“In this vast and glorious country,” Big Mother said gently, “everywhere is home.”
“Isn’t it so!” the woman said, drawing her fingers through the seeds as if in search of a silver coin. The countryside flew past the windows, woken by the first light of morning. All around them, people were asleep in their seats or pretending to be. Patiently, the young woman attempted to extract the reason for Big Mother’s visit to Bingpai (“Your sister is who, did you say? That young lady who used to sing in the teahouses?”), working like a needle beneath Big Mother’s skin. Big Mother, contemplating the sunflower husks accumulating on the floor, and thinking, in general, of the greed that propelled wars and occupations, and of the bloody excesses of civil war, opened her thermos and poured a generous cup of tea for her companion. As often happened, Big Mother Knife decided, impulsively, to adjust her strategy.
“I was pleased,” she began, “to witness the glories of land reform here in the countryside.”
“Genius!” the young woman said weightily. “Devised–no, composed!–by the Chairman himself. A program of thought that has no equal in the history of all mankind, past, present, or futuristic.”
“Indeed,” Big Mother said. They sat in thoughtful silence for a moment and then she continued, “I, myself, welcome any sacrifice to emancipate our beloved countrymen from these heinous–”
“Oh, very heinous!” the young woman whispered.
“–feudal chains. No doubt your husband, the deputy village head, has done his duty with distinction.” Big Mother reached into her coat pocket and withdrew a handful of White Rabbit candies.
“Wa!” the young woman said in astonishment.
“Please, try one. Try several. These delicacies were sent to us from the Shanghai propaganda chief himself. The flavour is delicate yet robust. Did I mention that my husband is a composer and a musician? They say his revolutionary operas have found favour with Chairman Mao himself.”
“Ah, ah,” the woman said softly.
Big Mother dropped her voice. The words seemed to come to her as if seeping out from the thirty-one notebooks in her bag, which Swirl had insisted she take to Shanghai; her sister would dispose of the love letters herself, or so Big Mother hoped. “But our Great Helmsman has always directed our affairs, in both grand and humble ways. Of course, my husband’s more modest than the most bashful ox, but he journeyed alongside our nation’s heroes all the way to Yan’an, ten thousand li! My husband played with such revolutionary fervour that his fingers were more calloused than his shoeless feet. Yes, every step he played the guqin. He had to re-string the bow with horsehairs.”
“No hairs were more joyously volunteered!”
Big Mother allowed herself a smile. “I’m sure it is so.”
The young woman accepted another handful of sweets. She slipped all the pieces except one into her shirt pocket. “Your husband is from where?”
“From Hunan Province, the very cradle of the Revolution,” Big Mother said. The woman was nervously unwrapping her candy and Big Mother waited patiently for the crackling of the paper to subside. “His revolutionary name is Song of the People. He is, if you allow me, a big brute of a man. A true, modern spirit.”
“I have heard his name,” the woman said chewing daintily, the candy sticking her words together.
“The last time he came to your village was for my sister’s wedding. Actually, Wen the Dreamer and my husband are as close as brothers.”
Did she sense consternation? Had even the sunflower seeds suddenly turned cold?
“Our village would give your husband a great welcome,” the hardy young woman said. “If you could just let us know in advance so that all the necessary preparations can be made–”
“Oh no,” Big Mother said kindly. “He dislikes having a fuss made over him. As Chairman Mao so honourably says, ‘We cadres in particular must advocate diligence and frugality!’ But I’m certain he will visit, he has such great feeling for the people here, in particular, as I say, Comrade Wen the Dreamer. Please, have another candy.”
As the bus heaved on, the two women took turns pouring each other tea, sharing their dried fruit, and paying poetic tribute to their husbands, fathers and great leaders. Fourteen hours later, when the bus arrived in Shanghai, Big Mother Knife had consumed so many sunflower seeds she felt as if she could beat her wings and fly away. The young woman clasped her hands and wished her longevity, prosperity and revolutionary glory, and they stood calling to one another like traffic directors, long after the bus had emptied and filled once more. Big Mother walked home from the bus station, through the rowdy twilit streets, and the novel in her bag gave her a pleasant, illusory calm, as if she were leaving a secret meeting and the documents she carried could bring down systems, countries, lies and corruption.
