Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  At home, Ling pushed her shoes off, went to the dining table and hung her purse on the chair. The apartment was quiet. She knocked at Ai-ming’s door and, receiving no answer, opened it. Sparrow was writing. When he looked up, it was as if he had no idea where he was.

  Ling took a breath. The room smelled of alcohol. “Has Ai-ming gone to the Square?”

  “She was already gone by the time I came home.”

  His hand covered the sheet of paper before him.

  Outside, the street noise grew, dissolved and came again, like an explosion.

  “Every citizen is on the streets tonight it seems. Except you, dear Sparrow.”

  She came nearer, looking closely at her husband’s face. He was extremely pale. “What’s happened?” she asked. “Are you worried about the demonstrators? The government won’t arrest the whole city. They can’t.”

  He couldn’t look at her. “What are the students asking for?”

  “I’m not sure they know anymore. The government accused them of inciting chaos. They compared them to the Red Guards and the students don’t agree. Nobody does.”

  Sparrow stood up. “They have no idea of the risk,” he said. He moved towards the door as if this room was too crowded.

  Ling followed him out. The sheet of paper, turned over, remained where it was.

  “But what if…” she said, following him into the kitchen. Suddenly exhausted, Ling sat down at the table. “Those students are rebelling against us, too. Against our generation, I mean.”

  Sparrow said nothing.

  When had they last had an honest conversation, she wondered. Could it be months, or even years, since they last confided in one another? “We let the Party decide our jobs, our fates, our homes and the education of our children. We submitted because…”

  “We thought some good might come.”

  “But when did we stop believing it? Look at me, I edit transcripts and I’m grateful for the job. My life is a mountain of paperwork and a sea of meetings.” She laughed, but found her own laugh alarming. “Unlike us, these young people have literally no memory. Without memory, they’re free.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking about my life, Sparrow. Not the past but the future. Don’t you ever think about yours?”

  “Yes, of course, but here in Beijing…sometimes I imagine that I…but we–”

  Ai-ming burst into the apartment, elated. Ling caught a glimpse of another girl darting down the alleyway, a flash of neon colour. It was the neighbour’s wild daughter, Yiwen.

  Sparrow turned towards the door. “Where have you been?”

  “At the Square, of course! You should see it, all the people–”

  He began to berate her. Ai-ming stared at her father as if he were a stranger.

  “How can I protect you?” he yelled. “How?” He had drunk more than Ling had supposed. She stood up from the table and went towards him. Sparrow kept on: “The government is right. You’re no different from the Red Guards! You think you know everything, you think you can judge everyone, you think you’re the only ones who love this country. You think you can overturn everything in a day, a moment!”

  “Sparrow,” Ling said.

  “They stole everything,” Sparrow said, turning to her. “But why did we let them do it? Why did we give in? I remember everything now. My brothers. I couldn’t…Zhuli. They needed me to help them, but I didn’t. Why did we throw away everything that mattered to us?”

  Ling’s heart was breaking. She had never seen him come apart, she had stopped thinking that he could. It was as if someone had cut a single wire inside him on which everything had depended. “Sparrow, let it go.”

  “How?”

  “Ai-ming,” Ling said, wanting to shield their daughter. “Go to your room.” Ai-ming obeyed. Tears streamed down her face.

  “How can I forget?” Sparrow’s face was drained of colour. He looked at Ling as if she had always known the answer. “If I forget, what’s left? There’s nothing.”

  All she wanted was to lie down, close her eyes and rest, but she had to get out of this room, out of the falseness of this home. Ling picked up her purse from the chair. The walls were pressing in on her and she couldn’t breathe, thinking of everything she had given up for her family, but most of all for the Party. She looked once more at her husband, who had covered his face with his hands. “Don’t you see?” she said. “Things are changing.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Live your life, Sparrow. It’s the best thing either of us can do for our daughter.” She went out the door, through the alleyway, and into the street.

  —

  When Sparrow woke, the room, the city, was quiet. He got out of bed, lit the lamp and took the letter out of its hiding place. On the kitchen table, the paper gleamed whitely.

  Even if I had the means to leave

  I was content in my life

  The night sky was a thickening dark. He would like to have a piano, he would like to sit, right now, in the darkness of a practice room. Music, for him, had always been a way of thinking. He pushed the pages away. Sparrow could not imagine leaving his daughter behind. Ai-ming was so much like Zhuli. Were they similar because of him, had he failed to give his daughter the room she needed? In the eighteen years of Ai-ming’s life, he had never been separated from her, not for a day. He covered the letter with his hands and chided himself for being mournful. If he could sweep away all this mournfulness, which must only be a kind of dust from his previous lives, he would be a better father and a kinder husband. Ling’s confidence and goodness had always sustained him. He had no right to grieve. Their neighbour was listening to the radio, Sparrow could hear the anchor’s even drone but not the words. Music began, echoing through the alleyway, but it was music he couldn’t recognize, music from an era he didn’t know, music composed in the present.

