Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  The game intrigued her. How pleasurable it was to bury words inside the soil of her thoughts. She imitated her father’s expression, a studied emptiness. But sometimes his expression failed him. Sometimes Sparrow looked at her with so much anxiety, she felt her hair stand on end. Ba, she thought, are you a good person or a good worker? Is Chairman Mao a good person or a good leader?

  One morning, Big Mother unlocked the battered suitcase that was used primarily as their dining table. Inside the trunk was a single straw shoe, a pretty blue dress, a sheaf of music in jianpu notation, and a cardboard box full of notebooks. Her first observation was that the books were grubby.

  “Your mouth is hanging open,” Big Mother said.

  Her grandmother fanned the notebooks out, removed three and told Ai-ming to close the suitcase. When it was latched and locked, Big Mother set the notebooks down and opened the first one: the pages looked even older than her grandmother. Big Mother’s face swooped down as if to taste the paper. From this position, she turned her head and looked at Ai-ming. “This,” she whispered gruffly, “is what excellent calligraphy looks like.”

  Ai-ming went in for a closer look. The characters seemed to hover just above the paper, like ink over water. They had the pristine cleanliness of winter flowers.

  “Waaa! Isn’t it strong?” Big Mother said.

  Delight squeezed Ai-ming’s heart. “Waaa!” she whispered.

  Big Mother straightened, grunting her approval. “Of course, the calligraphy is not as robust as Chairman Mao’s but still, it’s pretty good. Refined yet with a depth of movement. Maybe…you want to read some to me. Chapter 1, but no more. You’re still far too young.”

  It was early morning. Her father was at the factory which, last year had been reborn. Now it was Huizhou Semiconductor Factory No. 1, and he had gone from building wooden crates to making radios. The Bird of Quiet could assemble the new Red Lamp 711 shortwave radio in the shake of a feather.

  Outside, loudspeakers were chiding the world. Rain fell in continuous sheets, beating the tin roof like a regiment of horses, so they hid under the blankets. The many wrinkles on Big Mother’s face reminded Ai-ming of the dry, patient earth in February, thirsty for spring.

  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.

  And so the novel of Da-wei and May Fourth began once more.

  —

  It pleased Big Mother Knife that Ai-ming did not appear to notice the transition from the original Book of Records to the new chapters written by Wen the Dreamer. Unable to recover the rest of the book, he had simply continued on from Chapter 31. He, like the character of May Fourth, would spend the greater part of his life in the deserts of Gansu, Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan, where, they said, more than three hundred ancient settlements lay beneath the sand. Their traces–documents on wood and paper, silks and household objects–had endured, preserved by the dry air. In the new chapters, Wen continued the old code, hiding their whereabouts inside the names of characters. Sometimes the code was descriptive: wěi 暐 (the bright shining of the sun), wēi 微 (a fine rain), or wěi 渨 (a cove, or a bend in the hills). Sometimes heartbreaking: wèi 未 (not) or wéi 偉 (to flow backwards).

  Throughout her childhood, little Ai-ming asked for Chapter 23 to be reread so many times, the words must have shown up in her dreams. What the child pictured, or how she made sense of it, Big Mother could not say. “This literary resurrection of yours,” she wrote to Wen the Dreamer, “has won another admirer.” She meant Ai-ming but Wen the Dreamer imagined Zhuli, now grown. It was 1976, and Zhuli would have been twenty-five years old. Big Mother had begun letter after letter, telling Swirl that her daughter was gone, but she did not have the courage to send a single one. In September of that year, she wrote that Zhuli had received permission to study at the Paris Conservatory: their beloved child had crossed over into the West. Big Mother half believed her own letters. It was the first time since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that such a lie was even remotely credible. My beloved Swirl, she thought, I fear you will never forgive me. She sealed the letter and entrusted it to their messenger, Projectionist Bang, who travelled the hinterlands showing movies in the villages, and was a trusted confidant of Wen the Dreamer.

  That same September, the end of the beginning came.

