Elise knows that Ivy’s band has gotten good—very good—from the newspaper clippings that Ada sends her in the mail. When Choked by Kudzu comes to Atlanta in 1988 and plays at Chastain, Elise strains to love the music but recoils from the gravel in Ivy’s voice, the obvious fury of the guitar wail. Sometimes Sophie or Leah asks to hear one of Aunt Ivy’s tapes on a road trip to Indiana, to visit the Kriegstein farm, and Elise is always relieved when the tape is finished, the same feeling she gets when the credits finally roll after a particularly violent film.
* * *
What is there to say about the good years, aside from their goodness? Was it a mistake to leave the comfort of Atlanta, to presume that struggle abroad would be better, more interesting, build character? How different was that celebration of hardship from the farming philosophy practiced by Chris’s father, waking up at four every morning to work the land? For that matter, how different was it from Ada’s Southern Baptist soft spot for suffering?
Chris and Elise stay up late into the night discussing the potential move to Shanghai. They are on their fifth year in Atlanta. It is a sultry summer night, and thunderstorms are rolling in. The girls are in bed. Sophie is asleep; Leah is watching the storm tear across the sky, feeling safe under the covers and behind the window. On the front porch below, a little spray from the rain catches Elise’s arm and she moves her rocking chair back. “You and the girls would be able to come back each summer for vacation,” Chris is saying. “There’s an American school there where you could teach and the girls would go to school.”
Elise thinks of Janice Wong, a single mother who teaches language arts at Elise’s middle school, who stayed in Atlanta when her husband went back to Taiwan. That’s how it happens sometimes. But the idea of a move to Asia also excites Elise. She pictures herself walking through fresh produce markets, fingering silk, exploring bamboo groves. “I want to go there and see it first,” she tells Chris firmly, trying to sound ambivalent.
“Of course,” he says. He takes her hand and moves her rocking chair closer to his. A flash of lightning lights up the street and they both shiver. “China would be so much fun with you,” he says. She nods and snuggles into his sweater.
* * *
Let’s say they had stayed in Atlanta. Elise keeps teaching at the middle school, has a brief affair with the art teacher, an amateur photographer who seduces her after a photo shoot of Elise leaning on trees in Piedmont Park. Chris begins working as a consultant for a firm expanding its operations to Siberia; begins learning Russian on tape during the long transatlantic flights. Leah joins the less nerdy of two nerdy cliques in high school, gets an adorably dorky boyfriend, suffers a secret abortion at seventeen, and afterwards breaks up with said boyfriend and starts performing at a lot of poetry slam events. Sophie becomes a popular athlete, remains best friends with Ana, and surprises everyone by choosing a beat-up red pickup truck for her first car, her first sign, at eighteen, of any latent eccentricity. She drives out to Pomona with Ana, who will be studying at UC Santa Cruz.
If they had stayed in the States, would it have happened? Was Sophie’s death a foregone conclusion in any geography, a heart failure built into her system that would have struck her down on any continent? Later, the doctors would say, “There was nothing you could have done. Undetectable heart conditions are just that: undetectable. You mustn’t blame yourselves.” But because the death will happen in Singapore, its occurrence will be unimaginable anywhere else. Thus, in the parallel (irrational) universe, where they stay in Atlanta, where the good years never end, Sophie never dies.
* * *
What remains to be said about the good years, aside from their goodness, is the following: they were unsustainable, and in that sense, never safe. In other words, staying in Atlanta was never a distinct possibility. It was too late for Elise and Chris, having lived in Hamburg and London: by the fifth year, Atlanta had begun to feel boring. They saw it as a particularly pleasant rest stop, a quiet chapter in their cumulative adventure. Even Leah, with eleven-year-old pretentions of grandeur, craved a “next,” though her memories of “before” Atlanta were limited to the backyard in London, fish and chips, and falling blossoms in a British park. Still, Leah grumbled that they always went to the airport to pick people up but never went anywhere themselves. Sophie also longed to fly somewhere far away, because then you got toiletry kits with slippers and toothbrushes, which Chris always brought back for the girls after his trips to Russia. Also, the one time Sophie and Leah had flown to Wyoming for their babysitter’s wedding (visits to Indiana and Mississippi were always limited to road trips in the van), they had been allowed to drink Coke on the flight, which Elise forbade otherwise.
