Reviewed by Michael Matros
Even for wealthy Americans, secure in
their Hong Kong enclave, everything
can implode.
“How is it that life is so fragile?”
Hilary asks herself in Janice Y.K. Lee’s
new novel,
The Expatriates
. “It’s not
just life itself, and mortality; it’s more
how a perfectly conventional-seeming
life can collapse in a few short weeks…
and while she isn’t really mourning
the loss of what was, after all, an im-
perfect life, there is still grief for the
person she once thought she was.”
Chapter by chapter, this intimate
point of view changes from Hilary’s
to that of two other women – young,
rarely employed Korean-American
Mercy and pampered Margaret, with
her perfect husband and three perfect
children. And so, in this close com-
munity, sequestered from the other
seven million of this island city, the
Western expats of Hong Kong will
almost necessarily encounter one
another; men in their offices, wives
in a tightly structured social scene.
On an afternoon cruise, impressed
in part by the charm and Columbia
degree of new-acquaintance Mercy,
Margaret hires her as a sitter for
the family’s Thailand vacation.
We know that something terrible
will happen on this trip, and who will
shoulder the blame, when Mercy
appears an hour late at the airport,
unapologetic.
REVIEWS
Does Margaret have a sense of what
is to come during her massage at the
hotel, when she considers, “Is it any
wonder…that expats become like spoiled
rich children, coddled and made to feel
as if their every whim should be grati-
fied, [sheltered] from the brutal realities
just outside the guarded gates.”
Hilary, whose marriage has devolved
into routine and unsuccessful attempts
at conception, has brought the or-
phaned child Julian into her home to
give him piano lessons, in what she
and her friends have begun to consider
a “test drive” for adoption. Hilary has
learned that her “helper,” i.e., servant,
needs to provide the boy with food he
understands, “pork fried rice, spring
rolls with shredded carrots and turnips,
vinegary chicken wings; once she made
an entire steamed fish with head on.”
“This is a child,” Hilary realizes, “who
does not know what to do with a carrot
stick, or celery filled with peanut butter,
or a cream-cheese-and-jelly sand-
wich. She might as well give him hay.”
There are no easy resolutions in the
lives of the three women, but there are
resolutions nevertheless; tension, some-
times excruciating, does not mount to
melodrama, but eases instead to vari-
ous ways of acceptance.
With telling detail, in unadorned
prose – much like that of the late James
Salter – Janice Lee explores the soli-
tude that occurs within grief and the
ways love can abate some, but maybe
not all, sorrows.
Just a Bite
by Curtis Karnow ’71
CreateSpace,
96 pages, $9.50
Reviewed by
Hannah MacBride
Curtis Karnow’s latest work offers a sampl-
ing of appetizers for the engaged reader.
Though the 54 stories are shorter than
short (the longest tops out at four pages
and the shortest is a single line), their
combined flavors offer a full meal.
Each story “bite” is a window into a
world – of bad books, Dairy Queens, and
an as-yet-unbuilt adobe pizza oven; of
fried octopus, old china cups, and worn
linoleum floors; of unpaid bills, long-
term disability insurance, and the other
worries that wake us up in the middle of
the night; of white plaster, lime, and the
“great comfort of very old earth.” Though
our windows into these worlds are small,
their impressions are lasting.
If the collection has a theme, it may be
the preservation of a past that is not all
good and a wary eye to the future, which
will be worse. About halfway through
Karnow’s work, we meet Nigel, monocled,
surrounded by his beloved books, enthralled
by lavish liquor, petting a dog named for
the Duke of Brambat, Lotheir, and Limburg.
His point of view carries us forward into
a post-human world, where “the broken
hulks of airliners rust in rivers that will
themselves split open the cities.” How-
ever, his longing is not for the present,
but the past.
Despite plane crashes, explosions, and
a giant dragon that incinerates a classroom
full of disinterested students immersed in
screens (every 21st-century professor’s
vengeful fantasy), the collection is a study
in humanism. While the underlying spirit
of the world will eventually destroy us
and all we have wrought, it is our human
stories that bring meaning to the world.
This is what Karnow offers us – layered
stories to chew on and digest. While it
may be “just a bite,” by the time you flip
to the final page, you will feel full.
The Expatriates
by Janice Y. K. Lee ’90
Viking, 332 pages, $27.95,
available January 2016
30
