Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

Kai said, “What you said is true. I loved her. I loved you both.” “There was no shame in that.” “No,” he said quietly. “But I was ashamed.”

There was no need to weep, he knew. They were fortunate, they had seen through the illusion. Even if the country went on, they could never be made to forget. I loved you both, Sparrow thought. I love you both.

Big Mother had told her that in the early 1960s, Conservatory students had been sent out to the fields to wage war.

“Yet another solicitous idea from Chairman Mao,” Big Mother had said solemnly. “Who said Western music never killed anyone?”

Something so barbaric would never happen now.

1...

Ai-ming remembered how, when Chairman Mao still breathed, she had regularly written criticisms of her father.

She’d been only a kid at the time, so her father had to help her write the tricky characters.

He had taught her how to protect herself by hiding inside the noise.

“The Shanghai Conservatory only makes him feel bad.”

but there was another piece, a complex figure that seemed to disassemble as she listened, a rope of music, a spool of wire. It seemed to rise even as it was falling, to lift in volume even as it diminished, a polyphony so unfathomably beautiful it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. When it stopped, tears came abruptly to her eyes.

“Music I wrote a long time ago,

hadn’t expected to remember, I was sure that after all this time it had completely disappeared.”

She wondered how many things a person knew that were better forgotten.

From the moment she had first looked into the belly of a radio, Ai-ming had known her vocation: to study computer science at Beijing University and to be part of the technological vanguard.

That year, 1977, the competition had been epic: more than five million people wrote the university entrance examinations, competing for 200,000 precious places.

this was the first time since 1966 that university entrants would not be selected by the Party.

In 1988, after studying sixteen hours a day for a full year, it was finally Ai-ming’s turn to endure three days of testing on nine subjects.

Her impressive scores got her hopes up but in the end, although she made the cut-off for South China Institute of Technology, her scores were not good enough for Beijing University or Tsinghua, or her third choice, Fudan. She would not be able to leave the province.

Ai-ming was the only one from Cold Water Ditch going on to university.

The Bird of Quiet gave her two pieces of advice. Study hard. And: It is good to be cautious.

Ma had her own television. She’d just been promoted to news editor at Radio Beijing, and had moved to the capital.

Did her father honestly believe she wanted to spend hours listening to the agonized rumblings of Shostakovich? His Tenth Symphony made it clear life was hopeless.

She only hoped he wouldn’t choose Bach, whose uptight fugues made her feel like she was trapped in a

barrel rolling down a hillside.

As a result of yearly gifts from Ling and Big Mother Knife, her father had accumulated one of the largest record collections in Guangxi Province, but he still insisted on hiding them.

love letters from Canada stored words that kept Sparrow awake at night.

Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba’s elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time.

This was Smetana’s From My Homeland, and it made Ai-ming so irretrievably unhappy her tears started up again.

“If

Beijing University is where you wish to go, then study for another year and write the exam again.”

magazines occupied her. Not the candy-coloured women’s magazines that had begun to appear in Beijing kiosks but serious journals such as Let the Natural Sciences Contend. She had an affinity for probability theory and Riemannian symmetric spaces, which she continued to study, neglecting politics and English, which had been her downfall the first time around.

In this unfamiliar city, Glenn Gould seemed his only confidant, the most familiar presence.

“We should meet the students’ reasonable demands through democracy and law. We should be willing to reform and we should use rational and orderly methods.”

fracture had appeared in the system, and now water was rushing in to widen

listening to another of Ai-ming’s tapes, this one Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which had gone unperformed for twenty-five years.

A change in the system of government had the power to change the fundamental construction of the world he knew.

the past, he had misread events, he had reacted too slowly.

The old Symphony No. 3 was gone, he could no longer retrieve what it might have been, and so he had started a new work, a simpler piece, a sonata for piano and violin.

The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu once described his own work as “a picture scroll unrolled,” and Sparrow felt a kinship with this image.

It was like learning to breathe again, not just with his lungs but with his whole mind.

Half his co-workers had signed on to the new independent workers’ union operating from under a tarp on Chang’an Avenue.

Kai had been true to his word and Sparrow’s exit visa had been approved. For the first time in his life, he would travel outside China.

He began to suspect that Kai was living an illusion more complex than his own.

If Zhuli were alive, she would be thirty-seven years old.

he was not careful, they would all be calling him Grandfather, which was ludicrous because he was not even fifty.

But even a nothing like me can see that the students and the government aren’t speaking the same language. Everyone wants to fix the country, but everyone wants power, too, don’t they?

It’s just that you’ve got such a listening face.”

Sparrow felt that a world he had been living inside was being forced open.

have grown old, he thought. I no longer understand the ways of this world.