Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  They come to a blue oasis in the wilderness, shrouded in mist, where birdsong twists between them. It seems like the edge of the world, but in fact it is the ancient city of Khotan, for they have reached the southwestern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Da-wei thinks of his lost brothers, of May Fourth and now his own child, a girl named Zhuli, and he wonders if he and his wife are the last to pass through this gate. Where does the future exist? If they continue west, they will reach the disputed lands of Kashmir. Do they turn around or keep going? To which side do they belong? On the walls of a school, someone has copied out a letter or a poem and the words read,

  I came into this world

  bringing only paper, rope, a shadow

  Let me tell you, world

  I do not believe….

  His wife no longer has a photograph to show to strangers, and she simply crouches down against the wall, exhausted. The twisting cascade of her hair has fallen from its hold.

  Da-wei touches the words on the wall. A new conjunction adorns the sky now / They are the pictographs from five thousand years / They are the watchful eyes of future generations….

  “I know she’s gone,” his wife says. “I know it, but how can I let her go?”

  A young man in the schoolyard is playing music. He is playing a violin, what they called a xiǎo tí qin, a small, lifted zither, and Da-wei, recognizes the song. Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, written for two violins, but the man plays alone, the counterpoint is gone, or never was. Da-wei thinks of the duties of a father: there should be gifts of money to see his daughter through the underworld, oranges for sweetness, silk to cover her. His pockets are empty and he is ashamed that he has nothing to give her, in this life or for the next. This music, and the great distance it has come, confounds him. He wants to tell his daughter to return home, but the roads have changed and nothing in this country is familiar, if she turns back towards the cities of the coast, she might lose her way. How can he help her? Why has he been so powerless? Da-wei hears the counterpoint as if it were real, a melody line he knows intimately, having replayed it again and again from the radio station, into the safekeeping of the air. I came into this world bringing only paper, rope, a shadow….In surviving the present, did they sacrifice the future? The world he once believed in has changed its shape once more.

  His daughter left so long ago. But he himself does not know how to be free.

  “Help me,” his wife says. “Help me to let her go.”

  Sparrow closed the notebook. He heard music trickling from somewhere, a radio left on, a memory. Zhuli, he said. He listened as the air answered.

  —

  Ai-ming sat up in bed. She could hear a recording of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins circling through the house, starting and then stopping. When she crept out of her room, she saw her father seated on the floor, his back to her. He lifted the needle and held it there, as if something in his mind could not be decided, and then he set it back again. The first tension of sound, the air that came before the music, seemed to crackle up from the floor itself. Oistrakh performed the piece with his son, and the two violins circled one another, sometimes warily, sometimes harsh with accusation, disclosing a covetousness, but also an immense feeling, for which she had no words. She watched her father, thinking of Beijing and the future. What if everything was unprescribed, she wondered. What kind of world would that be? What if everything, or anything at all, had the capacity to change and begin again?

  FROM THEIR TWO-ROOM FLAT beside the Muxidi Bridge, in a traditional Beijing hutong–a maze of alleyway housing–Tiananmen Square was just fifteen minutes away. It was only fifteen minutes but still, pedalling down the wide boulevard, Ai-ming felt as if she were lifting off into outer space. Growing up, she must have seen thousands of pictures of the Square, but the reality was defiantly modern: shadowy couples, long-haired drifters, teenagers listening to rock music, singing, “The world is a garbage dump!” Small children wobbled by in their padded coats, moving at the same sedate pace as their grandparents, as if they had all the time in the world. Today, the afternoon wind had an unkind bite, April could not let go of winter.

  Her bicycle leaned on its kickstand. Ai-ming sat on the paving stones and gazed, proprietorially, out into the Square. For as long as she could remember, right and wrong had been represented by the Party through colour. Truth and beauty, for instance, were hóng (red), while criminality and falsehood were hēi (black). Her mother was red, her father was black. But Beijing, resting place of Chairman Mao, turned out to be softly ochre and even the colossal boulevards had a camel-coloured hue. Red existed only in the national flag and the Party banners, but all that red couldn’t make a dent in all this yellow. Sometimes the wind brought sand from the Gobi Desert and the dust got into everything, not only her perceptions but also her food, so that silky tofu tasted crunchy.

