The Expatriates

Hilary

HILARY PAUSES. There is a stain on the piano’s ebony surface.

“Puri,” she calls. “There is a water mark here from where Julian left his glass during his lesson.”

At some point in her life, she realized that she never says anything directly anymore. She has become a master of indirection, or misdirection. She will say, “Mr. Starr is arriving from Kuala Lumpur at 11:00 p.m. tonight” or “I stained this blouse with red wine at dinner,” when she should say, “Please keep the lights on and notify the gate guard that Mr. Starr will be late” or “Send this out for dry cleaning.”

Puri, of course, cannot always decode the message, and Hilary will come across the garment, still stained, folded neatly in her closet, or David will complain that the guard didn’t let his airport car into the complex without an ID check.

She has noticed how, as she grows older, she is more and more reluctant to say anything directly, even to her husband.

She will tell him, “I haven’t told anyone else about that,” when she means to say, “Don’t tell anyone.” When David later says he has mentioned it to a friend, she gets upset, and he will exclaim, in the simple way of men, “Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted to keep it private?” and she will retire, injured. He should have intimated, she thinks. Intimated, because they are supposed to be intimate. He should have known.

So she does not say, “Please try to get the stain off the piano.” She walks into the kitchen and says, “Puri, I’m leaving now.”

Julian is sitting there, having a snack. Usually she would be there with him, but she forgot her lunch appointment and now cannot cancel. He is seven, wary. He comes, once a week, for his piano lesson, paid for by the Starrs, a new arrangement that has already revealed itself to be static and in need of change, but one that she has no idea how to alter. She sat with him during his lesson, as she always does, watching his slender fingers hover over the keys. He is talented. She found Julian in foster care, half Indian, half Chinese, left by his teenage mother. At the table now, he looks up and gives a shy smile, with his light brown skin and beautiful dark eyes, ringed with impossibly long lashes. How odd, she thinks, to not know whether his mother was the Chinese or the Indian half. The system must know, she thinks, but she doesn’t want to ask. But this seems a vital part of the equation. He will want to know, she thinks, and he should be able to find out. She should find out for him.

“I have to go out for lunch, Julian. Sorry I couldn’t reschedule it. Sam will come to take you back in fifteen minutes, after he drops me off. I’ll see you next week.”

She thinks he understands her but isn’t sure. His English is almost nonexistent, but he is agreeable. He gets in the car to come here, he plays the piano, he eats the snack they give him, and then she takes him back to the group home. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and goes home. Another odd event in his odd life.

Sam is waiting downstairs for her in the car. She gets in, and even in the cooler air, the interior is redolent of body odors. Humors, she thinks. The humors of the body, escaping through those tiny pores, roiling around the interior of the car.

Chinese or Filipino? everyone had asked when she said she was hiring a driver. Sam is Indian, an anomaly, but he grew up in Hong Kong, speaks fluent Cantonese, and knows every street in Hong Kong. She thought he would be happy to see Julian visit, but he is odd about it. Later she realizes that he thinks Julian is a street child, beneath him, a proper working man with a family. She realizes that everyone wants to find his own level.

Sam starts the car, and they go to the club.

Hilary sits, hidden behind sunglasses, waiting for her friend Olivia. Children are playing on the lawn while their mothers sip tea and gossip. A boy falls and cries. His mother goes to comfort him. She is a woman Hilary sees at the club every time she is there: a woman with three children, two girls, one boy. Today the woman is in dark jeans that show her wide hips and bottom and a white wool sweater that is stretched across her large breasts and hugs the shelf of flesh above the waistband of her jeans. The muffin top, Hilary knows it is called, the soft, doughy edge that tips over the waistband of your pants. The woman stands up and returns to her group of friends.

Hilary views the thickening torsos and thighs of her peers with a visceral disgust. How can they let themselves go like that, these women, as if it didn’t matter? Even if they did have children, surely it can’t be too much work to refrain from shoving éclairs and cream puffs down their throats for a few months? She was a heavy child, but she lost weight, and she kept it off. She looks at their arms, spilling out of their clothes like ham hocks, and the way their faces are cushioned in multiple folds, what she calls carb-face, and is nauseated. They have plates of food in front of them, chicken satay in congealing pools of oil, half-eaten grilled cheese sandwiches, glistening mounds of French fries with violent squirts of tomato ketchup.

They are so cheerful, the mothers, so enamored of themselves and their lives, as if the fact of bearing children earned them some unnamed right to sit in the dappled sun with their warm drinks cooling in the winter air and their disheveled hair and their ketchup-stained clothes. Hilary loathes them. She loathes them so much.

They are so lucky.

