Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

IN A SINGLE YEAR, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life.

“What did the Buddhist say to the pizza maker?” “What?” “Make me one with everything.”

in general, anything universally praised is usually preposterous rubbish.”

He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also be a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?

I sat at the window reading Ma’s copy of David Copperfield. Again and again, I returned to the opening lines: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

As Mencius says, a benevolent man cannot be rich.

everywhere. In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, the true face of our Revolution was revealed. Why did our leaders dream that every farmer could be reborn as a steel-maker? 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.

I wondered at the absurdity of things. I had no explanation, except perhaps that I fell asleep as one person and woke as another. The surface of my life confounded me.

As many as 700 million Chinese, more than 50 percent of the population, regularly access the internet; until recently, 60 percent of internet users did not use their real names (as of 2013, anonymity became illegal). The Great Firewall, as it is commonly known, routinely deletes 16 percent of all Chinese internet conversations.

I’ll play the ‘March of the Volunteers’ and ‘The Internationale’ for all eternity. The old world shall be destroyed. Arise, slaves, arise! Do not say that we have nothing.

Big Mother had told her that in the early 1960s, Conservatory students had been sent out to the fields to wage war. They played their instruments loudly and dissonantly from morning until night so that no little birds could land in the fields and eat the grain. Day after day, thousands of sparrows, killed by exhaustion, had fallen dead from the sky.

There is no way across the river but to feel for the stones.

Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything will pass.

“When death catches me on the sidewalk of a poem, I will only regret not having had you in my arms long enough.”