Sour Heart Read online

  “The dude was unfazed. He instructed your grandfather to grab your grandmother by her shoulders. He was like, You got a grip on her?”

  “And then he grabs your uncle’s tiny legs and yanks him right out. Your uncle was delivered by a country janitor,” my mother said, laughing.

  “There’d be no me without your mother,” my uncle said. “I owe her my life.”

  My mother cleared her throat. “Childbirth,” she started to say, and then trailed off. We waited for her to continue, but she had nothing left to say.

  —

  The morning of the party, everyone had tasks except me, because I was too small to be useful and I was the guest of honor, so my job was to sit around and be cherished, except everyone was too busy to pay me much attention. My father was marinating the meat and combining packages of Cup Noodles to make a monster pot of ramen.

  My mother was mending my party dress, which I had snagged in our doorway the weekend before, ripping a hole through both the bodice and the skirt. When I showed my mom, she was furious for days, threatening to make me go naked to my own party.

  Sammy was busy baking cupcakes and mixing up eight kinds of frosting and showing my uncle how our oven worked. “Do they not have these in China?”

  “Nope,” my uncle said. “Well, unless you count those useless makeshift furnaces that were supposed to produce steel.”

  My father grunted. I had heard him ranting about those backyard furnaces at a party earlier this year. “Remember when we were told to throw all our kitchen implements in? That was supposed to get us on par with England. Whose ass were we supposed to be eating? Our own, apparently.”

  I got bored waiting around for the party to start. It was hours before anyone would pay attention to me. I fingered my presents and played with the bows until one of them fell off. I brought that one into the kitchen and asked my parents if I could open it before the guests came, but my mother said that would mark me as ungrateful. The plan was for the presents to be unwrapped one by one in front of all the guests.

  “Is today for you or is it for Annie?” my father asked, opening a beer.

  “What kind of question is that, even?” She slammed my party dress down on our dining table, which doubled as our living room coffee table since our dining room was also our living room and also temporarily my uncle’s room. “Of course it’s for our daughter. It’s her frigging birthday, why wouldn’t we want it to be the most memorable, lavish birthday to remember? Why else would I be mending this dress and jabbing my own finger with a needle? Look at this!” She held up her hand. “Do you see how many times the skin’s been pierced? I need reading glasses. Why? Because I’ve been squinting my whole damn life since meeting you. Squinting at every seam. Reading books by candlelight like a goddamn bum and now my eyes are ruined and we can’t afford to get a proper prescription.”

  “Calm down,” Sammy mumbled. “No one even likes the unwrapping presents part.”

  “No one likes it?” My mother was enraged now. “Everyone loves it! I leave parties early when they skip that part. It’s a birthday party. We specifically instructed everyone to bring presents. More than one if they can swing it. And on short notice too. This is what we told our guests and now, an hour before they’re supposed to show up, suddenly everyone wants to scrap it? Where was this last week when we agreed to have the party? Where were you all when I was out buying presents for Annie and hiding them under the bed and waking up before all of you to carefully wrap each and every one so it would be a surprise? No. No! I won’t let you look at me like I’m the one who’s being unreasonable. Don’t look at me like you’re afraid of what I’m going to do. I’m the one who’s afraid of what you people are capable of.” My mother was holding my dress like she was going to rip it down the middle.

  “Hold on a second,” my uncle said, approaching my mother the way cops on television approached a highly dangerous criminal who was holding a gun to an innocent bystander’s head, though in this case, we were all the bystanders; all of us were hostage to my mother’s outbursts. “All this talk about gifts reminds me that I still haven’t given you the gift Ma got for you.”

