Sour Heart Read online

  There was no way to be free in this world.

  There was no way to be free in this world.

  There was just no way to be free in this world.

  There was no way.

  There was simply no way.

  And to be safe? Forget it. No one on earth was safe.

  “Okay, fine then. I think you’re a pussy. You”—and she drew an equal sign in the air—“pussy. You glad you’re a pussy? Or do you feel dissed?”

  “Dissed. Duh,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Cause.”

  “Cause what?”

  “Why should I tell you?” I had my hands on my hips and my head jutted out in her direction.

  “Cause of this,” she said and shook her fist at me again.

  “So?”

  “So, you’re afraid of me.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yeah, you are,” Fanpin said. “You always do everything I tell you.”

  “No.” I was shouting now. “Liar. Why would I be afraid of you? You don’t even have your black belt yet.”

  “I’m going to get it this year. My sensei said so.”

  “Your senses said shit.”

  “Ha ha.” Fanpin laughed. “You sound so dumb trying to talk like that.”

  “Not as dumb as you.”

  “You’re going to get punched if you don’t tell me what a pussy is.”

  “What are you going to punch me with?”

  “What do you think? My fists. Now let me check your butt and make sure you wiped.”

  “Of course I wiped. Who wouldn’t?”

  “Well, I’m gonna be the one to decide that.”

  “Not this time, you won’t,” I said. I crossed my arms down low by my hips and grabbed the waistband of my sweatpants with my fingers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Anything,” I said. “I’m doing anything. It’s a free country, remember?”

  “Why’re you talking like that? You make no sense.” Fanpin reached her hand out and tried to pry my fingers away. She pushed me against the sink and tugged my pants down to my ankles. “Gosh, don’t you know I’m doing you a favor? Your ass is disgusting. You don’t even know how to wipe properly.”

  “Get away from there,” I said, pulling my pants back up. “Who said you could look?”

  “Who said you could tell me what to do?”

  I didn’t know why I was so weak all the time, why I had no grace or power to summon. Why was I so exposed? Was there no barrier separating me from the dangers of other people in this world? Before I left Shanghai for New York, my grandfather on my mother’s side told me my great-great-grandfather had been a diplomat during the reign of the Qing dynasty. “He was the official ambassador to Britain, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. He spoke eight languages. Switched back and forth between them in conversation. The ladies went mad for him, especially when he spoke in Italian. There was a statue erected in his honor in a small public park in Wenzhou. Of course all those statues have since been destroyed but you can’t destroy our pride. These are our origins. Our people traversed the globe. They lived for adventure. They were most at home when they were away. They could build a home anywhere. That’s in our blood, you understand?” It was the only pep talk anyone had ever given that actually made me feel braver. I returned to it whenever I felt like nothing and needed to reconnect with the part of me, no matter how deeply buried away, that still felt immense and maybe even, one day, capable of brilliant things. But every day, my grandfather’s speech dimmed from my memory. Yes, I had so much to say but nothing of what I felt inside ever came through—I was a follower and a coward and a mute and that was that. If I was descended from people who found a way to belong anywhere, it didn’t show. If I came from adventurers and poets who lived for themselves and resisted captivity, those qualities must have skipped me. I was an embarrassment to my bloodline. I couldn’t even stop Fanpin from forcing me to participate in the games she came up with, like when she made us pretend to be husband and wife so that we would know what it was like to be our parents. Playing that game embarrassed me but I did it anyway even though I didn’t like how I had to lie on my side and how she had to lie down next to me and wrap herself around me like she was cellophane and I was a cookie, or she was foil and I was a cheeseburger. The truth was, I didn’t even let my mom hold me that way in bed anymore, even though it made her cry the first time I told her not to wrap her legs around me on nights when she claimed she needed that to fall asleep, like after a bad fight with my dad, something she never explicitly referred to, but I knew that was why. I didn’t like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the moonlight reflected over her swollen eye or her busted lip. It sickened me. And worse was when I had to turn away. I sickened myself and that was the one thing I couldn’t avoid. All there was to do was pray. For sleep, for loss of consciousness, for rest, for a few days of peace.

