Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

the fear that drove Kai did not drive him.

He and his father had not been able to give Zhuli a proper funeral.

But scorn, degradation, disgust, loathing, what about those emotions? What composer had written a language for them? What listener cared to hear it?

Zhuli was sitting on the edge of the mat, so alive it seemed as if he and Kai were the illusion.

She said, “The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.”

The words shàng xī tiān (上西天) mean to “to go to the Western sky” or “to ascend to the Western heavens,” that is, to pass beyond the western border of the Great Wall, to leave this

country, to let go of this life, to die and pass away. Zhuli had not been able to wait for him. She had gone ahead to find another beginning.

Since August, ten faculty and eight students had died.

The year 1967 arrived, and the Conservatory remained closed.

He seemed to take pleasure in telling Sparrow that he was being reassigned to a factory in the southern suburbs.

“You know the saying: The time has come to re-string your bow

But tell me, is it really true you turned down a position at the Central Philharmonic?” “I was not worthy of the offer.”

Counter-revolutionaries like Wen the Dreamer will inevitably distort, resist, attack and oppose Mao Zedong thought. They appear to be human beings but are beasts at heart, they speak the human language to your face but behind your back

But was a miracle still a miracle if it came too late?

Zhuli’s shadow seemed to twist in the stairwell as if her spirit was tied to his thoughts, and unable to be free.

Flying Bear had said that Zhuli must be guilty because only a criminal would kill herself. Flying Bear had vowed never to go home again.

“Only traitors commit suicide,”

The loudspeakers rattled on, “There is no middle road.”

when he slept he still heard the factory’s disjointed percussion–thumping, crashing and syncopated drumming, dotted with sirens, buzzers and bells–not so different from the musique concrète of Varèse’s Amériques. He couldn’t stop hearing this music of the everyday, and its continuity threaded together his former life and his present.

the first televised struggle session of the Cultural Revolution.

To his shock, the Red Guards were known to him; they were former Conservatory musicians who had risen to leadership positions.

Kai stood among a group at the front.

At first, Sparrow did not recognize the elderly man, whose head the Red Guards were

forcing down so brutally his face coul...

When the elderly man looked up, Sparrow saw that it was He Luting, former President of ...

“Before I die,” He Luting said, “I have two wishes. First, I want to finish my current composition, a seven-part orchestral work. Second, I intend to clear each and every charge against me.”

He Luting’s wife, children and grandchildren had been gathered on the stage behind him, their heads also pushed down, light reflecting off their hair. Words that He Luting had spoken to him, years ago now, returned to Sparrow. “Music that is immediately understood will not outlast its generation.”

The image disappeared.

Yesterday he had turned twenty-eight years old.

Eight months later, Chairman Mao decreed that cities were wasteful and the educated must be sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to experience rural poverty.

all classes not yet cancelled were officially over. This new generation would be the heroic zhī qī, the sent-down youth.

“Kai’s in Beijing now, did you know? He intervened and made sure we were both assigned to the South, and not to the coal mines at the Russian border.”

“Kai asked me to look for you. He said you might take a position with the Central Philharmonic…” “But I don’t write music anymore.”

The day before, Sparrow had posted three hastily written letters: one to Big Mother Knife who was stuck in Yumen City and had not yet been granted a transfer back to Shanghai; one to Ba Lute, who was interned at a camp in Anhui Province; and one to Kai in Beijing.

Sparrow had even burned the papers he had hidden up in the trusses of the roof. His beautiful Symphony No. 2, the still unfinished No. 3–they went into the flames.

Nothing remained.

because he had promised Zhuli, the Book of Records.

San Li had died, jumped from a window or was pushed.

The further they travelled from Shanghai, the more he felt as if he was breaking apart.

A year later, he and Ling received permission to marry. And a year after that, they had their first and only child, a daughter, Ai-ming.

In the spring of 1970, Big Mother Knife finally returned to the laneway house on Beijing Road. There, she found her entire family missing.

That night, she took the train west to destitute Anhui Province, where Ba Lute had been consigned to a re-education camp.

Now Ba Lute told her that he had personally written a letter to Chairman Mao, who could not possibly know all that was being done in his name.

“Our own sons denounced me,”

Back in Shanghai, Big Mother put in a request to be transferred to Sparrow’s town, Cold Water Ditch.

premonition told her she would never see the city again: by the time the wheel of history tumbled forward and this country awoke once more, she would be stone blind.

wasn’t zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself?

Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time?

zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same...

PART ZERO