A year had passed before she thought anything wrong. She had gone off the pill, but it had been a casual event, after a dinner with a lot of wine, a lot of giggling about pulling the goalie, about whether they were really this old. They had not had a great longing for children; it was more of a maybe-it’s-about-time — they had been married two years. She supposed, they had both not been against it. The irony of their casual decision! She was thirty; they had just moved to Hong Kong. When it didn’t happen, month after month, she got nervous, figured out when she was ovulating by taking her temperature, made sure David was in town during her fertile time, as he traveled so much for his job. Sex became a chore, a baby-making effort. But nothing happened.

It has been eight years now, eight years during which she has seen friends have one or two or three children, or twins, a veritable frenzy of fertility, pregnancies, baby showers, births, and hospital visits, until they slimmed down and told her again, over lunch, apologetically, that they were pregnant again.

And yet she doesn’t want to go any further. The hormones, she has heard, make you fat, swollen, moody. She has been reading about the surrogate village in India — a friend forwarded the article — and the thought makes her feel faint.

So instead she waits. She thinks sporadically about going to a doctor, but then that thought is always drowned out by the thought that surely if it is to be, it will happen naturally. She is frightened by the thought of pregnancy, by the thought of her body changing. The body she knows so well and knows how to control so well. It is not the idea of being pregnant that moves her. She would like a child. She would like to be a mother.

David follows her lead, is amenable to what she wants. Their relationship has cooled in the meantime, cooled into politeness and well wishes, but she pushes that thought away, because how many difficult thoughts can one handle in one sunny afternoon? Perhaps a baby, a pregnancy, will save them from this gradual decline. But how to get there? She pushes the thought away again. She sits instead, wills her mind to go blank, sips at her iced tea, feels the smooth passage of it down her throat. She waits for her friend.

Hilary is from San Francisco, but not the San Francisco where everyone seems to be hiking or biking while chugging sports drinks, or doing some other sort of physical outdoor activity, and then talking about it endlessly. When people find out she is from the Bay Area, their eyes light up and they talk about this hike or that park, and she says, “Oh, I don’t know from that.” Or they talk about Napa Valley and the vineyards, and the cheese! “I like it,” she says. She is not effusive, the way people seem to want everyone to be, full of excitement and vim. She grew up just outside San Francisco, where her parents live still, and she moved to the city when she got her first job in PR.

She spent her early twenties working and then met David at a friend’s wedding. Everything according to plan. They married when she was twenty-eight, ten years ago. He was an associate at a law firm with offices all over the world, and he had always wanted to travel and live abroad. She said she would go with him anywhere.

After moving, there was a new vocabulary to learn: “lifts” instead of “elevators,” “flats” instead of “apartments”—vestiges of the British colony Hong Kong used to be. Also, instead of a housekeeper, the province of only the rich in America, everyone in her new world had a live-in domestic helper from the Philippines or Indonesia, who took care of all the housework and babysitting for the astounding sum of US$500 a month. They live in a particularly homogeneous enclave of expatdom, Repulse Bay, where half the people they see are white, and more than that are not locals, be they Chinese American or Japanese or Filipino. In this particular corner of Hong Kong, newly arrived Americans bump into one another at the supermarket and talk of their sea containers, arriving soon with their belongings, how to find a travel agent, how to get a driver’s license. The husbands get up in the morning, put on their suits, and take taxi-shares or minibuses or are driven to work in the tall, shiny office buildings in Central, while the women putter around the house before getting ready for their tennis match or going in to volunteer at the library, since they mostly had to give up their jobs when they moved. It all feels a bit like The Truman Show.

Still, even within this sphere, Hilary soon came to see the very fine distinctions.

There were the new expats, who signed up for courses on Chinese cooking at the MacDonnell Road YWCA, took the train to Shenzhen to buy fake DVDs and cheap dinnerware, went to the Art Village to have paintings copied cheaply for their apartments (“A funny Lichtenstein for the bathroom is so cute, don’t you think?”), and did first vacations in Phuket. Then there were the intermediate expats, who went to Bhutan to trek and Tokyo to eat and eschewed the touristy. They had favorite hikes. They threw out the IKEA furniture and bought real antiques. They had some local friends, a Mandarin nanny, and preferred to eat at restaurants secreted away in office towers. They started small businesses, like children’s clothing or jewelry design, all made in China, and sold their wares at the holiday gift fairs that sprouted up in hotel ballrooms around December. And then there were the old Hong Kong hands, who had racked up ten, twenty years in the colony. They were mostly in Hong Kong for good, sometimes had given up citizenship in their former countries. They owned their homes, always bought on a dip in the property market, didn’t talk to newcomers, and smiled blankly when people brought up newbie topics like schooling and medical care, as if they had mentioned something as unspeakable as their bathroom habits.

