Sour Heart Page 26

  “Weird. I don’t get how feng shui works.”

  “Common sense,” my father said. “It’s just paying attention to your surroundings. It’s like how Americans have a knack for laziness. No one taught them how to slack off at their jobs. No one taught them to get away with doing the least amount of work possible, and yet they’re the best at it in the whole world. They’re born with it. It’s the same thing with feng shui for us. It’s innate.”

  “Not for me,” I said.

  My mom reached out and stroked my hair. “Well, you’re a rare breed.” I beamed at her touch, though it stung to know I was leaving the next day. The three of us had stayed up after Emily went to bed to finish packing and go through some of the boxes I had shipped home after graduating from college. Months prior, I had accepted a job teaching English at a French high school outside of Paris. Doing what your daddy couldn’t, my mother had remarked when I told her my plans.

  It’s even worse over there, my father had said. It’s all reversed because their suburbs are our Brooklyn. Dou shi hei ren he a la bo ren. You won’t have many French kids in your classes, I’m guessing.

  I had been offended by his insinuation. They’re all French over there. It’s France. And anyway you really have to catch up. Brooklyn is the land of art galleries and trust-fund anarchists who dumpster dive as a lifestyle choice. I’m sure in five years Emily will end up dating, like, a terrible performance artist living in a loft in Bushwick.

  At the time, France had seemed so incredibly far away, and the overwhelming number of things I had to do to get ready for my move had kept the immensity of my decision from sinking in, but now that all there was left to do was get on a plane, it was starting to hit me—I was moving to another continent, this time of my own volition.

  “So yeye nainai are veterans?” I asked, looping back to an unfinished strand.

  “Sort of,” my father said. “Though they didn’t see much action.”

  “They were extremely fortunate,” my mother added. “Plenty of cadres survived both wars and ended up purged anyway. My father wasn’t so lucky. His father had been a landowner and his mother a schoolteacher. So he was stripped of his ranking even though he joined the Party early on. He volunteered because he believed in the Communist credo. Your grandfather was a man of ideals.”

  “And we all know how well that works out,” my father said.

  “My father’s younger brother was jealous that my grandfather had willed his property to my father so he tried to stir up trouble. This was before anyone understood what the consequences were.”

  “What were the consequences?”

  “A public hearing for anyone accused of being a counterrevolutionary,” my mother replied.

  “Well, that’s putting it mildly,” my father said. “It was a public humiliation.”

  “What did that entail exactly?”

  My mother shook her head. “No reason to relive those days. Anyway, they never had a chance because my father went up to the top floor of my elementary school and jumped out the window.”

  “Oh my God. He committed suicide?”

  “He tried, but he survived. He broke both his legs and was sent to the hospital. The Party leaders said that was proof of his guilt. Thankfully my mother was an extremely resourceful woman. Her sister—my aunt—was a nurse at the hospital and my mother instructed her to give him a lethal shot of potassium chloride. He died before they could smear his reputation. That was what he wanted.”

  “Damn,” I said. “That’s a rough way to go.”

  “That wasn’t even the end of it,” my father said. “People talked and the plan was found out. Your great-auntie was sentenced to hard labor at prison camp up north for twenty years. And your grandmother was never the same. She blamed herself for not wanting to divide the estate with your grandfather’s brother.”

  “Originally my father had been planning on sharing it with his brother. But my mother convinced him that was foolish.”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” my father said. “She did the best she could. It was chaos in those days. People were poor like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “It wasn’t all bad. There was a kind of freedom back then. Kids could do anything. Really anything. You could say, Mom, Dad, I’m going to travel the country for three months. And take off. Just like that.”

  “There was no adult supervision. Kids were out on the street. No one gave a damn if you skipped school and fucked around all day.”

  “And then schools were closed for a few years,” my mother said. “We thought we were so lucky.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “Weren’t you glad any time you got to skip school?”

  “I was fucking ecstatic. I hated school.”

  “So imagine that lasting for years. It was like a permanent vacation.”

  “You can’t give young people that much freedom and not expect chaos. Kids were wilding in the streets,” my father said.

  “Sounds crazy.”

  “It was,” he said.

  “I kind of miss it. Every single day you could go downstairs and find your friends playing outside. It was nice. I remember being nine and thinking, Just let me stay this age forever.” I waited for my mother to continue. She was gone from us for a second and then she was back. “Did you know your father went all around China by train and on foot?”

  “You Jack Kerouac-ed, Dad?”

  “I was young and foolish.” Now it was my father’s turn to slip away from us and then come back. “Your mother was with me for part of it. We were how old?”

  “It would have been chu er for you and chu yi for me.”

  “So basically middle school,” my father calculated.

  “Yes,” my mom said.

  “I tried to flirt with your mom but she was immune.”

  “There was no flirting back then!” she said.

  “They opened the trains for ‘revolutionary youth.’ That’s what they called us. That’s how they justified it. We were encouraged to leave home and see our country. Broaden our vision and really see how the people lived. We got free passes to travel anywhere, stay anywhere. We thought, No parental supervision? Hell, yeah!”

