Sour Heart Read online

  At parties, my father drank until he was red in the face and then talked and talked and talked. “It was rough in those days,” he would say. “We thought an education was an education—the finest thing you could get! And an education in America? What could be better? We were clueless. I couldn’t get into my own studio once because they didn’t believe I was a student. They thought I was there to deliver Chinese food. I walked past gallery openings where every single possession I owned and every cent to my name wouldn’t have added up to the value of a single earring hanging from a partygoer’s ear. They were interested if you were a dissident who had been beaten and jailed and sentenced to hard labor. But even then, it would have been impossible to make a real living. I had a wife and a kid. And you know how Li Huiling is. She’s the work of two wives.” Depending on how red my father’s face got, the number would change, increasing the redder he was. He’d sigh and say, “It’s like dealing with ten completely different people in a manner of hours. Our first year in America, she cried every night, saying things no man should have to hear. Let me die, just let me die, she said to me. Send my ashes back to my mother, she said to me. We were running out of money. Sammy had a high fever when he was eighteen months old and we thought…we thought he wasn’t going to make it. We had ten dollars to our name. We went to the ER and they asked if we had insurance and we said no. They asked for an address to send the bill, so I gave them my advisor’s address. He was a good man. He got the bill and paid for it himself. I never asked him how much it was. Too ashamed. I couldn’t afford art supplies. We went through dumpsters in the fancy neighborhoods on trash day, looking for anything edible or wearable.” He talked until he was stumbling and then a couple of guys, also red in the face, would hoist his arms around their shoulders and carry him to the bed or the couch and he’d fall asleep immediately, occasionally waking after a violent coughing fit or to puke his guts out. Sammy was usually the one who remembered to set a trash bin next to my father when he got this way. The day after these parties, he would get up before any of us to make breakfast, betraying no trace of pain.

  My mother didn’t need to drink to talk about the old days. She didn’t need to slur and lean against partygoers. She had me. I was her receptacle and I permitted her to speak endlessly. “Can you imagine? We were with the brightest and the best. These were people who placed number one and two nationwide in their subjects of study. And every single one of them dropped out.” Whenever she talked this way, she paused frequently to check my face for a response. If I didn’t express enough concern, compassion, pity, or horror, she would start her story over again. If I failed to show the right response three times in a row, she would become frustrated and threaten never to speak to me again. If I somehow miraculously showed the right face, she would go on. “Then again, none of them had the potential your father and I had. Your father was a painter, you know. He made sculptures too. Long ago, back in China. I watched him destroy all of them one night in a panic with a hammer. I had a brick saved from when I was planning on smashing my own head—don’t worry, that thought never lasted more than an hour. Anyway, I used that very brick to smash his sculptures into bits. We tossed the broken shards into the Huangpu River. Did any of those men who came to America to study ever make anything so incredible that it had to be destroyed? No, they were philistines. They were mercenaries. You wouldn’t believe what your mother was capable of. Your mother met a German tourist outside of the Summer Palace in Beijing and he told me that I had ‘vision,’ that I spoke English like a character from a Jane Austen novel. He gifted me his camera so I could capture the world through my eyes. He was probably in love with me. His wife wasn’t too happy he gave away their camera. Well, I took it. I was only twenty-two! I had never seen one before but I was like one of those savants. You know the ones who sit in front of a piano for the first time and start playing Beethoven? That was me exactly. I made a short film and had to go underground. There were plans made for me to seek asylum at one point. Do you know how good you have to be to get to that point? You basically have to be a genius! So your mother was a genius. So what? For what? So your daddy and I could go to America because he was offered a scholarship? So we could find out a scholarship was nothing? Nothing. There are no Chinese artists in America, did you know that, Annie? It’s like a human saying they want to fly with hawks. You can’t! You’re the wrong species. So your father failed. So he had no chance and he failed. So we had to live like animals, squeezed up in one room with five mattresses on the floor. We were woken up in the middle of the night by some little girl moaning about her itchy legs and how she wanted to burn them off. I was eight months pregnant and this girl just cried and cried and cried. Do you know what I said one time when I couldn’t take it anymore? I said, ‘Take her to get them amputated!’ No one else was offering any solutions! So I offered one. She was the one who named you. Did you know that, Annie? Can you imagine your poor mother coming back from the hospital with you and having to go right back to that room with all those people? All those failures. Can you?”

