Sour Heart Read online

  I was three and a half when my parents and I moved to New York. My mom ordered a phone line right away even though in the winters we could only afford heat a few hours at a time. In the beginning, she called Shanghai every other week. My mom would put me up on a stool so I could reach the phone that was mounted on the wall and say into the receiver in Chinese, “I love you grandpa, I love you grandma, I love you big auntie, I love you middle auntie, I love you small auntie, I love you uncle, I love you cousin, I love you favorite uncle, I love you auntie who just married my uncle, I love you cousin who I never met, I love you grandma on my mom’s side, I love you great-grandma and the spots of dirt on your head that look green in photos, I love you great-auntie, I love you great-uncle, I love you nephew who is older than me and who I never met and who is visiting us soon, I love you all and wish you good health in the coming year.” My mom would rehearse the speech with me over and over before calling, and even though I knew exactly what I was supposed to say into the phone, I never said a single word. My mother would take the phone from me and sheepishly say, “Did you hear her? She speaks very softly.” I knew that I had failed somehow, even though I didn’t understand at the time what was so dire about telling someone on the phone that you loved them. What made that more significant and profound than knowing you felt it—a warm and settling love that heated your insides and worked its way into your dreams at night? I revisited that question every time my relatives pressed into me, waiting for me to say something to relieve them of their fear that I would always be distant, that I would always keep myself hidden.

  A week after we arrived in Shanghai, my mother went out to see her high school classmates and as soon as she left, my relatives cornered me and asked me questions like, “All these houses you lived in—wasn’t it tiring after a while?”

  “Yes,” I said solemnly. “It was a hardship,” I thought I was saying to them in Chinese, but I was really saying, “It was a man.”

  “A man? I thought she was a woman,” they said, referring to my father’s girlfriend at the time. “A man, you say?”

  “Yes, a man,” I said.

  A few days after I went to the hospital and took so many laxatives that I couldn’t sit down without tricking my butt into opening and thinking that I was going to take a shit, my cousin Fang sat down next to me after dinner (which I ate ravenously, to the satisfaction of my aunts and uncles and grandparents) and asked me what sort of music I liked. She was four years older than me; we had grown up together in my grandparents’ house before I moved to New York. I didn’t know her very well anymore. She talked with me about a popular boy band whose sixth member was a real live monkey, and as she was talking, I could tell that she thought I thought she was boring, and I could tell she wanted me to feel an alliance with her, and I could tell that she could tell that I didn’t remember growing up with her and needing her all the time when I was a baby, and I could tell that she thought need was the basis of any familial relationship, and I could tell that it pained her whenever our grandmother mentioned the time my cousin drew my face in the dirt after I left for America with my parents, because when our grandmother told that story it never moved me the way it moved our grandmother, which was always to tears because it reminded her of all the times people in her life had left her, whereas for me, none of it impacted me much, at least not in a way that was easily read by others, and I knew that my indifference disturbed my cousin greatly.

  “You know,” she said to me after a long silence during which we ate watermelon with seeds (I swallowed all the seeds and she picked them out, even the white ones, which were soft and nice to chew), “when you were three, right before you and your parents moved to America, the whole family took the train to the country and had a picnic. You wanted to go into this cave very badly. For some reason, that day your parents gave me permission to take you. It was pretty small, but still—can you imagine? The two of us, three and seven years old, alone in a cave. You were overjoyed. I was really happy too. It was nice to go exploring on our own for a while. At some point, we found a small river running through the inside of the cave. You wanted to hop over it like Sun Wukong. Remember those comics about the monkey who has all these magical powers and hangs out with a really uptight monk? You were obsessed. I told you never to copy him. I said, You know Sun Wukong isn’t real, right? You know that real people can’t fly and part trees with their fingers, right? You asked me why not, and then suddenly, there was a big splash and you were in the water. I knew you’d panic once you realized where you were so I jumped in and pulled you out.”

  “There are rivers in caves?”

  “Yes. There was one in this cave.”

  “And I fell in?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you saved me?”

  “That’s exactly what I did.”

  “You did?”

  “I really did.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you just remember this?”

  “No, I’ve always remembered.”

  “You never forgot?”

  “No,” she said. “How could I forget it?”

  “I can’t believe you saved me.”

  “I really did. You fell into the river and I saved you!”

  We both laughed at how something like this could have happened, and after that I no longer looked at her and wondered what it would have been like to know her instead of just knowing that she was my cousin and I was hers because our mothers told us so. We had endured something together. We were family now.

  “I think I might be obsessed with jumping into rivers,” I told my cousin.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I jumped into this river back in New York a couple of weeks ago. It was really gross. There were solid human dumps floating everywhere. I might have even swallowed some.”

