Sour Heart Read online

  Reunion #1

  It was my fault our families had to play with watermelon seeds instead of real poker chips because, earlier that day, I had flung all the chips at the birch tree that shaded our living room, and I only regretted it later when my aunt mentioned she saw a bird choking on something.

  “A poker chip?” I asked her.

  “Possibly,” she said.

  My uncle Shawn had brought his deluxe poker set from his house in North Carolina, which I had visited once when I was nine. On the car ride back I wrote an essay, “My Favorite Place and Yeeeahhh It’s a Real Place!” where I described each of the rooms in his house and the various Monet watercolors and framed photographs of the old American West that I had been enamored with—they were a sign of patronage, a sign of having so much money that it had to be squandered on objects with no purpose except to be beautiful or interesting. (Only later did I realize that they were also a sign of having unrefined taste, that there was another whole class of people who would have found my uncle’s art collection garish.) It was a real house with long corridors and real Oriental-with-a-capital-O rugs, though later I found out some were Persian rugs from Iran, a connection that confused and delighted me, even if the connection was made up by white people who would never consider moving the continent of Asia to the center of the map or redrawing the continents to scale so that South America became the emaciated drumstick dangling off the shriveled forefinger of the withered arthritic hand of North America that it really was. No one who believed in the “discovery” of America could stand to see Europe as anything but centered or America as anything but inflated.

  But even more amazing than the artwork and the four bedrooms and the two and a half bathrooms and the finished basement with a minibar and entertainment center and the Oriental rugs that were steamed clean every six months was that my uncle lived in a gated community. When my father drove our sputtering maroon Oldsmobile up to the booth by the gate to tell the attendant we were here to see the Qiu family on 14 Willow Creek Drive, we felt like the wretched and the needy, a couple of peasants crawling up to the gates of the royal palace, asking to be let in, to see what we had only heard about, to confirm that not only anything we had ever dreamed of was real but things that we had not yet been able to dream existed too.

  Wrought iron with gold fleur-de-lis tips, my uncle told me on a walk around his gated community.

  Whatta whatta golda? I said, making him laugh and repeat himself more slowly.

  Let’s move here, I begged my parents each time the gates opened up for us, and my father said, Why wait? We’re already here! But five days later, we were back home in our tiny apartment in Bushwick that collapsed only a few weeks later. I submitted my essay to a writing contest and won a ribbon from my teacher, the first time I had ever been commended in school, and I kept it clean and unwrinkled and pinned permanently to my special-occasions crushed velvet dress. My mother had taken a set of photos with me holding up my essay in my velvet dress and ribbon and sent them to my uncle, who in return took a set of photos of him holding up a sign that read CONGRATULATIONS! over his mouth, which was so big and wide that even behind the white construction paper I could make out the faint contours of his smile.

  Those days were long past. My uncle and my aunt had driven fourteen hours to see us before moving to Thailand for my uncle’s new job developing face creams for men.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother said to my uncle the first night they arrived. “What do men need face creams for? They’re supposed to have terrible, rough-looking faces.”

  “So did women before face creams were invented,” I said.

  “She’s got a great point,” my uncle said, putting his arms around me. I shrugged them off and longed to be somewhere where I could say anything I wanted and still be left alone.

  My cousins Maddy and Tony were seven and six. They were going to go to boarding school in Massachusetts next year, and my parents had promised to visit every month to make sure they were settling in okay. I was fourteen and didn’t want to be involved in any of this, but I was a part of it as always, and as always, everyone kept asking me, What’s wrong? Are you okay? Is something bothering you? At night I flung my pillow against my mattress and prayed to my fake jade statue of the Guanyin goddess to give me a different face so that people would stop looking at my current one and asking me what was the matter.

  On our last night together as two families we decided to play poker. We had been playing for an hour, and Aunt Janet was beating everyone, and no one was good except her, and none of the betting was fun because of it, and between each play she turned to my sister, Emily, and cooed at her like she was a little baby hamster.

