The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Janice Y. K. Lee
- Language: English
- Genre: Asian American Literature
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
A SLOW-ROASTED UNICORN. A baked, butterflied baby dragon, spreadeagled, spine a delicate slope in the pan. A phoenix, perhaps, slightly
charred from its fiery rebirth, sprinkled with sugar, flesh caramelized from
the heat. That’s what she wants to eat: a mythical creature, something
slightly otherworldly, something not real. A centaur. Yes, the juicy haunch
of a centaur. Mercy lies in bed, not quite asleep, not quite awake, sheets
crumpled around her, feeling the gnawing hole in her stomach, relishing it,
savoring it.
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The sun streams in through her small, smudged window. By the looks of
it, it must be past 11:00 a.m., a time when most people—respectable people,
people with jobs—have been at work for several hours and may already be
contemplating what they should eat for lunch.
She can hear the muted sounds of the streets below. Sheung Wan, an
area too quickly being discovered by the rent-hikers—those young,
industrious careerists in their well-cut suits and shiny leather shoes who
leave at eight thirty in the morning with wet hair and sheaves of papers
shoved in briefcases. They have discovered this relatively cheap
neighborhood, a short walk from Central, and have succeeded in slowly
gentrifying it. The rent-hikers live among aging locals who view their
encroachment with bemused silence. Every morning they pass the crazy
charwoman in the lobby who barks incomprehensible Cantonese invectives
at them as they walk through, fingertips pecking on their phones, pretending
not to notice.
These superbly energetic men and women have tried to get the
charwoman replaced, started a petition, which was photocopied and slipped
under Mercy’s door for her signature, but all their efforts have come to
naught. The crazy woman stays all day and night, sitting on her plastic
stool, bucket and mop beside her, shouting at them and at herself. It is
believed she lives in a little room off the lobby, but no one has been able to
ascertain the truth.
No one has ever seen her do any cleaning, or leave, or
come back. It’s one of those Hong Kong mysteries, where she might be the
landlord’s demented aunt, a homeless person who has made the lobby her
home, or indeed an insane millionaire who owns the building. All this
conjecture and information is conveyed through messages posted in the
elevator. Then suddenly one day, a direction to an online message board, to
which they all migrate, leaving the wall in the elevator mercifully blank. All
that remains of the shrill, slightly hysterical dialogue is a strip of yellowing
Scotch tape on the plastic wall.
Mercy is hungry. She should eat. But she wants to eat a centaur’s thigh,
roasted over a bonfire, turned on a spit by fairies, their sparkly little faces
perspiring from the heat. She is certain she will not find this when she
ventures out into the small, tight streets around her. They are filled instead
with equally improbable things: shiny cow innards; disembodied pigs’
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