Sour Heart Read online

  That was the secret to being me back then: if you never say a word, people will think you don’t know anything, and when people think you don’t know anything, they say everything in front of you and you end up containing everything. On the inside, I was vast. But on the outside, I was a known idiot. Nothing that came out of me had any resemblance to what I thought I had inside of me. My parents talked to me like I was the kind of person who would enter an unmarked van full of leering, strange men just because they said there was candy. My teachers talked to me like I still colored outside the lines and couldn’t do two plus two without those red and yellow plastic counters to aid me.

  “My wife,” my father would often say in Shanghaihua, “you know that if I had my way, I’d send these kids and their parents to ten years of hard labor in Manchuria. See how much they like running around with their pants half-down and their shirts half-open then.”

  “Oh, yes,” my mom would say. “Yes, yes.”

  At least my parents always agreed in the end and I took that to be a small, throwaway sign of their love. I hoped and hoped it would remain that way forever but it never lasted long. They couldn’t seem to go more than a few weeks without blowing up over the same things—she irritated him and he disappointed her and because of innumerable miscalculations they accused each other of making, and thanks to the other, my future was a foregone conclusion: ruined. The question of whose fault it was had no resolution. Why didn’t he get a proper education back in Shanghai? Why did it take him so long to finish his university studies? Why did he choose to get a PhD in English literature of all things when he knew he was at a disadvantage with his thick accent? Why didn’t he just stick it out a few more years? At least then he would have the degree he came over here for and people back home wouldn’t think of him as such a colossal failure. She asked him these questions over and again until things were slammed and broken and in return, he asked her what the hell did she think he was doing now and furthermore where the hell did she think they came from? Did she somehow grow up in an alternate universe where schools weren’t closed for years? Did she somehow live in a country where they weren’t subjected to the fucked-up genocidal whims of a demagogue? Did she know anyone—anyone!—who had a choice? Didn’t she herself throw several tantrums when he said he was considering just staying in China and taking the government position he had been offered after graduating from school? Wasn’t she the one who insisted only someone who had surgically replaced their brain with their rectum was incapable of seeing that obviously going to America to pursue a PhD at NYU was the far better opportunity? Wasn’t she the one who complained without end about how he wasn’t dreaming big enough for her? How everyone was going to America and making it so why couldn’t we? Not everyone had lived in a cocoon of protection as she did back in Shanghai, he spat at her; not everyone felt as entitled to their dreams as she did.

  They’d argue until it was the next day and I would wake up thinking it had all been a dream—my mother crying that she could have been an interpreter at the UN and my father laughing and mocking her, saying, They wouldn’t have hired you as a janitor. The insults they traded back and forth until finally my father ended it by striking her in the face or grabbing her arm so hard that it made her laugh like a crazy person. Go ahead, she would say, I dare you to break it. I dare you to achieve something. Be the man you think you are.

  It was nightly and it was ugly and they sure as hell didn’t try to protect me from hearing it, so every night there was one more scream I couldn’t unhear, one more crazy peal of laughter that ended in things shattering, one more argument I could not unknow. I had my own shit, my own fears. The only thing that helped was when I could share some of them with my parents, and they listened and held me and petted me without leaving their nervous shaking imprinted on me. I needed reassurance and I wanted calm, but there was little occasion for that so I went to God instead. Every night before falling asleep, I got into my bed, stared up at the ceiling, and prayed:

  Dear God, never ever let me become like those Korean girls in my class who have really ugly cheekbones and smell so bad and can’t pronounce words right. Yesterday when Minhee read aloud from Bridge to Terabithia she was trying so hard to get each word right and you could tell because there was this little spit bubble on the side of her lip and it was disgusting and later she pretended like she wasn’t almost crying when the substitute teacher said, “Jesus, have we gone back in time to first grade? Can any of you read a sentence? I don’t see how the school board thinks it’s a good idea to assign this book when it has clearly gone completely over your heads. My God, how were you allowed to graduate from third grade? Did you kids really pass the statewide English test with this level of reading and writing? Unbelievable. This is a new low, folks. I’m talking rock bottom,” and kept looking over at us and sighing and closing her book and standing up from her chair like she was about to leave, which was probably why Minhee went around the playground at recess asking everyone if they wanted a “Korean massage,” and if you shrugged or asked, “Um, what’s a Korean massage?” she’d thump your back really hard and was getting so crazy about it that she actually made Eric Cho choke. Everyone laughed and was like, “Eric Cho-oked! Eric Cho-oked!”

