Saving Sourdi” by May-Lee Chai
Saving Sourdi” by May-Lee Chai
Page 81-96
In making distinctions between at and round characters, you must
understand that an author’s use of a at character — even as a protagonist —
does not necessarily represent an artistic aw. Moreover, both at and round
characters can be either dynamic or static. Each plot can be made most effec-
tive by its own special kind of characterization. Terms such as round and fat
are helpful tools to use to determine what we know about a character, but
they are not an infallible measurement of the quality of a story.
The next three stories — May-lee Chai’s “Saving Sourdi,” Junot Díaz’s
“How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Hale,” and Herman
Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” — offer character studies worthy of
close analysis. As you read them, notice the methods of characterization
used to bring each to life.
May-lee Chai
May-lee Chai, the rst of her family
to be born in the United States, is a
San Francisco author and graduate of
Yale University. Chai has worked as a
reporter for the Associated Press and
taught creative writing at San Fran-
cisco State University, the University
of Wyoming, and Amherst College.
She is the author of seven books,
including My Lucky Face (2001), Glam-
orous Asians: Short Stories and Essays (2004), and Hapa Girl: A Memoir (2007);
and coauthor, with her father, Winberg Chai, of The Girl rom Purple Moun-
tain (2002). Her novels Dragon Chica (2010) and Tiger Girl (2013) are about
the characters in “Saving Sourdi.”
Saving Sourdi 2001
Once, when my older sister, Sourdi, and I were working alone in our fam-
ily’s restaurant, just the two of us and the elderly cook, some men got
drunk and I stabbed one of them. I was eleven.
I don’t remember where Ma had gone that night. But I remember we
were tired and it was late. We were one of the only restaurants that stayed
open past nine in those days. The men had been growing louder, until
they were our only customers, and, nally, one of them staggered up andput his arm across Sourdi’s shoulders. He called her his “China doll,”
and his friends hooted at this.
Sourdi looked distressed and tried to remove his arm, but he held
her tighter. She said, “Please,” in her incense-sweet voice, and he smiled
and said, “Say it again nice and I might just have to give you a kiss.”
That summer we’d just moved to South Dakota. After all the
crummy jobs Ma had had to take in Texas, where we’d rst come to the
U.S., where our sponsors lived, we were so proud to be working in our
own restaurant. When we moved to South Dakota, I thought we’d nd
the real America, the one where we were supposed to be, not the hot
sweaty America where we lived packed together in an apartment with
bars on the windows on a street where angry boys in cars played loud
music and shot guns at each other in the night. The summer we moved
to join my uncle’s family to run the Silver Palace, I was certain we would
at last nd the life we deserved.
Now I was panicked. I wanted Ma to be there. Ma would know what
to do. She always did. I stood there, chewing my nails, wishing I could
make them go away. The men’s voices were so loud in my ears, I was
drowning in the sound.
I ran into the kitchen. I had this idea to get the cook and the cleaver, but
the rst thing that caught my eye was this little paring knife on the counter
next to a bowl of oranges. I grabbed the knife and ran back out to Sourdi.
“Get away from my sister!” I shouted, waving the paring knife.
The men were silent for about three seconds, then they burst into
laughter.
I charged and stabbed the man in the sleeve.
In a movie or a television show this kind of scene always unfolds in
slow motion, but everything happened so fast. I stabbed the man, Sourdi
jumped free, Ma came rushing in the front door waving her arms. “Omi-
god! What happen?”
“Jesus Christ!” The man shook his arm as though it were on re, but
the paring knife was stuck in the fabric of his jeans jacket.
I thought Ma would take care of everything now. And I was right,
she did, but not the way I had imagined. She started apologizing to the
man, and she helped him take off his jacket. She made Sourdi get the
rst-aid kit from the bathroom, “Quick! Quick!” Ma even tried to put
some ointment on his cut, but he just shrugged her off.
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to take the knife back and stab myself.
That’s how I felt when I heard her say, “No charge, on the house,” for
their dinner, despite the $50-worth of pitchers they’d had.
Ma grabbed me by the shoulders. “Say you sorry. Say it.” I pressed
my lips rmly together and hung my head. Then she slapped me.
I didn’t start crying until after the men had left. “But, Ma,” I said,
“he was hurting Sourdi!”
