By then, Ai-ming had decided that she would attempt to enter the United States. The amnesty for Chinese students arriving after the Tiananmen demonstrations had ended, but, in March, a school friend of her mother’s wrote to say that the U.S. Congress was considering a new immigration bill, similar to the 1986 blanket amnesty that had pardoned 2.8 million illegal aliens and granted them permanent residence. The stipulation then had been that the applicant had to have been residing in the United States for at least four years; no one knew what the new restrictions might be. The friend, who lived in San Francisco, offered Ai-ming a place to live temporarily; she said that to delay was foolish.
My mother had already obtained a forged passport for Ai-ming and other related papers. Neither of us wanted her to leave, but the decision was not ours. My mother’s low income meant that we did not qualify to sponsor Ai-ming’s immigration to Canada.
Ai-ming felt sure that one day, later in our lives, I would visit her in the United States. She would boast that she knew me because, by then, I would be well known. “An actor,” she guessed. I shook my head. “A painter?” “No way.” “A magician!” “Ai-ming!” I groaned, aghast. She smiled and said, “A writer? Sentences are equations, too.” “Maybe.” “An expert in substituting numbers for numbers.” I had no idea what that was but I smiled anyway and said, “Sure.” Only later did I find out it was the Chinese term for algebraic number theory. She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry. 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.
Or perhaps it could be that I have taken all our remaining conversations, all the half-finished and barely begun ones, and put each word into this particular night, that I have projected back in time some explanation for the inexplicable, and the reasons that I loved her and waited eagerly for each and every letter until the day arrived when no more letters came. Did she try to return to Shanghai and to her mother? Did she make a success of herself in the United States? Had there been an accident? Despite my efforts, I still do not know. It could be that I am misremembering everything. I had only a small understanding of the things that had happened in her country, my father’s country, in 1989, at the end of spring and the beginning of summer, the events that had necessitated her leaving. 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.
Ai-ming told me that I would always be family to her, I would always be her little sister, Ma-li, Marie, Girl. With my many names, I felt like a tree with crowns of branches. She sang snippets of songs Big Mother had taught her and we laughed all the way home. When we arrived, I felt that, little by little, our arms disappeared, the shape of our bodies ceased to exist, even our faces, so that inside we were well and truly hidden, erased from the world. But this did not seem a loss; we embraced the possibility of being part of something larger than ourselves.
Back in our apartment, Ai-ming had not turned the lights on. She made tea and we lay in the darkness and stared out the windows, into the courtyard and the neighbouring, mysterious homes. Ai-ming continued to tell me the story of the Book of Records, which was not, after all, a recapitulation of those thirty-one notebooks, but about a life much closer to my own. A story that contained my history and would contain my future.
WHEN SWIRL AND Wen the Dreamer married in Bingpai in 1951, the singers and booksellers of Shanghai arrived bristling with musical instruments and hand-copied books. Wen’s uncles slapped his back, sucked the ends of their long pipes and shouted, “Your wife is a treasure. Old West is smiling down on you!” They played cards and smoked so heavily, the resulting thick fog washed out into the road and confused passing bicyclists. The Old Cat, in a three-piece suit, danced with such elegance that even Ba Lute, itchy in his peasant clothes, wept as he played. Afterwards, the Old Cat proposed a toast to “that infamous explorer, that giant among men, Da-wei!” Everyone drank, most thinking this must be the scoundrel who had broken her heart. The party seemed to expand beyond its limits, twirling forward like a well-known song with extra verses.
Sparrow had written a piece of music, a truncated sonata with main theme and development, and he hummed it to Wen the Dreamer as the sun rose into the fog on the second day. In the echoing hum after he had finished, Wen said, “You are, of course, an acolyte of the illustrious Herr Bach?”
Sparrow didn’t understand four of the words in that sentence but he nodded just in case.
“In that case, I have something for you,” Wen said. He presented him with three precious records, imported from America.
Finally, on the third day, as the afternoon drew to a close, Swirl and Big Mother Knife sang a duet, and in their singing bade farewell to one another, to the narrow beds and the childhood fears they had shared, and the open roads that had marked this passage from one breath of life to the next. “I have fulfilled my duty to our parents,” Big Mother told herself. Swirl would live here, in the village of Bingpai, in Wen the Dreamer’s family home. She clutched her sister one more time, before turning away.
Everything passes, Big Mother thought, as she sat in the low bunk of the train returning home.
Dry shells of sunflower seeds cracked like kindling beneath her shoes. Ba Lute had met old friends from Headquarters and gone to play cards in their private compartment; Sparrow was reading a discarded copy of Literary and Artistic Issues in the Soviet Union. The landscape passed in waves of green and yellow as if the country were an endless unharvested sea. West of Suzhou the train stopped and goods were hustled out by a long line of porters. Big Mother stared out the window and saw a woman her age standing on the opposite platform, a small child in front of her. The little girl seemed lost in thought. The mother’s hands rested protectively on the child’s shoulders. Big Mother closed her bad eye and pressed the other to the glass.
