The Expatriates (29 page)

L
EAVING
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.

S
HE
’
S
FINALLY
DECIDED
she’s going to have the baby here in Hong Kong. Afterward, she and her mom have talked about maybe going to Korea or back to New York, or just staying in Hong Kong. She doesn’t know, but she feels good knowing that she has someone with her.

She went to see Margaret one more time, at her house, with Daisy and Philip.

They all sat together, eating buttered toast and drinking tea, and it was okay. She wanted to say so many things to Margaret. Feeling ragged and emotional, she almost said something completely crazy.

“I want to give you something,” she said. “I feel like I owe you so much. That I have taken so much, and I can’t ever make it right. I even thought about—”

And then Margaret put her hand over Mercy’s mouth, physically stoppered her. “Don’t say it,” she said. “Don’t even think it.”

She was grateful to Margaret for being so generous. That’s what a mother is, she remembers thinking, someone who puts others’ needs in front of hers, who takes the pain from others and swallows it herself. Her mother, Margaret: They are mothers. She thinks about that a lot as she puts her hands on her stomach to feel her daughter move fluidly inside her. This good person, this figure who is selfless and forgiving: This is who she needs to become.

T
HE
NEIGHBORHOO
D
of Repulse Bay is deserted. It is 5:00 a.m., late June. In the mornings, the sound of cicadas is a deafening backdrop to solitary men flagging down taxis to work, the coffee place is devoid of the usual Lululemon tribe, and the supermarket has a few desultory helpers buying groceries for one.

Hilary sits at her desk, replying to e-mails, filled with a serene yet overwhelming sense of well-being. She has deleted the forum websites from her computer and hasn’t visited them for several weeks.

She has been assured by the most cautious of bureaucrats that her case seems very promising, that Julian will be with her in a time frame that they have gone so far as to allow might be less than a year. They are pleased that she would like to adopt an older child, a mixed-race child, a child who had less than promising prospects because of these factors. When asked about further access to him in the interim, they did not shut her down, merely suggested she wait a little. She has come to understand that this is all but a formality and a matter of time.

She is in her office, which she will convert into a bedroom for him. She looks around, tries to picture where the bed will go, the bureau, the desk. He will sleep here, across the hall from her bedroom. He will breathe through the night, whimper through nightmares, wake in the morning to find her staring at him. Her son.

She remembers a moment from the other day. She took him to a local diner for a snack. She texted Puri about something and then put down the phone. Julian took it from the table and looked up at her shyly. She nodded yes and tapped in her code for him. He became
absorbed in the phone. This act, of a child taking his mother’s phone and playing with it, an act that she had seen a hundred times before, filled her with an aching contentment.

For the first time, Hilary is considering leaving Hong Kong. She hasn’t thought about it before, always assuming she would be here, with David, as he signed contract after contract. His law firm was happy for him to stay, and she didn’t think otherwise. She was fine, not missing home, not minding where she was. But now, assuming that she gets Julian and she and David are done, there isn’t much to keep her here. She would like to be closer to her mother as she becomes one, and so she’s been thinking. She remembers that when she first moved here, a woman who had been in Hong Kong for six years had confided plaintively: “I feel like my real life is on pause. It’s nice here, and I like all the help and the vacations, but I’m ready now. I’m ready to resume my real life, and now all I feel like I’m doing is waiting.”

So if she moves back home, she’ll start her life again, her new life with Julian. She doesn’t want to traumatize him with too much change too fast, but she’s thinking that after a few months, they will relocate. They can have a fresh start, together, as they begin their new life as a family. This seems right, that they’ll both start anew.

T
HEY
WOKE
UP
this morning and impulsively decided to drive out to Big Wave Bay. Because the parking lot there has only some twenty spots, there is always a gambling element to the excursion (Will you have to turn back? Will you get a ticket or be towed?), and they are relieved to find a few spots still empty at nine thirty in the morning. Clarke pulls in, whistling, jaunty in a baseball cap. They pull out all the beach things from the trunk of the car and make their way down the short path to the beach, where they stand on the sand. It is still quiet and uncrowded.

“Hot!” Philip says. He hops from one foot to the other, grimacing. He clowns around, like a monkey scratching his armpits.

