Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

That year, 1989, my mother flew to Hong Kong and laid my father to rest in a cemetery near the Chinese border.

My father’s name was Jiang Kai and he was born in a small village outside of Changsha.

He gave me my Chinese name, Jiang Li-ling, and my English one, Marie Jiang.

There was Glenn Gould hunched over the piano, wearing a dark suit, hearing patterns far beyond the range of what most of us are given to perceive,

Then, quiet (qù) became another person living inside our house. It slept in the closet with my father’s shirts, trousers and shoes, it guarded his Beethoven, Prokofiev and Shostakovich scores,

“There was a time when people copied out entire books by hand,” Ma said. “The Russians called it samizdat, the Chinese called it…well, I don’t think we have a name.

was like reading a letter from the future, or talking to someone who had turned their back on her.

“What did the Buddhist say to the pizza maker?” “What?” “Make me one with everything.”

People slept six to a bed, a dozen to a room. There you could always speak your thoughts out loud, assured that someone would hear you even if they didn’t want to. In fact, the way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.

a thick envelope arrived from Shanghai and Ma once again sat down with her dictionary.

Each word is filed under its root, also known as a radical. For instance, 門 means gate, but it is also a radical, that is, the building block for other words and concepts.

If

light, or the sun 日, shines through the gate, ...

If there is a horse 馬 inside the gate, this is an ambush 闖, and if there is a mouth 口 inside the gate, we have a question 問. If there is an ey...

“She says her husband was your father’s composition teacher

at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. But they lost touch with one another. During the difficult years.”

“She says that your father made contact with them last year. Ba wrote to her from Hong Kong a few days before he died.” A

“Her given name is Li-ling.”

Deng Li-ling’s daughter arrived in Toronto but her passport can’t be used. Her daughter has nowhere to go, she needs our help. Her daughter…” Nimbly, Ma slid the letter into its envelope. “Her daughter will come and live with us for a little while. Do you understand? This letter is about the present.”

Deng Li-ling says that her daughter…she says that Ai-ming

got into trouble in Beijing during the Tiananmen demonstrations. She ran away.”

“You think I’m going to leave? You think I’m as selfish as he is? That I would ever abandon you and hurt you like he did?”

did not even keep a piano in his own home? That he made his living by working in a shop? In fact, though I begged for violin lessons, my father always said no.

The Buick was gone; Ma had sold it. She had always been the tougher one,

My father had once said that music was full of silences. He had

left nothing for me, no letter, no message. Not a word.

The truth was that I had loved my father more.

On the 16th of December, 1990, Ma came home in a taxi with a new daughter who wore no coat, only a thick scarf, a woollen sweater, blue jeans and canvas shoes.

“Girl, greet your aunt.”

Our lives had contracted to such a degree that I could not remember the last time a stranger had entered our home;

pretended to watch the Weather Channel, which predicted rain for the rest of the week, the rest of 1990, the rest of the century, and even the remainder of all time.

The intensity in the apartment crept inside me, and I had the sensation that the floor was made of paper, that there were words written everywhere I couldn’t read, and one unthinking gesture could crumple this whole place down.

“What is the ‘ming’ of Ai-ming?” I asked in English, kicking a

box for emphasis. “Is it the ‘ming’ that means to understand, or the ‘ming’ that means fate?”

“My parents wanted the idea of aì míng,” she said. “ ‘To cherish wisdom.’ But you’re right, there’s a misgiving in it. An idea that is…mmm, not cherishing fate, not quite, but accepting it.”

Ai-ming was trembling. “I thought…I was afraid of the

police. I was frightened they would send me back. I don’t know if my mother was able to tell you everything. I hope so. In Beijing, I didn’t do anything wrong, anything criminal, but even so…In China, my aunt and uncle helped me leave and I crossed the border into Kyrgyzstan and then…you bought my ticket here. Despite everything, you helped me…I’m grateful, I’m afraid I’ll never be able to thank you as I should. I’m sorry for everything…”

“Zhí nǔ,” Ma said, leaning towards her. The words confused

me. They meant “my brother’s daughter,” but Ma had no brothers.

“And I’m so sorry for yours. My husband loved your father very much.”

words my father had underlined,

Worse, Ai-ming could read every character while I, his only daughter, couldn’t read a single line.

“Once, when I was very small, I met your father.”

“I call this the room of zá jì,” she said. “The things that don’t fit. Bits and pieces…”

The Book of Records.

My father was a great composer, a great musician, but he gave up his talent so that he could protect

me.

But they let him die. They killed him as if he were an animal.

was terrified that if I touched her, her pain would swell inside my body and become my own forever.

wanted to throw the picture on the floor but I was afraid that it was real, that it contained my father himself, and if I damaged it, he would never be able to come home.