names

excerpts from the short story collection sour heart by jenny zhang

(from "the evolution of my brother"):

i look at the poem again and then go through some other files, including one called "fight on dirt," a painting of magenta, lime-green, and teal-blue stick figures on brown mud. i see another file named "power rain," which i remember seeing a long time ago but never opened. i wondered briefly back then what "power rain" was -- massive droplets of rain, each one fat enough to contain an armed soldier ready for combat, hitting the ground, causing tremors in the earth?

i open up the file and realize the full name is actually "power rain jurs." sour tears well up in my eyes and fall into my mouth. i feel 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."

whenever i'm home for a few days, i start to feel this despair at being back in the place where i had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who i would be once i was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once i was free to commit mistakes on my own. how strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found -- in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where i sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until i could leave this place and start my real life. but now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that i had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us - me and my brother - and now that i am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides "daughter" or "sister." it turns out that this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. being someone is terrifying. i long to come home, but now, i will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager i was, but instead of insisting that i want everyone to leave me alone, what i want now is for someone to beg me to stay. me again. memememememememe.


(from "my days and nights of terror"):

my father said they needed "american" names on their resumes when applying for jobs; they had to have names that were pronounceable to white american english speakers because they already had faces that were considered vile to look at and who was going to hire someone with their faces and their names? i thought my mother and my father had beautiful faces but my father corrected me, not in america. we're ugly, and it's that simple. they look at us and think we're cretins. you think they like us going to their schools? you think they're okay with us working in their offices? taking their jobs? you think they're happy to pick up laundry and takeout from businesses we've opened up? you think they want to go to the corner store and see our eyes and our teeth and our skin looking back at them from behind the counter? no! they don't want us here. they don't want to look at us and they sure as hell don't want to have to try to pronounce our chinese names. x-u. q-u-i. they don't want to see that! the more my father went on about how much they hated us, the more i started to suspect maybe he was the one who hated us. on the first day of school in america, i was so frazzled and fearful of everything that i accidentally left off the second e and i became mande with one e and so i started my first day of school in america with a mistake. i was a failure right from the start.

*      *      *    

i had prayed for this kind of soft joy, this kind of contentment, a day like this followed by more days like this, and finally having it was like being born, only instead of not remembering what it was like to be born, i was fully cognizant and participating in my own creation and suddenly it was clear to me why we don't remember what it was like to be born -- because it would give us too much insight into what it will be like to die. to be present for your own birth was suicide. to know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist. they had to occur together and there was no prayer for what i knew in my flaky soul -- that there was no way to escape the fear. it would always be there, amplifying joy and stealing from it. still, it was tempting to sink into it, to roll around in its outer rings where occasionally the fear converted to a kind of happiness that turned an entire afternoon into an image that would stay forever, loom forever, return forever.