  I nodded. I had heard this story so many times before.

  “That little girl was called Christina. She said I should name you Annie. Her legs were covered in scabs. Her parents did nothing to control her. She told me the little orphan Annie was a great American hero and that I had to name you after the greatest female character in American film history.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to hack off her legs?”

  “You’re not listening,” my mother said. “I was supposed to keep making films but I was born in the wrong era. Do you know what happened to all the great people I grew up with? They went to jail. They were tortured. They were sentenced to hard labor and worked to death. To literal death. Have you ever seen someone literally drop dead with exhaustion? Have you ever seen someone cry to death? Literally…cry…to…death! These people took their own lives to cut the misery short. These people were disappeared. Do you know what it means when someone is disappeared?”

  “It means they’re dead.”

  She shook her head in that way where I couldn’t tell if she was disapproving of my answer or disapproving of what had happened back in China. “All for what? To move here in search of the good life? How is living in squalor with three other families in an airless room the good life? I was constipated,” my mother continued, “the whole time you were in my belly because all we could afford to eat was white rice, without any flavor, without any meat or vegetables, just plain white rice. We became petty thieves. We’d go into a supermarket and rip open a Cup Noodles and pocket the flavor packets. We would stretch them out over the course of a whole week, sprinkling little bits of it over our rice, and that was it. Can you even imagine? Can you?”

  I could not. I wasn’t there for it and the parts I was there for, I couldn’t remember.

  “We had to spend all our money on you. We had to eat less frequently because of you. You needed so much from us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Three months after I was born, they saved enough to leave that “dungeon of suspended farts,” as my mother so delicately put it to me one time when she felt like I wasn’t giving her enough acknowledgment of how much she had endured to bring me into the world and keep me alive. In the new place my parents frequently ate raw eggs because the stove was broken and their landlord was an out-and-out crook. My mother said my father was too complacent, too willing to suffer, he didn’t complain enough. “That’s the American way! Complaining! Did you see in the paper yesterday? Someone scalded their tongue drinking piping hot coffee from McDonald’s and they had the gall—the gall—to sue McDonald’s. On what basis? On the basis that the McDonald’s employee failed to warn them that the coffee was hot. Coffee is hot. It’s always hot. And this shyster got a million dollars. Do you know what your father would have gotten? Nothing. He would’ve gotten nothing.” It was true that my father rarely complained except when he got drunk at parties, and even then, it wasn’t for a purpose, it wasn’t to get a
head or to earn money, it was just overflow. That was why he failed to make a big stink about how the landlord never made good on his promise to fix the stove, and why he didn’t fight back when the landlord started turning off the heat from eight A.M. to six P.M. on the weekdays because he believed honest, hardworking Americans were supposed to be at their jobs during those hours and no, he didn’t expect less from a building occupied by Asians and black families, and no, he would not make exceptions for the hooligans who wore their pants well below their crotches so that their penises looked like guns peeking out above their belt loops, and yes, it just so happened that the kids who let their penises poke out like guns above their pants were all black, but no, that did not mean he was racist in any way against black people, he just didn’t need to see so many penises pointed at him when he stopped by his own building and that was all. According to my mother, the black kids dealt drugs and bought space heaters with their profits, among other things, so they were fine with the heat being off all day, but my father sold umbrellas, so what was he going to buy? More umbrellas, my mother said bitterly before I could answer.

