Sour Heart Read online

  “You have to get used to this,” I said, holding his hands together. “I know how you feel. I felt this way once too. I thought I was going to die without her. But it’s not so bad. You think it is now, but it’s nothing. You just have to get used to it. Every day you’ll miss her less. And then one day, you won’t even think about her at all. I promise. And you can always talk to me if you feel sad.”

  He wasn’t listening. His face was red all over like someone had slapped every part of it. The only time I had ever heard someone cry as violently as he was crying was in a documentary about the Vietnam War. This village woman had jumped into her dead husband’s freshly dug grave. She wanted to be buried with him. The sight and sound of her crying, seized-up body being dragged out of her husband’s grave haunted me for days.

  “This is a good thing, Allen. It’s not even the worst thing you’ll ever experience. Honestly, I’m happy. I’m happy she’s gone, and you know what? I won’t let you ruin this moment for me,” I said, my voice cracking a little.

  —

  The fourth and final time my grandmother came to live with us, I was seventeen. My brother had forgotten her in the two years that had elapsed. He and I were close again. He slept on my floor or in my bed whenever I let him and played computer games with headphones on while I did my homework. He asked me to sit with him when he practiced the violin, which he was terrible at, though it wounded him if I laughed. When my friends came over, he lurked in the corner pretending to check the doorframe for bugs. I told him he couldn’t always attach himself to someone, even though I liked it. I liked his small body leaning on mine in restaurant booths, or the way he pulled his chair up close to me at home and sat with half his body on my chair, and how he often said he wished I didn’t have homework or friends so I could spend all my time with him.

  My grandmother tried to get him to sleep with her at night again, but he only wanted to sleep in my room. He taunted her sometimes, like when she asked if he would get under her dress like old times, and he did, but then punched her between her legs and scurried out and into my room. That was one of many days when she came and sat on the edge of my bed, waiting for my brother to come apologize and tell her that he loved her and never meant to hurt her, but he never did.

  This time around she was deafer than ever and wore hearing aids in both ears. They were a new model my father purchased at Costco but worked just as poorly because she’d only use five-year-old batteries. Sometimes I saw her in her bedroom taking old batteries out and putting new old batteries in. She’d developed new interests and was teaching herself calligraphy and the history of American Indians. “America belongs to the Chinese,” she said. “We were the first to settle North America.”

  “I thought the Native Americans were first.”

  “The Indians are the Chinese. Christopher Columbus saw Chinese faces and called them Indians. We invented spices and gum and paper, block painting on wood and then moveable type for paper, paper money, gunpowder, fireworks, tea, silk spinning, alchemy, which later became modern chemistry, navigational tools for maritime exploration, weapons for war and machines for peace. That is why China sits in the center of the map.”

  “Not in American classrooms.”

  “You should be proud to be Chinese.”

  “Nainai, the Chinese aren’t Indians.”

  “The first Africans were Chinese. The first South Americans were Chinese. No one lived in Australia for a long time. The civilization there was and is backward. Just think—all of North and South America, all of Africa, and most of eastern Europe, all of Russia, Siberia—all first settled by the Chinese.”

  All of her was laid bare now—I saw her. She was just a little old woman, raised in the country without education or any of the basic things she had given my mother and my mother’s siblings, someone who’d been told as a young girl that women were put on this earth to give birth and rear children and not be a burden in any way but live as servants lived, productively, without fatigue or requirements of their own, yet had been resourceful and clever enough to come up through the feminist movement that Mao had devised to get women out of the house and into fields and factories, someone who had been given more power than any of the women in her lineage, who alluded to all the people she “saved” but never mentioned the people she turned in during the Cultural Revolution, someone whose hearing loss fed right into her fears of becoming useless, becoming someone others no longer bothered to address, and to counter those fears, she had to adopt a confidence that was embarrassing to witness, she had to maintain an opinion of herself so excessively high that it bordered on delusional. She tried to circumvent her obsolescence by making her children believe they would perish without her, and when they knew better, attempting the same with her grandchildren. But we were growing up, too, and it would be years before we had our own children, and by then, she would be dead. Buried or incinerated unless her garlic really did let her live to 117. I was old enough to understand how one of trauma’s many possible effects was to make the traumatized person insufferable, how my grandmother’s unwillingness to be a victim was both pathetic and impressive and made her deserving of at least some compassion, but fuck, why did she have to be so greedy for it? Why did she demand so much of it? Why did she require total devotion? It repulsed me that she wanted my brother and me to love her more than we loved our own parents, more than we loved each other, more than we even loved ourselves.

  So I taunted her. I ignored her. I told her that she spoke Chinese like a farmer, the deepest cut I could have made. “Here comes the Trail of Tears,” my brother and I would say whenever we heard her whimper and sniffle. We sometimes bet on how long she could hold out, sitting on the edge of my bed while we ignored her, before she went downstairs to practice her calligraphy. She had only a third-grade education and was teaching herself characters so that she could write a book about her grandchildren.