  They went into his room, a little curtained-off area that was really still the living room. Originally, my father had bought all these materials and tools to build a temporary wall, but my mother kept accusing him of scaring her, accusing him of wanting to bury my uncle alive like in that one story about the wine cellar, and my father wearily replied that she was the one who was concerned about her brother’s privacy and anyway, it was bricks in the story and it was meant to be taken as an allegory. My mother accused my father of condescending to her so he relented and worked on putting up a curtain instead, which angered my mother because she said a curtain provided no privacy at all! So it was back to the wall, which not only still scared her but she also claimed that she had bumped into it in the middle of the night and nearly broke her nose, so it was back to the curtain, but my mother hated the color of the curtain my father brought home from the store, she said it reminded her of puking when she was pregnant with me, so it was back to the wall, then the curtain, then the wall, then the curtain again, until finally my father blew up at her and told her that if she didn’t stop it, he would harden his heart and leave her. My mother was never one to be fazed, least of all by my father, so she ran to her bedroom to collect her things, shouting the whole time he wouldn’t dare leave because he was a coward and who was it that kept him fed and clothed the time he was nearly kicked out of school? Who was it that supported him when he could barely keep himself upright? Who was it that stuck by him when he couldn’t get a second-year scholarship, and while taking care of their infant son no less! Who? she screamed. Say who or never see me again.

  Who, my father said finally after polishing off half a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.

  That time she was gone for three days. In her absence we did not eat Cup Noodles. Sammy suggested it to wound my mother from afar, as a kind of revenge, but I told him we had to wait. We had to honor her even if she wouldn’t have done the same for us. When she finally came back, I waited for my father and Sammy to toast to me, to say, You did it, Annie, you brought her back. She would have been lost to us without you. But they never did. They forgot how serious I had been about the noodles when my mother returned with a curtain she liked—eggshell white, she said, the only acceptable curtain. They forgot that my mother cared about the little things and so did I. In a few days, we all forgot, because these were just little episodes, one after the other, all of them the same, another scar that faded enough to be just another mark we carried.

  My uncle took my mother behind the dividing eggshell-white curtain and they were in there for a while. When they came out, she was holding a microphone.

  “Your mom is going to sing for you, Annie. She’s a gifted singer, did you know that?”

  “Don’t tell me—” my father started to say.

  “He got me a karaoke machine!” My mother unraveled the cord and then bent down to hold the microphone up to me like it was my turn to say something.

  “Thank you, jiu jiu.”

  “Qin jiu jiu,” he corrected me.

  “Thank you, qin jiu jiu, for getting Mommy that microphone.”

  “Two microphones!” He pulled another one out from behind his back. “For duets. Did you know your mother and your father sang the most beautiful duet on their wedding night? Your mother—she’s not just some run-of-the-mill talented singer. She was the most talented singer in Shanghai. Producers literally pounded on our door to try and sign her. They wanted to make her the Chinese Shirley Temple. They said A-Ling had it all, beauty and talent.”

  “Your grandmother wouldn’t let me. She said it was a dirty business. They were liars and crooks, she said to me, and I’m not feeding you to those sharks. She told me my entire life I was hideous. Disgusting to look at, and it would destroy me if I went with those producers. They were setting me up for public humiliation. Well, I was only ten! I did
n’t want to be publicly humiliated, and how was I supposed to know I was pretty? The person I trusted the most told me every day I should cover my face so as not to scare people in the streets.”

  “Your mother was stunning. I mean, she’s still got it, but she was a head turner as a young girl. She had a voice like a nightingale too. But it’s good Ma kept you away from those producers. You would have never met Guoqiang and never had Sammy and Annie, my two favorite people in the world.”

  My mother got up and drew the microphone to her lips and spoke into it, breathy and slow. “Yes. It. Was. A. Good. Thing. In. The. End.”

  August 1966

  The dispute started when my grandmother announced that they were going to have a guest stay with them for a few days. There was an air of secrecy to the whole thing. My grandfather even came back from Baoshan for a day and was extremely occupied drafting papers and meeting with several people my mother and my uncle had never seen before. He and my grandmother spoke in hushed tones about making arrangements to “send her up north,” and then by nightfall, he was gone again. My grandmother decided the guest would sleep in my uncle’s bed, since it was the most firm, and my uncle would sleep on the floor. She scrubbed the sheets and aired them out in the sun and laid a wrapped-up dried plum on the pillow as a special treat for their guest.