  “Come on,” a boy whispered, “don’t be like that,” and the girl who leaned on his shoulder said, “If you like her, just tell me honestly. I’m not old-fashioned. I won’t do something foolish…”

  Ai-ming closed her eyes and pretended not to be eavesdropping. People in Beijing were different, she thought. They were surprisingly dignified, they were more subtle yet more hopeful creatures.

  Today was Ai-ming’s eighteenth birthday. She had undone her braids, emulating the city girls. Pedalling down the eight-lane thoroughfare of Chang’an Avenue, she had felt its soft heaviness floating behind her. Yesterday, instead of studying, she had altered the line of her best dress, and now the cotton tugged firmly at her breasts and hips, giving her a feeling of heightened containment. In the centre of the Square, she looked up at the ochre sky and thought, “Let me tell you world, I wish to believe.”

  Alone, she did not feel lonely at all. It was as if she walked upon some miraculous circuit board that made her more powerful. But later on, at twilight, when she met her parents at the Square’s northern edge and they walked to Ai-ming’s favourite restaurant, Comrade Barbarian, she began to feel as if her lungs were being crushed. Her mother radiated anxiety, or perhaps only regret. After dinner, when Ling paid to have their picture taken in front of Tiananmen Gate, Ai-ming had a sudden image of what they must look like: Sparrow, the factory worker, Ling, the diligent cadre and Ai-ming herself, the good student. They even dressed in the bland, inoffensive colours of a model family.

  “Don’t even breathe!” the photographer said. “Hold it, hold it….”

  She fixed her gaze on a point behind his right ear, where three slim boys in matching windcheaters stood beneath an enormous banner: “Study Hard and Make Progress Every Day.” She thought to herself, I must make myself fortunate. But what was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside? Since childhood, she had been reading Sparrow’s diary, which her father used to write and submit to his superiors every week. Until 1978, her father had been categorized as a criminal element, but with a diary this dull, there was no way he could be a hooligan. Only now did Ai-ming realize she’d underestimated the Bird of Quiet.

  Even Big Mother hadn’t known about the bundle of foreign letters hidden in a Glenn Gould album sleeve. At first, it had been the stamps that drew her to them: such glorious images of Canadian mountains and frozen seas, such thick Western paper. Are you writing? Will you send me your recent compositions? My beloved Sparrow, I think of you constantly. Who was this Jiang Kai and what did she look like? How was it possible that the Bird of Quiet had a secret love?

  The photographer’s shutter made a big clap.

  “Good,” Sparrow said. “Done!” He turned to Ai-ming. There was a tiny piece of fluff on his factory shirt. She removed it.

  Ling counted the coins in her purse and gave them to the photographer. The coins made a clicking like a handful of beans.

  Sparrow pointed up to a dragon kite in the air. He didn’t seem to realize she was no longer a little child, and could
not be so easily diverted. “How beautiful.”

  —

  At home, in the tiny room that served as her study, magazines occupied her. Not the candy-coloured women’s magazines that had begun to appear in Beijing kiosks but serious journals such as Let the Natural Sciences Contend. She had an affinity for probability theory and Riemannian symmetric spaces, which she continued to study, neglecting politics and English, which had been her downfall the first time around. One of their neighbours, Lu Yiwen, was a glamorous first-year student at Beijing Normal University. She had given Ai-ming a copy of Miyazaki’s China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examination of Imperial China. It was thick. Yiwen had laughed and said she didn’t need it anymore. Now, Ai-ming glared at her desk and felt the ridiculousness of it all. These high towers of books made a futuristic city around her. She hid inside and dozed off, her dreams intersecting like airplanes in the sky. A voice in her head kept saying, nonsensically, “Yiwen is airy like a cloud.” “The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announces with deep sorrow…” She turned and as she did so, a page of Let the Natural Sciences Contend crumpled under her cheek, she reached out to wipe it off, “–long-tested, loyal Communist fighter, Hu Yaobang, a great proletarian revolutionary–”

  Big Mother Knife, she muddily thought, used to mutter “yào bāng” when she scrubbed their only rice pot. The words meant “brilliant country,” and they also happened to be the name of the General-Secretary of the Party. The disgraced, former General-Secretary.