Of course, there were the international lines as well. The Japanese were a discrete group and rarely mingled, playing baseball and soccer together every weekend at the municipal athletic fields, with their neatly packed bento lunches and peculiarly named sports drinks. The French and Koreans were a bit more porous, the English perhaps a bit more, and the Americans most of all, although, after a few years of socializing strenuously with everybody, people tended to slip back into their national identities. It was just so exhausting to have to explain what a state school was, or how football and soccer were different. After a few years, even the most well-meaning Americans found themselves calling only other Americans and doing Super Bowl breakfasts (due to the time difference) and Thanksgivings at the club with other families. You found yourself somehow more American than ever.

Hilary has become firmly ensconced in her new life, one she slipped into frighteningly easily, as David’s career flourished in Asia over the past eight years. He is now one of the most senior attorneys at his firm. Hilary has servants — a domestic helper and a driver — a membership to a country club, where she plays tennis with other sun-visored ladies, and afterward, showered and dried and clad in cool summer shifts, they order Greek salads and salted French fries and sip pinot grigio as the sun sets and their husbands work and they gossip and complain and otherwise act as if life has always been this way.

And now there is Julian.

She first saw him a few months ago while on a tour with the American Women’s Association, which she joined back when she was new to Hong Kong. She had seen a flyer for the association at the American Club. There were photos of smiling women eating Chinese food, holding a bake sale, at a costume party. The aura of nonjudgmental acceptance drew her in. She stuck with AWA over the years, taking part in some of their activities, and was on their e-mail list. She decided to sign up for an introduction to Hong Kong Social Services, where they learned about different situations and how they might volunteer and be useful.

They saw an orphanage, or what they called a child-care center, as well as a small group home. The child-care center was in Kowloon, in a massive concrete building. Hilary found herself on a tour with five other well-meaning American women clutching Starbucks coffee cups. Amid the powerful scent of Dettol — disinfection was a religion in Hong Kong after SARS — Belle Liu, the bespectacled representative who sported the inexplicably mannish cut of so many local women, explained the different areas in the blunt, accented English Hilary often found startling, the locals not yet having adopted politically correct terminology.

“This for the retard children,” she said, gesturing to a padded room where two boys in helmets rocked back and forth while a woman read a newspaper in the corner.

“Sometimes mother will not come back for one year,” Belle said, “and we don’t know if the child is abandon or not.”

“Is there a cutoff date for when you would find the child a new home?” a woman asked.

Belle went into a lengthy explanation of government regulations and the forms the women were supposed to sign when they left their children. However, she said, very few complied. They were mothers, after all, and most could not bring themselves to give up their children if they weren’t made to. They imagined a future when they would be better off, have more, and reclaim their child. So then the children languished in legal limbo, unable to be put in the adoption pool, unable to go home. Like many locals in government administration, Belle was very excitable about rules and regulations and following them to the letter.

Another room had five baby swings and an equal number of foam seats for infants who could not sit upright yet. There were no children in that room — down for naps, Belle explained.

The women were kind, the furniture and equipment were clean, the endeavor was wholly adequate, and yet, of course, the whole building reeked of sad desperation. Hilary walked through the fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored hallways in a daze, looking at all the abandoned, luckless children.

She went to the bathroom, an institutional affair that smelled strongly of bleach and urine, and closed the stall door. When she pulled down her pants, they were stained with blood. Her period, again. The earthy, rich smell rose and sickened her. Her stomach dropped.

She sat in that stall, her head in her hands, for ten minutes, listening to people come in, urinate, pull on the toilet paper, flush, wash their hands — the mundane sounds of the lavatory. She breathed carefully, modulating the sound so that people knew someone else was there but not so loud as to disturb them. Someone from the tour came in to check on her, and she said to go on without her, she would find them.

She looked at her bloody underwear. This had to be a sign, she told herself. Just like the signs other people are always going on about of when they recognized their child. Getting your period in an orphanage had to be a sign.

She had taken a class in college about feminism and medicine. In it, she learned that the whole terminology around menstruation — a failure to conceive, a shedding of the lining — was negative and misogynistic and old-fashioned, teaching women that their sole purpose in life was to have children. The lining of the uterus was not shed; it was cleansing itself to make way for a new lining. Back then, so far away from the idea of having children, the whole premise had seemed impossibly academic and precious. Now she wants to find that book again and read it. She wants to find a way to redefine what is happening to her, to own it.

And then she saw Julian.

Of course, his name was not Julian then. She decided to call him Julian after all the arrangements had been made. That seemed an enormous encroachment into his life, already, naming him.

The group went on from the child-care center to what was called a group home, a smaller institution that housed only eight boys. Here, their guide explained, they had a smaller setting. The government outsourced child care, so children would end up in a child-care center, a group home, or foster care.

Julian was doing homework in a room with older kids. He stood out because he was not Chinese but, instead, that beautiful brown mix. She tried to talk to him, and the guide told her that he was wonderful at music. Sick with the knowledge that she was not pregnant, she rushed into something impulsive. “I’ll find him a piano teacher,” she said. Belle Liu nearly had a conniption, what with all the regulations that would violate, but Hilary simply kept talking, and the kindhearted woman finally could not bear to see Julian miss a chance at something he would never otherwise get.