Perhaps it was not the papers themselves, their secrets, that were were so explosive, but the names of the readers that must be protected. Courageous cliques, resistance fighters, spies and dreamers! She did not know why these thoughts came to her, but it was as if the very air shrouded the buildings in paranoia. How small yet heavy the notebooks felt. She began to wonder if Wen the Dreamer, during his hours of copying the Book of Records, had merged with the author or even the characters themselves, or perhaps he had transformed into something more expansive and intangible? When he finished copying, did he go back to being himself or were the very structures of his thoughts, their hue and rhythm, subtly changed? Past Beijing Road, she came to familiar streets, narrow laneways and finally the back door of their courtyard. Already she could hear a voice singing, a female colleague rehearsing with Ba Lute or perhaps just the radio, turned up wastefully high. When Big Mother entered the side wing of the house, her husband was hovering guiltily just inside the door, his shirt crookedly buttoned. He scratched his shiny head and looked at her in confused panic, blocking her entrance.
“Let me in, for heaven’s sake!” she cried.
Deflating, he folded sideways. She saw that the room was dark, that the only residual light came from the lamps outside. She set her bag down. “Did you run out of kerosene?” she asked. And then she heard it: a low trickle of sound beneath the blaring radio. She looked to Ba Lute for an explanation but he only shrugged and smiled sheepishly.
Her heart fell to her knees. A tart. A singer so operatic she needed ten radios at maximum volume to cover her cries. Grabbing the broom, Big Mother followed the sound towards the bedrooms. At the first door, she peered inside and saw her two youngest sons asleep, almost on top of each other, as if fleeing from dreams on the northern side of the bed. She pressed on to Ba Lute’s study. How did he dare? She would smash his nose, she would rip out his remaining hairs, she would…The door was closed but still the sound slid out, like water brimming from a glass. She turned the handle and pushed.
Two lamps glowed dimly on the far side of the room. She gazed in the direction of the light. Sparrow was sitting at his father’s desk, his pen poised over a long sheet of paper. There was paper, in fact, everywhere, in the armchair, on the carpet, cascading across the desk, balled-up sheets and ink-stained pages. On the record player, a disc turned.
“Have the men in this house lost their minds?” she said finally, lowering the broom.
Her son looked down and stared expectantly at the strewn pages as if they might answer on his behalf.
“Shall I leave this madhouse and return to the sane, oh yes, the marvellously sane, countryside?”
“Oh,” Sparrow said, when no one else answered. “No.”
“We have a minor, which is to say, a small and unimportant, school project,” Ba Lute said. That brute, that Song of the People, had come up behind her.
“A project! To exist in darkness like cavemen?” Big Mother asked. “To see how long it takes before state radio makes you deaf?”
Ba Lute pushed her gently into the room and shut the door behind them. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “It’s just that, some of our interests–a few musical interests�
�do not need to be broadcast.”
She picked up a sheet of paper from the floor and held it up to her good eye. She studied the numbers that climbed up and down the page, the numbers one through seven, the lines and dots, the chords lifting like ladders. They were transcribing music into jianpu notation.
“A school project?” she said, doubtfully.
“Extracurricular,” Sparrow said. There was ink on his face.
“But why?”
The music from the record player swirled faintly around them, adding its own thoughts to the conversation. The baroque constructions her son loved so much, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Sparrow, grown so tall, was standing beside her now. When had the child grown? Only yesterday he had been running beneath the tables of the teahouses, wearing the rough green hat she had knitted for him, the little flaps cupping his ears.
“For pleasure,” her son said quietly.
“Yes,” Ba Lute said, as if the word had dropped from the sky. “For pleasure!”
