The Expatriates

Mercy

MERCY SITS in the restaurant, sipping coffee. She had actually had something to do today. She remembered when she got up from bed to fix the salad she had been thinking about. On her computer, a reminder popped up: “Lunch with Sandra Parnells, Conrad hotel.”

Mercy avoids old friends, as they’re too concerned about her, or not concerned enough, and she can’t abide either. But this was a complete stranger, a friend of a friend, who e-mailed her a few days ago as she was new in town — a woman who followed her husband to Hong Kong and is now looking for a job. Pleasant enough, but Mercy watched the woman slowly realize that Mercy is not someone who is going to be helpful or useful or anything. Her face recalibrated; she was waiting for the lunch to end. So Mercy helped her out: She said she had to run, let Sandra pay for the salad Mercy had picked at, and then watched her leave.

Now she is sitting in the hotel lobby restaurant, nursing a coffee, loath to return to her rabbit warren of an apartment. When she does come out and see people, the outside world, it seems unbearably bright for the first fifteen minutes, and then she adjusts and can imagine herself living again. But this is dangerous to do too often, to imagine things changing. Suddenly she recognizes someone from across the room. He is a Chinese boy to whom she never spoke in college. He didn’t run in her crowd, was a bit FOB — fresh off the boat, as the immigrants call one another — but they had a few classes together. Nerdy, but would be handsome if only someone taught him how to dress. She can tell he recognizes her by the way he keeps looking over.

Finally he stops on his way out. He is tall, wears a double-breasted navy suit with a purple tie. Terrible, cheap shoes. He has a backpack. Still nerdy.

“Columbia, right?” His voice still carries a slight Chinese accent.

She nods.

“You had an interesting name. Not the usual Asian name…”

“I still have it,” she says. “Mercy. You’re…”

“Charlie,” he says. “Charlie Leung. I work here in Hong Kong. You live here now?”

“For a couple years.”

“What do you do?”

She hesitates. He sees it, rescues her. “Sorry, I shouldn’t ask.”

“No, it’s okay,” she says. But then can’t think of what to say.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” he says.

“Yes.” She waits, but he bows a little bow, formal, how odd, and turns to leave.

She has never seen him around in Hong Kong, which means that he must not go to the same places she and her friends do. Maybe more of a local. Hong Kong is so small that if you go out enough, you will run into every expat at some point in the same five restaurants that people frequent. The restaurants change, but the scene never does.

Next table over is a man at lunch with a redheaded woman, a business lunch that has seemingly stretched into something longer and more meaningful.

“I’m in a bit of a pickle,” the woman says cheerfully, sipping her coffee, and Mercy can almost see the man’s face soften, fall in love. It seems so easy, so ubiquitously available: love and happiness. It happens every day. Later she will see the man with his wife, a different woman, and realize, with a sense of relief that is almost palpable, that the world is complicated indeed. That everyone has secrets and despair and romance in them. It makes her feel better.

Another man comes and sits down at the bar and orders a martini. He is in a suit but somehow looks louche. Three thirty now, when all the responsible work people have long ago gone back to the office and the stragglers are the housewives who have had a second or third glass of wine, the freelancers who have no meetings, nowhere else to be. A man in a suit at the bar at three o’clock is a man to avoid.

He scans the room; his eyes alight on Mercy.

“Hi there,” he says. “Do you want a drink?”

Of course she says yes. Of course she sits down with him. She may not eat, but she drinks. Falling into another bad decision. It feels like coming home.

Men. Men are a disaster for her.

“You are a pig,” she said to one obnoxious man at a bar who had propositioned her in a particularly crude way.

“And you are a chick who loves bacon,” he said back. And she laughed, because she thought it was actually a pretty funny thing to say, and then she spent the night with him, which was a pretty stupid thing to do. She sees him sometimes in Central during the day and ducks her head or goes into a shop to avoid him. He never seems to see her. She doesn’t know if it would be worse if he pretended not to know her or actually didn’t remember her. Or if he tried to be nice.

Another guy once said, nodding toward his beer, “Do you know how to take the head off the foam?”

“No,” she said.

He swirled a finger around his ear and stuck it in the white foam. It dissolved instantly. He grinned.

“Am I supposed to be charmed?” she said. “Impressed?”

“The oil in the earwax makes it go away,” he said.

She got up and left.

But all too often, she didn’t.

Even when she was younger, she always liked the wrong men. In high school, all her crushes turned out to be gay or those boys who were unattainable. The one guy at college she had really, really been into had lately been in the news for being fired for writing an incredibly misogynistic e-mail, about his colleagues at the New York investment bank where he worked, that had gone viral. All this makes her very uncertain about her judgment.

She doesn’t understand why men seem to treat her as if she doesn’t matter, as if she’s someone to spend a few hours with. All around her, she sees her friends in relationships; boyfriends who call to see what the agenda is for the weekend, who plan trips, who want to get married. She meets the guy at the bar who wants to have sex for a few weeks.

And so, today, she sits down with David and proceeds to get very, very drunk.

They sit so long, they see a couple come in to have an early dinner with their three children. They look Indonesian or Malaysian, and the children range from five to ten or so. They have three maids trailing them, in matching uniforms. The mother, in head-to-toe designer wear of the most glittery kind, and the father, in a shiny Adidas tracksuit, sit down and both bring out their phones and start tapping on them. The five-year-old boy plays on an iPad that one of the maids holds up for him, like a human tripod. Another maid massages hand cream onto the hands of the middle girl. The maids stand up, as if they are not allowed to sit. Everyone in the restaurant is staring at them.

“Unbelievable,” says Mercy.

“Happens all the time in this part of the world,” David says.

They have ascertained that they are both American, both sarcastic, both a little bit bitter. She notices the ring on his finger but is careful not to ask. Nothing inappropriate has happened. They are just two strangers having a drink in the afternoon. It makes her feel grown up, this possibility of a married man, an opening into a world she has never contemplated before. They segue into flirtatious back-and-forth.

“Like, really, what kind of name is Tucker?” she asks. “Or Chet? Only white people have those names.”

“Korean names are odd too, like Yumi or Yuri.”

“Those are Japanese names,” she says.

“I knew a Korean girl named Yuri!” he says triumphantly.

“I’m sure you did,” she says drily.

“Hey, now,” he says.

“Hey, now,” she repeats, mocking him.

“Now you’ve hurt my feelings,” he says. “Don’t you feel bad?”

“Not at all.”

“Want another drink?” he asks.

“Better not,” she says. “Drinking at four in the afternoon. You must be a dissolute kind of guy.”

There’s a pause. All this sparring is going to lead to something, or not.

“Well,” he says, “if you’re not going to have another drink with me, I do have a dinner party to get to.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” she says.

He gets up to go but lingers.

“I guess I’ll see you around?”

“Maybe.” She’s not that desperate.

He considers, says it. “Where do you hang out?”

A better man would have asked for her number or e-mail, but she’s not used to better men.

“I know the bartender at Il Dolce, so I’m there for drinks sometimes.” A little crumb laid for a trail to follow.

“Okay.” He leans in for a kiss on the cheek. “Lovely to meet you, Mercy.” He smells of the cigarette they shared outside and the Macallan he’s been drinking.

She sits at the bar, with a lovely fizzy feeling in her stomach. Maybe this man is the way out, maybe this is the sparkly path to the future. She knows it’s the alcohol talking, mostly, but that’s okay. She’s had her fill of the past. She wants to break out of the mold everyone thinks she should be in. Everyone thinks for her too much, has their nose in her business, tells her what they think she should be doing. On rare occasions, something good happens to her, like two years ago, between jobs, when she found out she had enough miles for a free ticket and booked a flight to Italy just to get the hell out of the hole she was in, and people thought she was extravagant or foolhardy. One friend, Tracy, who everyone said came into a $10 million trust fund when she turned twenty-one, sat her down and told her she had to think about her career. “You can’t just go to Italy whenever you want,” she said, this from a girl who had gone to Italy twice in the past three years, plus India and Thailand and Australia.

“Why not?” Mercy asked, wondering why Tracy cared.

“It’s irresponsible. You don’t know where your next job is coming from. And…” It was unseemly, was what Tracy wanted to say but couldn’t. But she couldn’t understand how difficult it was for Mercy to sit in her tiny apartment day after day and do nothing.

“You can’t just get job after job,” Tracy said. “You need a plan.” As if plans were so easy to come by. Or careers. “You’re getting older,” she said. As if Mercy didn’t notice that all around her, people were getting promotions and getting important, or getting married, or having kids, or moving to other places. As if she were unaware. As if.

“You went to Italy,” Mercy pointed out. “Last summer.”

Tracy paused. “It’s different,” she said. She wasn’t embarrassed in the least.

Tracy is different from Mercy. It is just a fact to her. This is the dissonance. Mercy thinks she is like her friends, and they think she is different. It was not so apparent in college, but now in postcollege life, in real life, it is obvious that they think she is different. If she believes that too, that she is different, it seems like giving up, and then where does she go from there?

The trip to Italy didn’t pan out. She couldn’t find a cheap enough hotel and had to factor in traveling money and realized she couldn’t swing it, and then when she tried to get the miles back, it cost so much to put them back in her account that she hesitated, and when she called back two weeks later to do it, it was too close to the date and she lost all those miles. Of course. But, she thinks. But. It was almost worth it to have had that giddy day of possibility when she booked the trip, imagining the wonderful things she might do, the small, tiny espressos she might drink standing up at small cafés, and the old stones and fountains she would wander around and look at. It was almost worth it.

Mercy walks home, pleasantly drunk in the crisp December air, swaying a little, dreaming of a higher authority — one that sees all the injustices meted out to her, that sees all the good things she tries to do, no matter if they don’t work out or no one notices — and that she will be found to be correct: Everyone will see that she has suffered more, been given less. How unfair, they will say. There will, finally, be justice.

Margaret

SHE IS OUT of the bath now, skin moist and flushed, wrapped in a Portman Ritz-Carlton bathrobe from an old trip to Shanghai. A trip from another life. She has wrapped her hair in a turban, so it can dry slowly and comfortably, the heat from her head trapped and steamy inside. The small space heater in the corner is sputtering out some warmth, and she is making a cream-cheese-and-olive sandwich. She takes out the cream cheese from the small box refrigerator she bought a few weeks ago, which reminds her of college days. The cream cheese is thick and white and comforting as she slides her knife out of the container. She spreads it across the thick multigrain bread. She slices the olives and studs the cream cheese with the bits, fingers slippery with oil. Her mouth is watering. What a marvelous combination, the smooth creaminess and the salty oil, paired with the heartiness of the bread. Food is good. She has to remember the good things, the small good things.

And tonight, a dinner party. She has to get home, to make sure the kids are packed for vacation and to get ready. It’s at Hilary and David Starr’s. She knew Hilary as a child back in California. Their mothers were friendly. Hilary was very chubby, one of those flaxen-haired girls with porcelain cheeks, a rotund Dutch doll of a girl. Then suddenly one fall, maybe sixth grade, she came back to school with her cheeks caved in in a funny way, her arms and legs still largish but her waist tiny. Margaret remembers going to Hilary’s house one day, maybe in fifth grade, and seeing a schedule pinned up above the desk. In tidy, round letters, it spelled out a stringent schedule:

3:30 Arrive home

3:45 Snack and unpack

4:00 Homework

5:00 Outdoor time

6:00 Dinner

7:00 Finish unfinished homework

8:15 Shower

8:30 Reading in bed

9:00 Lights out

Margaret came away with a deep sense of wonder that someone her age could be so methodical and disciplined. She didn’t admire it — already she knew the beauty in ease, the greater cachet in sprezzatura—but the disconcerting sense never left her that Hilary was a deeply formidable person, one who would win over her genetics (she would have liked to see that diet and exercise plan) and whatever else stood in her way and never look back. There was something unnatural about the way she looked, like a fat person turned skinny, never natural, but she had won. She was no longer the chubby girl.