“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “I don’t know.”

And she didn’t say anything more, and Hilary knew to just shut up and come back and do it later. Julian’s paperwork had recently come through — a small miracle, the woman said — and he had been released into the adoption pool, but his chances for adoption were close to nil because of his age and because of his mixed race. Normally-developing babies had a 100 percent chance of being adopted if their paperwork was done, but after a year or two, the children’s chances dropped steeply. Julian went to school near the group home and walked there and back. He had already started on the life he would lead if no one were to intervene.

He has been coming to her house for just a month. She usually picks him up early, so that they can have a snack. The first time, she made him lasagna herself, Puri clucking over the mess Hilary made in her own unfamiliar kitchen, spilling tomato sauce on the countertop, opening every cupboard door in search of the Pyrex pan. But he barely ate it, pushing it around the plate until it became a huge, gloppy mess that looked unappetizing even to Hilary.

Puri stood over him with a satisfied expression on her face. The ma’am was not supposed to go in the kitchen. That was her domain.

“Sik mae?” Puri asked him, motioning to her lips with an imaginary spoon. She spoke some Cantonese, from her time with a local Chinese family.

“Chow faan,” he said. He liked fried rice. Even Hilary knew what that was.

So now Puri makes him the food he likes, that she knows how to make from her previous job. She makes pork fried rice, spring rolls with shredded carrots and turnips, vinegary chicken wings; once she made an entire steamed fish with head on. The house smells like a Chinese restaurant on Julian’s days, all soy sauce and deep-fried Mazola, but she does not say anything, because he devours the food while Puri looks on, gratified. This is a child who does not know what to do with a carrot stick, or celery filled with peanut butter, or a cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich. She might as well give him hay.

Hilary usually sits opposite him, always, stunned by the silence in her, unable to say anything but the most cursory social greeting. He has to learn English, she says to herself, he has to learn English. But who will teach him? She has given him an English name. What next? What next? Isn’t there some sort of manual?

But he doesn’t make it easy either. He is usually reserved, but sometimes, suddenly, clownishly friendly, as if the women at the group home have told him he has to close the deal, although she knows that must just be her own projection. She does not know how to handle him when he is like that; she is too close to his desperation and confusion and is overwhelmed. But she does not even know if it is desperation that drives him. She has no way to read what he thinks, what he feels. She has nothing in common with him except what she has the will to build, and that will, it seems, is not strong enough.

This complete flouting of all common adoption wisdom — that she is allowed to take a child home, a “test-drive” she thinks of it sometimes, the thought bubbling up in her head before she can suppress it with horror — is an incredible, under-the-table thing that has somehow happened because everything is personal and the head of the AWA really, really likes her because they went to the same university and so she vouched for Hilary to the department head, whom she has known for sixteen years. It is terrible, it is scandalous, and yet Hilary cannot come to a decision. She can tell herself that she is giving her time to a child who needs it, a volunteer sort of thing, and that she doesn’t have to go the whole way.

It is also, she tells herself, because she finds herself already too surrounded by people who depend on her. Given fifteen minutes in the same room, Puri will tell her of her family in the Philippines and their various medical ailments, their debts, their divorces, all of which Puri — and, by implication, Hilary — is responsible for. Puri will weep and all but rend her clothes. Their lives in that country are operatic: epic tales of affairs and jail time and abandoned children and mistresses and sickness and thirteen-hour bus rides. Hilary adjusts her bangles and makes sympathetic noises, but she cannot understand what Puri is talking about. She pays Puri triple the usual rate and hopes that recuses her from further responsibility. Puri is short, squat, with a farmer’s build. She is not honest, but she is clever, and from what the expatriate women say, you cannot have both.

Puri bangs around when Hilary is in the kitchen, asks loudly what she is looking for. She cannot stand to have intruders on her territory. She inhales sharply over Hilary’s cooking, signaling her complete disbelief that someone can have so few skills. The ma’am is not supposed to cook.

And Sam. Sam, the driver. Sam is a trial: proud and angry and a ruinously bad driver. He has dented their car twice, parking, and rear-ended someone at a red light. But she cannot fire him. He has not done anything really bad, she tells David, who shakes his head at her indecision. If I ran my office the way you run this house, he says before he leaves for the morning. The statement lingers. What would happen? she thinks. What would happen?

When Julian came into their lives, the few people they told assumed they were going to adopt him. And she thought so too. Once she and David took him out for dim sum on the weekend, an awkward outing, both parties not knowing how to move it forward, how to take the next step, paralyzed by the notion that it might be a mistake from which they would never recover. She cannot understand all the other families around her, the ones who add to their families with such single-minded, deliberate simplicity and assurance.

