Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

She was a performer, a transparent glass giving shape to water,

nothing more than a glass.

“It’s better for Aunt Swirl. Shanghai is uneasy right now,” he said.

Zhuli wanted to ask him about fear because this unease inside of her, it too was a kind of desertification, a kind of hunger, and where would it end?

Calm for you, Zhuli thought. Both Kai and her cousin had unassailable class backgrounds,

with Glenn Gould himself. “The truth is,” he said, “I’d never even heard Tzigane. I came early in order to practise it. I feared you would drop me from your concert and perform with Yin Chai instead.” “So you’ve mastered it.” There it was again: the proud shine in his eyes. “Of course.”

“Professor Tan told me to think about it alongside Gounod’s Faust,” Zhuli said. “You know, ‘All that you desire, I can give you.’ Selling your soul to the evil spirits.

doesn’t end well, thought Zhuli,

She was the devil playing.

She hated it when people touched her hands, they were sensitive and in constant pain, and she’d had dreams in which they were crushed or cut open.

She wasn’t afraid. Only, she thought, letting his mouth find hers, there are too many people, too many words, too many things that I wish for. I have the feeling there is too little time.

She willed herself to disappear into Ravel. She let herself go, into the walls and into sound itself.

On May 18, 1996,

after five long years, the rumoured amnesty had finally materialized and Ai-ming, along with nearly half a million others, had submitted her application for permanent residence in the United States.

But after she moved to New York in 1993 we didn’t see her anymore.

Still, her letters arrived like clockwork. Ai-ming didn’t write about the present anymore, but about things she remembered from Beijing or from her childhood.

In 1995, when Congress passed Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, we thought she would gain legal status within the year.

I should have persisted, I should have asked her what she wanted to tell me, but Ai-ming seemed so fragile.

Sometimes I’m on the subway for hours each day, I feel like a child in the underworld, and I imagine all kinds of things…The netherworld is a kingdom of its own, with its own prefectures, magistrates and government, it’s supposed to be another city entirely…I am lovesick for some lost paradise / I would rise free and journey far away. Do you know this poem?”

just want to take another step. I want to live.”

But when Ma tried to reach Ai-ming that night, the line was disconnected.

Two weeks later, a letter arrived. Ai-ming said that her mother’s health had suddenly deteriorated and she was going home.

When summer came, we flew to New York and took the subway to Ai-ming’s last known address.

She said that Ai-ming had been expected back weeks ago but had never turned up.

poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thoughts, Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city.

After Ma’s diagnosis in 1998, everything changed.

When her chemotherapy began, I had been at university, a mathematics major at last,

When I looked at my university classmates, I heard in their voices and saw in their lives a freedom I felt had been unfairly taken from me.

In the meantime, she altered her diet and dealt with the unending bureaucracy of sick leave, sick pay, health and life insurance, the web of paperwork and medication that quickly encircled her life, so that the measurement of time became divorced from the rising and the falling of the sun, and became instead about the intervals between treatment regimens, hospital stays, meal times, rest and recovery.

She made a will and left a sum of money to Ai-ming, which to this day has not been claimed; neither I nor my mother’s lawyer have been able to locate her.

In the last two years of her life, I changed.

The brevity of my parents’ lives has shaped me.

In 1999, Ma asked me to find Ai-ming.

Before she passed away, Ma gave me a photograph Ai-ming had left us. The picture was a duplicate of one Ai-ming carried, which had belonged to her father. It showed Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. On the back, my mother had written Shanghai Conservatory of Music, 1966.

My mother died fifteen years ago but I have been thinking about her more than ever,

It’s taken me years to begin searching, to realize that the days are not linear, that time does not simply move forward but spirals closer and closer to a shifting centre.

It’s possible that I have lost track of the dates, the time, the chapters and permutations of the story.

Years later, certain images persisted in my memory–a vast desert, a poet who courted beautiful Swirl with a story not his own, music that made not a sound–and I returned to them with greater frequency.

wish to describe lives that no longer have a physical counterpart in this world; or perhaps, more accurately, lives that might continue if only I had the eyes to see them.

“Once more, Sparrow recited the letter he had received from Wen the Dreamer. It had its own cadence now, the pulse of a libretto: My dear friend / I trust this letter finds you well! / And that you remember me / your dreaming friend….”

“Shanghai is full of walking sticks.” She meant informers and spies.

“Moonlight in front of my bed I took it for frost on the ground I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon Lower it, and think of home.”

Perhaps one day in the future, Sparrow thought now, as he lay in bed, he would write an opera about the life of Wen the

Dreamer.

The streets our brushes the squares our palettes The thousand-paged book of time says nothing about the days of revolution. Futurists, dreamers, poets come out into the street

Yellow dust, clear water under three mountains the change of a thousand years is rapid as a galloping horse. In the distance China is nine wisps of smoke and in a single cup of water the ocean churns.

Could such an opera be more than an idea, a counterfeit, an imitation? Could he sit down and write an original work, a story about the possible future rather than the disputed past?

I’m called Ai Di Sheng, after Thomas Edison, of course, because of my experiments with electricity.

The doors exhaled and covers of beds swept open to welcome them and Sparrow listened to the deluge while Kai held him clumsily in his arms. “How could you play my symphony so perfectly?” he asked. Kai answered, “How could you think I would forget it?” They fell asleep this way, touching without fully touching, near and far away, satiated and yet full of yearning.

Comrade Glass Eye had understood. “Our friend is not only a fine calligrapher,” the man whispered, “but an escape artist of the highest rank. Where does a person hide in the desert? It’s like a fish trying to hide in a tree!” He stopped to turn away, lifting his hands to his face. He said, from behind this shelter, “I’ve seen men leave this world midway through a sentence. If I tell you what we lived through, would you believe me?” His hands descended. “If I told you that, all through the bitter winter, we lived inside caves, what would you say? That good men, educated and honest men, had to copy the ways of animals in order to survive the climate, but we were not animals!