Sour Heart Read online

“I hate him.”

  “Us too, my sour apple. Us too. But what’s done is done, sourheart. Don’t you see? Everything happens for a reason. Everything happens for a good reason and we have to be patient if we want to find out what that good reason is. Do you see?”

  I saw. I didn’t know how my parents felt about moving so often. Sometimes we lived in four or five places in the span of a few months. Our possessions were whatever we could fit into our car and strap onto the roof, but all the same, I couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement every time we left a place, like it was the first day of school and there was still a chance for me to not be so much of a fuckup and that chance only existed in the window between when I sat down at my new desk for the first time and when my teacher introduced herself and gave out the first homework of the year—it was like that each time we loaded up our car and started driving to the next place and the next place and the next, and in a way it wasn’t so bad, it just meant there was no such thing as failure, only starting over a million times and then some.

  —

  Then there was one year, the year when I had to repeat first grade because I hadn’t done any assignments and failed all of my tests because the most effort I ever put forth was toward drawing trees that looked like broccoli on all of my exams, when we lived in Williamsburg, and it was a good year because my dad found a room with a shared kitchen and a private bathroom for $200 a month, and in that room, I slept between my parents every night and often woke up with long scratch marks up and down my legs and arms because I was born itchy as all hell and I would die itchy as all hell unless a crafty genius somewhere decided to invent a miracle drug that would save me from this long and itchy life.

  The worst of it was when I was five and we lived in Washington Heights in a shared room that was all mattress and no floor and my skin itched like there were little tiny ants carrying sticks of fire and doing somersaults and cartwheels all over my body. Everyone said it was normal to go through hell your first year in America, but no one prepped us for our second. I had placed out of ESL after the first few weeks of kindergarten, but when I changed schools in January after my parents heard about a room in Washington Heights that was so cheap it was practically illegal (and many years later, at a dinner party, a young housing rights lawyer, who had been avidly listening to my father tell the story of our first years in America, interrupted him to say, “You know that living situation actually was illegal”), the administrators of my new school insisted I needed more ESL. “Her grasp of English is not firm,” the principal said. So I was stupid again, even though I was sure that I wasn’t. My itching came back with a vengeance—it hadn’t been that bad since the six months before my family immigrated to New York.

  At night, my skin burned in that cramped room with five mattresses on the floor all pushed up against each other, my mom and dad and me on one mattress, and my mom’s childhood friend Shao Guoqiang and his wife and kid occupying the two mattresses next to us. They had grown up together in the same longtang and he had been instrumental in advising us through the whole visa process since he was one of the first to immigrate to the U.S. and everyone had been impressed until we heard that he had abandoned his studies in painting and sculpture and was barely supporting himself, buying umbrellas at wholesale prices from Chinese exporters and selling them on the street when it rained. He had been the one to tell us about this room in Washington Heights, which had been previously occupied by several Chinese graduate students in the Columbia visual arts program who fled the country suddenly because of some shady situation with expired visas. His wife, Li Huiling, supposedly made an avant-garde film about “the poetics of imperialism” back in Shanghai but had given up her dreams of smashing Western imperialism with art since becoming the mother to a very hyper five-year-old boy, and if that wasn’t enough to stop her, being five months pregnant was probably gonna do it (“Can you name her Annie if she’s a girl?” I asked, after watching Annie in a Nobody Beats the Wiz store while sitting in a shopping cart that my parents left in front of an aisle of TVs so they could go and do this scam where they nonchalantly grabbed small items like Discmans and batteries and then walked right up to the cash register to return them for credit, which they then used to buy something expensive, which they then returned for cash). On the third mattress from us was my dad’s friend Zhang Jianjun, who was an ESL schoolteacher taking night classes in business management and accounting, and his wife, Lu Shiyu, who came from a family of diplomats and professors and poets who turned up their noses at the thought of their daughter being married to a wannabe mercenary, and they were a somber couple because they had left their daughter behind with her grandparents when she was only two while they saved up money to bring her to the U.S. and it had been several years and they still couldn’t afford to send for her. And on the fourth and farthest mattress away from us were Wang Tao and his wife, Liu Xiaohong, whose mother was apparently a very high-up Communist leader during the Cultural Revolution and had been directly responsible for many people’s deaths, at least that was what I gathered from sleeping between my mom and my dad who whispered through me like I was air, like I was their phone cord, like I was what carried their voices to each other, especially when I pretended to lie there still and sleeping—that was when they would say everything to each other and even though they didn’t know it, I was part of it too. That was the year when my skin itched the most, and my parents wondered if it was because we were sleeping ten to a room that should have had two, and whenever I scratched or whined or made an annoying sound like, “Ahhhgrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaad, I hate itchiiiii­iiiii­iiing,” the daughter of diplomats and the ESL schoolteacher and the avant-garde filmmaker and the painter and the husband of the woman whose mother supposedly tortured and killed hundreds of “intellectuals and bourgeois effetes” would scold me and my parents, “Haven’t you learned to control her yet? Can’t you see we’re trying desperately to sleep in the middle of the night?” and it put pressure on my parents, who at the time had no choice but to live like that, and on me, who had no choice but to be so itchy that I had to cry out in the middle of the night.