  “Leave me alone, you sicko,” I said to Fanpin. “You’re disgusting and I’ll be the one to punch you if you try to get me into the bathroom again.” I inched sideways along the sink to get away from her. “And don’t try to suck up to me later at your house, because last Sunday, I got all sickened looking at the posters on your wall, and don’t think I haven’t already told Minhee and Yun Hee about that one poster and what you did to it. Yeah, you know which one and you know what you did. It made me need to throw up and you knew it and you know that anyone who knows about it would throw up, too, and you can bet on anything I’m never going into your house again.” I shot one fist straight out and punched her in the tit. It wasn’t a remarkable punch or anything but I felt it: her fleshy boob smushing up against my bony knuckles.

  I swear to God Fanpin met my eye with what looked almost like respect and then dropped down to the ground. As I ran out the door, I heard something—a low wail that chilled my heart and reminded me of a time when I had heard my father cry, the one and only time I ever heard him cry. It was after a fight with my mom. I had seen him through a crack in the door to his bedroom. He was slumped on the floor with his hands in his hair. I watched him pulling out strands of his hair and flinging them to the ground, and later, after several hours had passed, when it was all over, no one remembered me, no one remembered to explain to me what had happened; it was just quiet. At the end of the night, I took the vacuum out of the closet and I cleaned up my father’s hair; I didn’t want reminders like that to exist in our house.

  I didn’t look back after punching Fanpin in the tit, though it took me days, maybe longer, to forget the sound of her crying, which is why I still say, if anyone was traumatized, it was me, the innocent bunny who had to defend herself from the predatory wolf, and my red, wet eyes that afternoon after I punched her didn’t mean I was sorry or that I regretted what I had done, it just meant my allergies were flaring up again…and what could I have done to prevent that?

  —

  Fanpin and I never spoke again, not even when Mrs. Silver paired us up to do a presentation on ancient Egypt. We worked on the project in separate corners of the room. She used a computer and I used my mind. She sneered the entire time I was making a life-sized model of King Tut out of toilet paper, and when Fanpin gave her part of the presentation, I yawned nonstop and slipped a few silent but deadly farts in her general direction and then, at recess, told everyone it was her. “Fanpin has a real farting problem. No, seriously. I used to go over to her house and it smelled like she had a turd machine in her closet.” She was absent when I brought in a bag of puffy Cheetos for my in-class birthday celebration and I barfed during hers and got permission to leave school early.

  I asked my mom to not bring me over to her house anymore because it was distracting me from my schoolwork. “And anyway, I’m old enough to stay home by myself.”

  “No, you aren’t, but we can’t very well have Fanpin’s mom babysit you for free just because your father”—and she looked over at him and raised her voice—“can’t get it together to support t
his family on his own.”

  Whenever my mother insulted my father’s ability to provide for the family, he would smile like he knew the world was going to end tomorrow. It was the ugliest smile I had ever seen on a face and he had the capacity to hold it and hold it. This time, he held the ugly smile for so long we had to look away while we waited for him to respond to my mother. Finally, he said, “Like you’d be happy staying home with 李微 all day.” It meant something when my parents referred to me by my Chinese name. They had changed it to Mande because the first place my father ever took my mother shopping when they got to America was the Queens Center shopping mall and my mother was entranced by the sign for Mandee and went in, only to realize it was clothing for teenagers. She said to my father, We’ll shop for 李薇 here one day, when she’s grown. Before she goes to college, we’ll come here.

