Sour Heart Read online

  I burst into my brother’s room without knocking and he’s playing a game on the computer with such concentration that I can’t get him to look at me even as I’m pulling the swivel chair he’s sitting on away from his desk.

  “Stop,” he says. “What are you, an animal?”

  “Remember the time I burned your hair and it smelled like popcorn?”

  “Yeah, so? Why do you always talk about that?”

  “It’s funny to me.”

  “It’s stuff that happened when I was little.”

  “You look so old now,” I say. “You’re going to be taller than Dad.”

  “Knock next time,” he says. “You always just barge in.”

  “Well, that’s what you always did when you were little and I let you do it so many times. Don’t you owe it to me to let me barge in a few times?”

  “That was then.”

  “Well, this will be then one day too.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “That’s because sense isn’t made, it’s learned.”

  “Yo, you really need to get out of my room.”

  —

  At night, when everyone is sleeping, I sneak into his room like I used to when he was little. There were nights when I missed him, when I stayed up too late on my own after insisting that he couldn’t sleep in my bed with me, after insisting that he had to learn to sleep multiple consecutive nights in his own bed, nights when I stayed up trying to be my most romantic self, when I stared at myself in my bedroom mirror, flirting with myself, seducing myself, laughing at my own jokes, playacting the kinds of friendships I fantasized about having once I was no longer in this house. On those nights, there would often come a moment when I suddenly missed my brother so much that it was physically unbearable and I would creep into his room and watch him sleep, his little chest and his little face and his little knees smashed up against the mesh barrier that my parents installed so he wouldn’t roll off his bed. My brother never slept in the center of anything—he was always against some barrier.

  I’d kneel down next to him and kiss his pillowy cheeks or run my finger across his long, curled eyelashes that looked so angelic and heavy when wet. I’d stroke his hair from the little swirl in the center of the top of his head where it all seemed to originate. I’d take his fingers and wrap them around my pinky. I wanted him to wake up and hang out with me and when he wouldn’t, I’d pull his eyelids back and reveal the whites of his sleeping eyeballs. “Can you see me?” I’d clap my hands loudly next to his ear. Sometimes I’d pull him up like he was a marionette and I was his puppeteer. Through all of it, he would just sleep and sleep and sleep, even the few times when I dragged him fully out of bed and made him stand upright on his tippy toes, and when that wasn’t enough to wake him up, I grabbed his shoulders and made him do jumping jacks by pulling his arms up over his head and then letting them slap down hard against his legs. One time, he opened his eyes, though even then, he didn’t remember seeing me the next morning. There was no way to stir him.

  For years after I went away to college, he was afraid to sleep on his own. The first few months, he slept in my bed, but once our mother insisted on washing the sheets and pillows, he was no longer comforted by it. He slept in our parents’ bed after that for a little while, and then when he was too old to sleep with them but still too scared to sleep alone, they hid a twin-sized mattress on the floor next to their bed. It was positioned in such a way that anyone who peeked into our parents’ bedroom would not see it.

  “It’s on the floor,” my mother said, “so he can’t fall on the floor! It’s been working out great.”

  “You always want a baby in the house,” I accused my mother the year he started middle school. “You don’t even know who you are without a baby, do you?”

  “And you,” she said, “don’t know anything.”

  Last year, I helped my dad take the mattress into the garage and cover it with plastic.

  “Are you crying?” I looked at my mother and then looked away.

  “You could have just left it there,” she said to my father. “It’s his choice if he wants to sleep there or not. And now he doesn’t even have the choice.”

  Even though I tried to distance myself, I felt complicit in her tears. I didn’t want my brother to grow up either, just like my mother hadn’t wanted me to grow up nine years ago. I was the same as her—someone who nurtured my pain as if it could stop things from changing. No matter how many times I saw my mother’s watery eyes in my doorframe the summer before I left for college, it wasn’t enough to stop what had been put in motion: that I was leaving home and I wasn’t going to wait until thirty to do it.

