Sour Heart Read online

  This time I ran out after her. She was standing against our Nissan Sentra, hiding her face in her hands.

  “Are you okay, Mommy?” I asked.

  She shook her head and then picked me up and sat me on the hood of the car. “He’s a horrible man,” she said.

  “Daddy?”

  “No. Chen shu shu. I hate that he asks you that stupid question at every party in front of everyone. You shouldn’t have to answer that. No child should. He’s a horrible, awful man. He’s a drunk, Annie. I won’t stand for him bullying my daughter.”

  My uncle emerged to join us under the stars. “Everything okay here?”

  My mother nodded. “I can’t stand that guy.”

  “Should I go in there and kick his ass back to Hunan?”

  My mother laughed and then broke down in tears. “It’s a cruel thing to ask a child.”

  “He’s an idiot,” my uncle said. “He forgets his own name after a few drinks.”

  “Please don’t cry anymore,” I said. “It makes me cry when you cry.”

  “Really?” she said, separating my hair into three sections and loosely braiding it the way she taught Sammy to when I couldn’t sleep at night and she wasn’t available to soothe me.

  I didn’t have to answer—I was already crying.

  The front door opened again and this time it was Sammy. “Okay, seriously, guys? Dad is starting to talk about Leonardo da Vinci. It’s getting to the point where people are gonna start throwing tomatoes.”

  “Sammy!” my mother said, exuberance creeping back into her voice. “My eldest boy! My brilliant son! Should we go back in and save the guests from your father?”

  “Uh, yes,” he said. “I’d say the situation is dire.”

  My mother lifted me off the hood of the car.

  “Am I too heavy?” I asked her.

  “A little,” she said but didn’t put me down until we got to the front door.

  “I don’t like making an entrance,” Sammy said.

  “Then you and I can go in through the back,” my uncle said.

  “Annie and I have no problem going through the front. Right, Annie?”

  “Right!”

  The four of us went our two ways and ended up in the same place. “The party’s not over!” my mother announced as we reentered the crowd. “Is the microphone plugged in, Sammy?”

  He went over to check and gave my mother the thumbs-up.

  “Can you play ‘He Ri Jun Zai Lai’?”

  “Lai lai lai,” Chen shu shu cheered, oblivious of all that he had set in motion.

  My mother began to sing, “Beautiful flowers don’t live long.”

  My father was shouting about da Vinci’s notebooks to Xiao Ming a-yi, who was nodding politely.

  My uncle saw I was trying to follow along with my mother’s voice and losing the thread. “After you leave tonight,” he said in English, “when will you come back?”

  “Sing it with me,” my mother said. “For my brother!”

  “Ren sheng nande ji hui zui,

  “bu huan geng he dai.”

  I noticed my brother was singing the chorus—he had been listening all along, he had been learning the words I skipped.

  My uncle was still translating for me. “She’s saying there are so few opportunities to be happy in this world, Annie. So you have to take them all. When they present themselves, you take them.”

  “And drink up!” Chen shu shu cut in. “No need to censor yourself for the little one. That’s what your mother’s singing: Don’t wait until you’re unhappy to drink! He wanle zhe bei zai shuo ba!”

  “Lai lai lai,” my mother spoke into the microphone, beckoning me and my uncle. Her voice was girlish and soft. She departed from the script even as the music continued. “Come everyone, come gather around. Have a glass on me and my genius son Sammy and my brilliant little brother and my sweet, beautiful daughter. They live up in the skies and the rest of us are condemned to solid ground. We must toast to them! To those who choose to stay in heaven.” She was a poet sometimes, my mother.

  “A toast!” everyone agreed, raising their beers and whiskey glasses.

  “What about me?” my father asked right as the music stopped. Everyone laughed.

  My uncle said, “And to Guoqiang!”

  “To Guoqiang!” the people said.

  This time my mother raised her glass of orange soda higher than anyone and when the toast was over, she put down her glass, took the pins out of her hair, and let it all drop down. For a brief second, I could not see her—her face obscured by her long mane of hair—but I was certain it would not be long before she revealed herself again.