  “The world needs to know about you two,” she said. For a moment, I was moved. But I knew if either of us had any chance of growing up into the kind of people that other people in this world would want to know about, we had to leave her behind.

  “You should write about your own life, nainai,” I said. “People should know about you too.”

  “You and your brother are my life,” she insisted, and though it was not the first time, I felt genuinely sad that not only did she know very little about us, but we knew even less about her.

  —

  After I graduated high school, my parents took my brother and me on a cruise to Canada with some other Chinese families. The night before we left, my brother started crying and wouldn’t tell my parents why.

  “Are you worried Grandma will be alone in the house crying a Trail of Tears?” I asked him when we were alone.

  He nodded. “What if she’s too scared to be by herself?”

  “It’s just a few days, Allen. She’s been through much worse.”

  “What if she needs help?”

  “Then she can call Dad’s cellphone and we’ll rush home right away.”

  “What if we’re in the middle of the ocean?”

  “Then she’ll have to wait a few hours for us to land back on shore and get a flight home.”

  “What if she can’t wait that long?”

  “Then we call a neighbor and have them check on her.”

  “What if the neighbor doesn’t pick up the phone?”

  “Then she calls 911, just like Mom and Dad showed her, and don’t ask me what if they don’t understand her because I know for a fact they have Chinese-speaking 911 phone operators.”

  “But what if that day they don’t?”

  “Allen.”

  “What?”

  “You know what,” I said.

  “Don’t you feel bad for Grandma, Stacey?”

  “I mean, yeah, it sucks to be alone in the house, but she can handle it. I know she can. She has to. That’s life, it just is. Not everyone can have everything they want.”

  “But G
randma doesn’t have anything she wants.”

  “That’s not true. She got to go to America four separate times and live with us each time. That’s what she wanted. That’s not bad. Some people don’t get to come even once. Ever think about that?” Allen’s lip was trembling again. “Look, why don’t we find her something really cool to bring back from the cruise. Wanna?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Remember when you gave her that toothbrush we got for free on the plane? She still holds it up every night like it’s a rare diamond.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Allen laughed. “She said she wanted to be buried with it when she dies.”

  “I bet she did.”

  The cruise was so much fun we completely forgot to get her a gift. On the car ride back, I rummaged through my backpack and found an empty mini Coke can with a bendy straw stuck in it. We tossed the straw and wrapped the can in a food-stained pamphlet about onboard ship safety.

  “We got you a present, nainai,” Allen said.

  “It’s a souvenir we brought from Ontario,” I added.

  “Sorry we drank it already.”

  “Oh, my two precious baobei. You have given me a gift fit for kings.” She hugged Allen then hugged me then hugged both of us in an embrace so tight that all three of us started crying for different reasons. Our father interrupted us to ask if anyone rang the doorbell while we were gone and our grandmother said no one really except one afternoon a police officer had shown up and yes, it just so happened she opened the door a crack to talk to him while holding a knife behind her back.

  “A knife?” our father repeated with horror. “You were hiding a knife while talking to an armed cop?”

  “How was I to know if his uniform and badge were real or not? I had every right to keep a weapon on me.”

  “If that cop had seen the knife, he could have arrested you,” our father said. “Then he would have found out about your expired visa, and there’d be trouble for us all.”

  “Could he have…killed her?” Allen asked our father in English.

  He gave a curt nod and went back to chastising our grandmother. “And who knows with these cops. You piss the wrong one off at the wrong time and who knows. You could be sitting in a detention center right now, awaiting deportation. This is why I told you not to answer the door for any reason.”

  “Well, no, he couldn’t have, because I would have pummeled him without mercy if he so much as tried to step one foot through the door.”

  Our father shook his head and went downstairs to tell our mother what had happened. We figured out the next day that the cop had actually come to tell my grandmother not to turn on the sprinklers on Tuesdays and Thursdays because of new neighborhood ordinances. She had been turning on the sprinklers every day thinking our lawn was in dire need of extra watering, and some particularly meddlesome neighbor must have called the cops to complain.

  “Someone complained about you, you know,” I said to my grandmother. “They didn’t like that you were using up more water than is permitted.”

  “Your nainai knows martial arts. If a bad guy came into this house, your grandmother would only need to look at him and he’d be done for. I could fling him through all the corners of the house and out the back door and that’s just with my eyes alone. Now picture how it would be if your grandmother used her hands. Dead within five minutes. That’s why I have to fight with my eyes. More humane.”

  “That’s cool, nainai,” I said. “You’re very talented.”

  “I am. That’s why I’ll stay with you two forever and you’ll never have to be scared as long as your nainai is in the house.”

  She left that summer. Her head injury from three years ago hadn’t completely healed. She got headaches and started sleepwalking again. My grandfather wrote to her once more and told her that he was about to be diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. It was real this time, he wrote, and she had to go home and be with him.

  “He’s a liar, you know,” she told me and my brother.

  “We know, nainai.”

