The Expatriates

“The person responsible for the calamity is never mentioned. No one wants to hear about the guy who shot the gun by mistake, or the drunk boyfriend driver, or the chimpanzee’s owner. The victims are richly sympathized with, and their guilty, confused perpetrators are erased from the story. They don’t exist. They are supposed to disappear.”

Mercy scours the pages of newspapers and magazines looking for clues about how she should live her life. She wants to find other “guilty, confused perpetrators” and learn what they did after the disaster. Society treats them as invisible, so she has no examples to look to. Without a story or path to follow, Mercy is in stasis, refusing to live her life and withdrawing further.

“Now she leaves her house. Just leaves. The power of that impulse. Just leave the children. Just leave the house. It will all be here when you come back.”

Margaret leaves her home and goes to her secret apartment, pretending that her family can continue without her. The string of sentence fragments here creates the effect of her trying to convince herself that this is true. Though she knows this is a fantasy, she still indulges in it. She is so trapped by grief that she is unable to fully participate in things that used to give her pleasure and purpose, like raising her children.

“Margaret, who was used to being above average in most things, couldn’t understand the gap. This was the hardest thing she had ever done, and arguably the most important. And no one was acknowledging that it really, really sucked. A lot.”

Margaret is surprised to find how difficult the adjustment into motherhood is, especially with a newborn. While people talk to her about the importance of mothering, no one acknowledges all the hard parts. She slowly adjusts to the new normal, but later in life, she is careful to be supportive of new mothers, including Mercy, and make sure that they feel seen and listened to.

“She has noticed how, as she grows older, she is more and more reluctant to say anything directly, even to her husband.”

Hilary has slowly become a person who observes her life more than actively participating in it. This gradual chill is also reflected in her marriage, where she has stopped asking for things from David. Instead, she expects him to intuitively guess them and is disappointed when he does not.

“After a few years, even the most well-meaning Americans found themselves calling only other Americans and doing Super Bowl breakfasts (due to the time difference) and Thanksgivings at the club with other families. You found yourself somehow more American than ever.”

A recurring idea in Lee’s novel is that expatriate communities tend to group tightly around nationalities and shared social backgrounds. Hilary reflects that Hong Kong is cosmopolitan but, paradoxically, expats become more nationalistic once they arrive there. They cling to the comfortable aspects of home rather than venturing beyond the bubble, represented by signifiers like the Super Bowl and Thanksgiving.

“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.”

As Hilary withdraws from her life, she increasingly spends time online on her favorite message boards. There, she can stay safely in her room and “become someone else,” weighing in on other people’s problems and ignoring her own. Though these conversations give the illusion of community, she is withdrawing from her real relationships. This alienation is represented by how she describes the process of logging on—she becomes “gray” and “amorphous” and reduces herself to binary code, like an inanimate object.

“These small empires, these carefully tended paradises of sand and palm, shelter the expatriates from the brutal realities just outside the guarded gates.”

Margaret thinks that the expat community becomes so demanding and spoiled because of the environment they are in. People from wealthy countries visit places where they have more buying power and make demands of the locals. She thinks of the resort they are visiting—represented here through synecdoche with “sand and palm” standing in for the whole resort—and the other enclaves as “small empires” that replicate imperial attitudes.

“The signifiers were so important: Are you wearing Dansko clogs or Jimmy Choo mules, are you a salon blonde or do you leave your hair in a ponytail, do you live in jeans or gym clothes or are you always in a suit?”

Here, the arrival of new expats is compared to joining a new crowd at high school. Outer “signifiers” such as clothing or hair become important as people try to slot you into a group. Margaret connects this idea with her earlier thoughts on the unrealistic nature of expat enclaves, which are often shielded from the realities of the countries they reside in.

“Men strolled through life with a wallet in their pants, and women were saddled with children, the map, the bag, the half-empty water bottles. Resentment fired up through her body, flushing her cheeks, suffusing her with sudden rage.”

Margaret reflects on the unfairness of gender norms that require women to be the default parent, represented here through the physical load women carry compared to men. She feels frustrated that Clarke is allowed to travel unencumbered while she carries all the necessary items for the children on the family outing. Though she loves her family, this inequality makes her angry.

“She sits there on the floor of her bedroom, again, with the contents of her bag strewn around her, and clutches this cheap plastic dinosaur and the lollipop and tries to recalibrate her life so she can live it for the next five minutes. Then blinks, gets up.”

Margaret struggles to balance her grief and her ability to be present for Clarke and her living children. Small reminders such as the treats in her purse send her back into her spiral and are one of the few remaining ways to connect with G after his disappearance. The items she describes—a “cheap plastic dinosaur” and a “lollipop”—are normally disposable but are now given totemic significance.

“‘Eat your chocolate cake, sweetie,’ she says, heart beating fast, fast, faster. Is this what it means to feel alive?”

Hilary constantly feels like she is sleepwalking through life and is vaguely unhappy. When she defends Julian from a woman at the country club, she suddenly feels like she has a purpose. Motherhood has helped her come “alive” in ways that she was not before, represented through repetition here (“fast, fast, faster”).

“Margaret views all this with the dim, myopic view of someone watching slow sea creatures through a thick glass, creatures in another world, where emotions run high and people behave badly, as if they have all the room in the world to make bad decisions and they won’t be punished for them. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and she’s the creature behind the glass, watching normal people behave normally.”

