Janice Lee: The Expatriates

After the service, people gather for refreshments. She also knows this — the big urns of coffee and tea, the bowls of Coffee-mate and sugar cubes, Kjeldsens Butter Cookies in their white fluted paper cups. This could be a Korean church gathering anywhere on the globe. Exhausted from her time in the expatriate world, she eats biscuits and revels in the homely acceptance implied in this space.

Until a woman with a pinched face asks her where the baby’s father is. It’s a normal way in Korean to refer to one’s partner, so she could be asking innocently, but Mercy’s not so sure.

“Not here,” she says, smiling.

“Is he working? What does he do?” The nosiness of Korean ajumma is unparalleled.

“Law,” Mercy says. Nothing she has said has been a lie, although nothing is constraining her from lying either.

“Oh, lawyer. Great!” says the woman.

“How long have you lived in Hong Kong?” Mercy asks. The woman is short, and Mercy can see her scalp through the thin strands of hair she has dyed a purplish-black.

“Ten years,” she says. “Have a daughter. She at Berkeley now.”

“How wonderful,” Mercy says. “Congratulations.”

“She maybe become the dentist.”

Mercy’s mother appears by her side.

“ Heemduro? ” she asks. Are you tired? “Come sit down.” She leads Mercy away. “Don’t like that woman,” she says. “Mrs. Lee. She always brag.”

They sit by themselves, drinking hot tea with milk and sugar, surrounded by fellow Koreans in a foreign land. It’s not so bad.

EXPAT HONG KONG has emptied out in a long, wistful exhale. The families go back for home leave to see their parents and siblings, grill hot dogs, and drink beer on verdant lawns, experiencing the best of America.

There are several waves of migration. There’s the mass exodus that happens as soon as school lets out, when eager mothers have all the bags packed and ready so that when the kids get home from their last day at school, they give them a quick snack, and then it’s off to the airport for the flight to JFK or LAX and connecting on. There’s another wave of people who have their kids do an immersion program in China or a session of summer school before heading out in mid-July for a month. Still others, mostly dual working parents, just carve out a week or two, fly home quickly, and come back again.

The American Club becomes a ghost town, lounge chairs sitting empty as a lone swimmer does laps, when just a few weeks ago, it was bustling with children taking tennis lessons, birthday parties, farewell dinners. On a Sunday, Margaret and Clarke sit, nursing coffees. Clarke has exercised in the gym this morning, and Daisy and Philip are in the teen area, watching movies and playing air hockey with the few remaining stragglers.

Margaret and Clarke stayed all last summer because she couldn’t fathom leaving, but Clarke has broached the subject of going home to California for two weeks in July this year.

“You could see all your old friends,” he says. “And we could see your mom and my parents. The kids haven’t been back in a long time, and it’s important for them to stay in touch with their old friends.” This is what expats do, because they’re always preparing for the inevitable return.

This is all out of the question for Margaret. She cannot leave Asia any more than she would ever think of giving up on G. How could he ever find her if she moves half a globe away? She feels guilty enough being a three-and-a-half-hour plane ride away.

But, her other children.

She doesn’t say yes to going back for this summer, but she doesn’t say no.

She’s preoccupied with her dream, the one she keeps having, the one that woke her up this morning again, jittery. The apocalypse is coming. They have to get out. She has to pack. She has to think of everything her family might need and put it in backpacks. Water, food, blankets, can openers. What is necessary? What will help them survive? What shoes should they wear? In the dream, she is packing and packing, but her backpack keeps getting bigger and heavier, and she realizes she cannot carry it. So she takes things out. Then puts them back in. Considers what is important. Makes decisions and unmakes them. Packs and unpacks. A repetitive and anxious and crazy-making dream.

So she looks up what to store at home in case there is an earthquake or a nuclear bomb, and then buys everything. She has candles and gas ranges with extra fuel cans, water-purifying tablets, Cipro, containers of water, canned foods, a flint stone. There is a community of people she has found online who are preparing for the apocalypse, and they call themselves preppers. She has bought books off the Internet, and they come in brown paper packages tied with red twine, her address written in a shaky, unclear hand, an address that ends “Hong Kong, China, Japan,” all three included for good measure. The books are often self-published and, unsurprisingly, not well-written, penned by paranoid recluses in rural areas. But the dream seems a sign. She doesn’t want to leave anything to chance.

Besides, it feels good to have a project. And what better project than to maximize the chances of her family’s survival in the case of an apocalyptic event? Clarke doesn’t know, but she secretes everything in a closet off Essie’s room, so Essie sees the growing supplies, grows fearful that something is happening that she doesn’t know about. Margaret has a separate stash in her room in Happy Valley as well.

“I don’t know,” she says, noncommittal about going back to the United States. “Maybe.”

After Clarke’s party, she had woken up with a hell of a hangover and that dreadful shame that comes after a colossal bout of drunkenness.

She kept asking Clarke who saw her do what and what she had said, and he kept telling her to forget about it. She apologized to him, and he brushed it off, saying she deserved to tie one on, and then she had to go down for breakfast and face his parents. It took her a week to stop blushing involuntarily when she thought about what had happened.

But Mercy! She could remember that. Now she can’t stop thinking about Mercy either. What she is doing, if she has a job, a boyfriend, a life. At her last session with Dr. Stein, she asked if it would be okay to contact Mercy, and the doctor asked why she wanted to.

“It’s like an unfinished thing, and one that I can actually finish,” she said.

“What do you think you will be able to ‘finish’ here?” Dr. Stein made air quotes around the word “finish.”

“ ’Cause I’ll be able to talk to her,” she replied lamely.

There is no resolution — there never is — but clearly Dr. Stein doesn’t think it’s a great idea. Clarke goes to shower in the locker room, and she picks up her phone. She Googles Mercy’s name. It’s common enough that there are several, so she adds in Columbia and finds a few hits. Mercy being quoted in an old article in the New York Post about Ivy League grads not being able to find work and doing temp jobs, an entry in a half marathon in Cambodia from several years ago, but nothing that is recent, nothing after what happened in Seoul. There is an old Facebook page that hasn’t been updated for two years and a Twitter account with no tweets.

Then she Googles G’s story and finds, as always, page after page of Korean media, with his picture, with hers, with videos of their press conferences. She cannot read the articles, so she just goes through them looking at the photos.

And then she lets herself do what she allows herself to do only once every two or three months: She pulls up the album where there are videos and pictures of G, and she opens them up and loses herself in the pictures and the moving image of the child she no longer has.