Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

Why did our leaders dream that every farmer could be reborn as a steelmaker? How did they imagine that a boy who had studied the fields all his life could make iron ore out of nothing? I think it is much more serious than ideology, production and material needs. We had to become only what they proclaimed us to be, we existed to be forged and re-forged by the Party.

Brother Wen and I, not to waste anything in the wastelands. We ingested compost, animal feed, we welcomed any nutrient under the sun. From the Party to our stomachs! From the sun of Chairman Mao to our lips! We promised ourselves that we would seek out the last edible crumb on this empty plate and find a way to eat the plate itself, if necessary. There would be no slow death for us, only a slow regeneration.

One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions.

Perhaps that is the lesson the Party wanted us to learn: in our basic needs–air, water, food, and shelter–nothing separates the doctor from the flea, the educated from the ignorant. So, in fact, I was re-educated after all. I learned this lesson all too well.”

Night fell. Into the silence a true demon came. It shouted and raged as if to topple the hut. All at once there were people everywhere, some holding ropes and even singing, then hands shoving her aside as she tried to reach her mother, who had been forced to her knees. Swirl was saying, “Pity…pity.” There was a loud clap and her mother cried out. Wen the Dreamer’s voice shook as if it was coming from the foundations of the little house itself. Zhuli cried and cried. Was it her screaming that frightened all the demons away? She imagined she was the daughter and sky twisted up, demonic, and all the neighbours were afraid of her now. The men left, half carrying, half dragging her parents with them, as if they, too, were objects retrieved from underground. And then the room, in shambles, was silent.

Events were like dreams, she concluded,

The White Rabbit muttered that her parents were lucky not to have their heads chopped off, they were fortunate that the worst excesses were a thing of the past. “They’ve been sent for re-education, that’s all,” she said. “Since you’ve never been educated at all, it seemed pointless to send you along with them.”

“These are your relatives. Knock here and ask for your aunt.” The lady knelt down and gave her one last candy and an envelope with red letterhead. She touched Zhuli’s knee and the big, round bruise, which Zhuli had forgotten about, shot pain up her leg all the way to her eyes.

How had the men known, Zhuli thought, that she was part girl and part sky, a yāo who had been seduced by wood and strings that were not alive. But the qin was alive,

Inside her head, the music built columns and arches, it cleared a space within and without, a new consciousness. So there were worlds buried inside other worlds but first you had to find the opening and the entryway.

Zhuli recognized that voice, she felt she had known it longer than she had known life. Sparrow became her first violin teacher.

Tan recognized that, in each piece that she played, she heard more and more music. But what was music? Every note could only be understood by its relation to those around it. Merged, they made new sounds, new colours, a new resonance or dissonance, a stability or rupture. Inside the pure tone of C was a ladder of rich overtones as well as the echoes of other Cs, like a man wearing many suits of clothes, or a grandmother carrying all her memories inside her.

Could I awake now and cross towards her? Near the end, she seemed almost to forget that I was there and it was as if the story came from the room itself: a conversation overheard, a piece of music still circling the air.

And then, the music stopped. Her bow stopped. It was as if she could hear nothing, or had forgotten everything, or had been pushed underwater.

Do not say that we have nothing.

“Comrade Zhuli, don’t make the silly mistake of thinking your talent is enough.”

She wanted to ask him how he could acquiesce on the surface

and not be compromised inside.

But why would Jiang Kai do such a thing for her? When did he have time?

How many self-criticisms had she written? A thousand pages, two thousand?

Beyond the park, she heard what sounded like an encroaching sea but was only Red Guards. “Down with Wu Bei!” the students shouted. “Kill the traitor, destroy the criminal gang, down with Wu Bei, down with Wu Bei!”

“The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the People!” “What will you sacrifice, what will you sacrifice?” “Stand up and serve the Revolution!”

Something is coming for me, Zhuli thought.

There was someone watching her.

What is happening to us?”

“It’s what happens to every generation.”

think history is not so different from music, all the different eras, like when the Baroque ended and Classical began, when one kind of understanding transformed into another…

We’re teaching ourselves to think in an entirely new way, uncorrupted by the old consciousness.

Maybe we can become…But it is difficult because we must struggle against ourselves, really question our motivations and ask on whose behalf we’re building a more just society.”

Why did he trust her? Whom should she trust?

Sparrow knew Schiller only as the German writer beloved by Verdi, whose poem Brahms had used in a funeral song: Even the beautiful must die! See! The gods weep, all the goddesses weep Because the beautiful perishes, because perfection dies Even to be a song of lament on a loved ones’ lips is glorious…

In the darkness, the radio announcer was repeating familiar words, Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a group of counter-revolutionary

revisionists…

Some of them we have already seen through, the radio shouted, others we have not! Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors…

“Our books are full of stories of mistaken identity, star-crossed love, years of separation.

Ling was saying, “But who loves the Revolution more than we do? Who would die for it? I would. So why can’t I criticize policies and still be considered a reformer within the Party? Why does the Party persist in believing that criticism only comes from class enemies?”

“But the cultural revolution, the new campaign, is about questioning the old ways of doing things,” Kai said.

“Every work unit has to turn over a set percentage of rightists, but that’s crazy, isn’t

The four white walls, the plain desk and open space in his mind, could so spare a life be called freedom?

Could Bach’s limitations create another kind of freedom? Could an absence of freedom reveal the borders of their lives, their mortality, their fate?

This room, he told himself, was an anomaly, perhaps one of many: corners of the city that had not yet been polished smooth.

On the third floor, her class, the orchestral class, appeared to be cancelled.

What mattered most in this moment: the words on the posters or the lives–of her parents, of Ba Lute and Sparrow–in suspension, the promise of Mao Zedong thought or the day-to-day reality of New China? Which would win out, the Shanghai of utopia, or the city of the real?

That night, Ba Lute told her that she should cut her hair, that the long braid that slid against the small of her back was a symbol of vanity.

Zhuli felt a shiver of fear,

“Today, little Zhuli. We must do it today.”

Her parents seemed to rest in her hands, as if the novel had never been a mirror of the past, but of the present.

What if Da-wei and May Fourth, separated for so many years, still wandered as exiles, and this was the reason the novel could not be finished?

he copied pages from The Travels of Lao Can, the only book he had carried from China until, on a desolate spring day, he ran out of paper.

remembering a passage from a famous Lu Xun essay: