Chapter Four
The Secret Life of the Expat Wife -Chapter 4: The Things That Don’t Go According to Plan
My mother arrives on Friday.
I’ve been thinking about that all week – in the way you think about something that makes you quietly, unexpectedly emotional before it’s even happened. She’ll land in this city that has slowly, over time, become mine. She’ll walk through the door of an apartment that once felt borrowed and now just feels like home. And I’ll get to show her the life I’ve built here, in a place she’s only ever known through phone calls and photographs.
Outside, it’s 34 degrees. The kind of heat that sits on everything – on the streets, on the air, on your skin the moment you step outside. I’ve just come back from a few days away with friends. Women I met here, in the particular way you meet people abroad quickly, and with a depth that surprises you, because when you’re far from home you don’t have the luxury of taking your time.
We laughed a lot. We talked in the way that women who understand each other’s lives talk not explaining everything, not having to justify the context, just being exactly where we were.
Sitting here now, with the heat pressing against the windows and Friday getting closer, I find myself thinking about how different things look from here.
How much has changed.
And how very little any of it went according to plan.
Because here is something nobody tells you before you move abroad.
The paperwork will betray you.
Not might. Will.
At some point, in some form a visa, a permit, a document that was supposed to arrive and didn’t, a deadline that passed while someone somewhere failed to notice – the administrative machinery of your new life will catch up with you. And when it does, it will do so with complete indifference to how inconvenient the timing is.
I know this from experience.
I’m thinking of a Tuesday in February. Beijing, 2009. The kind of cold that isn’t dramatic just persistent, the low grey sky sitting over the city like it had no plans to move.
My husband was at the office when the police arrived.
Not for anything serious, I should say. Not in the way that word sounds. But serious enough, in the specific bureaucratic sense that turns your stomach even when you know, rationally, that everything will eventually be fine.
Our visa had expired.
Not because we had forgotten. Not because we hadn’t been paying attention. But because the company – the company that had brought us here, that had handled the relocation, that had assured us everything was taken care of had simply not managed to renew it in time. A delay. An oversight. Someone’s job that fell between the cracks of someone else’s department.
The result was a fine. And something considerably more inconvenient than a fine.
A blacklist.
I remember the particular quality of that afternoon.
The way Alex explained it when he came home. The careful, measured way he laid out what it meant as if speaking slowly might make the consequences feel less real. His flights to Germany for a new visa application. My annual obligatory exit and re-entry. The container we’d been waiting for – our things, our books, our DVDs, the accumulated domestic objects of a life – now delayed on an indefinite timeline.
Bye bye, German DVDs and books. At least for the foreseeable future.
I sat with that for a moment. Not devastated. Not even particularly angry, though I had every right to be. Just tired. The particular tiredness of realizing that no matter how prepared you feel, there will always be something that arrives from a direction you weren’t watching.
And then I made tea. Because there was nothing else to do.
That was sixteen years ago.
And sitting here now, in the heat of a different summer, I find myself smiling at how clearly I remember it.
Not with nostalgia exactly more with recognition. The recognition of someone who has been through the particular school of things not going according to plan, and come out the other side with a different relationship to plans in general.
Because here is what I understand now that I didn’t then:
The blacklist was not a catastrophe. The delayed container was not a catastrophe. Even Alex’s flight and the five days alone – which felt significant at the time, felt like a small test of something was not a catastrophe.
It was just life. Life abroad, specifically, which has a particular gift for producing complications in the most mundane administrative packaging.
What matters is not that things go smoothly. They won’t always. What matters is what you build around the interruptions the habits and the people and the small domestic rituals that hold things together when the larger machinery lets you down.
My mother arrives on Friday.
She will step off the plane and I will meet her, and for a few days she will see all of it the heat, the streets, the apartment, the life I’ve assembled here piece by piece.
She’ll see the women I’ve become friends with. She’ll understand, perhaps for the first time, what I mean when I say this place has become home. Not because it was easy. Not because everything went according to plan.
Because home isn’t the place where nothing goes wrong.
It’s the place where you know how to handle it when it does.
Outside, the heat is still pressing. The city hums.
And somewhere in an airport, my mother is probably already packing.
I cannot wait.