Hilary went on to do well at school, but she never was able to shake that plodding image, that of a workaday bee. She and Margaret were never good friends, just nodding acquaintances who were polite to each other.

Margaret hadn’t seen her in years, maybe decades, until they ran into each other at the airport. They had both been going to Thailand, and they ended up at the same resort as well. Their mothers had lost touch, so they hadn’t known the other also lived in Hong Kong.

She had been amazed at how quickly she could summon memories, pictures of them together, once they recognized each other. It reminds her of when she was going to her high school reunion and looking through the names of the attendees, and thought bubbles sprang up unbidden — old reputations, the gossip about someone: “pretty blonde, short legs, though,” “brainy, chess club, Stanford,” “opportunist,” or “comes too quickly,” the last the malicious gossip about a handsome football player who had killed himself when he was thirty. Could everyone be summed up in a few words like that? Hilary was “fat girl turned thin, type A.” She supposed she was something like “pretty, easygoing, lucky,” or had been.

She and Clarke had drinks with the Starrs during the trip but didn’t really keep up afterward in Hong Kong, and then it became a little awkward when they saw each other in town, or at parties, as they had both accepted they wouldn’t go any further with the friendship. But then after what happened, a phone call. Hilary called to say how sorry she was about G and wanted to see her. They had lunch, and now they had a passing sort of friendship where they saw each other and made polite noises about doing it again and sometimes coming through.

So, tonight.

She cleans up her snack and gets ready to leave.

Back at home, Clarke has returned early, is there before her. He kisses her.

“Good day?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. They are still always careful around each other. She wonders when that will end, if ever. They’ve both read the literature — the majority of marriages break up after the death of a child or something like what’s happened to them. It’s too painful. But they have the other kids, and the memory of what it used to be like. Maybe that is enough.

“We have that dinner,” she says. Before, she would call his assistant and have her remind him, or send an e-mail, but she never bothers anymore.

“Yes, it’s on my calendar,” he says. “David and Hilary.”

“Right.”

Clarke gets along with everyone, but they both don’t love David. Hilary is fine.

They both remember when they first met them together, on that trip to Thailand. There was a New Year’s Eve party at the resort, and after the children went to bed, things got a bit wild, with a lot of drinking and middle-aged people going crazy on the easily available drugs. David was on something and started grinding with some man. It wasn’t even that she thought David was gay or that she cared; it was just a little factoid about him that she kept with her. Just a little thought bubble in her head when she saw him put a jacket over his wife’s shoulders as they left a party or if she saw him swimming at the club. It was not unkind, more of a “people contain multitudes within them” feeling.

They kiss Daisy and Philip good night. Their children sit, watching a movie, as Essie reads a book next to them. This used to be one of her favorite moments in life, leaving clean, fed, contented children behind as she and her husband went out to enjoy each other, but now nothing is easy, nothing is pleasurable. She can’t let it be — it would feel like a betrayal. How can she be sitting in an air-conditioned restaurant in a comfortable chair enjoying a grilled fish and a glass of wine, or lying on a beach chair with a good book, while G might be starving or worse in some barn in rural Korea? How can she let herself?

They drive to the Starrs’ in silence. It is only fifteen minutes away, but she lets herself think that the silence is a friendly one, nonreproaching, comfortable. She touches Clarke’s cheek while he is driving, wonders what he is thinking. He looks over at her and smiles. They have learned to do with so much less.

At the Starrs’, everything is perfect, the house warm and inviting with scented candles, lamps giving off muted light, jazz playing softly. Hilary achieves this by being stringent in everything in her life, from her diet to her house. There’s the usual mix: South Side investment bankers and regional company heads and Mid-Levels ad execs and their wives, all American. When she first moved to Hong Kong, she thought she might make friends with the different nationalities she saw all around her. Her children’s friends were Danish, Japanese, local Hong Kong. But after a few strained meals, she saw how it was easier to stay with your kind. So, although she loathed the concept, she embraced the reality and became friends with the same people she would have known back in America.

She accepts a drink from the smiling bartender and turns to talk to a couple who are visiting from California, faces starry with jet lag.

“You’re from San Francisco,” she says politely. And the conversation starts. Another night in Repulse Bay.

Hilary

AN ODD MIX that never gelled. The Reades, whom everyone knew. Poor Margaret. They were trying to live, but how could they? She seemed tentative all the time now, as if she was trying to lead a normal life but had forgotten how. Hilary had never seen her cry, but she imagined that she must cry all the time. And the new couple, who were moving here. The wife, what was her name? Molly? She was asking about tennis, so she might be an addition to Hilary’s team. She would e-mail her about it.

Then the couple from out of town, David’s college buddy, who was the most boring person she had ever met. She sat him next to her, because he was the visitor (and, of course, the newcomer was on her other side), but he tried to talk to her about basketball, and she had been so bored.

She lies in bed, thinking about what transpired at the dinner. Nothing, really. Just the usual talk about children and families and where people were going for the upcoming holidays. It turned out that the Reades were going to Phuket the next day and coming back via Bangkok, and they would overlap with her in Bangkok when she was there with her mother. So they’d made plans to get together. Her mother would be glad to see Margaret. And all this not to think about the fact that David has disappeared. He said he wanted to go out with his friend, but the wife gave his friend the stink eye, and they declared they were going to hit the sack — jet lag and all. But David insisted, said he was meeting someone afterward. She was pointedly not invited, so she pretended she knew and was okay with it.

So here she is, lying in her bed, with an almost empty glass of wine on the bedside table, teeth freshly flossed, Bio-Oil glistening unattractively on her face, slubby pink floral pajamas. Hardly a temptress who knows how to keep her man, let alone bring a child into her world.

Because, of course, that’s what Olivia wanted to talk to her about. Hilary’s not an idiot. She knows, little bit by little bit, that David has changed here in Hong Kong. He is absent from her because he works so much and she has less and less to do with his life. She doesn’t know what his life is like when he leaves home, and home is where he spends two or three awake hours, max, getting into bed at night, showering in the morning. He’s been staying out later, smelling of booze when he gets home. (Oh, the irony! They could be drinking together.) Being evasive about where he’s been. It’s not like he is actively doing something wrong, like having an affair or nurturing a drug habit, but he is on the verge of tipping over. She can sense it. Olivia may not have seen him actually with some girl, but he’s probably been seen in bars in the company of other women, without his wife present, without a chaperone. There, that sounds about right, in a Jane Austen version of the world. Disporting himself inappropriately.

This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he’s supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire — a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks — and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life. The rental buildings are littered with the ghosts of ruined marriages: a husband who left his wife and kids for his assistant, an ebony-tressed Chinese sylph who is already pregnant; a man who was lost to the seedy, red-light pleasures of Wan Chai and the paid hostesses who found his every utterance completely fascinating, or sometimes to a more interesting, engaged female colleague, a welcome relief from the woman he faces at home, complaining about his travel, his schedule, his lack of time with the kids. So why not change it up? Why not trade up? Or down, and have some fun?

Hilary and her friends have all sat next to a sheepish father introducing his children to his sexy young fiancée in the safe, public, but judgmental environment of a restaurant. He is worried, solicitous of both his children and the woman but usually more of the latter. He is also proud and newly virile. He pulls out the woman’s chair, asks if she likes her food, hands her her dropped napkin as if demonstrating to the children that this is the proper way to treat the new person who has ripped their lives apart. Sometimes the woman is nervous, smiling too much and asking loudly about what the children like to do and saying how she would love to do it with them. Other times the woman is removed, arms crossed, sunglasses, skimpy dress. They’d better learn, these brats, that he belongs to me now. This is what I have to offer. You can’t compete. This kind of woman is usually very young and attractive and so very foolish. She thinks that the battle is a matter of weeks or months and that a victory is a victory forever. If the children are adolescent, the girls are defiant and silent, the boys more approachable. The young ones are heartbreaking, that is all. If you were to feel bad for the man, and the expatriate housewife usually emphatically does not, you would feel bad only because you would know that he knew, on some level, what he was doing to his children.

Of course, there are always two sides to every story. Sometimes the woman who’s been left is crazy, or horrible, or mean, and everyone understands why. But it does seem that she is always left worse off and the man just starts his life anew, with a younger model of a wife, sometimes a slightly smaller apartment, but that his new life pretty quickly looks like his old one. While the woman often starts working again, depending on what kind of financial arrangement they’ve come to, and has the kids and her work, and usually soon comes to look harried and gray-haired, so that when her ex-husband comes to pick up the kids, he can see the stark contrast between what he’s left and what he has now and congratulates himself that he’s made the right decision. To add insult to injury, in his fervor to not mess things up again — because it was so painful and he never wants to go through that again or put anyone else through it again — when he has more children, he vows to really do things right this time, so he pitches in to an unimaginable extent, does more with the kids, since he was always working before and now he knows that he needs more work/life balance, so the new family gets the benefit of this new and improved man, and the old family gets to see it all. It’s terrible.

In the eight years she’s lived in Hong Kong, Hilary has seen this happen to at least ten women she knew pretty well. She counts them on her fingers: Manda King, Tara Connelly, Kathleen Li, Padma Singh, Sheryl Wu, Jenny Harrison, Lorraine Greenspan… there are more, but she can’t think of them. A ghostly procession of marital destruction. Of course, marriages break up back home as well, but because Hong Kong is such a fishbowl, you view the carnage from a front-row seat. There’s Jim with the new wife at the American Club! There’s poor Sylvia waiting for the elevator at her new office with a lunch box — she had to take a job and can’t afford to eat lunch out anymore. Some women move back home, but that’s a struggle, because the husband won’t usually let them take their children so far away. Some enter into the strange netherworld of clubs and unsavory older men, who usually prefer their women younger but will entertain an older one the later the hour. Some migrate to the outlying islands, to Truman Show—like Discovery Bay or hippie Lantau, and change accordingly.

Once Hilary was approached by a heavyset woman with long, frizzy hair at IFC Mall. “Hilary!” the woman trilled, happy to see her.

“Hi,” Hilary said, reflexively.

The woman understood but was still taken aback. “I look different,” she said sheepishly. “I’ve gained some weight.”

And then the woman’s face shifted, and Hilary recognized a vestige of Tammy from the tennis team. She had been the captain of the A team, a five-year veteran of Hong Kong, when the newly arrived Hilary first met her. She had her husband, Garth, and two children, Mark and Melissa. Two years later, it turned out that Garth had another family in Shenzhen, the mainland city that neighbored Hong Kong, with a former club hostess, who had borne him two additional children, and that he was living a double life, shuttling between the two on his commute from Hong Kong to China. Mainland women had the reputation of doing anything to secure their futures and to have the opportunity to marry an American and move to Hong Kong or even — oh, the glory! — to the United States. The whole affair came out when the doorman of the apartment building Tammy lived in rang up to say there was a Miss Chan there to see Mrs. Brodie. Tammy, not expecting anyone but used to deliveries, was going through her e-mail when their helper, Gina, came to the bedroom saying that the woman was asking to see her.