  “And to my qin jiu jiu!” I cried out.

  “To qin jiu jiu!” everyone repeated after me, raising their glasses for the third time.

  My uncle picked me up as Sammy released the balloons he had pumped full of helium on his own, without anyone’s help. He raised me to the ceiling and I locked my legs together and held my arms out as if I were a plane and the red and blue and purple and green and silver balloons I pushed out of my way were the clouds parting for me as I made my ascent into the unknown territory of the skies.

  I.

  We were alone most afternoons. On one of them, we searched my room for candles. We found one that I liked: white with Colombian coffee beans clustered around the bottom.

  “Eat it,” I said.

  “No,” my brother said, furrowing his eyebrows, turning away.

  “Eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it.” I backed him into a corner with the coffee end of the candle pointed at his mouth.

  “Stop it, Jen-naay,” he said, stepping back, “or I’ll enable my force shield to turn your bones into dirt.”

  “Okay, fine. Let’s light this and then blow it out. Let’s do it like twenty times in a row. It’ll be just like our birthday.”

  “Why twenty? That’s too many.”

  “Fine, twenty-eight it is.”

  “No. That’s more than twenty.”

  “Okay, okay, fine. Fifty-five, if you insist.”

  We set the candle on our living room coffee table. I told him to stand back while I lit up the match and touched it to the wick. “You first.”

  He crouched down on the ground, closed his eyes, and leaned in close. Neither of us expected the front of his overgrown bowl cut to touch the flame, to curl up immediately, to change color as if he had gotten a badly bleached body wave. If he were old enough, I would have laughed and said, “Cute pubes.” But instead, I covered his face with my hands and pulled out the burnt ends. The little crisps disappeared between my fingers when I rubbed them together. It smelled just like popcorn.

  “Let’s not tell Mom.”

  “Okay, Jenny.”

  I picked out the rest of the burnt strands, and the two of us ate them from my cupped hand while we sat on the couch, my arm around him and his feet wiggling like noodles in boiling water, our eyes staring straight ahead, as if the opening credits were coming on.

  —

  The next summer, I pulled him inside my room and locked the door. I was supposed to be teaching him addition, but I tossed the workbook on the floor and stuck a pair of headphones on his head.

  “Good thing your head’s so big.”

  I turned the volume up. He was five and starting kindergarten in three weeks. I was going to be a high schooler.

  “So the casbah is like a huge palace,” I said. When he started to get that distracted look on his face, I turned up the volume another few dials and told him to pay attention. “This is important,” I said. “When kids on the bus ask what you’re listening to, you just say: PUNK ROCK MOTHERFUCKER!” I folded all his fingers down into his palm except for his forefinger and pinky.

  “What?” he shouted. I pushed one of the headphones away from his ear and held him by the shoulders.

  “Look at me.” We stared at each other. “You’re listening to punk rock music, the most rockin’ music ever made in this extremely unrock
ed-out world. So you just listen to this on the bus and school the shit out of the other kids about rocking out.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a punk rocker now.”

  “Can you make me cereal with milk?” he asked, handing me the headphones.

  —

  He came in holding two pieces of ham stuck together and wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt over a hand-me-down turtleneck that was so old and stretched out on him it reminded me of our neighbor’s Dalmatian after he was neutered and had to wear a big plastic cone around his neck. I had said so the last time my brother wore it. (We were outside throwing sticks for our neighbor’s Dalmatian to catch and my brother asked me what neutering was and I said, “Hold on, I’ll get some scissors and show you,” which earned me an appalled look from our neighbor, and I was immediately embarrassed because I knew he found me odious and cruel.)

  I felt bad whenever I saw my brother wearing my old turtlenecks and when I saw him eating food supplied by our mother. Our mother had a habit of shaping food into hard tangerines. She’d cram his mouth so full of food that I’d find him sitting on a couch, dazed and unable to close his mouth or swallow. I’d pick him up and carry him to the bathroom so he could spit everything out into the toilet. I pitied him because I knew he would never have an easy relationship with food, not now and not when he was older either.