“Then why Sourdi not do something?” Ma twisted my ear. “You not
thinking. That your problem. You always not think!” Afterwards, Sourdi said I was lucky. The knife had only grazed the
man’s skin. They could have sued us. They could have pressed charges.
“I don’t care!” I hissed then. “I shoulda killed him! I shoulda killed
that sucker!”
Sourdi’s face changed. I’d never seen my sister look like that. Not
ever. Especially not at me. I was her favorite. But she looked then the way
I felt inside. Like a big bomb was ticking behind her eyes.
We were sitting together in the bathroom. It was late at night, and
everyone else was asleep. Sometimes we locked ourselves in the bath-
room then, just the two of us, so we could talk about things like boys at
school or who was the cutest actor on television shows we liked or how
we felt when our family fought, when Uncle and Auntie yelled at each
other, or when Ma grew depressed and smoked too much and looked at
us as though she wished we’d never been born.
This night, however, Sourdi looked at me grimly. “Oh, no, Nea.
Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever talk like that.”
I was going to smile and shrug and say something like “I was just kid-
ding,” but something inside me couldn’t lie tonight. I crossed my arms
over my at chest, and I stuck out my lower lip, like I’d seen the tough
girls at school do. “Anyone mess like that with me, I’m gonna kill him!”
Sourdi took me by the shoulders then and shook me so hard I
thought she was going to shake my head right off my body. She wouldn’t
stop even after I started to cry.
“Stop, stop!” I begged. “I’ll be good! I promise, I’ll be good!”
Finally, she pushed me away from her and sat on the toilet, with her
head in her hands. Although she’d been the one hurting me, she looked
as though she’d been beaten up, the way she sat like that, her shoul-
ders hunched over her lap, as though she were trying to make herself
disappear.
“I was trying to protect you,” I said through my tears. “I was trying
to save you. You’re so stupid! I should just let that man diss you!”
Sourdi’s head shot up and I could see that she had no patience left.
Her eyes were red and her nostrils ared. She stood up and I took a step
back quickly. I thought she was going to grab me and shake me again,
but this time she just put her hand on my arm. “They could take you
away. The police, they could put you in a foster home. All of us.”
A chill ran through my whole body, like a live current. We all knew
about foster homes. Rudy Gutierrez in third grade was taken away from
his parents after the teacher noticed some bruises on his back. He’d tried
to shoplift some PayDays from the 7-Eleven and got caught. When his
dad got home that weekend, he let him have it. But after the school nurse
took a look at him, Rudy was taken away from his parents and sent to
live in a foster home. His parents couldn’t speak English so good and
didn’t know what was happening until too late. Anyway, what kind of
lawyer could they afford? We heard later from his cousin in Mrs. Chang’s
homeroom that Rudy’s foster-dad had molested him. The cousin said Rudy ran away from that home, but he got caught. At any rate, none of
us ever saw him again.
“You want to go to a foster home?” Sourdi asked me.
“No,” I whispered.
“Then don’t be so stupid!”
I started crying again, because I realized Sourdi was right. She
kissed me on the top of my head and hugged me to her. I leaned my head
against her soft breasts that had only recently emerged from her chest
and pretended that I was a good girl and that I would always obey her.
What I didn’t tell Sourdi was that I was still a wicked girl. I was glad I’d
stabbed that man. I was crying only because life was so unfair.
We used to say that we’d run away, Sourdi and me. When we were older.
After she graduated. She’d be my legal guardian. We’d go to California
to see the stars. Paris. London. Cambodia even, to light incense for the
bones of our father. We’d earn money working in Chinese restaurants in
every country we visited. We had enough experience; it had to be worth
something.
We’d lie awake all night whispering back and forth. I’d climb into
Sourdi’s bed, claiming that I couldn’t sleep, curling into a ball beside
my older sister, the smell of her like salt and garlic and a sweet scent
that emanated directly from her skin. Sometimes I’d stroke Sourdi’s slick
hair, which she plaited into a thick wet braid so that it would be wavy in
the morning. I would stay awake all night, pinching the inside of Sour-
di’s arm, the soft esh of her thigh, to keep my sister from falling asleep
and leaving me alone.
When she rst started seeing Duke, I used to think of him as some-
thing like a bookmark, just holding a certain space in her life until it was
time for her to move on. I never thought of him as a fork in the road,
dividing my life with Sourdi from Sourdi’s life with men.
In those days, I didn’t understand anything.
