Home Leave: A Novel

by Brittani Sonnenberg

  Banquets were even worse because she couldn’t wear a hood. Back then, it seemed like we had to go to banquets at least once a week. Dad’s Chinese joint-venture partners would throw them in his honor, or to celebrate some contract they’d signed that week. They lasted forever and consisted of about a million courses. Sophie and I would sit there chugging coconut milk or sugary orange juice, picking at the stuff on our plates. Some of it was delicious, like the shrimp dumplings or steamed ginger fish, but there were a lot of unsavory mystery elements involved with most of the dishes. Back in Atlanta, one of our favorite games had been taste tests, where one of us would blindfold the other, and then go in the pantry and spoon out Worcestershire sauce or sesame seeds, or shave off the top of a Pop-Tart, and put it into the other person’s mouth. The only rule was you couldn’t mix things, on our babysitter’s insistence, because she didn’t want us to puke. Back then, we had known everything in the pantry, so the whole blindfolded business was a challenge but not inherently scary. But in Shanghai, at the banquets, you had no idea what you were getting into: was it jellyfish or tongue or liver something? The translator didn’t usually help, though he tried. “Bearded scrounge dipper,” he would announce, or “pearl imperial abalone.” Mom said we should try a little bit of everything, but after a couple glasses of wine she would stop checking on us and we could eat whatever we wanted, which usually meant multiple courses of fried rice.

  Anyways, during those dinners, there was a lot of Dad’s Chinese colleagues and their wives patting Sophie’s head and calling her a lovely boy. In the States, if Mom or Dad had corrected such a mistake, the offending party would have apologized and said yes, how silly of them, Sophie was a beautiful girl. But in Shanghai they would just argue back, as though maybe Mom and Dad had gotten it wrong. I was used to Sophie getting more attention, even before we moved to China. She had always possessed something that drew people to her, including me, as much as I tried to ignore that pull. But in Shanghai I suddenly felt lucky to be the one who escaped notice. I had a new feeling of needing to do something to rescue her, to help her out. I had always been the sensitive one, but I could sense the dynamic was changing. She would make up excuses so she wouldn’t have to go for family walks on Sundays, and she grew quieter in general.

  I wanted my old sister back. I didn’t want to be the one to chatter brightly at dinner about everything I’d done that day. That was her turf. I didn’t know what to say when Mom and Dad trained their gaze on me, desperate. That’s the only way I can explain why I went along with Sophie’s scheme.

  * * *

  It was about a month after she’d cut her hair, in the late spring. I heard a knock on my bedroom door, really soft. I was working on impossible math homework. Things had gotten a lot harder in math and science since coming to Shanghai, because the Korean and Taiwanese kids in my class were a million times better than the rest of us, and our teacher, Mrs. Ng, who was Singaporean, said we should all be at their level. I was totally lost, and making Cs and Ds on tests for the first time in my life. I hadn’t told Mom and Dad yet, although Mom would probably find out soon, since she taught fourth grade at our school and had lunch with Ms. Ng every day in the teachers’ lounge.

  Sophie opened the door a crack. “Hey,” she said, and entered without asking, which I let slide. Her voice had an urgency to it, and some of her old excitement, like when she would be in a huddle with the neighborhood kids in Atlanta, hatching a plan for how to steal the flag from the other team. Those games had always been pointless to me, I could never summon up any kind of caring for a stupid old flag, and it had been exhausting to pretend that I did. But Sophie lived for that kind of thing.

  “I have a plan,” she said.

  She unfolded a wrinkled piece of notebook paper, onto which she’d scrawled long lists in pencil with headings like: “Supplies,” “Tickets,” and “Important Phone Numbers.” Basically, the plan was to run away from home. Or, as Sophie argued, when I put it that way, the plan was to run back home, since Shanghai was not our home and never would be. The heart of the scheme entailed going to the airport, buying tickets with one of Dad’s credit cards, and moving in with Sophie’s best friend in Atlanta, Ana. “Go for it,” I said. “I’m staying here.”

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Forget it.” I turned back to my homework.

  “Pleeeeease.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I need you,” she said, and I softened a little but didn’t say anything. “I don’t look old enough,” she said. “With you, it’ll work.”

