She wanted to cry but she climbed onto a chair beside him as if waiting to have her fortune read.
Her cousin was doing his homework and she picked up a pencil thinking that she could do something for him. Sparrow got up and gave her a cup of tea. She requested a task and he thought for a moment, then gave her some paper and a list of words which he instructed her to copy. She could not read all of them but reading seemed secondary; Ba had taught her how to copy neatly. All she wanted was the paper and the pencil and something to do. The list of words must have come from Flying Bear’s homework, some kind of vocabulary lesson around the word shū 书 (book). For years, she kept this sheet of paper written in her child’s hand:
Qin shū (a story that is sung), jìn shū (a banned book), tīng shū (to listen to a performance of storytelling), shī shū (the Book of Songs and the Book of History), mò shū (to write from memory), chuán shū gē (carrier pigeon), huǐ guò shū (a written repentance), niǎo chóng shū (bird writing, a style of calligraphy), jiǎn tǎo shū (self-criticism).
After her pencil was dull and her teacup twice emptied, Sparrow lifted her up and returned her to the shared bed. She asked him where the plastic bag had gone away to. He said nothing. She told him that she had wanted to keep the old qin but it was too late. What had they done to it? Had her devotion to the qin caused her parents suffering? Perhaps she was not speaking aloud because he still didn’t answer. I did this, Zhuli thought. How did I do this? Because of me, Old West’s treasures have all been taken away. Her parents came back to her in a rush of images. Was she powerless or powerful? Had Zhuli, herself, opened the door to the demons who barged in? Her parents had been roped together as if they were oxen. Why had her mother wept for pity? How had the men known, Zhuli thought, that she was part girl and part sky, a yāo who had been seduced by wood and strings that were not alive. But the qin was alive, she thought, fighting sleep. She and it were the very same thing.
The next day, Sparrow sat her down in front of the record player and played all the music he could find. Her cousin listened with his eyes closed and Zhuli copied him and did the same. Inside her head, the music built columns and arches, it cleared a space within and without, a new consciousness. So there were worlds buried inside other worlds but first you had to find the opening and the entryway. Sparrow showed her how to remove the record from its paper sleeve, how to set it on the turntable, how to place the needle in its groove. Everything in Big Mother Knife’s house was careful and considered; a world away from the bullying she had recently endured. Everything in Ba Lute’s home made music. Zhuli watched them all playing their instruments, she watched their hands and bodies, she let the music write itself into her memory. She felt, as with the qin, that she had always known this music. That they recognized one another.
There was a small violin that belonged to Flying Bear, which he shunned. One day she sat beside it for several hours and finally, she placed it on her lap like the old qin and tentatively plucked the strings. She did this day after day but her cousin told her: “It’s not a zither and, in any case, you are too young to learn the violin.” She continued for nearly a week and finally Sparrow took the violin from her, lifted Flying Bear’s bow and began to play. It was too small for him, and his body folded around the instrument as if to prevent its voice from escaping. Zhuli recognized that voice, she felt she had known it longer than she had known life. Sparrow became her first violin teacher. Later, when she was eight, he passed her on to Professor Tan at the Conservatory. She accepted every word, gesture and criticism; her teacher was blunt and, during his tantrums, Zhuli feared he would smash her violin on the floor or break it on her head. But it was all drama. Professor Tan recognized that, in each piece that she played, she heard more and more music. But what was music? Every note could only be understood by its relation to those around it. Merged, they made new sounds, new colours, a new resonance or dissonance, a stability or rupture. Inside the pure tone of C was a ladder of rich overtones as well as the echoes of other Cs, like a man wearing many suits of clothes, or a grandmother carrying all her memories inside her. Was this what music was, was it time itself containing fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, and all the ages, all the generations? What was chronology and how did she fit into it? How had her father and mother escaped from time, and how could they ever come back?
