Sour Heart Read online

  The day before the rain started, some kids from Nanchang longtang had strung up Teacher Liu to a poplar tree that was still mottled from years back when people had crowded around it to peel off slabs of bark for food. One of the kids Teacher Liu beat the most frequently had a twitchy lip from all the times she’d slapped him across the mouth with a ruler for answering math problems wrong, earning him the nickname “Twitch” (though his closest friends knew that his own father beat him much more savagely than Teacher Liu ever did and it was far more likely that his mouth twitch had come from the time his father tied him to a chair and flicked rocks at his face for hours until finally one of them knocked out his front tooth), and he had come up with the idea of carving 2 + 2 = 5 down her arm with a shard of glass, knowing there was no greater insult than to brand her with bad arithmetic. She gave the hardest tests of all the middle school teachers, often pre-quizzing her students on units that she only planned on teaching months later. She handed rulers to the good students and made them beat the bad ones. She wouldn’t let them stop until all the rulers were streaked with blood or broken in half. Once she had given ten rulers to the most soft-spoken girl in class and instructed her to hit Twitch with them until they were quote unquote “a pile of splinters.”

  As soon as the announcement was made in early June that all schools were to be closed immediately and students were to devote themselves to the revolution, Twitch began gathering evidence against Teacher Liu. She’s a seditious slut, Twitch told his schoolmates. She’s been wiping her pussy with images of Chairman Mao ripped out of the newspaper. Her father owned land, did you know that? And refused to give it up too. He had to be purged, that’s why she doesn’t have any family around because they were all rightists and capitalist sympathizers.

  At the break of dawn, Twitch gathered the beefiest and the grodiest of his classmates to break into her home and destroy all her possessions. There’s books gilded in gold leaf! Twitch cried upon seeing her library. He flicked his tongue against the filaments of gold, not knowing what else to do and inexplicably drawn to their beauty before snapping back into action and ordering the two biggest boys to drag her out of bed. By the time they had successfully tied Teacher Liu to the poplar tree, a crowd had gathered.

  What do you get when you add two plus two? they taunted her, ignoring her pleas to be untied.

  Four. It’s four.

  If you say four again…Twitch said, grabbing her pinky finger and motioning to slice it off. Someone who loves the number four so much should only have four fingers. Am I right? The crowd of children had stones in their pockets and full bladders they were planning to relieve on the fresh wounds on Teacher Liu’s arm.

  Look how fat she is, one kid pointed out. She must have been hoarding eggs and meat while the rest of us were fed shit from our own asses.

  Bourgeois scum. Say it! another shouted. Say you are bourgeois scum. Say you’ve always been a counterrevolutionary revisionist seed of pigshit and you deserve to be beaten blind.

  She said it through blubbering sobs, but Twitch was still disgusted by a certain self-satisfied gleam in her eye. He encouraged a couple of kids to force her mouth open while another few took turns aiming piss into it. The especially inventive discussed which branches to climb in order to position their ass cracks at the best possible angle to feed her some of the shit that her bourgeois upbringing had kept her from eating while everyone else lived at the level of dung beetles. Teacher Liu had lived well. It was obvious from her height: only people who came from generations of well-fed families could grow to be as tall as her. Her white skin proved that she descended from pampered thinkers who never had to labor under the sun from sunrise to sundown. Some of the kids talked about making a stew from her bones. We won’t even have to season it much! they shouted. Calcium for the people! By late afternoon, the children were bored and starving, having pissed and shat themselves empty. This is just the beginning, Twitch told the others before they all dispersed to go home and eat dinner—flour fried in a bit of old reused oil. The more fortunate kids had a few grains of salt to sprinkle on their fried flour, and the even luckier had a drop or two of soy sauce.

  The next morning, it rained and was cool for the first time in weeks, washing away the dust and shards of glass strewn all over the streets. The children were ecstatic. They set their bottles on the ground and stripped naked in the streets. You like what you see, don’t you, they said to each other, pointing at the littleness of each other’s parts, and flexing the muscles they didn’t have.