  “She’s three years old, you know,” I said to Aunt Janet, slurring a little from sneaking sips from my father’s glass of Rémy Martin all night long.

  “Three is still a baby,” she said and turned to my sister again. “Now, isn’t it? A goo goo goo goo. Isn’t your auntie right, you big baby? Ga ga goo goo coo coo.” I looked at her with disgust and she returned my gaze with a kind of simple sweetness, like I could hate her but I couldn’t cut her, I could never destroy the fullness and the aggressiveness of her joy. She tried to shame me into conspiring with her, but I could not. I wanted to feel tenderness, I wanted to be more generous, but I could not. I was sure I had always been sour. Our sour girl, my parents used to say back when we all woke up in the same bed.

  Am I still the sourest girl you know? I asked my mom when I came back from China and saw that her eight-months-pregnant belly prevented her from seeing the tops of her feet, her distorted, callused feet that I had spent so many evenings rubbing and clipping and sanding down and soaking, evenings when I would literally lie by her feet and massage them and run a warm towel over them—they were hidden now, they were the least of her concerns, she had a baby on the way. I was going to be a sister. I was no longer going to be her only child.

  Always, she said.

  Will she be sour too? I pointed at her belly. Will she become one of us?

  That’s the dream, sourheart.

  The next day I woke up thinking I was born angry.

  Is it too late to abort, I said to my mother, knowing that it was already too late for so much. The day they decided to send me away, I already knew this, but still, I could not accept it.

  Oh, sours, she said.

  No, I said. I don’t eat sour things anymore. Grandma taught me to eat sweet peaches and scoop out sweet watermelon with a spoon. I’m a sweet girl. She said so. And you, I said, hesitating before continuing, you’re here just giving me bullshit after bullshit. Even as I said those words, I knew it sounded like I was testing them out. My mom had tiny little tears trickling down her face, but I lowered my eyes and turned away from her then.

  I know change is difficult, but I promise—

  You know shit about me, I said, interrupting, changing into someone I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop becoming.

  “I don’t want to play anymore,” I said to my aunt. “I’m done with this game.”

  “C’mon, Chrissie,” my uncle said, reaching over to rub my shoulders. “Let’s just have some harmless fun tonight.” I stared icily at my aunt who was laying out the flop. Her darty eyes rankled my heart, made it sour like the last pickle in a decade-old jar of brine, and I knew there was nothing wrong with her eyes, darty or not, and I knew there was nothing anyone could do about the way their eyes darted just like how I couldn’t do anything about the resting frown on my face, and how I didn’t mean to start ninth grade with a face that looked like it wanted to spit on anyone who asked me a question. I had vowed to find it within myself to see what I didn’t understand as adventure rather than a particular kind of hell, to be someone who was moved by other people’s attempts to be good and had the ability to sense the love in a room before anything else, but it was too hard. I could not.

  “Nah,” I said, getting up and then stumbling back into my chair. “I was defending Emily. Why does she
talk to her like that? Is everyone here against me?” I climbed onto the table, scattering the watermelon seeds.

  “Zang si diao le,” my mother said.

  “I can’t understand what you’re saying, Christina,” my father said, his face looking old and exhausted.

  “Come down and join us, sweetheart,” Aunt Janet said, as if I could have been teetering on the ledge of a hundred-story building or on the second step of a staircase—it was all not to be panicked over. “It’s fine. We can pause the game and get some snacks. How does that sound?”

  “I wanna shoot you with this gun,” my cousin Tony said, pointing his Lego gun at my face. “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—”

  “Tony,” my cousin Maddy interrupted. “You done yet? You’ve killed her. Are ya happy now? You’ve killed our favorite cousin.”

