The Expatriates

Hilary

HOW IS IT already May? May and June are going-away-party season and pack-up-for-summer season. The expatriates have renewed or not renewed their contracts. They have quit or found something back home. The factory has closed, or HQ has downsized the office. Elderly parents are ailing, and they are needed. Some have just become fed up with life in Hong Kong and decided to pack it up and leave. There are homesick wives who tell their husbands they’ve had it with the air pollution and the unsafe food standards and take off with the kids, leaving their spouses to work and send money home. This sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t: The wife comes back to Hong Kong, or there is a divorce, or the man returns home and finds another job.

If the expats are staying for another year or two, the moms take the kids and go on home leave, staying at their parents’ or in-laws’ houses, camping out at others’ homes through the summer.

So in May or June, when the kids are finishing up with school, the packers are called, tram parties are booked, and many, many boozy lunches and dinners are had at the American Club or the China Club or some fancy Italian restaurant in Central.

Hilary sits at the kitchen table with her laptop, sipping coffee and going through her e-mails, finding out who is leaving.

It’s a bit like the end of college, when you bid farewell to the friends you’ve made before going on to the next stage of life. You might see them again, but never in the same normal, everyday kind of way. Hilary has gone to so many of these lunches she knows the format like the back of her hand. First a bottle of champagne and a toast to the departing friend, then the presentation of a group gift arranged by many, many e-mails sent around beforehand, a gift statistically most likely to be from Shanghai Tang — a frame or perhaps a wine stopper — but not before a card is surreptitiously handed around so everyone can sign. There will also most probably be a photo album compiled of many pictures of group outings to Shenzhen to buy fake DVDs and have clothes tailored, dinners at the China Club, girls’ nights out at Flow, family days on the American Club lawn, joint vacations to Bali beaches. It’s akin to a college yearbook, she supposes, a way to mark several years in one’s life, when one has inevitably changed and grown in ways that are hard to see until you find yourself back in the United States trying to explain to people what life was like in Asia and finding out that they care not one whit. But you will have this album to flip through, and a wine stopper. And that memory of the people who were there with you.

That’s the shock, and the surprise, to a lot of repatriates: No one back home cares. There’s an initial, shallow interest in what life is like abroad, but most Americans aren’t actually interested, at all. They’re back to talking about the divorces going on at work, or how the neighborhood pharmacy is going under, or how highway construction has added forty minutes to their commute. They don’t want to know about the trip to Hoi An and how Vietnam has changed immensely, or how Beijing’s pollution is so thick that when you were there, you had to wear a handkerchief over your face. America is so vast, and there is so much to see, just in the fifty states, these people tell you — it’s like you never have to leave. This insularity will seem shocking for the first year back, when reentry is difficult, when you miss the ease of Hong Kong, forgetting all your complaints from when you were there, remembering only the good winter weather, the amazing dumplings and cheap taxis, but all too soon most everyone slips into the warm comforts of America, so convenient, so uniform, forgetting there is anything outside its borders.

There’s a moment in all these farewell parties when the person leaving is alone, drying her hands in the bathroom, waiting at the bar for a drink, and she foresees a moment in her new old life. Perhaps it will be the still, frozen Thursday-night light of a mall refracting through the window of a TGI Fridays as she’s surrounded by old high school friends in this most American of venues, chosen out of what they choose to call nostalgia but is usually something deeper and more fraught, the uneasy push-pull of the giant frozen cocktail, the greasy blooming onion — the all-encompassing and smothering embrace of America. Or she’ll see another moment in her imminent future, when she’s looking back into the past: Washing dishes in the waning light of a Columbus, Ohio, kitchen, sudsy hands gripping greasy dishes, a woman will summon up a startling picture of herself, a moment in Hong Kong when she was walking across the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel in a fitted sheath and expensive stiletto-heeled shoes, the kind she has no use for anymore, on her way to meet a friend for lunch, or walking through the streets with her toddler on her hip while her helper, her servant, trailed behind, carrying the diaper bag and various other accouterments of daily life she hadn’t had to bother herself with. What a life it was! What a life they had all had! While many of them had complained the whole time they were stationed in Hong Kong, it is only after they leave, when they are ensconced in their old lives with no change visible for decades ahead, that they will appreciate the wonder of what they had experienced.

At the farewell parties and back at home, they will take a moment to see themselves with their present friends, their old friends, their new friends, their new old friends, the past meeting the present, endlessly echoing back and forth, and they’ll see their future, so close, bumping into the moment, and frighteningly the same, and they’ll wonder if their past, their time away in the Far East, was just that, a dream.

As Hilary sits at the kitchen table, she hears the piano playing. She is waiting for Julian to finish so they can go out together. Miss Kim, the Korean lady she found to teach him, says she is happy with his progress, but Hilary has no idea whether he is good. She doesn’t care that much if he is. The tinkling melody, not unpleasant, soothes her.

She is going to adopt Julian.

It was not some big awakening, some blazing moment of truth. Like so many things in real, unromantic life, it came in a slow accumulation of small tasks, almost unconscious. She filled out some forms. She sent e-mails to the few people she will need recommendations or information from. She asked the accountant for copies of tax returns and the consulate for legal documents. In this way, she came to realize that she is adopting Julian. She has not told him, but she is clearing away the brush in front of her to see what lies ahead. The social worker has told her that while she cannot request a specific child, if she starts the application process and says she is okay with a mixed-race, older child, the odds are very good she will get Julian, as the adoption pool in Hong Kong is very small, under two hundred, and he is likely the only one who fits that description. The odds of his getting adopted are almost nil. In the last year there were fewer than three hundred adoptions in all of Hong Kong. Most were infants adopted by local families, a small percentage by foreign, and a very few are within families. Hilary wonders about the stories behind that last, small statistic.

There have been moments when she isn’t sure, but she plows on, filling in David’s name as the father, listing her academic and medical history. Maybe this is all it is. She does not think he will deny her this, after all he has done.

After the lesson, she will take Julian on a walk. This is the second time they have done this. Sam drives them to Tai Tam, and they walk slowly through the park and talk to each other in stilted English.

Miss Kim closes the music book and smiles. “Good job, Julian,” she says.

Hilary looks at her, this woman with her lovely, always beaming face, and wonders what she makes of the situation. The orphan, the woman always alone at home, the piano lesson. A job where you go to other people’s houses all day must unearth some odd situations.

Miss Kim takes her leave, and Hilary asks Julian if he’d like to go.

They get in the car, equipped with water and some oranges, and ride out to the beginning of the walk. It is one she does often with Olivia.

They get out, and she helps Julian on with his backpack, one she has given him. She grabs his hand, and they set out. It feels strange to hold his hand, but she keeps doing it. It will feel normal, she thinks, she just has to get used to it.

A couple comes out and smiles at them, seeing what they see — a mother and her child. Hilary is suddenly giddy with happiness.

“What is?” Julian asks, pointing at the road where there are splotches of white powder.

“It’s snake poison,” she tells him.

He shakes his head. She pulls out the notebook she has gotten into the habit of bringing and sketches a snake. “Snake.” She draws a skull and bones. “Poison.” Then she puts X’s in the snake’s eyes to signal its death.

He nods.

There is so much he needs to learn, it’s overwhelming. Immersion, she keeps thinking, she’s going to have to immerse him in English. She reads stories about immigrant children going to America at thirteen and having to go to a school where they don’t understand a word. They survive; some thrive. She knows it’s possible, but how to give a child a whole new world?

“I’ll take you to the Botanical Gardens one day,” she says. “They have a few snakes there.” She draws a cage with snakes behind the bars. He seems to understand, but who knows.

This planning for the future, this evocation of things to come, gives her a frisson, not unpleasant. She grows bolder. “And in California, in America, where I’m from, there are lots of zoos, and they have lots of animals. We’ll go see them together.” She squeezes his hand.

“Do you know California?” she asks. She draws America, fails, pulls out her phone and finds a map of the United States.

“Here.” She taps the West Coast. “That’s where I’m from,” and she points to herself. “We can fly there together.” She makes her arms wings and bobbles them back and forth.

She has not explicitly told him that she is going ahead with the adoption, but he knows. When she goes to pick him up, his fellow orphans crowd around him, speaking rapidly in Cantonese. They give her the thumbs-up sign and grin widely. She usually leaves quickly, uncomfortable with the implicit longing in the other children.