“I just knew,” they say. “As soon as I walked into the orphanage and saw Mei, as soon as I did, I knew that she was mine. She looked at me and I looked at her and we both knew.”

“How?” she wants to ask them. “How did you know?”

But, of course, no one ever asks that. They tell their stories all in the same way: how they filled out their applications and waited and waited, the sudden call, the hastily booked flight, the anonymous hotel room they bring their new child to, the formula bought on the fly. The children never cry, because it never did them any good in the orphanage. Then they have tantrums. These adoptive parents have a network, and they help one another. They know their children when they see them.

They seem wholeheartedly good in a way that she cannot understand, because she is in some way bad, or selfish, or ignorant, or unwilling to believe, because she cannot recognize her child when she sees him. They believe her to be one of them, but she is not.

“You’ll know,” they say.

So she looks at Julian and tries to know. But all she can see is the questions. What if he hates her? What if he tries to run away? What if he has some genetic disease that will waste him away before he turns thirteen? What if — and this is the big one — what if she can’t love him? She knows these are selfish questions, not the kind she is supposed to be asking. She is supposed to care about his well-being, about how his life will be, but she cannot shake off her commitment to herself. Sometimes she thinks that is what the nine months are for, so that women can get to know the person inside them, that it is a mingling at first of self and child, and then after the baby is born, that is when you can become the selfless, generous mother you are supposed to be. She doesn’t have that yet, she thinks. Maybe nine months of getting to know him is what she needs.

And then, just when she and David seemed to be moving to some sort of decision, there was a spate of articles in the paper about a family who was essentially giving up their adopted child. Facts were murky and hard to come by, but the family was Dutch, and the child, Chinese. They had adopted him about three years ago, and they wanted to give him back. There were outraged letters to the editor, saying that adopting a child was not like buying a pair of pants — you couldn’t return him when he didn’t fit. There were racial overtones, of course, the privileged white minority and the beleaguered local community.

She read each day’s developments with a heightening sense of dread. She was implicated in this, she knew it. There was some lesson being taught, but she didn’t know what it was. Was what they were doing worse than this family? They were essentially trying out Julian, without adopting him, bringing him home, interacting with him, seeing if this could work. At brunch at the American Club, a woman brought it up, quite aggressively, and so now she doesn’t mention it anymore. Another thing to be ashamed about.

David lets her drive the process. He is supportive enough, but she knows he thinks she is being crazy about the whole thing, that it will just happen if they relax. Or that they can adopt. He is noncommittal about either situation, which seems to her a strange reaction to something so momentous, but she doesn’t push him on it. He seems to dissolve into the workday and come back spent. Whether they’re driving to a restaurant or taking turns in the shower in the morning, the complaints and discontents of their marriage have reached a granular level that surprises her with its mundane primacy: He never recaps the toothpaste; he never lets her know his schedule, then acts surprised when she is not available or is miffed when there’s nothing for him to eat. They bother her in a deep, distant way, as if they are coming from far, far away. Marriages are mysteries to everyone, she supposes, most of all to the people in them, if they are not paying attention.

Hilary sits and waits for her friend — her chronically late friend, who has told her she needs to see her — so that they can have lunch. She sits and waits at the table, seeing the white surface of it made gold by the light, with the sounds of shouting children and bursts of laughter and women’s chatter surrounding her, and wonders how she can feel so closed off from it all, how she feels as if she’s in an echo chamber, apart from everyone else, excised from the collective experience of a cool winter afternoon.

But she remembers. She remembers having moments when she felt lifted with gratitude. It was dizzyingly gratifying to feel that you wanted nothing more than what you had at that moment: a hot latte with a full head of foam, and a newspaper filled with facts you were about to learn, a man sitting next to you who wanted to be there. Those moments are there in her past, glimmering like small flames in the far, far dark of her memories. Maybe she has to go back to go forward to get there again. Maybe that’s what she needs to do.

Olivia arrives, finally. Forty minutes late.

She is Chinese, striking.

“Hello, darling,” she says. Never an apology for being late. People wait for Olivia. She takes off her sunglasses and waves them around. “Nice day for December, isn’t it? I love that you can sit outside in Hong Kong year-round. Nowhere like it.” The sky is crisp and blue, the blue-green sea meeting it in a flat line. She is wearing tan wool trousers and a brown chunky-knit sweater.

“It’s wonderful today.”

“Let’s get some drinks.” She waves her hand to the waiter. “Hello, Kevin,” she says. “Chrysanthemum tea.”

Hilary asked Olivia once why she didn’t speak Cantonese to the staff. Her English is perfect but stiff, as if she is elocuting, not talking.

“I do when I’m with family and other Chinese,” Olivia had said, surprised. “I’m with you, and I think it would be impolite.”

“Like you were talking about me to them or something?”

