Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

He felt too afraid to be afraid.

he felt he was looking into the past, or into a future that would not arrive.

She was distributing copies of an unauthorized supplement to the People’s Daily, printed covertly by the newspaper’s staff.

The Ling he had first met in Kai’s room, the sharp-eyed philosophy student, had been biding her time and here she was now, as if she had never been away.

We sacrificed everything so that Yiwen could get a good education. She’s our only child. When Yiwen was accepted into Beijing Normal, I held the letter in my hands and wept. The first time I had wept in forty years! I thought I might have a heart attack. Yiwen is the first in both our families to go to university.

even joined the Beijing autonomous residents’ federation. You should join, too. There are all sorts of initiatives under discussion.”

His sonata for piano and violin, the first piece of music he had written in twenty-three years, was finished, he could do no more.

He made a clean copy, signed his name and wrote the date, May 27, 1989, and the title, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. He put the copy in an envelope to send to Kai.

When he looked over the music, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it had come from someone else entirely, or more accurately, that it had been written by himself and another, a counterpoint between two people alive and awake, young and old, who had lived entirely different worlds.

Three days after I met with Tofu Liu, he telephoned me. His niece at Radio Beijing had put him in contact with someone I should meet: Lu Yiwen, the close friend of a Radio Beijing editor who had passed away in 1996. This was the same Yiwen who had known Ai-ming and her parents in 1988 and 1989.

Yiwen was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman in her mid-forties.

We spoke in English. After graduating with a degree in Chinese language and history from Beijing Normal, she had overturned her life and applied to study electrical engineering at Tokyo University. To her surprise, she had been accepted.

Yiwen had much to tell me. A story is a shifting creature, an eternal mirror that catches our lives at unexpected angles.

“This is Sparrow’s music,”

“But how did you find a copy of the music? It was destroyed in 1989. Ai-ming had only nine pages. I saw it destroyed.”

told her that Sparrow had sent it to my father in a letter dated May 27, 1989. That I had only found it a few years ago, in a Hong Kong police file. It had been among my father’s possessions when he died.

“Ai-ming thought it w...

“Ling? But she died in 1996.”

“The Old Cat. She lives in Shanghai. She turned a hundred this year and when you ask the year of her birth, she says she’s been alive forever. I’ll write down her address for you. She doesn’t have a telephone.”

“In 1996, Ai-ming came back from the United States.”

She came to Beijing for her mother’s funeral.

Ling made it possible for all of us to start our lives again, but she herself never had the chance.”

The first, a picture of Ling, Sparrow and Ai-ming taken in 1989. They were standing in the centre of Tiananmen Square. The second, Chapter 23 of the Book of Records, which Ai-ming had copied out and given to Yiwen for her twentieth birthday.

People simply didn’t have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted.

was about having the freedom to live where you chose, to pursue the work you loved.

Just recently, I began listening to the transcriptions and reimaginings of Bach’s music written by the Italian pianist Ferrucci Busoni; these albums had been part of my father’s music collection and now they are part of mine.

Why did Busoni transcribe Bach? How does a copy become more than a copy?

Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before?

In 1989, when he left my mother and me, he waited in Hong Kong ...

Sparrow, Zhuli, the Professor, his own family, they were gone; all the selves he had tried to be, everything that he had lost, could no longer be denied.

Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn’t render each variation false.

To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.

A new open-air forum, the Tiananmen University of Democracy, had been inaugurated the previous night.

“They’ve been arresting people all week,”

Last week, she had received a letter from Aunt Swirl and Wen the Dreamer.

Back in 1977, Wen had nearly been rearrested. If it weren’t for his friend, Projectionist Bang, they could never have gotten away.

“It only took ten years,” Big Mother said bitterly. Swirl and Wend were coming home.

“She knows. They both know.”

“It’s a joyful title, isn’t it?” his mother said. He nodded, surprised by the grief that overtook him. He remembered something Zhuli had once said. Luckily, joy seeps into all your compositions.

Today, Ai-ming would copy Chapter 23 of the Book of Records as a birthday present for Yiwen.

Her mother was holding that sheaf of papers and Ai-ming saw line after line of musical notation, a language she had never learned to read. At the top, three words were visible, For Jiang Kai.

“Do you know he could have composed for the Central Philharmonic, he could have studied abroad, he could have had a different life, if only he was a completely different kind of person….”

“Your father has always been a good man but kindness can be a downfall. It can make you lose perspective. It can make you foolish.”

“Why did he go with her?” Ling said. “Doesn’t he know what’s happening out there? Does he think that this life doesn’t matter? Does he really believe that he can carry on as if he is invisible?”

“We can’t go back,” Yiwen said. “They’re killing people at Fengtai. They’re killing people at Gongzhufen. Right in the street, at the intersection. I saw it, Ai-ming. I saw it. At first it was only tear gas but then there were real bullets, there was real blood, they’re following people through the alleyways–”

Big Mother’s voice came to him: “Never forget: if you sing a beautiful song, if you faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon the musician.

Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see?

“I hope they burned their lists,” Ai-ming said. “I hope they remembered to make all the names disappear.”

Now the army had them surrounded.

They were trying to negotiate a retreat.