The Expatriates Read Online Free PDF Page B

vision.
    Unfortunately, everyone there was extremely kind and concernedthat someone was being ignored, so she had to fend off questions from strangers about whom she knew and where she was from.
    Sucking down her second glass of wine and cursing her friends, she looked up to find Clarke.
    “Are you crashing?” he said with amusement. He was handsome, yes, but had crinkly, kind eyes. Older than she, mid-thirties.
    She mumbled into her glass.
    “Come on, fess up,” he said.
    She made a decision.
    “Who the hell says ‘chaise lounge’?” she asked.
    “What?”
    Good. She had startled him.
    “I was talking to someone and they said ‘chaise lounge.’ But it’s ‘chaise longue.’ You know? It’s French. Means ‘long chair.’”
    “I’m proud to say I’ve never said either,” he said.
    “Americans are so idiotic,” she said.
    “Aren’t you American?”
    “Yes,” she said, all twenty-six-year-old bravado. “So what?”
    He laughed. “You’re feisty,” he said. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”
    For some reason, she didn’t bristle.
    He joined her and her girlfriends afterward for dinner, at a small Italian restaurant on Madison Ave. They drank wine, and her girlfriends giggled, and the two of them knew that they were going to be together.
    He was working at Procter & Gamble in New Jersey at the time, and they married and headed back to San Francisco, where they were both from, and she went back to school for landscape architecture, and Clarke got a job at M_ D_. They had Daisy, Philip, and G in quick succession, building their family.
    When Daisy was nine, Clarke’s company approached him about a three-year rotation to Hong Kong, where he would oversee Asia Pacific, ex-Japan. It was a big promotion, and along with a substantial raise, they offered him a housing package, a car and driver, live-in maid,school fees for their three children, a country club membership, and two business class flights home a year for all of them. Later she would find that this was a standard package for senior executives, but it seemed dazzling at the time.
    He came home with a big folder labeled FAMILY EXPATRIATION , which included a few paperback books written by women who had followed their husbands abroad. They called themselves “trailing spouses.” Their author photos were bright and cheery, showing them in front of the Forbidden City in Beijing or sitting in a
tuk tuk
in Bangkok. There was also a guidebook on Hong Kong and a twenty-page printout on the different neighborhoods, schooling options, medical care, and associations that women could join to integrate. There was a lot of talk about the “honeymoon period,” when one was busy setting up and settling in, and that one would be fine during this time. Then, after all that was finished, there would be a grief period, where one mourned the loss of one’s old life. They cautioned against living in the past, suggested that one canvass diligently for new friends and interests. Going to museums seemed to be a popular suggestion.
    The entire thing gave Margaret hives. She was fine with moving to a different country, excited even, but the 1950s attitude toward women was frightening to her. Everyone seemed so earnest and cheery. It made her teeth hurt.
    Her job was portable, of course, with the Internet and e-mail, and she had been doing fewer and fewer jobs anyway as the kids got older and needed more help with school. Maybe that portrayal hit a little too close to home.
    She and Clarke flew to Hong Kong for a few days to house-hunt and get the lay of the land. The real estate agent, a young Chinese woman whose glasses steamed up in the humidity whenever she got out of the air-conditioned car, clutched a clipboard and had an earpiece permanently stuck in her ear. Her name was Rosacea. Margaret later discovered that the curious English names that locals gave themselves were cause for much merriment in the expat community. She and Clarkefound themselves that first