The Expatriates Quotes

“Men strolled through life with a wallet in their pants, and women were saddled with children, the map, the bag, the half-empty water bottles. Resentment”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he’s supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire—a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks—and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“[Hilary] ...after you left, I didn't understand what had happened. David, I don't hate you and I don't blame you. I don't think you were happy, and I wasn't that happy either. We were just coasting, seeing what would happen, and then you pulled the plug. Right?”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“[Margaret] went to a talk on parenting at the end of the school year where the speaker had said that doing good things, charitable things, was actually a selfish act, because it made you feel good. She has been mulling that ever since. Should she do something selfless, something good? Should she reach out to someone who really needs her forgiveness? Would this make her feel better?”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“This is what parents did. They told you stories about children and were outraged or delighted by some odd detail and were perplexed if you were not appropriately outraged or delighted as well. They lived so entirely in that sphere, that sphere of people with kids, that they forgot that people could have no kids and have no idea what they were talking about.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“The number of people walking through life with sub-par emotional intelligence was incredible.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“This was what bothered her: the presumption of the expatriates in Hong Kong. It is unspoken, except by the most obnoxious, but it is there, in their actions.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“When she sees her mother after a long period, like at the airport---she is always shocked for a moment at the stranger who is waving at her, that stoutish matron who looks wrinkled and untidy, tired from the long flight”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“She remembers having moments when she felt lifted with gratitude. It was dizzyingly gratifying to feel that you wanted nothing more than what you had at that moment: a hot latte with a full head of foam, and a newspaper filled with facts you were about to learn, a man sitting next to you who wanted to be there.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“That's the shock, and the surprise, to a lot of repatriates: No one back home cares. There's an initial, shallow interest in what life is like abroad, but most Americans aren't actually interested, at all.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“The feeling she has is most unexpected. The oddest thing. She feels no distress or worry. Instead, she senses a dim, faint feeling that rises from some unknown place in her heart, rising slowly and blossoming into something that she might call relief.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates

“She remembers that when she first moved here, a woman who had been in Hong Kong for six years had confided plaintively: "I feel like my real life is on pause. It's nice here, and I like all the help and the vacations, but I'm ready now. I'm ready to resume my real life, and now all I feel like I'm doing is waiting.”
― Janice Y.K. Lee, The Expatriates