The Amazon series “Expats” tells the story of three very different American emigrants in Hong Kong. Their loss connects them.

Scene from the series “Expats” with Nicole Kidman (r.) Photo: Prime Video/ap

“Expats,” Lulu Wang’s new miniseries starring Nicole Kidman, shows what uprooting can be like more than anything else. The literary adaptation of Janice YK Lee's bestseller “The Expatrians” portrays three American women in Hong Kong who, despite completely different life realities, are united by their experience of utter homelessness and lack of support.

Margaret (Nicole Kidman) despairs of her role as an “expatriate wife” who has lost all professional connections due to emigration and at the same time sees her relevance as a mother diminishing. The children prefer that the less strict housekeeper put them to bed and cook for them. Margaret wants to act against this with “clear boundaries” for the housekeeper and at the same time knows that she is starting a fight against the windmills.

Margaret's confidant and closest neighbor, Hilary (Sarayu Blue), confronts a husband who suddenly wants children and finds herself in orphanages holding small children, struggling to feel maternal love and devastated that he doesn't react “like “other women” with big eyes and small hands.

Both women live in an environment of American emigrants, “expatriates” who drink white wine on yachts on weekends, “put ketchup on ramen” and let a team of Chinese employees make their lives go as smoothly as possible. “We deserve it,” Margaret's husband says with his hands in her hair. “It's not real life,” Margaret replies, and she's right.

second class people

Local chauffeurs are on duty in the underground parking lot, local housewives have iced tea in hand when the front door opens. “You have to speak to them strictly, otherwise they won't understand,” explains Margaret, an American friend. She shakes her head with a smile and believes for as long as possible that her housekeeper is actually family.

Except, of course, it isn't. No one wants to admit that drivers and cooks know better than their own spouse about infidelity, crying nights, and broken promises of abstinence. Margaret ends up so caught up in a binary logic of Americans eating snacks and Chinese waiters handing them to her that she asks another Chinese customer at the supermarket to get her corn syrup.

Finally, Mercy (Ji-Young Yoo), American-Korean and one of the women who gives Margaret and Hilary snacks, sneaks into the two women's lives and leaves behind an earthquake that turns all comfort into a crater landscape. She needs a new beginning and that's why she's in Hong Kong, she explains to Margaret. “At 24?” the latter asks, laughing. The fact that youth does not protect against hopelessness can be seen in every expression on Mercy's face.

emotional brutality

The themes of “Expats” are not really new in the representation of female biographies: the decision against motherhood as a taboo that cannot be verbalized, the abandonment of one's own identity in favor of one's husband, the disappearance of one's own children, the attempted upward mobility that fails, because new knowledge cannot compete with old money. However, the intertwining of these women's biographies, in which questions of guilt are completely relegated to the background, is as surprising as the camera angles that provoke scenes whose emotional brutality is almost unbearable.

After “The Undoing” and “Big Little Lies,” Nicole Kidman has finally become a television phenomenon in female-perspective drama with “Expats,” which revolves around women between fulfilling their duties and confronting with sudden catastrophes. When in “Expats” she secretly scrubs the floors of a rented apartment and mixes tears and cleaning water, then “Expats” asks above all what a good life is and how much the comfort of it really has to do with it.