In the cinematic hustle of Hong Kong, director Lulu Wang’s new series Expats unveils the lives led by those who have ventured far from the shores of their birthplaces. Delving into the lives of a close-knit expatriate community, the drama explores the mercurial interplay of friendships, rivalries, and secrets among a group of women, their men, and their other loves, after a series of traumas—some reaching back to their childhoods.
Hilary (Sarayu Blue), Margaret (Nicole Kidman), and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) are connected by a tangle of friendship, infidelity, and guilt, each of them working through the aftermath of the trauma mentioned above. If you’ve already watched the first two episodes, you know the disappearance of a child is the accelerant that causes Expats to burn. And it burns slowly, meticulously dissecting Margaret and her husband’s (Brian Tee) reckoning with falling apart and what happens after. At the same time, Hilary and her husband (Jack Huston) are losing each other under the pressure of having a child or not having one. Finally, Mercy, the one grappling with guilt, believes herself to be cursed with bad luck and she acts accordingly—spreading the disease of pessimism to everyone she touches.
I’ll admit, I felt the same as much of the viewing audience, I was disenchanted with the series during episodes 1 and 2. Although the clever opening featured a series of vignettes about “the culprits” of catastrophes, and its cold khaki backgrounds with documentary-styled narration made me sit up, afterward Expats seemed too heavy to float and too flat to rise. What you don’t know—yet—is the series gets better with each episode. This is because of the steady crackle of a fire that is always on the verge of going wild, but never quite escapes the societal hearth that tells women they can only feel so much (at least in public). Expats presents a peculiar type of limbo that comes with being an outsider but also with the entitlement of living within a culture’s upper echelons yet never bothering to learn the language. Those elements become a metaphor for the distance between our leading women and the Hong Kong where they live. Based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s acclaimed novel The Expatriates, the series is less about the geography of its setting and more about the internal landscapes of its characters and how they fit in but stick out inside that world.
In the final episode, Hilary says, “I’m scared, of course, but… There’s a saying about how you can’t discover new lands without the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Expats finds its way into a confessional of sorts or maybe more of an unburdening, but it doesn’t let its characters off the hook. Perhaps this is where it works best. Despite its name, Expats is never pat or superficial. At its best it glories in complexity, at its most tiring it wallows in it. That artful avoidance of resolution makes it fascinating if not buzzworthy.
