Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

“Marie,” she said. She turned the handle but it was locked. “Li-ling, are you okay?” A long moment passed. The truth was that I had loved my father more. The realization came to me in the same breath I knew, unquestionably, that my father must have been in great pain, and that my mother would never, ever abandon me. She, too, had loved him. Weeping, I rested my hands on the surface of the water.

“I wanted to take care of them but everything changed so quickly. Everything went wrong.” “There’s no need to defend yourself here,” Ma said. “We’re family and these are not just words, do you understand? These are much more than words.”

In January, I came home from school and found my father’s papers completely exposed—not because she had moved them, but because she had pushed the dining table backwards. One of the boxes had been completely emptied. Ba’s diaries, spread across the table, reminded me of the poverty of the Vancouver flea market. Worse, Ai-ming could read every character while I, his only daughter, couldn’t read a single line.

Do you know why we keep records, Ma-li? There must be a reason but what good does it do to keep such insignificant things?

Ai-ming did something I had not seen her do since her arrival more than a month ago. Not only did she weep, but she was too overcome to turn away or cover her face. 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. I turned away from her. I went into my bedroom and closed the door.

Once each year, my father used to take us to the symphony. We never had good seats but Ba said it didn’t matter, the point was to be there, to exist in the room while music, however old it might be, was being renewed. Life was full of obstacles, my father used to tell me, and no one could be sure that tomorrow or next year, anything would remain the same.

“Before you feel too comfortable,” Ai-ming said, “I should tell you that my grandmother was known to everyone as Big Mother Knife.” “That’s not a real name!” “In this story, every name is true.” She tilted her head mischievously. “Or should I be saying Girl? Or Ma-li? Or Li-ling? Which one is your real name?” “They’re all real.” But even as I said the words, I doubted and wondered, and feared that each name took up so much space, and might even be its own person, that I myself would eventually disappear.

It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.

“Here is the little sand sparrow (or golden wing, or red sparrow or stone sparrow),” the grandmothers would say, “come to peck at our hearts again.”

“This will keep your voice sweet,” she whispered. “Remember what I say: music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, if we faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.”

Unexpectedly, she sang a line of notes, and the music, as natural to her as breathing, contained both grief and dignity. It seemed to expand inside my thoughts even as it disappeared; it was so intimate, so alive, I felt I must have known it all my life. When I asked her if it was Shostakovich, she smiled and said no. She told me this music came from her father’s last composition.

“I assumed,” Ai-ming told me, “that when Big Mother’s stories finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, ‘But that’s how the world is, isn’t it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world?’ “She would say, ‘Are you ready? This next story will last so long you’ll forget you were ever born.’

Wen kept the rejection letter and threw the poems away. He remembered Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear All this I cannot do.

Big Mother brought it up, saying that such fictions were a false world in which her younger sister, if she was not careful, would lose her corporeal being and become only air and longing.

She was thinking of the novel’s characters: Da-wei, the adventurer, and May Fourth, the scholar. Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life.

“You’d be amazed at how few people can tell a story,” the Old Cat was saying. The sound of her voice was as rough and reassuring as pebbles rolling together. “Yet still these new emperors want to ban them, burn them, cross them all out. Don’t they know how hard it is to come by pleasure? Or perhaps they do know. The sly goats.”

The candlelight grazed all the objects of the room. The waiter spoke to us kindly, as if we had come from very far away, from a place where words waited for their echo. I feared my childhood would pass before he finished a sentence. And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists had proved it was, so perhaps Ai-ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.

I felt she saw into me, past every facade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one’s life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security — Ai-ming’s love, the love of an older sister — out of my childhood and into my adult life.

Here, inside my father’s favourite restaurant, I asked the question I had been longing to speak aloud, to ask if she been part of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Ai-ming hesitated for a long time before answering. Finally, she told me about days and nights when more than a million people had come to the Square. Students had begun a hunger strike that lasted seven days and Ai-ming herself had spent nights on the concrete, sleeping beside her best friend, Yiwen. They sat in the open, with almost nothing to shelter them from the sun or rain. During those six weeks of demonstrations, she had felt at home in China; she had understood, for the first time, what it felt like to look at her country through her own eyes and her own history, to come awake alongside millions of others. She didn’t want to be her own still river, she wished to be part of the ocean. But she would never go back now, she said. When her father died, she had been dispossessed. She, too, had passed away.

