Sour Heart Read online

Page 28

We were approaching North Sixth now and my mother stopped in front of a junk shop. “Heping. It’s still here.”

  “Did you used to shop here?” Emily asked.

  My mother nodded.

  “Life really is a circle,” my father said.

  “I can’t tell if that’s totally depressing or totally comforting,” Emily said.

  “Me either,” I said, feeling a fraction of what my parents must have felt—old and plump with the familiarity of how we had once been.

  Reunion #6

  The day my father quit his job and swore off teaching forever after finding out his school was being shut down by the Department of Education and all the teachers were going to be reassigned to even worse districts, he came home with a map of the world and a tin of silvery thumbtacks.

  “Of all the things you could have taken, you chose that?” my mother asked him, looking up from chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

  “First of all, I’d much rather take back my sanity than any material object and second of all, I want to show our sourpuss something important.” He laid the map down on the floor and beckoned me over. “Right here is where your mommy was born.” He set a thumbtack down next to a unnamed part of the map near the East China Sea. “She moved to Shanghai when she was three.”

  I was into it right away. “Like me but opposite.”

  “Exactly. And here is where your grandfather—Mommy’s daddy—was born and this is the town where he discovered oil and started his own business. Your first auntie was assigned to work in this village when she was fourteen and ended up staying for ten years. Your second auntie lived on this island for a few years. It was considered a good assignment. It was only a half-day journey by boat to Shanghai, so I saw her more frequently than your first auntie. She was supposed to help build windmills but ended up marrying the mayor of the village after his wife died.”

  “That’s why she’s so fat,” my mother added. “She never had to work.”

  “Your little auntie lived here for two years.”

  “In Russia?”

  “No, but it was right by the Siberian border. She delivered babies. She hated it. She told me she used to retch before, during, and after. There wasn’t much to eat so she really messed up her stomach and throat.”

  “Poor thing,” my mother said. “She refused to marry when she came back. Rejected every guy we tried to set her up with. She said none of them were suitable but I think it’s because she was too traumatized to want children of her own.”

  “Could be,” my father said, putting two thumbtacks on a thin lizard-shaped island. “Now we actually have some family in Malaysia—here and here—and a very distant uncle in Pakistan. They escaped during the civil war.”

  “How did they escape?”

  “They went by foot through the mountains.”

  “They climbed mountains?”

  “It was pretty rough. You had to have a lot of stamina. Some people went by boat to Hong Kong if they were lucky. A lot of desperate people tried to swim. Speaking of Hong Kong, your mother has two cousins there.”

  “Never met them,” my mother said.

  “Did they swim or take a boat?” I asked.

  “Probably boat,” my mother answered.

  “This right here is where your uncle first landed,” my father continued.

  “Atlanta?”

  “Atlanta, Georgia. He was a prodigy in China. Ranked number one in all of Shanghai and number three in the entire country for his particular field.”

  My mother came over and stood next to us. “We were so proud of him. He was part of the very first wave of students. He got accepted everywhere. Colleges were competing for him.”

  “Is that why he lives in such a nice house?”

  “Could be,” my father said. “It was great for us because then he was able to sponsor us.”

  “We got really lucky,” my mother said. “It was really rare for a sibling sponsorship to go through.”

  “How come we don’t live in Atlanta?”

  My mother stood up. “It’s a tragic story,” she said and went back into the kitchen to finish dinner.

  “He got a temporary job in New York after he graduated,” my father explained. “I think he got along well here but then his first wife was hit by a truck on Canal Street on her way to work and died instantly. He met your aunt Janet the year our visas were approved. She was about to start school at UNC so he moved down there with her.”

  “I don’t want anyone to get hit by a truck and die,” I said.

  “No one’s going to die, sourheart,” my father reassured me. “Daddy’s here to make sure of that.”

  “What if you or Mommy gets hit by a car?”

  “We won’t. Because we always look both ways, isn’t that right?”

  “Sometimes you just walk without looking,” I said, draping my body across his lap.

  “I’ll never do that again. Okay. This is our final destination. Here is the town where your grandmother was born and right next to it is where your grandfather was born. My mom and my dad. That’s where it all started.”

  I sat up and studied the map. “So many places.”

  “I think it’s time we take a road trip. What do you think sours?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  My father laughed. “Maybe, if your mom agrees. Wanna ask her?”

  I called my mother over and she sat down next to us to look at what we’d made. “Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of all this”—and she traced the thumbtacks we had set over all the places where we had family—“being scaled to the whole world, wouldn’t it be nice if this were our own private continent?”

  My father considered it and came up with a better solution. “Maybe we can think of this as a blueprint for our future home with a big backyard and—”

  “—a pool!” I suggested.

  “And a pool for sours, naturally,” my father said.

  My mother sighed. “It would be so much easier.”