The woman, on closer inspection, was crying freely. Tears slipped unchecked down her cheeks. Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army moved behind her, circling the mother and child with a sly friendliness. The whistle sounded and the doors of the train slammed closed. Still the woman didn’t move.
The train pulled away and the mother, child and soldiers vanished from sight.
Ba Lute returned, half-drunk, his limbs clumsy. He tried to fold himself into the space beside her, only partly succeeding. “Despite your meanness, you’re the one I come back to,” he mumbled, eyes closed. “Home from the tiresome world.” Big Mother wanted to insult him but she restrained herself. Her husband’s lips were thin with sadness and his face had aged. Even his grey stubble looked desolate. Outside the window, the landscape hurried past as if it to erase everything that had come before.
—
A year passed, and then four or five, in which Big Mother Knife rarely saw her sister. Swirl and Wen now had a daughter, Zhuli, who had been born a ten-pound juggernaut before stretching into a lith
e and sweet-natured child. “The girl,” wrote Swirl, “sings all the time. This child is the mystery at the centre of my life.”
Big Mother wrote back, “They turn into wretches.”
It was 1956 and Big Mother’s family had been in Shanghai for almost a decade. In quick succession, she had given birth to two more fluffy-haired boys with soft, triangular eyebrows. Ba Lute had insisted on naming them Da Shan (Big Mountain) and Fei Xiong (Flying Bear). What next, Big Mother had shouted at him, Tasty Mutton? The walls of the alleyway house had begun to press in on her like a jacket grown too tight. This morning, for instance, Da Shan was jabbing all ten fingers into his younger brother’s screaming face. Meanwhile, Sparrow was deaf to everything but the records he had borrowed from the Conservatory. Her oldest son was about to graduate with a double major in piano and composition but, night after night, he sat with his foolish forehead pressed to the gramophone, as if the machine was his mother. He was transcribing Bach’s Goldberg Variations into jianpu and the bourgeois music fluttered through the house, on and on, until Big Mother heard it even when the rooms were silent. Meanwhile, her hero husband was busy leading another land reform campaign, he was always away, overthrowing a landlord’s family, repossessing fields of mung beans, flax and millet, and maybe the air itself, on behalf of the People. And if it wasn’t land reform, it was song and dance troupes, political study sessions, Party meetings, or private flute lessons for yet another influential cadre. Did he even teach at the Conservatory anymore? At home he was petulant and insufferable, and looked at Big Mother and the boys as if at a very dirty window. She ignored him. It wasn’t difficult. The insults that should have pricked her heart were as harmless as porridge.
Still, those pretty piano notes were mocking all the movements she made. They dripped from the kitchen to the bedroom to the parlour, seeping like rainwater over the persimmons on the table, the winter coats of her family, and the placid softness of Chairman Mao’s face in the grey portrait framed on the wall. She thought he looked doughy, not at all like the handsome, intrepid fighter he had once been. Regret crawled through her heart and limbs; did it crawl through Chairman Mao’s? Despite her best efforts, loneliness was encroaching upon Big Mother Knife.
Around noon, after the boys had left for school, Ba Lute unexpectedly arrived home. Her husband carried his army bag over his shoulders, and grinned as if he’d just won a nasty brawl. His padded coat was the same oyster-shell blue as the winter sky, except for a streak of what looked like blood, and it saddened Big Mother that the outside world, with all its hatreds, both petty and historical, had come inside her home.
“Stupid me,” she said. “I thought the war ended in 1949.”
Ba Lute had been gone for six weeks and, at the thought of seeing his family again, had broken into a run as soon as he entered the laneway. His wife’s indifference made him feel like a beggar. Big Mother was still in her nightdress and her curly hair stood up on her head like cotton batting. He couldn’t decide whether to scold her or comfort her.
He threw down his copy of Jiefang Daily and a pack of Front Gate cigarettes. “The Party has launched another bold campaign. Aren’t you interested? And why aren’t you dressed?”
“Oh, good. A new campaign. As Chairman Mao says, ‘After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be the enemies without guns.’ ”
He ignored her tone. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
“They closed our office because the pipes froze,” Big Mother said. “Everything flooded. We’re a unit of more than two hundred people and the committee has to find a new space for us. So I’ve been liberated.”
“That’s no excuse to stay indoors and feel sorry for yourself!”
Big Mother eyed her husband.
He sighed and tried to soften his tone. “Isn’t there anything to eat?” He took off his coat and went to the water basin, drinking straight from the dipper. Underneath all the padding, she saw that Ba Lute’s clothes seemed far too large, as if he had halved in size. Perhaps he had donated his flesh to the peasants. She got up, smashed around and finally slapped some food down in front of him. Ba Lute acted as if hadn’t eaten in a week. After polishing off a mountain of rice and a leg of chicken, their entire meat ration for the week, Ba Lute conceded he had missed her.
