The Expatriates

Mercy

VISIBLY PREGNANT NOW, Mercy is the darling of all the elderly people she sees on the street. People coo at her, try to touch her belly, give her unsolicited advice in elevators. She never knew what a pass pregnant women get in society.

Her mother has been feeding her, both with home cooking and out at restaurants. She has been eating spicy naengmyun, mung-bean pancakes, plenty of kimchi, and she has developed an intense craving for the braised sea cucumbers at a small Szechuan restaurant in Causeway Bay. Her mother funds all this eating with the revelation of a second nest egg, kept hidden from her father. “I’m not stupid,” she says. “I hide a lot.”

Mercy looks down at her belly with wonder. She can feel the flutters now, small touches from inside her that are growing stronger. Apparently the baby will also hiccup and somersault in the womb.

Her mother has been here for a few months and has acclimated to Hong Kong life. She has found a Korean church and has been trying to get Mercy to go.

“You want me to go like this?” Mercy asks, pointing to her stomach. “Your unmarried daughter?”

“I don’t care,” her mother says. “God is for everyone.”

Which is how she finds herself one Sunday attending a church that has set up in an office building in North Point. Most of the people her mother introduces her to are welcoming and nice.

“Columbia joropseng,” says her mother proudly to everyone they see. Columbia graduate. Ivy League. Understandable in any language.

The place is filled with tacky calendars from small Korean businesses and cheap ugly chairs, and while Mercy would have scoffed at it a year ago, it appeals to her now. It’s so comforting. They sit down and listen to the sermon. Mercy’s Korean is good, and she can understand most of what the minister is saying. Today his sermon is about forgiveness. She looks around at all the Koreans in the room. She has spent so much time with the young American crowd it’s a relief to see her other kind of people here. She recognizes these people — the middle-aged women with the perms and sensible shoes, the stylish young moms, the salaryman bankers. She knows them. They know her.

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

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

“Not here,” she says, smiling.

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

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

“Oh, lawyer. Great!” says the woman.

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

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

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

“She maybe become the dentist.”

Mercy’s mother appears by her side.

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

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

Margaret

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, her other children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels like looking at pornography, making her feel sick with guilty pleasure, knowing that she shouldn’t be doing this, that she’ll feel worse afterward, filled with an empty despair, but she watches the short clips, tears streaming down her face, letting herself remember his high-pitched voice, the way he clung to her leg, his first steps.

She hears someone behind her, quickly closes the window, and sits up straight. Luckily, it’s not Clarke or the kids. She surreptitiously wipes at her eyes. She didn’t have a chance to go in too deep, so she can recover relatively quickly.

She went to a talk on parenting at the end of the school year where the speaker had said that doing good things, charitable things, was actually a selfish act, because it made you feel good. She has been mulling that ever since. Should she do something selfless, something good? Should she reach out to someone who really needs her forgiveness? Would this make her feel better?

What would it be like to see Mercy again?

She starts typing an e-mail, ferociously, savagely, and hits Send before she can think about it any more. Doing something, anything, feels like progress. She puts down her phone and waits for Clarke to come so they can order breakfast.

Hilary

SHE HAS SAT through several sessions on adopting, started to process the paperwork, and otherwise gotten things rolling. And today she is meeting David for lunch to talk about what she had brought up at Clarke’s party. Nothing too emotional — she e-mailed him to see if he would be free, and he replied. They agreed to meet at the sushi restaurant in the mall that houses his offices. Twelve thirty. His secretary e-mailed her an evite, which made her wonder how much Pansy knew. Probably all. Maybe Pansy was the girl. She was pretty.

Hilary showers, gets ready. A purple shift, a chunky silver bead necklace clasped around her neck. She wants to look professional, accomplished, a woman who can handle becoming a single mother. Sam drives her into town. She hasn’t been in town in days, and she looks at all the efficient people striding around with purpose and drive. They carry briefcases or peck away at iPads in the coffee shops. They huddle, speaking urgently, or talk to the air on Bluetooth headsets curved around their ears. She has opted out, but she doesn’t know when that happened, when she gave up the chance to become one of them.

