Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood.

The sound disturbed me so much, a low keening that dismantled everything. I thought she was saying, “Help me, help me.” I was terrified that if I touched her, her pain would swell inside my body and become my own forever. I couldn’t bear it.

A story that contained my history and would contain my future.

Sparrow walked out into the moonscape of the fifteenth variation, side by side with his father and yet separated from him.

Big Mother watched moonlight creep beneath the door. It entered the room so piercingly that, when she looked down at her own fingers, she hardly recognized herself.

What must it feel like, I wondered, to begin again? Would I still be the same person if I woke up in a different language and another existence?

What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday.

His music made her turn away from the never-possible and the almost-here, away from an unmade, untested future. The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

Last month, Zhuli had overheard her mother saying that the bodies of those who died in the desert camps were left to decompose in the sand dunes. Scientists and teachers, longtime Party members, doctors, soldiers, paper-pushers and engineers, more than enough to build a better China in the underworld.

“Careful. Even ghosts are illegal here,” Big Mother had said.

She had a hint of New York in her English now, a tension that hadn’t been there before.

In villages like mine, individuals pass away, but generations and routines cycle on forever.”

We shouldn’t be afraid of our own voices. The time has come to speak what’s really in our minds.

We are here to learn and not to forget, here to question and not to answer. You are a man of questions. Of all the destinies of the world, this is a heroic one, and yet it carries suffering for it is hard to live with so little certainty.