It’s odd, because he already feels like he’s hers, separate from the others, especially since they look so different from him, being Chinese. “Which one of these is not like the other?” is the refrain that goes through her mind when she sees him at his home.

After the walk, she takes him to the American Club to have a snack. He has never been. On this warm day, she brings him by the pool and sees the scene through his eyes — these privileged kids splashing in the water outfitted in every possible contraption a diligent mother can strap or pull on: rashguards, water wings, water fins, goggles, colored zinc. There is so much much here. What is fifteen dollars for these women to spend on flippers or a safety vest for their beloved, the vessels for all their dreams and hopes? The children stagger in and out of the pool; the mothers hover over them, clucking from the side about rough play, calling out about one child hitting another with a noodle. The dizzying scene is rife with privilege.

Hilary sits with Julian, their silence surrounding them like a bubble enclosing them from the chaos outside. The sound track of a pool filled with children: happy shrieks, a crying toddler, a mother’s shout of warning, splashes of water.

Some boys Julian’s age come in through the side door, herded by one mother. Julian looks at them, all matching in their school uniforms on their way to get changed for their swim lessons. They chatter easily with one another, poking and cavorting like puppies.

“Toilet, please,” Julian says.

She takes him to the bathroom and waits outside.

After a long while, he comes out, followed by the other children, changed into their swimsuits. They look at him and giggle. She feels hot anger surge up.

“What’s funny?” she says to the boys.

They ignore her and start walking to the pool.

“Excuse me,” she says, and taps one boy on the shoulder. “Was something funny?”

“No,” he says. “What?” He looks confused.

“You were all laughing when you came out.”

As she speaks, she knows she sounds crazy, that the boys don’t know what she’s talking about, that it’s likely it has nothing to do with Julian, but she cannot help herself.

The boy shrugs and joins his friends. Next to her, Julian is looking down, his eyes brimming. She is stricken.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

He doesn’t reply.

She leans down. She has read this is what you do with children, get down to their level so they can relate to you better, so that you’re not so giant and unreachable.

“Julian,” she says, “you know you can tell me anything. And you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You tell me anything,” she says slowly. Even as she says it, she feels the impossibility of what she is saying. Does she really think an hour here and there will forge a relationship where he feels he can tell her anything? They don’t even speak the same language. She has to hurry up. It has to happen soon. He looks at her, eyes wet, trying not to cry. She hugs him fiercely.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asks.

He nods, and they go inside to the restaurant.

They sit down, and he looks around. All around, children are eating pizza, spaghetti, club sandwiches.

“They have Chinese food,” she says. “Chow fan, wonton noodle?”

“Maybe I have the pizza,” he says uncertainly.

“Want to look at the buffet?” she asks. They walk over and look at all the dishes. There is the usual international spread: a curry, a roast beef, a baked fish, sushi.

“Why don’t we do this, so you can try everything,” she says. They take plates, and she tells him to point at everything he wants. Soon his plate is laden with a smorgasbord of different foods.

When they sit down, though, he picks at everything.

“You don’t like?” she says.

He shrugs.

Just then, the boys from the swimming pool come through the door, hair wet, freshly changed from the pool. They swarm the buffet, grabbing plates before their mothers can even get a table.

“I get dessert,” Julian says.

He gets up so quickly she is behind him when she sees him stand next to one of the boys who is getting a piece of chocolate cake. In her mind, she is tut-tutting the fact that the boy is getting dessert before a main course when she sees Julian jostle him, quite deliberately. The plate teeters and falls, chocolate cake lies crumbled all over the floor. The boy lets out a wail and glares at Julian.

“You pushed me!” he shouts.

Julian painstakingly ignores him and takes a plate. He cuts himself a slice of the chocolate cake.

“You pushed me!” the boy shouts again.

Hilary is behind them, aghast and yet somehow exhilarated. She puts her hand behind Julian’s back to guide him back to the table. They walk back together, side by side, unhurried and deliberate, and sit down. She sees the boy run to his mother and talk to her excitedly, pointing at Julian. The woman rises and comes toward them, a pleasant-faced woman in her thirties.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Michael told me that your”—she hesitates—“your child? Pushed him? And that’s why he dropped the plate?”

Julian looks down at the floor, face a mask.

Hilary smiles at the woman. “I’m sorry?” she says. “What?”

The boy has joined his mother now. “He pushed me!” he says, still indignant.

“There must be some mistake,” Hilary says. “I don’t think Julian pushed you.”

“I dropped the cake because of him!”

The mother looks beleaguered. “Why don’t we just get another piece of cake?” she suggests. She takes her child’s hand. “Sorry,” she says with a backward glance. “You know kids.”

Hilary sits with Julian and finally dares to look at him. He stares back at her, expressionless, waiting for her reaction.

She blinks, then smiles, breathes.

“Eat your chocolate cake, sweetie,” she says, heart beating fast, fast, faster. Is this what it means to feel alive?

Mercy

HER MOTHER has had a job of sorts for several weeks. She’s been helping out with a catering company run by an American. Her experience at Mercy’s aunt’s restaurant has come in useful, and she has been hired as a quasi manager, to communicate to the other mostly Chinese staff what is expected. Why they think she can do this when she cannot speak Cantonese at all is a good question, but she talks in her Korean-accented English and seems to be doing fine. She likes her coworkers and likes having a place to go.

There is a big party this week that they are doing in some warehouse in Wong Chuk Hang, and her mother wants her to work. She moves around the tiny studio, getting ready to go.

“Shirley pays a hundred dollars an hour, and I’m sure she’ll pay you more — Columbia graduate!”

Her mother prattles on about the food and the preparation and the work to come — a kindness to her daughter, who she has recently come to realize has ruined her life.

All that jazz, as it were, came to pass, just as predicted. Two weeks ago, Charlie commented on her burgeoning waist, saying she had gained weight. The thing was, he said it in the loveliest way possible, saying, “Look! I’m taking good care of you. You have gained weight!”

She wasn’t able to quash the look of horror on her face.

He misunderstood. “No, no,” he said. “It’s good. I like it. You were too thin before.”

When she couldn’t speak, he said, “What’s wrong?”

And then it all came out, inelegantly, spastically, horribly. She kept seeing his face, uncomprehending at first, then horrified, then, finally, finally — and she couldn’t forget this — disgusted. The memory of his look makes her insides curl with embarrassment and self-loathing. When she visualizes it, she makes an involuntary grunt of horror. This good man, this good guy, was disgusted with her. She kept apologizing and apologizing for not telling him sooner, but it didn’t matter. There was something so final about being pregnant with someone else’s child. It’s almost comical. Only the most evolved or self-aware or confident man would be okay with it, or someone who was infatuated beyond reason, and that would be someone who had aimed way above his station. Charlie was none of these, she knew, and so she could not blame him or fault him or even wish that he had acted differently. He had acted in an eminently reasonable way, and she had been a bloody, bloody fool to spool it out for even a week. Now she imagines him telling all his friends, the newly married Eddie Lais, with whom they had had a perfectly lovely dinner, with the new wife being super friendly to Mercy, the work colleagues, other Columbia people. Her news spreading slowly, sickly outward, like an oil stain on the fine cotton tablecloth of common decency. Now she is known for something else, other than having lost a child, and it is this. A new kind of pariah.

And also, she thinks he had already bought their tickets to go away. So now she has cost him thousands of dollars as well.

So she does what she always does when her life goes awry. After all, she’s an expert. She puts it out of her mind and tries to move forward. Her prenatal visits are ongoing. She e-mailed David, delicately, about the cost. He e-mailed back immediately that she should send him all bills, then after the first two, he said she shouldn’t have to submit forms like an expense report and then just transferred HK$75,000 into her account (almost US$10,000) and said she should let him know when she needed more. So there’s that. It sits in her account, more money than she’s ever had at one time. Maybe he sent it all at one go because he doesn’t want a lot of contact with her, although he always signs his e-mails saying he’d love to see her and hopes that she is feeling well. He never gives a date, though, or any other indication that he cares about what’s happening with her. That should be a sign in and of itself.

She also told her mother, who took the news in the oddest way. She told her in halting Korean, and her mother took it in slowly. Then she hugged Mercy and, shaking a little bit, let her go to see the tears in her eyes. “I will have grandchild,” she said. “I am so happy.” Nothing about ruining her life or who the father is. She just let her be.