She sniffed. “Is it so bad out there?”
“The usual.” He found a clean cloth and wiped his mouth, then his whole face, pressing down on his eyes. Ba Lute had always been too round and cocky for his own good. This new thinness gave him a vulnerable, starved look, which confused her. He ran the cloth over the back of his neck. “Our land reform policy is glorious, but the People are in disarray. Still, it’s necessary work we’re doing. No one can say otherwise.” Without seeming to realize he was doing it, he started humming “Weeds Cannot Be Wiped Out.”
“You and land reform,” she said. “You’d think your mother gave birth to the idea.”
Ba Lute was so startled that he laughed. He checked himself and said abruptly, “Go to the devil, how can you joke like that? You’re going to get yourself killed.” As he put the cloth down, his hands shook. “Big Mother, you’ve got to learn to hold your tongue.”
She looked at the bone on his plate. Picked clean. “You’re home for awhile, are you?”
“I am.”
“Good. Because I’m going to Bingpai to see my sister.”
“Eh?” he said. His eyebrows lifted so high she thought they would fly away. “But what about your husband?”
She picked up the bone and chewed on the end. “He’ll survive.”
Ba Lute smiled but then, thinking over what she said, frowned. He slapped his hand on the table, working himself up into a grand annoyance. “Big Mother, listen here. Don’t you know we’re right in the middle of a life-and-death campaign? Please! Don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you, there’s a war going on in the countryside.”
“It’s always a war with you people.”
“There you go again! Now just hold on and think it through.”
Once Ba Lute got going, she couldn’t stop him. She stared hungrily at his empty plate.
“Some of these peasants, these desperate people,” he continued, “have to be forced to remember every humiliation. Forced! They have to be driven nearly out of their minds with grief before they can find the courage to pick up their knives and drive the landlords out. Of course they’re afraid. In the whole history of the world, what peasant revolution has ever made a lasting change?” He rubbed his bald head again. “I know what I’m talking about, don’t think I don’t. Anyway, it was all calming down but the new campaign stirred everyone up again. Encouraging the masses to criticize the Party! And now they’ve done it….”
“My work unit has already issued me a travel permit.”
“Your husband forbids it.”
“Chairman Mao says women hold up half the sky.” She took his plate, picked up the chicken bone and flung it towards the scraps bucket. She missed. The bone hit the wall and stuck there. “Be a model father,” she said, “and look after your sons.”
“Do you always have to be so stubborn?” he yelled. Ba Lute slumped forward over the table. “You weren’t so pigheaded when I married you.” He was like that. He exploded and then settled right down again. Like a trumpet.
For the first time in two months, Big Mother felt slightly better. “It’s true,” she nodded. “I wasn’t.”
—
The journey from Shanghai to the village of Bingpai was nineteen hours by train and minibus. By the end of her journey, Big Mother Knife felt like someone had broken both her legs. In Bingpai, she stumbled from the bus into the drizzle and found herself in an empty field. The village, which she remembered as prosperous, looked bedraggled and ugly.
When at last she trudged up the mountain path to Wen the Dreamer’s family house, she was in a foul mood. At his gate, she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Surely the driver was a crook, and the fool h
ad let her off at the wrong village or even the wrong county. Yet…there was no denying that the flagstones looked familiar. The courtyard was missing its gate, it had plain disappeared. Seeing lamplight, she marched through the inner courtyard and into the south wing. There was junk everywhere, as if the fine house was about to be torn down. Entering, she saw a half-dozen wraiths crawling on the ground. In her fright, she nearly dropped her soul (her father’s expression), but then Big Mother Knife realized these were not wraiths but people. People who were busily removing the tiles and digging up the floors.
“Greetings, Sister Comrades!” she said.
A wraith stopped its digging motion and peered at her.
Big Mother pressed on. “I see you are busy with reconstruction work? Each one of us must build the new China! But can you tell me, where I should go to find the family that resides here?”
The woman who was staring at her said, “Thrown out. Executed like criminals.”
“Travelling–like criminals?” Big Mother said. Her instinct was to laugh. She thought she had mistakenly heard xíng lù “executed” (刑 戮) rather than xíng lù “traveller” (行 路 ).
Another woman made a gun with her hand, shot at her own head, and broke into a chilling smile. “Firstly the man,” she said. “Secondly,” she shot again, “the woman.”
“They buried silver coins under the floor,” another said. “That money belongs to the village, they know it does, and we’ll uncover it all.”
Big Mother reached her hand out but the wall was too far away.
“Who are you, anyway?” the woman with the make-believe gun said. “You look familiar.”
“I would like to know who gave you permission to be here,” Big Mother said. To her fury, she could detect a trembling in her voice.
“Permission!” the woman hooted.
“Permission,” the others echoed. They smiled at her as if she was the wraith.
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