Home Leave: A Novel (19 page)

The second week “home,” we achieve enlightenment one evening in our backyards. It occurs during happy hour, a ritual imbibing treasured by both our parents and ourselves. The harsh realities of the day, the fact that we don’t know where we’re going in life, the empty malls, the excessive air-conditioning, our friends back in the States, all fade with the dying light, and with our bracing gin and tonics. It’s the gin and tonics that clue us in, ring a bell in our heads. E. M. Forster, we think. Eureka!
A Passage to India
. That’s what we’re dealing with. We cast a glance at our manicured grounds, our panting dogs, our fine silks, our sweating glasses. We’ve reached the conclusion, we gravely tell our parents, drawing courage from the dark and the drink, that you two are neocolonial alcoholics. We say it with the slightly apologetic air of doctors informing their patients of a serious disease. We do not include ourselves in this diagnosis, although we follow our pronouncement by drawing a long sip of the G and T. Silence. Did they not hear? Then our mothers’ voices, weary, hurt, carrying over the lawn: “Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?”

We don’t graduate with everyone else. We do six-month stints as reporters in Cambodia, congratulating ourselves that we’ve found an expat occupation that is honorable, ignoring the fact that most of the male reporters have prostitute girlfriends. Back in college, we join the newspaper staff and begin writing features, which we find much easier than term papers. Our off-campus apartment bedrooms are covered in museum posters with Chinese calligraphy and Nepalese prayer flags. We walk around campus with Cambodian hammocks that we hang from trees in front of the library until the police ask us to take them down and give us a citation.

We have grown up. We do not go to classes in pajamas anymore. We are applying for journalism jobs, fellowships, anything. After weeks of waiting, suffering through rejections from Cambridge University and internships at
The New Yorker
, we get a packet in the mail that looks promisingly thick. We learn that we’ve received a scholarship for a year abroad, a language fellowship, in the country where we lived before we went to college. We call our parents. We’re going home, we say. But we just moved back to the States, to be close to you again, they protest. You mean corporate headquarters, we remind them.

Three months later, we’re on a plane. We’re twenty-three, college graduates, determined to live overseas differently than our families did before. After two weeks of intensive language classes (surrounded now, not by kids whose parents spoke the language when they were growing up, but by white kids from Ohio who actually paid attention in college language classes), we desperately miss the American Club.

We drive past the club sometimes now, on our way to other destinations. We’re no longer members, and no longer allowed inside, but we cast hungry looks at its gates and imagine the swimming pool and the grounds within: the diving board, the turquoise water, the mango granitas, the nachos. The dining room with hamburgers and spaghetti, blond families with kids looking like drowned rats, fresh from the swimming pool, the shared-sympathy smiles from one American parent to the next, scanning the menu before placing their orders, then leaning back, assured of imminent French fries and unquestioned belonging.

W
hen I moved back to Shanghai after college, for a language-study fellowship, I thought I was going home for good. Eager to immerse myself in Mandarin and certain that my Chinese alter ego, Li Ya, would blossom, I forgot that I was white and that I’d never learned how to use chopsticks properly. The pipe dream that Shanghai could be a permanent home lasted for slightly under three years, and I was gone again.

Now I was in Berlin, where I had landed via a German boyfriend, Dieter. I had met Dieter in Beginning Chinese Literature classes at Fudan University. We both liked Lu Xun’s short stories and had both been scolded for writing “creative” essays.
Try mastering the language first,
Zhu Lao Shi, our teacher, had dryly written on our papers. We had planned on spending the summer in Berlin, where Dieter was from, and returning to Shanghai in August. But when August arrived, I found that I had fallen in love with Berlin and out of love with Dieter.

Moreover, with two months’ distance from Shanghai, I realized I was never going to be accepted as a local, no matter how convincing my Mandarin tones were when I ordered
cai bao
from a street vendor. When Sophie, Mom, Dad, and I had first moved to Shanghai, in 1993, I had never tried to belong to the city or the country; all my energies were concentrated on fitting in at the American school. A decade away from the city, in Singapore and the States, had sharpened my missing for it; I had been naive enough, at the end of college, to mistake that missing for homesickness. Only to realize, upon my arrival, that China would never let me call it home, the way some lovers blanch at the word “boyfriend.” Case in point: during countless taxi rides through the city, the drivers would ask me where I was from. “Here,” I would say, which they treated like the punch line of a great joke. Of course, had I truly been
from
Shanghai, I would have answered in Shanghainese, not Mandarin; I would have been Chinese, not pale and blond.

In contrast, Berlin was the ideal compromise, I thought: it wasn’t the States, where I felt like an outsider but looked like everyone else; nor was it Asia, where I felt like I belonged and looked like I didn’t. In Berlin, I looked German (until I opened my mouth), and the fact that I’d been born in Hamburg made me feel like I’d come full circle in a satisfying way. Unfortunately, being born in Germany hadn’t granted me citizenship, but who was I to complain? There were plenty of second-generation Turkish kids living in the city who had to choose between Turkish and German citizenship when they turned eighteen. This fact hinted at some of the antiquated notions of German blood-belonging that I disliked, but since when had I wanted things to be easily comprehensible?