It’s partly the money in her family. While it doesn’t seem as much these days, compared with all the hundreds of millions being minted by young men in tech, it’s always been enough to know she doesn’t have to work. After she got married, it wasn’t as if she felt passionate about her job in PR, so it seemed natural to quit, to be able to travel with David on his business trips and wait for the family to start to form.

Except it hadn’t. And then David was gone too. And now she’s trying to find who she is in the midst of all that she is not.

She is early to the restaurant and sits down, orders green tea, peruses the menu. She sees David at the hostess station, pretends not to until he sits down.

“Hi,” he says awkwardly.

“Hi,” she says. “Thanks for coming.”

“Probably overdue,” he says.

She gives a surprised laugh. “Yes, probably,” she manages. She studies his familiar face, trying to find the difference in him, now that he is no longer with her.

They talk about mundanities, the weather, what they will order, until they have sorted all those things out, called over the waiter, given him their desires. Then they pause.

“So,” she says.

“Yes,” he replies. “I know. You say your piece, and then I have something I need to share with you as well.”

“Okay.” She takes a deep breath.

“I want to adopt Julian. You know this. I’m sorry I brought it up in such an abrupt way and at the wrong place, but I was emotional at the time. I still am. It’s a big decision.” He is listening to her, with a kind look on his face.

“And after you left, I didn’t know what had happened. David, I want you to know I don’t understand what you did, but I don’t hate you and I don’t blame you. I don’t think you were happy, and I wasn’t that happy either. We were just coasting, seeing what would happen, and then you pulled the plug. Right?”

He nods.

“But I’d really like for you to support me on Julian. I really want this, and I think you might owe it to me.”

He clears his throat as the waiter pours his Diet Coke. “Hilary, I want to apologize to you. I should never have done what I did in the way that I did.”

She nods.

“I don’t know why I did, but I was feeling like I didn’t have much to lose, and I wanted to do something that I wanted to do instead of what I was expected to do, which I had been doing for so much of my life, and I was kind of sick of it. I thought, if not now, when? When am I going to live my life? I didn’t want it to slip away without my noticing.”

“Okay,” she encourages.

“So I was a total bastard and just dropped out. And a coward, because you deserved much better. You deserved an explanation and a respectful way out of our marriage, and I didn’t give that to you.” He looks down at his drink, takes a sip.

“And I want to tell you that I’m fine with your adopting Julian. You can put me down. I actually don’t even know what I want my role to be yet, so we’ll work it out later.”

The waiter sets down trays with salads and miso soup. Hilary starts to sip at her soup.

“But there’s something else,” he says. “Something I need to tell you that is going to be very difficult for you, and I wish it weren’t.”

He pauses, visibly nervous.

“Things happen that you never imagine, and I never…” He stops. “I’m worried you’re not going to hear me out.”

Dread washes over Hilary. “What do you mean?” she manages to ask.

“I never meant to hurt you. But I met this girl and…” He stops, unable to go on.

“Are you in love?” she asks. “Was it before you left?”

“No, no,” he says. “The girl is not the thing.”

“Then what is?”

At this crucial point, their main courses arrive — dishes filled with colorful sushi. He waits until they are alone again.

“Well. I guess I have to tell you that this girl is pregnant.”

It’s almost as if Hilary can hear the whistling of the bomb coming through the air and then landing, BOOM, right next to her. She feels as if the wind has been knocked out of her. She cannot breathe.

David looks at her, tries to grab the hand that is holding on to the edge of the table as if she might fall down without it. She clamps down even harder, not giving him anything to hold on to.

“Hilary? I’m so sorry. I didn’t want it. I didn’t even think it could happen, with our history, and I didn’t think. I mostly took precautions too.”

She shakes her other hand in front of his face to stop him from talking any more. She can’t listen to any more words from him. She feels as if she is going partially deaf from the pressure building up in her head. The ambient noise of the restaurant disappears — all that remains is David’s face, with his mouth grotesquely large, saying unsayable things. She breathes in and breathes out, as if this will save her life.

“Please,” David’s enormous mouth is saying slowly. “Please say something. I’m so sorry.”

Hilary closes her eyes, to escape briefly into oblivion. She breathes in and out again.

