The Expatriates (7 page)

And now there is Julian.

She first saw him a few months ago while on a tour with the American Women’s Association, which she joined back when she was new to Hong Kong. She had seen a flyer for the association at the American Club. There were photos of smiling women eating Chinese food, holding a bake sale, at a costume party. The aura of nonjudgmental acceptance drew her in. She stuck with AWA over the years, taking part in some of their activities, and was on their e-mail list. She decided to sign up for an introduction to Hong Kong Social Services, where they learned about different situations and how they might volunteer and be useful.

They saw an orphanage, or what they called a child-care center, as well as a small group home. The child-care center was in Kowloon, in a massive concrete building. Hilary found herself on a tour with five other well-meaning American women clutching Starbucks coffee cups. Amid the powerful scent of Dettol—disinfection was a religion in Hong Kong after SARS—Belle Liu, the bespectacled representative who sported the inexplicably mannish cut of so many local women, explained the different areas in the blunt, accented English Hilary often found startling, the locals not yet having adopted politically correct terminology.

“This for the retard children,” she said, gesturing to a padded
room where two boys in helmets rocked back and forth while a woman read a newspaper in the corner.

“Sometimes mother will not come back for one year,” Belle said, “and we don’t know if the child is abandon or not.”

“Is there a cutoff date for when you would find the child a new home?” a woman asked.

Belle went into a lengthy explanation of government regulations and the forms the women were supposed to sign when they left their children. However, she said, very few complied. They were mothers, after all, and most could not bring themselves to give up their children if they weren’t made to. They imagined a future when they would be better off, have more, and reclaim their child. So then the children languished in legal limbo, unable to be put in the adoption pool, unable to go home. Like many locals in government administration, Belle was very excitable about rules and regulations and following them to the letter.

Another room had five baby swings and an equal number of foam seats for infants who could not sit upright yet. There were no children in that room—down for naps, Belle explained.

The women were kind, the furniture and equipment were clean, the endeavor was wholly adequate, and yet, of course, the whole building reeked of sad desperation. Hilary walked through the fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored hallways in a daze, looking at all the abandoned, luckless children.

She went to the bathroom, an institutional affair that smelled strongly of bleach and urine, and closed the stall door. When she pulled down her pants, they were stained with blood. Her period, again. The earthy, rich smell rose and sickened her. Her stomach dropped.

She sat in that stall, her head in her hands, for ten minutes, listening to people come in, urinate, pull on the toilet paper, flush, wash their hands—the mundane sounds of the lavatory. She breathed carefully, modulating the sound so that people knew someone else was there but not so loud as to disturb them. Someone from the tour came in to check on her, and she said to go on without her, she would find them.

She looked at her bloody underwear. This had to be a sign, she told herself. Just like the signs other people are always going on about of when they recognized their child. Getting your period in an orphanage had to be a sign.

She had taken a class in college about feminism and medicine. In it, she learned that the whole terminology around menstruation—a failure to conceive, a shedding of the lining—was negative and misogynistic and old-fashioned, teaching women that their sole purpose in life was to have children. The lining of the uterus was not shed; it was cleansing itself to make way for a new lining. Back then, so far away from the idea of having children, the whole premise had seemed impossibly academic and precious. Now she wants to find that book again and read it. She wants to find a way to redefine what is happening to her, to own it.

And then she saw Julian.

Of course, his name was not Julian then. She decided to call him Julian after all the arrangements had been made. That seemed an enormous encroachment into his life, already, naming him.

The group went on from the child-care center to what was called a group home, a smaller institution that housed only eight boys. Here, their guide explained, they had a smaller setting. The government outsourced child care, so children would end up in a child-care center, a group home, or foster care.

Julian was doing homework in a room with older kids. He stood out because he was not Chinese but, instead, that beautiful brown mix. She tried to talk to him, and the guide told her that he was wonderful at music. Sick with the knowledge that she was not pregnant, she rushed into something impulsive. “I’ll find him a piano teacher,” she said. Belle Liu nearly had a conniption, what with all the regulations that would violate, but Hilary simply kept talking, and the kindhearted woman finally could not bear to see Julian miss a chance at something he would never otherwise get.

“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “I don’t know.”

And she didn’t say anything more, and Hilary knew to just shut up
and come back and do it later. Julian’s paperwork had recently come through—a small miracle, the woman said—and he had been released into the adoption pool, but his chances for adoption were close to nil because of his age and because of his mixed race. Normally-developing babies had a 100 percent chance of being adopted if their paperwork was done, but after a year or two, the children’s chances dropped steeply. Julian went to school near the group home and walked there and back. He had already started on the life he would lead if no one were to intervene.

He has been coming to her house for just a month. She usually picks him up early, so that they can have a snack. The first time, she made him lasagna herself, Puri clucking over the mess Hilary made in her own unfamiliar kitchen, spilling tomato sauce on the countertop, opening every cupboard door in search of the Pyrex pan. But he barely ate it, pushing it around the plate until it became a huge, gloppy mess that looked unappetizing even to Hilary.

Puri stood over him with a satisfied expression on her face. The ma’am was not supposed to go in the kitchen. That was her domain.

“
Sik mae?
” Puri asked him, motioning to her lips with an imaginary spoon. She spoke some Cantonese, from her time with a local Chinese family.

“
Chow faan
,” he said. He liked fried rice. Even Hilary knew what that was.

