Unexpectedly, the train braked. The old woman stumbled, her cake went flying, and she fell into my lap.
For a moment, she was suspended in my arms, our faces inches from one another. A big whoop went up from people around us, followed by jovial applause. A child reprimanded her for eating on the train, another wanted to know what kind of cake it was. The woman laughed, the sound so unexpected, I nearly dropped her. She was in her late sixties, around the same age Ma would be now. In my imperfect Mandarin, I tried to give her my seat, but the woman waved me off as if I had offered her a ticket to the moon.
“Save yourself, child.” She said something else, words which sounded like, “Enough crumbs, no? Enough.”
“Yes,” I said. “Enough.”
She smiled. The subway hurried on.
I could feel my jet lag now; the world around me seemed far away as if I was carried in a jar of water. A man opened a newspaper so wide, it covered his wife and daughter. Behind them, in the windows, their reflections shifted, one behind the other.
—
In his self-criticisms, my father wrote of his love of music and the fear that he “could not overcome a desire for personal happiness.” He denounced Zhuli, gave up Sparrow and cut all ties to the Professor, his only family. He wrote of how he had stood by helplessly while first his mother, then his young sisters, and finally his father died; he said he owed his family everything, and had a duty to life. For years, Ba tried to abandon music. When I first read his self-criticisms, I glimpsed my father through the many selves he had tried to be; selves abandoned and reinvented, selves that wanted to vanish but couldn’t. That’s how I see him, sometimes, when my anger–on behalf of Ma, Zhuli, myself–subsides and turns to pity. He knew that leaving these self-criticisms behind would endanger others, yet to destroy them was impossible, so he carried them first to Hong Kong and then to Canada. Even here, he would begin new notebooks, denouncing himself and his desires, yet he could not find a way to reinvent himself or change.
Last week, preparing for this trip, I came across a detail: in 1949, Tiananmen Square retained its place as the centre of political power in China by reason of analytic geometry.
An architect, Chen Gang, posited the Square as the “zero point.” He quoted Friedrich Engels: “Zero is a definite point from which measurements are taken along a line, in one direction positively, in the other negatively. Hence the zero point is the location on which all others are dependent, to which they are all related, and by which they are all determined. Wherever we come upon zero, it represents something very definite: the limit. Thus it has greater significance than all the real magnitudes by which it is bounded.”
That summer of 1966, the year Zhuli died, was the zero point for my father. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he went to Tiananmen Square to pledge his loyalty to Chairman Mao and commit himself to fānshēn: literally, to turn over one’s body, to liberate oneself. Decades later, he watched on television as three university students stood before the Great Hall of the People bearing a letter to the government. It was April 22, 1989. The three lifted their arms, raised the petition high and fell to their knees, as if seeking clemency. Behind them in Tiananmen Square, more than 200,000 university students reacted in shock and then grief.
Why are you kneeling?
Stand up, stand up!
This is the People’s square! Why must we address the government from our knees?
How can you kneel in our name? How?
The students, who came from every political and economic background, were distraught. But the three stayed where they were, tiny figures, the petition heavy in the air, waiting for an authority figure to receive it. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes passed, and they remained on their knees. Behind them, agitation grew. When Chinese leaders failed to respond, the Tiananmen demonstrations began in earnest.
I exited the subway at Tiantong Road, emerging at an intersection where condominiums, half-constructed, opened like giant staircases to the sky. I had been to this quarter before: Hongkou is where Swirl and Big Mother Knife grew up before the war, and it is where Liu Feng, a violinist once known as Tofu Liu, now lives.
At different times, Hongkou has been a clothing district, the American-Japanese concession, and, during the rise of Hitler and the Second World War, the Shanghai Ghetto. In the 1930s, the Shanghai port could be legally entered without passport or visa; some forty thousand Jewish and other refugees from Germany, Austria, Russia, Iraq, India, Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine and elsewhere arrived here, bringing not only their languages and traumas, but also their music.
I continued south, past a sidewalk argument, around three men, their bodies fully stretched out on their motorbikes, playing cards.
