In Jenny Zhang’s debut short story collection Sour Heart, the sweet sour undertones of young girls‘ narrations in first person demystify their first-generation experiences. In these honest perspectives of children, nothing but the next day seemed to matter to them while their futures were everything that mattered to their parents. While undeniably fearless, Zhang’s seven almost-novellas, all through the eyes (and mouths!) of Chinese immigrant girls in 90s New York only briefly touched by each other’s lives, exhibit a rare vulnerability. One that is hard sought in any brushed-up immigrant narrative dictated by any sociopolitical notion. Zhang focuses in on the presumed innocence of childhood and the distinctly Chinese parental love, one that is pulled by contradictory forces. This bond, it emerges, is consolidated from a prior life of now unimaginable poverty and uprooting sprung from the tumultuous recent Chinese history (aka the Cultural Revolution before Deng Xiaoping opened the Chinese market to the West), which retains a familiar vividness for the offspring because generational trauma manifests itself in unknown ways. At the same time, in a positive light, this expansive scope of human sentiment can be perceived as rather tasteful, so much so that in contrast, to a newly arrived uncle from China, American supermarkets, enigmatic for the streamlined American way of life, give off a vibe that makes it seem to be full of ‚boxes and bags‘.
Love as a Weapon
„It was my mother who tucked him in and told him that there exists a sort of love in the world that only survives as long as no one speaks of it, and that was the reason why he would never have to worry because my grandmother was never going to be the kind of mother who held her children in her arms and told them how smart and beautiful and talented they were. She was only ever going to .. make them feel like they were never good enough, make them know this world wouldn’t be kind to them. She wasn’t going to let someone else be better than her at making her children feel pain or scare them more than she could…“
The masterfully construed family figures of these girls fight demons of a selfless and at the same time self-absorbing kind, and these come to haunt the young protagonists in startling but also funny ways:
„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 / was younger and my life was filled with people who were my family for one minute and strangers the next…“
This anxiety is an added layer to the Chinese immigrant experience that I believe is felt to some extent so similarly by so many of the Chinese diaspora. Maybe that is because of the sameness, or homogeneity, of the Chinese inland population. Beyond city borders and the rural farm life, the Chinese hold onto a quiet mutual understanding that arose from the defiant and restless strive toward upward mobility, and from their collective pride of a pragmatic resilience.
Girlhood and Sacrifice
Zhang’s subjects are girls that are plagued and consoled by a chorus of frequently enlarged voices of a past before they were born, by their Chinese immigrant peers, and perhaps most of all, by themselves. In this book they have the power of transporting the despair of belonging on neither side, but also helplessness of being a burden to everyone involved, without sounding desperate. The ever so fragile thread between the parents can barely withstand self-destruction either. This crucial side of having immigrant parents finally is turned inside out – not only do the girls deal with inherent otherness, but coupled with the disintegration of family, Zhang tells a truth that perhaps consumes their childhood the most. Which is that the stress of living in a foreign environment can bring out the worst between two people that entered this at times hostile environment as a team. At times the bleak realities set against the parents having abandoned lives as academics and artists in China, strike a jarring chord difficult to bear. For the daughters, breaking loose from these convoluted ties is not the key, but to succumb and to understand. In the last chapter, which is narrated by Christina, the same girl as in the first chapter, a candid young woman has learned to accept the alienating world she has gotten to know.
Being Someone
In the story right in the middle called The Evolution of my Brother“, an older girl reflects on how now finally
„[bleing someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, / will always come home to my family as a visitor, that… reverts me back into the teenager / was, but instead of insisting that / want everyone to leave me alone, what / want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again. Mememememememe.“
She finds herself bursting into her brother’s room without knocking while he is playing video games, a habit he would do as a smaller child that used to drive her mad. These moments exude a sense of nostalgia for a time that she didn’t think would want to revisit when she was living it. One thing that stays is her disposition to get him involved in situations the wit of which he isn’t aware of, accentuating a kind of fear for missing out on his formative years. Toward the end of the story, when at night she misses him, she’d
„pull him up like he was a marionette and / was a puppeteer. Through all of it, he would just sleep and sleep and sleep, even after a few times when / dragged him fully out of bed and made him stand up-right on his tippy toes, and when that wasn’t enough to wake him up, / grabbed his shoulders and made him do jumping jacks by pulling his arms up over his head and then letting them slap down hard against his legs. One time, he opened his eyes, though even then, he didn’t remember seeing me the next morning.“
The Small and Great Pains of Things
The overspilling prose that is nonetheless tightly rhythmical leaves one catching for breath. If one were to praise a work for ‚taking pleasures in the small things in life‘, this one is for those appreciating the small and great pains of things. Amidst shame and embarrassment, Zhang has elevated literature to what it is capable of. While at some instances her unsparing style for some may be prone to evoke repulsion and outright shock, Sour Heart truly testifies to a few voices among many more craving to be heard. And this, for any migrant and anyone aware of them, is reassuringly more than enough.
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