  “The utmost efforts were made to rescue him….”

  Ai-ming opened her eyes.

  “At 7:53 a.m., April 15, 1989, he died at the age of seventy-three.”

  Her chair shifted. The scratching of wood against wood seemed to come from her own bones. One shoulder burned with pain and the other felt loose and long. She thought she could hear people weeping. The crying came nearer, it entered with the rain that was dripping down and darkening the concrete walkway outside the door. Today was Saturday, but both her parents were at work. She walked across the room and sprawled out on their bed, too restless to study, and watched the rain for a long time.

  —

  When Sparrow arrived home from the factory he turned their own radio on straightaway, even though they could hear the neighbours’ radios just fine. He had been caught in the rain and his wet hair looked sad on his forehead. Ai-ming took a towel and rubbed it violently over his head.

  “What did you study today?” he asked, muffled.

  “Everything. Are we bringing flowers to Tiananmen Square?”

  He pushed a corner of towel out of his face. “Flowers?”

  “Look, all our neighbours are making them.” She could see into the rooms across the narrow alleyway, and also the rooms adjoining their kitchen, where the Gua family were folding white paper chrysanthemums, the symbol of mourning. “For Comrade Hu Yaobang! He died today, you know.”

  “Mmm,” Sparrow said. He was tilted over, trying expel water from his ear. Now his hair was standing straight up and he looked like a porpoise.

  She said nonchalantly, “You know, when he was asked which of Chairman Mao’s policies might still be relevant in China, Hu Yaobang said: ‘I think, none.’ ”

  “You know better than to repeat such things.”

  “If the General-Secretary can say it, why can’t I?”

  Her father straightened. “Since when did you become the General-Secretary? And wasn’t he purged?”

  On the radio, Red Guards were shouting ridiculous slogans at a disgraced Hu Yaobang. This was the 1960s, before Ai-ming was born, and the frenzied sound clip lasted only a few seconds before moving on to better days. Here he was in the new economic zones, here he was with cadres in the Northwest. After the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four, Comrade Hu worked for the rehabilitation of those who had been wrongly accused….He travelled through 1,500 districts and villages, all the way to remote Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, to see how Partly policies manifested in people’s lives….

  It rained harder. Ai-ming slowly peeled an orange.

  In the alleyway, Yiwen walked by wearing a new pink dress, it swayed against her hips as she went, floating against her long pale legs. Ai-ming felt as vulnerable as this naked orange in her hand. They were the same age but she was a child compared to Yiwen, who was an actual university student. Yiwen had a portable cassette player and she was always listening to music as she walked. It was very modern and deeply Western to listen to music that no one else could hear. Private music led to private thoughts. Private thoughts led to private desires, to private fulfillments or private hungers, to a whole private universe away from parents, family and society.

  The squeak of Sparrow’s plastic slippers interrupted her thoughts. Ai-ming gave him the peeled orange and he smiled as if she had given him the sun. He went to the record player and Ai-ming flicked off the radio, silencing Hu Yaobang in mid-sentence.

  She crawled into bed even though it was still early. The fugue of Bach’s Musical Offering circled in the darkness like a dog chasing its tail. Ai-ming heard her mother come home, and the routine words her parents exchanged. Same bed, different dreams. The old saying described Sparrow and Ling perfectly. How could it be that her mother was such an independent, modern creature? Why did her father love someone so far away from his present reality? How could Ai-ming live a better life than theirs? To her, the only essay question that mattered was, How was it possible for a person to write her own future?

  —

  On Monday, Ai-ming ran into the neighbour Yiwen at the water spigot. “You’re going to Tiananmen Square this morning, aren’t you?” the older girl asked.