Actually, no one has asked her what she’s going to do, whether she will keep the baby, any of the questions she would have thought natural. She knows it’s getting late now to have an abortion, and she’s felt no urge to have one. It’s funny how she and her mother have both assumed that she’s going to have the baby. It’s not that they’re religious about it, or because of any sort of dogma, other than she does feel like she’s having a child, and the idea of not having it seems wildly improbable. She is pro-choice, always was, but this, her own body, is making the choice for her.

She hasn’t even Googled when the last possible date would be, although she has gone onto several pregnancy websites and looked at what babies look like at different months. At the last appointment at the government hospital, she asked when she could get an ultrasound, and the doctor said since she was young and healthy, she wasn’t lined up for one. That was when she decided to go private. After a little research, she ended up with an appointment at an obstetrician’s in Wan Chai. Her first one is today, and she didn’t tell her mother because she doesn’t want her to ask if she can come.

“I’ll ask Shirley if she need extra help for the party,” her mom says.

“Okay,” Mercy says, just to get her mother out the door.

After the door shuts and she is finally, blessedly alone, she showers and lies down on her bed, wrapped in a towel. Looking down, she opens up the towel to see how her stomach rises in a gentle peak. She sees the up and down of her breath. She sucks in her stomach, sees it go flat, then suddenly lets go in a panic, feeling as if she is squashing her baby, although she knows that is not possible at this stage. The websites say you might feel little flutters inside at this point, as the tiny baby starts to move around. It might not even be a baby yet. It might still be an embryo. She hasn’t gotten all the terms straight.

Her wet hair is warm against her scalp, and she feels water drops sliding off her face. Outside, a garbage truck beeps its slow retreat.

She gets up, dresses, leaves the apartment, and finds her way to the doctor’s. In the lobby of the office building, a brass plaque, Wan Chai Obstetrics, announces the name of her new doctor, a Dr. Henry Leong. The elevator has fancy brass buttons covered by a sheet of plastic that is sprayed with disinfectant every hour, or so a notice claims. Hong Kong: still disinfectant mad, decades after SARS.

The doctor’s office is pleasant, with fresh flowers and up-to-date magazines, although most of them are in Chinese. Private, public, private, public — the refrain keeps going through her head. Why does money have to make everything so much nicer? The receptionist hands her a clipboard to fill out and asks her to pee in a cup and weigh herself on the scale next to the desk. Mercy’s the only one in the waiting room until the door buzzes open again and a woman of about thirty comes in with her husband.

Mercy fills out the form and eavesdrops on the new arrival, an Englishwoman who is discussing with her husband their upcoming babymoon.

“Angie said Bali was great, but the food is terrible. I think Thailand is a better bet.”

“Okay,” her husband says, scrolling through his phone.

“And there’s a really lovely hotel in Phuket called the Andara. Bit expensive but think we should splurge since it’s our last vacation as a couple.”

“Is it on the beach?”

As they make their way through the inanities of travel, Mercy finishes up and places the clipboard on the desk, then weighs herself. The woman watches her and exclaims, “I can’t believe how they have you weigh yourself out here in front of everybody!”

Mercy looks back and lifts an eyebrow, which she regrets instantly, as it then gives the woman a chance to talk to her.

“Do you know what you’re having?” she asks, smiling, friendly. Perhaps she wants to make friends, mommy friends, and form a playgroup.

Mercy shakes her head, unwilling to talk, unwilling to unveil herself as a fellow native English speaker for fear of further intimacies. Better the woman thinks she is local, unable to converse.

But then the receptionist asks, “How much you weigh?” forcing her to speak.

“A hundred thirty-two,” she says softly, so the woman can’t hear her, but of course she does, so when Mercy sits down, the woman pointedly starts talking to her husband again.

“Listen,” she says finally, “I’m having kind of a terrible day.”

The woman nods curtly and continues speaking pointedly to her husband.

Mercifully, her name is called, and she goes into the waiting room. The nurse takes her blood pressure and leaves her with a cotton gown to change into. Mercy takes off her clothes except her underwear and folds them neatly. She lays them on the surface next to the sink. She wonders if she should take her underwear off as well. The one time she got a massage at an expensive spa, courtesy of the ever-generous Philena, she wondered the same thing. She sits down on the crinkly paper.

A knock on the door.

“Hello,” says the doctor, a soft-faced, aristocratic-looking Chinese man, in British-accented English. Outside, his credentials had been displayed prominently on the wall — Edinburgh, some other vaguely posh-sounding school.

“Hello,” she says.

“So.” He scans her file. “The date of your last period was approximately January 24.” He takes out a little wheel. “So that puts you at”—he spins it—“almost four months. A Halloween baby.” He looks up. “You took your time getting here. Most of my patients are here the moment they miss their first period.”

“Well,” she says, “I was being seen at the public hospital up until now.”

Behind the clear glass of his spectacles, a recalibration. Swift, but Mercy is an expert at recognizing these sorts of social calculations.

“I see,” he says. “So you’ve been taking good care of yourself.” It is more a statement than a question. “Folic acid and prenatals?”

“Um, no,” she says. “I’m not so good at that kind of stuff.”

“I see,” he says again. “Well, while you’re under my care, that stuff”—he repeats her word—“is nonnegotiable. You must start taking the pills, although you should have been taking them from day one. Actually, it’s already too late for the folic acid, but you can start on the prenatal vitamins. They may cause a little constipation, because they’re rich in iron.”

“But does everyone have a perfect pregnancy?” She can’t help asking. “I mean, I’m sure lots of your patients don’t know they’re pregnant for a while, and have acted”—she pauses here, not quite sure what she’s going to say— “I mean, acted like they weren’t pregnant.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he says.

She’s been here only three minutes, and she’s already alienated this doctor. She feels exhausted.

“I’ll take the pills,” she says.

“Are you feeling all right?” he asks.

“Yes, fine,” she says. “But this is all kind of new.”

He looks at her. “Yes, it’s a big change. You’re going to be a mommy.”

The stern, aristocratic doctor using a word like “mommy” makes her uncomfortable. He wheels over a large machine and starts tapping at a keyboard. His hands are as soft and white as flour, a gold wedding ring on his pudgy finger.

“Have you had a scan yet?”

“An ultrasound? No. The public hospital didn’t offer them.”

“Scoot down here.” He taps on the bottom of the chair. When he sees her underwear, he gives an exasperated sigh. “You have to take off your underwear,” he says. “The baby is still small, so we will give you a transvaginal scan.”

She gets off the chair and takes off her underwear, adding it to the pile. It looks sad and wrinkled.

He puts a condom on what looks like a giant dildo and holds it up and says, “I’m going to insert this, so don’t be surprised.” He glides it in as she breathes deeply. On the screen, black and white pixels glitter and wobble.

“There’s your baby,” he says, pointing with his free hand to what is recognizably a baby, with a head and body.

“Oh, my,” Mercy says faintly. “There it is.”

“It’s around ten centimeters now. Starting to grow.” He rolls a mouselike ball on the keyboard around. “I’m just taking some measurements.” He rolls and taps. “Everything looks good. You are young, so this should be routine. Too many women getting pregnant too old.”

Mercy is so rapt she can’t even take offense at what the man is saying. She can’t breathe. Her thickening waist, just now becoming apparent, is housing a baby, a human being, something that will come into the world in just a few months. There’s a man she’s just met who’s just inserted a plastic dildo inside her and is showing her something she cannot comprehend. The baby wriggles on the screen.

“It’s so weird,” she says. “I can’t feel the baby, but it’s totally moving.”

For the first time, the doctor looks at her with what looks like approval. She has finally reacted in what he deems a suitable way.

“Yes, it’s moving all around. Next time, I’ll probably be able to tell you if it’s a girl or a boy. Sometimes I can already tell at this stage, but you have a shy one.”

“I can’t believe it,” she says.

The rest of the exam goes in a blur. Dr. Leong never asks her about a husband or the baby’s father, making her wonder if he knows about her. She’s paranoid, she knows, but Hong Kong can be that small.

She thanks the doctor, and he leaves. Slowly she gets dressed. She’s seen her baby. She is holding three printouts of the baby’s image. The baby is real.

When she goes out, she goes to the reception desk to pay.

“Appointments are $1,200 each visit, and here’s the schedule of payment, including the hospital costs,” the receptionist says. She is a chubby young woman with a plastic name tag that says her name is Minky. She hands Mercy a sheet with the costs. There’s a separate line for multiple births.