* * *
In Atlanta, Elise is a science teacher. In Shanghai she will be an expatriate mother, then a guidance counselor and a self-appointed disciplinarian who chases the Chinese American and Filipino boys from the basketball court into math class.
In Atlanta, Chris is an out-of-work husband, a dreamer, a regular at the local deli, where he always orders club sandwiches with fries and tries to avoid chatting with the overfriendly waitresses, something he hates about the South: how much you have to talk. It is twenty years too early for smartphones, so Chris brings along biographies of Gorbachev to make him look preoccupied. In Shanghai, Chris will again be a front-runner, a deal maker, a man who gives speeches and unsuccessfully refuses traditional Shanxi grain alcohol, a man in charge of five hundred Chinese American factories without knowing a full five words in Chinese.
In Atlanta, Leah is a fourth grader who curls up in corners, always reading, oblivious to Elise’s calls to supper; who is still not unconvinced that Santa Claus exists (despite Sophie’s pragmatic assertions to the contrary); who wants to become her mother, flaxen blond and beautiful; and who resents Sophie for being poised to assume Elise’s legacy, given the honeyed color of Sophie’s curls and her ease with strangers. In Atlanta, Leah reads in her own closet, hangs upside down with Sophie on the monkey bars, and lets out a scream, sledding down the hill in Piedmont Park the one day a year that it snows. In Shanghai, at twelve, in one year, Leah will be taller than most Chinese men.
In Atlanta, Sophie performs in the talent show alone when Ana suddenly drops out. Sophie dons her black turtleneck and leggings and white gloves and does an interpretative dance to Enya while Ana stays at home with a fake headache. In Atlanta, Sophie is secretly pleased when Leah comes in to sleep in her room, snuggling into the bottom bunk, even if Leah talks too much when Sophie wants to fall asleep. In Atlanta, Sophie collects baseball cards and never wears dresses except to First Pres, the only time Elise puts her foot down. In Shanghai, Sophie will politely reject the advances of a gawky British boy in her class, except for once at a school dance, when she feels sorry for him. She will lose Leah, a little, to Leah’s own teenage loneliness, a territory Sophie will swear to herself never to enter, and which she never will. In Shanghai, Sophie will always order lemon chicken when they go to their favorite restaurant.
* * *
When the Kriegsteins leave Atlanta for Shanghai in 1992, with a six-month layover in Madison, Wisconsin, where Chris’s company headquarters are located, they are desperate to be overseas again. After three months in Shanghai, they will be desperate to return home. Like Persephone’s annual permitted return to her mother aboveground, by the gods in Olympus, the powers that be at Chris’s company will grant the Kriegstein women “home leave” once a year, each summer, when they will stay with friends and relatives, the flights covered by the company. In September they will be forced to leave again, back to China. This habit of home leave will cement Atlanta as “home” in their minds, since they always fly back to the Atlanta airport. In other words, the oblivion of the good years will become dissected, memorized, fossilized, and neatly placed in a glass jar with the label “home.” Years later, as an adult, when asked where she is from, Leah will always say “Atlanta,” as if we come from our joy, as if, aside from their goodness, there wa
s anything to say about the good years.