  That hurt, but I also knew that Sophie would never admit that she really just wanted me with her. That’s how she was. “You’ll never pull it off,” I said.

  But her excitement was infectious. She slept in my room that night, in the other twin bed, and we stayed up late talking about “the plan.” Pretty soon I could picture it too, being back in Atlanta, enrolling in Piedmont Middle School, where all my friends were now, not having to be around all the weirdos at Shanghai American School. I still felt awkward around everybody there; my plan to be wildly popular hadn’t really panned out. I’d never been very outgoing, but I’d always had a best friend in Atlanta, plus the neighborhood gang. Now I just had Sophie.

  The next morning, we went downstairs with our backpacks and hid in the mailroom instead of waiting with the other kids for the bus. Through a crack in the door, we watched Mom come downstairs and take a taxi to school. Then we hurried back up to our apartment, giggling like crazy in the elevator. I should point out that normally Sophie and I never did anything wrong—never disobeyed Mom and Dad, I mean. It’s hard to explain why. Aunt Ivy told me that one time, when she was babysitting us, when I was six and Sophie was four, she heard us fighting in the bathtub, and she came in and asked us what was going on. Apparently, we told her we were “pretending to have an argument.” So to go from never being rude at the dinner table to running away from home was a big step. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like the adventure we’d always wanted China to be, ever since Dad had told us we were leaving Atlanta.

  We didn’t know where Mom and Dad had put our suitcases, so we just started shoving clothes into our backpacks. I found Sophie in the kitchen, filling plastic bags with food. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “For the trip.”

  “They feed you on the airplane, dummy.”

  She looked sheepish but kept out a can of Pringles. “Just in case,” she said.

  We went into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and into the closet where we knew Dad kept a bunch of change, candy bars, and a few fifty-yuan bills. Sophie stuffed it all into the front pocket of her backpack.

  “We forgot the credit card!” I cried at the door, secretly relieved that the plan would be foiled.

  She whipped it out of her back pocket. “Sneaky,” I said, impressed and a little disturbed that she’d suddenly gotten so good at stealing. I could feel Mom’s disappointment leaking into me. So much for the wise-older-sister routine. But I reasoned that I was helping Sophie. We needed to get out of here. Shanghai was good for Mom and Dad but not for us. Had anyone asked us if we’d wanted to move to China? No. They’d just informed us we were going. And sure, back then we thought it was going to be great. All the kids had treated us like celebrities, and I’d figured Shanghai would look like the inside of the Golden Dragon Restaurant back in Madison—red lanterns, big fish tanks, fortune cookies. I hadn’t counted on what we had found here, where I felt lost and not really myself at all. I told myself that leaving was the adult thing to do.

  I wrote something to this effect in a note to Mom and Dad and stuck it on the refrigerator. Then we hauled everything downstairs, got in a taxi, and told the driver to take us to Hongqiao Airport.

  Everything went according to plan until we got to the Delta counter. An older white woman, who reminded me of Aunt Beth, peered over the counter dubiously. “Where are your parents?” she asked when I presented the Visa card.

  “They’re
divorced,” Sophie suddenly piped up. “We haven’t seen our mom since Christmas five years ago. Our dad said we should come here and buy tickets with his credit card. He’s going to join us soon.”

  I gaped at Sophie. The Delta attendant looked unimpressed. “You’ll have to wait until your dad comes,” the woman said.

  “Okay, ma’am, thank you,” I said, and took the card back. We stepped out of line.

  “She was about to buy it. Why’d you give in?” Sophie demanded.

  I didn’t answer and walked briskly to the airport exit. “Where are you going?” Sophie yelled at my back. “Leah! I know you can hear me!”

  Outside, on the curb, I hailed a taxi. “Get in the car,” I told Sophie.

  She shook her head.

  “Get in.”

  She threw her backpack on the sidewalk and crossed her arms. “Forget it. I’ll go by myself.” She tried to snatch the credit card from my hand. That did it. I took her by both arms and shoved her in the taxi. I was bigger than her, and it took her by surprise. I’d never pushed her around before, aside from playing basketball or wrestling in the backyard in Atlanta. “Shanghai Shangcheng,” I told the driver in Mandarin, our apartment building. Sophie tried to get out of the car, but I held on to her arm. “Ow, you’re hurting me,” she wailed. “Let go!”

