‘Expats’ Episode Puts the Spotlight on Hong Kong’s Domestic Underclass
[This story contains spoilers through the fifth episode of Expats, “Central.”]
A show called Expats understandably focuses on the cosmopolitan lives of those privileged enough to make their fortunes abroad, and for most of the Amazon limited series’ six episodes, it does just that, following neighbors Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and Hilary (Sarayu Blue). The two wealthy women live in Hong Kong’s tony Victoria Peak neighborhood, as well as Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), the American drifter who complicates both of their lives. To recap: Mercy was tasked with watching Margaret’s two sons during a night market outing when the younger one disappeared. A year later, Gus is still missing, and Mercy is having an affair with Hilary’s husband, David (Jack Huston).
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But the fifth episode drifts away from the trio of protagonists to focus on characters that have heretofore existed in the background, sometimes literally. “Central” (each episode of Expats is named after a geographically significant area in the region) opens in the titular business district on a Sunday, when the city’s hundreds of thousands of domestic “helpers” – mostly women from the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries – congregate in the empty plazas on their day off.
The camera soon finds a familiar face: Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), Hilary’s helper, now taking center stage with her own aspirations of winning a local singing contest. She confidently tells her skeptical peers that “Ms. Hilary” is not like the other employers – she’s more of a friend, one who has already granted her the time off to audition. Meanwhile, Hilary meets with her friend Olivia (Flora Chan), an upper-class local who is aghast at her plans to divorce David. Margaret’s husband Clarke (Brian Tee) gets a visit from Pastor Alan (Blessing Mokgohloa) as the family contemplates moving back to the States – to the quiet relief of their helper, Essie (Ruby Ruiz), who has not seen her own children and grandchildren in the Philippines in years.
Throughout the city, umbrellas fill the streets. They’re not just there for the impending storm; they are symbols of resistance in the pro-democracy protests that took place throughout Hong Kong in 2014, the year in which Expats is set. “Central” acknowledges the real-life Umbrella Movement through the eyes of one worried local single mom (Maggie Lee), whose son Tony has quit college to fight on the front lines.
As the typhoon rages on through the night, these supporting and new characters come to the forefront: Hilary, smarting from a recent fight with David, coaxes Puri to drink with her, giving her helper a makeover and one of her formal gowns and encouraging her to practice her audition song. Olivia – who as it turns out is de facto separated in all but name – spends a lonely night in her mansion with a leaky roof and contemplates leaving, while Tony’s mom finishes her janitorial shift in a grocery store and then goes searching for her son.
But in the bleak light of the morning, all returns to the status quo. Tony’s mom is informed that her son has been arrested; Olivia’s moment of vulnerability has passed, and she is back to interviewing new helpers for her home. Margaret breaks the news to Essie that they have decided to return to America – and they would like Essie to join them, taking her even farther away from her own home. As Puri excitedly prepares for her audition that morning, doing her makeup as Hilary taught her the night before, her employer wakes up with a hangover and calls for her breakfast. Wordlessly, Puri hangs up her formal gown.
“That episode in particular, it’s not my story; it’s Puri’s story, it’s Essie’s story,” Blue tells The Hollywood Reporter. “That episode is the actual show, in my opinion. You can’t tell the story of Expats without having Essie’s and Puri’s experience.”
With its focus on new characters and self-contained arcs, “Central” represents the most marked departure from the source material, Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates, which contains no mention of the Umbrella Movement and keeps each chapter’s perspective squarely on Margaret, Hilary and Mercy. Creator Lulu Wang walked The Hollywood Reporter through some of the creative decisions behind the penultimate installment, which at 101 minutes functions as a standalone feature within the series (it was screened on its own at Toronto, BFI London Film Festival, SCAD and the Boston Asian Film Festival ahead of Expats’ premiere last month).
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Why did you decide to devote this episode to the perspective of people other than the protagonists, such as the helpers and the locals?
It’s this fine line. Are we indulging in this expat world by being in this bubble? Are we critiquing it? Everything is like, “It’s a social commentary on wealth,” or “It’s a celebration of it.” I didn’t want to do either. I wanted to show people from all different walks of life dealing with their own dramas and failing at making the best choices oftentimes. It was just about intersection.
Margaret and Hilary both think they have this familial or friendly relationship with their helpers, yet at the end of this episode, they both break their helpers’ hearts without even realizing it. Talk about the thematic connection between Essie and Puri’s storylines.
So often what happens is a breaking of the spirit as opposed to a breaking of something obvious, like an insult or throwing things. That happens too, and there are these extreme forms of abuse, but I wanted to stay away from that. We saw helper’s rooms in Hong Kong when we were location scouting that are above the pantry, like the dog had a larger room than where their domestic worker was sleeping. Above the canned goods, like you pull out a shelf and that’s where she sleeps, and it’s hidden away. I could’ve done that, but that’s not what I wanted to explore. I wanted to show the casualness of [classism], ways in which even when people are so well-intentioned you can be really careless, and the power dynamics don’t change.