At Suzhou Creek, I reached the Embankment Building. Up on the tenth floor, Mr. Liu was waiting for me. I had contacted him on WeChat and, at first, when I said I was the daughter of Jiang Kai, he had been wary. But when I told him I was looking for Ai-ming, the daughter of Sparrow, he transformed entirely. Now, the first time we were meeting in person, he greeted me as if he had known me all my life. “Ma-li!” he said. “Come in, come in! Have you eaten? My daughter picked up these sugar pyramids….”
Books, sheet music, compact discs, cassettes and records occupied every inch of space. After a thirty-year teaching career at the Shanghai Conservatory, he had retired last month and moved his office home. “Don’t trip,” he said. “I don’t have insurance.”
We went sideways through the kitchen and into the living room. Across the river, Shanghai’s dramatic skyscrapers floated, surreal. We were a world away, but only a single generation, from the city my father had known.
Mr. Liu told me that, since the 1990s, he had watched this skyline come into existence. “When my daughter was born, none of these buildings were even a scribble on paper. These three,” he said, pointing out the tallest ones, “were meant to symbolize the past, present and future. But the government’s words were very boring. Instead, people call them the ‘three-piece kitchen set.’ You see? There’s the bottle opener. The whisk. And…what would you say in English? A turkey baster.”
I laughed. “I think the whisk is the most beautiful, Mr. Liu.” It was a cylindrical spiral like a ribbon in motion.
“I agree. But Shanghai still looks like a tool belt. By the way, don’t be so formal! Please call me Tofu Liu. That’s what everyone calls me, even my grandkids.”
Before us, the lights of the buildings began to glow.
Tofu Liu turned his back on the city. We sat down at a little table where someone had been sorting pencil crayons. He told me that he had entered the Shanghai Conservatory the same year as Zhuli. “We both studied under the same violin teacher, Tan Hong. My father was a convicted rightist, a counter-revolutionary, just like Zhuli’s father. I was a little in love with her, even while I envied her talent.” During the Cultural Revolution, the Conservatory had closed. “Not one piano survived. Not one.” He himself was sent to a camp in Heilongjiang Province, in the frozen borderlands of the Northeast. “We had to wear either blue, grey or black. Our hair had to be short. We had to wear the same kind of cap. That was only the beginning. The wind was glacial. We were beside a river, and on the other side of the river was Russia. We worked in coal mines. We had no skills in this work and almost every week, someone was seriously injured or killed. The Party replaced them. The only books available to us were the writings of Chairman Mao. We had daily self-criticism and denunciation sessions. This went on for six years.”
In 1977, when the Cultural Revolution ended, Liu ran away from the camp and returned to Shanghai, where he sought out his former teacher, Tan Hong.
“We talked about Zhuli for a long time and about others we had known. Then Professor Tan asked me, ‘Tofu Liu, do you wish to come back to the Conservatory and complete your studies?’
“I said I did.
“ ‘After everything that’s happened, why?’
“His question devastated me. How could I pretend that mus
ic was salvation? How could I commit myself to something so powerless? I had been a miner for six years, there was coal dust in my lungs, I’d broken all the fingers of my right hand, how could I possibly hold a violin? I told him, ‘I don’t know.’ But he kept pushing me for an answer. It wasn’t enough for him to hear that I loved music, that it had comforted me all this time, and I had promised myself that if I survived, I would devote my life to it. There were thousands of applicants for a handful of spots at the Conservatory. They all loved music as much as I did. Finally I told him the truth. I said, ‘Because music is nothing. It is nothing and yet it belongs to me. Despite everything that’s happened, it’s myself that I believe in.’
“Tan Hong shook my hand. He said, ‘Young Liu, welcome back to the Conservatory. Welcome home.’ ”
Tofu Liu showed me his mementos. These included a photo of Zhuli performing with the Conservatory’s string quartet when she was nine years old and a wire recording of Zhuli and Kai playing Smetana’s “From My Homeland,” which Liu had kept hidden until the end of the Cultural Revolution.