She emerged to see a pretty young Chinese woman in her twenties with a fierce look on her face. She was wearing red plastic shoes and a fake Hermès scarf. She had come on the train from Lo Wu, then the MTR to Admiralty, and then a taxi to the South Side. Gina later told her helper friends, who told their employers, that the girl showed Tammy pictures of Garth with her and their children, in their apartment and at restaurants in Shenzhen, and demanded that she be able to move to Hong Kong. It seemed that Garth had been putting her off, and she was sick of it. She had been waiting for three years, and she wanted her children to be educated in Hong Kong — her oldest would soon be three — and she wanted to have the life that was due to her and her children as the family of an American citizen and resident of Hong Kong. She had finally managed to get a visa to Hong Kong — mainlanders were not allowed unlimited entry — and now she was here to settle matters.

Tammy’s initial response was not duly recorded, as the Chinese woman quickly became very aggressive and threatening. Her English was not very good, and translated through the grapevine through a Filipina maid, her words and the events that transpired were not crystal clear. There were some broken items, as the woman declared that everything in Tammy’s house also belonged to her. She demanded to know how many bedrooms they had and how much the rent was. She wanted to know what kind of car they had and what Garth’s salary was, as she suspected he had been lying to her.

Tammy, who had been an alpha-expatriate woman, a sort of middle-aged mean girl in tennis whites, heading up school parent committees and chairing charity balls, did not know what to say to this woman who was walking around the house inspecting all her things, but when the woman started going through her closet to see her jewelry, she wrapped her arms around her and tried to restrain her. Thrilled, Gina — who had never seen such drama, even back home in the Philippines — screamed as the two came wrestling out of the master bedroom and did the one sensible thing she could think of: She called the driver, who was downstairs washing the car. He came up and saw three shrieking women scratching and pulling one another’s hair and, terrified, called his employer, Garth, who was having a coffee at Cova in Prince’s Building with a colleague. Garth took a taxi home.

Apparently — this had entered into expatriate lore — he separated the two women (who must have been tired by that point) and sat them both down on the sofa. Tammy demanded that her high school boyfriend turned husband, whom she had known for more than thirty years, kick this woman out of their house and out of their lives. For God’s sake, this is where she and their children lived, and this woman had trespassed on their private property. He looked at her and said, anguished, “I can’t.”

She started screaming then, started screaming and wailing: Hadn’t she followed him here to this godforsaken place where you couldn’t get a proper iced coffee to save your life? Hadn’t she never complained about all the travel he had to do, all the work, during which apparently he was fucking around with this whore? And hadn’t she kept herself up, looking good, and what the fuck? What the fuck? She was going to tell his kids what a shit they had for a father, what a terrible person he was, and he was never going to see them again, and she was going to take all his money. Garth sat there, taking it all, and the woman — he called her Lily — also sat quietly, perhaps afraid and understanding, finally, what she had started.

“There are children involved,” he said, meaning his children in China. And that set Tammy off again.

“Your children are Mark and Melissa! The ones who are at school right now, with no idea what you’ve done to our family. They are going to hate you forever. You are never going to see them again.”

Finally, “Tell that whore to get out of my house,” she said. You could only rage for so long before you physically gave out. And this Garth did, he asked Lily to leave. But he walked her downstairs, and he gave her some money and asked their driver to take her to the train station. Tammy did not know this. The two may have even awkwardly touched hands. The driver told the helper who told her friends and so on. And Lily tried to speak to the driver on the way there, perhaps to get more information, or to gain an ally, but his English wasn’t good and neither was hers, so they couldn’t communicate well.

What happened after was good for nobody.

Garth had four children with these two women, and he couldn’t give any of them up. Some of Tammy’s closest friends swore up and down that if he had come back to her, begging forgiveness, promising to never see the other family again but only support the kids financially, she would have taken him back, but he couldn’t leave two children, even if he was willing to leave the woman, which was unclear. So Garth was in a giant mess (“What was he thinking?” was the thrilled whisper heard around the American Club that spring). Tammy wrote an explosive e-mail, in which she luridly detailed all his transgressions with bizarre misspellings and breaks in logic, that she then forwarded to his boss, colleagues, and employees. As a result, he was told he should move to the Shenzhen office so he would not be a distraction to other employees of the toy-manufacturing-outsourcing company of which he was a vice president, and then one must assume that Lily got at least part of what she wanted — she got Garth all to herself — but in China, and not the Hong Kong apartment or residency or schooling she had so yearned for. Tammy had a nervous breakdown after the e-mail went viral, and she dropped out of sight for a few weeks. People said she went to rehab or an ashram or a yoga retreat, but no one really knew, and her best friend wasn’t talking. The kids were in high school and middle school, and Tammy’s mother came to take care of them for a while. Melissa, a tenth grader, started going out to bars in Wan Chai, and when people ran into her, she was with older men and reeked of smoke and worse. Mark’s grades went off a cliff and never recovered. Collateral damage, the housewives said, all because of one man’s penis.

When Tammy returned, she handled the divorce quickly and cleanly and then proceeded to get extremely fit. She ran like a maniac, did yoga almost daily, played tennis with even more vigor and enthusiasm, and lunched and dined with her friends frequently and publicly, as if she was showing the world that she would not be cowed by what had happened. She looked fantastic. Garth was no longer in Hong Kong, so people didn’t have to make the choice between them, which was convenient. She lived her life as normally as she could until one day, in the middle of a match, she got frustrated when an opponent contested one too many points, and she threw her racket down on the court, got her gear, and disappeared for the second time.

Later she surfaced in Lantau. Perhaps the ashram’s lessons had kicked in a little late, but they kicked in. Hong Kong was too small to ever disappear for long. Lantau was an island a ferry ride away, filled with expats who eschewed the materialistic, shiny world of the main island. It was grotty and small, and people kept beehives and made their own jam. And there she was, at IFC, on a trip to the mainland, as it were, smiling at Hilary and all but unrecognizable.

She was perfectly normal, asking how David was, saying that Melissa had just graduated from the University of Vermont and that Mark was operating a food truck in Portland. She seemed happy and asked after other women who had been on the tennis team with them. Hilary just couldn’t get over how different she looked. They parted, professing intentions to e-mail, to call, to have lunch, both comfortable in the knowledge that none of those things would come to pass.

Hilary is a little bit older now, and she thinks that Tammy may have finally got it right. Who gives a damn? Just make yourself happy. She was a miserable person before all that happened, she really was, excluding people from committees and throwing cocktail parties to which a few people were never invited, and now she seemed happy. She didn’t seem to work but lived simply. But who knows. She might be miserable and spend her evenings plotting revenge, but to Hilary’s eye, she had made the best out of an impossible situation. Could you spend the rest of your life being angry? She supposed you could, but it was never good for you in the end. When everything you thought was yours was taken away, and the foundation of your life shifted so you have to start from zero, you might find out who you really are. You might come up against that dark, immovable wall of truth. And that is probably the most frightening thought of all.

Hilary shifts in her bed, takes a last gulp of her drink, looks over at the absent spot beside her, and thinks, where on earth is her husband?

Mercy

THIS IS WHAT she smells when she comes out of the bathroom from her shower: a thousand stale exhales, humid with alcohol and cigarette smoke. This is what she sees: the man in her bed, his bottom half covered by the sheet, snoring. She sits down in her chair, wrapped in her towel, wondering what to do next.

It happened so quickly. She went home from the hotel and showered and took a nap. When she woke, at ten, she wanted to go out for something to eat, and something had pulled her to Il Dolce, the mere utterance of the name several hours ago suggestion enough. Maybe something might happen. She was talking to Richard, the bartender, on her second glass of sauvignon blanc when he walked in, the man from the afternoon at the hotel bar. David. The night accelerated into strobe lights and chaos. From bar to restaurant to club, he shouted his life story at her: a wife, no child, an orphan (she couldn’t remember whether he was an orphan or there was one in his life), disappointment, no solace at home. Then to her house. Messy coupling, not finished, dizziness, spinning ceiling. She looks at the sleeping man: this new and different animal, older, married, complicated. Different from the pale, anomic twenty-somethings who usually inhabit that space.

Her phone buzzes. Her mother is texting her: “What r u doing?”

“Getting ready for work,” she writes back quickly. “Text later, already late.” It’s Saturday, but her mother doesn’t know her work schedule, or even what she does exactly. The best thing about texting is that it makes phone calls obsolete. She doesn’t need to worry about her voice quavering or her eyes tearing up on Skype. She hasn’t had to talk to her mother in months — all communication is through texts.

Her mother doesn’t know about what happened, about the incident. Her mother doesn’t know, and her father is a bastard. She wishes she could tell her mother what happened. But she is afraid of making the fortune come true. By acknowledging what happened, by articulating it to the universe, sounds, words that can never be called back, it will become reality. She is indeed the unluckiest girl in the world. How will her mother react, to find that what she feared most has manifested itself? She can imagine the sharp intake of breath, the quick silence afterward while her mother tries to conceive of how she might best help her child. Because that’s what mothers do — they protect their children, no matter what. Mercy knows that in the matter of mothers, she has been blessed. Her mother, unhappy, still loves her daughter.

Of course, Mercy might be surprised. Her mother has always told her that Koreans are a hardy people, that what she and her family survived, with the war in Korea and then immigrating to a country where they didn’t speak the language, Mercy would never understand. “You think your life difficult,” she says. “You don’t know. In Korea, our lives so hard.” But this is not a high school misunderstanding or a lack of a job. There has been a disappearance, a crime, probably a death. There was fault.

Mercy hadn’t known those Reade kids very long, but they had liked her, and she had liked them. When she had gone out to where they lived, she had been amazed. They lived on the South Side, an area you got to by going through the Aberdeen tunnel, through a mountain basically. When you emerged, it was all sea and sky and rich suburb. She had passed by there before, on trips to Stanley or to Shek O Beach, but she had never gone into a high-rise with glossy marble floors and doormen and lobbies and gyms with gleaming new equipment. They had playrooms with colorful padded walls and what seemed like hundreds of toys, as well as a sparkling blue swimming pool outside with fancy deck chairs. Mercy grew up in a tiny two-room apartment in Queens, and she still remembered the day in elementary school when she realized that sometimes a family lived in an entire house. That not everyone lived in a room with a hot plate and Korean blankets on the floor.

Still, the Reade children were lovely. Not spoiled or entitled at all. She had an easy rapport with them. Daisy looked up to her. (She was too young to know otherwise, the way you idolize your high school teachers when you’re young and sometimes, when you come back for reunions, you realize a few are drunks or so very sad.) Philip liked how she was amenable to everything he wanted to do, and G, well, G was just the most scrumptious boy, a little love of a child. She was never one of those people who adored kids — she had babysat at Korean church gatherings and viewed children as cattle to be herded, mostly — but G was so sweet, slipping his hand unexpectedly into hers a mere five minutes after she arrived at their house the first time. There was no guile or fear in him. He expected to be loved, because that was all he had ever known.

