Janice Lee - The Expatriates

This Melissa Gordon is someone Hilary used to see in the waiting room of the physio, pudgy in the way of many comfortable American housewives, but the knife-sharp planes and sleek brunette waves of the woman before her now make her almost unrecognizable.

“You lost a lot of weight,” Hilary says. When she comes across someone who has gone through the same journey she had as a child, she doesn’t feel kinship; she feels uncomfortable.

“Yes,” Mel says. “I discovered CrossFit and Boot Camp!”

So she’s one of the women down at Repulse Bay Beach weekdays, going through a circuit with an Australian trainer.

“Well, you look great.” Hilary turns away. “This is my friend from college, Olivia.”

Later Olivia will say that all the American people she met were unable to distinguish her from the waiters or other Chinese staff, a statement so patently ridiculous that Hilary is unable to stifle her bark of laughter, but for now Olivia graciously shakes Melissa’s hand and exchanges niceties about the loveliness of the occasion. All that Hilary appreciates about Olivia has no currency here. Olivia does not watch the latest network shows on Apple TV; she doesn’t go back to the United States every summer, or know what’s going on with the NBA or the NSA or NASA. Instead, she talks about LegCo or the West Kowloon Arts project or other things that concern people who will make their life in Hong Kong forever. There are no people like that here. Everyone here is temporary. They all think of their stint in three-year increments. They have never considered politics in Hong Kong or China or the implications of raising the local minimum wage. Olivia is heard politely, then dismissed as foreign, ironically.

Now Olivia talks to Melissa, a light, meaningless conversation, and Hilary half-listens. Is it true that inevitably you end up with people like yourself? In college, everything is so idealistic, and you want to believe you can be anyone you want and be with anyone you want just because you both like early-twentieth-century French films or are both interested in cooking. When is it that you realize those are tenuous threads that are all too easily snipped by the stresses of daily life — work, money, children? She was someone different for David, and that wasn’t able to sustain them for so long. If she looks around, the crowd is so homogeneous she can easily believe that the young are foolish indeed.

THE KITCHEN is so hot she feels she’s about to faint. Her mother sees this and hurries over.

“Do you need to sit down?” she asks.

“No, I’ll be okay,” she says.

“Get out of the kitchen, too hot!” her mother scolds, then hands her a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Pass these if you are okay.”

Mercy emerges out of the heat into a cool, temperature-controlled wonderland. Is there anything more than this party, right here, right now, that decisively underscores her jaundiced understanding of the world? There are the servers and the served. She knows this so well. As a waitress at her aunt’s restaurant, in America, in an immigrant neighborhood, it was less stark, but here, oh, a wide, wide chasm divides the two. She thought an Ivy degree would help her bridge it, but here she is, in black pants and a white shirt, hair pulled back, wandering among the privileged, offering them a small, exquisite taste of cheese or prosciutto, being rebuffed as the women all give a slight shake of their head when she approaches, the men more welcoming, interested in her wares, as she proffers the tray.

She remembers the pastor at church laughing at her teenage self listening to Janis Joplin, the tinny music coming out of the speakers. “You want Mercedes, yes?” he asked. “Don’t ask the Lord. You marry rich man!” Ever the callow teenager, she tried to explain to this sixty-year-old Korean man that Joplin was counterculture, singing about materialism, but he just laughed and joked that she had to be pretty to catch a good man.

It had been so close. She had almost gotten there. Charlie would have brought her to a party like this in ten years. She would have a modest diamond ring, a designer bag, a haircut from a junior stylist at an expensive salon — hard-won prizes but hers. David lives in this world, she’s sure. Most of her friends are on a sure route to this place, this destination. The women are coiffed, their hair blown into silky waves. Their outfits are sparkly and shimmery; their skin is moist and toned. They radiate well-being and prosperity, the knowledge that someone cares about them enough to take care of them while they take care of the family. She doesn’t want this exactly — she’s never been purely materialistic, and money has never been her goal — but she wants something like it, maybe just an assurance that she won’t fall by the wayside, that she won’t become invisible.

She crosses the room, going from cluster to cluster, casting an anthropological eye on the crowd. Mostly American, 85 percent white, expats, most of whom will be here for less than ten years. Still, while they are here, Hong Kong is their oyster. She hears snatches of conversation about the best resort in Hoi An, the best airline to fly to Dubai, how someone had to fire her second helper for theft. These conversations are light and airy, buoyed by an unassailable sense of their place in the world, assured, secure in their corporate jobs and housing allowances.

A woman says loudly to her, “May I have a glass of sparkling water, please?” Mercy can tell that the woman thinks she’s a local who can’t speak English, and is speaking loudly and slowly so Mercy can decipher the foreign words. She tamps down the urge to reply, merely nods her head.

In the idealistic confines of college, she thought that all people had the same opportunities, but to be here, one of a throng of Asian servers serving a bunch of white people, is severely messing with her head. She knows that it’s not the case, that in the media everyone is talking about Asian money and power and that everyone is rushing to get a piece, but today, this hour, this minute, when she has on a waiter outfit, with her bastard baby in her belly, and she’s serving goat cheese puffs to some indifferent blonde from Charlottesville, she feels so despairing she thinks, why is she even considering bringing another girl into this world? For she knows her baby is a girl. She just knows. How could it not be? Given the arc of her mother and Mercy, of course she’s going to have another luckless female. Isn’t that some Korean folktale? To bring into the world another girl to suffer, carry on the story?

She’s noticed too how she can tell that some women have only sons and some have only daughters. The women with boys are rangy and attractive, as if all that exposure to testosterone has honed them into a lithe, goddesslike receptacle for male worship. Women with girls look a little more beleaguered, as if already psychologically worn away. It’s clear to Mercy, in the unspoken way in which some truths reveal themselves, that this girl will be her only child, another reason she’s determined to keep it.

Crossing the room, she sees the banner for the first time. HAPPY 50TH, CLARKE!

An electric jolt goes through her body. Jesus.

She almost drops the tray.

It can’t be.

Hong Kong is small, but it can’t be that small. In the kitchen, no one mentioned the party’s hosts. Her mother just said it was an American’s fiftieth birthday and marveled at how dressed up the women were. She keeps walking, numbly, because she doesn’t know what else to do, but now all the groups of people seem menacing, as if they might house one of the Reades, which they probably do. Her head expands in and out. White lights press in on her temples.

Of course, Hong Kong can be this small. For someone like her, with an excellent memory for faces and names, Hong Kong can be dizzying and claustrophobic. She will read about someone in Time Out or the South China Morning Post and meet them the next week or see them going up the escalator at the Landmark. It is a small, small pond.