“But what use is this? If it’s sheet music you want, why don’t you just take your son to Old Zhang? Jianpu is for little children and teahouse singers, not Conservatory students.” The record ran on, parsing its phrases into the air, and she saw that her husband and son were not listening to her, they were listening to it. “I’m tired,” she said abruptly. “I’m going to bed. Don’t bother me.” She turned and left the room, just as the music trumpeted into a bouquet of sound, raining down on her like false applause. She closed the door behind her.
All night, beneath the blare of the radio, music trickled through the house. She heard it, faintly, when she lay on her left side and then on her right, when she lay face down, face up, or diagonally across the bed. Finally, she crept out of her room and into bed with her boys. Flying Bear slept heavily, his paws curled and toes pointing up, but her dear Da Shan crossed the bed to be with her. This one, too, had grown too quickly. He rolled awkwardly into her arms. “I’m glad you are home, Mama,” he said, his voice drowsy with sleep. He clutched at her hand and held her, reminding Big Mother of Swirl and her little daughter, and that rough kang, and the quiet smoke from the cigarettes of Wen the Dreamer.
—
In the spring, Big Mother returned to Bingpai, and then twice more in the winter and following spring. Life had quieted in the village and although Swirl’s family still lived in the mud hut, the family had slowly begun to thrive again. Wen had begun farming half an acre of irrigated land and Swirl was teaching in the schoolhouse.
In all this time, Big Mother had not opened the box containing the thirty-one notebooks. But halfway through 1958, the sight in her good eye began to deteriorate. She woke up one morning congested, feverish and half blind. Immediately she began cleaning the house, from top to bottom and from right to left. Curtains came down, and blankets and pillows were hurled from their sleeping mats. She polished ledges, scrubbed walls, emptied cabinets, sifted through the boys’ room and discovered pencil drawings of herself and Ba Lute, she fat as a pomelo and her husband tall as a leek. Underneath, in Flying Bear’s rangy writing were the words, yué qìn (moon guitar) and dí zi (flute). The little turds! They were already laughing at authority. She beat the quilts violently, thinking that Mencius himself would have pulled their ears, straightened their handwriting, and introduced some physical deprivation to their lives, but here she was, carrying the drawing in her pocket as if it were a treasured pack of Hatamen cigarettes. “Oh, Mother!” she cried, startling Sparrow who was bent over a sheaf of manuscript paper.
Sparrow watched her with increasing anxiety. He had noticed her bumping into things, favouring her good eye, turning her head this way and that like a pigeon. These last few years, she had grown round and soft, yet also more quick-tempered, like a potentate of former times. The apartment was in great disorder. “Oh, Father!” she sighed, setting a small cardboard box on the table. As if all the woes of the world hung from her shoulders, she collapsed into a chair. There was no string or tape and the box could be readily opened, but Big Mother Knife just stared at it, as if expecting the lid to stand up on its own.
“Shall I open your package for you, Mama?” he asked.
“Eh!” she said, turning her head ninety degrees to peer at him with her left eye. “Do I interrupt you? Do I smash into your thoughts like this?”
“Sorry, Mama.”
“You…men!” she shouted, as Flying Bear padded by in his plastic slippers. “You must have had a brick for a mother. How else could you have grown into such misbehaving capitalist tyrants?” The boy gazed up at her. His mouth, which had been about to close around a piece of steamed bread, froze in indecision.
Sparrow watched covertly as his mother’s attention returned to the battered box. She sat motionless, as if willing the contents to clear their throats and account for themselves. Perhaps it was empty, Sparrow thought. Big Mother reached her hand out for a cup of tea that wasn’t there, and then she sighed and rubbed her forehead and continued looking at the box. When Sparrow poured a fresh cup of tea for her, setting it beside her disconsolate hand, she jumped and glared hatefully at him. He sat back down again. Flying Bear crammed the bread into his mouth and hustled away.