  —

  Ongoing disruptions in the street, in the factory and in his home continued. He suspected Ai-ming was going to the Square every day, but neither he nor Ling had the will or influence to stop her. On the May First holiday, he telephoned Cold Water Ditch on the neighbourhood phone. Big Mother came onto the line and shouted, “Workers’ Day? We live in a Communist country. Every day is workers’ day!” He could hear Ba Lute giggling behind her. Big Mother grumbled, “Tell that lazy Ai-ming to study hard.” When he said there was unrest in Beijing, she said, “Good! Nobody should be at rest.”

  How, he wondered, when he put down the phone, had Big Mother managed to raise a son like him? It was impossible not to believe in the mischief of the gods.

  The May Fourth demonstrations came and went, as large as the preceding April 27th demonstration, and included a contingent from Sparrow’s own Beijing Wire Factory No. 3. But he did not go.

  Sleep became impossible. Sparrow took to walking at night. Even at two or three in the morning, bicycles roamed the streets, students flitting from one place to another. Time felt elastic, stretching into unfamiliar shapes, so that he could be both in Beijing and in Shanghai, an old man and a young man, in the world and in his thoughts.

  One night, he came across three men and two women playing music at the closed gates of Jade Pond Park. The musicians made time disappear. On Chinese instruments, they played the dignified promenade from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Mussorgsky’s ten movements depicted an imaginary tour of an art collection, and the composition had been written in honour of his friend, a painter who had died suddenly at the age of thirty-nine. A deep and unfamiliar calm pervaded Sparrow. On a nearby pillar, someone had pasted up a letter, “I’ve been searching for myself, but I didn’t expect to find so many selves of mine.” When morning came, the musicians packed up their instruments. Sparrow bought a dough stick and savoured it as he watched the night workers go off duty and the day workers go on.

  One evening, he arrived home from the factory to find a gift from Ai-ming. She had bought one of the new Japanese cassette players, small enough to
fit into one hand. His daughter was so delighted with the gadget, she could not restrain herself from testing all the buttons and trying the headphones herself, adjusting and readjusting the volume. They might have toyed with it all night had Ling not dragged them out for supper.

  He continued his nighttime walks, listening to the Walkman. Ai-ming had made a dozen tapes for him, copying them, she said, from someone called Fat Lips. Lately, she had friends all over the place. One evening, Sparrow walked all the way to the university district listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In the darkness, one could always hear better. The music became as real as the concrete sidewalks and stout brick walls. Elderly guards at the entrance to Beijing University were immersed in their midnight card game, and so Sparrow passed through the gate unimpeded. Perhaps in his innocuous clothes, he had been mistaken for a cleaner or a parent visiting from the countryside.

  Low lights flickered in the student dormitories where, now and again, excited figures were visible in the narrow windows. The tape ended and he hit the eject button, removed the cassette and turned it over. The machine made satisfying clicks. Cannonades of laughter came from the dormitories, arriving in staggered bursts. Posters clung to every surface, banners wept from the windows, the ground was a deluge of papers and empty bottles. Workers were sweeping up the debris, twig brooms scratching the cement. The Variations started up again. The cassette was Glenn Gould, Ai-ming had told him, but a different, 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations. In the opening aria, each note seemed to Sparrow as if it had been pulled open rather than pressed down. Occasionally, he heard Glenn Gould himself, humming. Why had Gould gone back to record the same piece of music again? No one could tell him. Fat Lips only had this one edition, Ai-ming had said, a copy of a copy that a foreigner had given him.

  The counterpoint folded over in his mind. The further Sparrow walked into Beijing University, the greater the quantity of political posters. Even the trees had not been spared. Torches had been set up, and here and there boys wandered by in shorts, reading the posters, just as people of Sparrow’s generation, at the post office and elsewhere, studied the newspapers displayed in their plastic boxes. More posters were being pasted up over the old ones, making an ever-thickening book of protest. In 1966, Beijing Red Guards had written, “We must tell you, a spider cannot stop the wheel of a cart! We will carry socialist revolution through to the end!” Twenty-three years later, Beijing students wrote, “Democracy takes time to achieve, it cannot be accomplished overnight.” But several proposed an immediate hunger strike that would occupy Tiananmen Square before the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in four days’ time.