“Okay,” she manages to say. “Okay. Just give me a second.”

David looks worried.

“You know,” she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so concerned in our entire life together.” But what he’s said is still unfolding in her mind, and she goes silent again, trying to understand all the ramifications.

“So she’s pregnant, and she’s going to have the baby?” she says.

He nods. “I think she is. I didn’t tell her what to do, not that I could have.”

“No,” she says.

Silence.

“What’s her name?” she asks.

“Mercy.”

“How did you meet her?”

“At a bar.”

“Original,” she says.

He shrugs his shoulders helplessly. “It just happened that way.”

“And does she work? What does she do?”

“She doesn’t work. She’s between jobs.”

“So is she living with you? Are you supporting her?”

He looks uncomfortable. “No, I haven’t really seen her much since she told me. We definitely don’t live together.”

“What?” Hilary is outraged. “She’s having your baby, and you haven’t seen her since she told you? What’s wrong with you?”

“It was such a surprise,” he says. “I’m just figuring out what I should do. I told her to tell me whatever she needed, and I’m covering all the costs, of course.”

“Why is she having the baby? Is she older?”

“Not at all. She’s young, like twenty-seven.” He understands what it sounds like. “She’s smart. She went to Columbia, and she’s American, Korean American, actually.” He means, she’s not some young bargirl.

“So why is she having the baby?”

“I don’t know!” He throws up his hands. “As if I would ever be allowed to ask that question! You can’t ask that question either, of all people!”

“How far along is she?”

“She said the baby’s due at the end of October, so I think around halfway. It all happened really fast.”

“So she doesn’t have a job, and she’s young. What is she going to do?”

“I have no idea,” David says. “I really don’t. I did not plan for this.”

Looking at David, uncomfortable in his dark suit, sitting in front of her, suddenly Hilary pities David. She pities and despises him.

“Well,” she says, “you’ve gotten yourself into a situation.”

He grimaces. “You sound just like your mother when you say things like that,” he says. Then, “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hilary says. She is still digesting the new reality. David will not stand in the way of her getting Julian. David has gotten a woman pregnant and will have a baby.

“Is she going to keep the baby, like raise it? She’s so young.”

“I have no idea, Hilary!” he says, exasperated. “I really have no idea. I haven’t spoken to Mercy in weeks. This was all a big shock to me too.”

“Don’t you think you should?” she says. “Speak to her, I mean. You should be a good guy.”

He pauses. “That’s what she said too, that I should be a good guy.”

“ ’Cause it’s true. Don’t regret anything. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later. Be stand-up.”

“I’m trying to be, Hilary,” he says. “I was just trying to figure out who I could be, and then this happened, and it’s been screwing with me. I didn’t even have a few months for myself.”

“You’re not asking for sympathy, are you?” she asks, incredulous. “Please tell me you are not asking for sympathy.”

“No, no, of course not,” he says. “But… fuck it.” He picks up his chopsticks and starts to eat. She stares at him for a moment, and then does the same. You have to eat to live, right? This is what goes through her mind.

Mercy

THROUGH THE CHURCH, her mother gets Mercy a job. One of the women she has befriended has a small shop in Tsim Sha Tsui where she sells Korean antiques, and she hires Mercy to help her out. Mercy takes the MTR to Tsim Sha Tsui every morning now and emerges into the crowded streets of Kowloon to make her way to the shop, in the basement of a small, run-down shopping mall. Their customers are tourists, mostly Americans, so the woman, Mrs. Choi, is pleased to have Mercy there to talk to them. She pays her a nominal amount, but she brings them both lunch every day, and Mercy is happy to have somewhere to go.

Is it really so easy? She has slipped into another life entirely, in the same city, in the same time. But here there is no pressure, there is no expectation. Nobody knows who she is, nobody knows what happened the past year, and she feels, hopefully, that even if they did, she would be forgiven, because it took place in another world. She still hasn’t told her mother about G, but it seems so other, so foreign, she feels that even if she did, her mother wouldn’t be able to understand. So instead she just lives in this new world, where everyone is Korean and no one expects you to go out and party and have a boyfriend, an amazing job, and a glamorous life. Here lives a different kind of expat. Mrs. Choi’s kids, two boys, went to local school, and one graduated from Hong Kong University and one is at City U, local universities. They didn’t have the money to even think about studying abroad, she said. Mercy has met them once or twice, when they came by the store. They are a little younger than her, but nice, shy. They speak fluent Cantonese and Korean, but their English is a little halting, inflected with a Hong Kong accent. She can tell she is exotic to them, sophisticated. They treat her respectfully, as if she is much older. What Charlie would be like if he hadn’t gone to Columbia, she thinks.