  I wouldn’t, and I reached over her and locked the doors. I was furious. For lying so smoothly, for dragging me into this. I shook her roughly and she cried out in protest. “I can’t believe you lied like that,” I said. “‘We haven’t seen Mom since Christmas five years ago.’ What is wrong with you?”

  “You’re such a goody-goody,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t told you my plan. I should have gone alone.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Your plan. Like that would have ever worked.” We were heading onto the highway, back towards the city. Everything that I’d seen on the drive to the airport an hour ago—the dirty streets, the unfamiliar faces, the Chinese characters I couldn’t read, thinking, I’ll never have to look at any of this again—crowded my vision now, and I closed my eyes. I couldn’t remember ever feeling worse. I didn’t want to stay in Shanghai, but I didn’t want to get on a plane back home either. That’s what I’d realized at the ticket counter. I’d been relieved when the woman refused the card. I’d discovered, yet again, that I wasn’t as brave as Sophie.

  I thought Sophie might cry a little, which would have made me feel better, but she just sat in stony silence, looking out the window.

  “Your brother has beautiful hair,” the taxi driver said to me in English, as we paused at a red light, and I said, “Yes, he does.”

  * * *

  Back in the apartment, Mom was waiting for us. She hung up the phone when she saw us and ran to us, crying and mad like I’d never seen her.

  “What were you thinking?” she kept saying.

  That’s when Sophie started sobbing, conveniently. She fell in Mom’s arms and wept. I stood there awkwardly.

  “I counted on you, Leah,” Mom said.

  It made me want to stalk out of the apartment again, for good. But instead I went over to the sofa where Sophie was lying in Mom’s lap and sat down on Mom’s other side. I put my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes.

  “I hate it here,” Sophie was saying in little gulps and hiccups. Mom was smoothing her short curls.

  “We’re going home in a month, for the whole summer, sweetie,” Mom said. “Just think about that. All the Kroger’s and soccer camp and time with Ana that you want.”

  That made Sophie cry harder. “But it’s just a visit,” she finally said, once her breath had turned raggedly even. “It’s not home.”

  “Home’s here now,” Mom said firmly, and something in me plummeted. I had hoped she’d say, “We’ll see about going back, or staying after the summer.”

  “We can’t just abandon Dad, can we?” Mom continued.

  “Why not?” Sophie sniffled.

  Mom seemed to think about it for a second.

  “Shanghai will grow on you,” she said finally, not answering the question. “You’ll see. I promise. It happened to me both times, in England and in Germany.” She sighed. “I wish you girls had told me how you’d felt, instead of just running away.”

  Neither of us said anything, but I held Mom tighter.

  * * *

  Mom was right: it did get better. Kind of. At least, Sophie started to love it. She found a bunch of expat kids from our apartment building to play hide-and-go-seek with, except in Shanghai they called it manhunt. I would play with them too, halfheartedly; I felt lame sitting in my bedroom alone. But once I got outside I always missed the quiet calm of my desk and my books. I loathed crouching in the bushes, and the haunted, lonely feeling I got looking for people when I was it. Sophie, of course, adored the game and liked nothing better than ambushing me, screaming like a banshee, laughing her head off at my cry of terror, and sprinting away. She even concocted a manhunt uniform for herself, to maximize invisibility: her ubiquitous black hooded sweatshirt, black leggings, and black sneakers. We played with Jillian, a Swedish girl from the fifteenth floor; Nan, the daughter of the marine sergeant, from the ninth floor; and Ji-Mun and Seok-Jin, Korean twins from the sixth floor who always hid together and were easy to find.

  Outside our apartment complex, on Shanghai’s streets, Sophie still got mad when people touched her hair and called her a boy. But she had learned how to say saucy things back in Chinese, which always impressed them. Then they would launch into an elaborate speech about how brilliant her Mandarin was, which Sophie couldn’t get enough of.