  “Please stop feeding him,” I said to my mother once.

  “You must be kidding,” she said. “You were the one who begged me for an extra five dollars a month to feed African babies.”

  I was reading a magazine when my brother walked in, his mouth overflowing with half-chewed ham, and instead of taking the two slices of ham away and showing him the proper way to eat and instead of re-cuffing his drooping turtleneck so it didn’t look quite so pathetic, I ignored him and pretended I only cared about the new sweater-skirt combos for autumn. When he wouldn’t leave, I told him, “You have to.”

  “No.” He folded a slice of ham into his mouth. “No, I don’t.”

  I nudged his shoulder. “Yes, you do,” I said, bumping the other slice of ham out of his hands.

  “Hey,” he said, butting his head against my stomach. We started using knuckles, fingernails, pillows, magazines. He kicked my leg, and I struck his cheek, the ham side. His mouth opened, and big fat tears slid down his cheeks and into his open ham mouth.

  Seeing him like that made me feel like a monster. “Spit it out,” I begged.

  It would be my fault later in his life when he wouldn’t take packed ham and cheese sandwiches to school, and even later, when his teacher made a phone call to our mother, concerned that he had refused to eat the ham sandwiches the cafeteria had prepared for the annual seventh-grade overnight trip to Boston. It was my fault. It had always been my fault. It would be my fault again in the future; it was endless. “Please,” I whispered. More pieces of chewed-up ham slid out of his mouth. He tried sucking some of them back up in between gaspy breaths. I cupped my hands together and offered them to him. “Just spit it out in here.” The ball of ham in his mouth seemed to be expanding from the addition of all his tears. “I can’t see you like this.”

  Later that day, when we were getting ready for bed, I showed my brother how to pull back his lips to look at his gums, and when he did, I found a little piece of uneaten ham stuck between his incisors.

  “Can I have it?” I asked.

  “Why?” He smiled wide, baring his teeth so I could pick the piece of ham out. I popped it into my mouth. It tasted so, so salty.

  —

  He had a temporary stutter where he would add the sound “ma” to the beginning of certain words. Sometimes, when he called out for me, he would say, “ma-ma-ma-ma Jenny.” It sounded like he was saying, “my-my-my-myyy Jenneeeeeeee.” I liked being his property.

  “It’s very common,” the speech pathologist told us. “It’s a tic, almost like clearing your throat compulsively before speaking.”

  “Is it significant that he often does it before saying my name?” I asked, hopeful.

  “Not particularly,” the speech pathologist answered.

  “She’s a quack,” I said to my parents when we got home. “I don’t believe a word she says.” I went and found my brother pacing around in circles in the TV room, taking great care to keep the speed at which he paced perfectly steady. “Say it again.”

  “What?” my brother asked, continuing to circle until I stood in front of him, blocking his path.

  “Say, ‘my Jenneeeeeeee.’ ”

  “My Jenneeeeee,” he said, pushing me away and continuing to circle.

  “No. Say it like you did the other day. Ma-ma-ma-myy Jenneeee.”

  “Ma-ma-ma-myy Jenneeee,” he repeated after me, completing another perfect circle.

  It wasn’t the same. He was growing up. He was growing out of his speech disorder. From that point on, in order to be his, I had to request it.

  —

  When I was fifteen, I spent three weeks in California studying philosophy at Stanford University with people who made me feel like I was part of a tribe—their tribe, not mine, but a tribe nonetheless. All I had wanted for so long was to be part of a family that wasn’t mine. To have an excuse to love mine less, an excuse to run away instead of staying so close all the time. “Why,” I wailed to our parents the week I got back, “do we have to do everything together? Why can’t you ever go someplace without us?” My brother was standing as close to me as he could without touching me. I had warned him that if I felt any part of his body touch mine I would saw it off. “Why does it always have to be the four of us? Do you really think I’m going to live here forever? Maybe he will,” I said, pointing at my brother, “but not me.”

