Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

To be a renowned musician, one surely had to be already successful in one’s own mind; only musicians with this nature could rise above the others.

think it’s possible to build a house of facts, but the truth at the centre might be another realm entirely.

The same faces appear and reappear, they return with every generation. An old farmer might be reborn as his neighbour’s infant, a wealthy landowner might come back as an indentured farmer. In villages like mine, individuals pass away, but generations and routines cycle on forever.”

We can’t simply learn from Western art and music, we also need to examine and criticize our daily experience and our own thought. We shouldn’t be afraid of our own voices. The time has come to speak what’s really in our minds.”

and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.

Could an absence of freedom reveal the borders of their lives, their mortality, their fate? What if life and fate turned out to be the same thing?

a man with ambitions of greatness, an emperor in his own mind, a child who once imagined a different life but had come to see the disconnection between what he aspired to be and what he was capable of being. In 1811, when Beethoven was almost fully deaf, he performed this piano concerto,

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.”

“Individualism, privilege. The greed that is corrupting our Revolution.”

“The things you experience,” she continued, “are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. 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.”

Maybe these volumes of books acted as a kind of sponge, shielding the Old Cat from the muck of the city outside her door.

is so much easier to believe than to disbelieve.” “Father,” Sparrow said, but Ba Lute wasn’t listening to him. “After all, what good can come from disbelief? What grows, what changes, what improves? Isn’t it always better for your country, your family, for yourself, to believe in something? Doubt can only lead to confusion and complications. And, in any case, our lives were better. We didn’t mean to grow complacent, surely we weren’t complacent, the struggle isn’t finished, and yet …”

because they are the ones afraid of a world they can’t control.

At the core, is there only desire but no justice? All we’ve learned since the fall of the old dynasties is how to amplify the noise.

How had he never noticed, Sparrow thought tipsily, just how deeply music could lie? The smoothness of all the facades—not only of the apartment, but of everyone in the room and perhaps Beethoven himself—mesmerized him.

“Music that is immediately understood will not outlast its generation.”

If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life?

“I’m sure you know that, without obsession, there is no life’s work. But where does this attentiveness come from? Have you asked yourself? Surely it’s what we each carry, in greater and greater quantity as we age, remembrance.”

She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear? Is it better to have been loved, or to love? Of all his compositions, this is Teacher Sparrow’s most extraordinary.”

Ai-ming, believing everything in books is worse than having no books at all.”

What if everything was unprescribed, she wondered. What kind of world would that be? What if everything, or anything at all, had the capacity to change and begin again?

You had the Revolution to believe in, but what do we have?”

pushing between people like a dumpling between noodles.

Ba doesn’t even know how afraid he is, she thought. His generation has gotten so used to it, they don’t even know that fear is the primary emotion they feel.

But maybe, he thought, a parent should always have failings, some place into which a child can sink her teeth, because only then can a child come to know herself.

Perhaps the places in ourselves that appear empty have only been dormant, unreachable.

On a nearby pillar, someone had pasted up a letter, “I’ve been searching for myself, but I didn’t expect to find so many selves of mine.”

All these slogans and songs had been handed down, she thought, and if the words were not theirs was the emotion that propelled them borrowed, too? What about the students’ desire, their idealism, their righteousness, how many contradictory desires did it serve? Once idealism had belonged to Chairman Mao, the revolutionaries, the heroic Eighth Route Army. Had their generation inherited it? How could a person know the difference between what was real and what was

Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.”

Of course, no one knows tomorrow. Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything will pass.’”

“But these kids think it’s all up to them. They have no understanding of fate.”

Ma had truly loved him—the part of him that he had shown her. Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn’t render each variation false.

“Ling, you must give my regards to the future.”

Remember what I say: not everything will pass.