The Expatriates Read Free Page A

horse with no saddle. The rider will fall.” He hesitated. “And here it says, a crow cannot soar like an eagle.” His eyes dropped, and he handed the book back to her. “I have to go.”
    A crow cannot soar like an eagle
.
    It was always there in the back of her mind, but what did you do with a fate like that but dismiss it as old Korean folklore that had nothing to do with her?
    At Columbia, she had been disheartened to see how hard it was to do well, to stand out. When she got in, she thought, I’ll show those Korean ladies who has bad fortune. But it was harder than that. In her freshman class alone, there had been an Oscar-nominated actress, a boy who’d had two poems published in the
New Yorker
, someone who had sailed around the world and been written up in
National Geographic
.
    And this is the thing too. In college, Mercy had gone above her station, as she thinks of it in gloomier moments. Perhaps this was part of her misfortune. There was a whole new kind of person there, people she had seen in movies and read about in books. Rich people; really, really rich people. Kids who had drivers, who had never done a load of laundry, whose parents had private planes. Her own parents were not dry cleaners or deli owners, as some curious new “friends” had asked. Her dad had an unsuccessful import/export company with an office that was always littered with samples of ugly, Korean-made poly sports apparel, and her mom, long-suffering, helped out at her aunt’s Korean restaurant and told Mercy she had only one child because she could see that life wasn’t going to get any better. Mercy never apologized about her family but never volunteered information either.
    Mercy never knew why she was included in this new crowd. Anaccident, she thought, born of the fact that she was pretty, looked surprisingly good in a forty-dollar strapless dress from Forever 21, was always up for a dare, and that her freshman-year roommate was a friendly, pudgy Chinese girl from Hong Kong, who went downtown one Saturday in October and bought a cherry-red Mercedes convertible and whose parents had a three-bedroom pied-à-terre on East Seventy-fourth Street. Philena was a homely, uncomplicated rich girl who liked to have lots of people around, always, and included Mercy without drama, paying for everything with her black American Express card.
    That first year of university, Mercy studied her classmates, the rich ones, a special breed unto themselves. She noted the soft, flabby skin of the boys, their whiskey breath, the petulant way they talked to their mothers, the way things always got sorted for them. They came from all over the world: Abdul, from Saudi Arabia, who went to London every weekend and would sometimes invite a girl from school, who would come back with six new pairs of shoes and a dress from Harrods and a story about a party at Elton John’s country house, although privately Mercy thought the whole thing made them little better than escorts; or Cal, from LA, whose father was a director and who hung out with Julianne Moore on the weekends; or the boys from Manhattan, so many of them, with their hedge fund fathers, bony, raspy-voiced mothers, and limitless credit cards. The rich boys were thin-skinned, with a puffed-up bravado that was millimeters thin; if you nicked it, they collapsed.
    Mercy borrowed Jimmy Choos from Philena and went to the apartments of upperclassmen (oh, the irony of that term!) in doorman buildings, where you walked in to the heady smell of pot and dirty laundry and the drone of some basketball game always in the background. There were half-empty bottles of Johnnie Walker and Jim Beam on the Corian kitchen counters, props for an always ongoing party. The boys were pigs in the way they lived, whereas the girls were princesses.
    The girls burned an endless supply of $60 scented candles from Bergdorf’s and did class reading under embroidered duvet coversfrom Italy. They floated around in weightless cashmere