Janice Lee - The Expatriates

It’s odd, because he already feels like he’s hers, separate from the others, especially since they look so different from him, being Chinese. “Which one of these is not like the other?” is the refrain that goes through her mind when she sees him at his home.

After the walk, she takes him to the American Club to have a snack. He has never been. On this warm day, she brings him by the pool and sees the scene through his eyes — these privileged kids splashing in the water outfitted in every possible contraption a diligent mother can strap or pull on: rashguards, water wings, water fins, goggles, colored zinc. There is so much much here. What is fifteen dollars for these women to spend on flippers or a safety vest for their beloved, the vessels for all their dreams and hopes? The children stagger in and out of the pool; the mothers hover over them, clucking from the side about rough play, calling out about one child hitting another with a noodle. The dizzying scene is rife with privilege.

Hilary sits with Julian, their silence surrounding them like a bubble enclosing them from the chaos outside. The sound track of a pool filled with children: happy shrieks, a crying toddler, a mother’s shout of warning, splashes of water.

Some boys Julian’s age come in through the side door, herded by one mother. Julian looks at them, all matching in their school uniforms on their way to get changed for their swim lessons. They chatter easily with one another, poking and cavorting like puppies.

“Toilet, please,” Julian says.

She takes him to the bathroom and waits outside.

After a long while, he comes out, followed by the other children, changed into their swimsuits. They look at him and giggle. She feels hot anger surge up.

“What’s funny?” she says to the boys.

They ignore her and start walking to the pool.

“Excuse me,” she says, and taps one boy on the shoulder. “Was something funny?”

“No,” he says. “What?” He looks confused.

“You were all laughing when you came out.”

As she speaks, she knows she sounds crazy, that the boys don’t know what she’s talking about, that it’s likely it has nothing to do with Julian, but she cannot help herself.

The boy shrugs and joins his friends. Next to her, Julian is looking down, his eyes brimming. She is stricken.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

He doesn’t reply.

She leans down. She has read this is what you do with children, get down to their level so they can relate to you better, so that you’re not so giant and unreachable.

“Julian,” she says, “you know you can tell me anything. And you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You tell me anything,” she says slowly. Even as she says it, she feels the impossibility of what she is saying. Does she really think an hour here and there will forge a relationship where he feels he can tell her anything? They don’t even speak the same language. She has to hurry up. It has to happen soon. He looks at her, eyes wet, trying not to cry. She hugs him fiercely.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asks.

He nods, and they go inside to the restaurant.

They sit down, and he looks around. All around, children are eating pizza, spaghetti, club sandwiches.

“They have Chinese food,” she says. “Chow fan, wonton noodle?”

“Maybe I have the pizza,” he says uncertainly.

“Want to look at the buffet?” she asks. They walk over and look at all the dishes. There is the usual international spread: a curry, a roast beef, a baked fish, sushi.

“Why don’t we do this, so you can try everything,” she says. They take plates, and she tells him to point at everything he wants. Soon his plate is laden with a smorgasbord of different foods.

When they sit down, though, he picks at everything.

“You don’t like?” she says.

He shrugs.

Just then, the boys from the swimming pool come through the door, hair wet, freshly changed from the pool. They swarm the buffet, grabbing plates before their mothers can even get a table.

“I get dessert,” Julian says.

He gets up so quickly she is behind him when she sees him stand next to one of the boys who is getting a piece of chocolate cake. In her mind, she is tut-tutting the fact that the boy is getting dessert before a main course when she sees Julian jostle him, quite deliberately. The plate teeters and falls, chocolate cake lies crumbled all over the floor. The boy lets out a wail and glares at Julian.

“You pushed me!” he shouts.

Julian painstakingly ignores him and takes a plate. He cuts himself a slice of the chocolate cake.

“You pushed me!” the boy shouts again.

Hilary is behind them, aghast and yet somehow exhilarated. She puts her hand behind Julian’s back to guide him back to the table. They walk back together, side by side, unhurried and deliberate, and sit down. She sees the boy run to his mother and talk to her excitedly, pointing at Julian. The woman rises and comes toward them, a pleasant-faced woman in her thirties.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Michael told me that your”—she hesitates—“your child? Pushed him? And that’s why he dropped the plate?”

Julian looks down at the floor, face a mask.

Hilary smiles at the woman. “I’m sorry?” she says. “What?”

The boy has joined his mother now. “He pushed me!” he says, still indignant.

“There must be some mistake,” Hilary says. “I don’t think Julian pushed you.”

“I dropped the cake because of him!”

The mother looks beleaguered. “Why don’t we just get another piece of cake?” she suggests. She takes her child’s hand. “Sorry,” she says with a backward glance. “You know kids.”

Hilary sits with Julian and finally dares to look at him. He stares back at her, expressionless, waiting for her reaction.

She blinks, then smiles, breathes.

“Eat your chocolate cake, sweetie,” she says, heart beating fast, fast, faster. Is this what it means to feel alive?

HER MOTHER has had a job of sorts for several weeks. She’s been helping out with a catering company run by an American. Her experience at Mercy’s aunt’s restaurant has come in useful, and she has been hired as a quasi manager, to communicate to the other mostly Chinese staff what is expected. Why they think she can do this when she cannot speak Cantonese at all is a good question, but she talks in her Korean-accented English and seems to be doing fine. She likes her coworkers and likes having a place to go.

There is a big party this week that they are doing in some warehouse in Wong Chuk Hang, and her mother wants her to work. She moves around the tiny studio, getting ready to go.

“Shirley pays a hundred dollars an hour, and I’m sure she’ll pay you more — Columbia graduate!”

Her mother prattles on about the food and the preparation and the work to come — a kindness to her daughter, who she has recently come to realize has ruined her life.

All that jazz, as it were, came to pass, just as predicted. Two weeks ago, Charlie commented on her burgeoning waist, saying she had gained weight. The thing was, he said it in the loveliest way possible, saying, “Look! I’m taking good care of you. You have gained weight!”

She wasn’t able to quash the look of horror on her face.

He misunderstood. “No, no,” he said. “It’s good. I like it. You were too thin before.”

When she couldn’t speak, he said, “What’s wrong?”

And then it all came out, inelegantly, spastically, horribly. She kept seeing his face, uncomprehending at first, then horrified, then, finally, finally — and she couldn’t forget this — disgusted. The memory of his look makes her insides curl with embarrassment and self-loathing. When she visualizes it, she makes an involuntary grunt of horror. This good man, this good guy, was disgusted with her. She kept apologizing and apologizing for not telling him sooner, but it didn’t matter. There was something so final about being pregnant with someone else’s child. It’s almost comical. Only the most evolved or self-aware or confident man would be okay with it, or someone who was infatuated beyond reason, and that would be someone who had aimed way above his station. Charlie was none of these, she knew, and so she could not blame him or fault him or even wish that he had acted differently. He had acted in an eminently reasonable way, and she had been a bloody, bloody fool to spool it out for even a week. Now she imagines him telling all his friends, the newly married Eddie Lais, with whom they had had a perfectly lovely dinner, with the new wife being super friendly to Mercy, the work colleagues, other Columbia people. Her news spreading slowly, sickly outward, like an oil stain on the fine cotton tablecloth of common decency. Now she is known for something else, other than having lost a child, and it is this. A new kind of pariah.