Heart Theft
by Lucy Zhang
I told my daughter she didn’t need to play piano or attend Chinese school or join the Math Olympiad because “We’re not like other Chinese families.” I wanted her to do whatever she wanted the way our white neighbours let their kids have free rein. Self-discipline would grow organically as she learned what worked or failed.
Instead, she learned to steal. First, she came home with an unopened carton of sweet soy milk that had been left in the classroom after a holiday party. She said everyone was too busy drinking their packs of Capri Sun so she stuffed the soy milk in her backpack and took it home at the end of the day. It was the organic soy milk that tasted a little too thick and rich to resemble what I’d grown up drinking—strained and diluted and crushed soybeans, boiled until the pulp tasted like sand which we’d eat anyway because nothing was to be wasted. She placed the carton of soy milk next to our nearly empty Costco gallon of milk, saving us a grocery trip for at least another two weeks.
My daughter began to steal wads of napkins from the school cafeteria so we’d never need to buy paper towels. She pocketed packs of ketchup from the cafeteria and slipped stacks of paper from the library printers into her backpack. I rarely bought fresh tomatoes because they were either overpriced or tasted like wax balls of foam and water, but I found ketchup useful—mega flavour in a tiny pack, an easy way to transform rice into sweet, tangy, and savoury harmony.
“You can do whatever you want,” I told my daughter. “But you can’t steal.”
“It’s not stealing,” she said. I feared she had inherited my dad’s overzealous desire to maximize a good deal. My dad scrutinized every price tag and wouldn’t buy a single vegetable unless it was under one dollar a pound. He’d fast for two days before we visited buffets, and only loaded up on the steamed snow crab legs until his lips and surrounding skin turned bright red from all the salt and gnawing of shells.
I didn’t try hard to stop her. I didn’t want to be like those parents who told their kids they were better off dead if they didn’t rank in the top ten of their class, or who vowed social media was a breeding ground for crime and forbade their kids any form of digital communication.
We often spent our weekends patching holes in her pants with iron-on fabric that came in all sorts of colours including a pink Tinkerbell-patterned rectangle we had selected to cover the recent rip in her jeans. We didn’t think of it as fixing, but rather as a more productive substitute for the overpriced arts and crafts at Michaels. We’d snip up old, too-small shirts and resew them into rags. My daughter learned how to use an iron, needle, and shears more fluidly than her school’s home education teacher, a woman whose face seemed perpetually like she’d bitten into an astringent persimmon and who yelled if you tried to eat while walking to the table.
When my daughter needed new clothing, I’d take her to the Goodwill several blocks away and tell her she could choose anything, even the useless rainbow butterfly wings you’d strap to your back for Halloween. “If you want any candy by the counter, you can even grab the sour ones,” I said since my mom thought sour candy would cause my gums to melt and my teeth to topple. My mom also thought buying candy at the checkout meant caving to some greater evil of corporate marketing schemes—I could only watch other folks in line grab pretzel chocolate bars and Tic Tacs.
Goodwill let my daughter get creative, mixing and matching outfits from different decades into her idiosyncratic, slightly anarchist aesthetic complete with a smoky eye shadow blending blacks and grays and blues and pinks. I thought it made her look more raccoon-like than doll-faced because of her flat eye sockets and bone structure she inherited from me. We looked better with a thin line of eyeshadow in lieu of any eyeliner and maybe a light brown shading to offset our printer paper faces, but I didn’t tell my daughter that. My mom would’ve died a second time if she saw my daughter. My mom dressed me in the same gray-blue overalls and pigtails because “that’s what American kids wear” even though, I realized, that was most certainly not what Americans wore with their single-strap backpacks and loose-hanging hoodies.
When my daughter began to consider universities, I told her, “you can be anything you want to be.” She was sharp. She never complained about classes or teachers like I had as a child, condemning my English teacher for singling me out for messing up all of the “to be” verbs or misspelling easy words. “It’s not my fault some idiot created such a nonphonetic alphabet,” I’d replied, and after that, my mom quizzed me every night on fifty different, likely unknown-to-most-of-human-kind words until she was confident the teacher could find no fault in me. But my daughter performed well in all of her courses except gym which she skipped too often, and I’d send doctor’s notes saying she had a low blood sugar condition even though she’d spend that period trekking to the nearby sandwich store and working a shift that provided her free roast beef paninis to take home. She’d stuff a paper bag full of the leftover almost-stale bread and one-day expired meats to bring home, which we’d freeze and eat for breakfast. I wasn’t sure it was allowed because of food safety regulations and liability, but she’d never been caught and I supposed the store’s owners figured she was just cleaning out the inventory. After her shift, she’d return to the school for afterschool activities—she was always participating in something new—and stay until the evening when I could pick her up from work.
My daughter said she wanted to be an actress, but she enrolled in Caltech to study electrical engineering. She claimed it was close enough to Los Angeles and “proximity is the most important factor when it comes to career limiting opportunities.” I worried the environment might be too cutthroat and warned her about stories of students sabotaging others during exams, but she laughed, “that only affects people who care.” We bought her a brand new, upgraded wardrobe from Nordstrom Rack instead of Goodwill, and when I insisted on a trip to Macy’s, she rebuked, claiming she wouldn’t need to try very hard to look good at a place with mostly guys.