  And I had finally found a best friend, or at least something close to it. It turned out my instincts had been right about Evgenia, and we started hanging out together at lunchtime. She had the same sense of humor, and it made the days less lonely. But her father was really strict and wouldn’t let her go anywhere on the weekends or after school.

  I had a strange feeling I was getting younger, not older. I knew my friends back in the States weren’t playing hide-and-go-seek anymore. But it wasn’t like there were movie theaters we could go to in Shanghai, aside from the marine’s apartment, where they would screen American films every now and then. There were other kids in my grade who got together on the weekends, but I’d hung out with them a couple times and it horrified me. The first time, we’d spent the whole Saturday throwing eggs at Chinese people from a taxicab. I’d sat in the middle seat after throwing one egg and hitting a lady on her bike, messing up her dress. Everyone had given me a high five and I’d wanted to die of shame. I knew those kids (Joan, from the States; Zara, from New Zealand; Brad, from Australia) went out to bars and clubs on the weekends—if you were white, the bouncers just let you in—but that sounded worse than manhunt to me.

  In fact, contrary to what Mom had promised, the longer we were in Shanghai, the more I missed the States, maybe also because I felt like I’d lost Sophie as a partner in crime, now that she had turned so enthusiastic about the city. Or maybe she’d just decided that she couldn’t talk to me about it anymore. I wondered what would have happened if we had made it onto that plane. I pictured us on the flight, holding each other’s hands tightly, hugging each other out of excitement when we landed in Atlanta. The shock in Ana’s voice when we would call her from the airport, getting into her parents’ Volkswagen, the worn leather seats, seeing Atlanta come back to us from the highway. With every new day in China, I felt like I had to put on a face of okayness, of tough survival, with Mom and Dad and even Sophie, too, the same way I put on my clothes every morning.

  * * *

  That was the first year. The second year, after we got back from summer vacation in the States, I found that Shanghai had grown on me. I was happiest during family excursions, just the four of us. Walks around the city on the weekends. Sunday brunch at the Hilton, where you could tell the chef how to make your pasta, and pick out tiny cups of chocolate mousse, a string quartet playing in the background. Or sometimes, a private, del
icious feeling when dusk came, when I was on my own. In the gathering dark, nobody could tell I was foreign, and I could watch the city without anyone noticing me. What I saw was beautiful: the lick of flame under an enormous wok; old people sitting on the stoop in their pajamas. My favorite thing to look at, however, was still the people moving in slow motion, like the ones I’d seen among the ballroom dancers on our third day in Shanghai. I’d since learned these movements were called tai chi. I felt sure that if I could learn to move like them, I could also slow everything down enough for it to feel good. Their faces were both focused and absent. They were so intent on their exercises that they didn’t seem to see me on the park bench, watching them, and I, too, wanted to lose my self-consciousness like that.

  That was the year I turned thirteen, a real teenager. I didn’t know it then, but Shanghai was in an adolescent phase too, unsightly construction sites everywhere, in the midst of a crazy growth spurt. I’ve thought sometimes since then I must have felt some kind of empathy from the city, which was as clueless as I about how to hide rapid development, as embarrassed about its razed neighborhoods and disappearing rice fields as I was my new breasts and my monthly period.

  Aunt Beth visited us that year from Indiana. She brought Butterfingers and Honey Bunches of Oats for Sophie and me, mustard-covered pretzels for Mom, and Good & Plenty candy for Dad. Before she came, we had been worried about how she would handle all of the pointing and general foreigner frenzy; after all, she was six feet tall and had dyed red hair. But she pointed and stared at the local Shanghainese as much as they pointed and stared at her. She’d always wanted to be a movie actress, she told us, so she liked the attention. “I didn’t know you wanted to be an actress,” Dad said. “I always thought you wanted to be a librarian.” Aunt Beth gave a kind of snorting laugh and took a big sip of wine. For some reason, she winked at me as she put the glass down, and I gave her a conspiratorial smile back, even though I hadn’t really understood what the wink was about. After that, I saw her differently, as someone more glamorous and more mysterious than I had initially given her credit for. In Indiana, I’d always read her relative silence as boring, but now she seemed intriguing, and, oddly enough, more at ease in China than I’d ever seen her in Chariton.