  I wiped a tear from her cheek. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  “I’m okay,” she said, pressing her wet cheek against mine. “I just miss my family.” It was jarring to hear her refer to someone other than me and my father as her family.

  My father tried to console her. “We’ll just have to get rich and rent a big house and fly everyone to us.”

  “Sure,” she said, suddenly switching to anger. “I’m sure that’ll happen. And when it does, we can build a special wing for whoever your mistress is too.”

  “No way,” I said immediately and then mushing my words together, “No cunts,” but my parents were only hearing themselves now. They went into the kitchen and left me alone with the map for a while. They argued back and forth, my father vowing to get rich and my mother countervowing to get richer so she wouldn’t have to be dependent on his extravagant promises, which were more and more becoming lies. My father kept saying he would take care of this family and why didn’t she ever believe him and my mother kept saying she’d believe it when she saw it, which, she added, would certainly be after she was dead so unless ghosts really did haunt this earth she would never ever see it or believe it. After a long while, they finally came out of the kitchen and told me we were going to McDonald’s for dinner.

  As we were putting on our shoes, my father said, “Okay, here’s a promise I know I can keep. I vow that if my father lives to be a hundred years old, I will plan the most epic reunion. I’m talking every single person who is related to us. Whatever it takes. I will make it happen. And then we can all go to our graves satisfied. How’s that?”

  “That’s ridiculous, Heping. I told you to drop it.”

  “Can we just make up?” I said, tugging on my mother’s jacket sleeve. “Please?”

  “Okay,” my mother relented. “Okay, let’s make up.”

  The next morning, I was the first to wake and saw that someone had hung our map on the wall with all the thumbtacks pushed in, and a big circle drawn around New York City with t
he number “2024” written next to it in black marker.

  I crawled back into bed and woke up my parents. “What’s 2024?” My father’s eyes were still closed and my mother was nestled into the crook of his shoulder. They tried to pull me in between them but I resisted. “Why did you write 2024 on the map?” I asked again.

  “Oh,” my father said, slowly taking me in, still heavy with sleep. “That’s when we’ll have our reunion.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” My mother’s stance hadn’t changed since yesterday, though this time I swore her voice was weak with hope.

  “Something to look forward to,” my father said, and it was, and I did, even after our apartment collapsed and we had to be concerned with what would happen the next day and the day after that and the day after that until we were living hour to hour, minute to minute, and even then, I still believed in my father, who insisted there had to be something—anything—to look forward to.

  Reunion #7

  Tomorrow is my grandfather’s one hundredth birthday and so I decide to grow what some people might think of as wings, but what I think of as a natural desire to collect my family, which I do, sweeping down into cities and towns and villages I’ve never been in before and pulling each person close to me for a brief moment before throwing them into a sack.

  Hello, I say to each member of my family as I pick them up from their homes or their place of work or the restaurants where they are having their lunches or the recreation centers where they are shooting the shit about old times, and I say: hello, hello! hello there, hello remember me, I’m your cousin, remember me, I’m your niece, do you know me, I’m your second cousin, remember me, I’m your twice-removed cousin, have you heard of me, I’m your littlest aunt and I held you when you were born, I’m your great-grandniece, I’m your granddaughter, it’s really me, your daughter, your sister.

  The answers I get are: no hi yes yes yeah yup dang ran ji de sour angel I’ve missed you ning ning baobei is it really you you can fly piao liang gu niang it looks like your eczema’s flared up again do you still speak Chinese you look old.

  When I was three, I asked my aunts where humans came from and they started to talk about a woman opening up like a blossom for a man who loves her, and I said, No! The first human, where did they come from? My first aunt said, No one can really say, but I think, and my second aunt interrupted her and said, God created all of us, and my third aunt interrupted and said, The first humans came from monkeys. She then hunched her shoulders and lowered her arms and started to hoot like a monkey, and I jumped into her arms like she was my mom and these were our normal bedtime games. When I scoop up my third aunt from the hospital in Tianjin where she works, she says to me, But do you even remember how I was with you? I used to wipe your butt when you were a child, and I taught you about God and where humans came from.

  Monkeys, I say, we came from monkeys.

  Yes, and also God, my aunt reminds me.

  I pick up my grandfather last. He’s wearing a collar with no shirt attached. Looking good, Grandpa, I say. Xiao ning ning, he says, calling me by my first name, the one my parents dropped when we got to the States, the name I didn’t think about again until I went back to China and my idea of home became a problem once more. Ning ning’s home, my grandfather called out with unrestrained glee to the rest of my family as soon as my mother and I pulled up to his house in a taxi. He had been waiting outside for us all morning. Never forget, he had said to me on the first day, when my body was shaking all over, unable to accept that it had to remain still in the country where I was born. Your first three years were here. I already forgot, I responded, panicked, in bad Chinese, meaning to say the opposite, that I wouldn’t forget.