“I suppose,” she said. “I haven’t really thought about why, just do it naturally. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m speaking unless someone comments on it.”

The tea comes, and Olivia pours Hilary her cup first. This is something Hilary loves, how everyone is so polite here at the table. They serve others the choice bits first, would never dream of eating before a guest, never drink the last of the wine, fight to pay the bill. An admirable trait of Asian culture, but then you are horrified when you go back to the United States and it’s a free-for-all and every man for himself.

“My mother would faint, us sitting outside,” Olivia says. “She always says that you should retain warmth. After I had Dorothy, she didn’t let me go outside for a month, literally. You know, the confinement period, when they make you eat foul broths and teas and you can’t wash your hair.”

“This is for you,” Hilary says, and gives her a shopping bag tied with red ribbon. “Belated birthday. Open it later, though. I hate it when people open presents in front of me.”

Olivia is a citizen of the world, one of those effortlessly cosmopolitan people. She has lived in London, New York, Paris, but prefers Hong Kong to all else. She has been to every restaurant, every spa, every good hotel. She can hold forth on where to get the best massage in Morocco, a good driver in Italy, a yoga teacher in Bali.

She is not beautiful; she is sophisticated looking, with good bones, matte skin, perfectly arched eyebrows, long, thin fingers that are always buffed and filed, nothing as vulgar as nail polish. “I do think all those women who spend all that time getting manicures are insane,” she once said to Hilary, who burst out laughing. “But you spend so much time on grooming!” she said. “Your haircuts, your clothes, tailoring your clothes.”

Olivia just blinked, unmoving. “I do not,” she said simply. “That is different.”

Hilary admires her a great deal. Olivia’s very presence seems to suggest that alternatives exist.

“So I went to Burberry this morning because I had to pick up something that had been altered, and a shopgirl was there who used to help me at another boutique — you know the salesgirls move around a lot. She had just done a stint over at Tsim Sha Tsui at the Louis Vuitton, and she told me the most screamingly funny stories!”

This was another Hong Kong peculiarity. Olivia is Chinese, local-born and bred, went to a Cantonese girls’ school and then to the American school before college in California with Hilary. Yet she has English mannerisms and speech.

“Like?”

“You know, no one we know ever shops over there, it’s all for the mainland people. Have you ever been over there? Nathan Road, Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, with all the big luxury boutiques?”

“No, I barely buy that stuff over here.”

“But she said it’s like a zoo. There are children having tantrums, eating McDonald’s, licking the mirrors! She said once she went in to clean a dressing room and someone had peed on the floor! Peed! They’re really animals!”

Hong Kong people are like the landed gentry in England, beset by pesky, redolent immigrants, Hilary thinks. People like Olivia are disdainful of their mainland counterparts, who sweep over the border in overwhelming numbers with their fat wallets and arriviste ways. She makes fun of how they buy up baby formula and Ferrero Rocher in enormous quantities — these have become currency in the mainland for some reason — and thinks of them as not quite people.

But it seems Olivia wants to talk to her about something else.

“So I wanted to ask you something,” she says, bringing the cup of tea up to her lips.

“What?” Hilary asks.

Olivia puts the cup down.

“If you knew something about a friend, something that was important, would you tell her, even though it might hurt her?”

Hilary looks at her. Olivia is fiddling now with the fork, unable to look up. It is odd to see the unflappable Olivia visibly nervous.

“What kind of thing?” she says slowly.

“You know, important stuff. Stuff that might change their lives.”

“Is it,” Hilary says slowly, “to do with me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” Hilary says. “I don’t know.”

There is a pause.

“I think you should know,” Olivia says gently.

Hilary looks away, at the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. She makes a decision and looks up at the kind eyes of her friend.

“Not today, please,” she says, making the kind of statement that makes her wonder if she knows who she is anymore. “I can’t hear anything life-changing today. I have a dinner party tonight.”

When she gets back home, the salad she somehow managed to eat a jumble in her stomach and mind, Julian is gone, and Puri is furiously chopping something in the kitchen, and the table is already set, ready for the caterer. She is having a dinner party, but she doesn’t really have anything to do. She thinks of the tired jokes that Hong Kong housewives make, when complimented on their food at dinner parties: “Thank you, it’s homemade — meaning made in my house,” or “Thank you, I’m a great supervisor.”

She wants a drink, but it’s only three in the afternoon. Puri is in the kitchen, so she goes in and makes herself a vodka tonic, trying to seem like it’s perfectly normal to mix yourself a cocktail in the afternoon.

The fact is, the helpers see everything. They see the fights, they see the messiness. They hear the arguments, are witness to the silent, toxic aftermath as they pour the coffee and clear the breakfast plates. They know which vase got thrown, because they clean it up in the morning. They know when sir gets a call from a strange woman with an unknown, hesitant voice, or comes in at 3:00 a.m. when the ma’am is in America, or when the teenage children throw a party when their parents are out of town and hand them $500 to “clean up” and keep their mouth shut. They know so much.

