Hong Kong-born Korean-American novelist Janice Lee dissects the expat life

[Janice Lee, Class of 1989] In her second novel, The Expatriates, Hong Kong-born author Janice Lee captures a range of anxieties that plague well-off families living abroad. There’s the everyday: learning a new way to communicate with the hired help – indirect, so as to not bruise feelings and seem too hierarchical. Then there’s raising children – privileged and overindulged, whose values are not in sync with those of their hard-working parents.

But Lee doesn’t spare readers the more devastating moments. In one chapter of the book, published earlier this year, a Hong Kong wife discovers her American husband has another wife and children across the border in Shenzhen. It’s her children who ultimately suffer from the fallout.

Lee pushes the complexities – and dangers – an expat family can face in Asia to uncomfortable extremes. One character, an American mother of three called Margaret, suffers an almost unimaginable tragedy while living in Hong Kong. During a family trip to Seoul, she allows her young children to play on a busy street. They are supposed to be under the watch of Mercy, a flighty young Korean-American hired to take care of them. When Margaret pops into a Starbucks, she returns to find her youngest child, G, has disappeared. She quickly realises he has been abducted, never to be seen again.

It is a moment that may well have left many expat readers shaken, dropping their books and running off to hold their kids.

This plot twist left even Lee shivering. “At one point, I looked up from my work and said to myself, ‘I am writing about a child who gets lost’,” says Lee, who has four children. “I’m calling this into the world.”

The author admits she was “really scared” about writing this harrowing storyline. “I even put the whole manuscript down for a couple of months.”