And now he is somewhere she cannot imagine. That is, if he is not dead in a ditch somewhere. The fact that it was both her and Margaret watching the kids gives her a little bit of comfort. Except that Margaret went to the bathroom, implicitly giving her all the responsibility in that situation. And she was watching all of them — really she was! G was out of sight for five seconds, maybe ten, when Margaret came out, wiping her hands on her pants and asking where her child was.

She tries not to think about that day, she really does. She doesn’t see how it will help her. It is, indisputably, her fault. That much is clear. But it’s also indisputably just shit bad luck. She remembers trying to disappear, not knowing where to go. She couldn’t help, couldn’t speak Korean, couldn’t do anything except be the villain. At the police station, each new officer arriving to speak with her had a rebuke on his face, not only for her crime but for the fact that she couldn’t speak Korean — a useless girl. She was a disgrace to her country, and a careless girl who brought disaster to those around her. She answered all the questions for the report, and when it became clear that she could go home, she didn’t know what to do. Out of the question to return with the Reades — a more terrible situation she could not imagine. So she got a taxi to the hotel, getting there ahead of the Reades, stuffed all her clothes in her bag, and then asked the concierge for a recommendation for a cheap hotel. She was directed down the street to a yogwan, a local inn, where for fifty dollars she got a room not much bigger than the length of her and a bundle of thick, colorful blankets to be spread on the floor as a bed. Every Korean family had a set of these blankets, and after she spread them out, she lay there, cold, feeling a scratchy, unclean blanket over her, wondering what on earth she was going to do now. Every time she blinked, she prayed that she would wake up from the nightmare she was in, and every time she opened her eyes, the horror remained the same. The homeliness of the room seemed just right. A person like her should never enjoy anything nice again. The enormity of her guilt and her pain and the awfulness loomed so large it blocked out everything in her mind, so that all she could do was think about breathing another breath.

There was an old vacuum flask in the room, so she went downstairs and filled it from the hot water pot in the lobby, just to have something to do, just to feel something. She was grateful for the simple gesture the woman in the lobby made, helping her to work the lever. This is a person, she thought, who doesn’t know what I’ve just done. The woman’s nod and smile were like a salve to Mercy, who didn’t expect kindness from anyone ever again after what had happened. She sipped the hot water, felt its warmth trickle down her throat, shivered, and wondered if she’d ever feel warm again.

Somehow, at some point that night, she fell asleep. When she woke, she felt fine for a few seconds, and then the memory of the day before came roaring back. She washed up and tried to figure out what to do next. If she returned to Hong Kong, would it seem as if she were running away, and a fugitive? She had to stay. She also had to let the Reades know where she was in case they needed something else from her. Finally, she went downstairs, borrowed paper from the desk clerk, and wrote a note saying that she was at the yogwan and for them to call her if they needed anything. Then she walked to the hotel and dropped it off at the front desk.

She never heard from them, and she spent three days waiting before she paid her bill and took the bus to the airport. She left them another note, saying she was leaving, and sat, dry-eyed, for the entire three-and-a-half-hour flight home. She still hadn’t cried. She hadn’t been able to eat for three days, drinking only the hot water from that flask, and she felt empty. She soon became used to that feeling.

That was about a year ago, give or take. She was never able to tell her mother, and her friends found out through reading about the incident in the paper and putting two and two together. They e-mailed or called and came to sit with her. Most were ham-handed, only muttering inanities like “That’s so intense” or “Wow” until she wanted to beat at them with her fists. A few thoughtful ones brought food so she could eat. From these friends, she felt only their acute sense of relief that such a thing had not happened to them, that they were only the cars cruising by and seeing the pileup on the highway. She imagined what they said to one another afterward, how they talked about her, until she couldn’t bear it and stopped answering people’s e-mails. Then she started combing through magazines and the Internet for stories like hers, and what happened to the person who didn’t commit the crime — that wasn’t her — but was somehow responsible for it happening. To wit: the drunk-driver man, the chimp owner. These shadowy persons, she came to find, were never there. They were erased from the story as if they had never existed. They were inconvenient and culpable, and no one wanted to hear about them.

So it’s come to this moment, when she’s sitting here in her chair, damp from the shower, looking at a man in her bed, a married man she first laid eyes on a mere twenty-four hours ago. And there’s this feeling she has, this good, tingly feeling, that this is her first step out of this netherworld, that this might be forward motion. She doesn’t know how or why, but it’s the first good feeling she’s had in months, so she’s going to hold on to it.

The man on the bed stirs.

Let it not be like a bad movie, she prays, where the man groans and rubs his head and asks where he is and is ashamed and wants to leave and it’s so awkward.

Instead, he lies very still after his initial entry into consciousness, like a cornered animal, thinking what to do next while being watched by his predator. Then, wonderfully, magically, he sits up without embarrassment, naked, shaking off any vulnerability he might have had when he first woke, and looks straight at the young girl, sitting on the one other piece of furniture that can be squeezed into the room, arms wrapped around her legs, staring at him.

“Good morning,” he says genially. “What’s for breakfast?”

Margaret

THE FAME. That had been unexpected. Fame, infamy, whatever you called it. The police had said that publicity was good, and so she had allowed herself to be photographed, she had agreed to news conferences, she had stood up and pleaded for her child to be returned to her, with a Korean translator by her side. She and Clarke had been on all the local and news channels, the local ones making much of the fact that she was a quarter Korean, although she had never felt more foreign, and that Clarke was a Yale graduate, because Koreans loved brand names. For a few days, every newspaper, every news broadcast, had mentioned their story, which was what they wanted, with the photo of G plastered everywhere. There had been articles bemoaning the breakdown of Korean society and the rise of crime and all that was wrong with the modern world.

The abduction had also made the news in Hong Kong, because of their Hong Kong residency. But later, when it had all quieted down, the unwelcome development was that she was now known in Hong Kong, recognized, when she went to the supermarket to buy bananas, or to town for a doctor’s appointment. People, mostly women, stared at her for a beat too long, or nudged each other surreptitiously when they saw her. She supposes it is a little bit like being a celebrity, when so many people know you and you don’t know them at all.

At dinner parties, mostly, people were prepped in advance, she assumes. This happened to Margaret, they were told, so best not to talk about certain subjects, like children, or traveling to Korea. But it was amazing what people said nonetheless. A woman she knew only slightly tried to be provocative and knowledgeable and said it was great that the case got so much attention, and that it was probably because she and Clarke were so photogenic. Margaret stared at her and wondered why she always had to be the bigger person. She wanted to scream at the stupid cow and tell her to shut her fucking mouth forever, but she just nodded, and then she got up and walked away. Later the woman said to other people that it was understandable, of course, but Margaret Reade had become so uncommunicative that it was hard to get through. The number of people walking through life with sub-par emotional intelligence was incredible.

She knows what it’s like to be them, though, to have tragedy slip by your door so closely you can feel its chill. She was them before. A child drowned at a birthday party, a raging bacterial infection that could not be checked — tales told in whispers in case saying them too loudly would summon misfortune to your doorstep. These things happened, and people knew, and people went on living, because what choice did they have?

She has woken up early today, as she usually does, to a still house. The dinner party last night was fine, no one too obtrusive or obnoxious, but at one point she caught Clarke’s eye and they smiled at each other, chagrin-filled smiles, as if to say, here we are. She was seated next to Hilary’s husband, David, who was drunk at the beginning of the party and got progressively worse. He was drinking whiskey when everyone else was sipping wine. Hilary ignored him; everyone ignored him. Then he disappeared at the end of the night, saying he had an appointment. Poor Hilary. Margaret hadn’t known that Hilary’s marriage had gotten to that stage. Last she knew, they were thinking about having kids, and having some difficulty, but she hadn’t really heard anything more.

It’s good to go out sometimes, good to go out and interact with new, different people. Someone once told her that if you keep pretending it’s normal, it’ll become normal at some point and you won’t even notice when it happens. She’s still waiting.

But now they’ve come home and gone to bed, and now there goes the blare of her alarm clock. It’s been over a year since G disappeared, and Clarke had brought up the idea gingerly: what to do for winter break, do you think we should go away, the kids could really do with a holiday.

Tickets to the tropical Thai island of Phuket have been bought, a beachside hotel has been booked, a connecting door for the two rooms an absolute must. Because that’s what normal families do, she supplies in her mind. They go on vacation. Because it has been so long, because there is nothing left to do that she can think of, because she is worried about how much time Daisy spends in her room, because staying in a quiet town over Christmas seems terrifying, because her therapist says she needs to metabolize the grief and try to live life.

She goes downstairs and checks on the children. They are still sleeping, and their suitcases are lying open, mostly packed but still needing the last-minute things: the toothbrushes, the toiletry kits. She hovers over them, watching their breath coming in and out in small bursts, their small faces at peace. Philip still shares a room with G’s bed, empty for a year now.

She has packed her and Clarke’s bag already. Packing for hot places is easy: swimsuits, flip-flops, shorts, all taking up barely any space. Back in her bedroom, she adds sunscreen, a camera, to the bag. Clarke is starting to stir. She goes in to take a shower. The house starts to move: She hears Essie start the coffee machine, Philip going to the bathroom.

Margaret’s frighteningly efficient travel agent, Rosalie Chan, arranged this vacation. She is the type who, if she asked a question on e-mail and did not get a response within three hours, would keep e-mailing, asking if you had gotten her e-mail. She constantly scours her computer system for cheaper fares for her clients and books one type of ticket as a placeholder before exchanging it for a cheaper one, ad infinitum until the ticketing deadline. She is efficiency and diligence personified. Margaret, used to more desultory service types, marvels at her energy. She met her only once, years ago, in her rickety office building in Central on Wyndham Street, and it was awkward and strange, and they mutually implicitly agreed to continue only on e-mail. They have a sort of magic rapport online and none in real life.

Rosalie had, of course, asked some unanswerable questions when Margaret told her to look into a Christmas break in the Philippines or Thailand. What room configuration? What activities? She had just found a business-class seat to Phuket that was just a hundred dollars more than coach; did she want it for herself and Clarke and they could put the kids in coach? Of course, when she sent the itinerary through, G was on it, because how could she have known? And Margaret, of course, didn’t take his name off — how much could she be expected to bear? — and when they get to the airport, there is his name, and the Cathay Pacific check-in attendant is asking where is G, and Clarke is staring at her but not saying anything because, of course, he understands.

What she can’t stand, also, is how many “of courses” there are in her life. The sympathetic women murmuring “of course” all the time. How do you tell your travel agent that you lost your child, literally lost him, more than a year ago, and that now you’re going on vacation? Of course, it’s impossible.

The check-in woman tries to say their seats are canceled because G is not there and they are on a special group ticket — another side effect of Rosalie’s superb efficiency in getting them the best tickets for the cheapest prices is that they are usually immutable in their classification and resistant to any sort of change in plans or attempts at spontaneity. Somewhat like Rosalie herself, Margaret has thought on more than one occasion. Clarke sorts it out by raising his voice and demanding to see the manager — typically American behavior, which is amplified in an unusually distasteful way in Asia. When he does this, when she does this, to be really honest with herself, the usually dormant 25 percent of herself that is Korean raises its head and asks why a big, rich white man is shouting at a poor, small Asian person.