So why does she care? Hilary ponders this as she goes to her desk and takes her first sip. Ah, that warm thrum of the alcohol traveling down your body and hitting your stomach. She doesn’t care so much, it’s just that you can’t walk around naked or eat peanut butter standing in front of the fridge in front of someone who’s not your family. That’s the price you pay for having live-in help. Boo hoo. Poor her.

Hilary sips at her drink and wonders how many calories she is taking in. It’s not the alcohol she’s worried about: It’s that she is always looser, more lenient with herself after a few drinks. A small bag of potato chips, a slice of cake out of the fridge. It all adds up.

Her body, her body, her body. This is what she thinks about at night, lying on the sheets, after David has gone to sleep and she can hear him breathing. She imagines her old fat distributed uncomfortably over her, lying, puddlelike, on her bones.

She is thin now, but in an unnatural way, with pudgy arms and thighs that would not slim down no matter what she did. But she has kept off the weight for thirty years, something her mother praised her for. After her childhood episode with being the fat girl, she made herself be uninterested in food. Ate to live, didn’t live to eat. Nothing tastes as good as thin feels — isn’t that what the ads said? David once came across photos of her as a child, and he couldn’t believe how big she had been, even though she had been a little girl and still cute, though she could tell he didn’t think so. In college, she read a story by Andre Dubus about a fat girl who lost weight, got married to someone who worked for her father, and got fat again, and then the husband found her disgusting. She read it fast, furious, her face hot. She threw it down as soon as she finished, as if it were pornographic. In class, she didn’t participate in the discussion, as if to do so would let others see what she had been. She saw herself in that story but didn’t like to think about what that meant. Of course, she would never let herself get fat again.

The thing was, she and David had never fit. They were mismatched. She had never known why he asked her out. When she saw photographs of his ex-girlfriends, they were sharp-cheeked blondes with shallow blue eyes, mean-looking brunettes in small, tight dresses. She asked him once, early on in their relationship, “Am I a different kind of girl for you?” and he replied, not without affection, “You’re the kind of girl I marry.”

He was handsome, in a seamless sort of way, especially in a suit. He was better looking than most of the other guys she had dated. She had not had a very serious boyfriend before him. Everything had just fallen into place. Right time, right guy, right age. And now they have been married for ten years.

They are having the dinner tonight for a new person at David’s firm, someone who just made partner in San Francisco and then was relocated here. David told her that the promotion had been contingent on the understanding that the man relocate his family to Hong Kong for at least three years. Having been here so long, Hilary doesn’t understand why anyone is reluctant to come to Hong Kong, with all its advantages. There’s also an old friend of David’s, from California, who is passing through with his wife, another couple from Tai Tam, and the Reades. A comfortable mix of people.

The menu: Three canapés: sesame salmon tartare in phyllo tarts, Peking Duck spring rolls, mini cheese quiches for the vegetarians — vegans had an obligation to declare themselves in advance. Then a chicory salad with roasted garlic and goat cheese tumbles, and the main course: Chilean sea bass with an olive tapenade and mashed turnip, cappellini primavera for the vegetarians. For dessert, warm caramel tart with burnt-sugar ice cream and coffee or tea. A nice Italian pinot grigio and a red cabernet from Australia. Leafing through menus at her desk, she often floats above herself and sees the woman she’s become, eerily similar to her own mother, someone she thought she would never be. She knows that canapés have to be easily eaten in one bite, knows how much and what kind of wine to order for different crowds, has different sets of china and linens to set different moods.

The money has always come from the women in the family. Real estate, so quaint an industry in new-age San Francisco, but all those tech titans needed office space and places to live. It seemed quite natural to have David sign a prenup. “It’s the family custom,” she said at the time, nervous. It was true. Her father had signed one as well. Of course, her father had gone on to make his own fortune in real estate, then technology investments. “You should be so lucky,” her mother said. She had sized up David pretty well when they first met for lunch at a pier-side restaurant. “He knows how to eat an oyster, at least,” she said after he’d gone to the bathroom. She had always been a snob.

David was as good about her family and the money as he could be expected to be. But it was always there, especially when they talked about buying a house or a car. David was a lawyer and earned a good living, but they lived as well as his boss and had a nicer car. She supplemented their housing allowance to get a bigger place, and they bought a Mercedes, new, in Hong Kong, where cars cost twice as much as they do in the United States.

Hilary doesn’t care about money all that much, but that’s probably because she’s never been without it.