The bottom figure is alarming, but less so now that she has $75,000 sitting in the bank.

“Triplets!” she says to the receptionist, eyeing the multiples section. “Expensive!”

“Yes,” the receptionist says. “You are lucky to have only one.”

Someone just called her lucky. Tears pool in her eyes, blurring her vision as she signs the credit card slip.

Margaret

IN HER STUDIO. She is hidden. She has been here every morning this week. Outside, traffic sounds, people’s voices.

Clarke’s party is imminent. Priscilla has earned whatever exorbitant fee she is probably charging and has done everything, as promised. At some point, she figured out who Margaret was, and her dealings with her changed. She became softer, never got exasperated when Margaret didn’t return e-mails or failed to make a decision. She took over and did everything. She started e-mailing Margaret directions, like had she found a dress, did she want to book a hairdresser or makeup, and when Priscilla didn’t hear back, she would just e-mail that she had booked one for her and that they would be at the house at this time. For this reason, Margaret now loves Priscilla.

Now that Clarke knows about the party, now that it’s no longer a surprise, there is even less pressure, and she has even shifted the question of whether David Starr should be invited over to Priscilla via e-mail. So, Priscilla crisply informed her later, an invitation went out per Clarke’s wishes, but David has not RSVP’d yet. Hilary has RSVP’d and called to ask if she could bring a friend, another woman. Of course, Margaret said fine. Apparently David is still out on his midlife crisis, something that may solidify into reality. Margaret views all this with the dim, myopic view of someone watching slow sea creatures through a thick glass, creatures in another world, where emotions run high and people behave badly, as if they have all the room in the world to make bad decisions and they won’t be punished for them. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and she’s the creature behind the glass, watching normal people behave normally.

She asked Priscilla to coordinate with the children about doing something for Clarke, a speech or a song or some sort of entertainment, and apparently they have something planned. She has given Priscilla whole ownership of the party, not feeling bad because she knows now that Priscilla knows about the situation.

Clarke’s parents flew in a few days ago and are staying at a small hotel in Stanley. They have been to Hong Kong once before, after her mom left after her extended stay, and they filled in for a month or so, getting the children’s lives back on track. They are nice, from a small town an hour out of San Francisco, but they were overwhelmed by Hong Kong — all the foreign food and the maids and the taxis — and they were not much help. They went to a round of parent-teacher conferences on their behalf when Margaret couldn’t make it out of Seoul and Clarke was on a business trip, and they tried as hard as they could, but they are limited. They have decided to stay a few days, and then leave. They don’t want to be too much trouble. Margaret told her own mother she didn’t need to come, that it would be better if she came another time.

Margaret slips into the bath with her headphones on and plays music so loud it shudders through her head. This is the closest she can get to the comfortable numbness she craves.

Dr. Stein has asked her to make friends. To do things with people, to get close and share intimacies.

Friends. What an odd concept. She had them before, of course, but in her old life in California and through her children. When she moved to Hong Kong, being involved with the kids’ school made her busy and made it easy to meet other women. There had been a flurry of coffees and lunches, a few walks and girls’ nights out. It was so easy that she was lulled into thinking she had lots of friends. And in a way, she had, in the way that doing a favor for an acquaintance and sending a thoughtful e-mail segued into friendship. If you call someone a friend, they’ll become one. Something like that. Since everyone had live-in help, getting someone to go out with you for dinner was easy. It was so easy that the women often organized girls’ trips to other countries, like forays to Vietnam to buy art and get embroidered linens and lacquerware or to Bangkok or Seoul to get skin treatments. She did not do anything like that, but she had seen how she could have gotten there in a few years, when her kids were older.

Dr. Stein, her face small and concerned in the reduced Skype window of Margaret’s laptop, said, “Go out for lunch. Take a walk. Work. Do something.”

Margaret assented but then realized she had no idea how to get back into work mode or whom she would reach out to to have lunch. She never even got back to the Litchfield people on that spec project her friends had sent her way. She had zero desire to call someone to have lunch. The truth is that once you have three kids and a husband, you don’t really need friends. She didn’t, at least. They were a perfect unit, a self-sufficient ecosystem, like those green plants in glass spheres that produce oxygen and water and feed themselves forever in a perfect balance of waste and sustenance. Until fate came down with a giant, destructive swipe and shattered it forever.

But friends. Back to the point.

“How do I do that?” she asked Dr. Stein.

“You’ve been out a few times to lunches and things, right?”

“Yes, but those have been more”—she searches for the word—“general. I could leave when I wanted.”

“You need to make connections with people. You have Clarke and Daisy and Philip, but you need to go outside as well.”

“Why?”

“You need to start living as normal a life as possible. Live as though it’s normal, and slowly it will become so.”

Who would she call? Frannie Peck? Hilary Starr? Any of the well-meaning class mothers who dropped off food and ferried her kids to the birthday parties and soccer games she couldn’t face? Can’t she just stay here in this room that has become her sanctuary?

Even as she sinks lower into the too-rapidly cooling bathwater, she knows she cannot. The children are at home, Clarke too. She forgot to tell Essie that the washer repairman was coming, and Essie may deny him entry and cost her the appointment fee. There is a FedEx package to be picked up that will probably not make it to the door. She forgot to call to make the appointment for Philip’s haircut, and he will be shaggy for the party. And she has to make friends.

Life presses on her from all angles, and she is not ready to accept it.

When she emerges from the bath and puts on clothes, she feels fortified, a little, as if she has acquired a small buffer for what is to come. Which is Clarke’s party. An onslaught of friendly strangers, eager to connect and gladhand and drink and breathe unwelcome intimacies into her ear. These are the people she is supposed to be friends with, the people who will give her normalcy and support.

Back home, Margaret moisturizes her skin and walks around naked to let her skin dry so she won’t stain her new dress. She bought it last week in town, a gossamer purple shift with silver sequins, knee length, a bit flapper. When she pulls it out, Clarke whistles.

“Great dress,” he says.

She smiles. She wants this to be a good night for him.

“Are you excited?”

“It’ll be fun,” he says. “Thank you.” He is almost dressed, knotting his tie. “Are Daisy and Philip ready?”

“I’ll go check.” She goes downstairs, pulling on a thin cotton bathrobe. She had bought it outside her little flat, and the memory of that moment, alone, purchasing this item, stays with her as she descends the stairs. She finds Daisy wrestling with a blow-dryer, a new development for her growing girl.

“You want help with that?” she asks. Daisy nods, and she stands while Margaret combs out sections of her hair and dries them smoothly. She looks at her daughter in the mirror, her arms and buttocks thickening ever so slightly — a sign of the impending storm to come.

When Daisy was six, a scrawny girl with twiggy limbs, she had been into gymnastics. Once she sprang into a handstand and a shower of glitter, sequined barrettes, and pink plastic beads fell out of her pockets. Margaret was filled with wonder and gratitude that this strange unicorn being was hers. Having a girl meant sparkling rings and fake jewels twinkling from every crevice of your house, the chemical smell of nail polish, the high, sweet pitch of her voice. She loved it so much, and she sees the end of this era coming — the chaos waiting to erupt onto Daisy’s skin, the scramble of hormones to make her moody and silent. She aims hot air at her daughter’s hair and wishes for time to stop, for just five minutes. She closes her eyes to stop tears.

“Mom,” Daisy says. “Mom.”

Margaret opens her eyes.

“Mom, don’t.”

It’s a plea. She can see that Daisy needs her to be steady, to give her ballast.

“It’s okay, darling,” she says. The hot air blasts onto her hand, feeling almost like a burn. She shifts the blow-dryer. “Do you want French braids?”

“I’m not six, Mom,” Daisy says. “I’m just going to wear the new headband I got.”

“Okay.”

She goes to check on Philip, who’s reading a book on his bed.

“Do you know what you’re going to wear?” she asks.

“It’s fancy, right?” he says without looking up.

“Yes, so a collared shirt and a blazer, please. Long pants.”

“It’s so hot out, Mom!”

“It’s your dad’s fiftieth, Phil. I’ll find you a good shirt.” She goes through his shirts. Many don’t fit anymore. “You are growing so fast,” she says. Next to Philip’s drawers are G’s clothes, untouched. She leaves them alone. She picks out a shirt and hands it to him. “Get dressed,” she says.

She goes back upstairs.

“How do you feel?” she asks Clarke.

“Old.”