  In the morning, loudspeakers cried out the same turbulent song: “The Esteemed and Great Leader of our Party, our army and the People, Comrade Mao Zedong, leader of the international proletariat, has died….” Big Mother walked the shrouded streets. She stood before the newspaper boards and squinted at the text. Squinting made no difference; these were yesterday’s papers. She thought of her sister and Wen, of her lost boys and Ba Lute, the unwritten music, the desperate lives, the bitter untruths they had told themselves and passed on to their children. How every day of Sparrow’s factory life was filled with humiliations. Party cadres withheld his rations, demanded self-criticisms, scorned the way he held his head, his pencil, his hands, his silence. And her son had no choice but to accept it all. He let them pour all their words into him as if the life inside him had burned away, as if his own two hands had knotted the rope around Zhuli. Yet Big Mother thought she understood. In this country, rage had no place to exist except deep inside, turned against oneself. This is what had become of her son, he had used his anger to tear himself apart.

  Yes, how simple a thing it was to weep, she thought, gazing out at the frenzy of grief and uncertainty around her. She tried not to think of Da Shan and Flying Bear, of Zhuli, of all the names that would disappear completely, relegated to history so as not to disturb the living. White paper flowers, the traditional symbol of mourning, inundated every tree. She wept with rage and helplessness at all the crimes for which the death of an old, treacherous man could never answer.

  —

  Ai-ming was six years old and had never seen a foreigner before, but she thought the tall Chinese man with the shiny shoes and the pristine shirt with buttons must be from another province, if not from another age, perhaps the future. He had wavy hair, immaculate eyebrows, round eyes, a clean-shaven face and in his pocket, bright as sunlight, a golden pen. She had not known, initially, that there was a stranger in the house. When the music began to play, she had turned, as if in a dream, and rushed towards it. Looking through the open door was like peering into a cave. They were facing her, New Shirt and her father, but they were so busy looking at something, that she snuck inside and melted against the wall. If her father didn’t know she was there, how could he make her go away?

  As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the two men sharpened. New Shirt was clearly listening to the music, but Ba looked all chewed up. His elbows and knees contorted, he was folded up as if to protect his hands. Music held them within its downpour. Ai-ming squeezed her eyes shut and popped them open again. No, they were still there. Her father stared at nothing. The music, a joyful dance, made her think of the poem “Famous pieces and grand words,” and of the carcasses of dead radios Sparrow sometimes carried home, tinkering with them in his spare time. Now the music coiled into another feeling, it seemed to start all over again but suddenly it ended. New Shirt reached out to a square box that had a big whisker. He lifted a circle from the square, so shiny black it was almost blue, and he turned the circle upside down. He flicked a switch and pushed the whisker down. Her father said, “No, it’s enough. Don’t play the second side.”

  Another switch was turned. Ai-ming felt as if the remains of the music were treading silently from the room. Through the doorway, the light sagged in, pinkish grey.

  “Kai, your performance tomorrow…what time will it be?” Even Ba’s words sounded smaller.

  “You must come.” Kai reached into the pocket that held his golden pen. He retrieved a square of paper and gave it to her father. “It’s in the factory buildings. We’re doing Beethoven’s ‘Emperor,’ Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 and an America
n composer.” He said so many foreign words, Ai-ming wanted to cry out at the strangeness of it. “Li Delun is conducting.”

  Her father held the paper and stared at it as if he could not read.

  “All through the Cultural Revolution, we were able to perform,” Kai said. “Seiji Ozawa visited the Central Philharmonic last year. Did you know he was born in Manchuria? Not everything disappeared, it was only put aside.”

  “What happened to He Luting? The last time I saw him was on television….Years ago now, 1968.”

  “I heard it was Chairman Mao himself who ordered He Luting released from prison.” The man’s voice was smooth, like unmarked paper. “A few years ago, the charges were dropped and his name cleared.”

