—
After vanishing for years, Sparrow’s father returned a revolutionary hero. Ba Lute was a tower of a man, round as well as tall, with wide hands, thick feet, and startling triangular-shaped eyebrows. A Flying Horse cigarette was forever crushed between his meaty lips. But the soft waves of jet black hair that Big Mother had once described to Sparrow had disappeared; his father’s enormous bald head gleamed like the moon.
On their first meeting, his father plucked Sparrow from the ground and flew him over his head. “I was a book of zero when I joined the Party!” Ba Lute shouted. Sparrow tried not to vomit. He had always been a slight boy, and this slightness now convinced his father that Sparrow was still a little child. “I was a pig’s ear!” his father cried, strangely triumphant. “But our Supreme Party crushed me down and made me new again. I was reborn by the blood of my brothers in the People’s Liberation Army! Long live the Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao Zedong, the Red Sun, the Great Saving Star!”
Held aloft in the air, Sparrow gazed at his father in painful, dizzying devotion.
—
The Party favoured them with a traditional laneway house, not far from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. It was two storeys, with an inner courtyard and spacious side wings, with room enough for five families, yet despite the dire housing shortage, only two other people shared the courtyard: a husband and wife surnamed Ma, who had lost all three sons in the fighting. Together with Ba Lute, they painted the words, “Trust the Party in Everything” on their common brick wall, their feet tapping an intricate rhythm all the while.
Big Mother was the only one who didn’t have the heart for music. Here in her childhood city, she found herself dreaming of her dead parents and her missing brothers, of Swirl’s lost husband and child, fantasizing that they, like Ba Lute, would miraculously appear. She was going blind in one eye (“From looking at you,” she told her husband) and she saw that her youth, those years of catastrophe and flight, of running along a precipice, had come to an end. Gone were the crushing sorrows and terrors, and gone, too, was her independence. She feared she had no idea how to live in peace.
Worse, she had somehow ended up married to the king of slogans. Everything was ideological with the man. Ba Lute demanded shoes made of humble straw rather than everyday cloth and, in addition to committing the blackboard news to memory, he read the Jiefang Daily religiously, his arms open as if to hug the words of Chairman Mao. The Great Helmsman, her husband informed her one morning, had said love was no excuse for withholding criticism.
“When did I ever spit the word love at you?” she said. “You Communists are all delusional.”
Aghast, her husband twitched his cigarette at her. “If you had seen me at Headquarters, you would know how my comrades respected me!”
“Forgive me…I was lugging your son around on my back. I walked five thousand li hoping to trip over your big face again! Meanwhile, where were you? Off at ‘Headquarters,’ playing the piano and dancing polkas. You melon! Who’s the true revolutionary hero?”
He dismissed her. It didn’t matter. Their incompatible love made her feel hollow, as if the world had turned out to be flat after all. In honour of her husband’s hero status, Big Mother Knife had been assigned an excellent administrative job at the Shanghai No. 2 Electric Wire Company. The twice-daily political meetings were so endless and excruciating she wanted to stick her fingers in the sockets.
By now, Sparrow was eleven years old, and his parents’ arguments floated past him as lightly as a whistle of wind. In addition to his regular schoolwork, Ba Lute was tutoring him in music theory and jianpu, a notation using numbers, lines and dots
which Sparrow had first encountered when he was three years old, long before any other writing had entered his life. His father said that jianpu notation was accessible to everyone, and even the humblest daughter of the humblest peasant could read it. Numbers could describe another world. Now, while his father sulked and his mother shouted, he swayed at his desk, singing and singing again this exhilarating music in front of him, his audition piece for the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Every hair on his head seemed to flutter like wings. The score his father had given him to learn was Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor, arranged for the Chinese two-stringed violin, the erhu.
BY FEBRUARY, AI-MING HAD been with us only two months, but it felt as if she had been there always. One night, I remember, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 came on the radio. Partway through the third movement, Ai-ming sat down and gazed into the speakers as if into the face of a person she knew. Even I, as young as I was, felt disturbed by the music and the emotions it communicated. Or perhaps this is all hindsight, because later, through the Book of Records, I learned that Shostakovich had written this symphony in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Terror when more than half a million people were executed, including some of Shostakovich’s closest friends. Under terrible pressure, he composed the symphony’s third movement, a largo that moved its audience to tears by restating and dismantling the theme of the first movement: what initially had seemed simple and familiar, even artless, was turned inside out and refolded into another dimension. The first movement had been deceptive. Inside, concealed and waiting to be heard, were ideas and selves that had never been erased.
I was doing the dishes when the movement began, and at its close they were still unfinished, my hands wrinkled in the cold water, my fingers relaxed against the serrated edge of a knife.
“When I was little,” Ai-ming said, standing up, “the radio played only eighteen pieces of approved music. Nothing else. We called them the yàngbǎnxì, revolutionary operas. But often, Ma-li, I would catch my father listening to illegal music.”
