Sour Heart Read online

  Fanpin was already fluent. “I speak to God every night. My mom and I do it together. We go to church and do it with everyone else.” Her mom was from Taiwan and my mom was from mainland. According to my mom, that made all the difference.

  “It means they fled after the civil war. They were on the losing side, of course. It means they went to school. They live now the way people in China did sixty years ago. The women don’t work. They have multiple children if they can. It’s the old country, they live like it’s still 1920. It’s not normal. The men are vicious. They have free rein to beat their wives. It’s not looked down upon over there.” She had a strange look in her eyes, one that told me she wouldn’t elaborate further on the hypocrisy—I would have to get older and find out on my own.

  “Can you show me how?” I asked Fanpin after we spied on Minhee and her friends.

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s easy.”

  Fanpin wasn’t all bad. Just in front of the other kids, she was. At school, I pretended I barely knew Fanpin, even though I went over to her house all the time. I pretended like I didn’t know what Fanpin’s room looked like, like I had never laughed along with her at the part in Tiny Toons when Babs floods the entire town to get back at Buster, like I had never helped her bury her pet cat Lucifer, who died when she was in third grade and smelled so horrible that I had thought for sure someone in her family had soiled their pants during the goodbye ceremony. I pretended I had never got down on my knees with her and repeated after her: Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for blessing us with another day. We bow our heads in supplication to you, to show the immensity of our thanks, insufficient as they are to Your glory and Your blessings. O Father, grant us Your benediction. Watch over us through our hours of darkness. Protect us in spirit as well as in body when we sleep. Help us to confront tomorrow with unwavering faith and without fear. We are forever Yours. We place all our trust in You. We open our hearts to You and we implore You to guide our minds, fill our imaginations and control our wills so that we may be wholly Yours, dedicated to You and only You. In Your Holy name, we thank You for drawing us into Your heart. May You use us as You will, always to Your glory and Your honor and to the splendor of heaven. May we forever serve You, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

  The prayer was a whole other language to me, separate from English, separate from Chinese, it was new grammar, new sounds, new forms. I wished to be fluent in prayer faster than it took me to become fluent in English but it was fucking difficult. It was like the time I decided I would look up every single word that I didn’t know in Bridge to Terabithia, which meant looking up the words “copyright” “reserved” “registered” “trademark” and “dedication” before even cracking open the first numbered page. When an hour had gone by and I had only gotten through two of the assigned thirty pages, I was nearly inconsolable. I was bleary from going back and forth between the dictionary and the book and making things worse was when the definition for the word contained words that I had to look up. To understand the definition of the word “despise,” I had to also look up “scorn” “contempt” “loathe” “disgust” “disdain” and “regard”—basically everything except the word “to” had to be looked up and then in looking up the definitions of the words used to define “despise” there were even more words that had to be looked up, and so on and so on until I finally looked up every foreign word nested inside a definition for another word, at which point, I still had to then retrace each word back to the previous definition where I had first encountered it. By the time I finally returned to “despise,” I was so mixed up that I had to move on to the next word without ever figuring out what it meant. All was lost, all was impossible. I decided I would rather be successfully illiterate than fail over and over again at literacy.

  It was no different praying with Fanpin. I tried to hold in my head all the words I didn’t know to look up later while also remaining in the moment because I desperately wanted to talk to God and I desperately wanted God to speak to me. What was “benediction,” what kind of “thanks” was both “insufficient” and contained “immensity”? Was there a kind of “draw” that didn’t involve crayons, and a “will” that wasn’t a name or an indicator of the future, what was “glory” and why “amen,” why not “thank you,” why not “bye”? Were the Heavenly Father, the Lord, our Father, our Savior, and Jesus Christ ever in competition with each other, and which was the most supreme God? How was I supposed to figure out the order of calling on my own the next time? I was left more uncertain than ever.

