Jenny Zhang

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang review – from China to the US

A bittersweet debut short story collection from the Shanghai-born poet and essayist gives voice to young female narrators

Emily LaBarge

Friday 22 September 2017

“Am I still the sourest girl you know?” asks Christina, protagonist of the two stories that bookend Shanghai-born American writer Jenny Zhang’s moving and energetic debut collection. Zhang (right) is a young poet and essayist, and Sour Heart is the first title acquired by Lena Dunham for her Lenny imprint at Random House in the US. In Zhang’s stories, young female narrators – sour and sweet, wild and wilful – bear witness to the journeys of their families, who have left China to establish new lives in the US. “Will she be sour too? I pointed at her belly. Will she become one of us?” Christina asks her eight-months pregnant mother, who replies, “That’s the dream, sourheart.”

Jenny Zhang in her New York apartment. Photograph: Christopher Lane

Sour girl, tartberry, sour grape, sour apple, sourheart: these are the fond epithets given to Christina, a little girl who, like her mother, loves only the tartest of fruits, gleefully puckering her mouth to suck their juices. This sourness is a point of pride, a family resemblance that binds the two of them; difference is recast as uniqueness – an ability to appreciate those special qualities misunderstood by others. They move from cramped apartment to cramped apartment, across the boroughs of New York. Lucky breaks here and there land them on the clean floors of relatives or friends of friends; other times, there are five families to a wall-to-wall mattressed room. “E flat,” they call their home in Bushwick, “because we loved the sound of E flat on the piano and we liked recasting our world in a more beautiful, melodious light.”

E flat and a proclivity for melancholy; interior lives that course with imaginative flights; feral loneliness and unbridled, animating currents – there is a shared temperament to the girls who narrate these seven stories, as they negotiate present tenses filled to the brim with imparted pasts. Sour inclinations are passed down alongside other familial inheritances: histories, ideologies and dreams for the future that are embraced and rejected in equal, bittersweet measure. “Our Mothers Before Their Time”, the collection’s longest story, moves between 1966 China and 1996 America, with kaleidoscopic narratives of how the Cultural Revolution of the former has landed family members in the latter; who and what has been left behind, and the ways in which shared memories resonate across time and space. The arrival of an uncle from China heralds fresh insights for Annie, who narrates the story, as his presence reveals new depth to her mother’s life

As is often the case with deftly written child narrators (most of Zhang’s seem to hover around the age of nine), deceptively simple observations are occasions for poignant and difficult personal growth: parents seem human in a new way – their disappointments, personal and professional sacrifices pitted with all too familiar, childlike desire. The furious rue of mothers who dispense fierce but volatile affection features prominently. Many daughters of Sour Heart tiptoe around notions of duty, wondering how to express enough gratitude and devotion for what has been given, as they are perpetually reminded at what cost their lives have been secured.

“Can you imagine? We were 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,” Annie’s mother tells her of their move from the art schools of China to those of America. “Whenever she talked this way,” her daughter notes, “she paused frequently to check my face for a response.” One is owed and one also owes unfathomable quantities of love – a tie that both buoys and binds.

“Alas,” Elizabeth Hardwick writes in her classic memoir, Sleepless Nights, “the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.” Sour Heart hosts a well of emotion, but its critical organs are also intimately linked to the young female body that is hot, sticky, brazen, penetrable. These sensibilities seep into Zhang’s prose, in which interior and exterior collide in narrative jumps, associative imagery and long passages of idiosyncratic dialogue. Questions of language and how to translate experience recur, embodied by narrators who are acutely aware of occupying a space – physical, cultural and linguistic – in between English and Chinese, neither of which rings as a truly native tongue.

In “Our Mothers Before Their Time,” Annie’s extended family and friends host parties at which the karaoke machine is a key feature. Her parents perform a love duet and Annie can only understand some of the words, “[ __ __ ] may be broken, can [ __ ] wind [ __ ] rain”. Relatives attempt to translate, but literal meaning is lost.

Annie is left with only the evocative texture of the song, and the impression that the voice of her mother – who, like many of the parents in Sour Heart, had been an artist before moving to the US – strained for something distant and intangible: “She was a poet sometimes, my mother.”

In these gaping fissures and silences, Zhang gives life to a chorus of voices rich with reinvention, a narrative genealogy of what it is to be, to speak and to write across many forms of expression at once.

 Sour Heart is published by Bloomsbury.

THE GUARDIAN