Zhang picks at the concept of family-it’s got to be more than just obligation, unpayable debts, and unbearable need, right? In “You Fell Into The River and I Saved You!,” lonely Christina tries to reconnect with a cousin in Shanghai: They get angry and try not to be destroyed by that anger-it is that struggle that drives most of the book. In defiance, the characters in Sour Heart get creative with profanity and insults, they steal and scam, they talk about the needs of their bodies.
As in Zhang’s nonfiction work, the tension between expectations based on race, immigration status, gender and family roles, and the (often ugly) realities of life in America is thick but never murky. The deluge of demands that poverty creates, explicitly or not, internal or enforced from outside, is made even more suffocating by the crush of bodies in households already stretched in too many other ways, with family histories so tragic and seemingly inescapable that legacies haunt whoever knows the details. The indignities of poverty are here-the story that opens the collection details the strategies needed to take a shit when your apartment toilet barely works. Zhang’s characters are poor, or recently poor, or terrified of being poor again, and the girl protagonists of all these stories struggle for control over their own feelings and the various obligations of being a daughter in their family. Sour Heart never shies from anger, failure, or shit. Jumping from Brooklyn slumlord apartments to smelly family homes in Shanghai to lonely suburban single-families, through family histories and overheard gossip, Zhang’s stories probe the nested worlds immigrant children navigate. This echoing makes a strong statement on the mutability of history and how powerfully influential the stories we tell about ourselves can be. Characters reoccur, adding different points of view to events that carry different meanings for each. Shit-talking, sharp-eyed, first- and second-generation Chinese immigrant girls are telling the stories here. Each touches on the shame that comes with seeing too clearly, talking too loudly, and being angry and sad in a world that wants a decorative girl, if it wants a girl at all. The stories of Sour Heart, Zhang’s first collection of fiction, are filled with girls who know. Most people don’t even know, I said, weeping in the car. You always say I know I know I know, but you must DO.
You know everything, my mother used to say to me. In Brooklyn writer Jenny Zhang’s 2014 chapbook, HAGS, Zhang offers the following conversation:
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