  While I was mired in questions, Fanpin had moved on to snacks. Her mother only worked half-days selling ads for the Shijie Ribao, and was home every afternoon by two. Our school let out an hour later and by the time Fanpin and I got to her house there were sandwiches ready and juice boxes to choose from. It was perfect for someone with friends, only Fanpin didn’t have any, which meant more sandwiches for me. She claimed that in third grade she had been friends with this girl Frangie, a weird raccoon-eyed girl who never spoke.

  “What did her voice sound like?” I asked.

  “Actually, really, really nice,” Fanpin told me. “Kind of like the Pink Power Ranger. And she’s got a dead mom.”

  “So how come she’s not here now if you’re such best friends?”

  “Because I have a new best friend. The hell’s with you? Stop being a bag of farts already.”

  It made me uncomfortable when Fanpin made it seem like we were in this together, when I was only there for the sandwiches on weekdays and to stay close to my mother on weekends. My mother liked going over to Fanpin’s house to gossip with Fanpin’s mom about the other moms they knew and the light chitchat always turned into a discussion of all the ways life had failed to live up to the promise of my mother’s childhood dreams or whatever. It made me think my father was right: there was no satisfying her.

  Our moms had a lot to say to each other because they both had married men who didn’t know how to cook, who never brought them flowers on their birthdays, men so lacking in imagination and resources that they thought a good weekend was one when three Clint Eastwood Westerns aired on network television, men who came from families of much lower stature than their own and yet still insisted on being the “man” of the house, still insisted on a legacy named after them, as if, our mothers said, rolling their eyes, they would do anything of significance in their lifetimes.

  While I was eavesdropping, Fanpin was usually in her room practicing karate, and I savored the precious few minutes I had between my mom no longer having any responsibility toward me and Fanpin realizing that I was hiding in the bathroom, listening in on our moms talking about all the things that oppressed them. I waited for my mom to reveal that, in fact, I was one of the things in her life that kept her from being happy, from realizing all of her dreams, from being the sort of full, brilliantly expansive, and interminably layered person she wanted to be, that I was the primary cause of her imprisonment. But they only ever spoke about the shortcomings of our fathers, or how this place was worse than anything they had ever experienced in China.

  “After all,” my mother said once, “I could have worked at the UN, I could have floated on the Dead Sea. I could have walked around the Arabian desert with Bedouins, but instead I married him. Then he had to go and immigrate to America. Look at me now. Have I even seen the Jersey shore? Will the northern lights ever appear above me?”

  Sometimes, their conversations made my blood boil—all that ungratefulness they unleashed. It wasn’t as if my father was a monster. And if America was so terrible, why the hell did they bring me here? Why did my mother, a grown woman, get to talk like all her hopes and dreams had been shat on, kicked, and set on fire, all the while pushing me, a mere girl, a child, to do better, to accomplish more, to face down all the odds and become a legend? Where was I supposed to go to complain the way they did? To be validated the way they validated each other?

  “He puts his feet right on the coffee table,” Fanpin’s mom sa
id once. “As if guests don’t drink tea and eat guazi off of that table.”

  “Well, Jianjun might be a complete imbecile. He doesn’t even bother taking a shower half the time. He takes the shower nozzle and sprays at his ass for a minute, then wipes it with the same color towel that my daughter uses to wash her face. What sort of grown man is stupid enough to pick a towel the same color as his kid’s face towel to wipe his ass?”

  “Your husband uses an ass towel?”

  “Yeah. And who do you think gets the pleasure of washing it every week?”

  “Us. You and me.”

  “Well, just me, actually.”

  “I know, I meant you and me in a metaphorical sense. I didn’t mean I’m also literally washing your husband’s ass towel.”

  “Our men are spoiled.”

  “When we’re the ones who should be getting spoiled.”