Clarke waves at her to get the kids away so they don’t have to listen to their father angrily explain their situation to yet another person. The manager, a thin young man in his thirties, listens, bewildered, to the insane story he is being told.

They sit on the bench and wait for it to get sorted. Airports must get this all the time, she thinks. Like hotels or other clearing spaces, there must be tragedies and romances and happy endings every single day. Criminals on the lam, boys pursuing girls, families separated and reunited. The departure halls and detention rooms must be filled with tragic stories, the arrivals lounge with unbelievable happiness.

The boarding passes get issued finally, and they go through immigration, but Clarke is still fuming. In all fairness, he probably is angry at her but had to take it out on the airline clerk because he can’t yell at Margaret. Later in the lounge, where they go because Clarke travels so much he’s a VIP, he sits next to her and says, “Margaret, I understand why you did it, but come on! That was so much worse than it needed to be. Daisy and Philip are upset now.”

And they are. Daisy’s reading on her Kindle, and Philip is playing his DS, but their faces are tight and withdrawn.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Because that’s all she can say. She can’t say it won’t happen again or anything that will help the situation. She can just express her feelings of empathy for what her husband is feeling. Clarke sighs and heads over to the noodle bar to get a bowl for a late breakfast.

After the short flight, they are greeted in arrivals by a smiling young man holding a wooden sign with their name in one hand and a tray of cold, damp towels in another. Escorted to the car and offered water, they settle in and set off for the hotel. They have been to Phuket once before. It was their first vacation after they moved to Hong Kong three years ago. Margaret once heard a woman deride the island as the “expat starter vacation.” They stayed at an American chain hotel on the beach. This time, they are staying at a French chain hotel on the beach. She didn’t want to go to the same hotel.

“There is no way forward in these countries,” Clarke says, looking at all the young men sitting outside. “What are they going to do with their lives?” Margaret looks at the people talking, drinking beer, some animated, some resigned, and thinks, This is life. These people are living. They are not waiting. But, of course, some of them must be. Just as they cannot see her and what she is doing, how she is not living.

She shakes it off.

In a bright voice, she says, “No matter how many times it happens, I can’t believe that we can be in one place in the morning and then in another country in a few hours. And they speak a different language and eat different food. Isn’t it amazing, guys?”

Daisy nods, still reading her Kindle. Philip is looking out at the streets.

“Do you think we can surf?” he asks his father. “I want to try surfing.”

“Sure,” Clarke says. “I’ll try it with you.”

“What do you want to do, Daisy girl?” Her mother ruffles her hair.

“Maybe snorkeling?”

“Let’s see.”

They arrive at an enormous thatched-roof lobby, then are brought into a reception area overlooking a wide reflecting pool filled with lotus flowers. They can hear the sea and smell the humid tropical air. They are seated on red Thai silk sofas and given a fruity drink and more hand towels while Clarke registers at the front desk. The first time they did this, Philip put his feet up and said with satisfaction, “This is the life!” and they laughed, and then G did it and they laughed again. Clarke looked on with pride, seeing the life he had provided for his family: Thailand! And in such style! Margaret thinks, she will not do this for the whole trip. She will not think of the last time they were here and when G was here.

They go to their rooms and get their luggage, unpack, and change.

This is when she really feels like she’s on vacation: when she changes into a sundress and applies sunscreen to her kids’ faces. It’s so visceral: the smell of coconut sunblock and the feel of the white lotion, the light cotton of your dress on your pale body.

She unpacks the children’s clothes and puts them away, finds their toothbrushes, stands them up in a cup in the bathroom.

Is the change from three to two that different? There’s that funny equation that people talk about when they’re having children. The first is the hardest. The second is hard because it impacts the first so much. Then some say you don’t even notice the third. Others say you’re going from man-to-man to zone defense, that funny football analogy. But what is the reverse? Going from three to two means it’s simpler in terms of management. Two parents, two kids. Two girls, two boys. Simple. With a ghost in between.

They leave their room and walk down to the pool. The paths are wide and paved, and they pass housekeeping golf carts and smiling employees who greet them in the traditional Thai way, palms pressed together as if in prayer, murmuring, “Sawadee ka.” Large palm trees sway overhead, providing shade. There’s that disorientation that happens the first day in any resort — not knowing how to get from your room to the breakfast restaurant, to the pool, to the health club. By the end of the vacation, everyone is at home, familiar with the layout, just before they have to leave.

By the pool, they acquire loungers, towels, cold drinks. Margaret sits under an umbrella someone has set up perfectly so she is in the shade, sipping an iced tea, with a hat and dark sunglasses, the very picture of relaxation. But this is what she is actually doing, if anyone looks carefully: She is closing her eyes, trying to conjure up a picture of G. It is so difficult. She is getting panicked, heart racing, that his picture won’t pop up when summoned. It is so hard now to get a visual of him. She has a picture of him in her bag, but she doesn’t want to cheat. So she lies there, eyes fluttering, finding it harder and harder to breathe, feeling this sick sense that she is losing him all over again.

How can she not picture her child on command? So then she tries to picture Clarke and Daisy, and Philip. She is relieved to find they don’t spring instantly into focus either. So then she tries to think of a photograph, and then she can imagine all their faces. So this is how it starts. You remember the child. Then you remember the photograph. What comes next? These generations of memories. They fade.

Her children step carefully, lightly, into the pool, as if they know how fragile everything is, and of course they do.

It was hard, almost impossible, to know when to leave Seoul. In the beginning, they thought they would stay until they found him, because what was the alternative? And then, when days turned into weeks and weeks turned into a month, she started worrying about Daisy and Philip, how they were just sitting in a hotel room. Her mother came over, and their extended family in Seoul had been wonderful. Once they found out what happened, they came to the hotel every day with expensive melons and chocolates and offered to take Daisy and Philip out so they wouldn’t be bored, although it made her too nervous when the children were out without her. So sometimes they would just take them to their homes, but communication was difficult, and the children were frightened. But she knew she couldn’t lock them in a hotel room forever. She tried to get the international school in Seoul to let them go to classes, but although they were sympathetic, they were unwilling to admit her children for an unknown amount of time.

“It would be very disruptive to our community,” said the administrator, “and of limited use to your own children.”

In this new world, everything was so raw, so blinding. The first time she took a shower, her mother forcing her, she soaped her skin and told herself, G is gone, G is gone. She washed her greasy hair, fingers slipping over her roots, and thought, G is not here, he will not be here when I emerge from the bathroom. She put on new clothes, realizing, I don’t know where G is, and I don’t know when I’ll know. Everything looked new and meaningless. She looked out the window of her hotel room and saw a beautiful moon against the dark buildings and wondered if she would ever find any pleasure in anything ever again.

In the meantime, she started working on a comprehensive description of what G had been wearing that day. It had been unseasonably warm, and he had on warm-weather clothes. What drove her nuts was that she knew the T-shirt and the shoes but she didn’t know which exact shorts he had been wearing. He had a few pairs that were very similar. He had two pairs of elastic-waist khaki pants and a pair from Target that had a button. He liked the elastic-waist pants more, because his little fingers were not yet very dexterous. His fine motor skills were not very good, and she had been told to let him play with pens and chopsticks to strengthen his hands. She didn’t know which ones he was wearing, because she couldn’t remember which ones she had packed. She wanted to call and ask Essie what was at home, but imagining the conversation exhausted her. She knew the T-shirt. It was yellow, long-sleeved, with the faded image of a green dinosaur eating leaves off a tree with I’M A VEGETARIAN on top in green letters. He had loved it, wearing it whenever he could. The shoes were velcro Weebok sandals she had bought online, and they were no longer available. She had printed out a picture of them from the website, with the “No longer in stock” message, because she wanted an image of them. Because this is what she can do. She can write things down or print things out so she has a record. She can make lists of what is missing. She can do these things so she doesn’t have to think of what she cannot do.

She then became seized by the idea of getting a duplicate outfit, so she scoured eBay and found the T-shirt, used, for $3.99 (although it was a 5T, not a 4T). Then she paid $35 in shipping to get it to Korea. She brought it to the police station in triumph.

“This is the T-shirt he was wearing,” she told Mr. Park, the sergeant who had been appointed to be her point person. He carefully took a photo and said he would add it to the file. She asked whether it would be helpful if she found the shoes he was wearing at the time, and Mr. Park looked at her sympathetically and shook his head no. The T-shirt was enough.

She had already given them the photo of her extended family at the restaurant earlier that day, but G was on the periphery and barely visible, even when she blew up that part of the picture. She became obsessed with the fact that she hadn’t taken any photos of the kids later in the day, and her with an eight-megapixel camera on her phone! Perhaps if they had had an accurate photo of what G looked like on the day he disappeared and they had released it to the public quickly, someone might have recognized him. And then she wanted to document Daisy and Philip, but she wanted to do it without frightening them. She knew if she told Clarke, he would discourage her, so one night, before they got in the shower, she asked them if she could take photographs of them.

They submitted in a way that frightened her. They didn’t want to, but they did, because they knew it was important to her and that it would be futile to say no. They seemed a little bit like abused children. She was causing them more trauma.

But. She couldn’t help herself. So, a catalogue of moles.

She had been thinking about if she found G two or three years later and he had changed a lot. What if she was unable to know for certain if it was him? Yes, of course, DNA, but in the immediate sense, the first moment when they showed him to her. She wanted to know right away. Children change so much. How to be sure? She came up with this. A mole catalogue.

She stood Daisy and Philip in the bathroom in their underwear and took photographs of their arms, their inner thighs, anywhere they had a birthmark or irregularity or mole. And then she labeled and filed them on the computer she had had Essie send to Seoul. Daisy had a large mole on her left inner thigh, and two close to one another on her right back shoulder. Philip had a scattering of them on his right arm, above his elbow. He had a scar above his right eyebrow. She had the photos on her computer, backed up, and in hard copies.

Of course, the ones she needed, she didn’t have. She couldn’t remember the details of G’s body. He must have had moles, but who noticed those kinds of things on a third child? She pored over old photos on her computer, trying to see what spots he had on his face, things that would not change even after years and years. But everything seemed so mutable, so temporary: eyebrows, hair, even the shape of his face. He could get fat, he could be unrecognizably skinny, depending on what type of environment he was in. He might be with a family who had just wanted a child and got him off the black market and spoiled him rotten. Or he might be in some terrible place, a surly street urchin or worse. She can only bring herself to read snippets of what happens to children who disappear, glancing off the terrible surface of what might be. Her therapist tells her to stop thinking about it.

But sometimes she’ll read in the paper that in China and India, children are kidnapped and maimed so that they become more compelling and effective beggars. In other countries, kids are taken for their organs, but those are usually the older ones, older than G. There’s the sex trade, of course. This is what she has to digest. G, her one-eighth Asian child, who actually could pass for Asian. They would never have taken light-haired Daisy, who looks white. Too much trouble, a foreigner’s child, too much media attention, potential for international conflict. But Daisy and Philip look white. G looks Asian. Only G had that one recessive gene pushed to the fore, that stubborn Asian DNA strand that burst when he was made, so that while he’s recognizable as her child — only one person has ever asked her if he’s adopted — he looks quite recognizably Asian. So he has dissolved into the fifty million other Korean people on the peninsula.

After she photographed Daisy and Philip and they went to bed, quiet and submissive, she realized that she was damaging them further and they needed more normalcy. She booked a flight for them to go back to Hong Kong the next day with her mother so they could go back to school. She and Clarke stayed on.

