The Expatriates: A Novel by Janice Y. K. Lee

Author:Janice Y. K. Lee
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Asian American, Contemporary Women, Fiction
ISBN: 9780525429470
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

Mercy

“THAT WASN’T FLYING. That was falling with style.”

The phrase is knocking around her head, surfacing at odd moments in the day: when she’s making her bed in the morning, waiting in line for a coffee. It’s a line from Toy Story, the movie, when Woody is denigrating Buzz Lightyear. She caught it on a lazy Sunday at home a week ago.

She doesn’t know why that phrase keeps coming up, but it has some resonance. Because she’s feeling kind of good. She feels good, and she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is she flying, or is she falling?

David comes by once or twice a week, on weekends, when he’s off work and has some time. She doesn’t think there’s anyone else. He seems to work an awful lot, and when he does go out, it seems to be with colleagues and mostly men.

He’ll text, the buzzer will ring, and she’ll let him up. He comes with a bottle of wine, and they’ll spend time at her place before going out and walking along Hollywood Road until they get to a restaurant. They’ll sit and have a meal, the two of them, looking out at the passersby.

And when they do, she can’t help it, she thinks: Everyone out there thinks I’m normal. They think we’re a couple. They think that this is all mine. It is thrilling and dangerous, and she allows herself to think it in small doses of outrageous happiness.

She wonders if she was just the girl in the bar, the girl to start the ball rolling. If she could have been just any girl. She knows enough—barely—not to ask, but it is consuming her a little bit, as it would. She wants this to work, doesn’t want to self-sabotage, but she is who she is, right? Who would she be, what would the world be, if Mercy Cho didn’t screw things up by saying and doing the wrong thing?

If some other girl had been sitting there, in the lobby lounge of the Conrad hotel, on that December Thursday, would she be sitting here with David now?

But there is this now, this little window, where things are suspended in a magical way, where she is not the mess that everyone thinks she is and she has a life and a boyfriend. And when she’s with him, she’s okay! She’s funny and charming and not a nightmare. She feels as if she is juggling all of this, her new selves, and waiting for it all to fall apart.

“How are you supporting yourself?” he asks tonight as they’re finishing off a piece of mud pie. She is magically able to eat again, not feeding the emptiness inside her by fasting. She must have gained five pounds already. This morning, she had a cheeseburger for breakfast.

“I get jobs here and there,” she says. “I do a lot of different things.”

“Do you need any money?” he asks. It is so unexpectedly kind her eyes fill with tears. It has been so

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