  My uncle wasn’t out in the streets; he was indoors. He lived in a modest apartment at the end of Nanchang longtang with my mother and my grandparents. Unlike the kids who ran in packs and stayed outside until they felt like it, my uncle came from a family who could actually afford to eat eggs more than once a year (he and my mother ate them once on New Year’s Eve and once on their birthdays, which was unheard of and had to be kept secret). He had only used a match once in his life and it had gone badly, burning the hair on the back of his neck. When he went outside, he went outside alone, keeping few alliances. If he hadn’t looked so comically out of proportion—his big watermelon head balanced on a beanpole body—the hooligans of Nanchang longtang would have singled out him and his family for abuse, but instead they were soft on him, treated him like their own personal entertainment. Bighead, Bighead, they shouted at him, have you come to be our umbrella?

  Just taking a stroll, he would reply, waving cordially.

  When his mother told him he ought to stay indoors more, citing the legend of a village of people who put their children in steel boxes to keep them from growing as an example of what would have befallen him if only she had the means to do it, he was appalled and declared his intention to liberate all the village children from their boxes.

  It’s just a story, his mother said. It’s not real. It’s made up. It’s for a laugh. You don’t have to be the hero for some kids who never existed.

  Why would anyone even think of it? my uncle asked. Why did someone have that thought?

  Why, why, why? my grandmother said. You waste my time with these whys. Go do something already so someone can ask you why you did it.

  My uncle made a promise to himself that he would never let himself be caged. He would be free, he would always be free, he would stretch his long limbs out with great care and pleasure, he would stand up straight to be that much closer to the sky and feel the infinitesimal growth of his body happening in real time.

  The day the rains started, he went outside for his daily stroll around the neighborhood and passed by the poplar tree that Teacher Liu was still tied to, the odor of blood and piss lingering in the air despite the rain. He approached her like she was a display in a museum, taking tiny steps toward her unconscious body.

  You shouldn’t be here, he whispered. Before he could untie her, a pack of naked boys led by Twitch ran up to my uncle, formed a ring around him and the poplar tree and Teacher Liu, laced their fingers together and sang:

  Rain, rain, you make us wish

  We had an umbrella

  If we had an umbrella

  We wouldn’t be wet!

  Rain, rain, you make us wish

  All the good girls

  Were wet like you

  But look!

  There’s Chunguang

  With his big fatty bighead

  Who needs an umbrella

  When Bighead can keep us dry!

  But your mother’s still wet

  She’s always been wet.

  That’s how we know

  She’s a whore!

  February–March 1996

  “A whore?” I said in Chinese. “What’s that?”

  “No,” my mother said. “You misheard. I said, ‘That’s how we know all’s well.’ ”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  My mother sang the Bighead song obsessively during the months when we were preparing for my uncle’s stay. He was coming to live with us for a few months before starting school in K
noxville at the University of Tennessee.

  “What’s he going to do in Tennessee?” I asked my mom.

  “Make toothpaste taste like Sprite,” my brother Sammy interrupted.

  “Um, yeah, right.”

  “Ask him yourself when he gets here.”

  I was seven and starting to be curious about my uncle again. We were having fish for dinner when my father tipped his chair back and started choking.

  “There’s Chunguang,” my mother sang, her eyes averted to the ceiling.

  “Should we help Daddy?” I said, looking at Sammy. I didn’t move because often when I knew I wanted to do something I ended up doing the opposite, and my brother, who was good at anything that a person might ever want to be good at and even good at the things that we as a species had not yet conceived of wanting to do, ran up to my father and thumped him on the back.

  “With his big fatty bighead.”

  “Mom, please. Help him!” my brother said.

  “Daddy’s head is exploding,” I said.

