Janice Lee - The Expatriates

What a mess. This is what she comes from.

That first afternoon, when she gets out of the taxi, her mother asks where she has been. But that is just one small blip of maternal concern, a flare struck and gone, it seems, forever. If it’s possible, her mother seems even more lost than she is.

They go up together in the tiny, rickety elevator with her mother’s suitcase.

“This is where you live,” her mother says in Korean, standing uncomfortably close to Mercy, because the suitcase is taking up half the elevator.

“I know, it’s not nice,” she says.

“When we immigrated to Queens, our apartment was very small, and we didn’t have our own bathroom,” her mother says. The elevator doors open, and she leads her mother down the tiny, narrow hallway lit by fluorescent lights. She takes out her keys and unlocks the door.

“Ta-da,” she says as she swings it open to her studio, her messy bed, with clothes strewn all over it — remnants of her rejected dressing choices before meeting David this morning.

“Very small,” her mother says without emotion.

“Only one bed,” she points out.

“It is big enough. We can share,” her mother says, with finality.

Over coffee later, after her mother has showered and changed and they have made their way to a little café down the street, Mercy asks, tentatively, how long she is here for.

“I don’t know,” her mother says. “Things are strange at home.”

She sips at her plain coffee. She never ordered latte or cappuccino, or the fancy drinks.

“I flew through Seoul,” she says. “On Korean Air. Incheon Airport is so modern!”

“I know,” Mercy says. “It makes JFK look third world.”

“Things have changed so much in Asia,” her mother says. “I wonder what it would be like if we had stayed in Korea. Before, America used to be the best place, but now I think it is not so good.”

“I miss America,” Mercy says. And she realizes it is true. That there is no reason for her to be here in Hong Kong, with her married lover — Can he even be termed a lover? The implied constancy is not there — and a baby, or, rather, an embryo and all the messiness in her life. But she can’t go back now.

“I bought the ticket through Mrs. Choi at church,” her mother says, putting down her cup. “And she says I can set the return date whenever I want. It is very flexible. And I can stop in Seoul on the way back. But I wanted to rush to see you. You are never home, and you never return my phone calls.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Mercy says.

“So, do you have a job?” her mother asks.

Mercy’s silence is her answer. Her mother rips off a piece of the almond croissant they are sharing — powdered sugar is sprinkled on her chin. How disappointing for her mother, she thinks, to have a daughter like her, but how used to it she must be. Just as Mercy is used to men being disappointing, having had her father as a model. She and her mother — they are lost in these patterns, unable to kick out into another, freer, better life.

“Hong Kong is very expensive, isn’t it?” her mother asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“I’m staying for some time,” says her mother, “so I help you with the rent.”

When Mercy went to college, she met not only those wealthy aliens; she also met other Korean Americans from different parts of the country. She understood the Queens Koreans, how most of them came from struggling families, dry cleaners and deli owners and ministers, but there was a whole other breed, like the Korean American kids from Beverly Hills or Bloomfield Hills, or the wealthier suburbs of Long Island. Their parents were doctors or real estate developers or just businessmen more successful than her dad. It wasn’t the wealth that bothered her, though; it was the fact that their parents seemed so normal, and they assumed that other Koreans were just like them. They complained about overbearing mothers, fathers who were disappointed that they hadn’t gone to Harvard, grandmothers who were a pain. It was this assumption that her family was like theirs, that her parents were together, a team, and that they had the time or the inclination to care about where Mercy went to school or how she led her life.

It wasn’t that her mother didn’t love her but that she didn’t know how to help her, being in a terrible relationship herself.

“Do you think I can get a job here?” her mother asks.

She feels a panic open up inside her. The world she has so carefully been trying to hold together, the fragile bubble, seems on the verge of collapsing.

“I don’t—” she begins, but someone is tapping her shoulder.

“Hey,” says a young man behind her.

She twists around, looks at his face, trying to place him.

“Charlie,” he says. “From Columbia. We saw each other a while back at the Conrad?”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “Great to see you.” The day she met David.

He looks expectantly at her and then her mother.

“Oh, this is my mom,” she says. As they shake hands and exchange pleasantries, she gets the feeling she often does, where she floats away, above herself, and observes the scene. She feels a deep pleasure at the fact that this scenario, this snapshot, is so normal. Here is a girl who lives in Hong Kong, whose mother is visiting, who is introducing her mother to another acquaintance, an old college friend she has run into. She sees it happening all over town, all the time, and always feels on the outside, like that will never be her, and all of a sudden, here it is, happening, although everything on the inside is so very different. She’s so different, and marked, but this instant makes her feel normal. In a sudden moment of insight, she wonders if everyone feels this way.

“Maybe I’ll see you around,” Charlie says. But he lingers.

Her mother sees the look on his face and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. After all, this is a boy/man with a suit and a briefcase. A man with a job.

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asks suddenly.

“Oh,” she says. “Um, well, my mom just got here, and that was a bit of a surprise, so I have no idea.”

“There’s this party at my friend’s house,” he starts.

“Oh, yeah?”

“A bunch of kids from Yale are throwing it, but they’re pretty cool.” She has almost forgotten that this is how people her age talk, having sequestered herself for so long.

“Great,” she says.

“Wanna go?”

A party for twenty-somethings. This is what she should be doing. Not hiding out from having been implicated in a hideous crime and getting impregnated by a detached married man. She feels the gap sharply, suddenly. Maybe this is why she says yes. Maybe this is why she gives Charlie her e-mail address and phone number. He walks away smiling, and she remains, feeling that she has duped him and it is all going to come crashing down. Her mother comes back, smiling, saying that he looked like a nice boy. “Chinese men,” she says, “are better than Korean men. They treat their women well.” And Mercy is back to where she started, feeling like a fraud, that she is the architect of her own awful destiny.

But it’s as if fate helps her to make bad decisions. Because her mother is here, it is easy (and truthful) to tell David that she can’t see him for a bit. After the news, he clearly needs a bit of a break as well.

“She didn’t come because…” He doesn’t finish the thought.

“No,” she says. “She has no idea. Just a coincidence.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Buzz me when she leaves.”

And she hangs up and suddenly feels, can it be? Free. She feels a bit freer. She’s burst from one situation into another.

So then she’s free to go to this party with Charlie, which delights her mother, because even with her track record, she is still Korean enough to think that a man can save a woman. Especially someone with Mercy’s destiny, who needs so much saving.