  She told me I was lucky to have been in China for that year and a half, the hard years when she didn’t know if she wanted to live or die, and I thought maybe if I were really lucky I’d have a mother who didn’t feel like dying, and even if she did, maybe she could keep that to herself, because maybe, just maybe, if she kept her sadness to herself, it would go away on its own, or at least soften, like all the times I kept my anger to myself while waiting for her to notice that something was wrong and I needed to be held, to be told I was her beloved and it broke her heart to know she had hurt me. But what usually happened was my mother wouldn’t notice, and after a few hours I would forget my anger and be happy to put her clip-on earrings in my hair and show her the dance I made up with Sarah and Alexi, a dance so wild that it shook all the earrings to the ground, and then my mom and I would swoop down and compete against each other for who could collect the most. Sometimes she let me win and sometimes she was vicious, clawing the earrings away from my fingers, but the point was that if I could forget my anger then she could forget her sadness.

  The memories I had of China—of my uncle and my grandparents whom I lived with—were all given to me by my mother. She told me everything whether I wanted to hear it or not. “Everyone loved you the most and said you had inherited my exact personality. Don’t forget you were competing with boys over there! You know how Chinese people are—boys this, boys that. But our family’s different. My parents raised us differently. They never made me feel like I was any less than your uncle, and I always felt that my mom and dad gave me the same amount of love as they gave your uncle, and that’s why I made sure you were loved even though you came second, and even though you aren’t a boy. That’s what makes our family special from other Chinese families, and that’s why Mommy is different with you and Sammy compared to other Chinese mommies. Did you notice how all the other moms make their kids go to Chinese school on Sundays? Did Mommy make you go to Chinese school this year? Did I? Mommy suggested that you go to Chinese school because why would a Chinese person not want to learn Chinese? It’s like a snail wanting to learn how to fly instead of snailing around like a snail is supposed to do. It’s not natural and Mommy wants her children to do what is natural for them, which is why Mommy doesn’t push you and Sammy like Peng a-yi. Did you know she makes her kids take violin lessons in the morning, then Chinese school, then math tutoring, then English tutoring, then pre-PSAT-SAT tutoring, then ninth-grade biology tutoring for sixth graders, then badminton, and then piano! That’s how these women are, and you know what? I’m not going to subject you to that. Even if these women look at me like I want you to never go to college and never find a great job that earns enough money to take care of Mommy when Mommy goes blind and accidentally soils herself five times a day, because you know what? Those women couldn’t be more wrong. Mommy actually wants all of those things for you, but I’m not going to be one of those women who has to control everything. I won’t! That’s why Mommy let Daddy go to America by himself and live two years in dangerous neighborhoods where Daddy had a really good chance of dying before having a chance to give Mommy all the things that a daddy should give a mommy, and all the things your daddy should give to your mommy’s favorite two people—you and Sammy. Except you weren’t born yet, but Mommy had a feeling that the two people she was meant to love forever and ever in life couldn’t possibly just be Sammy and your father. Oh, certainly not. Can you believe your daddy wanted your mommy to have you when he couldn’t even afford to take your mommy out for dinner? Not one measly dinner! Did you know Mommy only agreed to go to America and bring Sammy with her because Daddy was such an extravagant liar? Lie number one: he said he had a lovely place for us. Lie number two: he said he was making so much money he would soon be able to buy Mommy a diamond ring. Lie number three: he said people here are free to pursue what they want. Unlike China, in America you can make a living doing anything. Lie number four: he said we would love it in America. I could keep going but our lives would come to an end before I get through all the lies your daddy fed your mommy. Daddy is delusional. Daddy is a person Mommy tolerates but you and Sammy are my loves. I was wondering…who do you love more? Mommy or Daddy? You don’t have to answer right now, but you should know that when Chen shu shu asks you at a party in front of everyone and everyone is waiting for you to say the answer and you don’t say anything, it embarrasses Mommy, and it makes Mommy cry, and that’s why Mommy didn’t pour you a soda with ice at the last party. I promise I didn’t forget. I was in the bathroom sobbing my eyes out because you hurt me so much when you wouldn’t answer Chen shu shu, which is why Mommy hopes you can think about this question right now and come up with an answer before next Friday since Chen shu shu is coming over for dinner and he’s going to ask you again and if you don’t answer, you’ll make Mommy so sad that I won’t be able to eat anything and then Mommy will get so weak that eventually Mommy will have to die and then you’ll be all alone, except for Daddy and Sammy, but Daddy will probably be so devastated I’ve passed on that he won’t even remember to make dinner for you and Sammy and then you know what? I’ll tell you. You’ll regret taking so long to figure out the answer to the question of who do you love more: Mommy or Daddy?”