That was when she weaned herself off the anxiety medication. The Korean doctors had been liberal with prescriptions, but she wanted to stay sharp, be ready for whatever came her way. She only took an Ambien when it was two in the morning and she couldn’t stand it anymore.

Then, after six weeks, Clarke went back to work. She couldn’t believe it, but he said, “You’ll be here. I’m not doing anything that you can’t do. And we need to see our other children. Make sure they have a parent there, even though your mother’s there. They are suffering as well.”

And he left her, fuming, in the hotel room. What was it about men? They didn’t feel things the same way. How could he leave the country where his child was lost? Now the person she saw the most in the world was Mr. Park, a gentle man with glasses who handled her with extreme delicacy.

She remembered sitting with him in the police station, as she did almost every day. It was getting cold, November, December, and the building was not well heated. He apologized for the temperature and said the government saved money on heating.

“At home,” he said, “we have the floor heating, the ondol. It is very effective, and we eat and sleep close to the ground.”

She wondered what he went home to every night, whom he lived with, if he had children. She asked him once about his family, and he told her in a way that indicated he was making a sacrifice by telling her, so she didn’t delve into the personal again.

They shared coffee every day. Once, sick of the terrible brew they had at the station, she made an impulsive purchase at Hyundai Department Store on the way to the station. When she came in bearing the espresso machine, the policemen were struck dumb and then all in unison said they could not accept the present, government regulations and all. She insisted, said it was for her as well, as she was there every day, and then she set it up and made everyone a cup, foaming the milk she had brought and stirring it into paper cups. She and the policemen sipped the good coffee together in silence, each lost in his own thoughts.

The police were very polite and concerned but completely ineffective. She didn’t go ballistic on them, because she didn’t think it would help her or G. But it was incredibly frustrating. Every day brought new leads: phone calls, e-mails from people who thought they’d seen G. But they never led anywhere. Seoul was blanketed with closed-circuit televisions, but there was a blind spot where they had been, and when they studied the adjoining ones, they couldn’t see G anywhere. One store’s camera had been broken for a week and was getting fixed that day, so the whole system had been down. This is the direction where they thought G must have been taken. They told her of another case where a boy had been taken and they had been able to trace his path with different security cameras. It had taken them a few weeks, but they had traced him to a village an hour outside Seoul, reachable by bus, where a mentally disturbed woman had taken him as her child. He had been shaken but healthy when they found him. She had treated him well, he said, but had insisted that she was his mother. He was seven years old, so he knew it wasn’t true but was frightened of challenging her, so he had played along and stayed with her in her house, afraid, but even more afraid of what lay outside.

The police were very proud of this case, but it didn’t seem that they were having the same luck with her child. They apprised her of all their work, but nothing ever panned out.

Clarke flew back every ten days or so, but there was never any progress to show him. He brought the kids with him the first few times, but they got upset when they had to leave her, so they decided it was better to let them stay in Hong Kong.

After three months, he took her by the hand while they were eating dinner at the hotel. “Come back home,” he said. “We have to live our lives. We can return whenever they find something. We can’t destroy four more lives. Philip and Daisy deserve a chance.”

She felt a white-hot hatred for him then that swept through her so violently she felt it physically. She snatched her hand back and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the night. He left the next morning in silence.

In Korea by herself, Margaret got into a rhythm. She’d wake up in the morning around six and go to the hotel gym for an hour. She’d run on the treadmill, watching the television. She got to know the other regulars at the health club, as many locals used the hotel facilities as their gym. An old white-haired man stretched with his young trainer every morning, a few businessmen in their forties, a few pretty young housewives. They nodded to each other in the morning. Afterward she went upstairs and showered and put on comfortable clothes to go to the police station. She walked over — it took about fifteen minutes — and checked in with the police. Initially they had asked her to stay at the hotel and they would contact her with any leads, but she had been politely persistent, and now they let her stay around the police station with her laptop and access the Wi-Fi. How could they say no to someone like her? It was sterile, with white linoleum floors and fluorescent lights and that peculiar Korean smell she now recognized, from the accumulated smell of a thousand bygone boxed lunches. It was comforting to her now.

She would ask for any updates. They would show her a few badly translated e-mails or phone messages that had come in during her absence—“I know kidnapped child in Suwon!”—and say they were following up. That she was allowed to stay was against all protocol, but they found a way as long as she didn’t ask too many questions or interfere with their work. They knew it was hard for her to stay at the hotel.

Lunch was at one of the many small restaurants in the neighborhood. She learned that one o’clock was the regular lunch hour, so she went at noon so there was no wait. She ate ddukbokki, bibimbap, naengmyun, trying all the different foods by pointing to the menu pictures and what other people were having. She felt as if she were connecting to her Korean roots a little bit, having a tiny taste of what it must be like to live in Korea and be Korean. She ate salted sprouts brushed with sesame oil, cold marinated crab — although she got food poisoning so bad she thought she might die later that day, lying on her bathroom floor — the gelatin-like mook, the kkagduki kimchi, the endless warm soups. She came to crave room-temperature barley tea with her food. It helped her digestion and soothed her stomach.

After lunch she would go back to the police station for a few hours. Around four, she would head back to the hotel and do laps in the pool. It was important to be physically active so that she could sleep at night. She usually ate dinner at the hotel, where all the staff knew her by now, watched TV, answered e-mails, and surfed the Internet, and was usually in bed by ten. Her life shrank down and became ascetic, which meant that she felt like she was focusing all her energies on finding G.

But he remained lost. The police shook their heads and complained about the dissolution of Korean society.

“Before,” Mr. Park said, “it was a good society. But now too much money and the Western values have come, and the children want to eat hamburger, and the adults only interest themselves. They don’t care for the other people.” He told her amazing stories: of people who were sick of taking care of their elderly parents with dementia and drove them out to the countryside and abandoned them, knowing they could never find their way back; of young parents neglecting their baby to go play a computer game in which they nourished a virtual child, only to come back to their apartment to find that their actual child had starved to death. “This society is no good now,” he told her. He recommended that she watch Korean television dramas. They were very popular around the world, and she could begin to understand the problems of modern Korea. He gave her the names of a few and also where she could download them. He highly recommended one drama in particular and underlined it, with exclamation points surrounding it.

She started watching and, despite the melodramatic acting and bad lighting, found herself quickly sucked in. Winter Sonata was the story of a young man in search of his father who falls in love with a girl in a small town. The girls in the show were always running after buses and scolding their love interests in a coy, flirtatious way, and the men were unnecessarily brooding, but there was something viscerally compelling about the people and their interactions. She watched episode after episode in a trance. She downloaded the entire series onto the Korean smartphone she had bought and watched it at the police station, on the subway, at the gym. Even now, whenever she hears the piano music of the opening credits of the series, she is transported back to those months in Seoul, cold mornings on the subway, the intense monotony of those days, the sick feeling she had the whole time.

Her mother found her a shrink from San Francisco she could talk to on Skype. Dr. Stein and Clarke seemed to be on a team, trying to get her to move forward, but she couldn’t. She didn’t tell them about the hours she spent on eBay, trying to find the sandals G had been wearing. This mindless searching for an artifact that was without value to anyone else was what made the hours go by as she sat in her hotel room at night, searching the Internet for anything that might help her find her child. She regretted not learning Korean, regretted that the most important parts of the Internet were off-limits to her. Koreans were the most plugged-in society in the world, and they had many, many more forums like the ones she read in English about missing children. They were the relevant ones, but she was stuck reading about missing children in Maryland or California when her child was missing on another continent.

She checked in with the embassy once a week, talking with a nice woman, Gerry, from Atlanta, a divorcee with two children, who tried to be helpful. Gerry moved every two or three years for her job with the State Department and had lived in Morocco and Shanghai as well. Gerry invited her over for dinner one weekend night, and Margaret went, because she couldn’t stand another night in the hotel room watching television and scouring the Internet forums or eBay. Gerry lived in an old neighborhood, a far cry from the windowed skyscrapers of downtown, where Margaret was. Gerry’s apartment was one of four in a two-story house, and spacious. But when you stepped inside, it was like stepping back into America. Everything was from the United States, courtesy of the State Department courier, which shipped things for free regardless of size or weight. Whereas most people who lived overseas had local-brand strollers or televisions, Gerry had everything straight from Amazon. It was the oddest experience, having dinner in a house in Seoul and being served Crystal Light and Duncan Hines chocolate cake, as if they were sitting in Atlanta, two miles from Target.

“People expect me to be so international,” Gerry said, “but to be honest, I get so homesick, I just want American stuff around me.”

She was not in touch with her ex-husband, and he didn’t keep up with the kids or pay child support.

“I’m here, carting his children around the world, and he has e-mailed me twice in two years,” she said. “You’d think he’d care a little more.”

She was abashed, then, remembering why Margaret was in Seoul, and tried to apologize.

“No need,” Margaret said. “It’s just nice to have a normal conversation sometimes.” And it was. This was her odd, staccato life in Seoul — the weird, empty evenings, the blank spaces — while she was waiting, waiting.

Korea turned cold in the winter, a vicious cold she had never before encountered. The wind sliced against her face and went into her bones, even as she bundled up in a newly bought winter coat, scarf, hat. She bought wool long johns and undershirts. She thought of G in his T-shirt and shorts, and her blood froze inside her.

This was when she developed a taste for being alone. She could glimpse her life as it might have been, if she had not married, if she had not had children, if she had been an entirely different person. She could see how your life came together, how you cobbled a life out of moments and routines. She started eating the same lunch at the same restaurant, a beef broth with a bowl of rice and a cup of barley tea. She ran five miles every morning. She watched television alone at night. She could see doing this for a long time. And that was when she decided she had to go home.

There were Daisy and Philip. They cried when they Skyped on the computer. They stopped short of pleading with her to come back to Hong Kong but wondered aloud when G would be found, when they would come home together. They told her about their days at school, the projects they were doing, the sports they were playing. She had two children trying to live a life in Hong Kong, and she was in Seoul, Korea, searching for a child who had disappeared. She was doing nothing in Korea. All the leads had dried up. The media were no longer interested in her story. She was like a hamster on a wheel, running, running, running, with no end in sight.

So she took a flight home one cold January day, having the concierge book her the ticket, because she didn’t want to talk to Rosalie, the travel agent, telling the police she’d be back every two weeks, and making them promise to e-mail her every day (which they did, religiously, and if they didn’t, she’d e-mail them until they replied), and then she went home, without G, something she had sworn she would never do, something that had been unimaginable five short months ago. She sat on the plane for the four-hour flight, alone, and ate the chicken and drank ginger ale and felt her eyes dry out in the airless cabin.

She hadn’t told the children or Clarke she was coming, so she came inside the house, strangely the same after all this time away, saw Essie, who started weeping the moment she opened the door for her, left her suitcase on the floor in the hall, and went upstairs to see her children: Daisy getting ready to go to soccer, Philip doing homework. They saw her and ran up to her, and she hugged them as they clung to her side. She dug her fingers into their hair as if to anchor herself. They didn’t ask about G; they didn’t want to hear the answer. She didn’t have an answer to give them. She didn’t even know what the question would be. So she did the only thing she could. She just wrapped her arms around the children she had, pulling them toward her with as much strength as she could muster, and tried to feel as happy as she could to be back home with them.

