Sour Heart Read online

  The other girls laughed with Soo-Jin as the girl fell to the ground. According to some accounts, one of the girls in the gang said, “All right, let’s go home now, this bitch is done for,” but Soo-Jin said, “No, not yet, there’s one more thing we have to do.” And that thing? Oh, the thing! We all secretly begged for a happy ending, the point in a movie when the impossible suddenly became possible, when the characters you felt sorry for were finally granted some mercy.

  Here was the thing: while the sixth grader was writhing in pain, Soo-Jin had four of the girls hold her still and had another girl gag her with the T-shirt they had stripped off her earlier, and then, little by little, Soo-Jin yanked the barbed wire off this sixth-grade girl, tearing off strips of her flesh, which stuck to the razored edges like bitty flags flapping in the wind. When it was all over, the sixth grader was candy-cane swirled with her own blood and had already tried twice to bite off her tongue from the pain. Some of Soo-Jin’s girls were shaking nervously, while others sneered but more out of performance than instinct, and Soo-Jin let out a very cute little giggle, as if she’d completed an adorable little prank, like slipping a banana peel in front of a walking cartoon character, or as if she had transgressed in the most insignificant of ways, like accidentally peeing on the toilet seat without wiping it clean. That was what made her such a brute—that, and how she somehow managed to pick up the girl-who-looked-at-her-wrong without any help and throw her right into the dumpster behind the rooms where band and chorus practiced.

  —

  Washington’s birthday marked the first day of my midwinter break and when my parents came home from work the Friday before they talked about potentially going somewhere. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I said. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, my mother said. Then yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, my father said. We had been getting along beautifully and my father announced that we had actually exceeded our savings goal this month. The next day, my parents loaded up the car while I was asleep and woke me up with a plate of fried eggs. The sun shone on every corner of our apartment.

  “I smelled eggs in my dreams,” I said to my mom, and I yanked her arm down farther so I could lick soy sauce from the egg.

  “Use these,” she said, handing me chopsticks. “But hurry, okay? Traffic is going to be bad unless we leave before eight, and I want to see the Lincoln Memorial. It never looks the same in the dark. I’ll have to call my boss when we get to New Jersey and tell him I’m running a fever.”

  Every once in a rarest while, my parents would just suddenly drop everything to seek adventure. For a day or a weekend or a weekend and a day, they would undo those gnarly coils of fear that were tightly wrapped around all the flexible points of their bodies, and finally let loose. I had no way to predict when it would happen, but every now and then, my parents would show me how to be free. The scarcity of these moments made me see how precious this freedom was, that it would always have to be saved up for, that it would only happen in reaction to long periods of constant emergency. It wouldn’t be long before I started to resist identifying as my parents’ child, when I would no longer show the right kind of gratitude for everything they did to protect me and lead me and guide me, when I would fight them on almost everything and blame them for who I had become. But for now, I was still their child—it was all I knew to be—and I was only free when they let me and when they let themselves be, and so, when it happened, I basked in it.

  My parents initially wanted to go south. The plan was to follow the Atlantic coastline all the way to Key West. But when we entered Pennsylvania, my mom said, “When are we going to see California?” and my dad said, “When are we going to give our daughter all the things we want to give her without sacrificing a single dream that she deserves to achieve and without needing to take out major loans from banks that will most likely deny us?” and I said, “Can we go to McDonald’s? I want a fish sandwich so bad,” and the whole car at times shook on the highway like the earthquakes we might never be witness to unless we drove farther and with more intention and unity. I threw my legs up in the air during traffic jams to entertain the cars behind us, and when we got to Maryland, I said, “Let’s rename this state Mandeland,” and my parents cheered me on, and we all got out at the welcome center and stretched like lions, big and lazy.

  I stopped in front of a penny-flattening machine. “Mom,” I shouted at her as she walked toward the restroom. “For a quarter, you can turn a penny into a historic souvenir.”

  “For nothing, you can use a penny as a penny and not waste a quarter.”

  “Please,” I said, “please, please, please.” I slipped my hands into her pockets, picked out four quarters, and said, “It’s time we send some souvenirs home to yeye, nainai, haobu, gonggong.” My mom smiled at me like I was the very girl she was meant to bring into this world, which meant I belonged to every single place I ever stepped foot on, but most of all, I was hers, and she was mine. “Be right back, Mom.”

  I squeezed out four flattened oval pennies with my mom’s quarters and pulled a quarter from my own pocket and squeezed out one more. Back in the car, I asked my mom to fish out an envelope and stamp from the glove compartment because she kept everything there: pictures of me, pictures of herself, lipstick and maps of every city she wanted to drive to one day, newspaper clippings of food she wanted to try, laces for our shoes in case we tripped and broke them somehow, aspirin and diarrhea pills, moist towelettes, ketchup and hot sauce packets, secret letters that I would never know anything about—who wrote them and for what purpose and to whom? My mother was the only one allowed to access that compartment of wonders.