The Six-Month Layover
Madison, Wisconsin, 1992–1993
After several years in Asia, the Kriegsteins will grow accustomed to long layovers in airports, and Sophie and Leah will rank their favorites. Tokyo is number one, for the Oreo cookies you get in the business-class lounge. Any domestic Chinese airport is a nightmare, where you better pray you don’t have to pee. The Seoul airport is number two, for its emptiness, which allows for races down travelators and hide-and-go-seek among the potted plants at midnight, fluorescent light bouncing off the tiled floor, tired Korean flight announcements echoing in the halls. Singapore is ranked number three, for its excellent gummy bears. The Atlanta airport is actually a million times better than all of them, because it means they are back home for the summer.
But for now, the Kriegsteins’ six-month stint in Madison, in between Atlanta and China, is their first and longest layover, a pregnant pause in a spotless midwestern state before heading off to a Communist one. It resembles spending a good while in the shallow end, trying to gather courage before advancing to the deep part of a chilly pool. Their months in Wisconsin are meant to build up their collective confidence, to reassure themselves that moving isn’t a big deal. We can do this, they think, in September, unpacking boxes in their temporary suburban abode, and then, in April, telling themselves the same thing, as they pack them up again. But moving to Wisconsin in order to prepare themselves for China is about as effective as training for surfing in Hawaii by boogie boarding in the Gulf of Mexico.
* * *
Over the six months, as Leah takes up the trumpet, as Sophie learns to play ice hockey, and as Elise becomes self-conscious of her southern accent, they forget that they will soon be leaving again. The only reminder of this is their biweekly Mandarin lessons at a local Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon, where they struggle, unsuccessfully, to remember the Chinese words for one another: Mama, Baba, Mei Mei, Jie Jie, Nu er, Qi zi, Lao Gong, and console their clumsy mouths with sweet and sour pork and fortune cookies.
In Madison, unlike Atlanta, snow never means you can stay home from school. Oddly, Sophie and Leah spend the six white months eating copious amounts of Dairy Queen Blizzards: Leah orders hers with Nerds, Sophie hers with M&M’S. Elise had anticipated dismissing all midwestern women as repressed robots but is both annoyed and relieved to discover that many are voracious readers and some don’t even shave their legs. Chris, at Logan’s corporate headquarters, being groomed for his upcoming Chinese assignment, looks like a golden retriever who finally, after an agony of searching and frantic paddling in the water, finds his stick and swims back, proud and fully himself. Chris is relieved to be back behind a desk, giving and taking orders, overachieving, and as reticent to talk about more than the weather as all the other German American Lutherans around him.
* * *
On April 17, the date of their departure, there is still snow on the ground. Sophie and Leah receive “Good Luck!” cards with signatures from all their classmates. Elise’s new girlfriends throw her a luncheon with no fewer than ten casseroles. Chris’s secretary shyly presents him with a certificate to Chili’s, which Chris irrationally packs to carry with him to Shanghai, even though it will be three years before a McDonald’s comes to Shanghai, let alone a Chili’s.
The Kriegsteins wave good-bye to Wisconsin with studied ease, board the Northwest plane, and snuggle into business class feeling like celebrities. It is only midflight, four hours from Tokyo, that Elise panics about not having put Ada’s quilts in storage, Leah has a nightmare about getting her period the first day of school, Sophie can’t get warm under the thin Northwest blanket, and Chris stares at his blank yellow legal pad, trying to come up with a stirring speech to give his new employees on the first day. The plane soars serenely over the Pacific Ocean.
Part Three
Mechthild
Outside Hanover, Germany, 1885
Chris’s great-grandmother, Mechthild Mayer, left her village in northwest Germany at the tail end of summer, as winter’s hard red berries popped onto bushes, as the Septemberkraut began to brown. She wept on the train to Hamburg, wept as she boarded the ship that would take her across the Atlantic. She wept across the pitching, aching passage, pausing only to vomit overboard, wipe her mouth with her sleeve, and continue where she’d left off. At first, the other passengers tried to comfort her. When she did not respond, but simply wept harder, they began ignoring her. Her sobs continued, and they grew irritated. They made fun of her or yelled at her to shut up, depending on their moods.