In college, my daughter began to steal hearts. During winter break when she returned home, she brought back five jars of hearts and asked me to keep them safe. I placed them in her bedroom which stayed untouched until she visited. “They’ll be useful in the future,” she said.
Several months later, she connected me to the father of one of the boys whose heart lay entrapped in a mason jar. The father was a CPA and offered to complete my tax returns and claim nearly all of my living expenses as deductible side business expenses. How he knew I performed tea ceremonies for rich, culturally explorative (but not explorative enough to visit another country) clients, I wasn’t sure. My teas came from the local Asian grocery store at a discount, not that my customers knew any better. I only served tea on Fridays though, and I only accepted cash. The father deducted my entire grocery, gas, car insurance, and clothing bills, and while reviewing my returns, he said, “You know my son? He’s an engineer in the same department as your daughter. She helped him a lot with that computer architecture course. Or maybe it was digital systems? Who knows, he struggles in everything. Well, let me know if you need any help for next year’s returns.”
I rarely used the other hearts. My daughter had accumulated twenty more jars, and I feared I’d need to buy a new dresser to fit all of them. I asked her if I needed to keep them cool, especially since some had been untouched for years. She reassured me that these hearts wouldn’t go bad.
During those few years at university, she’d started a YouTube channel where she reenacted scenes from movies as self-composed musicals. It was the first time I learned she could sing and dance. Her limbs stretched in ways I’d never seen, hips able to extend and rotate so extensively she’d surely need to be professionally trained in ballet since middle school at the latest. She’d never asked to take ballet classes when she was young. I texted her asking where she’d learned, and she claimed she’d read books, watched videos, and practiced in our basement which I never frequented unless it was to inspect for leaks after downpours.
After my daughter graduated, one of the boys whose hearts sat at the bottom row of the dresser, drove her to Los Angeles to attend auditions. He owned a Mercedes EQA and his parents ran a business in China and owned several homes in California. Her YouTube channel had grown exponentially in subscribers. I watched every video and read as many comments as I could. I called her when I saw some comments turn negative, but she laughed it off: “that only affects people who care.” Still, I eyed the hateful comments with disdain, secretly cursing those accounts into an unrestful grave such that even when the gates of hell opened, they’d be unable to follow river lanterns back to their resting places. “It hurts the dead more to wander around the living,” I told my daughter as justification. “I don’t think YouTube accounts can become ghosts,” she replied.
My mom would’ve had a riot. She took insults more seriously than her insurance bills, which was probably why she passed earlier than the doctors had predicted. If you told her she was looking plump, she’d starve herself for the week and even longer until you retracted the statement. It didn’t matter that it was meant to be a compliment, especially coming from her siblings who’d all starved together when they were young, fighting for rice rations and specks of meat. When Alzheimer’s took hold of her mind and I lost my patience and asked why she was so stupid after she forgot she’d left the rice cooker open, she completed an IQ test and presented to me the printed results, waiting for me to beg for forgiveness. I doubt she even remembered what she’d done to invoke my ire. I apologized and relocated the rice cooker to a shelf too high for her to reach.
My daughter’s YouTube channel ended up landing her a small but prominent part in a movie about a girl trying to seek revenge on an evil empress. She played a supporting character who only showed her face during one arc, but it was enough to catapult her to relative fame. When the film debuted in theatres, I fell asleep after her part in the movie, but I remembered her face in that dark, fae-like makeup and her dress that seemed to ripple sequins of stars and her few lines that she’d executed with such natural precision that I imagined it only took her one take to get right. In the first month of the movie’s airing, she’d stolen several thousand hearts, and knowing our home had no space for more, she buried them in a hole near my mom’s grave, claiming they’d protect my mom too.
During my daughter’s auditions, she maintained a job as a silicon chip designer. I asked her when she’d quit, and she claimed the insurance benefits were too good to pass up. “I only need to work twenty hours a week anyway, everyone else is so slow,” she said, although I continued to worry about her state of overwork. My mom had made a similar, abrupt pivot during my twenties: from “you are young, this is the only time you can achieve promotion” to “you should enjoy life, it’s too short to focus on only money.” Whatever I did, it had to be wrong.
“When do you think you’ll get married and have kids?” I asked my daughter. I had long forgotten how I’d answered my mom’s same question. Perhaps I’d marched out of the house, leaving behind all of my Lunar New Year red sweaters and gold jewelry my mom had recently passed down to me and moved into an apartment closer to work.
“It’ll happen when it happens,” my daughter shrugged. She brought home another heart, this time the one of whom she planned to marry. I had yet to meet the owner of the heart, but still, she placed the jar in my hands.
“There’s no space in your room anymore,” I said.
“You can put that one anywhere. Maybe the family room table. That should be easy enough to access, so it can help you when I’m not around.“
“I don’t need any help,” I insisted, pushing the jar back towards her. “You should keep it.”
“I know you don’t,” she said, resting her hands on mine. “Just in case.”
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in FOLIO, CRAFT, The Spectacle, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review). Find her at lucyzhang.tech or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.