  Kai picked up a square of cardboard and looked into its image. “These recordings are so rare now, Sparrow. Last October, people in Beijing began to unearth the records they had hidden. After Madame Mao was arested, we thought everything would go back to the way it was but…People know the Cultural Revolution is finally over, it was all the work of Madame Mao, the Gang of Four, and so on, that’s what the government says, but they can’t help being cautious. Not many records have resurfaced. I did meet a professor at Beijing University who has a small treasure of scores, but that’s all. Isaac Stern will visit Beijing and Shanghai, have you heard? Next year.” Sparrow said nothing, Kai adjusted his long legs and continued. “When Ozawa came, he said our ability to interpret the music had fundamentally changed….” He extended his hands as if he were carrying two eggs. “As if an entire emotional range was lost to us, but we ourselves couldn’t hear it. Every musician in the orchestra knew they’d been cheated. But until that moment, we never had to face it so directly.”

  “Maybe some people always knew,” Sparrow said. “Maybe they never stopped knowing what was counterfeit.”

  Kai brushed his fingers against his own mouth, as if to rid himself of dust.

  Now Sparrow addressed the other man as if he were a student, or a younger brother. “Now that things are changing, what will you do, Comrade? Do you still hope to study in the West?”

  “Sparrow, please don’t misunderstand.”

  Her father shifted his cotton pants, pulling them up slightly as if he was sitting outside and the sun warming his ankles.

  “We’ve started auditions at the Shanghai Conservatory,” Kai said. “There are over a thousand applicants for a handful of spots. He Luting will be reinstated as President. The old faculty will be invited back. Your father, too. And you. He Luting specifically asked me to visit you.”

  “My father is in Anhui Province. I’ll write down the name of the labour camp for you.”

  “Sparrow, some of the applications are from your former students. Remember Old Wu? They don’t forget. Some of them thought they might never touch a violin or a piano again.”

  They spoke of names and places Ai-ming didn’t know. In fact, she had never heard her father string together so many sentences in a row. It was as if the Bird of Quiet had taken off a coat of feathers, or put one on, and become another creature. Outside, her grandmother was calling for her, but Ai-ming burrowed even further into the shadows. Eventually Big Mother shouted something about eating frozen pineapple on a stick, and creaked away.

  “…but Shostakovich died.”

  “When?”

  “Two years ago. Li Delun managed to get hold of his last symphony, which none of us had heard. And Symphony No. 4, which he withdrew, remember? And a series of string quartets…Where are your brothers?”

  “In the Northwest. Flying Bear is in Tibet. Da Shan joined the People’s Liberation Army.”

  “Do they come to see you?”

  “No, they don’t have permission.”

  Kai said, “These reforms will give us back what was taken. I honestly believe this. You must have faith, Sparrow.”

  There was more music. As they listened, Sparrow and the man sat so close together, they made a single confused shape.

  “Sparrow, I’ve been thinking about Zhuli–”

  “I can’t…Tell me instead, what record is this?”

  “This? Don’t you remember, it’s Stokowski’s transcription of Bach. The chorale preludes. ‘For every vital movement in the world around us, there is a corresponding movement within us, a feeling.’ ”

  They used foreign words to describe the sound, which made her feel as if the night sky had been slipped into her pocket.

  “Since the reform and opening up, I’ve tried to–it’s very difficult–I can’t stop thinking about her, about Zhuli. Do you find that strange?”

  “No, Sparrow. But…no one is responsible for what happened.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “Come back and teach at the Conservatory. You’ll be able to write again, to continue where you left off. What happened to your symphonies?”

  Her father laughed and the sound chilled her. “My symphonies…”

  Ai-ming must have slept because when she opened her eyes again, Kai was gone. It was only Sparrow sitting in front of the square box, leaning towards it as if to another, more beloved, child. When Big Mother lit the lamp and found her curled up on the floor, she gave Ai-ming the needle eye.

  “I was listening to music,” Ai-ming said. “And I had a stomach ache.” She smiled because her own words sounded preposterous.

  “Who gave you permission to have a stomach-anything!”

  The Bird of Quiet paid no attention.

  Early the next morning, she found him sitting outside, smoking peacefully, oblivious to the breakfast Big Mother had prepared. One by one, Ai-ming ate all his spicy cucumbers.

  The Bird of Quiet was a shy creature. One had to approach him softly, as if he were a goat. “Who built that singing box?” she whispered.

