Expatriates

She signs in. HappyGal, password: honkers, all lowercase.

She enters the forum “Misc in Hong Kong,” her usual haunt, where a dozen or so people post regularly.

Taiwanmum is online, posting about a new dim sum place in Kowloon: “Very good food and reasonable price. The chef from Four Seasons.”

“That seems unlikely,” Hilary types. “And how do you even get there?”

“Ah, HappyGal, welcome,” blinks back the response. “There’s this thing called public transport. Not everyone sits around in their air-conditioned mansion in Repulse Bay and refuse to go to Kowloon.”

Hilary is surprised. She has always written that she lives in Mid-Levels.

“I live in Mid-Levels,” she types.

“OK, your mansion in Mid-Levels,” Taiwanmum pings back.

Hilary has been getting more paranoid lately about being found out.

“How long have you lived here again?” comes a question from Asiaphile, an intermittent poster, known for peppery remarks and not suffering fools.

“A year and a half,” she writes.

“All sorted out?” Asiaphile writes, not unkindly.

“Are you a man or woman?” she responds.

“Touche.”

“I’m home sick today, be nice,” she types. She clicks off to another thread.

And then she sees it. Her story. Right there on the forum for the other thirty or so regular readers to see.

“I know a woman,” it begins. “She is so rich and has a huge house. She can’t have kids and is maybe trying to adopt and has a kid she is ‘trying out,’ like a ball gown she can return.” The user ID on the message is HappyValley, a neighborhood in Hong Kong.

The casual cruelty takes her breath away.

She scrolls through. The subject line is “Should anyone be able to adopt?” Off-topic, yes, but not unusually so.

“Is this a friend of yours?” someone asks.

“More of an acquaintance. She runs in different circles.”

“Sounds horrible!” exclaims Christy3.

“Well, they have different rules for rich people, don’t they?”

“I’m sure the HK government wouldn’t allow this. They have such strict rules,” writes MadHatter.

“Yes, my friend wanted to adopt and had such a difficult time. She ended up getting a child from Russia.”

They are in this peculiar situation in Hong Kong, of living there but not being local, and being privy to the regulations of their own countries and of Hong Kong, and sometimes of China. Hong Kong orphanages give preference to local Chinese families and also prefer to place Chinese children with Chinese families. If there is a half-Indian or half-Filipino child, they will go to families with similar backgrounds, and once there was even a white child, and she went to a white family. It is their policy, and they adhere to it with much vigilance. It is surprising that Julian is with her, given his half-Indian, half-Chinese background, except that mixed-race children are much harder to place in Hong Kong. She’s been assured that this, in conjunction with his relatively advanced age, will make it much easier for her to adopt him.

She reads the thread. The last post was from an hour ago. Her heart pounds in her chest. Who could have written such a thing? Enough people knew about Julian, although she and David tried to be discreet. But who would write about her situation so meanly?

The doorbell rings. Her head is a mass of white noise from what she’s just seen. But her mother has arrived. Her mother has arrived. She hears a sudden burst of activity downstairs. Puri is probably taking her mother’s luggage, bringing her a cup of tea, and asking her about her flight, all the things that Hilary is supposed to be doing but can’t right now, can’t because she is sick and feverish, can’t because a website splayed her life out on the screen, and can’t, simply can’t, because, because, her husband is simply nowhere to be found.

CAN YOU SUDDENLY be summoned into adulthood? Mercy wonders. Is it the same as being promoted and suddenly having to pretend you know how to be a boss, or getting your period or having sex and suddenly being on the other side, knowing what it’s all about? She is suddenly an adult. She is sitting here with a man who has a wife, and he is on the precipice. This is what they must mean by being an adult.

He is sick of it, he says over fried eggs at the Flying Pan. He is sick of the wife and the nagging and the baby talk and just all of it. He doesn’t have the life he wants. He wants to change. He wants to evolve. He has the manic, unbridled energy of someone who has just made a foolish decision. Who better to do it with than me? thinks Mercy.

He tells her, this is the first time he’s done this. He’s never cheated on his wife, except he says it more delicately, says, he’s never “been with” anyone else since his marriage. She wonders if anyone calls what they’re doing cheating, or if they always make it into something more noble in their mind. She also knows to wonder whether it’s true. She’s not that stupid.

She listens, is the vessel into which he can pour all his frustrations and fantasies.

“So,” she says finally, “you’re having a kind of a Jerry Maguire moment, huh, where you’re taking a stand and going off on a new path?”

He laughs.

“Don’t you need to go home?” she asks.

“You know, my mother-in-law is coming today,” he says, ignoring her question and looking at his watch. “In fact, she’s probably already here. And she and my wife, they’re going to hang out here, and then we’re all going to Bangkok, which we do every fucking year, because the mother-in-law likes that weekend market and she buys all this crap and ships it back to the United States, like she doesn’t already have enough shit.”

“Listen,” Mercy says, “I understand you’re going through some serious stuff right now, but you need to back off a little bit and calm down. You are being way too intense.” How interesting to be the sane one.

“I’m not a bad guy,” he says. “And actually, Hilary is not a bad person. We’ve just really grown apart, and I’m angry because I haven’t had the relationship that I want for a while.”

Are all older men this conversant in Oprah language? Mercy finds herself thinking. She can’t imagine any of her contemporaries talking like this.

“And I work all the time, and all she does is sit around and mope. You know, her family’s rich, and she thinks that entitles her to bitch and be sad all day. And she’s gotten us in this situation with this boy, and this poor kid, he doesn’t know which end is up. He doesn’t know what we want from him, or what to do. It’s totally crazy.”

It turns out that the Starrs have a pet child they take out and walk and water every once in a while. What is wrong with these people?

“Are you serious?” she asks. “Isn’t that against the law or something? I thought that the government didn’t even let you look at a child until they decide to give it to you.”

“The rules don’t apply to certain people, babe,” he says. “You are so naïve.”

She pauses. “First,” she says, “don’t ever call me babe. And second, are you still drunk?”

“Is that why you think I’m still here?”

“I guess,” she says. “I would think that you would have to go home at some point.”

“You would be thinking wrong,” he says, wagging a finger at her. He sops up some runny egg with a torn-off piece of toast. “You don’t eat, do you?”

She has not eaten any of the pancakes he ordered for her. She feels light inside, clean.

“And what of you?” he says.

“What of me?” He asked, she thinks — he’s not a terrible person. Perhaps there’s more to this than a man coming off the rails.