“You look good.”

“Thanks.” He pulls her in for a kiss. “Hey,” he says, releasing her and looking at her face. “We good?”

“Yeah, we’re good,” she says. Working on good.

“Mom!” she hears from downstairs. “An airplane’s gone missing. Turn on the TV.” Daisy does have a highly attuned ear for disaster. Maybe Courtney’s mother, from that benefit lunch, was onto something. This is a change wrought by what happened. Before, Margaret had been surprised by her children’s lack of empathy or understanding. When she had wept at a news story or while watching a documentary, they had asked her why she was sad if she didn’t know the people or if just one person had died. Their smooth, guiltless countenances had struck her speechless.

She and Clarke turn on the television but can’t find anything — just soccer matches and financial talk. They go to the computer and read of a Malaysian plane that never arrived at its destination.

“Oh, no,” she says. “Those poor families.”

“It’s just disappeared,” Clarke says.

They pause, and then they silently agree to move on. This is how it is, Margaret thinks, when it’s not about you or your family. You have a horrified moment, your eyes fill, you say a silent prayer, but it’s possible, even likely, that you will smile in the next hour. But now she feels grateful for the disaster slipping past her, leaving her unscathed. These are the small mercies she waits for now.

Hilary

HILARY HAS INVEIGLED Olivia into being her date for Clarke’s party.

“Think of it as charity,” she said. “I really don’t want to go by myself.”

“Why are you going at all?” Olivia asked.

She doesn’t know why. She feels like going out, she supposes, having been a hermit for several weeks.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But tonight I want to put on a pretty dress and go out and have a glass of wine.”

“You expats have so many of these parties,” Olivia said. “Welcome parties, going-away parties. It’s like you never left college.”

They are getting ready together in the bathroom, Olivia having brought over her clothes and a bottle of champagne. Hilary is playing music, trying to get in the mood.

“So, you know,” she says, “I’m going ahead with the adoption. With Julian.”

Olivia pauses from applying foundation. “Oh?” she says. “That’s great. How about David?”

“I’m going ahead without him, but I think I’m going to list him as a father. I think he won’t mind.”

“Really?”

“Well, I was going to have an agreement that he’s not responsible at all for Julian. I just need him so they look favorably on the application.”

Olivia raises an eyebrow. “You seem to have a surprisingly good opinion of David, considering all that’s happened.”

Hilary can’t explain it, but she feels certain that he won’t make a fuss. He’ll yield to her on this.

“Are you ready for it?” Olivia asks. “He’s not a baby, so it won’t be the crazy change that is, and you won’t have all the hormones, but it’s still going to turn your world upside down. And schools! You have to get him into school! He’s going to have to get fluent in English very fast!”

The talk of Hong Kong schools always turns rational women into hysterics.

“That’s a ways down the road,” Hilary says mildly.

“Oh, you don’t know,” Olivia says. “Everyone wants ‘the best’ for their child.” She makes imaginary quote marks around the phrase. “You get crazy. People get crazy.”

“Well, I have to make sure it goes through first. There’s a lot that needs to happen.” Hilary looks at Olivia. “Are there websites you go on?” she asks. “Like websites where people ask questions or for advice, stuff like that?”

Olivia considers. “Not really,” she says. “There are a few groups on Facebook, if that’s what you mean, and there are a few local sites where people go, but I don’t spend much time on that stuff.”

Hilary hesitates. “It’s funny,” she says. “I’ve been spending a lot of time online, because, you know, nothing to do, and I’ve been on these expat-forum sites. People talk about their helpers or their jobs or other things.”

“Why on earth do you read about strangers’ lives?” Olivia asks.

“It feels a little bit like living vicariously,” Hilary says, embarrassed. “Like having a conversation with someone, and you don’t even need to go out.”

“You could be at a lunch but be in your pajamas.”

“Exactly! It can be kind of addicting. But the weird thing is that someone on one of these forums knows about me and Julian and wasn’t so kind about it.”

“About you? Really? Hong Kong is too small. It’s disgusting. What did they say?”

“That I was trying him on like a dress. That I was shopping for a child.”

Olivia turns to Hilary. “Hilary, there are always going to be trolls. Especially on an Internet forum! What do you care what some anonymous coward says about you?” She turns back to the mirror, sweeps on blush. “The best thing about getting older,” she says, “the absolute best thing, is that I don’t give two hoots what anyone thinks about me.”

“Come on!” Hilary protests.

“Okay,” she allows. “I am working toward not caring one bit. I am on that path, and I am getting far along. I know you are too.” Olivia’s eyes meet Hilary’s in the mirror. “Who cares?” she says. “It’s all about them, not about you. They’re motivated by jealousy or spite or their awful lives. It has nothing to do with you. Nothing.”

“I guess,” Hilary says doubtfully. “It seemed very personal.”

“They’re awful. The best thing anyone can do is just live her own life. You do that, and they should do that.”

“It made me feel bad,” Hilary says, almost childishly. Her eyes tear up.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Olivia says. She sits down. “What can I say? There are awful people in the world.”

“I know,” Hilary says.

They sit in companionable silence.

“Well,” Olivia says, “I’m with you. I’m here to help you. Whatever you need.”

“Thank you.”

They continue to get ready. Hilary remembers what her mother once said: You feel one age, and you see another in the mirror. She recalls nights in college, getting ready with her girlfriends before a frat party — not so different. What’s staring back at them, two middle-aged women, is somehow foreign to her, although she thinks they might look better than they did when they were chubby college coeds.

“So who’s going to be there tonight?” Olivia asks.

“The usual,” Hilary says. “The TASOHK crowd. I’m sure there’s very little overlap.” TASOHK means ultra-American, soccer mom and corporate dad.

“Oh, good,” Olivia says. “No one I know.”

“You’ll be slumming it with the suburbanites.” Hilary laughs.

“Any handsome ex-football players?” Olivia muses. “I knew I should have married an American.”

“Be prepared. There are going to be hundreds of them tonight.”

“I’m ready,” Olivia says.

Mercy

SHE’S WITH HER MOM at the gourmet supermarket in the basement of a big mall. Her mother’s boss, Shirley, had texted, asking her to pick up a few last-minute things for the party, so they have big bunches of parsley for garnish, many lemons to cut into pretty shapes for used toothpicks from the canapés.

“I’ve only lived here a few months, but Shirley crazy to come to this market,” her mother says. “The price here so high!”

“She just knows that if one of her customers complains, she can say she gets everything at the best supermarket. She can charge way higher prices this way, you know. Most of her food comes from wholesalers, but she gets the small stuff here.” It drives Mercy crazy how her mom just doesn’t get it.

Her mother shakes her head at the wasteful woman running a business this way. “This one lemon is eight dollars!”

“But it’s a big one, from Tasmania. At the local market, they’re small and not good. Anyway, it’s not your money.”

“Mercy, I want to help her,” she says. “She is losing herself the money.”

There are some seven or eight people ahead of them in the line. Late-afternoon Saturday is a busy time, with people picking up groceries for dinner.

There is a gradual commotion, in the way that minor disturbances come about. One, then two, then three people start to look at a woman, around forty, who is talking loudly in the way of the mentally ill.

“She’s Korean,” her mother whispers.

The woman is speaking Korean to the cashier, loudly and without stopping, even though the cashier is trying to respond.

“She must be crazy,” her mother says. The cashier, who is Chinese, waves her hands and shakes her head, but the woman keeps talking.

“Sometimes when you are too lonely, you get like that,” says her mother, who should know.

“There are a lot of Korean people from Korea here,” Mercy says, using the peculiar way Koreans identify each other — Koreans from LA, Koreans from Queens, Koreans from Korea.

“Yes, I see them,” her mother says. “Many in Taikoo Shing.” A neighborhood with malls and lots of apartment buildings.

The cashier keeps ringing up the woman’s items, items that suddenly look like the property of the insane: two oranges, a box of chocolates, a cabbage, and a six-pack of Japanese beer.

“Gananhae,” her mother says clinically. The woman is poor.

“How can you tell?” Mercy asks, curious for the first time.

“I can tell,” her mother says. “Look at her shoes.”

Mercy looks at the woman’s shoes, a simple black pair of pumps with sensible two-inch heels, and considers, possibly for the first time, that her mother might have her own value system in which she lives and judges other people, namely Koreans. This makes Mercy feel adult.