  Taken aback, Ai-ming could only say, “Why?”

  The girl laughed. She lifted her full water bucket, staggering backwards. “Yes, why?” Yiwen said, still laughing. “I almost believed you! Ai-ming, you really tricked me. What a straight face! If I ever need someone to give an alibi for me, I’m coming to you first.”

  Ai-ming smiled. She watched Yiwen’s pink dress float down the alley.

  Back in her room, she stood for a moment looking at the stack of books on the desk. The university examinations were still three months away. She drew the curtain across the window, changed her dress and left the apartment.

  She pedalled slowly, in love with the wind against her face. Long before Jianguomen changed into Chang’an Avenue, she saw bits of flowers, paper and ribbon all over the road, accumulating like clouds until, at the Square, she arrived at an unreal scene. Thousands of funeral wreaths, with their paper ribbons, were pulsating in the breeze. Just off the Avenue, factory workers were having a public meeting, some girls were reciting poetry, and a group of university students huddled on the ground with ink, brushes and paper, writing essay-length posters. She walked deeper into the Square, searching ludicrously for Yiwen. The concrete seemed to expand from her own feet like an endless grey footprint.

  At the Monument to the People’s Heroes, three grandmothers were muttering subversively. “Heart attack.” “Just like that! Right in the middle of a Politburo meeting.” “Those foxes humiliated him, they bullied him until his heart gave out….” A colossal black-and-white Hu Yaobang towered above them, the photo blown up so big that Comrade Hu’s nose was the height of a man. Posters were everywhere, on the ground, affixed to the Monument, on makeshift boards. The ones who should drop dead still live. The one who should live has died. Just reading the poster made Ai-ming feel as if she had cursed the government or ratted out her father.

  She actually lifted a hand to cover her eyes. Still the words on the posters slipped between her fingers. Why is it that we can’t choose our own jobs? What right does the government have to keep a private file on me?

  She turned around only to find herself facing another wall of paper.

  Is it not time to live like human beings?

  Do you remember?

  I am lonely.

  She stepped closer, squinting at
the characters. Do you remember?

  What illegal thoughts. The ones who should die…But actually, why should anyone’s thoughts be illegal? In the distance, the concrete was shifting, it metamorphosed into a small crowd. The small crowd seemed to replicate itself, more and more demonstrators appeared with banners elongated like ships above their heads. “Arise, slaves, arise! We shall take back the fruits of our labour…” A Tsinghua University flag dipped and slid sideways, and there were others, too, flags announcing the Institute of Aeronautics and People’s University. The students met a line of police. From far away, it looked like a grey wave gulping up a string of fish. The police disappeared and the crowd grew fatter. A banner floated, delicate as a finger, towards her, “Long live education!”

  She couldn’t help but wonder how the first-years among them had answered the examination question, “Leo Tolstoy. Discuss.” Turning awkwardly, she tripped over a schoolbag. The owner apologized and kicked the bag carelessly away from them, she thought she heard something snap. When he smiled the shadows under his eyes widened. The boy asked what department she was in and, when Ai-ming stared, he pointed to a pendant above his head (“Education Department”) and then, answering a question she hadn’t asked, he said, “An official re-evaluation of Hu Yaobang’s life and career. An end to the spiritual pollution campaign. That’s number one and two. And also…we’re asking the government to free those arrested in 1977 for speaking the truth. The heroes of Democracy Wall, you know. Twelve years later, and they’re still in prison!” It turned out he was speaking to someone behind her. Humiliated, she stepped sideways and out of his line of vision. His glasses had no nose rests and the frames were sliding down. She wanted, tenderly, to push them up. The students started shouting, “Yaobang forever!”

  The sweetness of a piece of cake she had eaten earlier in the day persisted in her mouth. Bits of paper carnations were stuck to her shoes and Ai-ming tried to scrub them off against the grey concrete, not wanting to trail them, like evidence, back home. She found her bicycle and pedalled slowly back, against the constant stream of Beijingers moving towards the Square.