Her father, the sparrow. “Listening like a bird?” I asked, immersed in the story that was now part of our day-to-day routine.
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. “That’s how Sparrow was, he wanted to exist through music, too. When I was small, he played his hidden records only at night, never in the day. In the village where I grew up, the nighttime sky felt everlasting.”
“But, Ai-ming, how can music be illegal?” The idea seemed so absurd, I almost laughed.
She frowned at the dishes in the sink which appeared to have multiplied rather than diminished, took the washcloth and shifted me firmly aside. She let the cold water out and started again.
Many nights, Ai-ming said, ignoring my question, her father’s music pulled her from sleep. Sparrow, she slowly pieced together, had been one of Shanghai’s most renowned composers. But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades. Ai-ming heard him humming fragments of music when he thought no one was listening. Eventually she came to understand that these fragments were all that remained of his own symphonies, quartets and other musical works. The written copies had been destroyed.
Ai-ming might wake hearing Shostakovich or Bach or Prokofiev; she knew them all, but their music didn’t interest her. Beside the hump of her grandmother’s snoring body, she fidgeted, hoping that Big Mother Knife would wake; half-asleep, she said things Ai-ming wasn’t supposed to hear.
“I was a nuisance,” Ai-ming told me. “To wake her up, I would loudly sing ‘One’s Young Life Is Like a Flower,’ which was also illegal at the time. My grandmother taught it to me by accident and I could do a perfect imitation of her.” At my request, Ai-ming demonstrated. Big Mother Knife, with her delicate hands and wrestler’s shoulders, her brittle yet sonorous alto, her curled hair like a cotton ball, came to life before my eyes: Ah, my beloved country, when will I fall into your embrace?<
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Most nights, Big Mother woke, cursed her grand-daughter angrily and fell back asleep. But now and then, she softened.
“My stories are too old for you,” she might say. “You don’t have the brains to understand them.”
“Maybe you don’t tell them well.”
“My stories are too vast. You haven’t got the patience. Go play in the dirt instead.”
“I have more patience than you.”
“Belligerent child!”
In these moments, Ai-ming knew her father was eavesdropping. She could hear the muffled hiccups of his laughter. The smell of his tobacco slid over them, as if he was right on the other side of the wall.
“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.’
“ ‘Hurry up, Big Mother!’
“ ‘Listen now: one night, a young man with poems folded up in his pocket heard Swirl singing in the New World Teahouse. It was the first time he’d been there, and the poor soul fell in love with her. Well, who wouldn’t fall in love with her?’ Big Mother said. Why did her voice break like that? Was she crying? ‘No one could help it. That was the world back then.’ ”
WEN THE DREAMER, the aspiring poet, was born in the village of Bingpai to a prosperous family with a shaky history. Back in 1872, his grandfather had received a great honour: the Imperial court selected him to be one of 120 children sent to study in America. The family sold everything to help pay for the boy’s journey. Fortune smiled on them for, after only ten years, that crackerjack son, now called Old West, sailed home, having lived next door to Mark Twain, studied at Yale and obtained his degree in civil engineering.
But after ten years at the Shanghai Armoury, Old West suddenly died of consumption, leaving behind a wife and baby daughter, and owing ten years’ skilled labour to the Emperor. It was a calamity. Old West’s father wept ten thousand tears and called destruction down upon himself. The four remaining sons, determined to prove their worth, banded together. Within a generation, the brothers acquired a dozen acres of land, including apple orchards and an enviable brick house, and were among the wealthiest men in Bingpai.
Meanwhile, Old West’s daughter grew up terrified of her father’s books, as if they held a disease that could destroy a village. Little West packed the books into a container and buried the lot of them. Her only son, born long after she had given up hope of a child, was the apple of her eye, and she hoped he would grow up to be a proper landlord like his great-uncles. Instead the boy lost his head to poetry. The boy was a walking cartload of books, he sat at his desk, calligraphy brush in hand, gazing up at the ceiling as if waiting for words to swallow him. His bedroom appeared to float, disconnected, above the solid world of transactions, commerce and land. She called him, sometimes gently, sometimes roughly, Wen the Dreamer. He was an observant and sensitive teenager and when the war came, it broke him.
In 1949, when the fighting ended, Little West sent him to Shanghai, hoping it would restore his vigour. Books made all his pockets heavy. When acquaintances met him on the road, Wen said he couldn’t stop to discuss the Communists or the Nationalists, Stalin, Truman or the weather, because he was composing a six-character eight-line regulated verse in his head, and any variation in his path would push the words out of order. It was a lie. In fact, he was empty of poetry and afraid of words. During the war, Bingpai had been ravaged by the worst famine in a century, but he himself had never known hunger. He had sat in his study memorizing ancient and modern verses while, outside, labourers ate nothing but tree bark, mothers sold their children and young boys died horrifying deaths on the front lines. Half the village of Bingpai starved to death, but the gentry, inheritors of seemingly limitless resources, survived. Now, the Shanghai literati were talking about a new kind of poetry, a revolutionary literature worthy of a reborn nation, and the idea of it both moved and troubled him. Could the avant-garde express the ideas that went unspoken, could it confront the hypocrisy of lives like theirs? He did not know. When his poems came back from one of the revolutionary journals, a thick brush had scrawled across the page: “Excellent calligraphy. But your poems still sleep in their pastoral prison. Moon this, wind that, and who cares about your bloody grandfather?! Wake up!!!”