Was it this box in her arm that was pushing open so many doors in her memory? What kind of creature was this book? She thought of Swirl’s little boy, the one who had died in 1942. He had been only a few years older than Sparrow but, unlike Sparrow, had never seemed afraid of gunshots, explosions, screams or fire. She remembered lifting his small body from her sister’s arms, and how the tears Swirl wept had seemed to burn Big Mother’s skin.

This house, she perceived, would one day decay to rubble. It would disappear from the face of the earth and leave no imprint, and all the books and pages that Wen the Dreamer and his mother, uncles and Old West had so carefully, or fearfully, preserved would be relegated to ash and dust. Except, perhaps, for this book, which would go on to another hiding place, to live a further existence.

Sparrow walked out into the moonscape of the fifteenth variation, side by side with his father and yet separated from him. Glenn Gould played on, knowing that the music was written and the paths were ordained, but sounding each note and measure as if no one had ever heard it before. It was so distinguished and yet so real, that he sighed audibly thinking that, even if he composed music for a hundred thousand years, he would never attain such grace.

“When you were a child, fine, it was okay to be a dreamer. But you’re a bit wiser now, aren’t you? Isn’t it time to start reading the papers and building your future? In a new world, one must learn new ways. You should be studying Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought with greater fervour! You should be applying yourself to revolutionary culture. Chairman Mao says, ‘If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.’”

“When you practically live in the Conservatory,” his father was saying, “when you shut the door to that practice room, do you think no one hears you? Do you believe, truly, that no one notices that you have played Bach for seventy-nine consecutive days, and before that Busoni for thirty-one days! You refuse to trouble yourself with the erhu, pipa or sanxian. And I have done so much for the land reform campaign! I have been a model father, no one can say otherwise . . .” Ba Lute drank morosely and fell silent. “Why do you love this Bach and this Busoni? What does it have to do with you?”

Sparrow wished that he could turn the hands of the clock forward, wind it another year, and then another, to when his symphonies would be played in the Conservatory’s auditorium. He imagined an immense orchestra of Mahlerian proportions, large enough to make the music inside him rattle the ceilings, vibrate the floor and realign the walls. “My son has heard nothing,” Ba Lute said. “He is deaf.” “I’m listening, Ba.” “To me,” his father said, staring at the album cover. “I want you to listen to me.”

Perhaps it was not the papers themselves, their secrets, that were so explosive, but the names of the readers that must be protected. Courageous cliques, resistance fighters, spies and dreamers!

The story began halfway through the lyrics of a song. He read, How can you ignore this sharp awl That pierces your heart? If you yearn for things outside yourself You will never obtain what you are seeking.

“There’s no shame in crying,” Ai-ming whispered. “No shame in remembering. Don’t forget, Ma-li. Nothing’s gone. Not yet.” Her arms released me. I opened my eyes. Because I loved her, I said goodbye. I held on to the character she had drawn for me, (wèi), not yet, the future, a movement or a piece of music, a question still unanswered.

Night after night, stories were passed across the long bed. Months ticked by until at last she knew the intricate histories of all the women she slept beside, and they knew hers. A line of women who, one by one, had fallen through a rip in a dream and woken here.

He said he was writing music, that his Symphony No. 2 was inspired by their journey across China during the war years, the tea houses and blind musicians . . . 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?

Sparrow suddenly remembered something in his pocket. He took out a photograph of Zhuli with her violin, and gave it to her. She had not seen her daughter’s face in more than four years. She stared at the image, as if into an unknown world. “What is the famous poem?” the Translator said. “Destined to arrive in a swirl of dust / and to rise inexorably like mist on the river. Your daughter looks like you. My dear Swirl, the child has your face.” Why do I weep, she thought, trembling. I should be overjoyed. Her daughter had seemed forever lost to her, and yet here she was, so near and close at hand. Perhaps her husband existed like her, still accused of being a traitor and an enemy, and yet their destinies had merged a long time ago.

Ai-ming was the link between us, my father and hers, my mother and me. Until we knew she was safe, how could we possibly let her go? At that time, I thought I never would.

From the opposite wall, Chairman Mao gazed at him with a knowing smile. What have you ever written, Chairman Mao said chidingly, that is original? What can you possibly say that is worthy?

“An hour,” Zhuli said. “Steal an hour from your life and give it to us.”

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.

