The Expatriates

Author/Guide: Janice Y.K. Lee

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Finding oneself in a strange land can be the best way to find one’s true self

ISBN: 978-1408706855
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

The story follows the lives of three women. An unspeakable tragedy leaves twenty-something Mercy with a crippling personal inertia, and Margaret, a mother of three, numb and unable to heal. In the same small expatriate community, Hilary tries to distract herself from a marriage gone stale by providing piano lessons for a local orphan, only to find her actions openly criticized on an anonymous online forum.

The individual, sometimes overlapping perspectives of Mercy, Margaret and Hilary are woven together, exposing the insularity and complex privilege of the expatriate world, whilst also revealing the fragility of a woman’s position in the world. When the women are struck by tragedy, each of them realizes how shockingly dependent they were upon conforming to the unspoken rules of their environment.

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Travel Guide

Hong Kong

A new expat lifestyle, a new country gives you exposure to new people and places. This is a new start, a chance to “reinvent” yourself . However on a more basic level, it’s the need to start over from the most basic of tasks – how to go shopping who to call in an emergency, how to navigate a new way of doing the most basic of things.

“The new expatriates arrive practically on the hour, every day of the week. they get off Cathay Pacific flights from New York, BA from London, Garuda from Jakarta, ANA from Tokyo, carrying briefcases carrying Louis Vuitton handbags, carrying babies and bottles, carrying exhaustion and excitement and frustration.

They are thrilled, they are homesick, they are scared, they are relieved to have arrived in Hong Kong – their new homes for six months, a year a three- year contract max, forever, nobody knows.”