  “No!” my cousin yelled, the two of us almost screaming with laughter at the thought of me guzzling human turds as I breaststroked my way across the river. I didn’t tell her my family had been trying to sink our maroon Oldsmobile, that I had felt a kind of nebulous fear I had never experienced before, this fear that I could never go back, and I didn’t know if it meant I couldn’t go back to dry land or back to my parents or back to our home or something even worse, like from this point on, I could never go back to the person I had been—whatever it was, I felt like it was closing in on me and I had to swim far and fast to escape it. I didn’t tell my cousin any of this and instead I just bragged that I parted that sea of decaying stools and almost got myself halfway to New Jersey.

  “You crazy girl! You still think you’re a magical monkey who can fly and do the impossible,” my cousin said, barely able to get out the words in between laughing.

  “That’s me. Crazy monkey girl reporting for duty.” I made a mental note to reread my old Sun Wukong comics so I could keep up with my cousin’s references.

  Later that night, I told my mother while we were getting ready to brush our teeth, “I actually don’t mind it here,” to which my mother replied, “I’m so relieved to hear that, sours. Oh, you have no idea how happy it makes me to hear you say that. I knew you’d come around.”

  From that moment on, my cousin and I were together every minute of every day for the next six months until my mother surprised me by calling in the middle of the night, giddy as anything. “Oh, sours, this is the greatest news I’ve ever gotten to deliver,” she said over the phone. “Your father, your brilliant, brilliant father has finally done it.”

  “What?” I said with disinterest. “What has he done now?” What he had done was the noble thing of actually saving up money and finding us a proper apartment that we could live in until he saved up even more money for an even more proper house. He was a hero, finally. He had done what he couldn’t do the night I jumped into the Harlem River. He finally figured out how to take care of us. Later, I found out that my grandparents had gifted my family five thousand dollars from their life savings because my father had written s
everal times, pleading with them to consider some solution that didn’t involve me living on the other side of the world, especially now that there was another baby on the way.

  The next time I went back to Shanghai with my parents and my baby sister, my cousin and I were strangers again—I felt as warm toward her as a fish toward a frozen pond, and I tried to remember how it all felt two summers ago when we rediscovered each other, and I tried to remember how she saved me from drowning and how that meant we would always be close, but it was futile. My cousin and I were beginning to understand why our grandmother cried so often, and how there were so few options for coping with the reappearances and disappearances that we would both continue to make in each other’s lives.

  Reunion #5

  “You really lucked out, Emmy,” I said to my sister after she showed me and our parents around her new Brooklyn apartment.

  “Right,” she said, scrolling through her phone. “I’m sooo lucky I get to pay thirteen hundred dollars a month to live in a glorified closet in Williamsburg.”

  “It’s not”—my mother paused to choose her words—“what I would have picked. But I’m not you.”

  “Remember that apartment we had in Williamsburg, Mom?” I asked.

  “I’ll always remember that apartment. It had a bathtub!”

  “And that teddy bear that was taller than me. I used to hug it every day after school.” I pretended to cry. “Because no one was home to hug me, waaahhh.”

  My parents laughed.

  “Was it as dinky as this place?” Emily asked.

  “Oh, it was the king’s palace,” my father said.

  I took Emily’s phone from her hand. “No, you wayward twat, it was ten thousand times worse. Our whole apartment was the size of your room.”

  She snatched her phone back. “I’m sending snaps.”

  “Your sister is being a sourpuss,” my mother said. “It was a great apartment. One of the best we ever had.”

  “Let me guess,” Emily said, trying to record us on her phone but my mother and I covered our faces right away. “You paid like five hundred bucks for it?”

  “Less,” my father said.

  “Less?”

  “Less.”

  “I’m seriously going to cry if you say four hundred.”

  “I think it was about two hundred bucks a month,” my mom said.

  “How’s that even possible?” Emily said. I didn’t know either how any of it had been possible. It was one thing to live through it, it was another to remember.

  “We paid even less when we were in East Flatbush,” my father said.

  “I love how you guys lived in all these places and never made friends with a single black person,” Emily said.

  “Why would you assume that?” I said.

  “I have eyes that work?”

  “Let’s go for a walk around the neighborhood,” my mother suggested. “I haven’t been back here in over twenty years.”

  We went outside and walked past a cold-press juice bar, a coffee shop run by Australian surfers, a cocktail lounge that specialized in absinthe cocktails, and a fusion tapas–dim sum restaurant.

  “Is this how you remember it?” Emily asked.

  “Not at all,” my father said. “We used to step over drunk Polish men passed out in the streets and Puerto Rican kids who dealt drugs on the corner.”

  “You think all Latinos are drug dealers, Dad,” Emily said.

  “He really does,” I agreed.

  Our mother walked ahead of us, turning the corner onto Driggs. “This is it,” she said. “That’s where we used to live.”

  We caught up with her and stood across the street from a construction site.