  Our mom kept singing as if nothing was happening. My brother tried to give our father the Heimlich, which I had also learned in school, but the Heimlich was for bigger things like a hunk of meat, not a slivery fish bone. My father pushed my brother away, pulled some black vinegar from the cabinet, took four huge slugs, wiped his lips, and said, “I’m fine. Vinegar washed it right down. Now, I don’t want you kids eating any more fish tonight. We need to save some luck for the next year.” He smiled in my direction and I covered my face, pretending to cry because I felt my father deserved better but only pretending because the only person who could make me cry was my mother, who knew it and never missed an opportunity to do so.

  Later that night, my brother came into my room and told me, “Mom doesn’t like Dad that much and she wants to live with just us. That’s why she didn’t do anything when he was choking. They’re trying not to fight all the time because our uncle’s coming so you have to be good and help me take care of Dad.”

  “How do you know Mommy hates Daddy?” I said.

  “Annie. I never said hate.”

  “So I know she doesn’t and who says I have to help you?”

  “I’m just trying to talk to you.”

  I was so sick of him then. I didn’t know why my brother had to be so mature at thirteen. Shouldn’t he have been surly and rude to me? Embarrassed about the pimples on his face? Hormonally out of control and wanting to nail every girl in sight only to be rejected mercilessly, which would in turn shatter his self-esteem, and as a result of his destroyed sense of self-worth, shouldn’t he have turned on me and taken his frustration out on me, instead of being someone who sat me down in my room and refused to speak to me as if I were a baby and instead took me seriously and cared for me and shamed me with his unflinching maturity? What allowed him to be at peace with the world when I was still so behind, waiting for the next several years to hurry up and finish so I could show everyone that I, too, would turn out this way, poised and so incredibly well-adjusted that I was a marvel to be discussed and openly pondered, perhaps even kept in a glass case rimmed with gold in a museum somewhere that charged exorbitantly for admission to see me, the special exhibit people traveled far and wide for.

  “I’m not on your side,” I said.

  “There aren’t any sides.”

  “Everyone’s on a side.”

  My brother came over and sat next to me on the bed. He started to braid my hair.

  “Stop it. I don’t want you to do that.”

  But he kept going because he was good at it and he knew I liked having my hair touched, that it made me feel moonstone blue like my favorite crayon color, and feeling that way made me fearless against the nightmares I knew I would have. My mother was the one who taught my brother how to braid hair so that she wouldn’t have to do it when she was depressed or stressed out or feeling frantic or in a hurry, or too tired to lift a finger or just wanted to be alone, and we had to understand or else it meant we didn’t love her. We had to understand everything, not that we had a choice when she would suddenly stand up and grab her jacket, yelling over her shoulder as she walked out the front door, “Get used to your father’s miserable cooking because you won’t be seeing me anymore.”

  Sometimes I covered my eyes before I could see her leave but I could never keep them covered long enough. When I opened my eyes again nothing was ever different—there was my father in his tie, holding a computer programming book he was planning to study on the train to work, and there was my brother, letting his cereal go soggy and lowering his head so no one could see if his eyes were moist or dry, and there was the spot where we first angered our mother, the spot where she pulled at her own hair and threatened to rip it out and throw it down by our feet, a spot we avoided all day, tiptoed around casually, as if it were covered in glass shards, until she came back late in the evening when the darkness that surrounded my house was much different from the darkness that had snuck its way inside.

  —

  At school during recess, I tried to sing the song to my friends Sarah and Alexi because I wanted them to know what a dynamic uncle I had and how lucky I was that he was coming to live with us. I stood with them by the hopscotch square and sang in English:

  Rain, rain, go away

  My uncle’s head is big today

  My mom is pretty wet today

  We’re also wet, we’re stinkin’ wet

  We need Bighead to keep us dry today!

  “So that’s how big my uncle’s head is,” I told them. “Ha ha, it makes me wanna laugh.”

  “Then laugh,” Sarah said.

  “Let’s all do it,” I suggested.