Her mother reached out, hesitantly, to touch the long ends of Zhuli’s hair. Her eyes were forthright and calm. “Foolish girl,” she said softly, teasingly. “I’ve already been to the sea and back. This is only a small journey.”

Her mother’s eyes flashed an unnerving light, part anger, part madness, part love. “Zhuli, be careful what you say and whom you trust. No one is immune. Everyone thinks that with one betrayal they can save themselves and everyone they love.”

Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart. Maybe, like Sparrow, Kai was terrified that one day the sound would shut off, his mind would go mute, and all the notes would disappear.

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.

“I miss your voices. Sometimes I’m on the subway for hours each day, I feel like a child in the underworld, and I imagine all kinds of things . . . The netherworld is a kingdom of its own, with its own prefectures, magistrates and government, it’s supposed to be another city entirely . . . I am lovesick for some lost paradise / I would rise free and journey far away. Do you know this poem?” Her words frightened me. “Ai-ming, don’t lose hope now, not when you’ve worked so hard.” “Oh, Ma-li, it’s not that I’m unhappy. Far from it. I just want to take another step. I want to live.”

poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thoughts, Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city.

I learned a great deal about the tenacity of love and also the terrible pain of letting it go. The brevity of my parents’ lives has shaped me.

“You’re the only one who knows,” she said. What did I know, I wondered, what had I truly understood back then? “I’ll try, Ma.” “I couldn’t find her. I tried so hard but I couldn’t do it. There’s no more time.”

When I walk through our old neighbourhood, Ai-ming’s voice comes back, as does my mother’s. I wish to describe lives that no longer have a physical counterpart in this world; or perhaps, more accurately, lives that might continue if only I had the eyes to see them. Even now, certain memories are only growing clearer. “Once more, Sparrow recited the letter he had received from Wen the Dreamer. It had its own cadence now, the pulse of a libretto: My dear friend / I trust this letter finds you well! / And that you remember me / your dreaming friend. . . .”

“‘Escape is the only answer,’ Wen said. “‘Escape is death.’ “Wen smiled. He had wasted away. If he lay down to rest his head, I feared he might never rise again. He said, ‘I would never walk knowingly to my death.’

did this, Zhuli thought. How did I do this? Because of me, Old West’s treasures have all been taken away. Her parents came back to her in a rush of images. Was she powerless or powerful? Had Zhuli, herself, opened the door to the demons who barged in? Her parents had been roped together as if they were oxen. Why had her mother wept for pity? How had the men known, Zhuli thought, that she was part girl and part sky, a yo who had been seduced by wood and strings that were not alive. But the qin was alive, she thought, fighting sleep. She and it were the very same thing.

You could not play revolutionary music, truly revolutionary music, if you were a coward in your heart. You could not play if your hands, your wrists, your arms were not free. Every note would be abject, weak, a lie. Every note would reveal you.

“What’s the use of copying those?” a friend had asked Lu Xun. “There’s no use.” “In that case, what’s your reason for copying them?” “There’s no reason.” What was the purpose, Da-wei finally asked himself, of copying a life but erasing himself?

At some point they fell asleep on the floor. He woke to the heaviness of Kai’s arm over him. It was hot, and sometime in the night, Kai had taken off his shirt and now lay, half undressed, beside him. How thin he had grown. Kai held him tightly, his mouth against Sparrow’s neck, his breathing calm and undisturbed, but he was not asleep. Sparrow lay on his back and let his hand drift down to cover Kai’s. The pianist caressed him, tentatively at first and then with greater confidence. Sparrow’s hand followed Kai’s hand and an unbearable heat settled deep into his body. They lay together, frightened, half wishing sleep would come and take them, and release them from this aching, intolerable yearning. They drifted and woke and held one another, and in the fitfulness of Kai’s touch, he felt as loved as he had ever felt. The first wash of dawn arrived without his noticing.

“The young aren’t wrong,” Kai said. There was an aggressive and unfamiliar despair in his eyes. “They say we need to change, remove obstacles and purge ourselves. Land reform brought equality but ten years later, it’s already slipping away. It’s obvious things aren’t well in society.” “Purge ourselves of what?” the Professor asked. “Individualism, privilege. The greed that is corrupting our Revolution.” “The Politburo leaders haven’t managed to become socialists,” San Li said. “Why should we?” There was a murmur of nervous laughter which seemed, to Sparrow, to rise from the books themselves.