  In the car it was 60 miles to Baltimore and 890 to Orlando, a few more after that to the Gulf of Mexico and we all wanted to get there. We were intent on a southern destination and we were prepared for the long haul. My dad played tapes of old Communist chants and we turned up the volume and filled the car with the voices of young boys and girls who had pledged to be lifelong revolutionaries for their country. The first song on the tape was the Chinese national anthem. My parents sang along in the car, their voices so different from what I was used to—clear, booming, and deep. The way they were sitting in their car seats, it was as if they were standing at attention. I listened intently:

  Rise up! Rise up! Rise up!

  We are millions with one heart

  We will take the oppressor’s gunfire and march on!

  We will take the oppressor’s gunfire and march on!

  Rise up! Rise up! Rise up!

  Rise up! All you who refuse to be slaves!

  By our blood and flesh, we’ll build a new Great Wall

  The Chinese people now face our greatest challenge

  Everyone must let out their lion roar

  Rise up! Rise up! Rise up!

  I yelled, “Dad, did you sing these songs and wear the same uniforms these kids are wearing?”

  “Of course we did. We were tiny soldiers.”

  The next song was an anti-imperialism song, a word I had finally learned in school and curiously, it was presented as a neutral thing, nothing to be ashamed of:

  It’s not the people who fear American imperialism

  But American imperialism who fears the people!

  A just cause enjoys great support, an unjust cause enjoys none!

  The laws of history can’t be broken, can’t be broken!

  American imperialism will certainly perish,

  And the people of the world will surely be victorious

  The people of the world will surely be victorious!

  “Is this song basically bashing America?” I asked, but my mother had turned up the volume even more, and so my question went unanswered. When the tape ended, my father was in a strange mood; he glanced back at me in the rearview mirror and I swore one of his eyes was leaking. “The old days,” he said simply, saying no more about them, and then he brightened. “Today is the day I want to experience. Why would anyone need friends when you have the world’s best family in your car on
an open highway on the warmest weekend in February? Huh? Tell me that, someone? Mande? Do you know why?”

  “I have no idea, Dad. Do you know, Mom?”

  “Nope,” my mom said and put a handful of sunflower seeds in her mouth. “You and your daddy are my best friends.” I had prayed for this kind of soft joy, this kind of contentment, a day like this followed by more days like this, and finally having it was like being born, only instead of not remembering what it was like to be born, I was fully cognizant and participating in my own creation and suddenly it was clear to me why we don’t remember what it was like to be born—because it would give us too much insight into what it will be like to die. To be present for your own birth was suicide. To know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist. They had to occur together and there was no prayer for what I knew in my flaky soul—that there was no way to escape the fear. It would always be there, amplifying joy and stealing from it. Still, it was tempting to sink into it, to roll around in its outer rings where occasionally the fear converted to a kind of happiness that turned an entire afternoon into an image that would stay forever, loom forever, return forever.

  We flew over the slower cars on invisible ramps built for us to get down south. We were probably going to buy sombrero hats for a dollar apiece and let them fall apart in the ocean if and when we finally got there, and I contentedly waited for my parents to say, “We have to go back now.”

  In the car, my mother had taken off her shoes and socks and had her feet up by the dashboard, and I noticed the little bumps by the sides of her toes, how she said she was born the daughter of peasants because her feet were so hard and we all haw-hawed that joke right off our knees—her parents and her grandparents were college professors and poets and government officials. There had been violent breaks in the lineage, but there had also been restoration and there would be even more to come; we had been granted everything in life and it was funny to pretend we hadn’t.

  My mother asked my father again about California, and he said to drop it, but she asked again, and a few minutes later, asked again, and then again, and again, and finally she drew out a long and husky sigh from the back of her lungs and said, “The western part of any country is always the most beautiful, and everyone should get to see the most beautiful part of the country they live in.”

  My father swerved across the two lanes to his right, parked in the emergency shoulder lane, took his hands off the steering wheel, opened the passenger seat door, and pushed my mother out of the car.

  “Get out,” he said. “This isn’t your car. You didn’t pay for any part of it.”

  “建军,” my mother said.

  “Get out.”

  In the car, I watched her grow smaller and smaller as we drove down the highway in silence. I prayed my father would see it had all been harmless—her voluptuous desire, his momentary flare of rage, the mistakes we had already made in this lifetime—it was all far from deadly, far from finite, there were still choices we couldn’t fathom yet, futures we hadn’t stepped into. WILL THIS WORLD SURVIVE? Yes, it had already and it must and it will.

  I didn’t need to speak to God anymore. I just needed to speak. I gripped the door handle and let the impulse to open it and hurl myself out become just another fantasy. We were going so fast I felt as if we had crossed state lines again. There was so little anyone could count on in this life…still I permitted myself to fantasize about how I would breathe normally again when my father, at the last possible minute, decided to get off at the next exit and turn back on the other side of the highway, how I would not let myself linger on the question of how she had gotten herself over the median and past six lanes of speeding cars, first in one direction and then another, and how instead I would just anticipate the moment when her tiny dot of a figure grew larger and larger until she was exactly the size that she had always been, and the relief I would feel in knowing that was never going to change.