  Next year my brother will be in high school and when I was in high school, I had a kid brother who grabbed my leg and walked with it in his arms through our house when it was cold, sat on my shoulders when it was hot to get closer to the ceiling fan, and slept in my bed when he missed me, which was all the time. I kneel down by his bed and kiss him on the cheek, no longer the pillow cheeks I remember from years ago, but now bonier and dotted here and there with pimples. I hold his hand up like he is my king and I am his loyal servant, and I kiss it, bring it up to my heart, hold it there for a moment, and say, “With all my regard.” I don’t let go of his hand right away. “Don’t forget me.” He stirs, and I wonder, for the first time, why it should be so important that he remembers me, that he remembers all of it? “Or forget me,” I add, placing his hand back underneath the blanket. “Or forget some of it. Or remember me. Whatever. It’s your life.”

  I leave twenty dollars on his desk to secure time for our next phone call. I want it to be possible for us to share a home again but I’ll be gone from this house in a week, and he will maybe tell our mom about a dream he had where he was swatting this giant bee away from his cheek, and finally, it came right for him, and no matter how much he ducked or swung his head, the bee remained close, and when it finally stung him, it was a soft puff, not bad at all, and then, it was on to the next dream.

  I say everyone, at least everyone who was ever me in elementary school, has known a clinger, a pest, a gnat who won’t go away, a stalker who would go so far as to ask God himself to insert her right into your bloodstream if He could…if He would. Someone who would stop at nothing to infect you, crushing every single one of your body’s defenses until you were resigned to slow, excruciating disease, until you were as poisonously entwined as two separate people can be—one a host (you), one a parasite (her)—so that with every passing day, you (the host) are dragged closer and closer to death as she (the parasite) inflates herself with your blood and your flesh, bringing her closer and closer to glory!!!

  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky that no one would go to such lengths to parasite onto you. Me, on the other hand? Too helpless, too tasty and succulent to blend in, to not be noticed, to not be someone’s prey. And that someone? That someone who ruined my health, whose very existence diminished me, the girl who literally chased after me like a poacher desperate for ivory tusks or a ravenous wolf about to pounce on a poor little rabbit, for me, that person, that fatal cancer, that bloodthirsty wolf, that greedy cutthroat poacher was Fanpin Hsieh.

  In the mornings, I watched her out of the corner of my eye during the Pledge of Allegiance. I did what I was told and pressed my right hand halfheartedly against my heart as we recited the Oath-to-Lick-America’s-Balls-Even-ThoughThey’re-Dirty-in-Order-to-Certify-That-America’s-Wonderful-and-Tolerant-Even-Though-It’s-Not, but not Fanpin. She always seemed to be lightly cupping the bottom of her breast, the left one, the one that had already grown into something substantial enough to touch by the time we were nine.

  She looked like an alien. (But then again, I was an alien, too; that was the box I had to check on every form. Did aliens have unalienable rights? Were we entitled to liberty and justice?) Alien or not, Fanpin moved her body like she had been in it far longer than the rest of us. Not only did she know all the curse w
ords, but she also knew how to use them correctly. She was the kind of person who didn’t know how to take no for an answer. She thought “no” still had the potential to mean “yes,” which, to be fair, so did I, but for her it didn’t stop there, she also thought there was a “yes” hidden in “no way” and “get out of my face” and “can you not talk” and also “no way José” and “you stink like liquid dumps, get away” and also “noooooo” and also “shut the hell up” and also “guess what? I hate you.” Nothing stopped her, especially me. She considered me her best friend and I considered her my worst nightmare come to life. At recess, she seemingly never ran out of ideas for us to do together:

  —Mande, let’s take off our pants and go bare-assed down the slide!

  —Um, no thanks.

  —Let’s see who can poke the other person’s eye out first with these pens my mom got me from Taiwan.

  —Poke your own eyes out and leave me alone.

  —Can you hold still so I can practice my roundhouse kick on your head?

  —Uhh, let me try to get as far away from you as I can.

  I prayed for someone to intervene, to take Fanpin’s attention off of me. At the start of fourth grade, I thought my prayers had been answered when some of the more outgoing kids tried to make fun of her, but she was peerless in her ability to deflect insult.