  We lasted eight months before moving to a shared room in Chinatown with a broken window we covered with duct tape. It became unbearably cold once winter hit so we packed up and crashed on the floor of my mom’s friend’s apartment in Woodside for five weeks before we were found out by her landlord who threatened to evict all of us, which severed my mom’s friendship with her friend who hadn’t really wanted us to stay with her in the first place. After Woodside we moved to another floor, this time in my mom’s cousin’s friend’s sister’s apartment in Ocean Hill that would have been perfect except for the nights when rats ran over our faces while we were sleeping and even on the nights they didn’t, we were still being charged twice the cost of a shitty motel just to stay there and when my father said to our host, I get the feeling you don’t want us here, our host said, I get the feeling you aren’t very grateful, so we got out of there and then tried to live in my mom’s cousin’s house while my mom’s cousin was in Shaoxing visiting relatives, which was all right except that it was right next to the Cypress Hills Cemetery, which spooked my mom and me, and then finally at the end of first grade, right after I found out I was being left back, my dad found a really nice room for rent in Williamsburg. A deity must have been watching over us then, because not only was it the best room we’d ever lived in but the landlord also threw in a free microwave and a queen-sized bed that had bedbugs we were responsible for getting rid of if we wanted it (of course we did) and on the day we moved in my mom declared as we walked into our shared kitchen, “We need to buy a toy for our little sour grape. I say a stuffed teddy bear that’s taller than me.”

  “And I say we fill this half of the freezer with vanilla-bean ice cream,” my dad said.

  “Both!” I cried out. We ended up getting one carton of vanilla-bean ice cream and a teddy bear that came up to my forehead when I placed him on the ground.

  The ye
ar we spent in Williamsburg was my least itchy year, and also the best for all the other ailments that I was afflicted with: my allergies to dust, cats, dogs, pollen, all types of nuts, perfume, anything that had a strong odor, the air after it rained, the air when it hadn’t rained for a long time, anything that was warm and necessary for winter like sweaters or wool coats or stockings or mittens or socks. Everything got calmer. I was doing well in school for the first time, turning in most of my homework, and I even got a 95 on a math test, which had never happened before, and we all joked that it was a blessing for me to have been left back because it was better to do something right the second time around than to get away with doing it wrong the first time, although it wasn’t a joke, it was just the truth and the truth was also that we were happy to have our own place again and not worry so much about where we were going to sleep.

  At night, if I was itchy, my mom would scratch my left leg and my dad would scratch my right leg while I slept with double protection—I wore oven mitts on both my hands, and on top of that, my parents tied a plastic bag around my wrists with a rubber band so that I wouldn’t scratch myself bloody in my sleep. In the mornings, my parents woke up with blood underneath their fingernails, dried and dark as a scab even though I was the one who had been wounded. Sometimes, I looked like the victim, long lines of blood scratched up and down my legs and back and arms and chest. Once I asked my mom to scratch my nipple until it split open and I lay there in bed cradling my own tit to sleep. The next day in school I failed a test because it was hard to concentrate when my undershirt was sticking to my pussed-over nipple. Then there were the nights when my parents would fall asleep before they had sufficiently scratched me and I would have dreams of being so itchy that I rolled down entire jagged mountains to flay off my own skin. I would wake up in the morning with skin missing from my legs and arms, the pain finally superseding the itch. It was like that back then, the weird union of what was possible with what was just reverie conspired against me, turned my thoughts into blah blah blahs and my words into yadda yadda yaddas and it was why I was left back and why I liked sleeping between my parents so much—I needed to be bound by their flesh before I could materialize.

  —

  Our apartment building in Williamsburg was razed to the ground after a year. We got four thousand dollars to move out, which at the time seemed no different from a million dollars, but later we realized how paltry a sum that was and how little we had been valued. We spent the money on a one-bedroom apartment in East Flatbush. My father quit most of his part-time jobs when we moved because he finally passed his exams on the third time around and got his teaching license.

  I didn’t like my new school. On the first day, my teacher sent me back to ESL even though I had passed out of ESL two separate times and was referred to as “a little genius” by my first ESL teacher and as having “incredible language acquisition” by my second. It was Washington Heights all over again and though I wanted to tell my new teacher that I knew English better than her sweaty thin-lipped veiny flaccid face did, I kind of just lost the will to keep saying the same thing over and over again, so I dutifully attended ESL while everyone else was in art and music, and was forced to participate in activities so humiliating that I understood why the kids in special ed acted out all the time.

  We had to do things like write out the word “chair” and then draw a picture of a chair underneath the word, only I drew pictures of women with huge breasts, and dongs so big and fat that they went off the page because I wasn’t going to let the administrators of P.S. 233 bully me just because my parents weren’t present on the first day of school to tell the ladies in the main office that I was as close to a native speaker as someone who wasn’t born in America could be and I had only been left back because I sucked at school in general, not at speaking English.

