Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  Sparrow, too, was quiet. He had lost his paper flower and his coat looked naked. His bicycle creaked. She unfastened her own flower, pulled him to a stop, and pinned it to him. Behind him, the last remnants of the student procession turned right, north towards the university district. What world had they come from and to what world were they returning?

  “Ai-ming, what are you thinking?”

  What had the Square looked like this morning when the sun rose on a hundred thousand youth curled together on the concrete? She felt embarrassed because, in response to her father’s question, she, a young scholar, could only think of Yiwen’s favourite song, It’s not that I don’t understand. It’s that things are changing so fast.

  Sparrow rephrased. “What were these students thinking?”

  They had entered the Square now. The phalanxes of police remained, guarding the Great Hall of the People, even though it was probably empty. The day was quickly getting on. A conscientious few students were meticulously picking up garbage, but they left the paper flowers, which tumbled like pollen whenever a breeze came. The oversized Hu Yaobang gazed sorrowfully down from the Monument.

  “I came here when I was a small child,” Sparrow said. “Big Mother brought me. She told me the Square is a microcosm of the human body. The head, the heart, the lungs…She told me not to get lost.”

  “Did you get lost?” Ai-ming asked.

  “Of course. The space is so large. It takes more than a million people to fill it. Even in 1966, the Red Guards couldn’t do it.”

  “Ba,” Ai-ming said. “I want to go abroad.” There was some part of her that remained untapped, she thought, that would never come to life unless it was given space.

  “A person needs money to go abroad. Your mother and I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “The ones without money try to find outside sponsorship.”

  Sparrow was quiet.

  The Art of War, Ai-ming thought, ashamed. Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business. “If you know someone in Canada who could sponsor me, I could go.”

  Her father looked at her as if from a great distance. Had she been too direct? Was it obvious she had invaded his privacy?

  “Yiwen told me,” she said hurriedly, baldly lying. “She said she has an uncle in America. That’s why she applied to go overseas. I thought we might know someone.”

  “But why would I know anyone in Canada?” Ba said. His voice was piercingly gentle, cutting her like a toothpick.

  “I don’t know….you must know musicians who went away,” she said wretchedly. “With my grades. If I studied hard, I could…”

  “Beida is a the best university in the country. Your mother and I don’t want you to study in Canada, it’s so far away.”

  “But you could come with me!”

  Sparrow shook his head, but not in a way that said no.

  She said, “Once you told me that when you were young, you wanted to go abroad. To write your music. To hear other influences. Why is it too late? Ba, you’ve been working in the factory for twenty years and this is a long time in a person’s life. I think…I have a sense that things are changing. The whole point of Hu Yaobang’s reforms was to give opportunities to people like you, people who were unfairly treated.”

  “Is that what you think, Ai-ming, that I was unfairly treated?” He touched the flower she had pinned to his coat, as if he had just noticed it.

  She wanted to curl up into a ball. Even though her intent was good, the directness of her words made her feel as if she was poking him repeatedly with a sharpened stick.

  After a moment, Sparrow said, “And what about your mother?”

  “Ma lived nearly twenty years away from us. What difference would it make to her?”

  “She lived far away because the government assigns our jobs and our housing.”

  “But why? Why can’t we choose for ourselves?” Across from them, in the emptiness of the Square, there were posters asking this very same question. She was not alone in her thinking, she had nothing to fear. Ba doesn’t even know how afraid he is, she thought. His generation has gotten so used to it, they don’t even know that fear is the primary emotion they feel.

  “I chose my life, Ai-ming,” he said. “I chose the life that I could live with. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way from the outside.”

  She wondered if he believed his own words. She said, “I know, Ba.”

  They stood together in the Square where funeral wreaths softened the emptiness. The architecture was intended to make a person feel insignificant, but Ai-ming felt confusingly large, there was so much room here, a child could run in any pattern, make any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.

  “I want to know what it’s like in a young country with lots of space,” she said. “If you say something out loud, you hear your own voice differently.”

  Sparrow nodded.

  She said, “Canada.”

  —

  In Sparrow’s mind, lines of Chairman Mao came back unbidden.

  We had much to do

  and quickly.

  The sky-earth spins

  and time is short.