Ma had hired Duke to wash dishes at the Palace that rst summer. At
rst, we paid him no mind. He was just this funny-looking white kid,
hair that stuck up straight from his head when he wasn’t wearing his
silly baseball cap backwards, skinny as a stalk of bamboo, long legs and
long arms that seemed to move in opposition to each other. Chopstick-
boy I called him, just to be mean. He took it as a compliment.
I could see why he fell in love with Sourdi. My sister was beautiful.
Really beautiful, not like the girls in magazines with their pale, pinched
faces, pink and powdery, brittle girls. Sourdi looked like a statue that
had been rescued from the sea. She was smooth where I had angles and
soft where I was bone. Sourdi’s face was round, her nose low and wide,
her eyes crescent-shaped like the quarter moon, her hair sleek as seaweed.
Her skin was a burnished cinnamon color. Looking at Sourdi, I could
pretend I was beautiful, too. She had so much to spare. At rst, Duke and Sourdi only talked behind the Palace, pretending
to take a break from the heat of the kitchen. I caught them looking at
the stars together.
The rst time they kissed, I was there, too. Duke was giving us a ride
after school in his pickup. He had the music on loud and the windows
were open. It was a hot day for October, and the wind felt like a warm
ocean that we could swim in forever. He was going to drop us off at the
Palace, but then Duke said he had something to show us, and we circled
around the outskirts of town, taking the gravel road that led to the open
elds, beyond the highway where the cattle ranches lay. Finally, he pulled
off the gravel road and parked.
“You want us to look at cows?” I asked impatiently, crossing my arms.
He laughed at me then and took Sourdi by the hand. We hiked
through a ditch to the edge of an empty corneld long since harvested,
the stubble of cornstalks poking up from the black soil, pale and bone-
like. The eld was laced with a barbed-wire fence to keep the cattle in,
though I couldn’t see any cows at all. The whole place gave me the creeps.
Duke held the strands of barbed wire apart for Sourdi and me and
told us to crawl under the fence.
“Just trust me,” he said.
We followed him to a spot in the middle of the eld. “It’s the center
of the world,” Duke said. “Look.” And he pointed back to where we’d
come from, and suddenly I realized the rest of the world had disappeared.
The ground had appeared level, but we must have walked into a tiny hol-
low in the plains, because from where we stood there was only sky and
eld for as far as our eyes could see. We could no longer see the road or
Duke’s pickup, our town, or even the green smudge of cottonwoods that
grew along the Yankton River or the distant hills of Nebraska. There was
nothing overhead, either; the sky was unbroken by clouds, smooth as an
empty rice bowl. “It’s just us here,” Duke said. “We’re alone in the whole
universe.”
All at once, Sourdi began to breathe funny. Her face grew pinched,
and she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“What’s wrong?” Duke asked stupidly.
Then Sourdi was running wildly. She took off like an animal startled
by a gunshot. She was trying to head back to the road, but she tripped
over the cornstalks and fell onto her knees. She started crying for real.
I caught up to her rst — I’ve always been a fast runner. As Duke
approached, I put my arms around Sourdi.
“I thought you’d like it,” Duke said.
“We’re city girls,” I said, glaring at him. “Why would we like this hick
stuff ?”
“I’m sorry,” Sourdi whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“What are you sorry for? It’s his fault!” I pointed out.
Now Duke was kneeling next to Sourdi. He tried to put his arm
over her shoulder, too. I was going to push him away, when Sourdi did something very surprising. She put both her arms around his neck and
leaned against him, while Duke said soft, dumb-sounding things that I
couldn’t quite hear. Then they were kissing.
I was so surprised, I stared at them before I forced myself to look
away. Then I was the one who felt like running, screaming, for the
road.
On the way back to the Palace, Duke and Sourdi didn’t talk, but they
held hands. The worst part was I was sitting between them.
Ma didn’t seem to notice anything for a while, but then with Ma
it was always hard to know what she was thinking, what she knew and
what she didn’t. Sometimes she seemed to go through her days like she
was made of stone. Sometimes she erupted like a volcano.
Uncle red Duke a few weeks later. He said it was because Duke had
dropped a tray of dishes. It was during the Saturday lunch rush when
Sourdi and I weren’t working and couldn’t witness what had happened.
“He’s a clumsy boy,” Ma agreed after work that night, when we all
sat around in the back booths and ate our dinner.
Sourdi didn’t say anything. She knew Ma knew.