“That’s interesting, Mom,” she says, and smiles. Her mother gives her a shy smile back. They both turn back to watching the woman and stand, listening, as she goes on and on, her manic delivery punctuated by her putting the items into a cloth bag. She pays, all the while chattering, signing the credit card slip, and walks out. The woman looks boldly at everyone, her gaze sliding over Mercy and her mother, stopping for a second. Koreans always recognize one another. Mercy looks away. The woman walks out, still talking.

People in the line exhale, shuffle their feet. The tension seeps out from the room.

“There was a crazy woman at church,” her mom says. “Remember her? Haeri’s mom, Mrs. Kim?”

“What happened to her?” Mercy remembers Haeri, quiet and studious, until ninth grade, when she came back from a summer program in Korea with permed hair dyed a startling orange, a predilection for blue eyeliner, and an equally changed attitude toward life. Her mother, a housewife, rarely left the house except to go to church, where she would sit and rock in the community room after service. The other women steered clear of her as her husband tried to talk to some of the other men. He was an unsuccessful import-export man, like her father. Haeri went wild after the Korean program, from which apparently three of the girls had gone home pregnant. Sent to improve their Korean and understand Korean culture, the teenagers had instead discovered that local bars would sell them anything and had hooked up with one another all summer long. This is what Haeri told the other girls at church after Sunday school.

“The hottest Korean guys are from Texas. They’re so tall!” she had told them. “And there are no Asian girls in Texas, so they’re so psyched. They’re totally jealous that we live in New York, where there are so many Koreans.”

At the program, there had been Koreans from Berlin, from Warsaw and the Canary Islands, and a few from South America and Africa. Their immigrant parents worried about their displaced children not knowing their homeland and sent them back through summer programs run by universities. Mercy’s father had pooh-poohed the whole idea and asked where the money would come from. But Haeri’s dad had come up with the money. Haeri said she was now called Hex — a new name for a new girl. It had stuck, strangely.

“What is Hex, I mean, Haeri”—Mercy corrects herself; the mothers still know her as Haeri— “what is Haeri doing now?”

“I don’t know. They move away,” her mother says. “Maybe Florida? I think she try to kill herself, the mom, and then they move.”

They have a moment to consider the mentally disturbed mother, the wayward daughter, then they are called to the cashier and are shaken out of the reverie.

Margaret

THEY HEAD OVER in the car. Clarke’s parents came over beforehand, and they had Essie take a photo of the whole group before they left. Then they decided to take one of just their nuclear family. Margaret stood behind Daisy and Philip in front of Clarke — the perfect family unit, a man and a woman with their boy and girl, their replacements in the cycle of life, Clarke turning fifty, with his entirely appropriate and attractive wife, their beautiful children. Margaret looks at the photo on her phone.

“So nice,” she says to Clarke, handing it to him. “What a great photo.”

“Love it,” he says. He hands the phone to his parents. “Look, Mom.”

“It’ll be fun,” Margaret says. A wish? A declaration? A vain hope, perhaps.

Daisy is fiddling around with her phone. “Can I Instagram the party, Mom?” she asks.

“Sure,” Margaret says, uncertainly. She’s seen Daisy’s Instagram account, follows it as she’s supposed to, and it still seems inexplicable to her — group pictures of girls flashing peace signs, photos of desserts.

“What does that mean?” Clarke asks.

“It’s this thing that all my friends do. We post pictures, and people can respond. I have three hundred followers!”

“Nothing inappropriate, though, okay?” Margaret says.

“I’ve heard that girls get into terrible trouble these days with those things,” Clarke’s mother warbles.

Margaret and Clarke’s mother are answered by an epic rolling of the eyes.

They get out of the car and ride up a creaky industrial elevator to find Priscilla rushing around clutching a clipboard, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She pauses to greet them and exclaim on how beautiful the children are. They look around and tell her what a marvelous job she’s done. And she has. There are a million twinkling tea lights, and she has rigged up paper lanterns all over so the rather uninspiring original warehouse space has the look of a cathedral. She has arranged for a band from Manila to play cover songs and get the crowd dancing, and they’re twanging through a sound check. There is a gorgeous long table set up and a mike in case anyone wants to make a toast.

“You have a lot of friends,” Priscilla tells Clarke. “And such lovely ones.”

What a pro, Margaret thinks, grateful.

“Kitchen’s working hard,” Priscilla continues. “We’ll have some hors d’oeuvres for you soon. Want a glass of champagne?”

“Why not?” Clarke says.

It’s a little after seven, and guests have been asked to arrive at seven thirty, so there’s time to wander around. Daisy takes a few photographs of the family and herself against the backdrop of the party.

“Those are called selfies, right?” Clarke asks.

Daisy rolls her eyes again.

“What’s with the eye rolling?” Margaret says. “Your eyes are going to roll up and never come down. I’m sorry we’re so embarrassing to you.”

“Can I see?” Clarke says.

Daisy shows him her phone, and Margaret looks at their two heads bent over the device. As staff bustle around them, lighting more candles, adjusting chairs, Margaret sits down. A waiter offers her a plate of chicken satay, decorated with a sprig of rosemary.

“No, thank you,” she says.

The first guests come through the door, Charlie and Mel Gordon, and she gets up.

“Welcome to Clarke’s birthday!” she says. “Thank you for coming!”

“We’re so glad to be here,” Mel says. “I haven’t seen you in so long! You look well.”

And so the party begins.

Hilary

OLIVIA INSISTS that they go early so she can get the lay of the land. It’s 7:40 when they walk through the entrance, decorated with shimmering silver tinsel. Margaret and Clarke are standing near the front, with three other early birds.

“Hi, Margaret! This is my friend Olivia. I don’t think you’ve met.” They all cheek-kiss, bobbing back and forth. With them is a woman Hilary has seen around but doesn’t know.

“I’m Hilary Starr,” she says, introducing herself.

“I’m Melissa Gordon,” the woman says.

“You look really familiar,” Hilary says.

“Yes, I know! You do too!” They size each other up in a friendly way.

“TASOHK?” Mel ventures.

“No kids,” Hilary says. “I know! We go to the same physio! From a few years ago.”

“Dr. Chan! Above Pacific Coffee.”

“Yes!” Hilary recalibrates. “You look really good,” she says. Mel was much heavier then and less attractive.

The woman blushes. “Yes, my mom says she can’t recognize me.”

Some expat women thrive outside their native terrain. They are the trailing spouse, so they don’t have to work. And they arrive and realize they can have someone else vacuum and make the beds and the lunch boxes and do the laundry, and so they take that found time and use it to improve themselves. Some who were stay-at-home mothers before go back to work; some become fluent in Mandarin; some take up painting seriously, or whatever it was they used to want to do; and some become very fit and attractive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mercy

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

“Do you need to sit down?” she asks.

“No, I’ll be okay,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An electric jolt goes through her body. Jesus.

She almost drops the tray.

It can’t be.

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

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

Then, there, she spots a Reade. Philip, the middle child. He doesn’t see her, because he’s sitting down, playing with an iPad. She walks on. Again. There’s Daisy. She scans the room. And there’s Margaret.

Mercy retreats into a dark corner, puts the tray down and tries to calm the pounding of her heart, which threatens to beat right out of her chest. She puts her right hand on her chest to try to calm it.

Where is the other? Where is the other? Her mind repeats this phrase like an insane refrain. She is the other. She is the one who caused the injury, not the injured. She is the invisible. She’s the one not mentioned in the magazine pieces and newspaper articles. She is the unforgiven, the unforgivable.

Mercy sinks down into a crouch. She hides.

Margaret

A WOMAN WHOSE NAME she can’t remember is thanking her for not having a costume party.

“I mean, I found myself in a toga more often my first two years here than when I was in college!”

It is true that something about being an expat often means finding yourself in a cowboy suit, or a sari. Dress-up balls, or masquerade parties, are uncommonly popular here, which is usually credited to the British influence.

“If I have to buy another cheap polyester outfit in the lanes, I’ll shoot myself,” the woman says. “There’s this Arabian Nights party at the American Club next month, and my girlfriends are going all out, getting dresses made, buying fake jewelry, and I just can’t be bothered, you know?”

Margaret assents. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Clarke stuck with someone from work she knows he doesn’t like. “Excuse me,” she says smoothly. “I just see someone….”

The woman lets her go with a nod. What was her name? Shirley? Shelly? She was a mom at TASOHK whose daughter was in Daisy’s class last year.

