Home Leave: A Novel (23 page)

But the funny thing is, I’d been jealous of her, too. I mean, I wasn’t as hung up on our differences as she was, but even that preoccupation of hers was something, I admit, that I envied a little bit in her; she had a focus, a quietness, a way of overthinking that I never had. I mostly saw how adults admired it, because it made her seem smart and more like them. Plus, being older, she got to do everything first: go to school, read, get her period, have a real kiss (with Lane, which I watched with Ana, from behind some bushes, although apparently, according to Leah’s files, we missed the real first one, which took place two days before). I had a just-for-fun kiss before I died, even before Leah’s kiss, which I know would have driven her crazy had she known, a sweet tiny one from a freckled British boy, on my cheek after the sixth-grade school dance, as formal as a handshake. Jonas Crockett. Now an investment banker living in Surrey, last time I checked.

People alive these days are pretty psyched about Facebook, but they should try being dead. Status updates from anyone you feel like accessing, anytime. Mostly I just stay tuned to my family, and Ana, of course. I’ve heard that the less you access the living, the better chance you have of getting to the next level, but I’m not too worried about it. That’s another nice thing about being gone; I used to be crazy about winning everything, whether it was a race down the sidewalk with Leah or a board game. I don’t have that urgency anymore; I just know what I want, like Robo the Elder lying in a sun spot. I also check in on him now and then.

I have a feeling that Leah’s wedding will be one of the last times that I duck back down to be with them. At first, I would go pretty often. I didn’t miss a single family therapy session for the first six months. But it gets more and more tiring, and now I can feel myself losing the knack for the dive, kind of the same way, just at the end of my life, I felt myself moving into adolescence, losing that kid quickness. And then, just on the cusp of it—a few days away from my first period, it turns out; you can read your own files, too—bam, snatched away, who knows why. What with all the knowledge you get up here, that’s nowhere in the data, the
why
. Maybe in the next level. I’m not even sure I want to know.

But I’m excited about Leah’s wedding, maybe even more than she is, because I know what it means for her. And the great thing about being dead, I have to say, is the pure joy you can possess for other people, especially the people you could be kind of annoying to or resentful of when you were alive. I’m not sure where I’ll stand, next to Mom, probably, or maybe I’ll move around during the ceremony, try not to make too much noise, or cast any accidental shadows. I hope they have steak. And dancing, to oldies. And that it’s everything that Leah really hopes it will be, which she won’t even admit to herself. I know my older sister.

And then it’s time, probably, for a little vacation, flitting around to my new favorite places to watch: the North Pole, Chinese construction sites, Costa Rican rain forest. And then there’re some briefings scheduled in September, which I’m looking forward to: it’s a big deal to be allowed to participate. I think I get to do it even earlier than usual because Grand Ada coached me, and I’ve gotten to shadow her on some of her briefings.

After I passed, Grand Ada was the first dead person I met. You’re allowed one person from your life before, a dead family member or a friend, to be your mentor, and Grand Ada chose me. She’s pretty different from how I remember her when we were both alive. As a dead person, she’s a lot more sassy; she makes jokes about how I’m her intern, and talks about which TV actors she would want to sleep with, if she were alive. I was relieved to see Grand Ada, because when you first die, you miss everyone in your family so much, just like they miss you. And even though all the rhetoric down there is about how great it is that the dead don’t feel pain anymore, how they’re in heaven (Yeah, right: I wish! Gummy bears for every meal and no Meditation Instruction ever!), what they don’t know is that pain becomes something we look forward to, or even cling to, because it is, as weird as it sounds, a consolation. Here you see the pain ending; you know it’s being lapped away even as you feel its pang, like the summer days growing shorter on earth. I wanted so badly to tell Leah this, during all those years of racking hurt for her, but there was no way, except to be a breeze in the trees, her favorite song: to inhabit her safest spaces. That’s one thing Meditation Instruction is good for.

The four of us. Leah, Chris, and Elise still look for me, for a second, in restaurants, when they sit down at a table set for four; just as I, sometimes, when waking (again, speaking in metaphor), forget that I’m not in the bed next to Leah, being woken by Mom or Dad for school.

Who knows what the next level is? There are all kinds of rumors flying around. Some say that you totally forget your past, or that you were never a “you” to begin with. Others scoff at that and say that the next stage is gradually losing individual feelings, so that you start to vibrate with everything that’s being felt everywhere. But the guy who said that is a big hippie, everyone agrees. I even heard someone say the next stage is being a house. A house? I don’t know. It’s a little frightening. But I draw courage from Leah, down there, composing an invitation list with Matthias, writing an email to Mom about which poems the pastor should read. I’m glad she’s getting married before I move on. The dead still need the living sometimes, to remember what choice feels like, just as they still look to us, the dead, to enter their own inevitability.

