Sour Heart Read online

  You you you you you you you you you turned turned turned turned turned turned her her her her her her in in in and and and and and and and and and him him him him him too too too too too too, Goober stuttered at Twitch, following him for blocks and blocks until he collapsed in front of the entrance to my grandparents’ apartment.

  Don’t, my grandmother said to my uncle and my mother, even think about going out there. It was mostly directed at my uncle, who had been watching from the window and saw Goober twist his stumpier leg and land hard on his good one. If you have a death wish, fine, but I won’t let you bring it on the rest of this family.

  For the rest of August, my uncle Chunguang was nowhere to be found and neither was my mother, who had very recently become beautiful and spent her first year of high school walking around town surrounded by a procession of girls far less attractive than her, and trailed by several lovesick boys who swore monuments looked more statuesque when she passed them, trees renewed their verdant leaves when she leaned against them, snow melted into gold when she stepped in it, and birds flew drunk into lampposts and dropped dead in the street after passing over her (it was the idea that my mother could be responsible for the decline of a species that pleased her the most).

  Don’t think they won’t come after you just because you have a decent face, my grandmother said to my mother after finding out what the Red Guards had done to Teacher Liu. Don’t think these delinquents are above slashing that precious face of yours. You’ll be a carcass before you’re a beauty queen.

  No one has said a word, my mother replied, preemptively defending her long hair, something that not a single other girl in their longtang still dared to have. That night, my grandmother hacked my mother’s hair off with a kitchen knife while she was asleep. “I knew she was going to do it,” my mother told me when I was older and more eager for these stories. “I was surprisingly calm in the morning when I woke up and saw that she had chopped it all off. I tried in vain to tie a chunk back onto the hair I had left. It was for my own good. She was right. Pretty didn’t spare you.”

  My uncle was less convinced of the dangers my grandmother spoke of. Why can’t I just go around the corner and back?

  Why why why, my grandmother said. You waste my time with these whys. I’m going gray from trying to figure out how to burn the last of your father’s books without anyone noticing and you’re sitting here asking me why?

  Twitch and the other kids with armbands came knocking on my grandparents’ door a few days after Goober’s mother disappeared.

  We’re looking for our umbrella. Where did he go? they asked my grandmother. We want to thank him for keeping us dry all those days it rained like hell.

  He’s with his father in Baoshan, my grandmother told the children. They’re laboring to bring a plentiful crop for the fall.

  Twitch had lost interest the minute he peered inside my grandparents’ apartment and saw that it was completely bare of books and artwork. Just two beds and a bamboo slat on the floor with the sheets neatly made up, a cracked kitchen table and a chair with a broken leg. C’mon, let’s go, he said to the other kids. We’ll find some other freak to be our shade.

  Far above the children loose in the streets, my uncle was seated on a chair that he had found in the hallway of his apartment building and had dragged up four flights of stairs to the roof. He was naked from head to toe, muttering, You can’t tell me what to do, you can’t tell me what to do, you can’t tell me what to do, you can’t tell me, you can’t, all the while clutching his exposed penis, which he feared would turn red from the sun that beat down on him without mercy, without knowing.

  April–May 1996

  The day my uncle was to arrive in New York, my family piled in my father’s 1988 silver Nissan Sentra, and in the car I grabbed for Sammy’s hand every time I thought I heard a strange sound coming from the engine or whenever I thought I saw a little stream of smoke rising from the hood. I imagined our car bursting into flames and exploding like in the action flicks I watched with my father on the weekends. “Could we survive that?” I asked my father after seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme emerge from a totaled car that had flipped over three trucks, crashed into a library, and exploded into flames after skidding across an oil slick.

  “No,” he said. “We’d be long dead.”

  As my father was getting a parking ticket from the machine, my mother lowered her face into her hands.

  “You’re already crying?” my brother asked her.

  “If you hadn’t seen your sister for seven years, you’d be crying too,” my mother said in between loud gulps of air.

  “Doubtful.” He snatched his hand away from mine. “Do you really need to be doing that right now?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Just keep your hands to yourself.”

  After we parked, my brother was contrite and went off to buy me and our mother a Sprite and a Sunkist to make up for his moodiness.

  “You don’t have to pay me back.” He had our mother’s can of Sunkist between his legs because she couldn’t drink anything too cold. It makes my throat feel like a lion trapped in an iceberg, she said once.

  “It’s still too cold,” my mother said when Sammy offered her the soda.

  “I’ll fix it.” I took the can from Sammy and slipped it down my pants. “It’s always warm in there.” I gave him my classic both-eyes-closed wink that Sammy pointed out was really just a drawn-out blink.

  “That’s disgusting,” my mother said. “Who would want to drink that?”