  “You see?” I shouted, the Rémy Martin gurgling through my gut. Was I standing anywhere significant? No, just standing on the table my father built when he was thirty-seven and I was nine and my mother was thirty-six, a time when the three of us would spend entire afternoons walking down Fifth Avenue, stopping at every pay phone to check for change. My father used to lift me up and let me push my sticky, candy-coated fingers into the change slot. Ka-ching, I said when I felt Washington’s raised, chiseled face, or the copper-nickel of the American eagle. “See, some people still love me,” I said, swallowing my vomity burp back down.

  “Xia lai before you hurt yourself,” my mother said.

  “There’s no need for this, Christina,” my father said.

  “Why don’t you come down, Chrissie? Maddy and Tony really want to get some playing time in with their favorite cousin,” my uncle said.

  “We all want to,” my aunt said.

  “Don’t listen to them,” my cousin Maddy said. “Christina can do anything she wants.”

  “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,” my cousin Tony said.

  “Is Chrissie going to throw up?” my sister asked our mother.

  “She’ll be fine,” my mother said, extending her hand to me. I took it though I didn’t want to be touched and fell into her arms. “I would slap you if your aunt and uncle weren’t here right now,” she hissed in my ear before pushing me away.

  “Go ahead,” I dared her. “Hit me and get it over with. I know you want to.”

  “I don’t like you this way,” she said and I said, “Well, neither do I,” and ran up the stairs.

  In my room, I grabbed a half-drunk two-liter bottle of soda and poured it over my carpet. I pretended it was gasoline and that I was setting the whole house on fire. I considered going back down to repent, to proclaim that I was sorry for it all and sorry for having been born, that I believed in God now and not just the five-dollar plastic Guanyin goddess that sat high on my shelf, but as soon as the sour bile of preserved duck eggs and lake shrimp and chicken and tomato and scallion and rice and string beans and ground pork rolled up through my stomach and into my throat and out my mouth in an upward-curving trajectory through the air before plopping down by my feet, I knew that nothing was going to change. I would spend the next hour tearing things off my wall—embarrassing lyrics from a Sunny Day Real Estate song (“forward on/to the place we sail”) that I had scribbled on construction paper, a poster I bought at a tourist shop in Little Italy of construction workers eating lunch while sitting unharnessed on a girder suspended high above the city that I later found out was really just a staged photo to promote a skyscraper that had been built during the Great Depression, flyers for basement shows and anarchist rallies that I never went to but felt were somehow my destiny, and cheesy pictures of JTT and Devon Sawa and Rider Strong and Leonardo DiCaprio that I tore out of the Tiger Beat magazines I stole from 7-Eleven, doing the unimaginative thing of drawing penises and breasts over their faces when what I really wanted was to mush my breasts into their faces, sincerely and without malice. When there was nothing left to rip off the walls, I would go back downstairs, where everyone was still sitting around, eating and chatting, and pretend not to regret anything. I would remain angry. I would grab food off the table and go back into my room to eat by myself, and in the morning, I would be angry still and angry the next day, and even when I no longer had the strength for it, even when I was sure that I no longer wanted to feel like I was being balled up into a fist, I would only become angrier when I realized that I was incapable of unclenching.

  Reunion #2

  “In the golden days,” my mother told me when I was twenty-two and about to leave her and our home for the third time, “our family would gather around the dinner table to listen to your grandfather—your father’s father—tell stories.”

  “Your mom means the old days,” my father said, explaining the only part of my mother’s reminiscence that was in English. I didn’t blame my mother for her verbal mishaps—she only learned English when she was thirty, and my father liked to say she wouldn’t have learned it at all if she wasn’t born beautiful and meant to stay that way for the rest of her life. Not long after we immigrated to New York a man approached her while she was waiting to check out Chinese books from the public library and offered to tutor her in English for free. He scared her during their first lesson, the way he kept inching closer to her when talking so that she had to back up her chair until it was against the wall. He kept offering more and more things to get her to come back: a can of soda, a deli sandwich which was later upgraded to a gourmet deli sandwich, which was then upgraded to a gourmet deli sandwich and soup. Despite my mother’s misgivings, she kept going back because no one in my family has ever been known to refuse free services.

