Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  But at that moment, Kai returned. “The Professor brought food for us,” Kai said, holding up three helpings of noodles, three wheat buns and, stunningly, a small jar of wine. Zhuli had no idea who the Professor was but decided it didn’t matter. Her stomach was rumbling. The melancholy in her cousin’s eyes vanished as if it had never been.

  Kai said some students had returned from demonstrating, but the streets were calm. Calm for you, Zhuli thought. Both Kai and her cousin had unassailable class backgrounds, they were Sons of the Soil, Sons of Revolutionary Heroes, Sons of…she laughed and drank the wine. Her cousin’s face was hazy with joy.

  She and Kai squeezed together on the bench. The alcohol made her thoughts light and immodest and she decided to climb up on the bench and salute her cousin. Kai wrapped an arm around her legs to prevent her from toppling over, and the pressure of his hands made Zhuli want to push him away and yet also collapse into his arms. “Cousin Sparrow!” she proclaimed. “Twice my age–”

  “So old?” he protested.

  “–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.

  Zhuli was the first to give in to exhaustion. She left them. Outside the practice room, she stood listening for a few moments, waiting for the music or voices to start up again, but there was nothing.

  —

  And yet, early the next morning, when the Conservatory was still quiet, here he was, just as he had promised: dear Kai, that exhausted performer, half draped over the piano as if over the arm of an old friend.

  “You’re late, Comrade Zhuli,” he said.

  “Did you sleep here?”

  “With my eyes open and a pen in my hand.”

  “Writing self-criticisms, I’m sure.”

  He smiled. How tired he looked, and yet electrified, as if he had just emerged from a ten-hour seminar with Glenn Gould himself. “The truth is,” he said, “I’d never even heard Tzigane. I came early in order to practise it. I feared you would drop me from your concert and perform with Yin Chai instead.”

  “So you’ve mastered it.”

  There it was again: the proud shine in his eyes. “Of course.”

  After playing it through once, they sat facing one another cross-legged on the floor. “Did you listen to the Oistrakh recording?” she asked him.

  “A dozen times. I found it eerie and couldn’t stop…I also listened to Heifetz and Neveu.”

  “Professor Tan told me to think about it alongside Gounod’s Faust,” Zhuli said. “You know, ‘All that you desire, I can give you.’ Selling your soul to the evil spirits. The usual thing.” Tan had said that the violin score of Tzigane was devilishly difficult. Perfect, she had thought.

  Kai nodded and made illegible, floating marks on his score. “The piano part is mysterious, isn’t it?” He turned a few pages. “First, it enters late. Second, I find it cold. See how it never loses control and is never out of breath? And yet I feel there’s a great hunger here. It wants to control things. To push the violin closer to the edge, maybe.”

  It was true. In the last third, the violin spun in faster and faster, nearly impossible, circles. She said aloud, without thinking, “Not love then, but something like it.”

  She and Kai played the piece again and the incompatibility between the two instruments heightened, like a dance between two lovers who had long since ruined one another and yet moved forward in the same maddening steps. It doesn’t end well, thought Zhuli, reaching for the notes, her back pinched, her neck aching. She was the devil playing. The walls of Room 103 danced sideways and seemed to give way to her, as if she had become the rain and torrent.

  The music ended. She sat down at the piano and stared at the keys. Kai took up her hands which were hot and damp. She hated it when people touched her hands, they were sensitive and in constant pain, and she’d had dreams in which they were crushed or cut open. As if he could read her thoughts, he let them go, picked up his pencil and tapped the score. “You see more in each measure than any violinist at the Conservatory.”

  “The Conservatory is a tiny corner of the world.” She took the pencil from him, flipped to the meno vivo and said: “Here is where I stumbled. Fatally. Let’s go back once more.”

  His hand floated down her back.

  She moved to stand up, but his hand was around her waist.

  “Zhuli.” His voice was too near to her, his mouth pressed against her hair. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  She wasn’t afraid. Only, she thought, letting his mouth find hers, there are too many people, too many words, too many things that I wish for. I have the feeling there is too little time. They kissed. She didn’t know that she was still upright, she felt as if she had lain down on the floor of the room.

  She pulled away and stood up and went to her violin as if nothing had happened, proud that she could be as uncaring as him, and tested the first bars of Tzigane. Her mind felt resolute and numb, but her heart was exhilarated. Kai was smiling at her. What did he feel, she wondered. Deep down, in that secret part of him, was there anyone he really trusted? She willed herself to disappear into Ravel. She let herself go, into the walls and into sound itself.

  WITHOUT OUR REALIZING IT, the weeks following Ai-ming’s departure became months, and the months years.

  On May 18, 1996, I was watching television and attempting to solve a hard problem (“Let D be a positive integer that is not a perfect square. Prove that the continued fraction of √D is periodic”) when the telephone rang. Ai-ming’s voice was miraculously clear, as if all that was required of me was to reach out my hand and pull her into the room. I was overjoyed. It had been a month since her last letter and Ma and I were expecting good news: after five long years, the rumoured amnesty had finally materialized and Ai-ming, along with nearly half a million others, had submitted her application for permanent residence in the United States.