And time keeps flowing. Here she is, in Phuket, Thailand, on Christmas vacation about a year after her baby disappeared, sitting by the pool. Here she is, reapplying sunscreen on her daughter’s face and reading a magazine in a beach chair. This is what she has learned in the past year: You go through the motions of life until, slowly, they start to resemble a life.

Hilary

SHE WAKES UP with knives in her throat, hot with fever. Pops three Advils, boils water, adds salt and cold water, gargles, staggering from bed to kitchen to bathroom to achieve all this, while Puri stands there as still as an Easter Island statue, staring at her employer, completely useless. It hurts to speak, so she doesn’t. Finally Hilary lies down in her bed, towel under her head for the sweat.

That’s when she notices that her husband is still not home. And then she remembers that her mother is arriving today at 11:00 a.m.

She texts Sam the flight details and tells him to pick up her mother at the airport. Then types out an e-mail to her mom, explaining that she’s sick and won’t be able to go to the airport to pick her up. Then she realizes that Sam and her mother have very little chance of recognizing each other and, groaning, gets up and finds a piece of paper that Sam can use as a sign and writes MRS. MARJORIE KRALL. She’s writing with a regular pen, and it’s not dark enough. Cursing, she goes downstairs to find a Sharpie. Then she rewrites MRS. MARJORIE KRALL in thick black strokes and hands it to Puri to give to Sam when he gets in.

“I’m sick,” she says, in case Puri has missed this fact. “I’m going to sleep. Please answer the phone and the door and don’t get me. And please bring me up a pitcher of water and a glass.”

She goes upstairs and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When she wakes up, she is surprised at how quiet the house is. Usually Puri is wrestling with the vacuum in some corner of the house or listening to tinny music through earphones. It’s past ten, and she feels much better, the Advils having kicked in. She gulps down a glass of water and wonders whether David has made his way home and gone out again while she was sleeping. There are no clothes strewn on the floor. She feels his toothbrush. It’s dry. So he never came home. This is new.

She calls him. There’s no answer, so she texts and e-mails him: “Where are you?” An even tone: no reproach yet, leaving the door open for fury. She’ll decide the tenor of her response when she sees him, based on the level of his dishevelment, drunkenness, remorse. Such are the negotiations of marriage.

She walks into the kitchen to see Puri at the stove making chicken soup and is filled with gratitude.

“Thank you, Puri!” she says.

“Yes, ma’am,” Puri says without turning around. “You are sick.”

When she is spooning up soup and sweating, she looks at the clock and sees it’s just past eleven. She dials her mother, who should be in the car.

“Did you get in okay and the pickup was okay?”

“Yes, all fine. How are you doing, dear?”

“I have a fever, but I took Advil, so I’m okay right now.” As she goes through the expected questions and responses, she wonders if she should tell her mother that her husband went out last night and didn’t come back. If she doesn’t, of course, her mother will find out, and it’ll be worse than if she had told her. Then again, if she tells her now, it will cast a pall on the beginning of her mother’s visit. She decides to stall.

“Okay, I’m here. Can’t wait to see you.”

She has an hour or so until her mother arrives, so she goes upstairs to her room and gets into bed and logs on to her laptop.

She found this other, online world by accident when she was looking for a way to get rid of some old furniture she was throwing out. A website for expatriates in Asia: www.expatlocat.com. The name was a bit confusing, but the site was marginally helpful. She posted a message on “Odds and Ends” saying that people could come and take pieces that she described: an old coffee table, three lamps, an ottoman. She was taken aback by the aggressive responses. People demanded photos, demanded to know where she lived, asked if she would deliver the items to their homes. She wanted to respond, “These are free!” but instead she never replied to any of the messages. She told Sam to get rid of the furniture instead, and it all disappeared without a fuss.

Poking around the site, she found advertisements and a tab labeled Message Boards. When she clicked on it, a list of topics popped up: “Dating,” “Friendship,” “Moving to Hong Kong.”

She is not at all current, but current enough to know that online forums, in the age of all that is possible online, are almost laughably antique. Still, that is why she likes them. This website has something quaint and old-fashioned about it, in the context of all this Internet insanity. The graphics are nonexistent, just lines of text, some underlined, some indented, some bold, and that’s as complicated as it gets.

She posts on two communities: expatlocat.com and citypeople.com, which is based in Los Angeles and is more lively, because people all over America post on it. There they talk about popular TV shows and current events, household income, and BMI. The tone is more ironic; people are feistier, less provincial. People often post their height, weight, and HHI and ask, “Do you hate me?” But the Hong Kong one is more relevant, and she’s there most often.

She is always astonished by how loose people’s networks are, how they are so trusting and willing to meet strangers based on a few electronic exchanges. People who have just moved to Hong Kong post on these boards and arrange social get-togethers. They seem to have no compunction about the fact that the only connection they have with these people is through the Internet. She knows that her mother would be horrified; in her world, it’s families, schools, workplaces. She also knows that no one in her world would ever be caught dead on an online forum. So it’s perfect.

She pores over the forums and has become familiar with people who post frequently, whose handles are JamesBond and taiwanmum. People complain about their help, or wonder whether to leave their boyfriends, or ask where to buy an air-filtering machine. No question is too personal or inane or random for this place. Anonymity is so comforting.

When she registered, she filled the blanks with fake information. Her online name is HappyGal, something that would set her teeth on edge in real life, but online, she figures, she could, she should, be a different person. In her bedroom, with her laptop on her bed, she signed up to become someone else, a gray, amorphous collection of 0s and 1s traveling through space to join a virtual community that has become a large part of her day.

HappyGal is younger than Hilary, twenty-seven, and she is originally from Oregon, although they used to live in California. Her husband works at an accounting firm. She likes to run and hike the country trails, which she’s had fun discovering. She is blond. This is important. Hilary has always wanted to be blond.

HappyGal has a helper they just hired, whom they pay HK$2,000 over the minimum wage, and the helper works only five days because they value their couple privacy. She and her husband live in the Mid-Levels. It’s like a smaller, scaled-down version of Hilary. Someone she might have been, in a different life, or maybe even this one, if she had made some different decisions.

Hilary has read a lot of the archives, so she knows the history of a lot of her fellow posters, and she has become one of the regulars. Taiwanmum is shrewish but clever. Texas4Eva is one of those irritating, newly arrived Americans who take umbrage at everything that is not shiny and happy, as she thinks everything ought to be. She complains about the injustices in Hong Kong — how helpers are underpaid, how the minimum wage is outrageously low, how pollution is ever-present. Her outrage is not shiny and happy, though, which many other posters have pointed out to her. Hilary wonders if she knows Texas4Eva in real life, if she’s had lunch next to her at the American Club. Still, they have formed a sort of community, a society of people who recognize one another and know one another’s personalities and quirks. They are merciless to newcomers but chummy with one another.

The etiquette of the online forum has to be learned through weeks, probably months, of lurking. Also, the tone. Hilary read thousands of messages before attempting to post one of her own. People were very extreme, punctuating their sentences with exclamation points and bobbing yellow smiley faces that winked or stuck out their tongue. It was like on Facebook, which Hilary goes on sometimes, and whenever someone posts a photo of themselves, all their friends post profuse compliments, say utterly ordinary women are “gorgeous!!!!” or “stunning!” On the flip side, people become enraged easily and insult one another with a vehemence that would never exist in a face-to-face encounter. There are dozens of posts where people try to explain why they are right and the other is wrong. Whenever Hilary sees this type of exchange, she wonders at the futility and hopefulness of these people, that they actually think they can change someone else’s mind, that others will acknowledge their correctness. They must be young. She was that way too when she was young. If only it is explained enough, they think, surely everyone will understand, everyone will come around to their way of thinking. It is exhausting, being so hopeful. She remembers.

She signs in. HappyGal, password: honkers, all lowercase.

She enters the forum “Misc in Hong Kong,” her usual haunt, where a dozen or so people post regularly.

Taiwanmum is online, posting about a new dim sum place in Kowloon: “Very good food and reasonable price. The chef from Four Seasons.”

“That seems unlikely,” Hilary types. “And how do you even get there?”

“Ah, HappyGal, welcome,” blinks back the response. “There’s this thing called public transport. Not everyone sits around in their air-conditioned mansion in Repulse Bay and refuse to go to Kowloon.”

Hilary is surprised. She has always written that she lives in Mid-Levels.

“I live in Mid-Levels,” she types.

“OK, your mansion in Mid-Levels,” Taiwanmum pings back.

Hilary has been getting more paranoid lately about being found out.

“How long have you lived here again?” comes a question from Asiaphile, an intermittent poster, known for peppery remarks and not suffering fools.

“A year and a half,” she writes.

“All sorted out?” Asiaphile writes, not unkindly.

“Are you a man or woman?” she responds.

“Touche.”

“I’m home sick today, be nice,” she types. She clicks off to another thread.

And then she sees it. Her story. Right there on the forum for the other thirty or so regular readers to see.

“I know a woman,” it begins. “She is so rich and has a huge house. She can’t have kids and is maybe trying to adopt and has a kid she is ‘trying out,’ like a ball gown she can return.” The user ID on the message is HappyValley, a neighborhood in Hong Kong.

The casual cruelty takes her breath away.

She scrolls through. The subject line is “Should anyone be able to adopt?” Off-topic, yes, but not unusually so.

“Is this a friend of yours?” someone asks.

“More of an acquaintance. She runs in different circles.”

“Sounds horrible!” exclaims Christy3.

“Well, they have different rules for rich people, don’t they?”

“I’m sure the HK government wouldn’t allow this. They have such strict rules,” writes MadHatter.

“Yes, my friend wanted to adopt and had such a difficult time. She ended up getting a child from Russia.”

They are in this peculiar situation in Hong Kong, of living there but not being local, and being privy to the regulations of their own countries and of Hong Kong, and sometimes of China. Hong Kong orphanages give preference to local Chinese families and also prefer to place Chinese children with Chinese families. If there is a half-Indian or half-Filipino child, they will go to families with similar backgrounds, and once there was even a white child, and she went to a white family. It is their policy, and they adhere to it with much vigilance. It is surprising that Julian is with her, given his half-Indian, half-Chinese background, except that mixed-race children are much harder to place in Hong Kong. She’s been assured that this, in conjunction with his relatively advanced age, will make it much easier for her to adopt him.

She reads the thread. The last post was from an hour ago. Her heart pounds in her chest. Who could have written such a thing? Enough people knew about Julian, although she and David tried to be discreet. But who would write about her situation so meanly?

The doorbell rings. Her head is a mass of white noise from what she’s just seen. But her mother has arrived. Her mother has arrived. She hears a sudden burst of activity downstairs. Puri is probably taking her mother’s luggage, bringing her a cup of tea, and asking her about her flight, all the things that Hilary is supposed to be doing but can’t right now, can’t because she is sick and feverish, can’t because a website splayed her life out on the screen, and can’t, simply can’t, because, because, her husband is simply nowhere to be found.

Mercy

CAN YOU SUDDENLY be summoned into adulthood? Mercy wonders. Is it the same as being promoted and suddenly having to pretend you know how to be a boss, or getting your period or having sex and suddenly being on the other side, knowing what it’s all about? She is suddenly an adult. She is sitting here with a man who has a wife, and he is on the precipice. This is what they must mean by being an adult.