It is June, and it is hot. She is starting to get bigger but is not ungainly yet. The rattle of the air conditioner in the shop is their constant background as Mrs. Choi watches Korean dramas on her laptop in the back office. Mercy sits up front, on a rosewood stool, waiting for customers.

This is where she is when she gets the e-mail.

Her blood freezes. Margaret Reade.

She shuts off the phone, reflexively, and slides it into her pocket.

Can’t be.

She gets the phone out and checks again. Yes, Margaret. The subject line is blank.

She gets up and tells Mrs. Choi she’s going to get a soy milk and does she want anything? The answer is no, so she takes the escalator up to the street level. She wants to find a quiet corner to read the e-mail. She walks to a distant corner where there is a dusty jewelry shop and a hair salon, both not open yet. She sits on the low ledge. Heart pounding, she opens the e-mail.

Dear Mercy,

You must be surprised to hear from me. I’m surprised to be writing. I haven’t seen or talked to you since Seoul. We have no news on G, although Clarke and I go regularly to check in. It is still very difficult, and my heart has been forever broken.

I’m not writing for any bad purpose. I’m just writing. I don’t really know why. I haven’t found a way forward yet. I wonder how you are doing. I have to be honest. I don’t know if I want you to be doing well. I don’t know if I could think that was fair.

But I am living my life. Mostly because of Daisy and Philip. They are doing okay.

I watched a documentary on texting and driving. In it, a young man killed someone’s son because he was distracted at the wheel. The dead boy’s father checks in with the man who has killed his child, and in the film, the man reads a letter that the father has written him. It was so beautifully written, and the father was so loving and forgiving, and I just cried and cried. Maybe this is why I’m writing you. I don’t know. Maybe this is just a hand lifted up to see what is out there.

Margaret

Mercy can tell that this e-mail was written hastily. She reads it again. She doesn’t know what she was expecting, but it was not this. She has no expectations of Margaret or Clarke. There is no rule book for relationships between people with their type of history. She knows she is expected to disappear, but she doesn’t know if she’s allowed to be happy or successful or whether she’s supposed to live the rest of her life in repentance. She feels that the life she has now is acceptable, with the small pleasures she has recently acquired, but she can also see how a few years down the line, she might not be so tentative with her own right to happiness, how time might blunt her guilt even more. This is growth, she thinks, but it is still painful.

Margaret

SHE IS WALKING through IFC running errands when she is accosted by an Indian man.

“You are lucky,” he says, “but you are sad. Can I tell you what will happen next?”

She looks at his eyes, and he smiles ingratiatingly. He is dressed in a cheap suit, the kind that makes you sad because the effort must be so great, like when she lived in New York City and once the Chinese deliveryman was dressed in a suit. To show you they are still hoping. She has heard of these men who accost you in public places, who offer to tell you your fortune and try to reel you in. She remembers reading about a court case where one woman had given her life savings to a psychic and then come to her senses.

“What do you think will happen?” she asks.

“I sense you are missing someone,” he says. So vague it could apply to anyone, and yet….

“Margaret!” she hears. It’s Hilary Starr.

“Oh, hello,” she says, turning to her.

“What are you doing?” She pulls Margaret away from the man. “Haven’t you heard what these men do?” she asks, glaring at him. “Sometimes they blow some sort of gas in your face that makes you drowsy and susceptible. It’s dangerous.”

“Urban myth, surely,” Margaret says, although she’s not sure.

“This man is not the solution,” Hilary says. “Do you want to get a coffee? I have to tell you the insane thing that just happened to me.”

“Sure,” Margaret says. They find a Starbucks and order lattes.