  “Oh my God,” Emily said. “Is that an apodment?”

  “It was a two-family house when we lived here,” my mother said.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” my father said.

  “Not apartment. Apodment. They’re like teeny tiny luxury apartments for tech bros who can’t give up dorm life.”

  My mother gave no indication she’d heard my sister. “Do you remember?” she asked me. “It was a shabby little red house with vinyl siding. I thought it was adorable. Your dad thought it was hideous.”

  “It was very nice for a flophouse,” my father conceded.

  I nodded, trying to remember. “How the hell did we ever get that place?”

  “The landlord felt bad for us.”

  “Cause we were—” I searched for the right word.

  “—because you guys were so raggedy back then?” Emily guessed.

  “We were pretty raggedy,” I agreed.

  “No,” my mother said. “Actually it was because of Tiananmen.”

  “When we went to see the place the owner started grilling us about life in China,” my father said. “Your mom barely spoke.”

  “My English wasn’t very good then.”

  “The guy was like, Are you afraid to speak? You’re afraid the government’s tracking you, aren’t you? You think they’re listening, don’t you? Once he realized we were from China, he started speaking at a whisper.”

  My mom laughed. “He actually thought we were dissidents or something.”

  “Which was stupid because if we were leaders of the student movement, how the hell could we already be in the U.S.? Tiananmen had only happened two days before.”

  “He must have thought of himself as some kind of defender of American democracy. He kept saying, You’re safe here. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Which was bullshit,” my father said, “because the guy was a slumlord.”

  “Fuck,” Emily said. “I love it when you can get stuff out of low-key racists.”

  My father seemed offended by the idea. “He wasn’t a racist. He was just extremely ignorant.”

  “Your father’s talent is benefiting from other people’s ignorance,” my mother added.

  “Wow,” I said. “I don’t remember this at all.”

  “I mean, he did have some reason to believe we were dissidents, I suppose. We had come straight from the demonstration. You were still carrying the sign your mother made. You wouldn’t let me take it from you. So, in a strange way, the timing worked to our advantage.”

  “We went to a protest?” I was really shocked now.

  “You don’t remember?” Emily asked. “There’s video footage.”

  “There is? How do you even know that?”

  “I watched it. Mom and Dad kind of looked like some far-out radicals back then.”

  “Emily took all our old videos and photographs and got them digitalized,” my mother explained.

  “I told Mom and Dad it was time to stop living in the Paleolithic Age.”

  “How did we even afford a video camera?”

  “Oh.” My mother smiled. “Your dad stole one.”

  “I literally do not remember that.”

  “Yeah, your mom was mad at me so I drove to The Wiz, thinking I’d get her something.” I knew he meant scam her something but I didn’t want to correct him. “I had just parked and for whatever reason, I looked down and noticed a receipt on the ground and picked it up. It was for this really nice camcorder. So naturally, I went inside and found the same make and model and tried to return it. It was a lot of money! I told the woman at customer service that my credit card had been stolen and she was really nice about it. She said she couldn’t do a return since I didn’t have the original form of payment but I could exchange it for something else. I couldn’t think of what else to get so I got a slightly crappier model and convinced the woman to refund me the difference.”

  “Of course you did,” my mother said.

  “Okay, this is too much,” Emily said. “I literally go back into the store when they accidentally undercharge me.”

  My dad was horrified by the idea. “Why would you ever do that?”

  “These places dock their employees’ pay if the till is off. I’m a law-abiding citizen, Dad.”

  “We only had the c
amera for a year or so,” my mom said.

  “We had to pawn it to buy your mom a plane ticket back to China when your grandmother died.”

  “The footage is pretty cool,” Emily said. “I was thinking of making a video with it.”

  “You want to make a video of a video?” my father asked.

  “It’s for her”—and I curled my fingers into air quotes— “art.”

  “Mom and Dad had on white headbands with, like, fake blood on them.”

  “We cut up one of your dad’s old white undershirts and tied them around our foreheads. I think we drew on them with red marker to represent the blood of the slain students.”

  “You begged your mom to let you wear one because all the adults had them but your mom said no, it was too morbid.”

  “I was not about to let my child wear a bloody rag around her head.”

  “It was symbolic,” my father said.

  “It was real life.”

  “Damn,” Emily said. “You guys went hard.”

  My mom started walking again. “Let’s keep going.”

  “You don’t want a picture?” Emily asked.

  “Of what?” my father countered and pointed at the building under construction. “That?”

  My mother shook her head. “I don’t feel very photogenic today.” We walked in silence for a bit, passing another juice shop and a cheese shop.

  “And I thought this whole time we had just gotten lucky for once,” I finally said.

  “We did get lucky,” Dad said. “We were lucky to encounter someone who was gullible and suffering from whatever guilty conscience led him to approve our application even though we had no savings or credit.”