  You mean we’ll shop for Mandee at Mandee. She’ll go by Mandee here, my father said, and just like that, I was renamed. I would have two names, just like all the other Chinese people in America did, just like how my father went by Jerry and my mother went by Susan so that people didn’t have to refer to them as 张建军 and 陆诗雨, which people inevitably pronounced zang gee-ann juhn and loo she-yoo. My father said they needed “American” names on their resumes when applying for jobs; they had to have names that were pronounceable to white American English speakers because they already had faces that were considered vile to look at and who was going to hire someone with their faces and their names? I thought my mother and my father had beautiful faces but my father corrected me, Not in America. We’re ugly, and it’s that simple. They look at us and think we’re cretins. You think they like us going to their schools? You think they’re okay with us working in their offices? Taking their jobs? You think they’re happy to pick up laundry and takeout from businesses we’ve opened up? You think they want to go to the corner store and see our eyes and our teeth and our skin looking back at them from behind the counter? No! They don’t want us here. They don’t want to look at us and they sure as hell don’t want to have to try to pronounce our Chinese names. X-U. Q-I-U. They don’t want to see that! The more my father went on about how much they hated us, the more I started to suspect maybe he was the one who hated us. On the first day of school in America, I was so frazzled and fearful of everything that I accidentally left off the second e and I became Mande with one e and so I started my first day of school in America with a mistake. I was a failure right from the start.

  My mother had agreed with my father on the name issue but on the issue of me wanting to come home to my own home instead of Fanpin’s (which would require the luxury of being a single-income household where one parent could stay home and look after me, which already hadn’t happened), she was indignant. “I wouldn’t just be home with our daughter all day doing nothing. What do you think I am? I’d start writing poetry again. I’d go back to painting.”

  “I’m sorry,” my father said. “Did I misunderstand? Are you a grown woman and a mother or are you a teenager now?”

  “Please,” I said in a rare instance when I didn’t just slink away to hide in my bed. “I just want to go straight home after school to focus on my homework. It’s hard at Fanpin’s house. It’s really loud over there and her mother is always watching TV, and the other family is sometimes there, too, and it’s hard to concentrate. Please just let me come home and do my work here. I won’t tell anyone at school. I’ll wear the key on a string around my neck and hide it under my shirt. I won’t ever make eye contact with anyone. If anyone tries to talk to me, I’ll refuse to speak. I’ll go mute. I’ll scream like a torture victim if anyone comes near me. I’ll be safer than I was with Fanpin. Did you know Fanpin’s always talking to strangers? Strange men. She doesn’t care. Not me. I’ll get myself home at the pace between a light jog and a brisk walk to signal how fast I could run if I had to while also signaling that I’m totally unafraid, because I’ll be walking, not sprinting home. When I get to our block, I’ll go around the secret way so no one sees me going inside the building by myself and thinks there’s no adult waiting at home for me. I can do it. I know I can.”

  “Okay,” my mother said. “You can come straight home after school, honey. That sounds like a fine idea. Doesn’t it, Jianjun?”

  My father relented. “Fine. But you will take every precaution. We’ll go over them again until it’s memorized. And when you come home, you leave—”

  “—the blinds drawn, windows locked, door dead-bolted. Never ever pick up the phone. Never ever take in the mail. Stay completely invisible once inside the house. Never give those crooks a chance to think there’s someone to kidnap, assault, beat, or worse. And yes, I know exactly what ‘worse’ is. No one will ever know there’s a child in here.” I was excited to be the one going on and on for once.

  All that my father managed to follow up with was, “I want to see nothing but 100s on your next report card.”

  For the rest of fourth grade, I went straight home. In fifth grade, Fanpin and I were assigned to different classes. It seemed like a chapter of my life had finally come to a close. My father was busier than ever planning my future. He was frequently in touch with this family we were friends with back in Shanghai who now lived in Little Neck, and had struck a deal with them to use their address on all of my school forms and applications so I could attend the public school in their district. We had our credit card and telephone bills sent to them instead of our Flushing address to establish residency. “This,” my father proudly said, “is what they call the long con. Do you know how long it goes for?”

