Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

One afternoon, she woke up and heard the voices of her three caretakers and Big Mother Knife, who had arrived from the South to be with them, and had managed to obtain false papers

for Ai-ming.

Ai-ming had written the examinations, she had scored high, but when the results came, she had told her mother she would not, could not, stay. Ling had not seemed surprised.

Her mother had already quit her job at the radio station, and moved back to Shanghai to be with the Old Cat.

“Did I ever tell you? He went back to see it but it had disappeared. The entire camp has been swallowed by the desert as if it never was.”

Swirl was humming a fragment of music, a small piece of the unending sonata that Sparrow had written.

still the music and its counterpoint remained.

An elderly woman who had once been a translator met her at the Kyrgyzstan border and went with her to Istanbul.

Even if everything repeats, it is not the same.

She would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts. In Toronto, she waited for my mother to call her. In Vancouver, I reached out and took her suitcase.

It is a simple thing to write a book. Simpler, too, when the book already exists, and has been passed from person to person, in different versions, permutations and variations. No one person can tell a story this large, and there are, of course, missing chapters in my own Book of Records.

The entire book of records is lost, but some objects and

compositions remain.

In Dunhuang, where Ai-ming stayed with Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, forty thousand manuscripts were recovered i...

Mixed in with Chinese prayers were documents in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uighur, Sogdian, Judeo-Persian, Syriac and Khotanese; a Parthian fragment written in Manichean, a tantric instruction manual in the Uighur alphabet, a past due bill for a camel. Ballads, inventories, circulars and donations. A letter to a husband that reads, “I would rather be a pig’s wife than yours.” Astronomical maps. Board game instructions. A guest’s apology for getting drunk and behaving badly. A poem for a beloved donkey. The sale of a brother.

Variations of Sparrow’s complete composition, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, can be heard all over China.

Maybe no one knows where the original recording came from, or that it arrived, like a virus, over the internet.

Mathematics has taught me that a small thing can become a large thing very quickly, and also that a small thing never entirely disappears. Or, to put it another way, dividing by zero equals infinity: you can take nothing out of something an infinite number of times.

will wait for Ai-ming to find me and I continue to believe that I will find her–tomorrow, perhaps, or in a dozen years.

this book of records.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing began in the freedom and openness offered to us in Berlin.

to my friends in Hong Kong, thank you for six beautiful years.

small group carried me through difficult times, financially, artistically and spiritually.

David Chariandy, Sophie McCall, Steven Galloway,

Phanuel Antwi,

Dionne Brand,

Tsitsi Dangarembga,

Not everyone who supported and strengthened this story can be named. To my beloved friends in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing and Dunhuang, thank you for accompanying me through this book of records and an alternate memory of history. Remember what I say: Not everything will pass.