  She talked me into falling asleep when I was perfectly well rested, she talked me into tears when I didn’t want to hear any more stories about her youth, the way she had suffered, how she married a man who would only continue to make her suffer, how my brother’s main accomplishment in life so far was making her suffer, how she suffered when my father convinced her to take me back to China to live with my grandparents and uncle for a while until my parents were more financially secure, how she suffered while I was away in China, how she suffered the day she drove alone to the Charleston airport in South Carolina to meet my distant aunt Cheng Fang who agreed to bring me back to the United States from her trip to Shanghai, and how in the airport arrivals lounge the first thing I did was kick my mother in the shin repeatedly and head-butt her when she tried to pick me up. I honestly didn’t recall doing this, but my mother insisted that I had behaved monstrously and would never let me forget how I hurt her that day, the day she waited a year and a half for, and how one day, I would turn on her again. Her predictions bewildered me. How could I, who clung to her in the mornings right when I woke up, who crawled into bed with her at night even though I was supposed to be sleeping on my own, who only made things for her in art class and never my father, never Sammy, never any of my friends, who set up a lemonade stand with Sarah and Alexi and spent my share of the profits on a glass vial that contained a grain of rice with my mother’s name on it—how could a person so pathetically lovestruck for my mother as I was become someone who would one day callously abandon her?

  For my mother, the good life had long expired, there was only struggle and pain left to endure, so when her mood lifted so tremendously at the news of my uncle h
aving finally secured a visa, I was taken aback.

  “Our life is finally just beginning,” my mother told me after reading a letter from my uncle. He was coming in a month.

  “Mommy,” I said, pulling her hand. “Mommy, tickle me already.”

  She ignored my request. “You’ll see your mommy like you’ve never seen her before.” That night, I saw her arranging old photos of her and my uncle on our living room carpet with such intention and focus, I imagined she was an intrepid adventurer laying down a path. One of the reasons I studied her so closely was because I wanted to track how she ended up in these secret places I couldn’t enter. How did she get there and why couldn’t I follow her? But it was no use. She frequently disappeared without warning and I had to tell myself that if I wasn’t a part of it, then I wasn’t a part of it, and I would learn to savor that too.

  August 1966

  Twitch had a first cousin everyone called Goober, who had been so severely malnourished as a baby that he walked with a permanent limp and had a tendency to repeat the same phrase for a week at a time. He was rumored by the other kids to be so stupid that he once stood up before he was done shitting and walked around the rest of the day with a broken turd sticking out of his ass. The day after all the papers reprinted Mao’s speech at Tiananmen in front of a million pulsing Red Guards, Goober made the mistake of going around Nanchang longtang and telling all the kids hanging around outside that he saw his father wiping his ass with the front page of the Jiefang Ribao. The next day his father was rounded up by a mob of kids and flogged publicly for hours. The kids, not satisfied with the beating, decided to shove a bundle of sticks up his ass so he would never shit on Chairman Mao again. Twitch had been one of the kids who kept gathering sticks even when the enthusiasm from the crowd had died down, and for several days afterward, the children of Nanchang longtang heard Goober’s mom wailing deep into the night until one day she was gone too.