  So please, God, show me some mercy and don’t let people think I’m like Minhee Kim because she’s a degenerate and I bet she’s going to join a Korean gang when she gets to middle school, something I won’t ever do, which already makes me so much better than her, and please also, if you remember, give me boobs before sixth grade and my period before seventh even though I heard most girls get boobs in fifth now and little nubbies in fourth and their period in sixth, but then again, most of those girls are really fat and they all say that I’m anorexic, which I’m not. By the way, God, can you also make those girls stop calling me anorexic? I can’t help being the way I am, and it’s not like I flaunt it or anything like that Lucy girl who is always saying stuff like, “Oh no! I’m so tiny the wind is gonna blow me away!” when it’s really windy outside. I just happen to have to poop a lot and my mom says my grandfather was the same way. He was on the toilet all the time. Apparently just like me, he needed to poop immediately after every meal and that was why my grandmother said he was just skin wrapped around bones because he weighed so little. So yeah, it would be great if you could help me out. Thank you, God. Good night.

  Wait, also protect my mom and my dad and my grandparents in China and also my cousins and my aunts and my uncles and their families of cousins and uncles and aunts and things like that and also my mom’s friends and also my dad’s friends and also my friends’ families and also their friends and anyone else I forgot, but…you’re God, remember? Since you are God (and why would I be praying to someone who wasn’t God, and how would I even know to pray to someone who was only pretending to be God, that makes no sense), you probably know everyone I am thinking of right now, even though I can’t exactly go through every single person I want you to protect for me because I don’t want anyone to be sad and it would even be okay if you didn’t protect me as much as everyone else because it’s not a big deal if I’m sad sometimes. I just wish people didn’t have to die in real life and in movies and in books and in dreams and in my imagination. Sometimes I imagine myself dead and then I can’t sleep, but don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. Good night.

  —

  The year I immigrated to New York, my mom was working as a bookkeeper for a shipping company in Jamaica, Queens, and Fanpin’s mom was working part-time for a Taiwanese newspaper and had walked into my mom’s office to try and sell her boss on the idea of buying ad space in the paper, but my mom’s boss was a patriotic mainlander who had issues with the Shijie Ribao for being an apologist for Taiwan. It escalated quickly and Fanpin’s mother was asked to leave and never return. My mom ran out after her to apologize on behalf of her boss, who was an asshole and a half, and the two of them bonded over all the assholes and a half in their lives. After chatting a bit, they realized they li
ved just blocks from each other and that their kids went to the same school but different classrooms. I’d see Fanpin now and then, weekends when my mom’s face was more or less unbruised, she’d bring me over and I mostly sat around, shy and unwilling to leave my mother’s side. My mother had to speak for me, chalking it up to the fact that I was still learning English and wasn’t comfortable playing with other kids in English yet.

  “Oh, but Fanpin speaks some Chinese,” her mother said encouragingly, tricking me into feeling okay about going with Fanpin to her room but as soon as she shut the door, she spoke to me in a rush of English, and I didn’t know what to say back, so I just stood there, looking at her collection of tiny knives and G.I. Joe figurines that she had neatly spread out on her dresser.

  “She’s not very bright,” Fanpin said to her mother as I was leaving with mine. Fanpin’s mother admonished her but the damage had been done. I had to continue going over to her house to please my mother. In fourth grade, I had the misfortune of being placed in the same class as her, which meant more Fanpin but also meant that I had moved up from the remedial classes I had been in for second and third—I was with the okay kids, not the bright kids, but the okay ones. I thought my father would be pleased but he was disappointed.

  “You should be in the gifted class,” he said. “You should be with the top kids. Not failing is no accomplishment.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, just be better.”

  “Okay.”

  Once Fanpin and I were placed in the same class, she insisted on walking me home every day after school. “I’m your knight in shining armor.” She grinned.

  “You’re my blight in shining armor,” I said, trying out a new word on her.

  “You really don’t know how to speak right.” Her voice was slightly softer than how she usually spoke to me so I knew she was impressed. I lived on Ash Avenue and she lived on Delaware; since the streets went in alphabetical order it made sense for Fanpin to walk me home though it had a gleam of inequality because I didn’t want to be escorted.

  She insisted and had a million and one reasons for why it wasn’t just her right to escort me, but her duty. “You know we live in a kind of crap neighborhood, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I knew. I knew too much and never enough. “But you live in a house and you have your own bedroom.”

  “So? A house in a crap neighborhood is still a house in a crap neighborhood.”

  When we got to Ash Avenue, we kept walking because Fanpin insisted she had something really special to show me—her mother had bought her a VHS tape of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and there was one scene in particular she thought I would really like.

  “Fine,” I said, “but I have a lot of homework.”

  “We have the same homework, dumbo. We’re in the same class, remember?”

  “It takes me too long to alphabetize the vocab words. I wish we could just alphabetize our streets. Ash, Beech, Cherry. It would be sooo easy.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Fanpin said.

  “You always go against me.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just if everything is easy we’ll never learn. It’s supposed to be hard. That’s how we know we’re learning.”

  She had a point and I found myself nodding like the Korean kids in my class did during church service. I knew how vigorously they nodded because one afternoon Fanpin and I snuck into the back pew of Flushing Memorial Presbyterian on our way home from school to spy on Minhee and her crew, but what we stumbled upon was so new to me, so unknown, I forgot to think of ways to make fun of them and instead just stared, wondering if this was something I would do one day.

