In 1851, Louis Kussoth said the following upon his arrival to America during exile from his homeland, Hungary:
"Freedom and Home: What heavenly music in those two words. Alas! I have no home and the freedom of my people is downtrodden....Even here with this prodigious view of freedom, happiness and greatness which spreads before my astonished eyes, my thoughts are wondering toward home..."
Enoch rarely lets himself think out loud about home. One conversations when he did so came last July after he had gone to visit some friends from China who now live near Midland, Texas. The trip was arranged by the same Chinese pastor friend who had first introduced me to Enoch in June of 2018. Bob's intentions for the trip were good, but an unintended consequence, happened about five hours after I picked Enoch up at the airport. Enoch was exhausted. He had just spent nine days speaking mostly Chinese close friends and eating home-cooked foods very like his mother's own. Then he was dropped off again at a large airport.
He had traveled alone by air and was again alone all day as he returned to us. Traveling alone is one thing, but during the long flight he had missed some connections, sat through long layovers in strange airports, and learned of his missing luggage to boot. By the time he saw me at the terminal, he had not seen a familiar face for 24 hours. He sighed and said, "I never want to fly again in my whole life." I laughed, and he laughed, but his eyes were tired and sad. Once "home" with us, he went to his room and slept for hours. Upon waking, he called Julie and I into the room, and whispered, "I am sick."
"Are you going to throw up?" Julie asked "Do you have a fever?" she added, feeling his forehead.
"No not that kind of sick." He blew his nose. "Homesick... I am homesick."
It was the first time in over six months that I'd heard him say the word. I was actually surprised that he knew the term, but hearing him say it gave us pause and helped me reset my own thoughts for a long conversation.
Little did Enoch know, but I happen to be an expert on homesickness. Seriously. As a child, going off to church camp... I was a mess. I hated it. I was in high school before I would spend the night at a friend's house, and even then I secretly dreaded it. Going off to college was very hard for me. Ask my siblings, I was the world's worst when it came to getting homesick. I still struggle with it when I travel internationally or I'm away from my wife and family. There are hints of these sentiments in much of my writing, but not until that morning, when Enoch openly spoke for the first time of being homesick, did he know I was so equipped to help him talk through it.
I learned that day that this was not a new problem for Enoch. Even in China, back in middle school when the kids are sent to mandatory "military camp" for a week, Enoch "got sick" and had to go home. He told me that story during this long talk, and there were other times during those first six months in America that he secretly cried and cried when we thought he was sleeping in his room. He later told us there were weeks when he was in a very "bad loop of depression" because he was so homesick. He was so grateful for what we were doing for him that he never wanted us to know he was sad.
More recently he told me, "I do not have time to be sad. If I get sad, I will cry, and if I cry, I cannot do my work. So I don't let myself think about it. I just keep doing what I need to do. Sadness wastes time."
I admire Enoch's will and determination. Julie is a lot like that herself, and I am a much more stable person because of our shared life together. We balance each other, and that is important because as the Gotye song says, "You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness." That is to say, it is possible to wallow in sorrow as a default mood, and that is not healthy.
For centuries nostalgia spoke not of a reminiscent mood but rather debilitating medical disease. During the Civil War, it is noted as a cause of death on hundreds of soldiers who bore no visible wounds. In my experience, the word nostalgia refers more to feelings of separation caused by time rather than distance. I can become nostalgic for the way things were 20 years ago. Or I can get homesick for "homes" that don't even exist anymore. The houses are there, but the people and memories that make those places "home" live only in my mind.
Enoch's home in China is very much in the present. It's right where he left it. His mother and father and brother go on with their daily lives connected to their son only in thought, and with the help of the internet, but that is not the same as being there. Nearly all of the international students at CCS go home for the summer, and one of Enoch's friends had done just that a few weeks before his trip to Midland, TX. It was hard for Enoch to think about that, because for him such a reunion is impossible.
The title of this chapter is "Two Words He Cannot Say." The two words are not "Freedom" and "Home" from Kussoth's quotation above. No, the two words, left unspoken until some day far away, were memorialized in Dvorak's "New World Symphony" and are sung angelically by a boys choir named Libera in the clip below:
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