Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

“What’s the use of copying those?” a friend had asked Lu Xun...

“In that case, what’s your reason for ...

“There’s no r...

What was the purpose, Da-wei finally asked himself, of copying a life...

DIG OUT THE CHILDREN OF RIGHTISTS, CAPITALIST ROADERS, AND COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES,

After his return from a tour in 1938, his passport was confiscated.

I’m a teacher, the eldest son of a revolutionary hero, Sparrow told himself, and there’s no reason for me to be afraid.

“People like me don’t join anymore. We are Red Guards, that’s all.”

We, Kai meant, as in those with revolutionary class backgrounds.

“This new campaign is just beginning,” Sparrow said.

His position has made him naive! The worst is that he’s dragging San Li and Ling down with him.

“I nearly had an exit visa,” Kai said, “but yesterday…everything fell apart.

But now…this morning, the cadre who signed my papers was denounced. They say he’s going to be expelled from the Party…Teacher, what if suspicion filters down to the Professor and to me?

How much like Zhuli the young pianist was, Sparrow thought numbly. How strange he had never noticed it before. They believed they could attain what the Party had put beyond their reach, that they could strive and strive and go unpunished for their longings. From where had this blind ambition come?

“You must take precautions,” Sparrow said.

Kai had cut his hair,

The disc, a recording made by Glenn Gould, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was in near perfect condition.

There was music inside him, it was as simple, inexplicable and exhilarating as that. Music overflowed from everything he saw.

If it ended, he would have no idea how to make sense of the world.

The ubiquity of recording had made them all equal: they heard the same recording that Gould himself listened to when he placed

the record on a turntable, they heard what an American or a Frenchman or a German heard.

A deep silence was about to arrive. How could he live with

“What the Party wants is always changing,” Sparrow said quietly.

used to own the Perilous Heights bookshop on Suzhou Creek Road,” the Old Cat said,

“But during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the government was banning titles left and right. There was so much overthrowing go on, I couldn’t take it.

So in 1955 I closed the shop and moved ev...

Guo Moruo’s translation of Faust.

The German Faust chafes against his condition. This Faust was seeking a freedom within the mind that would expand his spirit as well as his intellect, so that both could attain their most divine state. But what if the truths of the mind and the soul were not merely different, but incompatible? “In me there are two souls, alas, and their / Division tears my life in two.”

prefer The Sorrows of Young Werther.”

“I wonder if Zhuli is right,” Kai said, addressing the Old Cat. “Maybe it’s time to get rid of these books. They’re saying it’s the Anti-Rightist Campaign all over again–”

all the Russian composers are out.

Kai blushed. “I never keep music. I memorize the scores and get rid of them.”

“A-Fan’s Weeping over His Daughter by the Sea! I’ve been looking for those poems for thirty years.”

All revolutionary intellectuals, now is the time to go into battle! Resolutely, thoroughly, totally and completely wipe out all the ghosts and monsters. The leaders of Beijing University shout about “strengthening the leadership” but this only exposes who

they really are: saboteurs of the Cultural Revolution. We must tell you, a spider cannot stop the wheel of a cart! We will carry socialist revolution through to the end!

Now the whole university is under the boot of the Red Guards, and this manifesto is the Voice of the Revolution.”

“And now the Conservatory students are going around smashing violins.” San Li laughed. “What kind of person breaks a violin?”

But Kai had already turned on the Professor. “You’ve already ruined me, and now you’re endangering everyone in this room. For you, political struggle is just a game. It’s taken me years to see you clearly.”

This was the same hand that had copied the Book of Records. This was her own father’s handwriting and she would know it anywhere.

the calligrapher is a scholar from Shanghai, a poet in fact. But alas, he is not a poet anymore. He fell under the wheels of the Party and they sent him for re-education. I haven’t seen him for years, he disappeared.

In her hand was the aria of the Goldberg Variations, transcribed into the numbers, dots and lines of jianpu notation.

My niece and I have been inserting this piece of music into traditional song books.”

Aunt and niece, Zhuli thought, so this is why I felt so comfortable with them.

“But who is the mysterious sender?” Zhuli asked. “Who knows? There was a note which said that even banned music should be assessed on its own merits, that songs as well as novels could serve as samizdat, passed from person to person. Some foolish idealist. One of your kind, I’m sure.”

The so-called ‘enemies of the People’ are the ones whose luck has run out, nothing more.

If they want to come for you, they will come, and it doesn’t matter what you read or what you failed to read.

A

voice in her head scolded her: Why do you persist in playing music that is outrageously formalist? Why did you react disdainfully when Kai brought you the correct music? Are you too idiotic to realize that the very existence of a violin soloist is counter to the times?

“The things you experience,” she continued, “are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation.

Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my minuscule life to the act of copying.”