  Of all the voices speaking to me, it is my grandfather’s voice that I hear the clearest. Where is my little world-traveling granddaughter coming from now? he asks. Weren’t you in St. Petersburg last year? Or was it Berlin? Or Budapest? Or Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Manila? Bangkok? Seoul? All of those places, Grandpa, I say, tightening the bag.

  Is there a home for us somewhere? I ask the bag of my family, and immediately, I hear muffled votes for New York! Shanghai! Beijing! Shandong! Wenzhou! Heilongjiang! Tianjin! San Francisco! Williamsburg! Los Angeles! London! Bushwick! Paris! Sichuan! Hunan! Hong Kong! Washington Heights! E Flat!

  I try to take in all their suggestions but there’s too many and still more coming in. Without knowing exactly where I am, I begin to descend. We will all live to see this moment, I say into the bag of my family. We will land wherever there is solid ground, I promise. Everyone cheers and tells me they will go wherever I take them. There are so many voices talking at once to each other and to me and over me and over each other that I am suddenly flooded with an old, familiar anxiety from when I was younger and my life was filled with people who were my family for one minute and strangers the next, when we shared our home with other families who were close enough to hear our secrets but not close enough to understand them, when I would get so overwhelmed by the people around me that I would wish everyone, even my parents, could disappear, and when they did, when they left me alone for a few hours at night, I’d blame myself for letting the thought of living without them cross my mind, certain that of all the things I had ever wished for, this would be the one to come true and the more I thought about it the more I froze until I was gripped in a loneliness so stunning I could only stand still, surrendering myself to it and replaying every moment of the last few hours, reenacting all the conversations adults had around me, all the conversations I should have joined, all the phone calls back to Shanghai I should have participated in, only this time, I responded with the words that I thought were expected of me, and I said them, exactly as gracefully and graciously as they were meant to be said, sounding them out in my head and whispering just the beginnings of each response out loud: I am so grateful for…I know you tried your best…May you have…I wish I could offer…I don’t need…When I grow up…I hope one day…I do miss…yeye nainai I…I’m sorry I didn’t…Well, my favorite…I’m very fond of…I remember…It was wonderful to…Funny because…I plan on visiting…Ha ha ha…I don’t want to be so…You know what I miss…Studying has to be a priority…You’re right…I’d like to try…I shouldn’t have been so…I know what you…No one is more beautiful…If you don’t want me to I won’t…Yes, I will come and see you…and it went on like that until my parents came looking for me, and without me having to ask, they would lie down next to me, sensing exactly the kind of exhaustion I was trying to outlive, and pet me and ask me questions that required no answer. How did we end up with such a sour girl? How did we get so lucky? they’d say, clearing away the frantic voices of who I thought I was supposed to be, and though I knew it wouldn’t last forever, I stayed between them until I remembered who I was again and no longer felt lonely.

  For my mother and my father

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Kaela Myers, for guiding these stories into adulthood and seeing the true creature inside each one. To Samantha Shea for bestowing so much faith onto this book that I eventually had it too. To Andy Ward, who right away welcomed these stories with warmth and generosity. To Lena Dunham, for offering this book a home—thank you for reviving what I was ready to give up.

  And to the whole team at Random House & Lenny who worked on this book, often without me knowing—the rarest and most undeserved of privileges to possess and I did—thank you.

  I am grateful to Linda Swanson-Davies for being the first to accept a short story of mine and rooting for me to keep going. And to Tavi Gevinson for plucking me out of a slush pile a year later and offering a space for me to roam free.

  Heartfelt thanks to my teachers and classmates at Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ workshop who read me, wrote me, and fought for me, especially Rick Barot, Edward Carey, and Marilynne Robinson. My deepest gratitude to Samantha Chang and Connie Brothers for supporting me without exception.

  To Adrian for exceeding my dreams.

&nb
sp; To my friends: Durga Chew-Bose, Harry Chiu, Leopoldine Core, Anthony Ha, Benjamin Hale, Sarah Heyward, Leslie Jamison, Alice Sola Kim, Tom Macher, Karan Mahajan, Monica McClure, Anna North, and Vauhini Vara, who went through it with me and cared for me through all my whining and spiraling.

  To my chosen brother, Tony Tulathimutte, who read these stories at their limpest and nurtured them till they were stronger, and because of it, they are, and I am too.

  Finally, eternal love to my family in Shanghai and New York. To my nainai, yeye, haobu, gonggong—I am always trying to reach you in my baby tongue. And to my mother, father, and brother, who made this book with me, who speak to me in the finest, most private of tongues, who have loved me without stipulation and protected me from what I want—thank you. You are my only home that is constant.

  Also by Jenny Zhang

  Dear Jenny, We Are All Find

  About the Author

  JENNY ZHANG is a writer and poet based in New York.

  jennybagel.com

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