The Expatriates Read Online Free PDF Page A

traffic light and wrote down the telephone number.
    The next week, she took a taxi there—parking was difficult in the tight, scrambly streets, and no one answered the phone when she called. The door was smudged glass with chipped plastic Chinese characters glued on. She pushed the metal bar. A rank lobby with chipped tiles onthe floor, torn red vinyl couches along the wall. An old woman sitting behind a steel desk, eating a pungent lunch out of a Styrofoam container, shabby ledgers and an impossibly old phone. A phone that no one answered.
    â€œI would like to see the room,” she said, girding herself for the exchange that lay ahead.
    â€œMae-ah?”
the woman grunted in Cantonese, uninterested. One of her front teeth was outlined in gold.
    â€œThe room.” Margaret gestured outside, to the sign.
    The woman inspected a piece of meat in her chopsticks and looked away. Complete disinterest in the crazy
gweilo
who was trying to complicate her life.
    Margaret clasped her hands in front of her chest and took a deep breath. She remembered the thing she had done when she first arrived, when she had gone to a supermarket in search of corn syrup, something not easily explained if you don’t speak the local language. When the first store clerk had disappeared on her, unwilling or unable to help, she had collared another and would not let him go, frustrated. “Find the corn syrup,” she had said over and over again, implacable in her consumer’s right to do this to a store employee. (Wasn’t that his
job
, finding products for customers?) She had raised her voice as if this would make him understand her better. Finally, after wandering the aisles, they had found it. And then the store clerk found his friend and left the store. He had been another customer, a hapless local, not a store employee, abused by yet another boorish foreigner. She still blushed when she thought of the incident. She wondered what he must have thought of her. He probably had not been all that surprised.
    This was what bothered her: the presumption of the expatriates in Hong Kong. It is unspoken, except by the most obnoxious, but it is there, in their actions. The way they loudly demand ice in their drinks or for the AC to be turned up or down or for “Diet Coke,
not
Coke Zero,” as if everyone thought such a distinction was crucial. The idea, so firmly entrenched, that they could be louder, demandmore, because they were somehow above—really, better than—the locals. How did that still exist in this day and age? And it was in her. That was the thing. Every time she spoke louder than a local because he or she didn’t understand what Margaret was asking, every time she insisted on her way, was rude, she felt it in her and was ashamed.
    So instead she had groveled, beseeched, stayed long enough at the building that the woman realized she was not going away. Margaret had led her outside and pointed to the sign, and the woman had taken her, grumbling, to the elevator, which they took up to the third floor. There, in a glum hallway, she paused outside a steel door that was painted a glossy olive green that was stripping away in long ribbons.
    â€œ
Bat cheen
,” the woman said in Cantonese, holding up eight fingers. Eight thousand. Outrageous. A foreigner’s price. The room was probably full of asbestos and cockroaches.
    â€œOkay,” Margaret said before the woman had even turned the key and opened the door.
    An iron bed, twin size, or possibly even smaller. A filthy thin mattress, pink, with brown stains. No sink. When Margaret wrung her hands, pretending to wash them, to ask where the sink was, the woman pointed to the miraculous thing in the room: a tub. As if to say, why would you even ask? But a tub in this kind of space was a mistake. Certainly. It was ugly, a small, plastic thing, but was newish, bought in the last five years, installed with the water line coming straight up outside of it.