  Ten thousand years is long

  and so a morning and an evening count.

  Near to them, in front of the Great Hall of the People, the first line of police, too, seemed to be melting. It could be, Sparrow thought, that a person does not even know that they have gone quiet. Qù could be a substance that begins as a strength and transmutes, imperceptibly, into loss.

  They had reached the southern edge of the Square.

  Now Ai-ming asked him, “Why did the students kneel down?”

  “I imagine…they wanted to show respect. They followed the ways in which petitioners have always approached the government.”

  “But why did no government official come out?”

  “Because…even though they were kneeling, if a member of the government had come and addressed their demands, the students would have been in a position of power.”

  The sun was luminous but the wind was cold. His daughter hugged herself tightly. Paper flowers jumbled over the ground, paper carnations grew from the trees, though some had fallen and been mashed by the everlasting stream of bicycles. He heard their tinkling bells and also a music in his head, shaken loose, the Twelfth Goldberg Variation, two voices engaged in a slightly out-of-breath canon, like a knot that never got tied. He could still write music. The thought jolted him. It might be possible to procure a piano, he could visit the Central Conservatory and ask for the use of a practice room. But then Sparrow had an image of himself, waiting beneath their turning fans, and smiled to think of himself appearing in his Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 uniform and his blue worker’s cap. The absurdity of it made a deep impression. His age struck him forcefully, as if some blindfold had momentarily loosened and allowed him to see things as they were.

  He wanted to take Ai-ming’s hand. Sometimes, when Ai-ming bruised her knee on the table or suffered some psychological melancholy, it seemed to lodge inside him as well. Where did the line between parent and child exist? He’d always tried to refrain from pushing her in one direction or the other, ever fearful he might drive her towards the Party, but what if his silence had let her down or failed her in some crucial way? But maybe, he thought, a parent should always have failings, some place into which a child can sink her teeth, because only then can a child come to know herself. He thought about those young students kneeling with their petition. Eventually, they would be arrested. It was inevitable.

  “What happened to all that music, Ba? What if…I wish you’d been able to get away, to the West or some other place. I think, if it weren’t for me, maybe you would have tried to live a more honest life.”

  Had he been dishonest, Sparrow wondered. To whom had been dishonest? Hadn’t he said what needed to be said?

  “Forgive me for speaking so directly, Ba. Only…you raised me to think my own thoughts, even if I couldn’t say them aloud, isn’t that
so? I think the time has come to say, sincerely, what I feel.”

  The brutality of children never ceased to surprise him.

  He had to stop and rest. His heart was beating strangely and his hands felt full of paper cuts, even though there was no visible injury. Ai-ming caught hold of his arm. She looked suddenly alarmed and he wanted to smooth the terror from her face. Big Mother Knife and Aunt Swirl used to trace their fingers over his forehead, his eyebrows; when he was a child, it would help him fall asleep. But that was almost fifty years ago, when Shanghai was occupied. How funny, Sparrow thought, to think that he had been a child of a former world. When had he ceased to be that person? Ai-ming pulled him to a sidewalk bench and then she ran to fill her tea thermos. She also came back with fish balls on a stick. They looked so unappealing his mouth twisted in disgust. Relieved, Ai-ming laughed. He drank the tea and she ate the fish balls, savouring their saltiness as only a young person can. He fought the urge to put his arm around her. Did he want to hold on to her to keep her safe, he wondered, or just to keep himself from being lonely? Ai-ming was eighteen years old and she was ready to find a new beginning, entirely different from his own. This realization shocked him: Ai-ming was still so young, and already she had judged him.

  —

  Over the weekend, the Square came into Sparrow’s thoughts like a continuous sound. He had heard from his co-workers that hundreds of thousands of people continued to gather there, they were writing public messages, using Hu Yaobang’s funeral as a pretext to mourn others, those who’d never been given a proper burial.

  On Tuesday, when Sparrow arrived home from work, Ai-ming and Ling were engrossed by the apricots they were eating and barely noticed him. He changed out of his factory clothes. The previous night, while his wife and daughter slept, he’d written a wall poster to bring to the Square. Now he tucked the narrow roll of paper into his coat.