  Our mothers weren’t really friends. They just had to be because this was a lonely life. At night, my mom stuck cotton in my ears because those were the days when the Puerto Rican gangs shot at the black gangs who shot back at the Puerto Rican gangs who constantly fought over a corner with the Korean gangs who declared a truce with the Vietnamese gangs who together turned on the Puerto Rican gangs who temporarily teamed up with the black gangs who had a shoot-out with the Korean gangs over that same corner and lost, only to have the issue come back up again with a newly formed Cantonese gang who accidentally shot an old woman who was crossing the street too slowly. We clipped out photos of houses on Long Island that we were going to move into one day if we did everything right, if we lived long enough. We made secret and not-so-secret promises to ourselves that this current life was temporary. No one lived this way forever. We told ourselves we were going to escape one day or another, although I never figured out if dying counted as escape.

  At least it was safe in Fanpin’s house. At least she had a house. Even though she shared her two-story colonial row house with two other families, she still had her own room, she had a mom who made my favorite sandwiches—ham and cheese—and let me have as many as I wanted and never said anything like, “My, you are a hungry little girl. Do your parents not feed you enough? Do they not let you have seconds?” which was what the other, cattier parents always asked me because I was stick-thin and yawned all the time. At the Hong Kong Supermarket on Main Street on Saturdays, the other moms pushed their shopping carts close to ours and asked my mom if she ever let me eat meat, or was it all just rice and a few vegetables here and there? Fanpin’s mom never bugged me about what I ate at home. She watched Taiwanese soap operas on a small portable TV in the kitchen while chopping vegetables and meat. She cleaned up after Fanpin and drove her to karate lessons and took us for Baskin-Robbins afterward. Her mom never yelled and always said yes to anything Fanpin wanted, or anything I wanted, for that matter. I liked asking her mom if I could have a second Juicy Juice juice box, mostly to test myself to see if I could say, “Can I have another Juicy Juice juice box?” without stumbling over the words because even though I had only learned English two years ago, that didn’t stop the two white kids in my class from mocking me when I misspoke. There was the Irish kid whose skin was so white it blinded me on sunny days (and it wasn’t just me because Minhee Kim and her posse called him “Albino Potato”), and there was the Italian girl who once stuck her foot out to trip me as I was going to put a box of crayons back into the art supply drawer and then laughed like a villain while pulling her eyes back to taunt me, “I knew you couldn’t see with these!” It was doubly worse when they got the black and Spanish kids to join in, and even worse than that was when they got the Korean girls to participate, too, because most of them also spoke English with an accent, and there was something so undignified about having someone torment you for something they themselves were probably tormented for a year or two ago. It made me think the whole world was vicious. No one had it in them to have a heart for anyone, not even themselves, or at least, not the selves they once were that other people still had to be.

  The Korean kids, who had all immigrated not too long before me (with the exception of Minhee, who, apparently, when she was one year old, was carried across a live minefield by a North Korean soldier who had defected, then smuggled through an underground railroad all the way to Thailand, where she was put into a refugee camp that sent her and her family on a plane to JFK airport, and when she told that story at show-and-tell, the part that none of us could believe was that of all the places her family could have ended up in, they chose…Flushing?), were the best at taunting me, knowing exactly how to push me over the edge by asking me if I needed another year of ESL, by asking me to pronounce P-e-n-e-l-o-p-e. “Do it, do it, do it,” they said, “say her name.” When I finally said, “Pen-ah-lope. Simple,” everyone threw their heads back in delight and laughed, and I sheepishly laughed, too, even though what I wanted to say was:

  Wet twat motherfucking cocksucking ass-opening reverse turd of a cocksucked smelly balls piece of shit shitfucker cuntpeeled fuck! I learned this language two years ago, does that mean anything at all to you? I don’t come home and say, “Mom, I’m home!” I say, “Wo hui lai le ma ma.” I say, “妈妈, 我回来了.” That’s right, you mondo-clit. And while we’re at it I’d like to say this to you: “你是一个臭王八蛋.”*1 Yes, I mispronounced “stereo” last week but that’s because we don’t own a stereo, and even if we did, I wouldn’t have an opportunity to say, “Mom, can you turn up the stereo?” I would say, “可不可以把音响关轻一点.”*2