  “Ma-li,” she said, “I called to wish you happy birthday.”

  I had just turned seventeen. Ai-ming rained questions on me–about Ma, math camp, my plans for university, our lives–but I ignored her. “What happened to your application? Did they schedule your interview?”

  “No…nothing yet.”

  I told her to give me her number, to hang up so that I could call her back.

  “Oh no, don’t bother,” Ai-ming said. “These phone cards are so cheap. Just a penny a minute.”

  She had a hint of New York in her English now, a tension that hadn’t been there before. In both San Francisco and New York, she’d been working different jobs–waitress, house cleaner, nanny, tutor. At first, in the newness of America, her letters had glimmered with observations, jokes and stories. Ma and I had visited her twice in San Francisco where, despite everything, she had seemed happy. But after she moved to New York in 1993 we didn’t see her anymore. Ai-ming always said it wasn’t the right time–she was living in a dormitory and couldn’t receive visitors; her hours were erratic; she was working night shifts. Still, her letters arrived like clockwork. Ai-ming didn’t write about the present anymore, but about things she remembered from Beijing or from her childhood.

  In 1995, when Congress passed Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, we thought she would gain legal status within the year.

  On the phone now, I didn’t know what to say. There was static now, all of a sudden. “Ai-ming, how are things, really?”

  “Marie, my English has improved so much. They won’t be able to turn me down.” Her laugh seemed to come from someone else. “As soon as I have my papers, I’m going home. My mother…It’s nothing, only…” Behind her I heard a machine rattling. “You’ll come to New York soon, won’t you?”

  “Of course!” But even as I said the words, I had no idea how such a trip would be possible. Ma and I were as broke as we had ever been.

  “You’re seventeen already
. If we crossed on the street, maybe I wouldn’t recognize you.”

  “I’m just the same, only taller….Ai-ming, I 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.”

  The machinery behind her seemed to laugh in counterpoint. “Could you…” She coughed and took a breath. She said, “Do you still have that handwritten copy of Chapter 17? It was your father’s copy…”

  I should have persisted, I should have asked her what she wanted to tell me, but Ai-ming seemed so fragile. It was as if I had become the older sister, and she the younger. I told her, “Of course, it’s right here on the bookshelf, beside the set we photocopied in San Francisco. Remember? I can see it from where I’m standing…This summer we’ll come to New York, I promise.”

  “I miss your voices. Sometimes I’m on the subway for hours each day, I feel like a child in the underworld, and I imagine all kinds of things…The netherworld is a kingdom of its own, with its own prefectures, magistrates and government, it’s supposed to be another city entirely…I am lovesick for some lost paradise / I would rise free and journey far away. Do you know this poem?”

  Her words frightened me. “Ai-ming, don’t lose hope now, not when you’ve worked so hard.”

  “Oh, Ma-li, it’s not that I’m unhappy. Far from it. I just want to take another step. I want to live.”

  —

  Before saying goodbye, I had written down her new telephone number on the same page as my solution for the continued fraction of √D. But when Ma tried to reach Ai-ming that night, the line was disconnected. I feared that I had misheard or made an error transcribing it, yet her voice had been so precisely, perfectly clear. When Ma tried to reach Ai-ming’s mother, the line rang, but no one answered.

  Two weeks later, a letter arrived. Ai-ming said that her mother’s health had suddenly deteriorated and she was going home. She told us not to worry about her, that very soon she would be able to visit us in Canada. I had wanted to give Ai-ming my e-mail address–marie.​jiang1979@pegasusmail.​com. We had just set up the internet at home and this was the first address I’d ever had; I knew it meant we would never lose touch, we would be able to communicate almost instantaneously. Each afternoon, when I arrived home from school, I was convinced there would be a letter or a voice mail, but there was only quiet, a qù that became a friction in the air.

  When summer came, we flew to New York and took the subway to Ai-ming’s last known address. One of her roommates, Ida, an older woman, said that she had warned Ai-ming not to go. If the INS found out she’d left the country, Ai-ming’s application would be thrown out. Worse, if she was caught re-entering, she’d be barred from the United States for a decade. Ida, herself, had just been granted amnesty under the same program. She gave us directions to the plastic flower factory where Ai-ming had been working, but when we arrived, no one in the office would speak to us. Finally, just as we were leaving, a teenaged girl ran out. She spoke to us in Cantonese. She said that Ai-ming had been expected back weeks ago but had never turned up.

  Not knowing what else to do, Ma and I wandered through Chinatown, carrying a photograph of Ai-ming from restaurant to restaurant. One after another, people studied the picture and shook their heads.

  Neither of us had ever been to New York before, and I felt like a blade of grass in a world of fish. Every vehicle, it seemed, was in disguise, dressed up as a yellow cab. Ma, dazed, barely seemed to notice the city. As if in a dream, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, above the rippling water.