  By the time Sparrow reached Tiananmen Square, it was twilight; thousands of others like him had come to feel the breeze of the open air. Walking across the Square’s infinite greyness, he felt as if he had been exiled to some distant moon. The memorial to Hu Yaobang remained, more flowers had arrived and more posters. In 1976, after Premier Zhou Enlai died, similar events had taken place. Beijingers had come to the Square and mourned openly, provocatively; his death had allowed people to demonstrate loyalty to the disappeared, to people like Zhuli. The government must know that allegiance to the dead was a stubborn loyalty that no policy could eradicate.

  He took the poster from his coat. Nearby two girls were mixing glue, and he asked for their assistance. “No problem, grandfather!” one said. She had a Shanghai accent. “I’ll stick that up for you.” She read over his poster, nodded with a kind of bureaucratic approval, and pasted it up in a prominent position. Sparrow had copied a quote from the scholar Kang Youwei, whose treatises he had read in Kai’s room, with the Professor, San Li, Ling and the Old Cat, and still remembered: “And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered help to them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.”

  The contours of Hu Yaobang’s portrait were disappearing bit by bit. In the openness of the Square, he allowed himself, for the first time in many years, to remember. Zhuli was in Room 103 playing Prokofiev. His Symphony No. 3 had been finished in his head a thousand times, but he couldn’t hear the ending. Perhaps the places in ourselves that appear empty have only been dormant, unreachable.

  Zhuli, he thought. I’m sorry that I came too late. Of course he knew that she had forgiven him long ago, so why did he hold on to this guilt? What was the thing he was most afraid of?

  —

  The next afternoon, Sparrow gazed once more into the chassis of the Model 3812 radio. At the next work station, Old Bi and Miss Lu were arguing over the ongoing demonstrations, which had spread to a boycott of classes at thirty-nine universities by sixty thousand students. Despite the fact that university students were now banned from factory grounds, someone had managed to smuggle pamphlets into the cafeteria, “Ten Polite Questions for the Chinese Communist Party.”

  Bi’s foot kept kicking the table leg to punctuate his words, which seemed to be directed at no one. “Donkeys, donkeys, donkeys!”

  “Just last month, fifty people here got reprioritized,” Miss Lu said placidly. “They’ve no jobs and no rations. Modernization stinks.”

  “But we need to be practical.” Bi made a triple kick. “We don’t need a million kids in the Square. We need a few smart bosses who know how to run the shop.”

  The young woman beside Sparrow shouted, “Fuck this wire! These new 1432s are shit.” Her name was Fan and she was hot-tempered. “Old Bi, if you kick the table one more time, I’m going to stab both your eyes.”

  “Give it to me,” Sparrow said. He took the chassis, realigned a crooked filter capacitor, connected it straight to the chassis, soldered it with his hot iron, checked the circuit ground and the alignment, and handed it back. It made him think of an electrified violin.

  “Comrade Sparrow has the fingers of a little girl,” Dao-ren joked.

  Radio Beijing was playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major. Ever since the announcement of Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May, they had been bombarded by Tchaikovsky and Alexander Glazunov.

  “The fact is,” Fan said, pointing her soldering gun at Old Bi, “these Beijing kids took one look at our lives and decided it wasn’t for them. I thought I would study at Fudan University and become a doctor, but look where I am now, not that you comrades aren’t a daily joy to be with! I didn’t see my parents or my siblings for fifteen years! I know for a fact that Comrade Sparrow here hasn’t seen his brothers since they were kids! These days, if you curse the wrong person, you might as well shoot yourself! My sister’s kid complained about his corrupt boss. Poor little shit was re-prioritized and hasn’t been assigned a job for three years! He’s going to the Square every day now!”

  Sparrow pivoted the chassis and began working at it from the opposite corner.