Good luck with that, Dieter told me on the day he flew back to China, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. Did you ever consider the possibility that you’re just terrified of commitment? I didn’t answer, and he walked out.

But of course I was looking for commitment—just of the geographical, rather than the romantic, variety. To put it simply, I was looking to stay put. After years of shuttling back and forth between continents, after the failed experiment of Shanghai, I wanted to try out permanence in the country of my birth, something that customs arrival forms in airports worldwide had been hinting at for years. Germany was also the only country I had ever lived in without Sophie. Perhaps living here again, I thought, would teach me how to live without her again.

But even more than Germany, I felt called to Berlin. The subway sounded like the Tower of Babel. Barely anyone was
from
Berlin. Despite this fact, or because of it, everyone was nonetheless eager to claim some kind of belonging (think JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”). The city threw so many multicultural street festivals they put the token Kwanzaa songs found in American elementary school Christmas recitals to shame.

Of course, Berlin’s hedonistic cosmopolitanism was complicated by its pitch-black national past. For every all-night dance party there was a shiny copper cobblestone with the names of the murdered dead; for every art installation there was an abandoned lot filled with broken glass (and sometimes they were the same thing); for every mixed-race couple making out on the banks of the Landwehr Canal there was an old German pair walking home with shoulders sagging from memories much heavier than their groceries. Germans have never been accused of being a lighthearted people, and many wore their history like a hair shirt. As it should be, some would say.

I didn’t know. But to a certain degree Berlin’s schizophrenic struggle was familiar to me. It was another kind of home leave, an exhausting internal commute between life and mourning. The grief and guilt of surviving Sophie were all around me in Berlin—in every sad-eyed statue, empty church, crippled Jewish graveyard, awkward silence. They were not the same, of course. But they spoke to one another.

A place’s pain can make your own more bearable. The throbbing ache of Phnom Penh, where I had done a reporting stint during college, made mine seem normal, as did Shanghai’s still-gaping sores from the Cultural Revolution. Ann Arbor, by contrast, where I had attended college, was entirely too cheery, too whitewashed, too good-natured, too American.

Coming to Berlin was like leaving a Hallmark store in a suburban strip mall for a walk in deep woods. I left plastic expressions of sympathy for a society with sadness in its marrow. Everywhere I looked in Berlin I saw monuments to nightmares, wars, and walls. But things were growing, too: wildflowers bursting from concrete, blackberries drooping over S-Bahn tracks, ivy coating whole apartment buildings, barely hiding the bullet holes.

Despite my initial ambitions to conquer the city as an energetic, no-holds-barred Brenda Starr, a series of reality checks had diverted this career goal such that now, nine months in, I had instead joined the invisible, yet very vocal ranks of the city’s English-language voice actors. Each week, I filed multiple MP3s, not news stories.

The foreign-correspondent dream had sputtered and died at the realization that there were thousands of others like me, namely, overqualified and underemployed English lit majors who had just gotten off the plane from Brooklyn and Little Rock. (The ones from Little Rock were the ones to fear: they were hungrier for success.) The difficulty of the various tasks I had set for myself after Dieter’s departure (the first: forgetting him by becoming a wildly successful reporter) became clear during an unpaid internship at the Associated Press’s Berlin bureau.

The other intern and I were like the before and after versions of a journalism school makeover, with me being the before case. I was painfully shy and counted down the minutes to lunch. Kendra was outgoing, winning, well dressed, and constantly pitching stories that ran in newspapers worldwide the next day. She casually called up local police chiefs and, in fluent German, demanded to know why justice had not been served to the neo-Nazis taunting Turkish shopkeepers; I reluctantly dialed the Berlin zookeeper and asked for a quote (in English) about Knut, Berlin’s beloved polar bear. Whenever I had to do a phone interview, I typed out all my questions beforehand, including an introductory paragraph at the top with my name spelled out, in case I forgot it. All in all, it wasn’t pretty, and I was relieved when the six weeks were over. Kendra, by contrast, stayed on at the AP and is now working for them in Cairo, last time I checked.

I got into the voice-acting racket through a friend of a friend, the way most things happened in Berlin. It was astonishingly simple. Show up, read into a microphone for thirty minutes, get paid a hundred euros. I’d always been the dork in elementary school who would volunteer to read out loud from the textbook and obnoxiously continue reading beyond my assigned paragraph until the teacher intervened, so this job was perfect. Occasionally the scripts would be a little bit odd, plagued by my boss’s non-PC policies: I would get calls every now and then to do African American accents, and once was asked to read from
A Raisin in the Sun
. “Mama! Sister! There’s a white man at the door!” I practiced it for Mom over Skype and she said I sounded like the whitest black person she’d ever heard. I felt squeamish doing the recording, but I needed the money.

