Janice Lee - The Expatriates

“So, you know,” she says, “I’m going ahead with the adoption. With Julian.”

Olivia pauses from applying foundation. “Oh?” she says. “That’s great. How about David?”

“I’m going ahead without him, but I think I’m going to list him as a father. I think he won’t mind.”

“Really?”

“Well, I was going to have an agreement that he’s not responsible at all for Julian. I just need him so they look favorably on the application.”

Olivia raises an eyebrow. “You seem to have a surprisingly good opinion of David, considering all that’s happened.”

Hilary can’t explain it, but she feels certain that he won’t make a fuss. He’ll yield to her on this.

“Are you ready for it?” Olivia asks. “He’s not a baby, so it won’t be the crazy change that is, and you won’t have all the hormones, but it’s still going to turn your world upside down. And schools! You have to get him into school! He’s going to have to get fluent in English very fast!”

The talk of Hong Kong schools always turns rational women into hysterics.

“That’s a ways down the road,” Hilary says mildly.

“Oh, you don’t know,” Olivia says. “Everyone wants ‘the best’ for their child.” She makes imaginary quote marks around the phrase. “You get crazy. People get crazy.”

“Well, I have to make sure it goes through first. There’s a lot that needs to happen.” Hilary looks at Olivia. “Are there websites you go on?” she asks. “Like websites where people ask questions or for advice, stuff like that?”

Olivia considers. “Not really,” she says. “There are a few groups on Facebook, if that’s what you mean, and there are a few local sites where people go, but I don’t spend much time on that stuff.”

Hilary hesitates. “It’s funny,” she says. “I’ve been spending a lot of time online, because, you know, nothing to do, and I’ve been on these expat-forum sites. People talk about their helpers or their jobs or other things.”

“Why on earth do you read about strangers’ lives?” Olivia asks.

“It feels a little bit like living vicariously,” Hilary says, embarrassed. “Like having a conversation with someone, and you don’t even need to go out.”

“You could be at a lunch but be in your pajamas.”

“Exactly! It can be kind of addicting. But the weird thing is that someone on one of these forums knows about me and Julian and wasn’t so kind about it.”

“About you? Really? Hong Kong is too small. It’s disgusting. What did they say?”

“That I was trying him on like a dress. That I was shopping for a child.”

Olivia turns to Hilary. “Hilary, there are always going to be trolls. Especially on an Internet forum! What do you care what some anonymous coward says about you?” She turns back to the mirror, sweeps on blush. “The best thing about getting older,” she says, “the absolute best thing, is that I don’t give two hoots what anyone thinks about me.”

“Come on!” Hilary protests.

“Okay,” she allows. “I am working toward not caring one bit. I am on that path, and I am getting far along. I know you are too.” Olivia’s eyes meet Hilary’s in the mirror. “Who cares?” she says. “It’s all about them, not about you. They’re motivated by jealousy or spite or their awful lives. It has nothing to do with you. Nothing.”

“I guess,” Hilary says doubtfully. “It seemed very personal.”

“They’re awful. The best thing anyone can do is just live her own life. You do that, and they should do that.”

“It made me feel bad,” Hilary says, almost childishly. Her eyes tear up.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Olivia says. She sits down. “What can I say? There are awful people in the world.”

“I know,” Hilary says.

They sit in companionable silence.

“Well,” Olivia says, “I’m with you. I’m here to help you. Whatever you need.”

“Thank you.”

They continue to get ready. Hilary remembers what her mother once said: You feel one age, and you see another in the mirror. She recalls nights in college, getting ready with her girlfriends before a frat party — not so different. What’s staring back at them, two middle-aged women, is somehow foreign to her, although she thinks they might look better than they did when they were chubby college coeds.

“So who’s going to be there tonight?” Olivia asks.

“The usual,” Hilary says. “The TASOHK crowd. I’m sure there’s very little overlap.” TASOHK means ultra-American, soccer mom and corporate dad.

“Oh, good,” Olivia says. “No one I know.”

“You’ll be slumming it with the suburbanites.” Hilary laughs.

“Any handsome ex-football players?” Olivia muses. “I knew I should have married an American.”

“Be prepared. There are going to be hundreds of them tonight.”

“I’m ready,” Olivia says.

SHE’S WITH HER MOM at the gourmet supermarket in the basement of a big mall. Her mother’s boss, Shirley, had texted, asking her to pick up a few last-minute things for the party, so they have big bunches of parsley for garnish, many lemons to cut into pretty shapes for used toothpicks from the canapés.

“I’ve only lived here a few months, but Shirley crazy to come to this market,” her mother says. “The price here so high!”

“She just knows that if one of her customers complains, she can say she gets everything at the best supermarket. She can charge way higher prices this way, you know. Most of her food comes from wholesalers, but she gets the small stuff here.” It drives Mercy crazy how her mom just doesn’t get it.

Her mother shakes her head at the wasteful woman running a business this way. “This one lemon is eight dollars!”

“But it’s a big one, from Tasmania. At the local market, they’re small and not good. Anyway, it’s not your money.”

“Mercy, I want to help her,” she says. “She is losing herself the money.”

There are some seven or eight people ahead of them in the line. Late-afternoon Saturday is a busy time, with people picking up groceries for dinner.

There is a gradual commotion, in the way that minor disturbances come about. One, then two, then three people start to look at a woman, around forty, who is talking loudly in the way of the mentally ill.

“She’s Korean,” her mother whispers.

The woman is speaking Korean to the cashier, loudly and without stopping, even though the cashier is trying to respond.

“She must be crazy,” her mother says. The cashier, who is Chinese, waves her hands and shakes her head, but the woman keeps talking.

“Sometimes when you are too lonely, you get like that,” says her mother, who should know.

“There are a lot of Korean people from Korea here,” Mercy says, using the peculiar way Koreans identify each other — Koreans from LA, Koreans from Queens, Koreans from Korea.

“Yes, I see them,” her mother says. “Many in Taikoo Shing.” A neighborhood with malls and lots of apartment buildings.

The cashier keeps ringing up the woman’s items, items that suddenly look like the property of the insane: two oranges, a box of chocolates, a cabbage, and a six-pack of Japanese beer.

“ Gananhae ,” her mother says clinically. The woman is poor.

“How can you tell?” Mercy asks, curious for the first time.

“I can tell,” her mother says. “Look at her shoes.”

Mercy looks at the woman’s shoes, a simple black pair of pumps with sensible two-inch heels, and considers, possibly for the first time, that her mother might have her own value system in which she lives and judges other people, namely Koreans. This makes Mercy feel adult.