In her grief, Margaret feels separate from the world, presented through an extended metaphor here. She imagines other people and their problems as “slow sea creatures” that belong to another species entirely. However, she recognizes that she is the one behaving strangely and that her grief has sequestered her from normalcy. Regardless of who is the sea creature and who is the observer, they are separated by glass.

“She is the other. She is the one who caused the injury, not the injured. She is the invisible. She’s the one not mentioned in the magazine pieces and newspaper articles. She is the unforgiven, the unforgivable.”

After G’s disappearance, Mercy thinks of herself as “the other”—unmentioned in accounts of disaster, she is the person who caused it all. She believes that this makes her “unforgivable.” Her isolation and shame after the incident are represented in the titles she gives herself—“the other,” “the unforgiven,” and “the unforgivable”—new, anonymizing ways of identifying rather than her name. Eventually, she learns to move past her mistake and to try to reach for happiness.

“If Hilary pressed her to be honest, the truth would be that Olivia feels superior to all the expats here. Hong Kong is her real home. She owns her apartment, her daughter goes to a local school and speaks Cantonese and English perfectly. To her, the expatriates are just visiting, naïve galoots who come and screech about the jade market and getting dresses copied in Shenzhen.”

While the expats in the novel often treat the Asians they encounter as inferior, Hilary is attuned to other class and cultural nuances. She understands that Olivia, a wealthy Hong Kong native, sees herself as superior to the foreigners. In her eyes, they are gauche and fail to grasp the beauty and nuance of the culture there.

“‘You’re going to become a mother,’ her friend replies. ‘You’ll understand. It’s the only thing that matters.’ Hilary ruminates on this, rolls it around her head, finds the thought pleasing. ‘I would like that to be true,’ she says. ‘I would like that very much.’”

In this exchange, Olivia insists that parental love is the most important emotion someone can experience. Hilary wants to believe her friend and experience this depth of emotion but is also worried about taking on motherhood. This reinforces The Complexities of Motherhood. In this passage, she has finally begun to imagine herself capable of motherly love.

“‘Don’t you think you should?’ she says. ‘Speak to her, I mean. You should be a good guy.’ He pauses. ‘That’s what she said too, that I should be a good guy.’”

Hilary encourages David to reach out to Mercy since she is pregnant with his child, and he responds that both she and Mercy have asked him to be a “good guy.” The fact that David needs to be encouraged to be “good” implies that he might not be and that fatherhood requires him to suppress his more selfish impulses. Hilary recognizes that Mercy is in a vulnerable position and urges David to behave less selfishly.

“There is no rule book for relationships between people with their type of history. She knows she is expected to disappear, but she doesn’t know if she’s allowed to be happy or successful or whether she’s supposed to live the rest of her life in repentance.”

Mercy’s relationship with the Reades is incredibly fraught. She has been reading news articles about disasters to try to find a blueprint for her own behavior, seeking a rule book for herself and perhaps them. Margaret’s gesture of forgiveness reminds Mercy that she still has a life to live and that time might release her from her intense devastation and torment.

“‘You shouldn’t think you are unlucky forever,’ her mother says. ‘You can change your destiny. Look, I change mine by leaving your father. It reset. I don’t know how it is going to be, but it’s going to be different. It will be.’”

Mercy has been worried about disappointing her mother, but her mother insists that she loves her and that their paths align more than Mercy thinks. She also rebukes the words of the fortune teller that have haunted Mercy all these years, instead arguing that fate is something people can change. Her courage to change late in her life inspires her daughter to have the same bravery.

“Mercy spoons up the melting ice cream in her milkshake and wishes, more than anything, to feel that at some point in the future, she might be happy. But she looks across the table and sees that the woman sitting there wishes for that even more desperately.”

Since G’s disappearance, Mercy has been in agony, imagining that she will never be happy again. In this moment, she realizes that Margaret has also been trapped in stasis, wondering if she will ever get over the loss of G. Lee allows the final sentence to hold a double meaning: Margaret wishes for her own happiness and for Mercy’s as well.

“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.”

Lee declines to offer a solid answer to the mystery of what happened to G. Like Margaret, readers must make peace with not knowing. Here, Margaret releases Mercy from her expectations and accepts that there is “no answer” found anywhere. This enables her to finally forgive Mercy.

“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.”

Throughout the novel, Lee uses Margaret’s secret apartment to symbolize her grief and isolation. Now that she is beginning to heal and rejoin her family, she no longer sees the apartment as her home. Instead, she is “an interloper” who borrows this space—she really belongs with Clarke and her remaining children.

“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.”

Hilary has spent much of the novel agonizing over the decision to adopt Julian and overanalyzing every aspect of their interactions. This moment at the restaurant reveals that she and Julian have become more comfortable in one another’s company. Hilary realizes that these quotidian moments bring her a deep joy, in contrast to her former state that saw her locked in her room staring at her laptop screen.

“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.”

In the novel’s final sections, Margaret begins to open herself to the possibility of happiness. While she began this journey believing happiness was a betrayal of G, she now realizes that experiencing moments of joy does not negate her loss. She begins to live in the world again rather than losing herself in grief. This is represented by the sensory language—“the warm sand,” “the bright sun”—which places Margaret firmly in the present.