  “The trains were unbelievably crowded. In some cars, people were literally piled on top of each other. You had to crawl over hundreds of bodies just to get out. After the first day, I thought for sure I was going to suffocate to death from being so tightly packed in.”

  “So I spot your mom at one point—we had gone to the same school but were in different grades—and I always thought she was pretty, but that day on the train, she was glowing.”

  “I was miserable,” my mother clarified.

  “I decided to work up the nerve to approach her.”

  “You didn’t really consort with people who weren’t in your class, especially if they were of the opposite gender.”

  “Finally as the train is about to enter this village outside of Pingxiang, I approach your mom and I’m like, Hey, let’s get off here. I’ve got an uncle who lives three kilometers away from the station. He can put us up.”

  “Did you go, Mom?” My mother looked at my father and my father looked at my mother. “Okay, if Emily was up, she’d be so grossed out right now.”

  “Your mom can’t resist me.”

  “I keep falling for him, is what it is. There was no uncle. It would have been romantic if it hadn’t been a total setup.”

  “Now, wait a minute, my uncle was there but then he got reassigned to Sichuan. I had no idea! It wasn’t like you could just email someone back then. So we ended up in this village. Didn’t know a soul, but it turned out my uncle was beloved there. He made a really good impression on the villagers and when they found out I was his nephew, they welcomed us like we were family. We partied our asses off. Your mother was wasted the first night. They had this secret stash of alcohol. It was foul. They insisted we drink with them. Help us drain the evidence! they said. So we did. I tried to kiss your
mom but even six drinks deep, she still rejected me.”

  I laughed. “Good move, Mom.”

  “You see how your father’s always been this way?”

  “It was a great time,” my father concluded. “It was better than I promised.”

  “Okay,” my mother said, getting up to throw away our plum pits. “We have to wrap this up and get you packed for Paris.”

  “Montreuil,” I corrected.

  My father glanced up to the clock. “It’s already two in the morning? Let’s get the scale out and weigh your suitcases.”

  “Don’t you want to stay up all night with your firstborn before she goes off to a scary new country?”

  “And crash the car taking you to the airport? I’m not about to chance that.”

  “I guess we are overdue for that kind of thing,” I said fearfully.

  My mother gazed at me with amazement. “Our baby’s going to France.”

  “Our baby’s no longer a baby,” my father said.

  “Let’s stay up all night!” my mother said, suddenly exuberant.

  “Okay!” My father perked up, too, we all did. “Car crash on the way to the airport it is!”

  It was everything I wanted before I had to go.

  Reunion #3

  More and more, I no longer remembered my days in Shanghai. I was only one and two and three and three and a half when I lived there, and ten when my parents sent me away to live with my grandparents for six months, and twelve when I visited for four weeks, and thirteen when I visited for three weeks, and fifteen when I visited for ten days, and nineteen when I visited for four days, and twenty-one when I visited for ten.

  When I was twenty-one and visited for ten days, my cousin Fang, who worked for a German pharmaceutical company where she corresponded with her boss in the form of handwritten letters in English that she faxed throughout the day and worked weekends as a voice-dubbing actress for American cartoons that flopped in the U.S. but were big in Asia, explained some things to me about our grandfather. “Grandpa’s side of the family was dirt-poor. No one in the generation above him lived past the age of forty. When he was fourteen they sent him to this village to work for a rich family who was looking to basically purchase a full-time laborer.”

  “Like an indentured servant?”

  “Yes, exactly. He hated it so he ran back home but his family wouldn’t take him back. They were like, Oh you’re a loser, you’re a failure, you’re a good-for-nothing—that kind of stuff.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re not supposed to come back empty-handed. You come back when you’ve made it. And he lasted…two weeks? A month? He was an embarrassment. So his family kicked him out and told him to go back to the village and fulfill his duties.”

  “That sucks. I probably would have lasted one day.”

  “Me too. So our grandpa’s hometown is right at the base of Lao shan. It’s really beautiful. Clear springs, stunning waterfalls. It’s like a painting.”

  “Oooh.”

  “I’ll take you there next time you come.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “So he’s got nowhere to go and he runs up into the mountains and falls asleep against a tree. He loved to sleep.”

  “Hee hee,” I said. “Now I know where I get my good genes from.”

  “Right?” she said. “It’s the Zhang family curse. Anyway, all he wanted to do was sleep. He was exhausted. When he was working for the family, they only let him sleep four or five hours a day. So he slept in his clothes, freezing all night. When he woke up in the morning he thought he was going to die up on that mountain, but thankfully a high-up army commander was out doing some kind of reconnaissance and found him.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he was conscripted into the army.”

  “Wow, so his laziness got him a job.”

  “Exactly. The funny thing is, his unwillingness to work saved him a bunch of times. But you know how it is. This family has always been lucky. We’ve always had fortune on our side.”

  “This family,” I repeated. “I never realized it, but you’re right.”