Many thanks to—

My parents, Karen and Steve Sonnenberg, for enduring interminable living room readings when I was a kid, for patiently repeating my name until I looked up from books, and for their deep underground river of love and support.

My extended family, the Sonnenbergs and the Stevenses, for giving me a fierce sense of family ties and belonging, no matter where we were in the world.

My agent, Jenni Ferrari-Adler, for believing in
Home Leave
, offering invaluable writerly wisdom, and, along with the rest of the Union Literary team and its subagents, helping this book find its homes.

My editor, Helen Atsma, for her scintillating sense of story and character and for her encouragement and presence, even during a rapidly unfolding chapter of her life; and to everyone at Grand Central, for their fabulous work.

My German editor, Ulrike Ostermeyer, for her inspired suggestions and support, and to everyone at Arche Verlag in Germany and AST in Russia.

My closest friends and readers, especially Kayla Rosen, who saw this book through every stage, including the awkward pubescent one, when most would have avoided it in the cafeteria; my Berlin writing group, Emily Lundin, Florian Duijsens, and Clare Wigfall; my CGS gals, Danielle Lazarin, Christina McCarroll, and Mika Perrine; my friends in academia, nonfiction, and design, who offered fresh perspectives, Nasia Anam, R. Jay Magill, and Karen Schramke; and my Minneapolis crew, Bonnie Marshall and R. D. Zimmerman.

My teachers, i.e., heroes: Beth Burney, Kim Gage, Bob Dodge, Ginny Donahue, Patricia Kuester, Gish Jen, Patricia Powell, Lan Samantha Chang, James Wood, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack,
Nic
holas Delbanco, Michael Byers, and Julie Orringer.

My director at HKU, Page Richards, for emphasizing the importance of maintaining a writing practice as a writing instructor, and for grasping my deep connection to Asia.

My lamplighters, Renate Becker and Elizabeth Bowen.

My
Montags Gesangverein
; for giving me a suitcase in Berlin.

My love, Erwin M. Schmidt, for his deep caring and clear-eyed faith.

And to my sister, Blair Sonnenberg, for teasing me, coaxing me, knowing me, and loving me, still.

HOME LEAVE is a work of fiction, but you have also lived all over the world, and sadly lost your own sister at a young age. Why did you decide to use those elements of your personal story in a fictional setting, rather than in a memoir? 

While I initially experimented with writing a memoir and exploring some of the autobiographical material in HOME LEAVE through nonfiction, I was unsatisfied with the results. As I wrote, I didn’t feel that urgent curiosity that is crucial for good writing. Instead, I felt as though I were merely reporting events. I put the memoir aside and turned my attention to short fiction. But I still found myself strongly drawn to the basic setup—an American expatriate family abroad, two sisters, a tragedy—and I decided to start from scratch. This time, I allowed myself the freedom of fiction: I drew on real-life events while creating wildly different scenarios, inventing characters, rewriting outcomes, etc. You might think, given the pain of losing my younger sister, Blair, I would have wanted to make that story end differently for the Kriegsteins and keep Sophie alive. But I wanted to look closely at how a family that lacks a geographical home (and considers the family unit itself “home”) deals with loss when one of its members suddenly dies.

Once I began working on the material as a novel, I started having a lot more fun. One of the chapters I most enjoyed writing was “The People’s Square,” in which Sophie and Leah attempt to run away from home (or “run back home,” as Sophie puts it). Although my sister and I complained a lot about Shanghai to each other, we never put our grievances into action. It was exhilarating to push the emotional truth of that era—our longing for Atlanta and the familiar—into a new “truth,” an imaginary series of events. If plot is simply the result of choices that characters make and the consequences that follow, it holds true that by introducing new choices, and thus new consequences, a new story emerges, and with it, a new family.
 

You live in Berlin, Germany, but you’re a US citizen and your extended family resides in the United States. Where is home for you? Has that answer changed for you over the years? 

I suppose I would say that I have several homes. I’m going on my sixth year in Berlin, which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere (my family lived in Atlanta for five years), and I enjoy the sense of belonging that comes with staying put, even if I still feel foreign on a daily basis. Then again, feeling foreign also feels “homelike” to me! I tend to say I am from Atlanta when people ask, just because it’s the easiest answer, but if my interlocutor has a patient air I might add that my family moved to Asia when I was twelve. Or, if I’m feeling provocative, I may simply answer that I don’t have a home.

Aside from Atlanta and Berlin, I also feel a deep connection to Shanghai and Singapore. Our time in those two cities profoundly challenged and changed me, and I think any place where you experience significant growth also becomes a home. It resides in you, even when you have ceased residing in it. Like the Kriegsteins, my family also traveled to the US in the summer when we lived overseas, and we spent a great deal of time at my grandmother’s mountain house in North Georgia. So the word “home” also strongly evokes memories from that region: piney mountain air, blackberry cobbler, the gentle peaks of the Smoky Mountains, roadside vegetable stands, hot, briny boiled peanuts, and the teasing banter of my cousins and Southern relatives.
 

