‘You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious,’ writes Hemingway in the ultimate expat novel, The Sun Also Rises. The invective continues, ‘You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.’ 

The same can be said of the characters in Janice Y K Lee’s second novel, The Expatriates. Instead of young Americans running wild in Paris and Pamplona, Lee shadows three better-behaved American women in Hong Kong. Two of them live in affluent, insular Repulse Bay, ‘a particularly homogeneous enclave of