It’s going better than she thought. She’s had a glass of champagne and feels a little looser. No more, though, as she gets jittery after more than one. She wonders whether Clarke is having a good time. She walks over to him, places her arm on his waist.

“Hello, darling,” she says. He is standing with Jack McMillan, someone who has been a thorn in his side at work ever since he arrived. He is a man who is almost good-looking, who aspires to surfer good looks but is just one or two degrees off. His hair is an expensive golden hue, which she is certain he highlights; he booms, “Here he is!” when someone comes into the room.

“Hey, Margaret,” he drawls. He is in requisitioning or something. A Duke boy in China. Khaki pants in Guangdong.

“Hi, Jack,” she says. “How are you?”

“Not bad, not bad. Can’t believe the man here is fifty, you know?”

Jack must be forty-five.

“Age gets us all,” she says.

“Hey!” Clarke protests. “Don’t write me off. I’ve still got a few good years.”

Jack made a play for Clarke’s job when they were in Korea — a move that still leaves her breathless with wonder, that someone could be so ruthless. Still, here they are, being adult, smiling at each other. Conventions are not so easily thrown out, she’s found.

“Are you dating anyone?” she asks.

“You know,” he says. “Here and there. Actually, there.” He points to a lissome twenty-something walking toward them.

Jack is known for turning up with the latest underage models off the plane from the Ukraine or Israel, the ones who were not quite tall enough for London or New York.

“This is Svetlana,” he says when she arrives.

“Hello,” Margaret says.

Svetlana has a heavy accent that Margaret cannot decipher. “Clarke,” she says, “can you help me with something?” They escape and walk away.

“Thanks, darling,” Clarke says, kissing Margaret. “What an asshole.”

“Why do we always have to be the bigger person and invite people we hate?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “But better to be the bigger person, right?”

They are waylaid immediately by another group of people, eager to congratulate the birthday boy. Margaret stands a little apart, watching her husband talk to his friends, his business associates, wondering at him, at what a good man he is.

There is a ripple in the crowd. The children are about to do their performance.

Daisy and Philip stand in front of the crowd, shy and awkward, shifting their shoulders and looking down at the floor. From the side, Priscilla coaches them in a whisper.

“We’ve prepared a song,” Daisy says. Priscilla hits play on an iPod.

They sing a sweet song about their father, set to the tune of “It Had to Be You.” Philip’s voice, not yet changed, rises in a sweet tenor; Daisy harmonizes with him. Waiters begin to distribute glasses of champagne. Clarke finds his way over to Margaret and puts his arm around her shoulders. She puts her hand around his waist and holds on, feeling the comforting solidity of his body. Of course, she cries, tears welling and running down her face in a constant stream. She cannot stand the empty space next to her two children, the way they are standing close so their elbows are almost touching, the fact that Priscilla, a stranger, arranged this because she could not. How to cope with all the new realities of her life, which shouldn’t feel so new, so raw, still. How she feels she should be on the road to somewhere better but absolutely is not. All these emotions are drowning her, so she cries and cries, silently, hoping her children will not see.

They finish, and the audience claps enthusiastically.

“Speech, speech!” The crowd demands Clarke.

He lets her go — she can feel the warmth disappear from her when he departs — and goes to the front of the room.

Priscilla hands him a mike. He takes it and clears his throat.

“Thank you all for coming,” he says. “It means a lot to me and Margaret.” He looks at her, understanding. “Margaret and I moved here three years ago, and as we all know, Hong Kong can be a tough place to transition to, although it is a wonderful place. There are a lot of things to get used to: Work is quite different. I didn’t have to drink snake liquor back in San Francisco to get anything done, and I’ve finally learned to call my assistant by her name without apologizing.” A big laugh. “But the thing that has made our move here doable is the people.”

He pauses.

“They often say that in expat life, your friends become your family. Because you don’t have mothers and fathers and siblings nearby to count on, you grow close to the people around you. So many of you have come to our aid in so many ways. You have taken our children to birthday parties when we could not; you have brought us food when circumstances made it impossible for us to take care of ourselves; you have shown us unimaginable kindnesses. For this, Margaret and I are truly grateful. It’s impossible to think that three years ago we did not know any of you. You are our family now, and I am so grateful that you are here to celebrate with us this birthday of mine, which I gather is quite a big one. Of course, I want to say thank you to my actual family, my mom and dad, here all the way from California, my gorgeous kids and Margaret, my amazing wife.”

The crowd waits.

“And especially to my son G, wherever he is.” His voice quavers. “We love you so much, G.” He looks down, composes himself. Margaret holds her breath.

“To you, our Hong Kong family,” he says.

Priscilla hands him a glass of champagne.

They all cheer and toast one another. The band strikes up again, and the space is filled with noise and cheer again. The moment has passed as lightly as it could. Margaret doesn’t know if she’s relieved or upset about this.

Is this all it is? Human beings have figured out that to celebrate and feel happy, you need certain elements — people, music, alcohol — and that’s all it takes to create this feeling of celebration and acknowledgment of life and time passing. The rituals we make — the elaborate wedding, the twenty-first birthday — these all signal to the world outside the changes in one’s life. And the funerals, to say good-bye to someone. The one she will never be able to do.

Hilary

HILARY HAS BEEN on pins and needles all night, waiting to see if David is coming. Olivia is well on her way to getting bombed, a combination of not knowing anyone at the party and not caring to know anyone at the party. Hilary knows most of the people here — they are on the American Club-TASOHK-Central circuit, and she is a card-carrying member of this group, even without children. She can be at this party and not feel a shred of social anxiety. The same cannot be said of Olivia, who both cares and doesn’t care. If Hilary pressed her to be honest, the truth would be that Olivia feels superior to all the expats here. Hong Kong is her real home. She owns her apartment, her daughter goes to a local school and speaks Cantonese and English perfectly. To her, the expatriates are just visiting, naïve galoots who come and screech about the jade market and getting dresses copied in Shenzhen. Not for them the rarefied rooms of the Hong Kong Club or the Stewards Box at the Jockey Club on race day. They are temporary and best ignored or tolerated until they receive their orders to return home. She would usually live her life perhaps dining next to them at Otto e Mezzo or browsing alongside them at the bookstore, never having any real interaction. Olivia has granted Hilary an exemption due to their friendship in college, when Hilary acted as a tour guide to California and the rest of America.

Then she sees David walk through the entrance, looking around. She hasn’t seen him in a long time. Not like him to be so late, but she guesses he’s a new person now. He is alone, as far as she can tell. He looks good — a little thin, but good.

She taps Olivia on the shoulder. “David just walked in.”

“Let’s go say hi!” Olivia says.

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“Oh, come on,” Olivia says, and drags her to David.

“Oh, hi, Hilary,” he says uncomfortably. “And Olivia.”

They stand awkwardly.

“How are you?” Hilary asks. “You’ve been traveling a lot?”

“Yes,” he says. “A fair amount.”

There’s an awkward pause while Olivia sways, tipsy, beside them.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Hilary says. “I was going to see if you wanted to get a meal, but I might as well tell you now.”

“Okay,” he says agreeably. Again she wonders where his calm is coming from.

“So I think I’m going to go ahead and adopt Julian,” she says.

“Oh.” A look passes over his face that she can’t interpret. Not panic, not distress, something more complicated.

“I’m going to need your help, though,” she presses on, although in the back of her mind something’s telling her it’s not a good idea. “They’re so strict and picky here. I want to keep you on the forms as my husband, and we’ll adopt him together, but it’ll be purely a formality. You don’t need to have any responsibility, and I can do a separate contract like that if you want.”

“Jesus,” he says. “That’s a lot to drop on me right now.”

Anger rises in her so quickly it feels as if her head is on fire. “Oh, you think?” she says hotly. “You think it’s a lot? You… asshole. You think it was a lot for you to leave without any… any”—she cannot find the word—“any… notification,” she says, using an absurd, businesslike word, “the day my mother came for her annual visit?”

“Calm down, Hilary,” he says. “I’m not saying anything bad. I’m just saying it’s a lot. And that’s part of the whole problem, you know. When you bring this up, the fact that I left is more about that it was the day your mother was coming than the fact that I left. You have some messed-up priorities.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You always, you always made me feel like I joined your family and not that you joined me, do you know what I mean?” He shakes his head. “This is not the place to be doing this.”