The Kriegstein family moves from Europe to Asia, with stints in the United States in between. But also explored in the novel is the dramatic shift Chris undergoes as he moves from a rural world to an urban one. Why did this migratory story also interest you? 

I think Americans possess a strong capacity for reinvention. But reinvention is often spurred by both profound confidence—I can be someone else, somewhere else—and profound insecurity—I don’t belong here; I crave transformation. What interested me most in Chris’s character is how the values he learns on the farm and on the basketball court as a kid (work hard, don’t complain, stay humble) remain vital for him as his career accelerates and he becomes a successful, jet-setting CEO. Chris is able to manage his daunting travel schedule and work demands precisely because of this steadiness. He is eager to leave the farm but he never rejects its ethos, whereas Elise winds up shedding many of the Southern Baptist beliefs she grew up with in Mississippi.

You have lectured and written on the subject of Third Culture Kids. Can you explain what a Third Culture Kid is? 

I think that David C. Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, two sociologists who have written extensively on the subject, have come up with a good definition. According to them, “A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.” (Pollock and Van Reken,
Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds
, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2009.)

This definition helps explain why living overseas impacts children much differently than their parents. For Elise and Chris, “home,” for the first eighteen years of their lives, was inarguably Chariton and Vidalia, respectively. For Sophie and Leah, “home” is a flexible construct. To some degree, the same is true of the girls’ trans-national identities, even if they carry US passports. After eighteen years of living across three continents, Leah doesn’t feel fully American, a fact made painfully obvious when she goes to college and finds herself surrounded by “real” Americans. Often, TCKs struggle with feelings of inauthenticity, of not having “full ownership in any one culture,” as Van Reken and Pollock put it. I, too, spent my college years grappling with what the novelist and TCK Joseph O’Neill has called “personal placelessness.” Over time, however, I have discovered just how widespread this phenomenon of displacement is, and have deeply benefited from the community of others who are similarly bereft, and/or similarly searching. Due to globalism’s advance, those who have a secure notion of home are increasingly in the minority, and the rest of us—TCKs, CCKs (cross-culture kids, for example second-generation Chinese Americans), immigrants, exiles, nomads—understand that we may never truly feel “at home” in any one place.
 

One theme of the novel is loss—and how a family moves on, or doesn’t, following a tragic death. And grief and mourning is expressed differently around the world. In your travels, have you found that people from other cultures deal with death in a healthier manner than Americans generally do? Or vice versa? Or is grief simply grief, no matter the place? 

I do think that, to a certain extent, “grief is simply grief” everywhere. When we listen to music, even if we don’t understand the lyrics, we can usually guess whether the song is about budding love or searing heartbreak, because it speaks to shared human emotions. That said, I think grief is closer to the surface in some cultures than in others, where it is neatly tucked away. In Cambodia, for example, where I lived for six months in 2001, the grief from the deaths of millions of Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime was still palpable. When I told people there I had lost a sister, I often received weary, understanding nods—they had lost sisters and brothers themselves, though in much more horrific circumstances. In the US, despite the numerous shelves dedicated to grief and mourning in bookstores, death feels like a much more awkward subject to broach. I’m not sure whether some cultures’ methods of dealing with death are healthier than others; I think each culture’s various methods represent a long evolution of what Lionel Trilling called “manners and morals,” and evince, more than anything, our stumbling bewilderment in the face of death and the loss of those we love. For years, I shunned therapy, perhaps because it seemed too “Western” to me; I’ve since found it to be tremendously life-g
ivin
g.

How does your reading life influence your writing life? Did any books or writers in particular influence you as you wrote HOME LEAVE? 

My reading life strongly influences my writing life. Often, the feeling I have when reading brilliant books is of receiving courage for my own writing. When I was in college, I struggled, as I mentioned above, with the sense of not belonging to any one culture. I was just beginning to write fiction, and this insecurity manifested itself in the fear that I would not be able to set a story anywhere convincingly, because I did not know any one place well enough. But reading Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul, who each had their own struggles with displacement and “belatedness,” as Naipaul puts it, helped me envision a way in which I might draw on all of my homes, rather than dismiss them as long layovers.

Ha Jin and Eudora Welty have also been strongly inspiring authors for me: I admire how they both manage to evoke foreign settings (China and the American South, respectively) for audiences largely unfamiliar with those regions. They succeed in doing so, I believe, for the same reasons: richly drawn characters and a great sense of humor. “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town” by Ha Jin and “Why I live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty are two of my favorite stories, and ones I go back to again and again. Finally, as I was drafting HOME LEAVE and experimenting with which novelistic form best suited my material, I also drew inspiration from authors such as David Mitchell and Jennifer Egan, whose formally adventurous fiction urged me to take my own risks.