Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

WHEN JIANG KAI, MY FATHER, left China in 1978, one of his suitcases was filled with more than fifty battered notebooks.

Self-criticism, samokritika in Russian, 检讨 (jiǎn tǎo) in Chinese, required that the person confess his or her mistakes, repeat the correct thinking of the Party and acknowledge the authority of the Party over him or her.

arrived in Shanghai on June 1, 2016.

How the city mesmerized me. Shanghai seemed, like a library or even a single book, to hold a universe within itself. My father had arrived here in the late 1950s, a child of the countryside, in the wake of the Great Leap Forward and a man-made famine that took the lives of 36 million people, perhaps more.

We were not unalike, my father and I; we wanted to keep a record. We imagined there were truths waiting for us–about ourselves and those we loved, about the times we lived in–within our reach, if only we had the eyes to see them.

In his self-criticisms, my father wrote of his love of music and the fear that he “could not overcome a desire for personal happiness.” He denounced Zhuli, gave up Sparrow and cut all ties to the Professor, his only family.

For years, Ba tried to abandon music. When I first read his self-criticisms, I glimpsed my father through the many selves he had tried to be; selves abandoned and reinvented, selves that wanted to vanish but couldn’t.

That’s how I see him, sometimes, when my anger–on behalf of Ma, Zhuli, myself–subsides and turns to pity.

in 1949, Tiananmen Square retained its place as the centre of political power in China by reason of analytic geometry. An architect, Chen Gang, posited the Square as the “zero point.” He quoted Friedrich Engels: “Zero is a definite point from which measurements are taken along a line, in one

direction positively, in the other negatively. Hence the zero point is the location on which all others are dependent, to which they are all related, and by which they are all determined.

That summer of 1966, the year Zhuli died, was the zero point for my father.

commit himself to fānshēn: literally, to turn over one’s body, to liberate oneself.

It was April 22, 1989.

When Chinese leaders failed to respond, the Tiananmen demonstrations began in earnest.

had been to this quarter before: Hongkou is where Swirl and Big Mother Knife grew up before the war, and it is where Liu Feng, a violinist once known as Tofu Liu, now lives.

the 1930s, the Shanghai port could be legally entered without passport or visa; some forty thousand Jewish and other refugees from Germany, Austria, Russia, Iraq, India, Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine and elsewhere arrived here, bringing not only their languages and traumas, but also their music.

Mr. Liu was waiting for me.

at first, when I said I was the daughter of Jiang Kai, he had been wary. But when I told him I was looking for Ai-ming, the daughter of Sparrow, he transformed entirely.

After a thirty-year teaching career at the Shanghai Conservatory, he had retired last month and moved his office home.

We were a world away, but only a single generation, from the city my father had known.

He told me that he had entered the Shanghai Conservatory the same year as Zhuli.

was a little in love with her, even while I envied her talent.

“Not one piano survived.

He himself was sent to a camp in Heilongjiang Province, in the frozen border...

We worked in coal mines.

We had daily self-criticism and denunciation sessions. This went on for six years.”

In 1977, when the Cultural Revolution ended, Liu ran away from the camp and returned to Shanghai, where he sought out his former teacher, Tan Hong.

had been a miner for six years, there was coal dust in my lungs, I’d broken all the fingers of my right hand, how could I possibly hold a violin?

Finally I told him the truth. I said, ‘Because music is nothing. It is nothing and yet it belongs to me. Despite everything that’s happened, it’s myself that I believe in.’

Welcome home.’

My father had blindfolded himself, he had tied a piece of cloth over his face before he took his

life.

This was the first time I had ever heard Ba playing the piano.

It’s difficult to understand,” he said. “The pressure on us was unimaginable. Don’t forget, back then, your father was only seventeen years old….we were all too young.”

showed him my copy of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records.

From my bag, I took out Sparrow’s composition, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. “This is the piece of music I mentioned to you.

“I’m sure you know that, without obsession, there is no life’s work. But where does this attentiveness come from? Have you asked yourself? Surely it’s what we each carry, in greater and greater quantity as we age, remembrance.”

“The music reminds me of something Zhuli said when we were rehearsing Prokofiev. She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear?

Note by note, I felt as if I was being reconfigured.

“Why, it’s Zhuli isn’t it?” he said in surprise, staring at the image. “It must be. No? It’s Teacher Sparrow’s daughter? Ai-ming. Ah, well. How remarkable. She has the very same face as Miss Zhuli.”

remembered, then, something that Ai-ming had said. I assumed that when the story finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. “But that’s how the world is, isn’t it?”

The newsreader had said the date, September 14, 1973. But it was 1976. The concert had been almost three years before.

It had been nearly a decade since the radio had broadcast any music besides the eighteen approved revolutionary operas.

You could close a book and forget about it, knowing it would not lose its contents when you stopped reading, but music wasn’t the same, not for him, it was most alive when it was heard.

She looked like Zhuli.

Ling, her actual mother, had been reassigned to Shanghai nearly five years ago, and only visited once each year, during Spring Festival. Her father, Sparrow, was the Bird of Quiet.

In school, as the daughter of a class enemy she was forbidden to join the Young Pioneers, among other injustices.

How can you ignore this sharp awl that pierces your heart? If you yearn for things outside yourself, you will never obtain what you are seeking. And so the novel of Da-wei and May Fourth began once more.

He, like the character of May Fourth, would spend the greater part of his life in the deserts of Gansu, Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan, where, they said, more than three hundred ancient settlements lay beneath the sand.

Throughout her childhood, little Ai-ming asked for Chapter 23 to be reread so many times, the words must have shown up in her dreams.