More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The only note he left was not a goodbye. All it said was that there were debts he couldn’t pay, failures he couldn’t live with, and that he wished to be buried in Hong Kong, at the Chinese border. He said that he loved
told me that, when he was a young boy, his adoptive father, the Professor, had gone with him to the symphony in Shanghai and that the experience had changed him forever. Inside him, walls that he had never realized existed suddenly revealed themselves. “I knew I was destined to have a different kind of life,”
“Mìng,” he said. “Fate.” It was only later, when I looked up the word again, that I saw that mìng 命 meant fate but it also meant life.
“My father loved music, like yours. He used to teach at the Shanghai Conservatory, but that was before I was born.” “What did he do afterwards?” “He worked in factories for twenty years. First, he built wooden crates and, later on, he built radios.”
But even as I said the words, I doubted and wondered, and feared that each name took up so much space, and might even be its own person, that I myself would eventually disappear.
IN THOSE DAYS, your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese. How easy it was to mistake your brother for a traitor or your beloved for an enemy, to fear that you yourself were born in the wrong moment of history. But in the teahouses, anyone could share a few songs, anyone could lift their wine cup and toast the validity and the continuity of love. “People knew family and kinship were real,” Big Mother said. “They knew regular life had once existed. But no one could tell them why, just like that, and for no
...more
Throughout his childhood, Sparrow was startled awake in little towns. Teahouse patrons shouted drunkenly beside his mother and aunt,
Sparrow asked his mother how the blind musicians, swaying forward like a rope in the dust, could hide themselves when the warplanes came, strafing houses and refugees, trees and rivers. Big Mother answered brutally, “Their days are numbered. Can a single hand cover the sky?” It was true.
Only this troupe of blind musicians could not be erased. Once, at the start of the war and then, astonishingly, near the end, they had reappeared
Were they real? Without realizing it, had he, Big Mother and Swirl, like the musicians, found a way to survive by becoming entirely unseen?
Sparrow knew what loneliness was. It was his cousin’s small corpse wrapped in a white sheet. It was the man on the sidewalk who was so old he couldn’t run away when the Reds came, it was the boy soldier whose decapitated head sat on the city gates, deforming and softening in the sun.
Gone were the crushing sorrows and terrors, and gone, too, was her independence. She feared she had no idea how to live in peace.
Worse, she had somehow ended up married to the king of slogans. Everything was ideological with the man.
even the humblest daughter of the humblest peasant could read it. Numbers could describe another world. Now,
Or perhaps this is all hindsight, because later, through the Book of Records, I learned that Shostakovich had written this symphony in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Terror when more than half a million people were executed, including some of Shostakovich’s closest friends.
“When I was little,” Ai-ming said, standing up, “the radio played only eighteen pieces of approved music. Nothing else.
“But, Ai-ming, how can music be illegal?”
But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades.
The written copies had been destroyed.
Why did her voice break like that? Was she crying? ‘No one could help it. That was the world back then.’ ”
Half the village of Bingpai starved to death, but the gentry, inheritors of seemingly limitless resources, survived.
He remembered Bertolt Brecht:
It was a story, handwritten in brush and ink. She hadn’t read a story in years, and at first could make no sense of it.
When the notebook ended just as it had begun–in mid-sentence–she retrieved the envelope and shook it mightily, hoping that another might fall out, but it was empty.
A few days later, a second chapter arrived.
On its surface, the story was a simple epic chronicling the fall of empire, but the people trapped inside the book reminded her of people she tried not to remember:
There were moments so piteous, she wanted to slam the book shut and close her eyes against its images, yet the novel insistently pulled her forward, as if its very survival depended on leaving the past and the dead behind. But what if the novel was written by someone she knew? Her family had all been singers, performers and storytellers. What if they had somehow lived, or lived long enough to write this fictional world? These irrational thoughts frightened her, as if she was being tempted backwards into a grief larger than the world or reality itself. What if the notebooks came from her dead
...more
Something else had caught Swirl’s attention. The writer was playing with the names of Da-wei and May Fourth.
Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life.
The bookseller teased her and said she had a twin in this district–a failed poet known as Wen the Dreamer was going from place to place, seeking a copy of the very same book.
Apparently the mimeograph was in need of a part that might never be replaced.
“Wen the Dreamer,” she said. “Miss Swirl,” he answered.
think it’s called the Book of Records.”
“I made a copy of the book for you,
“You’d be amazed at how few people can tell a story,” the Old Cat was saying. The sound of her voice was as rough and reassuring as pebbles rolling together. “Yet still these new emperors want to ban them, burn them, cross them all out. Don’t they know how hard it is to come by pleasure?
“Are you certain it’s a local writer?” a poet asked. “Everyone here is worthless. It must be a translation of a foreign work.”
Swirl had given birth to him when she was just fourteen years old.
On Huaihai Road, Wen was asking her to be his wife.
ONCE, AI-MING SAID TO ME, “Ma-li, I’m sure I’ve disappeared. Have I? Can you really see me?” She lifted her right hand and then her left, ever so slowly. Unsure if she was teasing or not, I echoed her movements, imagining I was at the mercy of the wind, pushed forward, turned sideways, only by forces unseen. “I’m invisible, too, Ai-ming. See?” I pulled her into the bathroom where we stared at our reflections as if they, and thus we, ourselves, were a mirage. It’s only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to
...more
It was 1991, mid-March,
Ma was working all the time now, and had taken an extra job to cover expenses for...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
She, after all, came from Beijing, a city that, in 1991, had eleven million people.
various methods of constructing a mathematical proof, including the “proof without words” which used only visual images.
In the summer of 1989, while still in Beijing, Ai-ming had sat the national university entrance examinations. Shortly after, she had been offered a place in the newly established computer science department at Tsinghua University, the most prestigious scientific university in China.
Her decision not to attend Tsinghua, a principled but reckless choice, astonishes me now.
solitude can reshape your life. “Like a river that gets cut off from the sea,” she said. “You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself.
And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists had proved it was, so perhaps Ai-ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.
My mother had already obtained a forged passport for Ai-ming and other related papers. Neither of us wanted her to leave, but the decision was not ours. My mother’s low income meant that we did not qualify to sponsor Ai-ming’s
immigration to Canada.
was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one’s life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security–Ai-ming’s love, the love of an older sister–out of my childhood and into my adult life.
