I was a Hong Kong expat and toxic dynamics of Kidman’s hit ring true

The staircase was shiny mahogany, the décor opulently colonial and the view a picture postcard cliché of the world’s most famous harbour. As I tiptoed up the stairs to my very first expat party at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, nerves pulsed through me. The club’s elegant chart room was full of equally opulent women, but their conversation made me want to turn tail and flee.

‘I’ve told him time and time again,’ I overheard a tall, willowy blonde saying, ‘I simply can’t cope with only two maids. Three children, three maids, the maths is simple.’

It was the first of many similar comments I overheard that night – my first social gathering after moving to Hong Kong with my husband for his job.

And the sounds of their entitled voices came rushing back as I watched Nicole Kidman’s hit drama Expats this week. Launched in a blaze of glory with Kidman in a backless Versace dress at the premiere last month, it quickly became the second most-watched programme globally on Amazon Prime.

The six-part series — the first of a much-anticipated collaboration between Amazon and Kidman’s own Blossom Pictures — follows the lives of a close-knit expatriate community in Hong Kong, where affluence is celebrated, friendships are intense but short-lived and the highs and lows of personal lives are played out publicly – then gossiped about; a 360,000-strong community (4.6 per cent of the 7 million total population, though only about 10,000 are Britons) that I got to know very well during my four years there.

Kidman plays Margaret, who gives up her high-flying career as a landscape architect to follow her husband’s relocation to Hong Kong. The plot, which focuses on the disappearance of Margaret’s youngest son, is set against a backdrop of listless, cossetted wives, surrounded by maids and chauffeurs, who spend their time shopping and attending soirees.

In the opening scene, Margaret is asked whether she works. ‘I did. I do. I’m not a housewife!’ she snaps back, before acknowledging, ‘It’s a touchy subject’.

This struck a nerve with me; during my time in Hong Kong, I too had to scale back my work as a travel writer: like many women there I was a ‘trailing spouse’, an official term for the partner of a worker on an expat package. I was not allowed a working visa by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, so any writing I did was on the down-low and paid into my UK bank account. 

There were many like me in the glossy hillside apartments above the Central business district. Some, like me, looked upon it – perhaps disingenuously – as a holiday from their real life: the perfect time to have children; others were clearly frustrated by the enforced career break, the loss of the kudos they had earned back home.

‘Trailing spouse! I hate it!’ I remember one friend saying, fresh from having to give up her job as the high-profile manager of a Michelin-starred restaurant in London because her husband had scored a six-figure position with a Hong Kong investment bank.

‘It makes me sound like such a wet blanket, walking five paces behind my husband: especially since I was the one out in front back home!’

This notion of the bored, dissatisfied expat wife underpins the TV series, with bitchy asides and betrayal visible from the off. From a first scene where Kidman’s character and her erstwhile friend ignore each other in a lift, to Margaret’s husband’s birthday party, where the women gossip and criticise her while eating her canapés, I recognised the toxic dynamics.

When we first arrived in 2000, it felt as though I had stepped into the Far Eastern equivalent of an Evelyn Waugh novel, full of jaded lotus-eaters, and I wasn’t sure I liked the sense of entitlement swilling around me. After all, I wasn’t working and I was the opposite of bored, loving the excitement of a bustling metropolis, the novelty of not having to count our pennies.

I was living the expat dream. I gave birth to both our children in Hong Kong’s Ritz-Carlton of hospitals, The Matilda, where even the fridge in the room was hidden behind teak panelling and described as the ‘champagne fridge’.

Just like the characters in Expats, I went on fancy ‘junk trips’ – sailing out of the Harbour to the golden coves of the New Territories on glamorous three-decked yachts. Expensive restaurant dinners in the downtown area of Wan Chai below Mid-Levels were the norm, along with dancing on the tables in the bars of Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s equivalent of Soho.

But, just as it does for many of the wives in Expats, the devil made work for idle hands.