Only a little girl, Katha, seven years old, whose mother was too busy taking care of her brothers and sisters to notice her absence, was kind to Mechthild. For Katha, the crying woman, who sat immobile, aside from her shaking shoulders, was like a giant doll. Katha combed and braided Mechthild’s hair, told her stories as she stroked her hand, and bossed her around, telling her she should find a husband, repeating what she’d heard her mother say about Mechthild to the other women. And Mechthild wept, beautifully. It was what Katha liked most about her.
Just one month earlier, Mechthild had laughed at sentimental women, the kind who cried when the bread came out wrong, or when their sweethearts forgot their birthdays. That was before she had rounded the corner in her small house, where she lived with her parents and her older brother, having forgotten coins for shopping in the village market, and entered her parents’ bedroom, the midmorning sun falling gloriously on the entwined bodies of her mother and Mechthild’s fiancé.
That image, so stunningly, unquestionably lit, like the stained glass scenes of Christ in the village church, which Mechthild had loved to stare at as a child as the preacher droned on, would not leave her vision now. The gray, choppy sea, the rough pine of her bunk, Katha’s large blue eyes and grave gaze, taking her in, merely framed the other image, the horror. When the ship reached New York and the passengers stepped, shakily, onto land, they were so consumed with the details of their new life in the new country—counting offspring, practicing English words, sniffing the air expectantly—that they didn’t notice Mechthild had stopped crying.
Mechthild never returned to Germany, though she spoke German with Gregor Kriegstein, the man she wound up marrying two years later, whom she chose for his doglike loyalty and his toughness. Gregor would make it in America, she could tell. He was a thick branch hanging above her, as she was being swept down a cold current, which she grabbed and held on to. It was she who would have affairs, later, while Gregor was in the fields, after they had moved to a German community in Indiana and begun a small farm. It would occur to her, picking hay out of her hair, lying in a square of hot afternoon light in the barn, in the arms of a neighbor, that her decision to emigrate, the moment she left her parents’ bedroom, had been a melodramatic one. It had just been lust, after all. The long voyage, the years of hard labor and loneliness, the foreign taste of English on her tongue: her mother probably wouldn’t have slept with her fiancé again, after being caught, and Mechthild could have kept her place at the table at Sunday dinners.
Mechthild did not have a child until she was forty-two. She had assumed she was barren until the sperm of the Polish handyman, traveling through town, repairing broken farm machinery in return for a warm meal, was lively enough to rouse her lethargic eggs, and she gave birth to a black-headed screamer the following February, to her blond husband’s resigned suspicion and to her great joy.
* * *
What would Mechthild Mayer have said, watching the four Kriegsteins climb out of the airplane in Shanghai after a mere twenty hours (as opposed to her twelve-day sea voyage), stretching from the flight, searching for their baggage on the carousel, Chris trying to assume a manly knowingness, Elise looking after the girls, Leah taking Sophie’s hand, the four of them walking to the taxi that would take them to their new home? Mechthild would have laughed. Laughed and laughed, just as long and hard as she had wept on the ship to America. To think that her descendants, afte
r all her struggles as an immigrant, would have the arrogance to simply up and relocate, to another continent, another culture, with no thought of the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps their relocation was the very consequence of her own actions? At this point, Mechthild would have stopped laughing and concentrated all of her energy on wishing them well.
The People’s Square
Shanghai, China, 1993
Those first days, we were awoken by the sounds of ballroom dance music at dawn. Old tunes from the fifties, like “Jailhouse Rock,” along with waltzes and tangos.
“This is exactly why I said I’d never live in an apartment building again,” Mom told Dad on our third morning in Shanghai. “Remember the Schmidts in Hamburg? The parties they would throw?”
“You were just mad they never invited you,” he said.
“They ruined John Denver,” Mom said, ignoring him. “You could always tell a party was winding up when ‘Country Road’ started playing, over and over.”
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