Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

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

Second, that in poorer countries, people like Ma and me would not be so lonely. On television, poor countries were crowded places, overloaded elevators trying to rise to the sky. People slept six to a bed,

In fact, the way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.

“If you’re trapped in a room and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It’s obvious, Li-ling, that crying doesn’t help a person live.”

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.

Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words.

She was very, very beautiful. Her eyes were dark and unclouded and the shape of her mouth was, just as the poets say, a rose against her skin.

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.

Da-wei, the adventurer, and May Fourth, the scholar. Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life. She recognized in them desires which, until now, had gone unexpressed in her.

the girl next to her, an erhu major, mocked Zhuli for favouring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor, and continuing to play sonatas by revisionist Soviet composers, including the disgraced formalist, Prokofiev. Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys, and ended her self-criticism with, “Long live the Great Revolution to create a proletarian culture, long live the Republic, long live Chairman Mao!” Had she been critical enough, too critical?

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.

have a new joke: What did the Buddhist birthday card say?” She was already giggling. “It said, ‘Not thinking of you.’” “Ma-li, how many Buddhists does it take to screw in the light bulb?” “Zero! They are the light bulb.”

I wrote my papers and tried to find my mother’s strength within myself. In the last two years of her life, I changed. Ma’s diagnosis was an end but also a beginning, a period of time intensely lived. We were lucky because, finally, we had time to talk,

“Look straight ahead and don’t turn back. Don’t follow illusions, don’t forget to come home.”

It’s taken me years to begin searching, to realize that the days are not linear, that time does not simply move forward but spirals closer and closer to a shifting centre.

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

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.

“Music,” Comrade Glass Eye translated, “is a solace of great labours. So, young man,” he said, turning to Kai, “won’t you play for us? Teacher Sparrow has told us that you are a divine pianist.”

Sparrow thought, his mind rambling, he had known that he would not be a performer, he did not have the genius of interpretation, even if he played well enough. Sparrow’s gifts were of a different temperament. There was music inside him, it was as simple, inexplicable and exhilarating as that.

“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.

They had never been targeted and so, deep in their bones, did not believe they could be. They were free because, in their minds, they persisted in believing they were. Maybe they were right but Zhuli felt as if she were watching an oil drum that was about to explode.

“It was fate that you found us,” the Old Cat said. “Or, to put it another way, fate that I found you again.”

“There’s a joke inside of it,” Zhuli said, “that’s why everyone laughs at me. Do you understand? All these things that we don’t have are nothing compared to the things we did have.

The Forbidden Palace and Tiananmen, Big Mother told him, were built on a north-south axis that mirrored the human body.

In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time?

“The music reminds me of something Zhuli said when we were rehearsing Prokofiev. 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?

She had leaned close and whispered in Ai-ming’s ear: “The world is like a banana, easily bruised. Now is the time to watch and observe, not to judge.

Sometimes the code was descriptive: wěi 暐 (the bright shining of the sun), wēi 溦 (a fine rain), or wēi 渨 (a cove, or a bend in the hills). Sometimes heartbreaking: wèi 未 (not) or wéi 湋 (to flow backwards).

There had been a time in Ai-ming’s life when her father’s quiet had seemed like another person in their midst. Quiet was alive, like a toy you could just keep hitting.

Once, when she was twelve, she had asked him, “The music you used to write, Ba, was it criminal music?” He could only say, “I don’t know.”

the man who thought he could change China from within, introduce economic freedom step by step, serve prosperity one sip at a time. Ai-ming wondered: could such a method ever work? Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious — economic freedom and political reform — a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one mouthful?

unhappy laugh. “Does anyone want to make radios?” she said. “Oh, damn your second uncle!” This was a special Beijing curse and it made Sparrow smile.

You couldn’t live against the reality of the time but it was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private. You had to keep something for yourself, and to do that, you had to turn away from reality. It’s hard to explain if you didn’t grow up here. People simply didn’t have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted.

Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn’t render each variation false.

“Deng Xiaoping and those old farm tools in Beijing should retire! All those old men, it’s like they breathe through the same nostril!”

On the back, he had copied out a quote, “Beauty leaves its imprints on the mind. Throughout history, there have been many moments that can never be recovered, but you and I know that they existed.”

Everyone tells me how much you resemble Zhuli. Don’t ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?”

“Uncle Wen, how many chapters do you think there are?” “Once I asked my wife the very same question. She told me, Wen the Dreamer, it’s foolhardy to think that a story ends. There are as many possible endings as beginnings.’”

letter to a husband that reads, “I would rather be a pig’s wife than yours.”