  My first year in America, no matter what language I used, I was always wrong. In English you can turn off the lights and close the door, but you can’t close the lights and turn off the door, and in Chinese you can close down the lights, but you can’t simply wear glasses and shirts and hats because each of those things had its own specific counting word for “wear,” and every type of object in the world had to be counted differently. In English, some e’s were soft, some g’s were hard, some consonants sounded like others, every rule had an exception, no exceptions didn’t have rules. I started to regret saying anything at all. I started to see how delusional I had been to believe that words could only lift me into the glorious upper stratosphere of possibility instead of pulling me down into the drowning waters of inarticulation. My bad tongue mocked me for ever thinking that language was miraculous, like, for example, how did anyone ever come up with a hundred different ways of saying, “You have made this world a great one for me”?

  —

  For every single thing I gave two shits about, Fanpin gave none. She had this aura about her, like she could easily karate-chop a sixth grader into oblivion, and unlike the other girls, her long black hair made her look tough, like those men who wore beat-up jackets and swore while smoking and rode motorbikes on the highway, laughing all the way to the bank at all the other people on the road—the people with neat, trimmed hair, who drove dependable cars with the windows rolled up—and it intimidated and confused us, the way she could look like that while the rest of us idiots still heeded what we were told about being girls and boys who were supposed to grow up and become adult women and adult men.

  Even if I did respect Fanpin a little bit, our so-called friendship was doomed. I knew it without even knowing God. Sure, I wanted to be loved and accepted, but why did it have to be by her? She embarrassed me when she insisted on holding my hand as we walked down the hallway, acting tough whenever a boy was around us. Once, she smacked Jason Lam in the face when he came up behind me and pinched the back of my shirt to see if I was wearing a bra. “Don’t be touching my friend, Shrimpson,” she said.

  “What the hell,” he said, recoiling. “Don’t go around hitting people.”

  “Don’t go around being sexist.”

  “Sex-what?” I said.

  “Sexist, you idiot,” Fanpin repeated. “Don’t you know we live in a sexist society?”

  “You don’t need to tell me,” I said. But she did. She needed to tell me and tell me and hover
around me.

  The day before Valentine’s Day, Fanpin pulled me into the girls’ bathroom and demanded that I touch her boob in the stall closest to the door. She pressed my hand to her breast like I was swearing on oath:

  I do solemnly swear that I am not a lesbian, but you, Fanpin, my not-dear friend, are. And since you are also scary and practice karate (on your own and on me), and are already a purple belt (pretty gay color. Coincidence? Um, HIGHLY DOUBT IT), and because I have great hopes that you will scare my non-existent tits right out of me, I will do as you tell me to. Also, why are your breasts like two hard rocks? I do believe that is not normal. Amen.

  Afterward, she said, “You better not wash your hands if you know what’s good for you,” when she saw me reaching for the faucet. She raised her hand as if to strike me. It was an all too familiar gesture and I winced. I was an autobot back then and certain expressions, certain ways that people lifted their arms made me flinch, made my skin prickle like it had been touched by an ice cube.

  “I won’t,” I said. Her hand was still raised in the air. “Um, what if I just turn on the water? I won’t use soap. It doesn’t count if you don’t use soap. My mom said.”

  “Oh, God, you little baby. You still call her Mommy? You’re such a loser. You’re so square. You’re like a reject for life.”

  “I never said Mommy.”

  “I heard you.”

  “I didn’t say it.”

  “Yeah, you did, liar.”

  “Did not.”

  “Bet you don’t even know what a pussy is.”

  “Like hell I don’t,” I said, even though it was the first time I had heard that word and knowing it could mean literally anything and knowing that I would never get another chance to encounter that word for the first time again frightened and elated me. Back then, I was always learning. I learned how to say everything and I would say it and say it and say it and say it until no one bothered me, and I would do the same with “pussy.” I would walk home and say it until it was my only thought, until I could get to a point where every time I said the word I said it as perfectly and beautifully as any human being who ever existed ever could. And then, and only then, did I stand a chance at being free. Except I was so far from that point. Except everyone still bothered me.