The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

time, and she supposed she had looked like a spoiled princess.
    “Women!” the other man had said to Clarke, as he scanned her carelessly. “Women and their shopping.”
    She had been stunned. The man spoke as if she were invisible, or as if she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Later she had thought of all the things she could have said. Like “I went to Columbia!” or “Because you men take all the high-paying jobs.” Or something. The idea that she was entirely inconsequential to the men in a small elevator was hideous to her at that moment, struggling as she was to find a job, find her rent money, find her life. She turned red, almost stamped her feet, struggled to find something to say. And then they got off. She was left steaming, unfulfilled. And here Clarke was, sitting across from her, as confident as ever, as unknowing, married to a perfect woman who was presumably exempt from the assumptions of him and his ilk.
    As Mercy looked over at Margaret, something dawned on her. “Are you half?” she asked.
    “A quarter,” Margaret said, a little surprised. “My father is, was, half-Korean—he passed away—but my mom is white. Most people can’t tell.”
    Barbara piped in, “I could tell right away.”
    “Yeah, but others can’t, really,” Mercy said. “Do you speak Korean?”
    “Not at all,” Margaret said. “I feel bad about it, but I think it’s usually the mother who does it, and my mother couldn’t. And we lived in a very homogeneous neighborhood. My dad basically wanted to be white. He didn’t like growing up Asian in California at the time. There weren’t very many. Do you speak?”
    “I understand everything, but talking is hard. I grew up in Queens.”
    “Have you gone to Korea while you’ve lived here? It’s so close.”
    “Not yet,” said Mercy. “Soon.”
    “I’ll take the both of you,” said Barbara. “It is so wonderful now, you cannot imagine. I grew up there, and it is so changed now!”
    “We’re going soon,” Margaret said. “For school fall break, and Clarke needs to go see the office there.”
    The conversation fizzed on in the hot summer sun. Mercy drank cold beer and listened in on the exchanges. She heard a woman slip up and say something about a helper’s “owners,” instead of “employers.” Then her husband, embarrassed, made things worse by trying to make it academic, saying that throughout history, humans have always enslaved other humans. There was a pause after that statement. Then, being adults, they moved on. Mercy, being not quite so adult, meditated on it for a while, realizing that she would never view that woman in the same way again when she ran into her at the prepared-food counter at Oliver’s or in the taxi queue in Central.
    Jenny’s husband, Bill, noticed that she wasn’t speaking and kindly tried to pull her into conversation. He was interested in shamanism, he told her, having studied anthropology in university. He was telling her about shamanism and the place it had in Korean culture. “Why is it,” she said with a smile, “that it’s always the white person telling the Asian person about their culture?”
    When his smile faltered, she persisted.
    “No, really,” she said. “It’s funny, and I don’t mean to be obnoxious, but haven’t you noticed?”
    “Not really,” he said.
    “I think it’s because of the study of anthropology,” she said. “It’s a Western construct.”
    As she spoke she knew she was off-putting to him, that she could not engage in the simple interchange most people lived and died by, that the casual, nonmomentous observations were anathema to her. She could also tell, as if she were looking from high above, that her approach was detrimental to her, but she couldn’t help herself.
    When she’d said this to a friend, he’d said, “Self-important much?”
    But she couldn’t change. She couldn’t talk to people like they expected to be talked to.
    “So what do you do, Bill?” she