When Ma finally returned home after six years in the desert camps, Zhuli wondered what words she could possibly say to her. There were no words adequate to the feeling between them. One night, Zhuli played the opening of Handel’s Xerxes for her mother. It was the simplest of songs, romantic, maybe even deadly with bourgeois sentiment, of course it was no Stravinsky, and yet in the middle of the aria, Zhuli felt as if her arms and her body were disappearing. She felt the only reality was this wire of tension between herself and Ma: it was the one true, unfinished movement of her life. In this room, there was only the act of listening, there was only Swirl, a counting down and a counting up, the beginning that could never be a real beginning. Her mother stared at her as if she did not recognize her daughter.
“Ma,” Zhuli had wanted to say, “it was my fault. I found this opening in the ground….I should have been sent away, not you. But don’t you see how long I waited for you, don’t you see how much I have tried to improve myself. I only exist now, I only…” If she put the violin down, would the real Zhuli, the one they had left behind, appear as surely as night after day? If there was no me, she thought, Great-grandfather West’s container would never have been discovered. Her parents would not have been condemned. These notes would not sound. An insignificant soul like hers could break the world but never remake it. What was the world becoming? Her mother was sickly pale and the hollows in her face reminded Zhuli of the grave itself. One blunt motion and Swirl would fold. And yet, Zhuli thought, we are alive now. I am alive. My mother is alive. It is a new age, a new beginning, and we are here.
IN THE SPRING OF 2000, after my mother passed away, I gave myself entirely to my studies. The logic of mathematics–its methods of induction and deduction, its power to describe abstract shapes that have no counterpart in the real world–sustained me. I moved out of the apartment that my mother had been renting ever since she and Ba first came to Canada, and in which I had grown up. Desperate to leave it behind, I cobbled together every penny I had and bought a dilapidated apartment on Alexander Street. The windows looked straight out into the port of Vancouver and, at night, the endless arrivals and departures of multi-coloured shipping containers, what they held, what they divulged, comforted me.
I kept my parents’ papers in the bedroom closet and a Cantor quote taped to the wall: “The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom,” and, like a child, I distracted myself by imagining numbers so immense, so limitless, they far exceeded all the atoms in the universe. Numbers, real and imaginary, were a language inside me, equations were branchings of substance and shadow, relationships and interrelationships, randomness and pattern, the fractional, incomplete yet consistently ordered world we live in. I listened to my father’s records but thought only of intervals, frequency and temperament, of the expression of numbers in an audible world.
By the time I turned twenty-five I had finished my Ph.D. and, thanks to a well-received paper I had published in Inventiones Mathematicae, I was offered teaching positions in Canada, the United States, Korea and Germany. To the surprise of my professors, I chose to stay in Vancouver. A year later, I was teaching Galois theory, calculus and number theory, as well as a seminar on the symmetry and combinatorial structure of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I had a small, but close, circle of friends. In and out of my research time, I continued to be preoccupied by Ma’s death and by the statistical improbability of finding Ai-ming. My mind was full of numbers; I was not lonely.
Yet I understood, even then, that my life was strange, shaped by questions that seemed to have multiple and conflicting answers.
—
In 2006, the year I turned twenty-seven, I
made my first visit to Hong Kong.
For the next ten days, I disappeared into the crowds, nightclubs and bars of Mong Kok, returning to my rented room at 7 a.m. and sleeping until mid-afternoon. Ever since Ma’s death, work had been my entire existence; I had become, without knowing it, the perfect caricature of a reclusive professor, or as G.H. Hardy described mathematics, “the most austere and the most remote.” In the concentrated work of trying to prove a theorem, social life fell by the wayside. But, here, in Hong Kong’s neon lights and perpetual noise, I let myself be someone else entirely. Walking home as the city woke, miles from sober, I felt happy for the first time in many years.
Finally, the day before I was due to fly home, I willed myself to find the dwelling in which Ba had been living–the last one, since he had moved several times during the final months of his life. The address, 9F, Alhambra Building, 202 San Tin Dei, was known to me from police and coroner reports, which concluded: “The deceased, Jiang Kai, burdened by gambling debts, suffering from acute depression, committed suicide by jumping from his ninth-floor window.”