Many people feel like, “Well, this is the system, this is how it works, and so it’s OK here.” I’ve seen that a lot with Western expats who many times would be perhaps morally opposed to [the domestic help practice] because the society morally opposes it, [but] when they go to another society that embraces it, it’s like, “Well, the locals treat them even worse, at least we do X, Y and Z,” like there’s a justification. And we do have a local wealthy family, we never see their helper because she’s fled, but we hear about what happened. I wanted to show that it wasn’t just coming from expats, that this kind of negligence and abuse comes from all different sides.
You’re referring to Hilary’s friend Olivia, a wealthy Hong Konger who is horrified that Hilary is going to get a divorce, even though she and her own husband have secretly been living separate lives for quite a while.
So much of this episode and the episode before are ways in which our characters are trapped: the trappings of their life, their society. Episode four, they’re literally trapped in a physical location, like the morgue, and episode five deals with the trappings of society, of our psychology, of our culture. Just because you’re wealthy doesn’t mean that you’re happy. I know people say that all the time, but I wanted to interrogate that and show ways in which she is trapped by her lifestyle, by the life that she’s built. There’s a jealousy when she hears from Hilary that she’s just going to divorce. But when you see someone else doing the thing that perhaps you’re afraid to do, it gets her thinking. “What if I take charge and free myself and leave?”
[Olivia’s storyline] is a psychological journey about a woman packing who then ultimately puts all the clothes back. I didn’t think about this while writing it because we were a [writers] room full of women, and now I’m like, “What do men think? ‘Nothing happens, what are these scenes?! It’s a non-event! It’s a woman who packs her bags and then unpacks them!’” (Laughs.) But that feels so powerfully female to me. It makes me laugh because it’s so ridiculous too. [Olivia’s husband] said he’s going to take care of the ceiling, the rain’s coming through, which is very common in Hong Kong, and then she’s the one left to deal with it. And she’s leaving! She could go, “What do I care, this is not my house anymore,” and yet she can’t. She can’t escape that sense of, “This is still my home, my responsibility.”
The novel focuses on American expats who are white, yet you’ve chosen in this adaptation to make Hilary and Clarke expats of color, and many of this episode’s spotlight characters are also outsiders to Hong Kong who are neither Chinese nor white: Essie, Puri and Pastor Alan. Why is that?
It wasn’t that I set out intentionally to challenge expectations; it was just a reflection of what I knew to be true. I myself am an expat, yet people don’t think of me as such. So who are the expats? There are Black people, Indian people, Indian American people.
I’d love to say I had this goal of giving opportunities to people, but the truth is they are the opportunity. It’s interesting as a storyteller to reflect on a part of society that we don’t get to see very often. So I’m not doing it to give anybody anything. I’m doing it because it’s really fulfilling for me as a storyteller, and they give me so much. They tell me about things in the world that I didn’t know about. I learned for example so much about Sikh culture through [writer and supervising producer] Gursimran Sandhu. Hilary and that family and the Path prayer ceremony that they do, that’s all from her. Her parents came to set and helped make sure that every part of it was accurate, and I got to learn about that.
We see the Umbrella Movement in this episode via Tony, who is passionately giving up his education in order to be on the front lines, and his mother, a working single woman who is worried about his safety and his future. Why did you choose to approach this massive real-life geopolitical story in this way?
I didn’t want it to be a backdrop, but it’s also not the main storyline. Nicole Kidman didn’t come to me to make a documentary about Hong Kong politics. So, how do I balance both of these things that are so disparate from each other? It feels so important that they both be in this world because it speaks volumes to who’s affected by their time and place. Expats are in a bubble: They’re not actually impacted, they’re not voting, it’s not their home so their home isn’t being threatened. And so the way I approached developing that storyline was really looking at how Hong Kong as a character parallels the journey of these women: The sense of resilience; the lack of control; the tremendous changes that are right on the horizon; the fears; the hopes.
I also thought a lot about outside the world of the series. The show is set in 2014. A lot of Hong Kongers have since left Hong Kong, and so they themselves have become expats in the world, or immigrants or whatever term you decide to call them. And so it’s about diaspora. I thought about them watching this moment, and what they might think about it, and if they might remember themselves in it. I consulted with a lot of our crew who were in Hong Kong in 2014, who were very much a part of the movement and wanted to capture the color and the feeling and the sense of hope that they had.
Expats will release its sixth and final episode on Amazon Prime on Feb. 23.
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