Ce recueil de sept nouvelles nous emmène sur les traces de Christina, Lucy, Annie, Jenny, Mande et Stacey, des gamines de neuf/dix ans, immigrées chinoises aux États-Unis, vivant en périphérie de New York dans les années 1990. Leurs parents sont issus de la génération ayant grandi pendant la révolution culturelle ; ils sont venus chercher une vie meilleure au pays de cocagne sans forcément mesurer les difficultés auxquelles il faut faire face. Les sept histoires sont liées les unes aux autres d'une façon ou d'une autre car certaines de ces petites filles se sont croisées à un moment de leur parcours, et le livre forme une boucle avec Christina placée au cœur du premier et du dernier chapitre.
Voilà une lecture qui sort des clous et qui ébouriffe, plutôt inattendue. Ces tranches d'enfance sont livrées du point de vue des fillettes, de façon brutale parfois très crue, en évitant les travers habituels liés à cette période de la vie, sans édulcorer ni faire dans la dentelle, en faisant abstraction de toute notion d'idéalisation, d'angélisme, de diabolisation ou de victimisation dans la façon de traiter le sujet.
Au fil des pages, l'auteur aborde beaucoup de choses qui transparaissent et cohabitent dans ce monde à la frontière de la petite enfance et de l'adolescence, pas toujours antinomiques : relations aux parents et des parents, famille, voisinage, amour, misère, colère, désillusion, vulgarité, expériences, peurs, alcool, petits boulots, combines à la fois drôles et désespérantes, petites et grandes frustrations, apprentissage, amitiés, préjudice, humiliations, résignation, conditions de vie, petits moments de bonheur, communautés, solidarité et rivalités, langue, relation à la Chine, sexualité, séparation, aspirations et rêves, etc.
Un texte explosif, irrévérencieux, subversif et troublant, qui renverse pas mal de clichés sur la "communauté chinoise" et le regard à l'enfance. Jenny Zhang est une voix unique qui tranche par rapport à tout ce que j'ai pu lire sur ces sujets et il y a fort à parier que cette lecture ne laissera personne indifférent, en positif ou en négatif car certains passages sont particulièrement dérangeants. Il faut dire que les parents des protagonistes portent un double handicap, celui d'avoir grandit sans repères éducatifs et sans instruction du fait d'une révolution culturelle profondement destructrice, et celui de l'immigrant avec toutes les difficultés liées à l'installation dans un nouveau pays.
Des histoires denses, riches, brutales mais aussi pleines d'humanité, qui bousculent et m'ont parfois fait sortir de ma zone de confort.
À l'arrivée, un livre à valeur universelle qui compte, puissant et marquant. ❤️
Tirés du texte :
She wasn't going to let someone else be better than her at making her children feel pain or scare them more than she could,
and to her, that was a form of protection.
That trip didn't make them travelers, at least not the way the people I met at Stanford would speak of travel ; that trip just made them immigrants,
it made them charity. They became people to be saved, to be helped by institutions and individuals.
Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, We would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about "family" we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from. From that point on, I would refer to him as "your uncle" and he would mostly refer to me as "your aunt" and it would take a long time for our children to even understand that we were siblings first, but more than that, our children just as we hadn't, would likely not think much about a time before they were born, a time when he was my brother and I his sister, and together, we were our parents' children.
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.
At home we spoke Chinese. None of us knew how often and how badly the other made mistakes in English. None of us knew the other's humiliations.
If I somehow escaped drugs, pregnancy, pimps, and gangbangers, then I would still have to deal with my parents, and the constant unloading of their fears made it impossible for me to fear the feared things themselves as all my time was taken up fearing my parents would never stop fearing.
That was the secret of being me back then : if you never say a word, people will think you don't know anything, and when people think you don't know anything, they say everything in front of you and you end up containing everything. On the inside, I was vast. On the outside, I was known idiot.
People died of anger back then. They died of humiliation, they died of sadness, they died of longing. They died of shame. Families were separated. Husbands and wives assigned to provinces thousands of miles away from each other. My mother and father saw each other five times in ten years.I saw my father a total of three times after my ninth birthday. People my age walk with cane because they were sent to the countryside and worked to exhaustion.
Her mom was from Taiwan and my mom was from mainland. According to my mom, that made all the difference.
"it means they fled after the civil war. They were on the losing side. It means they went to school. They live now the way people in China did sixty years ago. The women don't work. They have multiple children if they can. It's the old country, they live like it's still 1920. It's not normal. The men are vicious. They have free rein to beat their wives. It's not look down over there. "
My sweet, well-intentioned parents, no matter how much they tried to see and anticipate and prevent all the things that could hurt me,
in the end, had no idea what truly frightened me.
I would hate him for hating her and then I would hate her for hating him. Then I would hate myself for not protecting my mother and then I would hate my mother for needing me to protect her, and then I would hate my father for causing my mother to need that protection, and finally, I would hate them both for insisting that the person who really needed protection was me, and if I had any chance of surviving, I would have to be better than perfect. What I wanted to know was if my parents couldn't even be satisfactory to each other, than why I was expected to be perfect?
So I was fed and I was looked after and I was encouraged to be perfect and I was told over and over that life would always improve, that this was how anyone at all was supposed to live, by striving, by being perfect when you were young and it was still easy to be perfect because just wait, my father would say, just wait until you're older, but I didn't need to wait. I was young now and I found it so fucking hard.
To know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist.
Titre original : Sour Heart
Titre français : Cœur âpre
Auteur : Jenny Zhang
Première édition : 2017
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