Chinese-American ‘Girls’ find a voice in ‘Sour Heart’ Lena Dunham gives a voice to an original new Millennial. NOAM GALAI, WIREIMAGE
Growing up is already rough, and immigration doesn’t make it any easier
Girls fans no doubt remember these bon mots famously uttered by twentysomething Brooklynite Hannah Horvath: “I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.”
This brilliant display of Millennial bravado/insecurity emerged from the polarizing lips of Lena Dunham, who has moved on from her seminal HBO series to launch a publishing imprint called Lenny, a division of Random House, with her Girls creative partner, Jenni Konner.
They’ve made a savvy choice with their opening literary salvo: Sour Heart (Lenny, 301 pp.,
out of four), a collection of seven short stories from Brooklyn poet Jenny Zhang, who, we can safely say, is “a voice” of a generation, and an original one who commands attention.
I couldn’t help wondering as I read these electric stories of awkward adolescent Chinese- American girls if any of them would grow up to hang out with Hannah, Marnie, Shosh and Jessa. Probably not. The lesson here is that it’s a long way from Flushing, Queens, to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And even farther to Shanghai.
“My first year in America, no matter what language I used, I was always wrong,” says Mande, the young narrator of “My Days and Nights of Terror,” whose English is mocked by two white classmates after she arrives in New York from China. Her bigger problem is fellow Chinese immigrant and classmate Fanpin, a bully and budding lesbian who is both friend and foe to meek Mande. Sour Heart is about the immigrant experience, but Zhang isn’t out to bash the Good Old U.S. of A. Her coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that’s rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy. Her girls, like so many, are caught in between: different cultures, warring parents. Add assimilation to the bucket of typical teenage woes, and good luck with that. The same families and girls pop in and out of these interconnected tales, all variations on a single theme. Some of the families are desperately poor, crammed together in the same roachinfested apartment until they can move out and up. In “We Love You Crispina,” the anxious, prickly, eczema-riddled Christina is wrapped in a tight threesome with her parents, their bliss interrupted only by the fact that Christina’s father has a mistress. At night, in an apartment filled with mattresses and other families, Christina is an antenna, picking up signals as she “sleeps between my mom and my dad who whispered through me like I was air, like I was their phone cord.” Chinese mothers are powerful figures in these tales, smothering their daughters with love (while remaining oddly elusive). Their bratty yet beloved daughters are trying to find their own ways, but don’t really want to let go. In the last story, “You Fell Into the River and I Saved You!,” Christina is grown-up. She’s left the nest but is sometimes gripped by loneliness (where does she belong?). Visiting her family, the ache lessens a bit. Home, it turns out, is where the Sour Heart is.