He knew they were right. 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.
By chance, he wandered into the New World Teahouse. A young woman was singing and Wen the Dreamer, perplexed and enchanted, listened to her for five straight hours. Afterwards, he wanted to speak to her, to commend the harsh beauty of her music, but with what words? The young woman’s music contained poetry and the written word, and yet it travelled far beyond them to a realm, a silence, he had believed inexpressible. Wen wanted to call out to her but instead he watched her disappear, alone, up a flight of stairs. Nothing had shifted, the world was still the same, and yet, walking home, Wen felt as if his life had snapped in two. He stood for a long time looking at the muddy, sleepless river, which in the darkness was only a sound, trying to understand what had changed.
—
On a muggy August night, a package arrived for Swirl in the quarters she shared with three widows. This package contained a single notebook: the shape of a miniature door, bound together by a length of walnut-coloured cotton string. There was no postmark, return address or explanatory letter: only her name written on the envelope in a square yet affecting calligraphy. She sat down to her dinner of salted turnips but the notebook, occupying the empty space beside her, beckoned. Swirl opened it to the first page and began to read. It was a story, handwritten in brush and ink. She hadn’t read a story in years, and at first could make no sense of it.
Page by page, her cramped, lonely room dissolved; she breathed in the dusty air of an imaginary Beijing where the government was on its knees, the old beliefs were all corrupted, and two friends, Da-wei and May Fourth, once intimate in every way, had arrived at “the tenth word,” the place where vows are broken and lives diverge. When the notebook ended just as it had begun–in mid-sentence–she retrieved the envelope and shook it mightily, hoping that another might fall out, but it was empty. She sat on her bed in the newly quiet room, consoling herself by setting a passage of the story to music. When she sang the words, they took on yet another life, and filled the room with possibility. Her neighbours, the widows, rapped on the walls and yelled at her to be quiet.
A few days later, a second chapter arrived. Why was someone harassing her with mail? The following week, she received a third and a fourth. The novel continued, following first Da-wei and then May Fourth, as they made their way across a China in ruins. The narrative leaped and turned, as if entire chapters or pages had been ripped out; but Swirl, too, had been uprooted by the war, and she had no trouble filling in the missing gaps. Bit by bit, her irritation gave way to recognition and, slowly, without her realizing it, attachment.
On its surface, the story was a simple epic chronicling the fall of empire, but the people trapped inside the book reminded her of people she tried not to remember: her brothers and parents, her lost husband and son. People who, against their will, had been pushed by war to the cliff’s edge. She read the fourth, ninth and twelfth notebooks as if reading would keep these characters anchored to the pages. Of course she was only a spectator; one by one, they spilled into the sea and were swept away. There were moments
so piteous, she wanted to slam the book shut and close her eyes against its images, yet the novel insistently pulled her forward, as if its very survival depended on leaving the past and the dead behind. But what if the novel was written by someone she knew? Her family had all been singers, performers and storytellers. What if they had somehow lived, or lived long enough to write this fictional world? These irrational thoughts frightened her, as if she was being tempted backwards into a grief larger than the world or reality itself. What if the notebooks came from her dead husband, a Nationalist soldier killed at the start of the war, letters misplaced in the chaos and only now arriving? Swirl had heard of such a thing happening, a bag of mail lost in northwest China in the fourth century, preserved by the desert air. Thirteen hundred years later, an Hungarian explorer discovered them in a collapsed watchtower. But such things were as good as fairy tales. She chided herself for her delusions.
The parcels arrived on Sunday or Thursday evenings, when she was occupied in the teahouse downstairs, performing The Dream of the West Chamber. Could the writer be someone in the audience, or did he or she simply take the opportunity to slip in unnoticed, leaving the parcel at her door? Sleepless, she burned candles she couldn’t afford to waste and reread the notebooks, searching for clues. Something else had caught Swirl’s attention. The writer was playing with the names of Da-wei and May Fourth. In the first notebook, for instance, wèi had been written 位 which means place or location. In the third, wèi 卫, an ancient kingdom in Henan or Hebei Province. And in the sixth notebook, wēi 危, another name for Taiwan, as if the writer’s location was coded into the book itself.
The day she received the twenty-fifth notebook, she met her sister in Fuxing Park. “I can’t shake the feeling that I know this person,” Swirl said. “But why such an elaborate game and why am I the recipient? I’m just a widow with no literary taste whatsoever.”
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