  Why don’t we get special treats? my uncle asked.

  You’re alive, aren’t you? You want a better treat than that?

  Everyone I know is alive, my uncle protested.

  And still, my grandmother said, you want more treats.

  Finally, in the middle of the night, without even hearing an audible knock, my grandmother got out of bed, opened the door, and quickly pulled in the woman standing in the doorway. Her head was totally shaved and she wore a ratty long-sleeved cardigan over another sweater riddled with holes and tears even though it had been over a hundred degrees that day and not much cooler at night. She immediately started to weep, bracing herself in my grandmother’s arms.

  There’s no need for this, my grandmother said. Everything has been taken care of. Save your tears for something worse.

  It’s Teacher Liu, my uncle whispered to my mother. It’s definitely her.

  No, it can’t be. I thought she committed suicide.

  Well, it’s either her or her twin or her ghost.

  Deep into the night, when everyone was asleep, my grandmother heard a scream and leaped out of bed to rush to Teacher Liu’s side.

  It’s okay, it’s okay, she said. No one is coming for you. You’re safe. But it turned out to be something else altogether: my uncle had spent the past six months erecting a house made of boogers on the wall he faced at night, and what Teacher Liu saw when she woke up from uneasy dreams was my uncle’s dried snot meticulously arranged into a two-story Spanish-style villa, glistening from the glow of the streetlamps outside.

  The next morning, my grandmother stood over him and instructed him to destroy his creation, booger by booger, until there was nothing left.

  She didn’t have to make such a big deal about it, my uncle said, shooting dirty looks at his teacher, who was wrapped up in blankets and eating porridge. And anyway, he continued, I saved her and she never even thanked me.

  No, my grandmother said.

  Yes, I did—I untied her.

  No, my grandmother repeated, and slapped him clear across his cheek. You don’t know her.

  She’s in our house. I’m looking right at her. How are you going to say I don’t know who that is?

  We don’t know her. She’ll be gone tonight. Do you understand me? You don’t know her. She was never here and I don’t want to hear another word about it.

  My uncle put his hands over the side of his cheek that she had slapped. I hate you so much, he told my grandmother.

  And I don’t care, she replied, stepping into the kitchen to prepare a wet cloth to run over the faint, oily marks that still remained on the wall, the only evidence that once, a house made of snot had resided there and its creator could not have been more proud.

  May 1996

  For the first two hours of my birthday party, I stayed by my uncle’s side. As soon as my mother pulled him away to introduce him to a guest who had recently come back from Tennessee on business, Chen shu shu made a beeline for me. I had refused to answer his question all night but he wasn’t giving up. “Can you at least say if you love me?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Surely you like me? C’mon, Annie, we’re old friends! Who do you like more—me or your uncle?”

  “Qin jiu jiu,” I said.

  “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. What about your mother or your father? Who do you love more?”

  “I love them both equally.”

  “You have to choose.”

  “I love my mommy and my daddy the same,” I said, careful to say my mother first and then my father. My mother had a way of knowing who was talking about her even if she was on the other side of the room. She probably heard every instance her name was invoked when I was in Shanghai and she was in New York. She probably sensed from across the world that after a month, I stopped calling out for her, and she would probably never forgive me for it.

  “Did you forget about your mother?” she would ask me. “Did you remember my face? Did you ever hear my voice in your head? Did they even tell you you had a mother back in New York or did everyone cut me out of the picture?”

