The Expatriates Read Free

anymore. Although China could be interesting.”
    â€œYes, China, of course.”
    They both stop to ponder its enormity and possibility, as happens thousands of times every day in Hong Kong, where China’s proximity and power is both celebrated and feared.
    Margaret tenses, waiting for the next question. She has cultivated a very accurate sense of when it might come in an introductory conversation.
    â€œAnd children? Have any?”
    She looks down at the menu. “I’ve never been here. What’s good? I’m starving.”
    Priscilla takes it in stride. “The chopped salad, the Hainan chicken. Everything is good here.”
    â€œOh, lovely. Chopped salad!”
    They murmur the conversational inanities and order from the waiter.
    â€œSo how does this work?” she asks, after they have ordered. “I’ve never used someone like you before.”
    â€œYou tell me what you want, I try to make it happen.”
    â€œYou can guide me, though.”
    â€œOf course. This is for your husband’s fiftieth, is that right?”
    â€œYes, in May.”
    â€œAny ideas on themes or what he’d like?”
    â€œHalf-life?” She laughs, but Priscilla does not. “Mid-century?”
    Priscilla has taken out a big yellow pad on which she writes “Clarke Reade’s 50th birthday” with a Sharpie. She looks up, all business. Margaret wonders why she always thinks everything seems absurd. Like it seems absurd to write the client’s name and event on a yellow legal pad. With a Sharpie. No one else seems to find it the least bit strange.
    â€œThoughts?” Priscilla tries again.
    â€œI haven’t the slightest idea, I’m afraid,” Margaret says. “Is there something you can suggest?”
    After going over possible themes and venues and dates, they get the check. Margaret opens her bag, unsure of the protocol, but Priscilla waves her away. As they take leave of each other, Priscilla asks again. “Do you have children?”
    Margaret gathers her jacket from the back of the chair, where she has hung it.
    â€œYes,” she says. “They’re at TASOHK, you know, the American school.” She nods, looks away, past Priscilla and her bright smile.
    And that’s it. She has survived the moment. She walks quickly to the glass doors of the hotel lobby and pushes through to the cool air outside. She gulps and breathes.

Mercy
    H ONG K ONG was supposed to have been a new start—if one could say one needed a new start at the age of twenty-four, which is how old she was when she came, three years ago. It is safe to say that life has not turned out the way Mercy thought it was supposed to.
    But she cannot say she wasn’t warned. Her mother came home ashen-faced one day when Mercy was thirteen. She wouldn’t tell Mercy what had happened, but her father, dependably drunk and abrasive in the evenings, told her the bad news. Superstitious mother had gone to a fortune-teller to waste his money and find out about Mercy’s future. Idiot fortune-teller had clucked his tongue at her reading, said he had rarely seen someone whose life would be so muddled. She would have bad luck. Things would always go topsy-turvy. She was not a bad person, but things would never go her way. Understand? Her father poured some more whiskey, face already tomato red.
    Korean
ajumma
, busybodies that they were, were all amateur fortune-tellers themselves and liked to read faces. One Sunday, at their church in Queens, she had overheard her mother’s friends talking about the composition of her face having no
bok
, no good fortune. Thin, jutting eyebrows, cheekbones that were too sharp, a chin that was so pointy it would cut away all the good. She’s pretty, one said. Pretty in a cheap way, said another. That makes it worse. That will invite the bad luck. And the bad men.
    Later, she found the fortune-teller’s predictions in her mother’s