  “Till everyone’s dead,” I guessed.

  “The whole world,” my father corrected me. “Until human life itself ends.”

  We went over to their house in Little Neck quite often, and their daughter Peggy was two years younger than me and even shyer than I was. They lived in an attached townhouse in Little Neck, which was right by the Queens–Long Island border, and by attached, I mean they shared walls with their neighbors. We used to move with our ears along the walls, as if maybe we had been magnetized by the hand of God (we both used the same loose definition of God:

  “God is definitely something.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s also what I think”) and as if we were being pulled along by Him.

  I loved Peggy’s house and so I loved Little Neck, which was still in Queens, unlike its neighbor Great Neck, which was on the Long Island side, and it was easy to tell which side you were on; all you had to do was drive up Northern Boulevard. On the Queens side it was Korean barbecue restaurants and SAT and tutoring prep schools and Honda dealerships but as soon as you entered Great Neck (which my parents and all their friends pronounced “Green Neck” as if they were discussing someone who had been poisoned and had gangrene crawling up their neck) there were no more Korean restaurants, and it was all Italian places like Capobianco’s Auto Repair and Pasquale’s Pizzeria, and BMW dealerships where the cars were spaced out and not crammed in like on the Little Neck side. Sometimes when we were waiting at an intersection, we’d see a group of white girls in foamy black sandals with two thick white bands across their tanned feet, taking their sweet long-ass time crossing the street, and the sight of them made me curse God all over again for making them get to be them and making me have to be me.

  My parents refused to resign themselves to the fate they thought I was inevitably headed toward: pregnancy, drug abuse, alcoholism, gangbanging, general ne’er-do-welling, etc., etc. They wanted to plop me in the land of kimchee claypots because going to middle school in Little Neck was the only thing—short of spending eighty grand on a down payment for a new house, short of having hundreds of thousands of dollars for private school tuition—that stood any chance of saving me from a life of misery, poverty, and pain.

  Sixth grade passed in a haze and marked the end of my elementary school years. The most interesting thing I learned all year was in social studies class when we were assigned to write research papers on World War II and I
found out from a library book that Wenzhou dialect had been used as a secret code during the war. When I went home to tell my parents that, my mother said, Of course it was. Your grandfather was a code talker. He was brought in to relay coded messages back and forth. He was responsible for sinking a Japanese warship that was about to set fire on our people. No wonder, I thought, being near him had felt as holy as kneeling before God.

  Every now and then, my path crossed with Fanpin’s, and sometimes, I would see her walking in front of me after school, her long black hair swishing back and forth. She had taken to wearing lace-up combat boots that hit mid-calf with black pants bunched up over the top of her boots and a long black trench. I could hardly believe I ever fought her and won. All of my friends wrote in my yearbook, “Why aren’t you going to J.H.S. 181 for middle school? It’s the best! (If you think prison is the best!) Miss u4ever, KIT.” And I wrote in theirs, “Hell to the no-no. You think I want to get beat up by a buncha Spanish girls? Have fun getting kicked in the vagina and learning math from crack-ho teachers.”

  No one called me that summer. I ate Blimpie sandwiches every single day and watched Let’s Make a Deal and waited for my mother to come home from work at eight so that I could tell her how much I loved the Blimpie sandwich she’d brought me the night before to eat for lunch while I watched game shows, and how much I was going to love the Blimpie sandwich she would surely bring home with her that night, and how much I loved her in general (and my father, too, when he was in a good mood), and that I believed in her, no matter what, I believed in her. I believed one day she wouldn’t have to work six days a week, and one day she really could stay home with me and keep me company, not just because it was scary to be in the house alone after six P.M. but because I wanted her to be a poet like her granddaddy and I wanted her to see beautiful things like her granddaddy’s granddaddy, and as for me? I wanted to be someone too. I was on the verge of telling her this the night she showed me some of the poems she had written when she was a young girl in Shanghai: