Jenny Zhang’s astounding short-story collection, “Sour Heart,” combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain. Its first story, “We Love You Crispina,” opens by situating its narrator, Christina, in a building in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that’s tucked between drug houses. Christina and her parents wake up coated in roaches each morning; in shaking the bugs off their limbs, she says, they “strove for grace, swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas.” The story’s second sentence sprawls over an entire page and details, in harrowing fashion, the scatological logistics involved if one of them has to use the toilet in the apartment rather than the safer option at the Amoco across the street. The sentence functions like a page-long overture for the whole collection, ranging from the comic (a family using “old toothbrushes and chopsticks to mash our king-sized shits into smaller pieces”) to the brutally intimate (“secretly I blamed myself for instigating all our downward spirals”), sketching the cyclical weaknesses of a family (Christina’s father, realizing she’d been waiting all month to ask for a single ice cream, buys her the ice cream and also a rhinestone anklet, which is why there’s never any money for a toilet plunger) as well as its extraordinary private strengths. It—the sentence—concludes with Christina observing that, in later apartments, “it still wasn’t simple either, but at least we could take shits at our own convenience, and that was nothing to forget about or diminish.”
There are eight stories in “Sour Heart,” and the first and last are narrated by Christina. The other narrators resemble Christina in obvious ways: they are first-generation Chinese-American girls who live in the outer boroughs or on Long Island, typically with a single sibling (usually a brother) and parents who have outsized standing in their children’s hearts. But, mostly, the girls of Zhang’s collection, who narrate their stories in retrospect, are mutually exclusive versions of each other. The collection’s organizing theme is familial love that warps a person beyond all recognition: specifically, a type of immigrant devotion with a power that is both creative and entropic, and which affects its recipients in idiosyncratic ways. The parents in “Sour Heart” vary widely—they are seamstresses, bicycle delivery guys, bookkeepers, failed avant-garde filmmakers; they are alternately spontaneous, brittle, prudent, empty-headed, cruel, affectionate, needy. They are connected by a certain Washington Heights apartment, which recent immigrants use as temporary housing and which Zhang uses like a narrative polestar: the characters offhandedly reminisce about their nights in this cramped shithole, with a sad girl named Christina who wouldn’t stop scratching her legs. Their daughters carry very specific inheritances, which are complementary but not interchangeable. “Sour Heart” is a feminist bildungsroman—the narrators act upon their world just as much as the world acts upon them—and it depicts, from start to finish, a collective coming of age.
Until now, Zhang has been better known for poetry and essays, but she has a background in fiction—it’s what she studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—and she has a knack for deploying and combining common literary devices for mischievous, unexpected ends. “Sour Heart” is frequently disgusting, but the obscenity often serves as misdirection. Love and poverty are distracted or doubled: one character eats a piece of spit-coated ham she finds in her brother’s mouth; when Christina is in a sickly phase and throws up her dinners, her father eats her vomit and gives her the food he had planned to eat himself. While reading a story called “The Empty the Empty the Empty,” I found myself unable to finish my own dinner. Lucy, the narrator, and her friend Francine have one of those early, escalating, codependent friendships: they spend all afternoon “digging around in each other’s vaginas, and when I least expected it, she would suddenly put her fingers up to my nose.” In the story’s final scene, Lucy and Francine tie Lucy’s cousin Frangie to the bed and order Lucy’s boyfriend, Jason, to have sex with her. They’re fourth graders—clueless, fumbling. Jason’s penis is “shiny and gross with [Francine’s] saliva but still tiny and soft.” But what really wrecked me in this hideous tableau were Lucy’s attempts at kindness. “Frangie,” she says, “I still want to be a jellyfish with you. . . . I saved an orange soda for you. I’ll get Eddie to put your name on it so that I don’t forget and drink it by accident.”
Zhang uses the collection’s structure to check and subvert her characters’ narrative authority. Christina’s universe, a private kaleidoscope of sorrow and love, is dismissed in other stories as an object lesson in irresponsibility. Lucy imagines herself as a magnetic figure: “the lights in the gymnasium followed me everywhere I went, and surely I was the shining, burning asteroid-comet-sun-galaxy-universe-rings-of-Saturn-ninth-wonder-of-the-world-never-gonna-burn-out star of the dance.” In another story, a former classmate of Lucy’s remembers her briefly and witheringly, as a tiny girl who thought her size made her cute. As Christian Lorentzen noted at Vulture, child narrators rarely improve fiction; they’re often “too cute, too smart, cloying, fatally earnest, or too innocent to be interesting.” But Zhang’s child narrators serve as apt vessels for the writer-friendly psychological tics that plague most fictional characters, regardless of age. Protagonists in literature generally seem overloaded with feelings of possibility and futility; they have acute, superstitious senses of cause and effect. They arrive at epiphanies with a mechanical regularity: close to the end of a short story, there’s often a moment where details start crystallizing portentously, where time starts to expand into eternity. This can all feel practiced. But this is also how kids’ minds actually, privately work, a fact that Zhang makes canny use of. “Sour Heart” has a delightful air of artlessness, the result, surely, of careful and worked-over craft. (Zhang puts the epiphanic finale to particularly strange and beautiful use at the end of a story called “Why Were They Throwing Bricks?”)
In interviews, Zhang has spoken about how certain immigrant experiences are central to her collection: the constrictive intimacy within families that can’t be understood by outsiders, and the way that bind is corroded, helpfully and terribly, by an upwardly mobile American life. Zhang told Electric Literature that when she was younger, she “wanted to be loved less by my family and loved more by others—friends, lovers, basically anyone who wasn’t related to me.” She added, “It’s very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.” And yet this model of esteem, which does seem particularly American—ahistorical, individual—maps perfectly onto the multi-generational immigrant longing for a fresh start. The coming-of-age story in “Sour Heart” is a story of learning to reject, lovingly, the totalizing quality of your parents’ love. The right to be a little cruel is often what immigrants bequeath to their children.
In a story called “The Evolution of My Brother,” the narrator asks her parents to send her across the country, to Stanford, for a three-week philosophy program. She doesn’t realize that she’s demanding half a year’s salary from two people whose first big plane trip was flying from Shanghai to America with hard-boiled eggs in their pockets. Later on, she regrets her foreordained selfishness. One day, she goes through the old family computer, and she finds her little brother’s stash of Microsoft Paint art work, which he had always tried to show off to her. She clicks on a file called “Power Rain Jurs” and crumbles into tears. “I felt self-conscious and stupid crying for myself—for my shame, for my regrets, for how quickly a childhood happens. I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for ‘Power Rangers.’ I wish it wasn’t so natural for me to dwell on the past.” But to dwell on the past like this is a profound act of love, akin to sacrificing for the future; it means doing for your family what no one demanded of you but yourself.