When he next looked up, he saw that she had inched the box nearer to her, opened it and removed a tidy stack of notebooks. She opened the first one and held it up to her good eye. She was looking at the page so hard he thought it might spontaneously combust. “Ma,” he said, summoning his courage. Her good eye swivelled to face him. “Shall I read it to you?”
“Go away!”
He was so startled his pencil fell out of his hand. Hurriedly, Sparrow gathered his papers and left the table.
“Nosy interfering child!” she yelled after him.
Sparrow retreated to the bedroom, where he found Flying Bear giggling. He cuffed him lightly and the boy let himself roll away in a graceful somersault. Da Shan was standing incongruously in the middle of the room, bent over, touching his fingertips to his bare toes. Sparrow put his papers on the bed and sat in the last light by the window, waiting. When he heard his mother calling him back, he smiled and his brothers smiled back at him. Sparrow heaved himself up, returned to the kitchen, and saw his mother clenching her fists like a toddler. He sat down beside her. Bitterly, Big Mother handed him the first notebook. Without waiting for instructions, he began to read aloud.
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.
“MA-lI, COME BACK. Wake up.”
In my dreams, the Book of Records continued.
As I came awake, I couldn’t remember where I was or even who I might have been. I saw lights gliding across my bedroom ceiling, they captured all my attention, endlessly approaching, recurring yet unpredictable.
Outside, it was still dark. Ai-ming was sitting on the edge of my bed, wearing the coat that Ma had given her. Her face was fuller now, her hair was the sea, she looked so lovely sitting there. I stretched out my arms and held her tightly around the waist. Ai-ming scratched my head. She smelled good, like biscuits.
“One day, Ma-li, we’ll go to Shanghai and I’ll introduce you to Big Mother Knife.”
“Big Mother!” I sighed. “She’ll bite my head off.”
“Only if she likes you. Hurry and get up, before I eat all the breakfast.”
I heard the opening and closing of doors and the footsteps of Ma and Ai-ming as if they crossed effortlessly not only from room to room, but between my dreams and my present. What must it feel like, I wondered, to begin again? Would I still be the same person if I woke up in a different language and another existence? Rubbing my eyes, I climbed out of bed.
It was May 16, 1991. Ai-ming’s suitcase, the same one with which she had arrived, waited beside the sofa. In a little while, she and Ma would driv
e the rental car to the border and they would cross into the United States. Once through, Ai-ming would board a bus to San Francisco, where her mother’s friend was waiting to receive her.
At the dining table, Ma was setting out French toast. I mixed juice from frozen concentrate, readied three glasses, and served it as if it were champagne.
Ai-ming told us that, for the first time in many months she had not dreamed at all, and this morning, opening her eyes, she’d felt at peace, as if she were standing in the centre of Fuxing Park in Shanghai, in a deep pool of sunlight. Even the surrounding buildings, built in varied times and eras of the past, swayed as if they, too, were made of nothing more than leaves.
I said that I had dreamed of the border.
Ma sighed.
“Please take me with you,” I said, even though I knew it was futile. “What if you get thrown in prison? How will you send me a message? They don’t put children in jail. I’m the only one who can rescue you.”
“Let’s hope it won’t come to that,” Ma said.
Part of me understood that Ai-ming and Ma wished this leave-taking to be a hopeful one, and so I picked up my fork and went along with them. How I longed to be older, to be able to play a role. We lingered over breakfast, inventing a game that involved drawing words in the air. Ai-ming said that to arrive 来 is made up of the radical for tree 木 and the word not yet 未 : arrival is a tree that is still to come. Ma said that the word onion includes the character 洋 yáng (infinity, to contain multitudes), thus the onion as the root of infinity. I wanted to know why “infinity” consisted of 氵(water) and 羊 (sheep), but no one could tell me.
If I pass over what follows, it is because, even now, more than twenty-five years later, I regret this parting. In Canada, no amnesty had been passed since 1983, and Ma didn’t have the financial resources to help Ai-ming in the ways she needed. In America, we all wanted to believe, Ai-ming would have the best chance for a stable future.
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