“But, Mr. Liu, how could you possibly hide these things?”
He shrugged, smiling. “Before I was sent to the Russian border, I cut a small hole in the parquet floor of my bedroom in Shanghai. You know how hard parquet is! All I had was a kitchen knife. It took me two terrible weeks. I was convinced that Red Guards would burst into the room and that would be the end of me. I buried a dozen wire recordings, some photos and scores, and my violin. Ten years later, when I pulled it up, there was a nest of mice inside the violin…But look at this wire.” He lifted the spool and showed it to me. It was pristine. “Would you like to hear it?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
Delicately, he loaded the spool into an antique wire recorder. When it was ready, he turned a knob.
The notes came to me. I half turned away.
I thought I saw curtains shift and Ba looking down at me from a window above. On the ninth floor, he leaned out. Did anyone else see him? Was it only me? My father had blindfolded himself, he had tied a piece of cloth over his face before he took his life. I had learned this only after obtaining copies of the Hong Kong police files, and the detail had broken me.
This was the first time I had ever heard Ba playing the piano. Jiang Kai seemed a stranger to me, someone who had always been more alive, more full of memory, than I could know. And yet, hearing Zhuli’s violin, her measured, open voice, why did I feel as if I had known her all my life?
We listened to the recording three, four, five times. Each time I heard something different, a separation and a unity, the musicians, dust, the machine, our breathing. Music. Each time, at the end, I heard my father’s voice, speaking. I had not heard it since I was ten years old. His voice like no other voice that had ever lived.
I wept. Seeing that I was upset, Mr. Liu brought me a cup of tea. “It’s difficult to understand,” he said. “The pressure on us was unimaginable. Don’t forget, back then, your father was only seventeen years old….we were all too young.”
We returned to the table. I showed him my copy of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records.
“Teacher Liu,” I said, “I’ve made tens of thousands of copies of all the notebooks. With a few keystrokes, it’s possible to send files anywhere in the world, instantaneously. I want it to exist everywhere, to keep growing and changing.” From my bag, I took out Sparrow’s composition, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. “This is the piece of music I mentioned to you. It seems only right to perform it here in Shanghai. To record it. But…I really wonder at my sanity.”
Liu took the pages. Slowly he read through them.
I watched the curtains move and the wind alter; Ba and Ma had left this world, yet I was here in Shanghai. I still breathed and changed and dreamed.
After a long time, Liu looked up from the score. “Ma-li,” he said, “I’m sure you know that, without obsession, there is no life’s work. But where does this attentiveness come from? Have you asked yourself? Surely it’s what we each carry, in greater and greater quantity as we age, remembrance.” He used the word jì yì, which has two meanings: 记忆 (to recall, record) and 技艺 (art). He was silent for a moment, looking down at the pages. “The music reminds me of something Zhuli said when we were rehearsing Prokofiev. She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear? Is it better to have been loved, or to love? Of all his compositions, this is Teacher Sparrow’s most extraordinary.”
He opened his violin case and lifted the instrument out. A phrase filled the room, it seemed to move both backwards and forwards, as if Sparrow wished to rewrite time itself. Note by note, I felt as if I was being reconfigured.
When Teacher Liu set the violin down, he asked me, “Do you play the piano?”
“I never learned.”
“Then I’ll arrange everything. Teacher Sparrow meant for this music to be heard here.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
Before I left, I showed him a photograph of Ai-ming.
“Why, it’s Zhuli isn’t it?” he said in surprise, staring at the image. “It must be. No? It’s Teacher Sparrow’s daughter? Ai-ming. Ah, well. How remarkable. She has the very same face as Miss Zhuli.”
Tofu Liu gave me the recording to keep and I gave him a copy of Sparrow’s music. I remembered, then, something that Ai-ming had said. I assumed that when the story 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 Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. “But that’s how the world is, isn’t it?”
SPARROW WAS PEDALLING SLOWLY home from Huizhou Wooden Crate Factory, pushed forward by a steady breeze. It was late August, just after rainfall. Along the road, loudspeakers announced a special program: “Tonight in Beijing, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy, will perform for Madame Mao. This is their third concert in the city, one of a total of six performances in China.”