“I just had lunch with David,” Hilary says. “I wanted to tell him that I’m going ahead with adoption. I don’t know if you knew, but I’ve been having this boy come to my house for several months for piano lessons. He’s seven, Julian, and I’ve decided I want to adopt him.”

Margaret had heard vaguely about this and nods.

“That’s wonderful, Hilary. Congratulations.”

“But get this! So I’m telling him because I want to keep his name on the forms because it’s easier to adopt as a couple, and then he tells me he’s gotten some girl pregnant!”

Margaret claps her hand over her mouth. “Come on!” she says. “No way.” It feels good to be having this conversation about other things, other people.

“Yes! And she’s keeping the baby! She’s young, some Korean American girl who went to Columbia.” Hilary keeps talking, not realizing that Margaret has stopped reacting, gone white with shock.

Hilary stops after a while. “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Wait,” Margaret says. “A Korean girl? From Columbia? What’s her name?”

“A strange name. Mercy? Milly?”

As if she had summoned the girl into her universe again, just by writing the e-mail.

Margaret gets up abruptly, uncertainly, as if she is drunk, chair clattering to the floor behind her, and walks out, leaving Hilary agape in her wake.

Hilary

THE ODDEST THING. She ran into Margaret after leaving David, and full of the news, she asked her to coffee so she could tell someone, share with someone. Why does it not seem real until you’ve told someone?

But when she told her the news, Margaret got up and ran, like someone was after her. She left her latte steaming on the table.

Hilary let her go, then, thinking it over, it hit her.

Of course! The girl.

The girl who lost G. The nanny. David’s girl. The same.

Jesus.

Mercy

SHE HAS TO WRITE BACK, of course. But what to write?

Maybe meet face to face? But the baby, her swollen stomach. She doesn’t want to spring that on her.

She goes home that day, having sold an antique chest to a nice older couple from Indiana. She helps them fill out the shipping forms, and they pay with traveler’s checks, something she hasn’t seen in years. She feels useful, good, as if she has a place in the world.

At home, her mother is making kimchi jjigae, one of her favorites.

“Thanks, Mom,” she says. “That smells really good.”

“When I was pregnant with you, I always want the spicy food.”

They sit down to eat at her tiny folding table, one of them on the bed, the other on the chair. Mercy wants to weep, because it feels so nice to be sitting here with someone who loves her unconditionally.

“Are you going to move?” her mother asks. “This place so small.”

Mercy knows what her mother is asking. “I don’t know,” she says.

“Coming soon,” she says. “Four months and you’re going to be more and more uncomfortable.”

“I know,” she says. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“We could go back to New York,” her mother says. “You can come home. Have more space. And baby can be born in America.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she says. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

“I can help you, Mercy.” Her mother moves over to sit next to her. Mercy can smell her familiar smell — the lotion she rubs on her hands after she finishes cooking, mixed with the scent of doenjang, a unique, pungent odor that brings her back to childhood.

Mercy’s eyes fill with tears. “Umma,” she says: Mom. And she breaks down.

She tells her mother everything, the whole story, with all her jobs and the unemployment and how she met Margaret and went to Korea with their family, and G — her mother breathes in sharply at this part but does not interject, just lets her keep going — and how she’s been living, or not living, for the past year. She tells her about David and about Charlie and how she’s messed everything up and how she thinks she always will be messed up. She tells her how she knows she’s going to have a girl, and she’s deathly afraid for her already. Mercy has been alone with all this for so long that, while she is telling it, she is so overwhelmed with gratitude and relief that someone is there to listen that she almost feels happy. She even tells her mother about getting the man to translate the fortune booklet when she was a teenager.

Her mother listens to all this and starts crying in the middle of it, so they are both weeping together, talking and listening, sitting on the bed in the tiny apartment.

“I love you,” her mother says. “Don’t worry. You are okay. How can you not tell me before? I am your mother. I fail you.”

Mercy has watched enough Korean dramas to know that Koreans are used to tragedy and melodrama. It’s in their blood. Mothers pretend to abandon their adored child rather than let them know some secret that would hurt them, or lovers don’t tell each other the one thing that would unravel all their issues. It’s a distinctly Korean way of being, and so she fits right in.