  “I…I…I…” I could never get past those I’s, which was disastrous because my mother was looking to be disproved, she was looking for me to deliver a speech that directly counteracted the one she had concocted in her brain, so it wasn’t enough to say, “No, I didn’t forget you, Mommy,” whenever she brought up that year and a half. What she wanted me to say was: “I can’t even begin to imagine the pain you must have felt being ripped away from me when we had such a close bond and when you already had to go through the trauma of being separated from your family to come to America to be with Daddy who failed to deliver on every single promise he ever explicitly and implicitly made. And then to think that your one and only daughter was in Shanghai, reunited with the family you missed so much that it made you go crazy with grief, and on top of that, I wasn’t even aware of all the sacrifices you had to make to keep me safe and loved, and then to think every day that passed, I was less and less aware of you as my mother and as the most important person in my life so by the time I came back to you in America all I wanted to do was head-butt you in the face, which left lasting psychic scars as well as physical ones. It really is true that you have had one of the most unfair, terrible lives any person on earth could have and I’m so sorry that you’ve had to go through that.”

  My mother kept tabs on every single thing that could hurt her so I had to say her name first to Chen shu shu, who was still grilling me, unsatisfied with my answer.

  My uncle broke away from his conversation to intervene. “She loves everyone! There’s no one sweeter than little Annie.”

  Xiao Ming a-yi came over and took Chen shu shu’s cup away from him. “One an hour,” she reminded him with a look in her eye that said, Better if it’s zero.

  “That’s a really nice dress.” Chen shu shu fingered the raised mesh polka dots on the top layer of my skirt. “Show Chen shu shu how you twirl like a princess.”

  “You know,” my uncle said, coming to my rescue again. “I’ve worn a dress before. In public.”

  “You?” Chen shu shu slapped his knees with laughter. “I didn’t know you swing that way.”

  “Oh, I swing every which way,” my uncle said, winking at me, which either meant he really did or he really didn’t, but either way I had no idea why it was so funny.

  “Hey, Li Huiling,” Chen shu shu shouted. “Did you know your brother’s a cross-dresser?”

  “He was,” she said, smiling. “For a day. Are we telling that story now?”

  “Story time,” Chen shu shu said, shushing the party chatter and indicating that people should gat
her around to listen.

  “I used to be jealous of A-Ling when I was a kid. I thought it was really unfair my sister was allowed to wear dresses and skirts and pants, but I was only allowed to wear pants.”

  “Chunguang was always concerned with what he wasn’t allowed to do. He used to get into massive fights with our mother over how he wanted to wear dresses too.”

  “Wow,” Sammy said. “You guys really are related.” My father raised his glass of Johnnie Walker and clinked it against Sammy’s can of Coke.

  “Naturally our mother thought I was being ridiculous. She ignored me and let me fume for days. I was a crier back then. One time she finished knitting an entire sweater while I stood there crying in front of her. She tuned me out like I was street noise.” My mother nodded enthusiastically. “Anyway, so I run out of school early one afternoon and I go through my sister’s clothes, pulling out all her best dresses, and I change into one of them. The nicest one, of course. Well, not as nice as Annie’s dress, but it was really something. Our mother pulled out all the stops on that one—it had silk sleeves and those nice twirly clasps around the neck.” The women at the party all looked at each other knowingly, nodding their heads like yes, yes, yes, it must have been a fine dress for a girl back then.

  “Go on, Chunguang,” Chen shu shu said, putting his arm around my uncle. “Tell us about all the men you picked up in that tasty little number.”

  “Well, I’m pretty proud of myself, right? So I go outside where everyone’s hanging out and I go, Look at me! Look at me! Who says only girls can wear dresses?”

  My mother was already laughing at an ending that she knew but the rest of us were still waiting to hear.

  “A crowd starts forming around me. Everyone’s coming out of their houses to look at me prancing around in a dress. I hear this one kid saying, Bighead Chunguang is a girl! and I get this sinking feeling in my gut that I’ve made a huge mistake. The crowd is growing around me and the kids are yelling, He’s a girl! Bighead wants to be a girl! and the one who started the whole thing—you guys remember Twitch? Some of you must have known him.”