Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

Big Mother was both big and small: long eyebrows over slender eyes, a small nose and big cheeks, shoulders like hilltops.

Big Mother had a jackdaw laugh, a terrible temper, and a shouting voice, and even when she was a small child, nobody dared to treat her lightly.

Ai-ming told me that solitude can reshape your life. “Like a river that gets cut off from the sea,” she said. “You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself. That’s how I feel. Do you understand, Ma-li?

He was like that. He exploded and then settled right down again. Like a trumpet.

“One should be careful of the sun,” the man said, as if talking to himself. He reached out, pulled the string, and the fan started up once more. “One should learn to practise in the shade.”

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.

She was a performer, a transparent glass giving shape to water, nothing more than a glass.

“ — but my best friend in all the world! I shall stand beside you when the flood comes!” “May the flood bypass us all, sweet Zhuli,” Sparrow said. “May the flood lift us to better shores,” Kai said.

I felt too wide, too full of feeling, for the small space I inhabited.

So desperately did I want to escape my village that I even felt sorry for the grass that grew in that blighted place.

It is one thing to suffer, another thing to be forgotten.

Maybe, no matter his or her convictions, a great musician, a true genius, could play any piece and be believed.

In the darkness, it was unexpectedly near.

“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.