“It sounds like a drama,” her mother says, as if reading her mind.

“I know!” she says, smiling through her tears.

“You shouldn’t think you are unlucky forever,” her mother says. “You can change your destiny. Look, I change mine by leaving your father. It reset. I don’t know how it is going to be, but it’s going to be different. It will be.”

“But what should I do? Should I write her back?”

Her mother gets a fierce look on her face. “That woman cannot tell you you are not allowed to be happy. She is not in charge of you.”

“But I ruined her life. Her family’s life.”

Mercy remembers something from her teenage years. She lost an earring at someone’s house, and after searching for a while, she went to ask her mother for help. Her mother went and scanned the area where she had lost it. “When you want to find something small like this,” she told Mercy, “you have to get down to the floor.” She lay down on the carpet and put her eye to the ground. “Come down, Mercy,” she said, gesturing. They lay on the carpet and scanned the floor at ground level. She was right: Things looked different from down there. Mercy found the earring immediately. “See,” her mother said. “You have to get down to the level of the thing. Don’t be too proud to do it.” They lay there for a moment more, Mercy absorbing the lesson, the fact that her mother was there with her, willing to get down on the floor and find something with her, teach her something. She felt lucky.

Her mother speaks again now.

“That woman has responsibility too, Mercy. She choose you to help her, and these things can happen. It is not all your fault. You can live your life. You are allowed.”

“I don’t think she’s telling me I can’t be happy. I think she just wanted to reach out.”

But people like Margaret are aliens to her mother. They are so far apart they will never be able to understand the other’s motivations or predilections. To be her, to be Mercy, always traveling back and forth from these different kinds of people, is to be exhausted. To straddle all those viewpoints and be the translator and the mediator and never know what you yourself should be thinking.

“Thank you, Mom,” she says. They sit with their simple Korean meal, spooning up the spicy stew, feeling it burn its way down their throats, nourishing them.

She will handle the Margaret issue by herself, but she does not feel alone anymore.

Margaret

IT HAS BEEN RAINING nonstop for a week. The sky opened up and never closed, and torrential, steady rain has been flooding the island. The mountains are crumbling onto the roads, where the concrete, swollen with moisture, has been caving in and creating soft, porous potholes. The sea is a muddied, swirling green full of sand and sediment; the beaches are a sodden, sorry mess.

Margaret comes across a book on the balcony, left behind by a forgetful Daisy. Now a bloated pulp of soft, tender paper, it smells rich and sweet and musty. She throws it in the garbage. The never-ending rain has made her feel hopeless but also secretly pleased that she doesn’t have to go anywhere. She stays in, empties the dehumidifiers, and regulates the temperature of her house, as if she’s in survival mode.

She enrolled Daisy and Philip in the first session of summer school with the promise that they might take a vacation after. They grumbled but acquiesced. So the summer days resemble school days a little, except slower, more soothing, the pressure let out.

Clarke e-mailed her a tentative itinerary that had them going back home in late July. He said he was going to book it unless she said no. She didn’t respond, so she assumes he has booked it. He is learning.

Today is the day she is going to meet up with Mercy.

A few days after she sent her e-mail and then found out about the pregnancy from Hilary, she received a brief note back, thanking her for reaching out and suggesting that they meet in person. Mercy suggested a few days but could only meet after six, as she worked in Kowloon now. Not a word about the pregnancy, although Margaret didn’t really expect her to tell her over e-mail. They arranged to meet in Kowloon, close to Mercy’s work.

She calls Clarke. “I’m going out tonight,” she says. “Is it possible for you to come home early, since I have to leave by five?”

“Sure,” he says. “What are you doing?”

“I’m meeting a group of girls for dinner,” she says. If she keeps it general, he won’t ask who.

“I’m really glad,” he says. “It’s good for you to go out and spend time with friends.”

When she comes back through the kids’ rooms on her way out, she comes upon Daisy sleeping, book splayed out next to her, unusual because she is too old for naps. It must be the rain. Daisy’s hand is in the pocket of her hoodie, and it looks uncomfortable. When Margaret pulls it out, it’s clutching a bead necklace. This girl. She can break Margaret’s heart a million different ways.