  “He’s jealous that it’s my fourth time in America when he’s too chickenshit and complacent to come even once. He wants to take me away from everything I love. Why should I leave my grandchildren and my real home for that worthless sack of bones? I won’t let you two grow up without the one person who matters the most to you.”

  She returned to Shanghai shortly before I went to college. My mother had to ask Allen several times if he was sure he wanted to stay behind at home with me instead of coming along to the airport. At the last minute, as my father was dragging the last of my grandmother’s suitcases to the car, I said that I wanted to go with them.

  “There’s no room for both of you,” my father said.

  “Who said I wanted to go?” Allen said.

  “Well, you can’t stay alone,” my mother said. “I suppose Daddy can stay with Allen.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s too complicated and she”—my grandmother was kneeling down next to Allen, who was on the couch playing Super Smash Bros., and she was trying to turn his body toward her but he kept shrugging away from her grasp, annoyed every time she caused him to mess up—“won’t be happy if I’m the one who comes. We all know who her cherished angel grandchild is. She’d rip her ear canal out before she’d have me take his spot.”

  She wouldn’t let go of Allen, and it was getting so late that finally we told her Allen was coming, which made him so mad he refused to look her in the eye.

  “My own grandson won’t even look at me because I’ve let him down so completely,” she said. “I’m so ashamed. I’d rather die by his side than live a long life in China without him.”

  “He doesn’t even give a shit,” I mumbled in English.

  When we got my grandmother in the backseat of the car, she kept motioning for Allen to sit on her lap while my father started the engine.

  “I said I didn’t want to go,” Allen said, starting to cry next to the open car door.

  “Oh,” my grandmother wailed. “And now he’s crying for me.”

  She tugged on Allen’s arm until his elbow was resting on her knee, while the rest of him was angled as far away from her as possible. My father nodded at me, and I stepped in between them, prying her fingers off his arm with all my strength.

  “It’ll be too sad for him, nainai,” I said quickly. “We love you, have a good trip, see you next time.” Once Allen got loose, he ran into the house without looking back or waving. I slammed the car door and saw my father engage the child-safety locks. My grandmother was trying to open the door, banging on the window with her fists like an animal who had been feral and free her whole life. My father backed the car out of the driveway and drove up the C-shaped hill, away from view. I heard a familiar low whine by my feet and looked down to see one of her hearing aids on the ground.

  “It’s like you just won’t go,” I said, kicking it away from me, then running to pick it up, cradling it in my hand and tenderly brushing the sediment away from its face like I had done when I found my grandmother three years ago, fallen on the asphalt, bleeding from her head.

  —

  The night my grandmother told me she was leaving for the third time, I felt strange inside. My father reassured me she would have the very best doctors back home, who would figure out what was going on with her headaches and sleepwalking, and once she was healed she could come back again. I wanted her to get better but I didn’t necessarily want her to come back. I lay in bed until everyone was asleep and then crept downstairs and snuck out of the house as I often did back then. I circled the neighborhood under a sliver of moon and imagined being born to a different family. On the walk back, I stopped in front of the purple house, then followed the stepping stones to the backyard.

  I had a feeling she would be there and she was, crouched by the chain-link fence, facing the purple trampoline. “Nainai,” I called out, even though I knew she could not hear me. I wanted to jump with her. Though I would forget in a few days, though my resist
ance to her would rise again the next and last time she came to visit, in that moment, I felt her loneliness and it scared me.

  She stepped forward and then she was running so fast that she looked like a young girl, no longer saggy and round in the middle. She was a straight line—something I could understand, something I could relate to. I closed my eyes, afraid she would trip. When I opened them again she was high in the air, her dress flying up. I knew there might come a time in my life when I would want to sleep next to her again, return to her after the uncertain, shapeless part of my life was over, when no one would mistake me for a child except for her. Her children and her children’s children were children forever—that was how she planned on becoming God and dragging us into her eternity.

  I was about to run to her, to reveal myself, when I realized she wasn’t awake.

  “Mother,” she said, jumping on the trampoline. “Mother, I didn’t want to leave you, but I had to go with Father into the mountains. Mother, you told me to take care of my brother and I let him fight and he lost his legs. Mother, I let you down. Mother, you said you wanted to die in my arms and instead I watched our house burn with you inside as I fled to the mountains. I told Father I wanted to get off the horse and die with you and he gripped me to his chest and would not let me get down. Mother, I would have died with you, but you told me to go. I should not have gone.”

  I took a step toward her. Her eyes were open but they did not see me. In the dark, I thought I would always remember that night and be profoundly affected by having seen her this way, but it was like one of those dreams where you think to yourself while the dream is happening that you must remember the dream when you wake. That if you remember this dream, it will change you, unlock secrets from your life that would otherwise be permanently closed. But when you wake up, the only thing you can remember is telling yourself to remember it. After trying to conjure up details and images and coming up blank, you think, Oh well, it was probably stupid anyway, and you go on with your life, and you learn nothing, and you don’t change at all.