They stare at each other, the hostility finally bubbling to the surface.

“I didn’t come here for this,” he says finally. “I’m going to go get a drink, and we can talk about this later, not at a party, not tonight.” He walks off, shaking his head.

She looks at his receding back, trembling with anger. When had this man been her husband, someone she thought she might spend the rest of her life with? He seems like a stranger.

Olivia has been sobered up by the exchange. “Sorry, that didn’t go well, did it?” she says, and puts her arm around Hilary, who is trembling a little.

“That’s not how I imagined it,” Hilary says. “I didn’t expect him to be so… uncaring, or mean, even.”

“Imagine where he is,” Olivia says. “He’s had to cut you off in his mind to be able to leave. Of course, he’s not going to want to do the adoption.”

“I just thought…”

“I know,” Olivia says. “I’m sorry.”

Mercy

ONCE SHE CROUCHES DOWN, she starts to plot her escape. She’ll tell her mother she doesn’t feel well, and she’ll go down and get a cab home. But then everything stops for the kids’ song and Clarke’s speech. She listens to it all, feeling sicker with every word. When it’s over, the crowd starts to buzz again, and she knows they’re going to start the dinner service soon. It’s buffet style, with open seating.

She gets up, then spots David.

Great. It’s getting even better. She starts to walk and keeps her head down. He doesn’t notice her, but then she bumps into someone.

“Oops,” says a man in a tan suit. Mercy cannot breathe.

“Hey, you okay?” He looks at her, concerned.

She nods and keeps walking. Only ten feet to the kitchen now. She sneaks a look right and sees Margaret, looking right at her. She keeps walking, swings the kitchen door open, lets it close behind her.

Blessed cacophony of heat and activity inside. She needs to find her mother.

Margaret

SHE COULD HAVE SWORN she saw Mercy, walking to the kitchen, but it was out of the corner of her eye. Must have been someone who looked like her. What on earth would Mercy be doing at Clarke’s party? She shakes her head as if she’s seen a ghost and continues talking to Frannie Peck, who’s had a few and is encouraging Margaret to do the same. They flag down a passing waiter for another glass of wine, which seems like a good idea at the time.

Hilary

A CIGARETTE. That’s what she needs. She doesn’t really smoke, but she could use a break. Olivia has a pack, and they take the industrial elevator down and walk through the parking garage to the street.

They light up in the street like teenage girls playing hooky. The smoke sweeps into her lungs, clarifying the moment.

“Why is smoking so bad if it feels so good?” Hilary asks. She feels light-headed, removed.

Outside, Aberdeen blinks and twinkles. It’s an industrial warehouse zone, with a truly apocalyptic waterway running through it that is filled with a mysterious murky liquid. Around them, buildings encased in scaffolding emit ghostly light.

“It feels like a Batman movie out here,” she says.

The elevator doors open again, and a young woman comes out. She looks pale and a bit unhealthy. She looks at them warily and then passes by.

“Do you want to leave?” Olivia asks. “It’s kind of boring.”

“I don’t think we can,” Hilary says. “It would be rude, wouldn’t it?”

“No one cares,” says Olivia.

“Cynic.”

The young woman stands, waiting for a taxi. Hilary can tell, in that strange way that one can always tell, that she is listening to their conversation, which is odd, because she is dressed in a waiter’s uniform and is probably local.

“So sad, isn’t it?” Hilary says. “I don’t know how you go on after something like that.”

“If anything happened to Dorothy, I would kill myself, and I’m not being melodramatic,” says Olivia. “She’s the only thing I’m living for.”

“We have to find more to live for,” Hilary says.

“You’re going to become a mother,” her friend replies. “You’ll understand. It’s the only thing that matters.”

Hilary ruminates on this, rolls it around her head, finds the thought pleasing. “I would like that to be true,” she says. “I would like that very much.”

Mercy

SHE FINDS HER MOTHER, tells her she’s feeling unwell and has to leave. There’s a flash of disappointment in her mother’s face (Mercy, flaking again, if there’s a verb for flaking in Korean), but it passes in an instant, and she nods her head and says, of course, go home.

Mercy grabs her purse and exits through the staff door. In the hallway, she jabs the button for the elevator, willing it to come quickly. Inside, a musty fan circulates dusty air in the fluorescent light. There’s an old mirror on the wall, and she looks at herself. She looks normal. She looks fine. She’s dodged a bullet. Margaret may have seen her, but she might not have recognized her.

Outside, two women are smoking, talking. She waits for a taxi next to them as they talk idly about maybe leaving the party. Then they bring up the Reades and their situation.

“You never get over something like that,” the Asian woman says. “Most of those marriages don’t make it.”

“She was always perfect,” says the white woman, not unkindly.

Mercy strains to hear. She wonders if they will bring her up, the guilty, the other, the never-mentioned. Before she can hear any more, a taxi passes, and she runs after it, arm aloft to flag it. She runs away and disappears.

Margaret

MARGARET IS DRUNK, for the first time since G was lost. Really drunk. It snuck up on her, like most drunken states, and by the time she realized, it was too late. Clarke keeps giving her sympathetic glances, and she feels ashamed before her in-laws.

She escapes to the bathroom and sits down on the toilet. She puts her palms on the opposite walls of the stall to try to stop the spinning. She tries to catalogue, as if that will make her feel better. She had a glass of champagne, a glass of wine after, and then another with Frannie Peck. There may also have been a shot of vodka, pressed on her by Clarke’s colleagues, a hard-partying crew. She was feeling good, feeling buzzed, until all of a sudden she felt rotten.

And there is something else, a niggling feeling that she’s missed something, or that something is wrong. She can’t put her finger on it.

She gets up, stumbles as she tries to pull down her underwear. What a mess she is.

She pees, thickly, hoping that at least some alcohol is leaving her body.

What is the thing that is wrong? What is she missing?

Mercy.

She saw Mercy. Now she is sure of it.

She has not thought about the girl in so long. She put her out of her mind, because what was the point? Now she remembers the girl walking fast, head down, going to the kitchen. She was in a waiter’s outfit, so she must have been working.

The white-hot hatred she felt toward the girl has cooled over the past year. When she thinks of her now, she can have moments of empathy. What is it like to have caused such a seismic change in someone else’s life? What is she doing now? Has she moved on? She doesn’t feel sympathy, but she doesn’t feel an active enmity. She wished her dead for a long time, but Dr. Stein told her that was not a path forward.

She wishes she weren’t so drunk.

She rises and walks unsteadily out the door to wash her hands.

Someone comes in.

“Oh, hi,” she says, trying to speak clearly. It’s Hilary’s friend, the elegant Chinese woman.

“What a wonderful party,” the woman says. “Thank you for having me.”

“Not at all.” She wipes her hands on a paper towel and walks out to find Clarke. It seems imperative that she find him.

“Clarke!” she calls when she sees him across the room. “Clarke!”

He sees her and looks concerned. “Are you okay?” he says. “You should drink some water.”

“I saw her,” she says. “I saw her!”

“Who?”

“Mercy! I saw Mercy!”

“Mercy?” Clarke doesn’t recall, and then his face changes when he realizes whom she is talking about. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Mercy was here! She was working! She went into the kitchen!”

“What?” he says. “No, not possible. What would she be doing here?”

“I don’t know, but I saw her! Do you think I should find her?”

“Why would you do that?” he asks.

“I don’t know! I just want to know why she’s here!”

Around them, people are listening with great interest. It’s not often one gets a front-row seat to a full-blown family drama.

Clarke notices, takes her by the arm, and leads her away.

“You’ve drunk too much,” he says. “I think you should sit down with my mother and drink some water.”

“NO!” she shouts. “I’m going to find that girl and see why she’s here!” She shakes him off and runs to the kitchen and flings open the door. “Mercy!” she shouts. “Mercy! Are you here?”

Hilary

PERFECT MARGARET READE is creating a spectacle. Hilary has never seen anything like it. She has clearly had too much to drink and is causing a commotion in the kitchen, yelling out the name of the girl, Mercy, the girl who was watching G when he disappeared. People have stopped talking and are watching Margaret scream and shout.

Clarke goes over and grabs Margaret and brings her to a chair, calming her down. She’s crying and wailing quite loudly. He gestures to his mother to get the children away, as they are running toward their mother. He sits down next to Margaret and covers her with his jacket, talking to her quietly.

Hilary looks at Olivia, nods, and quietly they make their way out.