Janice Lee: The Expatriates

“No,” she says. “My mother wants me to go back to New York and have it there. The father’s…” She doesn’t finish the sentence.

“Okay,” Margaret says. Another silence.

For a moment, Mercy considers telling Margaret about being the other, the unseen, the one not in the magazine article or the news story, but she can’t see how she’s going to explain it. “I couldn’t eat for a year after what happened,” she says instead. “I felt so guilty I couldn’t do anything.”

“I don’t know what you went through,” Margaret says simply. “What I was — what I am — going through is so intense I didn’t have any time for anyone else other than my family.”

“And I’m the reason! I’m the one to blame!” She feels she has to be out front taking the blame, telling Margaret, Here is your chance! Take your best blow!

Margaret doesn’t, though. “I didn’t know what it would feel like to see you,” she says. “It’s not as painful as I thought it would be.”

“I don’t know how you’ve survived,” says Mercy, although right after she says it, she thinks it might not be the most helpful thing to say. At least she is talking about Margaret now and not about herself. She thinks that’s probably the right tack.

“I wanted to erase you so badly,” Margaret says. “I wanted you not to exist, because if you didn’t, this never would have happened. But here you are, adding to the world. That’s ironic, right?”

“I don’t know if I can handle your being kind,” Mercy blurts out.

The starts and stops of this conversation make Mercy feel as if she’s having a series of seizures. “Do you know what the opposite of talking is?” she blurts out.

Margaret is taken aback. “No, what?”

“It’s not listening. It’s waiting.”

Margaret processes, understands, then finally laughs. “Are you just waiting?” she asks. “Are you not listening to what I have to say?”

“No, no, no,” Mercy protests. “It’s just that this is a very weird conversation, and there are all these awkward pauses.”

“I’m waiting for the massive wave of hatred to flood over me,” says Margaret suddenly.

Mercy looks stricken. “I know,” she says. “It should.”

“I know it should. But I don’t feel it.”

They sit quietly. The waitress brings their drinks.

Mercy unwraps the straw. She shouldn’t have ordered this. It makes her feel like a child next to Margaret. Shouldn’t she be more strategic in every aspect of her life? She decides she must pick up the check when it comes, a forward thought that surprises her.

Margaret stirs cream into her coffee. “Were you at Clarke’s party?” she asks. “I thought I saw you, but I didn’t know why on God’s green earth you would be there.”

Mercy barks out an embarrassed laugh. “Um, I was. But I didn’t know it was Clarke’s party. I obviously wouldn’t have gone if I had known. My mom has a job at that catering company, and she asked me to help out. Hong Kong is so small, you know. So sorry.”

She wants to sink down into the earth. She wants this terrible and awkward encounter with this lovely and damaged woman to be finished. She wants to get up and leave.

But still she sits, they sit, drinking their coffee, their milkshake. They are still bound by social convention. She supposes this is maturity, or adulthood, or life,

Mercy spoons up the melting ice cream in her milkshake and wishes, more than anything, to feel that at some point in the future, she might be happy. But she looks across the table and sees that the woman sitting there wishes for that even more desperately.

LEAVING THE RESTAURANT, Margaret feels so unmoored she wanders for a while in Tsim Sha Tsui. It has finally stopped raining, and people are starting to emerge from indoors. TST is the type of neighborhood that gathers energy as the night descends, bustling and alive, with tailors calling out to hawk their services, brightly lit electronics stores blaring music, food stalls selling satay and pungent, bubbling curry.

She feels as if she’s walking inside a bubble, watching everything happen around her. She doesn’t know what she wanted out of seeing Mercy, whether it was supposed to have been cathartic or revelatory in some way, but she can’t sort out what it was. It’s too close. She remembers odd details from the past hour, like watching Mercy push back her hair with her hand, purse her lips around the straw of her drink — such utterly ordinary and quotidian gestures. Maybe that’s the message, she thinks: that everything ultimately becomes ordinary. That Mercy is just another person, another human being. There is no answer to be found in her.

She walks as if in a dream. She remembers, in college, once seeing a woman carefully drop a coffee cup into a mailbox, as if it were a garbage can, and then walk crookedly away. Maybe, she realized later, the woman had had a stroke. She still feels guilty that she hadn’t done anything, called after her to see if she was okay. But maybe that woman had been in a dream state so deep everything she did was unfamiliar and unconscious, and she had walked home and gone to bed, and then all was fine. Maybe this will happen to her.

Margaret walks down the steps to the MTR to take the subway back to Hong Kong side. When she first moved to Hong Kong, she used to ride the train and get out at random stops, just to discover more of Hong Kong. Mostly it was disappointing, just blocks of apartment and office buildings and malls, with people pushing past her anonymously. The inside of the MTR jars in another way, all polished steel and bright blinking lights. It is clinical and clean, the pride of the government, as it transports its citizens back and forth, back and forth, with maximum efficiency.

Inside the car, she slides on the smooth steel bench, the compartment only half-full with drowsy commuters, young people chatting. It is past rush hour, so it is almost quiet, peaceful. Most people sit or stand, tapping at their phones, dozing off with earphones on their heads. She wonders at everyone, enclosed in their own little world. When her stop lights up on the panel, she gets off and walks, almost unconsciously, to her little apartment.

She gets off on her floor. A man is waiting for the elevator. Is he a waiter, a construction worker, a security guard? Around her are the sounds of people eating dinner, talking, listening to the radio or television, instead of the usual silence that surrounds her during work hours. She has never been here in the evening.

She opens the door to her sanctuary, walks in. She sits down on her bed, but all the sounds of the living around her are too distracting. It is no longer her place. And, she realizes, it never really has been. It was just borrowed, a place she used in the off hours, while the real residents were gone. She is an interloper.

Margaret opens the window to the sticky air and the outside noises. It has started to rain again, lightly. Below her is the vivid tapestry of Hong Kong: the bright, colorful wares of a fruit shop, a flower shop, the pungent odor of the butcher, the fishmonger pouring out the day’s remaining ice onto the street with a muted clatter. Young couples wander under umbrellas, arms linked, eating sausages on sticks. Above, alone, she watches the world as the open window starts to streak with raindrops and a stray drop hits her cheek.

She used to wonder whether people were generally good or bad. She used to wonder whether she was a good person. She used to wonder whether bad things happened to good people more or less or if it was just random. And she used to look at people on the street and wonder what they were hiding or suffering from, or if they were that rarest of things: happy. She used to do all these things until she had to stop because her head was starting to ache.