Sixteen years later, the building was still there, and I wondered how much it had changed, if at all, since 1989. There was no lobby, there was not even a door, just a grey staircase that led up from the street. I went up, passing room after room; metal grates or small altars, offering oranges to the ancestors, were all that separated each dwelling from the stairwell. The apartments were minuscule, with barely enough space for a bed. I saw windows the size of a sheet of paper. I climbed higher and higher. The door to 9F was closed and though I stood before it for a full half hour, I could not bring myself to knock. I had an irrational fear that Ba would open the door, that I would face the window he had climbed through. I turned around and descended. After leaving the building, I took a taxi to the district office of the Hong Kong Police where I requested a copy of my father’s file. An officer helped me fill out an application for access to information, telling me that I would receive a reply, by post, within thirty days. I left the police station and wandered aimlessly. Standing on an overpass that crossed a six-lane thoroughfare, and despite the noise of traffic and the vibration of the entire structure, I could hear nothing. My life felt entirely out of order.
I took the subway almost all the way to the Chinese border, switched to a bus and then walked up a paved road. My father’s only request had been to be buried at this cemetery, a place whose name brings together the characters 和 (harmony) and 合 (to close, to be reunited). But I did not know, and had never known, exactly where his ashes lay. In the cemetery office, I was surprised to find they had no record of him at all. The young man at the desk asked, bored but apologetic, if it was possible that my mother had scattered his ashes in the Garden of Remembrance. “It’s possible,” I said. “She never told me.” The man returned to his paperwork and I went outside. All the graves were set on narrow terraces, rising upwards along concrete steps. After walking for several hours in the heat, I was drenched in sweat and could barely see. Crickets cried unceasingly and the butterflies were delicate yet large as handkerchiefs. Above me, cotton balls that seemed to come from nowhere glided through the air.
I came by chance to a small columbarium where, inside, four tiny tea cups and four pairs of red chopsticks lay waiting on a sheet of newspaper. Square niches, for holding urns and ashes, were mounted on the walls. But some squares were empty: these had only cardboard covers with two characters written in red marker, 吉 (fortunate) and 玉 (jade). What this meant, I could not fathom. The room was soft with spiderwebs, and the teacups and chopsticks appeared to have been left behind by ghosts. Desperate to find him, but afraid, too, I studied all the pictures one by one. His picture was not there. I left the columbarium and walked between the graves, but still Ba could not be found. At last I sat down on the steps of a long walkway. A worker, clothed in blue, passed by, with a white towel tucked into the collar of his uniform. He wanted to help but I could not communicate what it was that I wished for, and finally he left me where I was, under the sun, thinking of my parents.
Four weeks later, a small box arrived at my office at the university. Inside were a number of documents, police and autopsy reports, some of which my mother had already received. There were a dozen photographs of my father’s body, his clothes and few possessions. There were also letters I had never seen before, eight from my mother, and five from Sparrow. One of Sparrow’s letters contained a composition, 31 pages long, the pages taped together: a sonata for piano and violin called The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. At the top, Sparrow had written: “For Jiang Kai.” The pages, copied by hand, were dated May 27, 1989. A one-page report stapled to it took me many minutes to decipher. Finally, I understood that these pages had been accidentally misfiled and the error had only come to light in 1997 during the digitization of all police files. Because so many years had passed and the file was now closed, they were releasing the original documents to me, the only surviving family member. I was looking at letters that even my mother had never seen–not when she went to Hong Kong to bury my father and not later on, when she, too, requested the file.
I took everything home. That night, I read through the pages slowly, once, twice, three times. I woke up in the night and reread it. The photographs of my father’s body, the cold detachment of the report and the details of the inquiry opened up emotions I could not stand to feel.