The newsreader had said the date, September 14, 1973.
But it was 1976. The concert had been almost three years before. Others, too, were staring up at the loudspeakers, just as baffled. It had been nearly a decade since the radio had broadcast any music besides the eighteen approved revolutionary operas. Now, music exploded above them, the feverish opening crescendo of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Sparrow coasted to a stop, bewildered by its detail, the cheerful, almost absurd piano and the tinkling brass.
By the time he reached home, the second half of the program had begun. His daughter ran out to meet him. “It’s a new work by Madame Mao!”
Sparrow smiled, despite himself. “No, Ai-ming. This is Beethoven and it comes from another century.” This is a fragment, he thought, of something that once existed but that no longer grows here, like a field cut down.
He went inside. The Sixth Symphony, Beethoven’s Pastoral, trotted gaily through the rooms. Even Big Mother was lost in thought. He thought the walls were creeping nearer to him, they brushed his arms and scraped the back of his neck. You could close a book and forget about it, knowing it would not lose its contents when you stopped reading, but music wasn’t the same, not for him, it was most alive when it was heard. Year after year, he had wanted to play and replay it, to take it apart into its component pieces and build it once more. And then, finally, after six years, after seven, and then a decade, his memory had gone quiet. Without trying, he had stopped remembering. But this broadcast, what was it? Were they hearing the future or was it only the final outburst of the past? Long ago, He Luting had shouted, “Shame, shame. You should be ashamed,” and Zhuli said, “I will make Prokofiev himself proud.” If the concert truly took place in Beijing, Kai must have attended. A sound inside a sound. But what if all of this was only in his mind?
The applause that came was so fierce, he feared the radio might topple over. Violent catapults of applause, rhythmic, sustained.
From the opposite side of the room,
Big Mother said, “What bloody change is coming now?”
The music was nothing more than a broadcast, a simple program, but he turned and saw exultation on his daughter’s face. Little Ai-ming had pressed her forehead up against the radio, his daughter was overjoyed, she had been transported, she looked as if all her nerves were alight. She looked like Zhuli. For a moment he had no idea where he was. He wanted to pull her back, to take the machine away and bury it noiselessly in the ground. Trembling with cold, he walked across the room and switched the radio off.
—
Because her father was so quiet, Ai-ming had, from an early age, turned to Big Mother Knife; her grandmother was her confidante, her teacher and also her pillow. No one in this life cared about her as Big Mother did, and so she took great pleasure in climbing over her, sleeping on her and fluffing Big Mother’s curls. Ling, her actual mother, had been reassigned to Shanghai nearly five years ago, and only visited once each year, during Spring Festival. Her father, Sparrow, was the Bird of Quiet.
“Don’t be fooled,” Big Mother once told her. “He’s not moving, as usual, and he’s not thinking either, sadly. Your father is empty as a walnut shell.” She had leaned close and whispered in Ai-ming’s ear: “The world is like a banana, easily bruised. Now is the time to watch and observe, not to judge. Ai-ming, believing everything in books is worse than having no books at all.”
For weeks after, Ai-ming wondered about these words. On the August night when the Philadelphia Orchestra performance was broadcast, she had spied on her father as he listened to this Beethoven, and she observed how, for at least a year afterwards, the radio returned to its usual music, playing only Shajiabang and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Once, though, there had been a broadcast of Albanian music, and it had made Sparrow stop what he was doing and turn towards the radio, as if it were an intruder. In school, as the daughter of a class enemy she was forbidden to join the Young Pioneers, among other injustices. This was a new word for her, injustice, and she liked to roll it on her tongue for the shock of it. In school, they recited essays about what made a good revolutionary. She began to wonder what made a good father, a good grandmother, a good enemy, a good person. Are you a good person, she thought, looking at her teacher, or are you a good revolutionary? Are you a good revolutionary, she thought, looking at Big Mother Knife, or are you a good grandmother? Was it even possible to be both?
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