  “The shining days,” my mother said in English before continuing in Chinese. “I often think about those days. There was so much food on the table that we worried about it collapsing. We ate fast, like a bunch of deprived animals after the winter thaw. Your father always had to loosen his belt after the first round of eating. You think it looks like he’s carrying a watermelon in there now? Try going back in time and he could really show you a watermelon baby.”

  “I thought there was no food back then.”

  “Mo wo de arm.”

  I touched her shoulder even though I already knew what her skin felt like—smooth and cold, my greatest source of comfort on warm summer nights.

  “Mei you hair. Do you know why?”

  “Because you were born into a famine?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t get my lao peng you until I was seventeen either.”

  “I thought that was because you were so tiny. And that’s why I was so tiny? Dad, remember how Darling pretended she couldn’t see me because I was so small and she’d pick up a Cheeto from the floor and be like, Crispy, is that you?”

  “What a clown,” my father said.

  “What’s wrong with clowns?” We had been getting into it a lot lately but my mother wasn’t interested.

  “I do come from a family of small women, but my body needed nutrients it wasn’t getting. Too much stress on a girl’s body can keep her from becoming a woman.”

  “Doesn’t that happen to those creepy little gymnasts? You think they’re ten and then you find out they’re like twenty-two.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t do it to win medals. It was done to us.” My mother went and got some plums from the refrigerator.

  “Please tell me these are sour,” I said to my father, who did the shopping this week and was notoriously bad at picking out fruit sour enough for me and my mom.

  “I think you’ll be pleased,” he said.

  My mom bit into one and gave me the thumbs-up. “I used to steal grapes from our neighbor. He kept this really nice grapevine after the worst of the famine passed.”

  “It wasn’t like, boom, famine’s over,” my father clarified. “We were still hungry all the time. It wasn’t starvation exactly either. Let’s just say I don’t remember ever going to bed on a full stomach as a kid.”

  “That’s right. But I did have this neighbor with a grapevine. Poor guy, he neve
r figured out how to keep me and my friends away. We’d steal the grapes before they ripened. We thought they were delicious. Or I did. The other kids ate them out of desperation, but for me they were the finest grapes I had ever tasted. Even till this day.”

  “Lucky,” I said.

  “The food situation did get better after you were born. And your father’s family had more access than most because your yeye nainai fought in both wars.”

  “The civil war and the war against Japan,” my father explained. “So they were ranked pretty high up.”

  “They’d get extra rations and little privileges like that. It’s even better for them now. They’re considered lao ganbu. When they die, they’ll be buried in a locker room full of the ashes of martyrs. It has the best feng shui in all of Shanghai.”

  “Fung shway?” I pronounced it the way my white freshman-year roommate had pronounced it when she informed me that her white Buddhist boyfriend was going to perform a Tibetan blessing on our room and clear it of bad energy. Not that I have to explain it to you, she had added, trying so hard to respect me that it became disrespectful. Right, I had said. I don’t need to know more. “I thought that stuff was bullshit. Like something celebrities get into to cover up the emptiness of their lives.”

  “No, it’s real,” my mother said. “That’s why we didn’t buy that house with the pool. It was at the bottom of the hill. It’s really bad feng shui to let everyone else’s shit roll down into your house.”

  “Your mother takes that stuff very seriously.”

  “And it’s a good thing I do! Tell me, is our house cold in the winters?”

  I shook my head.

  “Is it hot in the summers?”

  I shook my head again.

  “It’s because the entrance to our house sits north and faces south. That’s no small detail. The spot where your grandparents’ ashes will one day rest is the most peaceful in all of Shanghai. Your father and I took a tour of the place in March. You can’t hear the traffic outside at all. It’s very still.”