  Reunion #4

  When I was ten, my mother took me to Shanghai. It was supposed to be a good thing but I didn’t see it that way. When you come back, you’ll see. Everything will be different. We’ll live like fat little princes, she promised me. I don’t believe anything you say anymore, I replied. She was six weeks pregnant at the time and I was the last to know. All I knew was that she had been appointed by my dad’s mother to bring me to Shanghai to live with my grandparents while my parents got back on their feet. They paid for our plane tickets and even sent along a pair of hand-knit socks with twenty dollars stuffed in each sock so we could buy snacks at the terminal before boarding. Later, when I was an adult, my mother admitted that she had begged my father’s mother to let her be the one to take me, even though it would have made more sense for my father to go so he could see his own parents.

  “Is this, like, your way of telling me that you couldn’t bear to be separated from me?”

  She smiled in that way she’d let herself smile ever since I was grown, ever since I wasn’t so wounded by every instance when she acted not just as my mother, but as her own person with her own needs and her own fears and her own dreams.

  “Is that why you stayed with me in Shanghai for a whole month? Because you wanted to make the transition easier for me?”

  She smiled again.

  “Wait,” I pressed her, “what’s the real reason why?”

  “That was one of the reasons.”

  “But what else?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Because you wanted to get away from Dad?”

  “Ding ding ding ding ding.”

  In the weeks leading up to the trip, I had started scratching my skin raw again and my itchiness was exacerbated further when I got to China and found that everything, including the bedsheets and couch cushions, was rough and uncomfortable and smelled faintly of mold, piss, and shit. I was sullen from the shock of not knowing the place where I was from. Everyone stared at me when I went outside. Waiters and shopkeepers asked my mom if I was deaf or dumb or mute or just plain stupid when I took too long to answer their questions.

  In the evenings, I sat around at my grandmother’s house and waited and ate oranges and grapes while the adults cooked food I never wanted to eat and then apologized for not having a hamburger or fried chicken or hot dog on hand. I wanted to say that I didn’t even like hamburgers or fried chicken or hot dogs all that much, and that actually my favorite food was Chinese food, just not the Chinese food in China. After dinner, everyone talked at each other and over each other as if there were not enough hours left in the day to get everything out and so it all had to happen at the same time—the listening and the expressing and the laughing could not happen one after the other but instead had to coalesce on top of each other into a massive cloud of noise. My silence was conspicuous, it signaled something, and everyone wanted to dissect it and make an emergency out of it. I was quiet not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I was overwhelmed by it all, and I didn’t want anyone to pity me or laugh at me or throw their hands up in the air at the absurdity of a Chinese person who couldn’t speak Chinese. I didn’t want to promise to learn Chinese perfectly because I still needed people in America to look at me and know instantly that I spoke perfect English instead of looking at me and assuming that I didn’t know how just because I was quiet. I took my parents at their word when they said my time in China was temporary, and if it was temporary, then I wasn’t going to commit to being a Chinese person in China when I already had so much trouble being a Chinese person back home.

  My relatives in Shanghai took my silence to mean that I was lonely or sad, or that I didn’t like it in Shanghai, or I didn’t like the food, or I was bored with the television shows, or I was unhappy with the bathrooms, all of which was basically true, especially my displeasure with the bathrooms since
the one in my grandmother’s house really did smell of fecal matter. The smell was so repulsive, I couldn’t stand to be in the bathroom long enough to expel shit from my own body, and by the end of my first week in Shanghai, I was so constipated and backed up that I had to be hospitalized, which would have been embarrassing if I hadn’t already embarrassed myself by sobbing on the toilet the night before when I thought I was finally going to drop a turd, but it turned out to be nothing more than a massive fart. Other than that incident, though, I was all right. In fact, I was doing much better than I had been in the weeks leading up to leaving New York. I was coping like a goddamn champ, as Darling used to say to me whenever I showed up to my father’s class. “The goddamn champ of the world is here,” she would say, pretending to rub the top of my head like she was shining a trophy to put on display.

  After I came back from the hospital, having expelled all the shit that had been backed up inside me, I decided to try to do the thing my parents had been pushing for all along: be less attached to them. For years, when they encouraged me to go off on my own, I would think: So you do it too. Be less devoted to me, then. Don’t love me so much that it becomes all I know.

  How was I supposed to know that they would follow through on my dare? That they would actually push me away? You’ll have to harden your heart against us, my mother used to say to me. Whether you like it or not, there’ll come a time when you’ll just have to do it. We deluded ourselves into thinking that there was some way to prepare for it, like twisting your baby tooth a little bit each day until it was loose and then you only had to touch it with as much pressure as a feather against a rock to make it fall out painlessly and beautifully.

  After months of crying and begging and arguing and bargaining and planning and delaying, it suddenly happened. We got two plane tickets and a pair of socks in the mail one week, and the next week I was at the airport with my mother, clutching her hand and then letting it go and then clutching it and then letting it go again and then finally just clutching my own two hands like I was about to bump a volleyball. I didn’t even wave goodbye to my father as we turned the corner through the security gate. I had no idea he would spend the summer painting houses and becoming the man we not only deserved but dreamed of. Everyone I knew agreed. It was never too late to change. So we did. The family I hadn’t known long enough to care about would be my family once I got to Shanghai and the family I never wanted to be separated from, the one that I had based my entire identity on, whose love was the only thing I was sure of, would have to become something else.