He is sick of it, he says over fried eggs at the Flying Pan. He is sick of the wife and the nagging and the baby talk and just all of it. He doesn’t have the life he wants. He wants to change. He wants to evolve. He has the manic, unbridled energy of someone who has just made a foolish decision. Who better to do it with than me? thinks Mercy.

He tells her, this is the first time he’s done this. He’s never cheated on his wife, except he says it more delicately, says, he’s never “been with” anyone else since his marriage. She wonders if anyone calls what they’re doing cheating, or if they always make it into something more noble in their mind. She also knows to wonder whether it’s true. She’s not that stupid.

She listens, is the vessel into which he can pour all his frustrations and fantasies.

“So,” she says finally, “you’re having a kind of a Jerry Maguire moment, huh, where you’re taking a stand and going off on a new path?”

He laughs.

“Don’t you need to go home?” she asks.

“You know, my mother-in-law is coming today,” he says, ignoring her question and looking at his watch. “In fact, she’s probably already here. And she and my wife, they’re going to hang out here, and then we’re all going to Bangkok, which we do every fucking year, because the mother-in-law likes that weekend market and she buys all this crap and ships it back to the United States, like she doesn’t already have enough shit.”

“Listen,” Mercy says, “I understand you’re going through some serious stuff right now, but you need to back off a little bit and calm down. You are being way too intense.” How interesting to be the sane one.

“I’m not a bad guy,” he says. “And actually, Hilary is not a bad person. We’ve just really grown apart, and I’m angry because I haven’t had the relationship that I want for a while.”

Are all older men this conversant in Oprah language? Mercy finds herself thinking. She can’t imagine any of her contemporaries talking like this.

“And I work all the time, and all she does is sit around and mope. You know, her family’s rich, and she thinks that entitles her to bitch and be sad all day. And she’s gotten us in this situation with this boy, and this poor kid, he doesn’t know which end is up. He doesn’t know what we want from him, or what to do. It’s totally crazy.”

It turns out that the Starrs have a pet child they take out and walk and water every once in a while. What is wrong with these people?

“Are you serious?” she asks. “Isn’t that against the law or something? I thought that the government didn’t even let you look at a child until they decide to give it to you.”

“The rules don’t apply to certain people, babe,” he says. “You are so naïve.”

She pauses. “First,” she says, “don’t ever call me babe. And second, are you still drunk?”

“Is that why you think I’m still here?”

“I guess,” she says. “I would think that you would have to go home at some point.”

“You would be thinking wrong,” he says, wagging a finger at her. He sops up some runny egg with a torn-off piece of toast. “You don’t eat, do you?”

She has not eaten any of the pancakes he ordered for her. She feels light inside, clean.

“And what of you?” he says.

“What of me?” He asked, she thinks — he’s not a terrible person. Perhaps there’s more to this than a man coming off the rails.

“You know,” he says, “don’t be coy. I’ve just laid out my life in front of you, and you haven’t told me anything.”

“I didn’t know we were sharing so much.”

“Come on,” he says. “Throw me a bone.”

“I’m not your escape hatch,” she says. It’s the only smart thing she’s said all morning. “Your bad behavior doesn’t mean that you get to blame it on me later.”

He looks up, startled. Maybe he’s seeing her for the first time. “I’m not doing that,” he says.

“Good,” she says. “Then we can have a conversation.”

She reaches over and covers his hand with hers. “Are you ready?”

Margaret

AT THE LUNCH BUFFET, picking up melon and prosciutto with silver tongs, Margaret hears a familiar voice. She looks up to see Frannie Peck, whose kids go to TASOHK as well. They greet each other, and Frannie asks if they want to get dinner at the seaside restaurant tonight. There is no gracious way to demur, so Margaret agrees, and they both go back to their tables.

After a few hours by the pool, Margaret goes back to their room, where Clarke has booked her a massage in their private garden. There, amid frangipani and bougainvillea, an embarrassment of tropical lushness, a quiet, dark-haired woman spends ninety minutes moving Margaret’s muscles around, in an air temperature that miraculously seems to be the same as her own body’s.

It is so indulgent and gorgeous and the masseuse so docile, so servile (she won’t even look at Margaret as she sets up the table), that Margaret spends the entire time — lying on soft terry cloth, her face looking down through the hole cut out of the table onto a thoughtfully placed bowl with a floating lotus flower — feeling absolutely awful.

Is it any wonder, she thinks, that expats become like spoiled rich children, coddled and made to feel as if their every whim should be gratified? These trips to islands where the average annual wage is the cost of a pair of expensive Italian shoes cast the Western expatriate in the role of the ruler. The locals are the feudal servants, running to obey every whim. These small empires, these carefully tended paradises of sand and palm, shelter the expatriates from the brutal realities just outside the guarded gates.

The woman softly asks her to turn over onto her back. She drapes the towel decorously over Margaret’s torso, all the while looking away. Margaret wonders where she lives, probably in some disheveled bunkroom in a hotel dorm with other staff. What must she think of the cool, stiff hotel rooms she visits for her work, with their Bose stereos and private plunge pools? They must seem a strange, alien fantasy land. Margaret saw staff quarters in another hotel once, when she went for a tour of the organic garden, and there through a fence, where the foliage had not grown quite thick enough, she saw some ramshackle buildings with laundry hanging out to dry. She asked what those buildings were and was given an abashed answer by the gardener, suddenly embarrassed after proudly showing off his work. Do you live there? she asked before she could stop herself, and he crumpled into an impoverished island native, transformed from the career horticulturist he had just been. She was ashamed, of course. What else could she have been — an apologist for the way things were and how she could not change them.

She drifts off into a light sleep and is wakened by the sound of the woman getting her things together.

“Finish,” she says softly. Margaret sits up and wraps a towel around herself, hair falling disheveled around her face. She is drowsy and disoriented.

“Thank you,” she says. “That was wonderful.”

She moves to the bed and dozes until she hears Clarke and the children at the door.

They come in with excited stories of crabs and sandcastles — they are still young, these children, these remaining children of hers. They are tentative with their happiness, as if afraid it will upset her equilibrium. It makes her sad that their emotional calibrations are so accurate and so attuned to hers. Any overt happiness immediately tips over into guilt and anger because G is not here, and what right do they have to any happiness? Still, she cannot ruin their lives as well. She smiles and listens to their stories, absently patting Philip’s head as she urges him to shower so they can get ready for dinner.

Frannie Peck is one of those small, pert blond women who get married, have two children, and, essentials accomplished, then proceed to live their lives with maximum efficiency, going to Pilates and Zumba on alternating weekdays and running bake sales and school fund-raisers with cheery aplomb. Margaret would think no more of her, except that she remembers driving past her one day going in opposite directions on Repulse Bay Road, when the traffic was slow, and seeing Frannie behind the wheel, shoulders shaking as she sobbed. She was alone. This one image gives Frannie unexpected depth for Margaret. When they meet down by the beach, she is wearing a white sundress on her compact body, freckled shoulders rosy from the sun. They send the children to the beach to play while they order dinner.

“Did you have a good day?” Frannie asks. She has one of those unexpectedly raspy voices.

“Really relaxing,” Margaret replies.

Frannie’s husband, Ned, kisses Margaret on both cheeks, a European custom that has, for some reason, been hijacked by every American expatriate in Hong Kong. Margaret is quite certain that none of these people ever did the two-cheek greeting prior to stepping on Asian shores, and it’s funny that they all adopt it without question.

Is it cynical of her to think this way? As she’s grown older, Margaret has developed the bad habit of sizing people up immediately and passing judgment. This person is a small person, she can tell from the wrinkled brow when the person asks about a mutual acquaintance, worried whether she has been one-upped without knowing. This one seeks validation and so is always rushing about doing a million things that don’t add up to anything. Another person doesn’t understand why she’s not relevant. With the exception of that one weeping moment Margaret witnessed, however, Frannie Peck remains a cipher. She seems like a wide, shallow plate, holding nothing except the reflection of others.

Frannie tells an amusing story about a previous vacation, in Sri Lanka with another family, where the villa had been so remote there was no Internet and no cell signal. The husbands all went nuts without access to their e-mail, but the wives refused to let them leave, so they compromised by hiring a driver to drive the two hours into the city with a bag full of phones they had turned on so they would pick up the e-mails when in reach of a signal.

“You should have seen these men,” Frannie says. “When the car returned, they rushed it like tweens at a Justin Bieber concert.”

So the dinner goes on, with lazy gossip and glasses of wine to soften reality. The children eat satay and pad thai, and the adults eat spicy prawns with basil and marvel that they are on a beach on the Andaman Sea doing such a thing.

The hotel has set up paper lanterns on the beach, maybe a Thai custom, maybe something they do for tourists. It doesn’t matter, because they are beautiful. A hotel staff girl is with Daisy and Philip, helping them light their wicks and puff up their lanterns. Daisy and Philip stand on the sand, backs to their watching parents. They each hold a lantern and hold it up high, as if it were an offering. Soon the lanterns float off their hands and sail toward the dark night. There are dozens of lanterns in the sky now, burning off their tiny light, drifting away until they are no longer visible.

Daisy turns around with a bright face. “I made a wish, Mama!” It’s uncharacteristic, her use of the babyish “mama,” and it makes Margaret suddenly tear up, not wanting to guess what that wish might have been. She thinks, Where is G now? His family is here, in this burnished pocket of paradise, on this sandy beach, lighting lanterns, without him. If he could see them now, would he feel betrayed? She looks at Daisy and Philip standing, watching their lanterns soar, and feels dizzy from the hole in her heart.

Hilary

HER HUSBAND’S GONE AWOL. And her mother is here. Could there be a more awkward set of circumstances? Phone calls to his cell go unanswered — she’s been trying for an hour. She’s also been checking expatlocat.com to see if anyone else posts to “Should anyone be able to adopt?” and refreshing her e-mail box. She is thinking about calling the police — there has been a spate of crimes where bar hostesses spike drinks and clean out ATMs — when an e-mail from David blinks up on her computer screen.

“I need some time to think things through,” he writes. “Will be in touch.” Then, as an afterthought, “Not sure I will make it to Bangkok.”

After she gets this e-mail, like a bomb, like a bad joke, in her inbox, she sits at her desk, tapping her forefinger on the matte metal of her laptop like a nervous metronome. Her mother is taking a shower — she can hear the water running — but she’ll be out soon, and Hilary’s going to have to say something.

It occurs to her that it’s odd she’s more worried about what she’s going to say to her mother than about what has happened with her husband.

It’s not as if they have had the most loving relationship lately. More… cordial. Definitely platonic, except when she tells him the time is favorable, and they dutifully have intercourse. She has felt his waning interest in her as a person, but coming as it did with her own diminishing engagement with his life, she hadn’t really minded.

But this is bold! He has written an e-mail, with words that cannot be taken back, words that are a proclamation! She hovers, her hands over her keyboard, waiting. But of course, nothing happens. She does not reply.

The feeling she has is most unexpected. The oddest thing. She feels no distress or worry. Instead, she senses a dim, faint feeling that rises from some unknown place in her heart, rising slowly and blossoming into something that she might call relief.

The shower stops running. She hears the door open and close. Her mother will be in her doorway soon, asking what the plan is, what they will do. What will she say? What will she do?