The Expatriates

Margaret is one of the novel’s narrators and protagonists. She is the wife of Clarke and the mother of Daisy, Philip, and G. She met Clarke when she was in her twenties and he was much older. They married and had three children. People who meet Margaret see her as beautiful and assured and assume her life was perfect before G disappeared. Mercy describes her as “beautiful, in that polished, golden brunette way, with the perfectly peaked eyebrows and tawny skin and long, coltish limbs” (34). She is a fourth-generation Korean on her father’s side, though most people are not aware of her heritage. Margaret herself is self-aware and often sarcastic. She thinks, “Could everyone be summed up in a few words like that? […] She supposed she was something like ‘pretty, easygoing, lucky,’ or had been” (94). Unlike many of the other expats she encounters, Margaret is also attuned to the existence of privilege and race. She often thinks of the expat experience as a rarefied bubble that encourages bad behavior because of how spoiled they are.

Margaret finds deep meaning in motherhood, though she is devastated in the wake of losing G. She thinks, “She had never known how much she would love, really love, being a mother and having kids, how natural it was to her, how everything else paled in its intensity and pleasure of experience” (48). She and Clarke have a loving marriage, and she relies on him heavily. After G’s disappearance, she struggles to function or move on while Clarke keeps things going for the other children: “In some of her more interior moments, she even admits that she is being the selfish one, while he is the one with the harder job” (215). By the end of the novel, she can enjoy more moments with her family and understand that moving on does not mean forgetting her son.

Hilary Starr is one of the novel’s narrators and protagonists. She is married to David and eventually adopts Julian as her son. Hilary is independently wealthy due to family money and does not work. Instead, she fills her days in Hong Kong with planning parties and lunches. When the novel begins, she is very unhappy. She and David have been trying to conceive for several years, and she is on the fence about adopting Julian. In contrast to her determined nature as a child, she now sees herself as a passive observer of her own life: “She spirals up, out of her body, so that she is looking down at the house, at the husband and wife, having a dinner party, like paper dolls, or those Sims characters in that computer game” (82). She will eventually change her life after David leaves her and she decides to adopt Julian on her own.

Hilary is very image-conscious and worries what others think of her. She was higher-weight as a child and lost weight through intense dieting. As an adult, she struggles to stay thin and harbors bias against higher-weight people: “[She] views the thickening torsos and thighs of her peers with a visceral disgust” (61). At the same time, these negative thoughts are a coping mechanism for her envy over other women’s pregnancies and children. Margaret, a childhood friend, thinks of her as “a deeply formidable person, one who would win over her genetics […] and whatever else stood in her way and never look back” (93).

At the start of the novel, Hilary also lacks empathy for many people outside her privileged circle. She looks down on her housekeeper, Puri, and dismisses her pleas for financial help as histrionic. She adopts and loves Julian, but she does not spare any thoughts for his mother or the circumstances that led him to be abandoned. Her deepest friendship is with Olivia, who counsels her to become a mother and be a better person.

David is Hilary’s estranged husband and Mercy’s lover, as well as the father of Mercy’s child. He works as an attorney and brings Hilary with him to Hong Kong. He is “handsome, in a seamless sort of way, especially in a suit” (77). At the beginning of the novel, he and Hilary have been married for 10 years. David is unhappy and often goes out drinking without his wife. He eventually leaves her on a whim and immediately hooks up with Mercy.

David is insecure and often shallow, though he is capable of kindness. He often embodies negative stereotypes about men. While he has a successful career, he is uncomfortable with Hilary’s wealth and complains “You know, her family’s rich, and she thinks that entitles her to bitch and be sad all day” (139). When he sees a photo of Hilary as a chubby child, she thinks that “he couldn’t believe how big she had been, even though she had been a little girl and still cute, though she could tell he didn’t think so” (77). After he impregnates Mercy, he abandons her, though he eventually pays for her prenatal care after both Mercy and Hilary implore him to “be a good guy” (181). However, he complains to Hilary that “this happened, and it’s been screwing with me. I didn’t even have a few months for myself” (297). Likewise, when Hilary asks him to support her adoption by pretending they’re still married on paper, he blows up at her. His focus is primarily on his desires rather than anyone else’s, though the women in his life eventually convince him to do the right thing.