Expats: The Review
I first interacted with Lulu Wang through her acclaimed 2019 film, The Farewell. The film, starring Awkwafina as a Chinese American woman in her twenties, focuses on the main character’s journey to Changchun, China, where she and other family members seek to spend time with their dying grandmother. Wang’s film (and Awkwafina’s performance) was poignant, funny, and surprisingly hopeful. Thanks to The Farewell, I had high hopes for Expats, Wang’s first TV project, and was quite satisfied with what Wang had to offer.
The six part mini-series, available to stream on Amazon Prime, would not feel out of place if offered by HBO. Set in 2014 Hong Kong, the series focuses on the lives of three women and those in their orbits who are impacted by an unexpected tragedy and must deal with the fallout. A light spoiler warning here for those who haven’t watched; that which I’m about to discuss is revealed in the first episode, so feel free to keep reading. One of the families, of which Nicole Kidman’s character Margaret is a part, loses a child during the events leading up to the first episode. Flashbacks reveal the circumstances for this loss, a loss that defines the rest of the series. The other two main characters are Hilary, an Indian American woman who is a close friend of Margaret’s, and Mercy, a young Korean-American college graduate who comes into contact with Margaret thanks to her rich friends. The viewer spends most of the show’s runtime with these three women, though the show’s fifth episode expands the scope to include Puri and Essie, helpers of the two families, and one of Hilary’s friends, a non expat named Olivia who deals with marital woes of her own. This episode, probably the series’s best, doesn’t detract from the main characters’ stories. It enhances them, providing glimpses into the inner lives of those individuals on whom the main characters rely but rarely seek to understand. The show’s pace is languorous, taking its time to explore Hong Kong in ways which many U.S. viewers may not be familiar with. Amidst the grey and green cityscape in which life for locals and expats plays out, massive Umbrella Protests punctuate the show and providing jarring contrast to the seclusion of Mercy’s small apartment and the modern luxury boxes in which Hilary and Margaret live. The show is a visual delight but doesn’t spend all its time on such treats; Expats also offers some salient thoughts, if not conclusions, about the business of living life amidst tragedy.
While the three key performances, along with Brian Tee’s portrayal of Clarke and Jack Huston’s portrayal of David, anchor the show, they could have been brought out of these talented actors by other directors as skillful as Wang. What really separates this project from other prestige dramas guided by excellent creative teams lies in the series’s penultimate episode. Zooming out to include perspectives beyond those of the expats, Wang uses this episode to showcase her talents for setting a mood. The episode is, in a way, even in tone; none of the stories are necessarily hopeless, yet all are grounded in realism that questions how much control individuals can really exercise over their own reality. Some characters, like Olivia, ponder whether a rupture in her unsatisfactory home life would truly improve her situation. Others, like Charly, attempt to find enjoyment amidst the uncertainty of the Umbrella Movement protests until realizing that this enjoyment is incompatible with her ideals. Idealism also defines Charly’s classmate’s story as he is soon reckons with the cost of exercising his ideals. The expats, decentered in the narrative but never far from view, rarely contend with the issues faced by the characters Wang focuses on in this stunning episode. This episode deserves its own review; shorn from the other episodes, it could even function as a standalone film with very few changes needed.
Hilary, Margaret, and Mercy, portrayed by Sarayu Blue, Nicole Kidman, and Li-young Yoo, respectively
In reading other reviews of Expats, some critics have expressed frustration with the slow, sometimes arduous, pacing. While I agree that certain scenes drag a little too long, especially in the beginning of the series, this approach often feels like a manifestation of Wang’s commitment to depict the worlds in which her characters inhabit. At times, my interest waned slightly during scenes in which Margaret languished in her Kowloon apartment. Sinking into her grief, we see a woman undone and are soon ready to be spared further glimpses. Margaret’s and Clarke’s visit to the Shenzhen morgue in which a small boy matching Gus’s description has turned up, seems interminable. Yet these scenes round out the characterization and also underpin a core truth the show seeks to deliver: some feelings, grief chief among them, can be nestle so deeply into the psyche that traditional notions of moving on may never take place.
Another point of criticism, one that I heard from friends rather than read from critics, was that the lack of focus on resolving Gus’s disappearance detracted somewhat from their enjoyment of the show, at least in its early episodes. Whodunnits in the realms of the rich are a staple of the huge umbrella that is the prestige drama, and setting one in Hong Kong would likely draw a sizable audience. But with no goal of returning for a second season and a blank canvas provided by the mighty Amazon Studios, Lulu Wang simply sought to create what she wanted to create with Hong Kong as her backdrop. A prestige drama populated by pretty, privileged people is nothing new, and it’s easy to argue that Hong Kong is merely a backdrop for another such series. As NPR’s Linda Holmes puts it “You could pack up this series and fly it to Manhattan, tell the same core stories about these three women (Margaret's loss, Mercy's guilt, Hilary's marriage), and change ... almost nothing.” This isn’t necessarily untrue, but I’d argue that translating the story back to the U.S. would detract from that which the series seeks to demonstrate.
Essie, Margaret’s family helper, and Puri, Hilary’s helper, respectively portrayed by Ruby Ruiz and Amelyn Paredilla
Each woman’s alienation from the setting exposes something about them and their situation. For Margaret, Hong Kong transformed from an impediment to her career and her role as a mother to the location of her greatest failure and tragedy. Now, it’s a prison cell within which she remains trapped alongside the ghost of her missing son. Had this tragedy happened in New York, Margaret would have had more to allow her to move on in a traditional sense; she could turn to her career and established community instead of continuing her fruitless search or rotting in her Kowloon apartment. For Hilary, Hong Kong is representative of freedom from her family and from feeling othered in her own country. In Hong Kong, her ethnic background means almost nothing compared with her nationality and salary, paid in U.S. dollars. Mercy’s relationship with Hong Kong, like Hilary’s, centers on her flight from a former life. Unlike Hilary, however, Mercy isn’t fleeing from specific trauma. Instead, she wants what she labels as a fresh start, somewhere where she isn’t defined by her former actions or by her difficult relationship with her mother. This blank slate allows Mercy slightly more interaction with the city than the other two main characters. Mercy, the most connected to Hong Kong by virtue of her life as a service worker and her relationship with Charly, is accused consistently of being a tourist and does nothing to remedy this status. Her self-centeredness is on full display even when she spends time at a protest site.
Living on the Peak, the affluent hilltop expat colony, provides Margaret and Hilary the ultimate mechanism for avoiding interaction with the city in tangible ways beyond the economic value they extract from it by working there. Expats questions the moral implications of being an expat: is it a predatory practice? Is the role Hilary and Margaret play any different than that played by Olivia, Hilary’s friend living in a large house with a leaking roof who isn’t an expat? By existing in a world that feels cut off from their homes, each character must contend with the choices they make without the buffers that would be present on their home turf. In effect, the questions Expats asks about expats themselves remain unanswered; even if the existence of expats is predatory, the world keeps turning and such questions gets lost in the endless shuffle that Wang artfully uses to conclude the final episode. Our three characters, like most expats in their respective cities, have negligible impact on their adopted place; how much impact that place has on an expat however, is entirely dependent on the conditions which define that person’s life. At a minimum, Expats reminds us that we exist in communities teeming with life unseen to us as we go through the motions, discover the unknown, or battle demons. Thanks to our personal agency, we can often choose the degree with which we interact with the milieus in which we live.
Mercy and Charly; Bonde Sham plays Charly; I hope to see more of her in future.
