Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

I want to make my parents and my sisters proud. I want to rise higher still. Do you feel as I do, Teacher? Your music has meant everything to me, it showed me…I ask myself why your symphonies are never performed, and I think it’s because they make us feel so much, they make us question not only who we are, but who we aim to be.

Why did our leaders dream that every farmer could be reborn as a steelmaker?

“He showed me his suitcase. Written on the inside of the lining were the names of all the men who had died, and the dates of their falling. It is, I believe, the only accurate record that exists. He told me he had a plan to do something more. He would take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei.

Numbers, real and imaginary, were a language inside me, equations were branchings of substance and shadow, relationships and inter​relationships, randomness and pattern, the fractional, incomplete yet consistently ordered world we live in. I listened to my father’s records but thought only of intervals, frequency and temperament, of the expression of numbers in an audible world.

Silence saw everything, owned everything, eventually took everything.