  I ended up drinking both and asking Sammy to take me to the bathroom three separate times. As we returned from the third bathroom trip, people on the flight from Shanghai began streaming out of the arrivals gate. I recognized my uncle immediately, though it wasn’t exactly a great feat of psychic prowess since my mother showed me pictures of him every day for hours until I felt like attacking someone more helpless than I was. He had big, frizzy hair that I learned later was permed, and was several heads taller than most of the other Chinese people in the terminal. I could not stop staring at his mouth, unsure if I really saw what I thought I saw—that every single one of his teeth was crooked and black at the roots. Later in our lives, when everyone who took care of me when I was a child started to raise the question of who would take care of them, my mother would call me in the middle of the night to tell me that Uncle Chunguang had lost his last tooth on his fiftieth birthday, and I would grieve for him as if he had lost his arms and his legs, too, wailing alone in my dorm room, pounding my fists against my chest until I knocked the wind out of myself, falling onto my bed and lying there on my back, breathing shallowly, realizing that my mother had gotten to me after all. Her hysteria would not end with her passing because it had already been passed on to me.

  He came for me first, picked me up and raised me as high as his arms extended. It was my first memory of looking down on so many people at once—I felt like we were all strangers meeting in the same giant living room. He set me down and crouched to my height. “Do you remember me?”

  I nodded shyly to please him, permitting a tiny lie, something I had only done previously for my mother.

  “You should,” he said. “You peed all over me before boarding your flight back to America with Auntie Cheng Fang.” Everyone laughed except me. My uncle patted my brother on the back and then decided to pull him in for a full embrace. “You know the drinking age in China is unofficially whenever the hell you want, right?” My brother smiled and I glanced at my father, trying to imagine Sammy’s face turning as red as his had been at all the parties this year. My uncle motioned for me to get on his shoulders. “May I?”

  I nodded.

  “Guoqiang, nihaonihaonihaonihaonihaonihaonihao,” my uncle said, cradling my father’s hands in his and shaking them vigorously. “Happy belated eighteenth birthday, brother!”

  “Spoken like a man with the energy of a boy,” my father said. We had celebrated his forty-fifth birthday the week before with Chen shu shu
and the usual suspects. My gift to him was hiding in the bathroom for the last hour of the party to avoid the question of how I ranked my love.

  My uncle hugged my mother while I was still perched on his shoulders. I felt my sneakers graze my mother’s shoulder blades. She was crying silently for once, not making a show of herself, not proclaiming that she had been cleaved apart, leaving us responsible for holding her up, for mending her.

  “You won’t believe what Ma made me bring in my suitcase.”

  My mother held on to Sammy’s shoulders for support, still unable to speak.

  “Sugarcane.”

  A new stream of tears ran down her face.

  “Have you ever,” my uncle asked Sammy, “seen anyone so emotional over sugarcane?”

  Sammy shook his head. “Get ready.”

  “Oh, I’ve been preparing.”

  It was lovely to be above it all and when my father motioned to leave, I felt the pleasure and panic of doorways that had once seemed impossible to reach looming ahead of me. I felt sure I was on the verge of something wonderful. I wanted to come right up to it, and shake its hand and say, I’m ready I’m ready I’m ready I’m ready.

  —

  At first, it seemed like nothing was changing. I was shy around my uncle and Sammy was helpful. Sammy showed him the public bus system, how to use tokens instead of exact change, the way to the nearest McDonald’s and the trick of asking for the secret two cheeseburgers deal, which was only forty-nine cents more than the regular meal. He took my uncle to the library and showed him the selection of Chinese books, cassettes, and videos. He explained that at self-serving soda stations like 7-Eleven, the way to go was to fill your cup with only soda, no ice, that way you get twice as much drink.

  My father got my uncle a job delivering Chinese food through an old friend he knew back in the days when they sold umbrellas in the street. Now his friend was the owner of a Cantonese restaurant on Bayard Street even though he was from Jinan.

  “They don’t know the difference here?” my uncle asked.

  My father snorted. “These people don’t know the difference between Japan and China. You’ll see soon. Everything here is Hunan Garden or Great Wall restaurant and nothing to do with either. Lao wai only know how to order three things: sweet-and-sour chicken, beef with broccoli, and lao mian, but they pronounce it low mee-en.”

  My uncle was amused. “Sweet-and-sour? So the lao wai here have a taste for Shanghai style.”

  “If you can even call it that.”

  “Do you remember,” my mom interjected, “when Ma traded a stalk of sugarcane she had smuggled back from that farm for extra flour-ration tickets?”

  “Oh yeah, to the really weird dude who consorted with the long-haired Canadian who came and taught English at our middle school for a month before he disappeared. Didn’t he hide the sugarcane in some hollowed-out tree one time?”

  “I think that turned out to be a made-up story.”

  “Well, anyway, remember how excited we got when we came home to those lumps of fried flour and we’d dip it in expired soy sauce that was all gooey? It looks like that crap.”

  “Oh, c’mon. You’re exaggerating.”

  “It’s not exactly like that stuff,” my father said, “but it might as well be. You’d be lucky to find a speck of meat inside all that fried dough.”

  When we took my uncle to the supermarket for the first time, he started laughing at the concept of a supermarket that didn’t sell food.

  “Where’s the food?” he kept asking. “Where do they keep the food in this food market?”

  “Right here,” I said, gesturing toward shelves of cereal.

  “And here,” Sammy said, pointing at another aisle for chips.