Finally, I put the papers back into the box, and the box under my desk. I went on with my life, returning to the world of numbers. Their possibilities, their language and structure, filled me. They were as beloved, alive and universal as music.
—
Not long after, I met a colleague who was also a professional musician, a violinist. His name was Yasunari, and he became my closest friend. One night, I gave Sparrow’s manuscript to him, confiding its origins. Yasunari said he would arrange everything.
A few weeks later, I went to his apartment. We opened a bottle of wine, toasted the composer, and then I sat on the sofa and listened. I had never heard Sparrow’s music before, but as the violin and piano began, I felt a strange humming, as if I’d heard this music in my childhood. Perhaps it was an echo of Bach’s Sonata No. 4, an echo of that recording of Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin I would later chance upon in Chinatown: it was as if I knew this person, and had always known him. In that piece of music, I imagined I heard three voices–piano, violin and composer–and in their separateness, they carried sorrow, yes, but also…how can I describe it? Inside The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, I heard an unbroken space protecting all three, and also a limitlessness, an ever-expanding room like the desert. All of my unanswerable questions seemed to circle within the notes, at the intersection of piano and violin, between the music and the pauses, the rests. How did a composer live his life unheard? Could music record a time that otherwise left no trace?
I walked home. Lights on the ski hills gleamed faintly behind the clouds, leaving a blue wash in an otherwise darkened sky. I thought about my father, about his love for Sparrow and Zhuli. How many notes are there in Bach’s Goldberg Variations? In Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony? How many words are each of us granted over the course of a lifetime? That night, I began writing down my memories of Ai-ming. I wrote slowly at first, and then the story quickened. I hoped that writing would allow me, finally, to keep the promise I had made to Ma. I wanted, as Ai-ming did, to move forward, to take a further step.
A few months later, Yasunari asked me to marry him and I did. I was twenty-eight years old, but still far too young and unsettled in myself. Indeed I might go so far as to say that I was hostile to myself; I was, in so many ways, my father’s daughter. I broke Yasunari’s heart when, after only a short time, I abandoned our marriage, and I felt as if I had torn my own future into pieces. My father’s death consumed me, a rift had opened between my thoughts and my emotions, and one day I woke with the sensation that I was falling through that rift and would fall forever. I was drawn to suicide.
T
ime passed. My emotional life was, as Big Mother Knife would say, as firm as a stack of eggs.
And yet, during this time, my research flourished. Blindly, I followed the first principle of pure mathematics, the hunger for beauty; in number theory we say that beauty exists in the machinery. Unexpectedly, my work on elliptic curves won a French number theory award and the revered journal, Annals of Mathematics, published one of my papers. My name was put forward for a Meadows Prize. I wondered at the absurdity of things. I had no explanation, except perhaps that I fell asleep as one person and woke as another. The surface of my life confounded me. Yet, in the world of numbers, everything felt possible: numbers had no substance and were made entirely of thought.
My mother’s voice returned to me. If you’re trapped in a room and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. Li-ling, you have to climb out by yourself. Month after month, my father’s copy of Sparrow’s sonata sat in a drawer, waiting. I woke one morning unable to deny this truth, that the love I carried for Ba had survived undimmed.
—
In 2010, I travelled, for the first time, to mainland China.
I was attending a number theory conference in Hangzhou, but it was Weibo and QQ, Chinese social media sites, that absorbed me. As many as 700 million Chinese, more than 50 percent of the population, regularly access the internet; until recently, 60 percent of internet users did not use their real names (as of 2013, anonymity became illegal). The Great Firewall, as it is commonly known, routinely deletes 16 percent of all Chinese internet conversations. Looking for Ai-ming in cyberspace was like trying to pluck a needle from the sea, but I saw, too, that the internet was a series of doors: all I had to do was create the door she could open. I began posting scanned copies of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records; I also posted jokes I knew Ai-ming would love. For instance, “The Yoda embedding, contravariant it is.” Or, “Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.” Every post was a letter to the possible.
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