The Expatriates (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, Puri!” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I live in Mid-Levels,” she types.

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

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

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

“A year and a half,” she writes.

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

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

“Touche.”

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

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

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

The casual cruelty takes her breath away.

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

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

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

“Sounds horrible!” exclaims Christy3.

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

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

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

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

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

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