  “Those are boxes,” my uncle said, “and those are just bags.”

  “We’re taking you to the food,” my father said. We brought him to the produce and fruit section, which did seem really sad—wilty greens and all manner of lettuce sprayed by jets of ice-cold water.

  Normally, we never went to American grocery stores; we shopped at Chinese supermarkets in Flushing or Elmhurst, but every once in a while on his way back from work, my dad would stop by the Key Food on College Point Boulevard and check to see if the three-for-one-dollar cilantro deal was on. As soon as I remembered that, I told my uncle that he didn’t need to worry, we only shopped where Chinese people shopped. He would see soon—there were other supermarkets that had long aisles of greens with names that had not yet been given English counterparts, where you could buy fish heads for a buck and a three-pound bag of pork bones for two.

  “So Americans don’t eat food,” he said, still unable to recover from the lack of food we found on our grocery trip.

  My father nodded. “They just eat boxes, brother.”

  —

  My mother wanted to have a welcome party right away for my uncle but there was no time. It took him a few weeks to acclimate to his new job—he frequently mixed up chow mein and lo mein and had to work extra hours to make up for his errors. “Will someone set these lao wai straight?” my uncle complained after his first week.

  “Chicken lo mein is Sarah’s favorite food and egg rolls are Alexi’s,” I said.

  “You see?” Sammy said. “You gotta get into the American mindset.”

  “They aren’t egg rolls,” my uncle said. “They’re tough rolls of fried flour with cornstarch and MSG.”

  Then once my uncle got used to the job, some issue came up with his student visa and he had to take the bus to D.C. to sort it out and returned with a mysterious illness that lasted ten days. “I’ve figured it out,” he said. “It’s too sanitary here. There aren’t any germs! If I ever go back to Shanghai, I’m a dead man.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “China’s filthy,” Sammy translated. “Though you’re probably inoculated because you were there when you were a baby.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “No one does. Just accept that and move on.”

  “Your qin jiu jiu will explain everything to you, Annie,” my uncle promised, using a word I didn’t understand, and when I didn’t understand a word I imagined a hole where the word was supposed to land. Sammy was the most attentive to my bouts of blankness but he wasn’t always in the mood to do something about it. My uncle, on the other hand, was like my mother in that he could talk for hours and never needed space like Sammy did, but, unlike my mother, when my uncle spoke at length, it didn’t leave me smothered. “You know, in Shanghai, you had way too many uncles.”

  “I don’t remember any of them.”

  “Neither does your daddy,” my father joked. “And they’re my brothers!”

  “Well, I couldn’t stand to be just another uncle. I wanted to be your best uncle, the one you love more than anyone. So I asked you, Am I just another jiu jiu or am I your qin jiu jiu? And you said qin jiu jiu. So that’s what you called me from then on. Qin means something really dear to your heart. You agreed I was the most cherished uncle of all your uncles and so I became your qin jiu jiu.”

  Without precedent, my mother was elated to hear this story about my time in Shanghai even though it didn’t involve her.

  “This is why we have to have a party. For your qin jiu jiu,” she said.

  “Isn’t my favorite niece’s birthday coming up?”

  “May tenth,” my brother confirmed.

  “Well, then, the party should be for Annie,” my uncle said.

  My mother was uncharacteristically excited to celebrate me and didn’t even try to make it about her. “Eight birthday cakes! Eight presents! Eight different birthday outfits!”

  “Eight days of Annie,” my uncle said.

  “Can I have eight days to myself? That’ll be my present to you,” Sammy said, already weary of us. “Or at least eight hours.”

  “Eight days before my baby is no longer a baby,” my father said. “It’s happening too soon.”

  “With her, you might have to wait longer,”
Sammy said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with staying small,” my uncle said. “As long as it’s what Annie wants.”

  “I get to choose?” I asked. I had never been given the choice before.

  “It’s your life, little lady,” my uncle said.

  “Look at what being big gets you,” my mother said, pointing to my uncle’s head.

  “Huh?” Sammy said.

  “It’s true,” my uncle explained. “I had this big head when I was in the womb.”

  “You know this story,” my mother said to me even though I didn’t. “Your grandmother couldn’t push him out in the final moments of giving birth. It was no joke.”

  “Your mother had to go and get the guy who was mopping blood off the floor of this rural hospital. She brought him to your grandmother thinking he could help.”

  “Ma was screaming. I mean actually screaming. Pleading with God to let her get through this.”

  “And cursing our father,” my uncle added. “She really gave it to him.”

  “Ma was like, If you ever try to come near me again to make another of these, I’ll slice it off.”

  “So your mother goes and she gets this guy who is basically the janitor, and she’s like, Attention! I’ve brought help. You have to remember this was back then. There were no specially trained doctors in the country. They got some teenager with a month of training to deliver all the babies. It was normal for the child—”

  “—and the mother—”

  “—to not survive childbirth.”

  “So at this point your uncle is half out but it’s the wrong way. His head was still stuck inside your grandmother’s belly. There was something like half a minute left before he would have suffocated and come out a stillborn.”

  Dead, I realized, a stillborn is dead.