  As the others argued, Tchaikovsky’s triplet configurations and double stops rained from the speakers like the beating of a thousand wings. When at last the shift ended and they all shuffled towards the exit, Sparrow felt as if a century had passed. On the way home, he nearly fell asleep on the crowded tram, pinned between the window and someone’s dried beans. His fingers were completely numb. When he finally tumbled out at Beijing West Railway Station, a large crowd was jostling in front of the post office. Lunch tins cracked against his elbows. Sparrow tried to push his way through but was impeded by the cart of a candy maker. If we let this turmoil go unchecked, a China with a bright future will become a chaotic China with no future. Loudspeakers were broadcasting the seven-o’clock news, which meant he had gotten home later than normal. “These children are creating political turmoil?” people around him were muttering. “Counter-revolutionaries? Is that the verdict?” The broadcast continued: Under no circumstances should the formation of any illegal organizations be allowed. He would have to…pain sparked along his arms, as if strings had been tied around his fingers and slowly tightened. Wasn’t this what Red Guards had done to…he couldn’t think. The bystanders around him were staring malevolently at the speakers. “Are they kidding?” someone asked. “Do they plan on using tanks on a bunch of math students?” Uneasy shifting. “This is turmoil? This is like the Cultural Revolution? I’ve seen more political turmoil in my soup pot.”

  Sparrow pushed his way around the candy man. The vendor tried to interest people in the fantastical shapes he created by pulling sugar syrup, he made words and even the heads of famous figures. Sparrow had loved these sweets when he was a boy. He bought three, one that seemed to be in the shape of Chairman Mao, another that was clearly Bee
thoven, and a third unidentifiable. He pushed his way through the crowd.

  Home at last, he could smell the starchy sweetness of the rice Ai-ming had prepared. His daughter had already laid out pickled turnips and spicy eggplant. On radios and speakers up and down the hutong, the government verdict on the the student demonstrations repeated: This is a serious political struggle confronting the whole Party and People….The announcer let it be known that the editorial would appear in People’s Daily the following morning, April 26, and the Party urged all citizens to study it carefully. Sparrow thought he must ask Ai-ming to design a device that surreptitiously turned off other people’s radios.

  A translation of the Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky sat on the television. Why in the world was Ai-ming reading this? He turned its thin pages. He couldn’t concentrate on the words but in the photos, he observed that Tchaikovsky had the large belly of a fortunate man. The composer looked stout and stylish.

  He turned the pages of the book as loudly as he could, hoping Ai-ming might emerge, missing her company. The letters of Tchaikovsky were full of banter, he seemed to have several brothers. Here Tchaikovsky was, writing to one brother about the composition of his famous Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35: “It goes without saying that I would have been able to do nothing without him. He plays it marvellously. When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and I run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it…passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength….”

  Sparrow stared down at the page.

  Where was the record player? This was a fever pervading his limbs, causing turmoil in his thoughts. He felt such an intense longing for music that he was almost a child again, listening to his mother and Swirl as he waited beneath a teahouse table. And where were Kai’s letters? They were missing from the record sleeve where he normally kept them. For years, he had heard nothing of Kai and then, out of the blue in 1985, as reforms intensified, a letter had gotten through. Only then did he learn that Kai had left the country. In 1978, after visiting Sparrow in Cold Water Ditch, he had crossed the border into Hong Kong where he applied for asylum. Within a year, he had married, left for Canada and had a daughter. The first letters had trickled into Cold Water Ditch, arriving every six months. Now, in Beijing, the letters from Canada came every few weeks. Kai said he no longer played the piano. This turning away from music was impossible to explain, he was haunted by people and events; he felt he had been sleeping all these years. He wanted desperately to return to China, however briefly, but his defection made it impossible. The government refused to grant him a visa. Could Sparrow come and see him in Hong Kong? He had already looked into all the particulars. Kai would wire money that might serve as a guarantee for Sparrow’s exit visa. This detail was entered into the letter as if it were an ordinary passing thought. Sparrow did not comprehend, but the texture of Kai’s writing, the inability to picture either of them in a foreign country, the inability, in truth, to picture the outside world at all, embarrassed him. Sparrow wrote a hesitant reply. And then, last month, Kai had written to him. Long ago, you told me not to turn back but I know now that you were mistaken, I knew it then, Sparrow, but I was too afraid to see it. I was too selfish. And what right did I have to ask you for anything? But Sparrow, the future depends on knowing what we loved and who we have become…Please, if you can, please come to Hong Kong. There are too many things between us. There is a lifetime. I recently learned that the Professor was imprisoned and survived the turmoil. He passed away in 1981. We never reconciled. How could I not know of his death until now?