  Natalia Diaz, who had the nicest, most luscious curls of anyone in our grade, said, “Fanpin loves fans and pins!” (Too simplistic and dim-witted to affect her.) The class clown Min-ho So said, “Fanpin, spell I CUP. Bet you can’t.” (She pointed at his crotch and said, “Pass, even though I’ve seen you piss yourself.”) Jason Lam, the shrimpy kid who was always the first to step so that no one attacked him for being small said, “Look, Fanpin! Boyz II Men just crossed the street.” (She punched him in the arm and said, “Do I look like a gaylord to you?”)

  Yasmine Williams got a bunch of her friends to sing, “Fanpin is a ma-aa-aaa-nnn. Fanpin is a ma-aa-aaa-nnn.” (She went up to the offending singers and knocked them all out with a quick swipe of her arm.)

  Another time some Vietnamese kids went up to Fanpin and said, “Ewwwww, we heard you like touching girls.” (She raised her fists and said, “Nah, but I am going to enjoy touching you, and by touching I mean punching.”)

  It went on and on like that until everyone gave up and moved on to easier targets. As for me, I didn’t even bother trying because for one, unlike the other kids in my class, I had to deal with Fanpin outside of school, too, and for another, I tended to avoid anything that involved speaking in front of others. I had only begun to learn English two years ago and even though I pretty much mastered it within a year, I still had trouble pronouncing certain words. Sometimes I inflected my sentences in a manner that gave me away, and revealed my alien soul, my true FOB origins: a lowly immigrant with a shit-stained anus for an anus who added the word “riiieeeght?” to the end of every sentence. Minhee is so cute, riiieeeeght? The kimbap at Kay’s is so much better than the one Jun’s mom made, riiieeeeght?

  I worried about how I was seen, who I was seen with, and what kind of abysmal creature other people thought I was—these fears disfigured me though the damage was invisible to my parents, whom I could never compete with as they were always a hundred times more worried, more fearful, more occupied than I could ever be. They worried about me growing up in this neighborhood and attending an elementary school that had been mandated by the school board to offer pre–sex education sex education in fourth grade because we had been identified as a high-risk population. They heard all the rumors and and repeated them back to me. They especially latched onto the ones that involved some poor girl who went from bringing home straight A’s to taking a nosedive into junkiedom—everything from stealing money from her parents to selling her body for more quick fixes to stints in and out of jail to winding up pregnant by some other junkie who also tested positive for HIV, and finally OD-ing in a sad gargle of bubbling blood and vomit and shit smears in a gutter somewhere, leaving the fate of her innocent unborn baby totally uncertain. All these stories involved great leaps of disaster, buckets of drained blood, older-men-predator types who could somehow convince even the most clear-eyed girl to do anything, and frequent references to the “problem with America,” which, as far as I could tell from what my parents discussed, had everything to do with the extremely disturbing phenomenon of American parents not loving their children at all, and knowing this about themselves, and in spite of this, still insisting on raising children and having more children, creating generation after generation of children who were never loved, are never loved, and will never be loved.

  “Why do they do this?” my mother asked one evening when I brought her and my father our class field-trip slip to sign so I could spend the day at the American Museum of Natural History. “Why do they want to sign away their children’s right to learn in school?” At home, we spoke in Chinese. None of us knew how often and how badly the other made mistakes in English. None of us knew the other’s humiliations.

  “My teacher said it’s another,” I started to say and then hesitated and used an English phrase, “component to learning.”

  “Co-what-what to what?” my mother said.

  “They think it’s just as vital as studying math and science in school,” my father explained. “Regardless, it looks like they want us to sign off on you spending a day not at school.”

  Still, my mother wasn’t satisfied. “Why do these people have kids if they aren’t going to ever love them?”

