Janice Lee - The Expatriates

“Thank you,” she says.

He doesn’t say, “What happened?” or “How did it go down?” or “Do you ever talk to the family?”—all questions she has been asked by other friends, not out of empathy but more out of an unseemly, almost prurient, interest. There are those advice columns that tell you to respond, “Why do you ask?” but that’s just such an aggressive thing to say to someone who is purporting to help you that she can never bring herself to say it.

“Terrible things happen all the time,” Charlie says. “You just got to keep living your life.”

“You are nice,” she says.

“I think Asian people are better at this sort of thing, suffering,” he says.

She almost laughs but realizes he is serious. “Oh?”

“Yes, of course,” he says. “Americans are very soft.”

“You like to make generalizations about Americans versus Asians.”

“Americans like to say things like that, tell people about themselves,” he says with a smile.

“Whoa, this is so meta.”

“Like that,” he says. “This meta thing is so American, and I don’t really get it.”

They laugh, and she thinks, Can it really be that easy? Then remembers the other thing. And feels sick again. What would it be like, she thinks, to live life without guilt, without worry, without feeling fraudulent? What is it like to be like Philena, to traipse through life protected by attentive parents and endless bank accounts? She wishes she could have that, just for a little bit, maybe just to see her through this time in her life when everything is going wrong, and even the things that are going right are going to veer off course at some point because of the other things. How fast will this guy flee when he knows everything? She would guess pretty fast.

“What did you do today?” he asks.

Today she tried to make an appointment at a public hospital, but since she’s not a permanent resident of Hong Kong, they told her that she will have to pay the nonlocal rate. Since the local rate is around HK$100 a visit and the nonlocal rate is ten times that, this is a big deal for her. She hadn’t known that only permanent residents got the cheaper rate, since everyone always talked about how cheap health care was in Hong Kong. She also found out that the birth was going to cost HK$100,000 or almost US$12,000, at least as a nonlocal. Since all this is unsayable, she smiles and says something about updating her resume and browsing online.

She actually finds the whole thing weird. The fact that Charlie is willing to put up with a girl who is unemployed, ostracized, and odd just because she happens to be rather pretty and compatible with him in bed makes her question everything about the world. Why does it work this way? Is this the way everything works? What sort of value system exists that that’s okay?

“Do you know Eddie Lai?” he asks. “He’s from Columbia as well.”

“Name rings a bell,” she says.

“Do you want to have dinner with him and May next week? You know they just got married. They’re having people over to their house, like a dinner party,” he says.

She sees it happening, this coupling, how she is being presented to society as Charlie’s girlfriend. She has been witness to it, all through college and after, but it’s never really happened to her. She’s always been the girl to hook up with at parties, to go out with a few times, but never anything lasting. Is it really this easy? How is it that she’s never been privy to it before? It’s seductive, this image of newlywed bliss, the starter apartment in Mid-Levels with the IKEA furniture and the expensive groceries from the gourmet supermarket. Acting at being real adults, having dinner parties with other couples. It is so close she can practically smell the California cabernet and the chicken with garlic cloves roasting in the oven — the beginner meal for young couples playing house.

She’s been with boys who are cheating on their girlfriends. She can tell the affair is even more amazing for them, the forbidden making everything heightened, double the pleasure, like a drug they snort and then fall back, hit over the head with ecstasy. In the morning comes remorse, but still, the intense pleasure is worth it for them. Damn couples, she used to think, even the illicit sex is better for them than for single people.

So if this is what it’s like, she wants to enjoy it, but she can’t. Because she’s Mercy Cho. Because things never go right for her.

“There are a couple of long weekends coming up,” Charlie says. “Do you have any plans?”

“My whole life is kind of a long weekend,” she says.

“True.” He grins.

“It’s Buddha’s birthday, right?”

“Yeah, and May Day, and a few before,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about going away.”

“Oh, yeah?” she says. “Where?”

“I don’t know. I want to go to a beach and drink cocktails with umbrellas on them.”

“That sounds nice,” she says.

“Want to go with me?” he asks.

“Oh!” She is surprised. This she had not expected.

“I just thought…” He is embarrassed, a little shy.

“That sounds great,” she says. She cannot even go on to say “but…” as she intended, because he beams and grabs her hand.

“Good,” he says. “My treat.”

Later she wonders what she should have said. “But I’m pregnant.” “But my mother is here.” “But why me?” All things she is thinking. Anyway, she will have several weeks to mess things up with him, so it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes she lets herself imagine what would have happened if she had met Charlie before she met David. Would her life have spooled out in this wonderful, unimaginably effortless way? Girl meets boy, boy likes girl, boy pulls girl out of her awful life. But then she reminds herself that’s a fairy tale, and of all people, she should be the last to believe in fairy tales.

HOW IS IT already May? May and June are going-away-party season and pack-up-for-summer season. The expatriates have renewed or not renewed their contracts. They have quit or found something back home. The factory has closed, or HQ has downsized the office. Elderly parents are ailing, and they are needed. Some have just become fed up with life in Hong Kong and decided to pack it up and leave. There are homesick wives who tell their husbands they’ve had it with the air pollution and the unsafe food standards and take off with the kids, leaving their spouses to work and send money home. This sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t: The wife comes back to Hong Kong, or there is a divorce, or the man returns home and finds another job.

If the expats are staying for another year or two, the moms take the kids and go on home leave, staying at their parents’ or in-laws’ houses, camping out at others’ homes through the summer.

So in May or June, when the kids are finishing up with school, the packers are called, tram parties are booked, and many, many boozy lunches and dinners are had at the American Club or the China Club or some fancy Italian restaurant in Central.

Hilary sits at the kitchen table with her laptop, sipping coffee and going through her e-mails, finding out who is leaving.

It’s a bit like the end of college, when you bid farewell to the friends you’ve made before going on to the next stage of life. You might see them again, but never in the same normal, everyday kind of way. Hilary has gone to so many of these lunches she knows the format like the back of her hand. First a bottle of champagne and a toast to the departing friend, then the presentation of a group gift arranged by many, many e-mails sent around beforehand, a gift statistically most likely to be from Shanghai Tang — a frame or perhaps a wine stopper — but not before a card is surreptitiously handed around so everyone can sign. There will also most probably be a photo album compiled of many pictures of group outings to Shenzhen to buy fake DVDs and have clothes tailored, dinners at the China Club, girls’ nights out at Flow, family days on the American Club lawn, joint vacations to Bali beaches. It’s akin to a college yearbook, she supposes, a way to mark several years in one’s life, when one has inevitably changed and grown in ways that are hard to see until you find yourself back in the United States trying to explain to people what life was like in Asia and finding out that they care not one whit. But you will have this album to flip through, and a wine stopper. And that memory of the people who were there with you.