If life is a continuum, and Daisy is at the beginning of an adult life and Margaret is the midpoint, where, what, is someone like Mercy? She seemed so unformed, so unknowing, a mere child still. For the first time, Margaret considers that Mercy has a family of her own, a mother, a father, possibly siblings. A family, a history, a background. All she saw before was someone in relation to herself, how Mercy could be helpful to her family, to her, for her. What Mercy did to her.

Margaret leaves to meet Mercy, wondering what, or who, she will find.

Mercy

WHEN SHE AND MARGARET see each other, she swallows, hard. Beautiful Margaret, still perfect looking, if a bit drenched from the rain. They sit down at the coffee shop, an out-of-the-way place in a touristy hotel. She places her hands under her belly. Margaret, always polite, doesn’t say anything.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Mercy says.

“I knew,” Margaret says.

“Really? How?”

“Hong Kong is so small,” Margaret says. “You know that.”

“It’s due in October,” Mercy says. “A Halloween baby.”

“And what will you do?” Margaret asks. An open-ended question for a fluid situation.

“I don’t know,” Mercy says. “Jeez. This has gotten intense so quickly.”

Margaret smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Maybe we should order something.”

“Don’t you think it’s funny,” Mercy says, “that people always have certain rituals? We need to meet for meals or nourishment to mark certain occasions, and we have to observe certain customs before we get into what we really feel.”

There she goes again, saying inappropriate and bizarre things at the worst times.

But Margaret smiles. “Yes, otherwise it would descend into chaos, I suppose.”

“One small way for us to distinguish ourselves from the animals.”

“You’re very smart, Mercy,” Margaret says. “I think you always have been.”

“About everything but life,” she says.

She hadn’t known what to expect, but this is okay.

The waitress comes over, and she orders a chocolate milkshake while Margaret gets a coffee. “Cravings,” she says apologetically.

“I know,” Margaret says. “I had different ones with every child. With my first, it was BLTs with fries, all the time, and with mint-chip ice cream. I gained fifty pounds!”

“I think I’m well on the way to that,” says Mercy.

They look at each other.

“So,” Margaret says, “how have you been?”

Mercy is quiet. “Not good, obviously,” she says. “But I don’t want to talk about me when it’s your family I’ve impacted so much.”

“It’s weird,” Margaret says. “I’ve thought about you so much, but in a way, I’ve not thought about you at all. Only about G.”

Silent again.

“I got a job,” Mercy says. “Through my mom at the church. Oh, my mom came over, and she’s living with me for a while.” She feels that these are okay things to talk about with Margaret, virtuous, noncontroversial things like mothers and churches.

“Oh? What kind of work?”

“Selling Korean antiques. One of the church ladies has this store. It’s just down the street, and that’s why I couldn’t meet you earlier. I work there kind of as her sales assistant. She’s nice.”

Margaret’s eyes fill with tears.

“Sorry!” Mercy says, stricken. “I’m so sorry.”

Margaret shakes her head. “I’m sorry too.”

“No, you don’t need to be sorry!” Mercy says. “I’m the one. I’m the one to be sorry forever.” As she says this, she realizes she has never apologized to Margaret, never seen her since what happened. There was the note, but that was it.

“I know,” Margaret says. “I didn’t know for a long time, but now I think I know.”

“How are Daisy and Philip? And Clarke?”

“I think everyone is doing better than me. I’m the one dragging everyone down. They tiptoe around me.”

“It’s hard to move on,” Mercy says.

“How did this all happen?” Margaret says, gesturing to Mercy’s belly.

“Oh, this,” she says. “It’s complicated. It was unexpected, to say the least.”

“I don’t mean to pry,” Margaret says. “Have you thought what you’re going to do?”

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

“Okay,” Margaret says. Another silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret is taken aback. “No, what?”

“It’s not listening. It’s waiting.”

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

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

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

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

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

They sit quietly. The waitress brings their drinks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret closes the window, looks back into her tiny room, with its basic, elemental plan for living. She does not belong here, alone in an apartment building surrounded by strangers. She should go home, she realizes. She should go home to her family.