  * * *

  *1 Literal translation in English: You piece of shit and also swollen bunghole of a waste of life.

  *2 Sorry, no translation currently available.

  “I lost hearing in this ear when a horse jumped over a fence and collided against the side of my face,” my grandmother told me when she arrived at Kennedy Airport. I was nine and hadn’t seen her in four years. “In Shanghai you slept with me every single night. Every week we took you to your other grandmother’s house. She called incessantly, asking for you. ‘Can’t I see my own granddaughter?’ I said, ‘Sure you can.’ But—let’s not spare any feelings—you didn’t want to see her. Whenever you were at your waipo’s house you cried and called my name and woke up the neighbors. You hated her face because it was round like the moon, and you thought mine was perfectly oval like an egg. You loved our house. It was your real home—and still is. Your waipo would frantically call a few minutes after I dropped you off asking me to come back, and I would sprint all the way there. Yes, my precious heart, your sixty-eight-year-old grandmother ran through the streets for you. How could I let you suffer for even a second? You wouldn’t stop crying until I arrived, and the minute I pulled you into my arms, you slept the deep happy sleep of a child who has come home to her true family.”

  “I sleep by myself now. I have my own bed with stickers on it,” I told her in Chinese, without knowing the word for stickers. I hugged my body against my mother who was telling my father he would have to make two trips to the car because my grandmother had somehow persuaded the airline to let her bring three pieces of checked luggage and two carry-on items without any additional charges.

  “And did you see that poor man dragging her suitcases off the plane for her? How does she always do that?” My mother shrugged me away and mouthed in English to me, Talk. To. Grandma.

  My father threw his hands up. “You know exactly how,” he said and went off with the first two bags.

  “You remember how uncanny it was,” my grandmother continued, tweaking her hearing aid until it made a small shrill sound and then a shriller sound and then another even shriller sound. “They called me a miracle worker and I said, ‘No, no, I’m just her nainai,’ but everyone said, ‘You’re a miracle worker. You’re the only one who can make that child stop crying.’ They said there was no need for me to be modest. ‘This child prefers her grandmother to even her own mother and father! Why sugarcoat the truth?’ I had to stop myself from stopping other people from saying it after a while. Was I supposed to keep insulting everyone’s intelligence? Protesting endlessly? Your nainai isn’t that type of person. And the truth is, people don’t make things up out of nothing. There’s truth in every widely believed saying, and that’s just true.”

  “What?” I said. “I don’t understand Chinese that good.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t forget a moment of your real life, your real home—the place you come from. Have you learned English yet?”

  “That’s all I speak. It’s America.”

  “Your nainai is so proud of you. One day your English will catch up. It’s such a gift to be here now with you. You don’t know how many lonely nights I’ve spent dropping tears for you. It was wrong of me to let you go. Remember how you called for me when you let go of my hand and boarded the airplane with your mother? Remember how you howled that you wanted to take me with you? Four years ago, your father wrote to me, ‘You can’t keep my own wife and child away from me any longer. I’m sending for them immediately.’ I wanted to know if he ever considered maybe you and your mother simply didn’t want to go to America? In those days, you would’ve rather eaten a basement full of rats than be separated from your nainai. Your father’s also stubborn, but I’m not the type to insult the spoonful of food nourishing me. You see what I mean? I won’t say any more. I’m living in his house now and even though he has only made fatally wrong choices, we still have to listen to him. But remember how at the airport you cried and said, ‘Nainai, I love you the most of everyone. I want to stay with you. I don’t w
ant to go to America.’ ”

  “I don’t remember that,” I said to my grandmother. “Sorry.”

  “You remember everything, don’t you? But it hurts too much to dredge up bad memories.” Her hearing aid buzzed again and she twisted its tiny hidden knob with her thumb and index finger. “This thing works for a moment and then it goes dead for days. Your father said he would get me a proper hearing aid so I can hear your beautiful voice. You speak up now and let your grandmother look at you. She’s only missed you every minute of every hour of every second of every single iota of a time unit that’s elapsed since you last slept with your nainai every night, refusing to even close your eyes unless I was in the bed with you. You know what everyone’s favorite joke was? ‘Who’s the mom? You?’ Oh, I laughed.”

  “That’s not a joke.”

  “That’s right. It was the plain truth,” she continued. “They all asked me, ‘Doesn’t your granddaughter ever want to sleep with her mother and father?’ And I had to tell them—not in a bragging way, just in an informing way—‘No. Her father is in America learning how to build computers and her mother works late at the factory and even if her mother didn’t come home from work so late, my granddaughter has made it clear she can only sleep with me. I know it’s not proper while her mother sleeps alone in another room under the same roof, but when a child wants something, how can you look her in the eye and deny her?’ ”