  He started. She feared that everything she did unsettled him, and it made her so mad she wanted to shout at him and slap herself.

  Sparrow said it wasn’t a singing box, it was an “electric singing engine,” a record player.

  “I want to see it.”

  He brought out the box once more. When he lifted and let go of its sturdy whisker she could not tell if her father was bothered or tired, or only lost. The piece of music with the slow, spare notes turned out to be Variation No. 25 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. She told her father that hearing the music was like looking into a radio. What she meant was that, even looking at the innards of the sets her father brought home, even staring into the belly of the machine, into the thing itself, electricity and sound remained as exquisitely mysterious as the night sky.

  He looked at her with such sadness, as if she were someone else entirely. He taught her the first foreign names she ever learned: the first, Bā Hè (Bach) and the second, Gù Ěr Dé (Glenn Gould).

  —

  Inside Sparrow, sounds accumulated. Bells, birds and the uneven cracking of the trees, loud and quiet insects, songs that spilled from people even if they never intended to make a noise. He suspected he was doing the same. Was he, unconsciously, humming a folk song or a Bach partita, had he done it when he walked with Ai-ming at night, hoping to turn her eyes to something larger? The hiss of small, soldering devices crackled in his ears, the same tired jokes, the same clanking and capacitors, resistors and minuscule shunts, the high-pitched pain in his hands, the sly meetings and self-criticism sessions, the repeated slogans like a knife sharpened to dullness: sound was alive and disturbing and outside of any individual’s control. Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite. One night he dreamed that he sat in a concert hall. Around him programs fluttered, voices hummed, bags opened and closed, the orchestra keened towards harmony. Giddy with joy, full of nervous anticipation, he awaited the performance of his own Symphony No. 3. A chime summoned the last members of the audience. The lights dimmed. Quiet settled. He watched, unable to move, as Zhuli walked onto the stage in a long blue dress. She searched the
auditorium for him. Her hands were empty. He woke.

  —

  In the Cultural Palace of the People, on the grounds of the Huizhou Battery Factory, Sparrow presented his ticket, expecting to be turned away. Instead he was shown to a row of reserved seats. Everywhere was movement. Upwards of a thousand people pressed into the hall, Party cadres (grey), office workers (white), assembly line workers (blue), filing beneath a cascading banner that read: Fully expose and condemn the treason committed by the Gang of Four!

  Sparrow found his seat. Beside him, a woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in a pale green skirt and a flowered blouse, was turning heads. A few months ago, the flowered blouse would have been deemed unacceptable, even criminal; but today it was merely odd. The young woman, confusingly familiar, wore her hair loose. Unbraided, it curled in arabesques. There was a mark on the underside of her chin, the shape of a thumb, a violinist’s mark. She turned and met his gaze. Sparrow blinked, embarrassed to be caught staring. He turned back to the stage. Eventually the conductor of the Central Philharmonic, Li Delun, stepped forward. From the podium, Li stared out with a quivery calm. The two pens in his breast pocket shone extravagantly. Li introduced the concert program (Mahler, Beethoven and Copland) and then began speaking, at length, about the successor to Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping. It was extraordinary that Deng had come to power. He, too, had been brought down by the Cultural Revolution, his political career destroyed and his family targeted. His eldest son had been tortured by Red Guards and, in 1966, fell, or was pushed, out of a third-storey window, the same as San Li. But father and son had outlasted the turmoil, the son now famous in his wheelchair. Deng had out-manoeuvred Madame Mao and her admirers, who now languished in prison. Now, with the backing of the Politburo, he was unrolling a series of economic and political reforms. In the auditorium, Li’s speech was a kind of song in itself, in which people intermittently cried out, “Ashes burn once more!” and “Strive to implement the Four Modernizations of Comrade Deng!” The Great Helmsman’s name, xiǎo píng, meant “little bottle” and so, in the trees just outside, someone had hung a collection of small green bottles, along with colourful banners that read, “Deng Blue Skies.” The glass tinkled in the breeze, a hope for better days.