Her mother was once a great beauty, but all of a sudden her face caved in, her body ballooned out, her hair frizzed, as if beauty were an all too temporary gift, perhaps from a witch or a fairy, to be cruelly taken away somewhere between your sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. Or maybe you just stopped caring. Not her mother. Hilary cannot reconcile her mother now with the one in the photos and in her memories. Lissom, shiny waves of mahogany hair, large brown eyes, always in a fitted sheath or silk blouse, immaculately pressed pants with a thin leather belt. Slim, slim, slim. This is the chant she grew up with. Of course. When she sees her mother after a long period, like at the airport — she still picks her up, dutiful daughter that she is — she is always shocked for a moment at the stranger who is waving at her, that stoutish matron who looks wrinkled and untidy, tired from the long flight.

How uncharitable, she knows, but what can you do to suppress your thoughts about your mother? Her mother mentions it sometimes, as she pushes away from the dinner table: “The metabolism goes, you’ll see,” and “I never thought I’d look this way.” Once, when they were standing together in a restaurant bathroom in front of the mirror, her mother said, “When you get older, Hilary, there will come a day when you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror. You will feel like the same sixteen-year-old girl, or twenty-five-year-old, or thirty, but an old woman is staring back at you.” Hilary was uncomfortable with the confidence, but she nodded and quickly dried her hands.

Her mother comes once or twice a year, usually at Christmas. She is due to arrive in a few days, and they will spend three days in Hong Kong and a week in Bangkok, where her mother loves the Chatuchak Market and the food. Her father is ill, with dementia, and this is the only time her mother leaves him.

If she had a child, maybe she would understand her mother better.

She finishes her drink, goes down to find CK already setting up the ice bucket and the highball and wine glasses. CK is a freelance waiter and bartender, a Chinese man who has found a living working the expatriate dinner party circuit. He has been at her house so often he doesn’t need any direction, just comes in and starts placing the glasses and folding the napkins. She sees him at every third event she is at, at other people’s houses, always in his impeccable white shirt and sporting a steady smile. Once, leaving a party very late, she saw a man waiting at the bus stop and, startled, realized it was CK, in a black tank top and baggy pants. His deference was gone, and he seemed decades younger as he talked in Cantonese on his mobile phone and gesticulated with his other hand. His voice carried over as he talked easily, loudly. Where was the exaggerated bow, the ingratiating smile? Her heart sank as she thought of how he put on his face for his job, but was it really any different from a disgruntled accountant complaining loudly to his wife over dinner, then smiling and making a sycophantic comment to his boss in the elevator the next day? Wasn’t everyone just trying to make a living?

“Hello, CK,” she says. His name was Cheng Kiang or something like that, but of course he told all his Western clients to call him CK. Whatever was easier for them.

“Hello, Mrs. Starr,” he says, smiling.

CK and Puri have a funny relationship. Now they are friends, but they had it out the first few times about whose responsibility it was to clean the glasses. Puri, no fool, said it was his job. He said his job was outside the kitchen. Now they have come to a compromise: He brings the glasses into the kitchen and puts them neatly in the sink for Puri to wash. Everyone saves face.

The cook and his assistant have arrived and are clearing space on the tiny counter. The kitchens in Hong Kong are small and uninviting, as the mistress of the house is never expected to be in one.

“Hello, do you have everything you need?” Hilary asks. She stumbles over a box of pre-prepped entrees.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Starr?” asks the cook. He is of an indeterminate race — Tibetan? half-Indian? half-Chinese? — but speaks perfect English. He has been here once before, but she doesn’t remember his name.

“Fine, it’s nothing.” She waves him away. She is more deliberate after a drink.

She dials David, gets his voice mail. “Tell me your ETA, please,” she says, and hangs up.

“I’ll have a glass of the white,” she tells CK. He pours with a flourish and hands it to her. She sits down on the couch and crosses her legs, cool in the flurry of activity around her. Another Saturday night. Another dinner party.

She remembers one of the first ones she was invited to in Hong Kong. A woman, unpopular, it later turned out, leaned over to her and said, “Out here, you’re not a real woman unless you have four kids.” She left, back to New Jersey, a year or two after Hilary arrived, but she thought of her sometimes and her casual, unthinking cruelty.

She hears David arrive downstairs and gets up to greet him.

“You look nice,” he says. She looks down at her black dress with filmy chiffon sleeves to cover the upper arms she is sensitive about. “Thank you,” she says.

“Everything set?” he asks. He smells like alcohol, or maybe it’s her.

“It always is,” she says. When did her marriage shift so that the simplest comments come to seem like snipes? She doesn’t remember, but it has, indisputably, shifted. She remembers Olivia’s face hovering over the glass of hot tea.

“Okay,” he says. “Great. I’m going upstairs to freshen up.”

She looks at the retreating back of her husband as he goes up the stairs, a slim, handsome back in a gray suit. She spirals up, out of her body, so that she is looking down at the house, at the husband and wife, having a dinner party, like paper dolls, or those Sims characters in that computer game that used to be popular. Sometimes she feels so old.