  That night, Ma used her credit card so that we could attend a concert in Carnegie Hall; in the foyer and the main hall, I studied every face, row after row, up the steep balcony until everything disappeared into shadow. A poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thoughts, Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city. The music, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which my father had performed decades ago with China’s Central Philharmonic, made Ma weep. I sat in the dark, grown up now. I felt too wide, too full of feeling, for the small space I inhabited.

  On the plane home, I told Ma it was only a matter of time before Ai-ming contacted us. All we could do was wait.

  —

  After Ma’s diagnosis in 1998, everything changed. We no longer fit into the hours, days and weeks of the regular world. She began to speak of the future not as an open and undetermined place, but as a fixed measure of time; a year, maybe two, if she was lucky. Her pragmatism hurt me. I was only nineteen years old, and needed to believe she would be the one to defy the numbers. When her chemotherapy began, I had been at university, a mathematics major at last, and I could think of all sorts of statistical reasons why she should not die. I spent many hours brooding over just this problem, as if Ma’s life and death were a simple question of numbers and probabilities. To my surprise, but probably not to Ma’s, all the anger I had stored up since my father’s death returned. When I looked at my university classmates, I heard in their voices and saw in their lives a freedom I felt had been unfairly taken from me. How oblivious they seemed of their good fortune. I compensated by studying harder, by trying to outdo everyone, to defy–what? I didn’t know. It’s no wonder that I became such a solitary young woman. I was irrationally upset with Ma and angry all over again with Ba. I saw that I might lose my mother no matter what the numbers said, no matter how many things she still had left to experience.

  As usual, Ma let me think what I wanted.

  In the meantime, she altered her diet and dealt with the unending bureaucracy of sick leave, sick pay, health and life insurance, the web of paperwork and medication that quickly encircled her life, so that the measurement of time became divorced from the rising and the falling of the sun, and became instead about the intervals between treatment regimens, hospital stays, meal times, rest and recovery. She made a will and left a sum of money to Ai-ming, which to this day has not been claimed; neither I nor my mother’s lawyer have been able to locate her. That year, I published a paper in a prestigious mathematics journal and I am glad that Ma lived to see this small success, this glimpse of a future stability.

  During those long hours at the hospital, I willed myself to understand everything there was to know about algebraic geometry; somehow, the impossibility of my task saved me. 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, to go back to subjects we might not have raised in a lifetime of reserve, of quiet. In those two years, I knew only two constants: mathematics and Ma. I learned a great deal about the tenacity of love and also the terrible pain of letting it go. The brevity of my parents’ lives has shaped me.

  In 1999, Ma asked me to find Ai-ming. “You’re the only one who knows,” she said.

  What did I know, I wondered, what had I truly understood back then? “I’ll try, Ma.”

  “I couldn’t find her. I tried so hard but I couldn’t do it. There’s no more time.”

  But what if there had been an accident? What if Ai-ming had passed away? I wanted to say these things but could not imagine speaking the words aloud.

  The painkillers made her words slow and heavy. “She went back to Beijing. Maybe Shanghai. I’m sure of it.”

  “I’ll look, Ma.”

  “I wrote a letter to Ai-ming.”

  “How?”

  “I sent it to her mother in Shanghai. But it was returned, her mother had moved. There was no forwarding address. I called that number so many times.” Ma’s eyes filled with tears. “I promised her mother that I would take care of Ai-ming. I gave her my word. They were family to us.”

  “Please don’t be upset,” I said. “Please. I’ll f
ind them.”

  “Look straight ahead and don’t turn back. Don’t follow illusions, don’t forget to come home.” It was as if she could see into the future, she knew I would take on my father’s regret and guilt. “You’re listening to me, aren’t you, Marie? Li-ling…”

  “You don’t have to worry about anything, Ma. I promise.”

  Not once did she ask for my father, yet I believe that somehow it was the same, that to hope for Ai-ming was also to hope for his return.

  Before she passed away, Ma gave me a photograph Ai-ming had left us. The picture was a duplicate of one Ai-ming carried, which had belonged to her father. It showed Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. On the back, my mother had written Shanghai Conservatory of Music, 1966.

  —

  My mother died fifteen years ago but I have been thinking about her more than ever, the way it felt when she put her arms around me, about her qualities, especially her loyalty, pragmatism and quickness to laughter. She wanted to give me a different example of how to live my life and how to let hers go. And so, at the end, her words were contradictory. Look forward or look back? How could I find Ai-ming and also turn away from my father? Or did she think both acts were the same thing? 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. How much did Ma know? How will I know when to stop looking? I think it’s possible to build a house of facts, but the truth at the centre might be another realm entirely.

  It’s possible that I have lost track of the dates, the time, the chapters and permutations of the story. That afterwards, I reconstructed what I could about Ai-ming’s family and mine. Years later, certain images persisted in my memory–a vast desert, a poet who courted beautiful Swirl with a story not his own, music that made not a sound–and I returned to them with greater frequency. I wanted to find her again, to let her know what I remembered, and to return something of what she had given me.