Sour Heart

by Jenny Zhang

Surely there was someplace where it was safe, where who you thought you were matched up with how others treated you, where there was forgiveness in great abundance, never to be depleted, and as far as I knew, the first step to getting there was to have a boy who loved you and only you.

Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about “family” we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.

From that point on, I would refer to him as “your uncle” and he would mostly refer to me as “your aunt” and it would take a long time for our children to even understand that we were siblings first, but more than that, our children, just as we hadn’t, would likely not think much about a time before they were born, a time when he was my brother and I was his sister, and together, we were our parents’ children.

“可不可以把音响关轻一点.”

All I’ve ever known about any of them is how much pain they went through…and I’m just supposed to go through it too? Well, forgive me if I don’t fucking feel like it. If I don’t want to be a story my children rant about to their children when I’m dead.

She was just a little old woman, raised in the country without education or any of the basic things she had given my mother and my mother’s siblings, someone who’d been told as a young girl that women were put on this earth to give birth and rear children and not be a burden in any way but live as servants lived, productively, without fatigue or requirements of their own, yet had been resourceful and clever enough to come up through the feminist movement that Mao had devised to get women out of the house and into fields and factories, someone who had been given more power than any of the women in her lineage, who alluded to all the people she “saved” but never mentioned the people she turned in during the Cultural Revolution, someone whose hearing loss fed right into her fears of becoming useless, becoming someone others no longer bothered to address, and to counter those fears, she had to adopt a confidence that was embarrassing to witness, she had to maintain an opinion of herself so excessively high that it bordered on delusional.

In the dark, I thought I would always remember that night and be profoundly affected by having seen her this way, but it was like one of those dreams where you think to yourself while the dream is happening that you must remember the dream when you wake. That if you remember this dream, it will change you, unlock secrets from your life that would otherwise be permanently closed. But when you wake up, the only thing you can remember is telling yourself to remember it. After trying to conjure up details and images and coming up blank, you think, Oh well, it was probably stupid anyway, and you go on with your life, and you learn nothing, and you don’t change at all.

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 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.