Margaret laughs. How lovely it is to see your children grow, develop personalities, become their true selves. Philip was a difficult baby and an obstinate toddler, but he is now bursting into a quirky and engaging child.

“Where should we set up camp?” Clarke asks.

They walk to a midpoint between the sea and the path.

“This looks like a good spot,” Daisy says. She is lovely, this daughter of theirs, in her practical navy Speedo swimsuit, solid shoulders, and tousled hair. Margaret resists the urge to squeeze her delicious flesh. Daisy goes about making their temporary place, pulling out the mat and anchoring the corners, as Margaret unpacks the towels—women’s work, Margaret thinks suddenly, without rancor. A man comes by to ask whether they’d like an umbrella, and they rent one for the day. Then the children run down to the water, excited, shrieking.
They splash and walk along to where there is a rock pool, looking for hermit crabs.

“Do you want anything?” Clarke asks.

There’s a small canteen at one end of the beach that makes surprisingly good coffee. “Love a coffee,” she says.

He wanders off, and she puts on a floppy hat and her sunglasses. Thus armored, she looks out at the flat line where the sea meets the sky and breathes in the warm morning air.

“Hooey” is what she thought when she first tried meditation and deep breathing. She went to a class at the gym she belongs to but felt so panicked and stressed she got up and left, eyes cast down so she wouldn’t have to look at the teacher. She remembers thinking, Will the teacher think it’s her and her teaching? Will she realize it’s not about her? It’s one of the things she’s come to think about more and more: how everyone is stuck in their lives, thinking about what people are thinking about them, when actually nobody is thinking about them. Only you are thinking about yourself, usually. You or your mother.

Clarke comes back with a coffee for her and sits down next to her.

This is good, she thinks. Sitting here on the warm sand with the sun still low in the sky, water just before them, clouds puffy and white, children in their sights. This is a good thing. She feels his body next to hers, companionable, separate.

“I think I’ll go to Korea before we leave for California,” she says. “Just check in.”

“Yes,” he says. “That’s a good idea.”

They leave it at that, light, not too heavy, letting the intent pass over them.

“Want to swim?” Clarke asks.

“Mmmm,” Margaret says. “Maybe in a bit. I want to get hotter before I go in.”

“I’ll get the kids to go in with me,” he says. He rises and goes to their children, talks to them, and they wade in.

Scrolling through her Facebook feed this morning, Margaret saw
someone post “Grief is the price you pay for love.” She is a passive observer of this kind of social media, but she has seen how it’s a kind of hive-mind, that it reflects the lives and mind-set of her peers, how posts about raising children, taking care of elderly parents, job stress have taken over the musings about finding your love, social occasions, newborns.

She thinks about that now. Is grief the price? Why does love have to be so costly? The benefits she has reaped from this love, have they been enough? When she had just Daisy toddling around, an older woman had said to her, “I think by the time they’re two, kids have repaid their parents for everything. They give us so much joy in just those first two short years of their life. All the worrying and misery that might come after is just paying the piper.” Margaret, then a frazzled, first-time mom, wondered what the woman was talking about. But now she thinks she knows. She’s had those moments, a nestling child in her arms, a kiss and a deep inhale of the heady scent of a sleeping baby, a laugh of pure joy shared with her husband at something funny that has been said by an unknowing innocent—she has had so, so many of those moments. Her life has been rich with those moments. She is grateful for them. She wants to remember and honor them.

This is such a moment, she realizes. Sitting here, on the beach, with the warm sand beneath and the bright sun above, with Clarke and two of her children present, she feels something like a brief moment of contentment.

You don’t win anything for being saddest the longest, Dr. Stein has said. There’s no prize for being the most miserable. You are not betraying anyone by trying to live a better life. You are not giving up on anyone.

I’m not telling you to be happy. I’m telling you that it’s okay to have moments when you’re not sad. You can laugh, maybe once a month, maybe twice. It’s okay.

Here’s the thing. You think only one specific event, one miracle, will make things better, but actually, life will get better if you only
let it. You have to let life get better. You have to for your family’s sake, and for your sake. You don’t think your happiness matters, but it does. It matters for your family. They can’t be happy unless you see that you have the ability to be. Time will help. It can be agonizingly slow, but it always does.

Forward. Outward. Those are the directions she has to follow.

Remember this moment, she thinks fiercely. Hold on to it.