From that first party at the Yacht Club, I soon learned to recognise the women for whom the lifestyle had palled; for whom the excitements of Hong Kong were no longer compensation for the professional or social progression they felt they were missing out on back home.

The richer they were, it seemed, the idler and more bitchy they became.

Nights out at the China Club, a private members’ club set up by the late socialite David Tang, were particularly fraught. I was once criticised for not dressing smartly enough by an American woman, whose shoes alone were worth more than my entire wardrobe. Another time, I saw a woman I’d just been talking to slap away the hand of a lavatory attendant who was simply offering a hand towel, saying loudly to a friend: ‘It’s just so annoying when they work for their tips like that, isn’t it?’ as if the attendant couldn’t hear her.

One feature, echoed in the drama, is how quickly friendships inside the expat community are made and rapidly deepened. I am godmother to three children of friends from back then. In all three cases, we ended up drinking together until the early hours of the morning on our first night of meeting. As no one tended to stay more than a few years there was a sense of not wasting time.

However this rapid intimacy could curdle equally quickly: friends of ours met a couple at dinner, liked them, went home with them for a nightcap. Before they knew it, they were being invited to join them between the sheets.

‘We’d heard the rumours of rife swinging, but from sipping to suggested sex in about five minutes flat was still a shock,’ they said afterwards.

As in most expat communities, there was a sense you were playing away, consequence-free, that sometimes led to behaviour you’d never have been allowed to get away with back home because your family or neighbours would have got to hear about it. Coupled with the tedium of not working, this ‘freedom’ could corrupt.

We heard tales of swingers’ parties happening across whole floors of respectable 5 star hotels in the central business district of Causeway Bay, of husbands moving their maids into the main bedroom once their wives and families were safely packed off back to Europe for the summer.

And there was a famous, mostly American, enclave called Discovery Bay, where the tennis pros were known to score love-all with their ‘me-time’ mum clients all year round, as if straying was simply the fashionable thing to do to stave off the boredom.

Twenty years on, it would seem from watching Expats, which finishes this week, that not much has changed. Nicole Kidman’s glossy character has little to do but wallow in grief and guilt over the tragedy that has engulfed her family. She and her fellow American expatriates are delineated against that familiar Hong Kong backdrop of lavish parties, beautiful apartments and fabulous wardrobes, but all is not as it seems: the dark side lurks particularly close to the surface of this perfect life.

Luckily, my early exposure to the sour side of privilege taught me to avoid ostentatious gatherings as often as I could; the friends I ended up with were anything but ‘tai-tais’ (as the spoilt, overprivileged women were known). They were equally privileged but with a drive and joie de vivre I could embrace. It’s interesting to note that my friends who are back all now work with as much gusto as they ever did, despite their ‘holiday’ in Hong Kong, whereas the tai-tais who returned all too often found it difficult to slot back into a working life.

When I lived there, I was always fascinated by a third level of demographic beyond the expats and the Mainland and Hong Kong Chinese: that of the Filipina domestic helper community that underpins the entire bubble lifestyle of their expat employers.

In my day we joked that perhaps our children loved their helpers more than they did us: in Expats, there is a sense that this has developed into a real paranoia.

A few of my friends still live in Hong Kong. They have been awaiting Kidman’s show with interest but, alas, will not be allowed to see it. Amazon has agreed not to show it in the territory, probably because it contains scenes of street protest against the government. Actually, apart from some visually stunning shots showing some rain-soaked moments from the 2014 ‘umbrella revolution’, when the people of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest the inroads into political freedoms and freedom of speech by the Chinese government, the choppy and increasingly prohibitive geopolitics of Hong Kong since its 1997 handover to China are little more than occasional background noise to the main drama of the expat world.

‘Money talks,’ shrug my friends in Hong Kong, when I ask them about this. ‘It always has,’ explains one. ‘The general Hong Kong economy may be suffering, the expat packages are getting a little smaller, the political freedoms narrower, but, as much as ever, Hong Kong is all about the excesses of wealth from a high-end minority.’