  “You should have stayed in California, then,” my mother said.

  “If you want to stay home while we go to Home Depot, that’s no problem,” my father said. “It’s fine. We’ll take your brother with us.”

  “Jenny’s not coming?” my brother asked.

  “If you come one inch closer to me, I swear to God,” I said.

  In the weeks leading up to my Stanford trip, everyone had been extremely tense. I was about to experience my first taste of independence and I wanted to celebrate, but my excitement had been deflated by my mother’s moping, my brother’s tears, and my father’s absence—he seemed to be staying late at work even more than usual. Everything became an argument—whether I was going to check one bag or two, whether I should buy a phone card now or wait until I got to California, whether I should try to find used copies of the assigned books or buy them new at the Stanford bookstore. The one thing we didn’t ever bring up was money, how I had convinced my parents to spend nearly six months’ salary to get me to California and cover tuition and room and board, how I had sold them on the necessity of all of this. I wasn’t thinking about how the first time either of them had ever traveled anywhere significant was to America from Shanghai, with nothing more than eight boiled eggs in their pockets, fifty dollars that were confiscated at customs upon arrival, and a suitcase full of pots and pans and one broken broomstick for fear that they would not be able to find or afford these things in America. And anyway, that trip didn’t make them travelers, at least not the way the people I met at Stanford would speak of travel; that trip just made them immigrants, it made them charity. They became people to be saved, to be helped by institutions and individuals. I didn’t want to be saved, I wanted to be a member of the institution organizing the charity, the philanthropist dripping with generosity.

  At one point, in the early years of living in New York, they became friends with another Chinese couple who showed them how to scavenge for edible food in dumpsters. This other couple was saving money to bring their little girl back from Shanghai, where they had sent her to live with her grandparents after a long struggle with their finances.

  “Essentially, they were broke,” my mother told me. “They were irresponsible. They talked constantly about their little girl. I think her
name was Christina. Every time we came across a carton of tangerines or something, the mother would say, ‘Our Christina only eats sour fruit.’ They were odd. They were the kind of people we didn’t know to stay away from back in the day. Just compare them to us. Your father was not only able to save up enough money on a student scholarship—a student scholarship!—to buy you a one-way ticket to America so we could be together, but he was also able to save so well that he could afford to gift me a real gold pendant necklace and you a keyboard because remember how in Shanghai when you were small, you said you wanted to play the piano?”

  My mother made it all sound like a fairy tale and I didn’t want to point out that we were also separated for more than a year, when I was in Shanghai and my parents were in New York saving up enough money to reunite us.

  “But,” my mother continued as if reading my mind, “it’s not the same as that family, you know. They were wild. They had so many problems. What kind of person can’t afford their own apartment after six years in America? What kind of person brings their child to America only to send her right back for a full year? And what were they doing to change their situation? Eating out of dumpsters? Selling chips from Atlantic City at an inflated rate to the elderly who didn’t know any better?”

  “How long were you friends with them?” I asked my mother.

  “Oh, you know how these things go. We would see them here and there and then they disappeared and we found out that they had gone to North Carolina to live with the woman’s brother. They came back with some unlikely plan to make money and then disappeared again for a few weeks and turned up with no mention of what happened to all that talk about starting up a tutoring business or whatever their idea was. That’s the kind of people they were. Show up out of nowhere and then disappear for weeks and then reappear. We fell out of touch. It wasn’t accidental. Eventually I think the man got a job in an office and it turned out that his wife was pregnant with their second child. We ran into a mutual friend a few years ago and they said that they live on Long Island now. New Hyde Park, which means they must have gotten it together. Anyway, it’s not important. All that’s important is what happens to our family. Our family is just too lucky. I’ve got you and your brother and your father and we live in this gorgeous house, and every day I wake up and feel so lucky.”