It was a strange feeling to let your voice float away from you, to be captured on an English-language instruction CD for bored middle schoolers staring longingly out the window in a hot May classroom somewhere in Bayern. After a couple months, I received my first call to audition for a video game voice-over, and showed up with five other American women in a slick lobby in downtown Berlin. I hadn’t known that Berlin had slick lobbies: it seemed the city was driven purely by tourism and shabby coffee shops, where aspiring freelance writers would spend all day trying to come up with a good lead on another euro doomsday story, or the revival of 1920s cabaret fashion. But this lobby was the real deal: black leather sofas so shiny they looked wet, an enormous espresso machine, and modernist art so unattractive you knew it was expensive.

I exaggerated my acting experience in the interview, which was conducted in front of six executives in suits: four men and two women. At one point, after running through my CV, they asked me to demonstrate a dying sound, like I had been stabbed. I groaned obligingly and gasped shallowly. I was also asked to say, with wonder: “Look! On the horizon! The glowing tower of Trenea!” and “This is one bitch you won’t mess with, Wrath Master!” I thought I did especially well on that last line. They said they would call me in a week.

I was in German class, reading the lines of a travel agent from Munich in our
Deutsch ist super!
textbook, when they called back: I’d gotten the part. They emailed me the script and said I should prepare to come in four days later. I pored over the lines and read a few of them out loud to my German roommate, Marie, which prompted a long, boring diatribe from her on the misogynistic nature of video games. I could see what she meant with my character’s looks, however. They’d sent me a sketch of Lavender Lopez over email: tight black leather pants, high-heeled boots, an eye patch, and light purple hair. Lavender Lopez was not rewriting any heteronormative notions of beauty. But as an imaginary alter ego, she was pretty badass.

I practiced for Mom over Skype, leaving out some of the more offensive lines, and she said I sounded great. Now that I was in Berlin, Mom and I spoke at least three times a week: aside from one or two girlfriends from college, she was the only person I kept in touch with from the States. Mom’s and my relationship had gone from a tense, mostly silent standoff in high school and college to a best-girlfriend bond now. After having lost Sophie, after moving around so much, after breaking up with Dieter, I liked that I didn’t have to explain anything to Mom; that I could talk about the Botanic Gardens in Singapore or about something Sophie had done in Shanghai, and Mom would know exactly what I was talking about, wouldn’t take on a weird pitying tone that even my closest friends back home still did. She could also empathize with what was so maddening about Germans (their nitpickiness) and what was so great about them (their moral aversion to small talk).

The only thing I didn’t like, speaking with Mom, was how hungry I was for her approval, for her empathy. Since she was the only one I trusted to
get it
, the times when she didn’t would be extremely painful, and I never felt so foreign, or so alone, as when that happened. It usually came up when I would talk about how much I wanted to settle in Berlin. For our family, the notion of living overseas had always been paired with the unspoken assumption of an eventual move back to the States, as certain a belief for most expats as heaven for most Christians. That was the logic behind home leave every summer, to remind you of what you were missing and where you were really from.

But I didn’t have home leave anymore. I didn’t have the money for it, and even if Mom and Dad were happy to pay for my flights back to Madison, where they were now, what would I do there the whole summer? My work was in Berlin, I told Mom, trying to convince myself.

“Is there a chance they’ll hire you full-time?” Mom asked, and her question echoed all the voices of doubt in my own head. How long could I keep this gig going? Then she and I would fall into an uneasy silence, or what I thought was an uneasy silence, until it just turned out to be a Skype delay.

But the studio was happy with my performance as Lavender, and I was soon assigned several more roles. Biking through Berlin, my head was filled with aggressive, staccato phrases (“Make my day, sad sack!”), and words like “flamethrower,” “ballbreaker,” and “Geronimo.” I thought about starting to play video games myself, to go more deeply into the roles, but I ultimately decided that the worlds I imagined were even more intense, and I didn’t want to put up with Marie’s teasing.

Around that time, I also joined a singing group. I viewed the group as one of the classic contradictions of German culture, which I loved. Here was a people that would come up with the most complex philosophies and entangled explanations for personal motivations or desires (Marie regularly quoted Wittgenstein when talking about troubles with her boyfriend), yet they were also prone to delightfully goofy behavior, like ordering cocktails with names like “Watermelon Man” (straight men included), wearing Speedos (ditto), or requesting two scoops of the popular ice cream flavor “Smurf.” And several of the smartest, most compelling Germans I knew, who had come to Berlin from across the country, from both sides of the Wall, had a weekly singing group, the sort of equivalent of a piano bar, where we would show up each Thursday in one girl’s kitchen to sing songs like “Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Favorite Things,” and “Eternal Flame.” The group had originally been formed because one of them had read an article suggesting that singing helped alleviate depression. The fact that it was all so premeditated struck me as hilarious and yet very relatable. Somehow, the earnestness I saw all around me in Berlin, the commitment to trying to make yourself feel okay, because happiness was hardly a given, felt like home, and much more peaceful than the expectation that joy be the status quo, which always felt like an unbearable pressure in the States.