  “What are they doing?” I murmured to Fanpin.

  “Praying,” she said.

  “That’s praying?”

  “Yeah. Don’t your parents take you to church? Don’t you speak to God?”

  “No,” I lied. I spoke to God every night, but I had never known how to pray because my parents didn’t believe in God.

  “God is money,” my father told me after slamming the door on some Jehovah’s Witnesses one evening. “God is having medication when you’re sick, babies that have a chance to live out their adult lives.” He was sputtering the way he did when he’d had it with my mom. “Your mother’s grandfather was tortured. Where was God then? Where was God when they were torturing that poor old man?” The word for “torture” in Chinese sounded like the word for “bean.” Like a cute, round, soft bean. It stretched for miles—it was appropriate to use when describing one kid making a mean face to another kid just to be annoying, and it was appropriate to use when describing a group of Red Guards accusing their history teacher of being a bourgeois landlord and dragging her out of the classroom and forcing her to crawl on her hands and feet across a path paved with coal cinders until they bled, then stringing her to a lamppost while students pushed thumbtacks into her forehead for being a “bourgeois pig who valued intellect over class struggle” and so deserved to have her brain permanently injured, and deserved to be beaten with sticks and belts and clubs spiked with nails and deserved to stand under the sun while boiling water was dumped over her head until she lost consciousness and was placed into a garbage cart to die. When my father brought up torture again in the context of my mother’s grandfather, I was ready to bite my lip so hard that it bled, I was ready to grind my teeth against each other until I had a headache for the next three days, I was ready to pull my sleeves over my hands so I could secretly dig my fingers into my palms until skin broke.

  “They tortured my great-grandfather?” I asked my father while holding up the pamphlet that read in big block letters: WILL THIS WORLD SURVIVE? My father had thrown it onto the ground in disgust and I picked it up after him.

  “They tortured him to death. To death. They took all his paintings and dumped them in the river. They burned his books and ripped up his scrolls. They emptied his booze down the toilet. They literally torched his family history that had been scrupulously recorded and passed down for generations. In a matter of minutes, it was all lost. Forever. They demanded he give up his own home so they could turn it into a shoe factory. He began coughing up blood. He was so mad. He forsook God. He had no paper to write on. He was a poet without paper! His home was emptied of beauty. He was a lover with nothing to love. Your great-grandfather owned the most beautiful estate in Wenzhou. It was a dream home he built with his own hands. He hadn’t harmed anyone. He was known as the most generous man in the village. He volunteered himself in the early days of the party. He joined the army because he believed in the Communist utopia. He convinced other people in the village to collectivize when no one else was willing, and this was how they repaid him. They dragged him out and forced him to kneel in front of his own children! Do you understand, Mande? Can you explain what kind of God oversees this? Can you imagine continuing to pray to this God? Your great-grandfather died standing up, writing his last poem in the air, scribbling with his fingers. He was engaging with ghosts, he handled ghost objects for a brief time in the real world. His children thought he was going mad. He took ten shots of baijiu, one after another, like a general about to take his men into a losing battle, and after gulping down the tenth shot, he died.”

  “Where did he get the alcohol from? I thought they drained it all.”

  “There was no booze. There weren’t even glasses. He was holding air, he was already a ghost and his body took another few days to catch up. He took empty shots of nothing and dropped dead.”

  “Dropped dead?”

  “Dead. Died. Diiiiiiiieed. He was in perfect health and then he was dead. People died of anger back then. They died of humiliation, they died of sadness, they died of longing. They died of shame. Families were separated. Husbands and wives assigned to provinces thousands of miles away from each other. My mother and father saw each other five times in ten years. I saw my father a total of three times after my ninth birthday. People my age walk with canes because they were sent to the country
side and worked to exhaustion. Tell me what prayer will do for them. Go on.”

  “Religion was banned in China,” my mother added, saying nothing more of her grandfather. “It was illegal to pray. You could be jailed or beaten if someone snitched.”

  “And that’s why…” I started, then hesitated, “God is money?”

  “Listen to your dad. He’s right. It was illegal to have money. Or it was impossible to have it. It’s hard to explain because it was a different world.”

  My head was spinning. I prayed for a God who would show me there was a God. I prayed for the past, which had already happened and was too late to change, but still, I thought, what if God could? What if the past could be healed? What if my parents could unlive what they lived through and still be my parents, then what? I began to kneel because Minhee knelt. I clasped my hands because the Korean kids clasped theirs. I learned in school that everywhere in the world except Europe, people didn’t know how to pray and God had to be brought to them, and everywhere God had to be brought to, it seemed people disappeared, died, lost all dignity, and/or were forced into lifelong servitude. I didn’t want anyone to bring God to me. I didn’t want to die standing up. I didn’t want to live in servitude to the people who claimed they found God first. I would learn in secret, I would become fluent with God. I had to.