So now Puri makes him the food he likes, that she knows how to make from her previous job. She makes pork fried rice, spring rolls with shredded carrots and turnips, vinegary chicken wings; once she made an entire steamed fish with head on. The house smells like a Chinese restaurant on Julian’s days, all soy sauce and deep-fried Mazola, but she does not say anything, because he devours the food while Puri looks on, gratified. This is a child who does not know what to do with a carrot stick, or celery filled with peanut butter, or a cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich. She might as well give him hay.

Hilary usually sits opposite him, always, stunned by the silence in her, unable to say anything but the most cursory social greeting. He has to learn English, she says to herself, he has to learn English. But who will teach him? She has given him an English name. What next? What next? Isn’t there some sort of manual?

But he doesn’t make it easy either. He is usually reserved, but sometimes, suddenly, clownishly friendly, as if the women at the group home have told him he has to close the deal, although she knows that must just be her own projection. She does not know how to handle him when he is like that; she is too close to his desperation and confusion and is overwhelmed. But she does not even know if it is desperation that drives him. She has no way to read what he thinks, what he feels. She has nothing in common with him except what she has the will to build, and that will, it seems, is not strong enough.

This complete flouting of all common adoption wisdom—that she is allowed to take a child home, a “test-drive” she thinks of it sometimes, the thought bubbling up in her head before she can suppress it with horror—is an incredible, under-the-table thing that has somehow happened because everything is personal and the head of the AWA really, really likes her because they went to the same university and so she vouched for Hilary to the department head, whom she has known for sixteen years. It is terrible, it is scandalous, and yet Hilary cannot come to a decision. She can tell herself that she is giving her time to a child who needs it, a volunteer sort of thing, and that she doesn’t have to go the whole way.

It is also, she tells herself, because she finds herself already too surrounded by people who depend on her. Given fifteen minutes in the same room, Puri will tell her of her family in the Philippines and their various medical ailments, their debts, their divorces, all of which Puri—and, by implication, Hilary—is responsible for. Puri will weep and all but rend her clothes. Their lives in that country are operatic: epic tales of affairs and jail time and abandoned children and mistresses and sickness and thirteen-hour bus rides. Hilary
adjusts her bangles and makes sympathetic noises, but she cannot understand what Puri is talking about. She pays Puri triple the usual rate and hopes that recuses her from further responsibility. Puri is short, squat, with a farmer’s build. She is not honest, but she is clever, and from what the expatriate women say, you cannot have both.

Puri bangs around when Hilary is in the kitchen, asks loudly what she is looking for. She cannot stand to have intruders on her territory. She inhales sharply over Hilary’s cooking, signaling her complete disbelief that someone can have so few skills. The ma’am is not supposed to cook.

And Sam. Sam, the driver. Sam is a trial: proud and angry and a ruinously bad driver. He has dented their car twice, parking, and rear-ended someone at a red light. But she cannot fire him. He has not done anything really bad, she tells David, who shakes his head at her indecision. If I ran my office the way you run this house, he says before he leaves for the morning. The statement lingers. What would happen? she thinks. What would happen?

When Julian came into their lives, the few people they told assumed they were going to adopt him. And she thought so too. Once she and David took him out for dim sum on the weekend, an awkward outing, both parties not knowing how to move it forward, how to take the next step, paralyzed by the notion that it might be a mistake from which they would never recover. She cannot understand all the other families around her, the ones who add to their families with such single-minded, deliberate simplicity and assurance.

“I just knew,” they say. “As soon as I walked into the orphanage and saw Mei, as soon as I did, I knew that she was mine. She looked at me and I looked at her and we both knew.”

“How?” she wants to ask them. “How did you know?”

But, of course, no one ever asks that. They tell their stories all in the same way: how they filled out their applications and waited and waited, the sudden call, the hastily booked flight, the anonymous hotel room they bring their new child to, the formula bought on the fly. The children never cry, because it never did them any good in the
orphanage. Then they have tantrums. These adoptive parents have a network, and they help one another. They know their children when they see them.

They seem wholeheartedly good in a way that she cannot understand, because she is in some way bad, or selfish, or ignorant, or unwilling to believe, because she cannot recognize her child when she sees him. They believe her to be one of them, but she is not.

“You’ll know,” they say.

So she looks at Julian and tries to know. But all she can see is the questions. What if he hates her? What if he tries to run away? What if he has some genetic disease that will waste him away before he turns thirteen? What if—and this is the big one—what if she can’t love him? She knows these are selfish questions, not the kind she is supposed to be asking. She is supposed to care about his well-being, about how his life will be, but she cannot shake off her commitment to herself. Sometimes she thinks that is what the nine months are for, so that women can get to know the person inside them, that it is a mingling at first of self and child, and then after the baby is born, that is when you can become the selfless, generous mother you are supposed to be. She doesn’t have that yet, she thinks. Maybe nine months of getting to know him is what she needs.

And then, just when she and David seemed to be moving to some sort of decision, there was a spate of articles in the paper about a family who was essentially giving up their adopted child. Facts were murky and hard to come by, but the family was Dutch, and the child, Chinese. They had adopted him about three years ago, and they wanted to give him back. There were outraged letters to the editor, saying that adopting a child was not like buying a pair of pants—you couldn’t return him when he didn’t fit. There were racial overtones, of course, the privileged white minority and the beleaguered local community.