  Sometimes, I took my parents’ rhetorical questioning as a challenge and tried to answer. “Maybe it’s because so many parents are junkies,” I started to say but as soon as I said the word “junkie” in Chinese, they flipped, asking me how I knew about drug abuse, was it because some nefarious drug kingpin had lured me into his lair, was it because I had been convinced by a stupid girl to try drugs, was that why I no longer flinched when the doctor told me I needed a few more booster shots? Because I had been sticking heroin-filled needles in my veins? Was that why I had slumped over one time while watching Looney Tunes in the morning, because the crack had worn off and my body was in the process of organ failure and total shutdown? Was that why I wanted to buy new clothes, because some gangbanger had told me I was a tasty little morsel and I should come by his van sometime? Did I know there had been 344 murders committed in our borough last year? Did I know that there was still time left in the month to make it 345? Did I want to be the 345th murdered person in Queens? Did I? Did I?

  No, I said and then no again and then no again and then no to all the other questions. Still no, I said, and still no. By the end of their questioning, I was too battered to respond and so they took it as a sign that I was actually hiding something. That I didn’t realize how dire the situation was. The more my parents fretted about my survival, the more it seemed like it was a miracle I was alive at all. If I somehow escaped drugs, pregnancy, pimps, and gangbangers, then I would still have to deal with my parents, and the constant unloading of their fears made it impossible for me to fear the feared things themselves as all my time was taken up fearing my parents would never stop fearing.

  I moved from Shanghai, China, to Flushing, Queens, in the middle of second grade to reunite with my parents who had immigrated to America a few years before me. On the flight, I was put under the custody of a “family friend” whom I had never met before though he swore he was there at my birth, which I couldn’t argue with because no one can remember their own birth and so it was the perfect lie that could never be disproven. The trip left me rattled and terrified. Several times during the flight I woke up lying on the floor of the aisle with everyone looking at me, having not a clue how I got there. It was abject and then suddenly I was in America.

  Almost right away, my dad began to regret all those months he spent waiting in the American consulate, filling out paperwork for my sponsorship to come to America. He checked my arms for track marks and had a home kit to measure my blood pre
ssure for signs of hypertension, sign number one for drug addiction, according to the latest literature. My mother checked my vagina every few weeks, making sure there weren’t any signs of having been tricked into participating in gangbangs with older men. America was crawling with rapists and addicts, fucked-up nurses at free clinics who gave you a live dose of HIV instead of the measles vaccine because they didn’t like the shape of your eyes or because they didn’t like the way your glasses slipped down the low bridge of your nose or how your head sloped in the back while the front of your face was as flat as an ice hockey rink.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” my dad used to say to me in Chinese.

  “How?” I asked.

  “By getting yourself killed.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “These kids here have death wishes. It’s always the ones born with the right to live who want to die. These people have never been forced to suffer and that’s why they seek it voluntarily. Do you know how easy it is to get mixed up in the wrong crowd? Do you know how easy it is to throw your life away? Do you realize how fun self-destruction looks at first?”

  I nodded furiously. I knew, I knew it all, he and my mother told me a thousand times.

  “Are you trying to teach our daughter how to become a sex-crazed drug addict?” my mother asked him in Shanghaihua. “Are you instructing her on how to do it? Step by step?”

  “Far from it.”

  My mom and my dad spoke to each other in Shanghai dialect in front of me when they were discussing things that I wasn’t supposed to be privy to. They thought for the longest time I couldn’t understand because back when we all lived in Shanghai, none of us ever spoke Shanghaihua to each other; my father’s family came from Shandong and my mother’s family came from Wenzhou. I remember hearing the strange cadences of the Wenzhou dialect whenever I went to visit my mother’s mother’s house, how it sounded like an argument between people who really loved each other. My other grandparents spoke in heavily Shandong-accented Mandarin, saying za men instead of wo men and loo instead of lü. I started speaking that way, too, until everyone laughed at me and said I was talking like a little farmer girl, and I said, Then we’re all farmers! Shandonghua was everywhere in my grandmother’s house in Shanghai where the three of us used to live in a tiny sunlit room that overlooked the garden. We slept in a bed so tiny and narrow that my mother and my father had to sleep on their sides. Usually they faced me so they could talk to each other in the mornings while I pretended to sleep between them, but sometimes we faced in the same direction, like taco shells stacked up against each other—those were the days that they thought I forgot, or never knew about in the first place.