  I hated school so much that by the time third grade rolled around I was only going to school two or three days a week. My parents let me skip whenever I wanted and they thought all of my reasons were valid, just like they thought it was okay for me to get C’s and D’s because they knew they weren’t always there at night when I was supposed to be eating dinner with my family and they weren’t there when I needed them to check over my homework and they weren’t there to read me bedtime stories so I would love reading and usually they were gone before I woke up in the morning for school.

  At the time, my dad was making a pretty decent salary teaching language arts at a declining middle school in East New York that was under constant threat of being shut down. It was so terrible that apparently the social studies teacher had been jumped after school by four seventh graders who shattered his knee and broke his nose, and before that, two consecutive principals resigned in the same year, and then there was a terrible rumor that one of the female teachers had been raped by a couple of eighth graders late one night in the parking lot.

  The only reason I knew any of this was because my dad brought me to hang out in his classroom when I asked him to, and I knew not to ask him too many times but there was something about Thursdays that made me feel like I was born without a brain and that I would die without a brain if I had to go to school, and so there were a few Thursdays when he would take me with him to work, which was the best day of all because it was Computer Day, otherwise known as Fuck Off Day. We spent the whole day in the computer lab and all of his students, even the ones who carried knives and guns to school and tried to sell pot laced with harder stuff to fifth graders, would print out pictures of puppies snuggling with each other or outrageously cute unicorns for me because they thought I was so much smaller than most kids my age and they liked pretending I was the class baby.

  “You’re our pet, Christina. Pet Christina!” they said. “Get it? It’s like a noun and a verb. See, Mr. Zhang? Don’t be saying we never learned anything from you.”

  In my father’s third period class there was a black girl named Darling, whose name was pronounced “Dah-ling” as if she were a character from Gone with the Wind, another movie I watched in The Wiz while my parents were off scamming and when they were done and came back to get me, my father remarked to my mother, “These people will never let go of the past, will they?” and I didn’t know if he meant the white people in the movie or the black people, but I knew we were not “these people” and to my parents that was a good thing, but I wasn’t so sure. Darling wore her hair differently every time I saw her, sometimes it was cornrows and sometimes it was big and everywhere and other times it was half cornrows, half big and everywhere, and sometimes it was straight and stiff and oily like the sheen on a cast-iron pan that had never been washed with soap. “Can I touch it?” I asked her once and she let me but added, “Don’t go around asking other girls that. It’s not polite.”

  Darling had been left back twice and was almost as tall as my mom. The first day she saw me, she grabbed my hand and told me that she was my older sister and I could ask her anything and if I wanted to go to the bathroom she would escort me. She was usually the first one in the computer lab and would squeal when she saw me sitting in the far right corner with my dad, playing that typing game where words fell furiously from the sky and you had to correctly type each one to prevent the Manhattan skyline from being destroyed by words like “rat” and “philosophy” and “torrent.”

  “Christina’s here,” she would announce and then everyone would run in and pull their seats close to me and the girls would start braiding my hair and the guys would pool together their quarters to buy me a soda (which sometimes my father allowed and sometimes didn’t) and my father would shout at us to settle down at a computer station, and then finally Darling would stand up and put two fingers in her mouth and whistle and say, “Everyone leave Christina alone. I’m helping her with her homework and unless you people think you know third-grade math, you better leave us alone. I know none of you know shit about math.”

  “Dah-ling,” my father said.

  “Sorry, Mr. Zhang, I didn’t mean to cuss, but it’s th
e fuckin’ truth.”

  My dad tried to enforce the three sheets per student rule, but everything went out the window when Darling discovered how to print banners that used up thirty-plus pages. One time Darling and all the other students were huddled in a corner, whispering and being perfect students to the point where my father couldn’t help but ask, “What’s the occasion? Up to no good? Is that why you’re all so quiet?”

  They ignored me the whole class period and I was so confused that I almost cried and had to unpouf my bangs and let them down to cover my eyes and I was about to tell my dad that I never wanted to go to work with him again but right as the bell rang, the class presented me with a banner long enough to go around all four walls of the room, and it just said, WE LOVE YOU CRISPINA over and over again. My name was misspelled because Darling and Chadster were fighting over the keyboard and Darling pushed Chadster when he was trying to type out my name because she wanted to be the one to do it and then everyone liked the way it sounded so they just kept it that way. Darling wanted to put the banner up on the wall, but my dad refused. “Are you crazy? Get out of here. Go to your next period and stop wasting paper in my classroom.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Zhang,” Darling said, “but this isn’t your classroom anyway. It belongs to the taxpayers.” Darling helped me fold up the banner in sheets of four. “Here you go, Crispy,” she whispered into my ear.

  “What?”

  “Crispy, short for Crispina,” she said, brushing her fingers gently across my bangs. “But only I get to call you that, okay?”

  I threw my arms around Darling’s waist, something I used to do all the time with my mom when I was really little. We’d walk around our apartment in Shanghai like that, me swinging from her waist like a monkey. You’re a tree and I’m the sour fruit! I would shout in Chinese. You’re the ear and I’m the earring!

  “Aw,” said Darling, “my pet Crispy.” I glowed through the rest of the day, carrying the folded-up banner in my hands with noble attention and care, like it was a gift for the queen. My father told me to just dump it in the trash on the way to the car, but I told him I wanted to hang it up in my room.