  “Nah,” Sarah said.

  “Can’t,” Alexi said.

  We stood around shifting dirt underneath our shoes for no reason.

  “Why would a head keep a person dry?” Sarah asked.

  Alexi didn’t get it either. “Yeah, I know, right? I have a head and I still get wet.”

  “But the mother is wet and the head is big. It’s bigger than an umbrella.”

  “Ew,” Alexi said.

  “No, thank you,” Sarah said.

  “Guys, it’s so funny. I was laughing so hard before. Tears were coming out of my eyes.”

  “Not me,” Sarah said. “I don’t even wanna laugh for one minute.”

  “Me either. See?” Alexi pulled the corners of her mouth up into a smile and then took her hands away from her mouth and dropped them to her sides. Her smile fell down immediately. “My mouth won’t laugh at it.”

  After that, I tried telling my mother I didn’t want to hear that many stories about my uncle, but she claimed deep within my heart I did, and I kept saying, No, I really don’t, I’ll find out about him when he gets here, and she kept saying, No, but in your heart you want to know everything there is to know about him, and I said, No, really I don’t, and she said, But no, really you do, and then I gave in, like I always did. She usually got her way with me, and if she didn’t, she cried. No one liked seeing her cry but for me it was unbearable. I tried covering her mouth but that made her cry harder. I covered my eyes but that only made my ears more sensitive.

  So I let her go on and on about how I used to love my uncle more than I loved to eat Cup Noodles in the middle of the night, which was my favorite thing to do. It was mostly the three of us who partook but every now and then my brother Sammy would poke his head into the kitchen when he heard our dad pouring water into the kettle and the sounds of us ripping open the plastic wrap. It was one of the rare moments when the shadow that shrouded his face lifted, and he was no longer “let me have my ups and downs” Sammy who made me pay him twenty-five cents just to go into his room to sharpen my pencil on some nights because he needed to be alone for hours, unlike me and my mom who needed to be needed. I respected his wishes because there were other nights when he came into my room and slipped two dollars under my pillow after I lost a tooth because Mom and Dad didn’t know about the tooth fairy.
>
  He was confusing that way, my savior one moment, a menace the next. But when we had late-night Cup Noodles he was only ever my savior. He let me slurp from his foam cup, saying he only liked eating the noodles, and he also fished every little dried carrot and pea out of my cup because I hated those things—what person who enjoyed good-tasting things and hated terrible-tasting things didn’t? There was a kind of brief paradise in staying up later than was supposedly allowed, in being the kind of family who enjoyed one another’s company. I never felt as safe and calm as I did on nights when my family treated ourselves to instant noodles, bloating ourselves with salt before bed.

  Apparently the gooey pleasures of eating late-night noodles were nothing compared to the celestial company of my uncle, whose face and personality my mother encouraged me to recall with precision and tenderness even though I was only a baby during the year and a half I spent in China with my uncle and my extended family and I had never heard of anyone remembering what it was like to be a baby, yet my mother demanded it of me as proof that I had a heart, that I remembered the people who loved and cared for me. When I was seven months old, my parents took me to Shanghai and left me there until I was two. Your father was selling umbrellas in the street, my mother told me again and again, the more times she repeated herself, the louder she became. The street! she yelled. The friggin’ street! Do you know who else wanders the street looking for money? Homeless drug addicts who give birth to stillborns in toilets!

  Is a stillborn baby alive or dead? I asked my mother so many times that I eventually gave up on her hearing me.

  Before I was born, my mother and my father and my brother shared a cramped room in Washington Heights with three other families for forty dollars a month. Like my father, the men in the room had come to America to study, they had gotten sponsors in China who believed in them, they had been told they were the chosen ones, the ones who had actually worked their way up to a miracle. They got to America and saved up enough money to bring their wives and children over, too, and one by one, after a year, two years, three years, four years: each and every one of them, just like my father before them, dropped out.