  A tall boy gestured menacingly at him, but Glenn Gould prevented Sparrow from hearing the shouted words. Sparrow pushed his headphones off. “I said, don’t think of tearing anything down!” the student said impatiently. “I know you’re a fucking government spy!” Sparrow was so surprised he mumbled an apology.

  He backed away, nearly tripping over a gracefully written pennant with the words, “A society that speaks with only one voice is not a stable society.”

  The breeze cooled him. He left the grassy hill and exited through the gates of Beida, to the tree-lined edge of Haidian Park. In this unfamiliar city, Glenn Gould seemed his only confidant, the most familiar presence. Do I really look like a spy, Sparrow wondered. Are there spies who behave like me?

  —

  A hundred radios passed through Sparrow’s hands.

  In the evenings, when he went to Tiananmen Square, the boulevards had a serene yet haunting openness, the wide streets themselves seemed to promise an end to this impasse. The government had not reversed its condemnation of the student protest, but had begun to speak in soothing tones. General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had worked closely with the deceased Hu Yaobang, had used a May 4th speech to air his own point of view. The students, he said, were calling on the Communist Party to correct its mistakes and improve its work style, and these criticisms were in line with the Party’s own assessment of itself. “We should meet the students’ reasonable demands through democracy and law. We should be willing to reform and we should use rational and orderly methods.” To Sparrow’s great surprise, the press had begun reporting on student demonstrations that were occurring not only in Beijing, but outside the capital, in some fifty-one cities. A fracture had appeared in the system, and now water was rushing in to widen it. Ling said that even within her work unit at State Radio, the consensus was that the government had been too harsh. The demonstrations offered an opportunity: if the Party could prove its sincerity, it would win the loyalty of a further generation.

  The nights continued, growing ever warmer. He wrote to Kai to say, “Yes, I will come,” and having sent the letter off, lost himself by walking the Muxidi alleyways, listening to another of Ai-ming’s tapes, this one Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which had gone unperformed for twenty-five years. What would it be like to go to Canada at this stage in his life? What if Kai could sponsor Ai-ming? He would pay the money back. But what about Ling and this life? What about his parents? In what way was he still a composer if he had made not a sound for more than twenty years? There were no answers to his questions.

  Yet the knowledge that he would see Kai brought him an undeniable, undiluted pleasure. Upon sending the letter, Sparrow had felt abruptly changed. That a few simple words could transform him, Yes, I will come, unsettled him. But why should he continue to fear? Wasn’t society changing? Nearly a month had passed since Hu Yaobang’s death, a month in which Beijing students continued to boycott classes. There were rumours that high-ranking members of the Communist Party were prepared to sit down with the students, face to face, and take part in a televised dialogue. If so, this would be the first time such an event had occurred in Sparrow’s lifetime; he could not fathom it, and remembered, still, He Luting, his head forced down by Red Guards.

  A change in the system of government had the power to change the fundamental construction of the world he knew. He would go to Hong Kong. A truthful end could come at last. He and Kai were no longer young, they had families of their own. It was difficult to move on without an end…but move on to what? He could not think so far into the future and if he thought of Ling, all his childish imaginings evaporated. Everything changed in a day, an hour, a moment. In the past, he had misread events, he had reacted too slowly. Sparrow had made mistakes but he promised himself he would not make them again. Now, in the afternoons, when he came home from work, Sparrow sat down at Ai-ming’s desk and composed. The old Symphony No. 3 was gone, he could no longer retrieve what it might have been, and so he had started a new work, a simpler piece, a sonata for piano and violin. The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu once described his own work as “a picture scroll unrolled,” and Sparrow felt a kinship with this image. He could hear this sonata in his head as surely as he could hear Bach and Shostakovich on the cassette player. The sonata was real and had already been created. One’s own mind, the saying went, concealed more information than five cartloads of books. It was like learning to breathe again, not just with his lungs but with his whole mind.

  On May 13, the students went on hunger strike. Sparrow was working in Ai-ming’s room when the announcement was broadcast on the radio. He sensed that the piano and violin piece was unfolding at a sped-up tempo, and he erased the last hour’s work and began again, re-counting the measures, altering the space between development and return, two themes supporting one another. The line of the piano was difficult to hold, but the violin felt supple and unceasing. It was not heroic, it wished only to play for itself alone, even if it knew such a thing was not truly possible.

  A commentator on the radio argued that these revolutionary youth were part of a deliberate attempt to humiliate the government and the nation. “Why else begin a hunger strike two days before our historic summit with Mikhail Gorbachev? This is the first visit from a Soviet leader in forty years….” Another said the students’ intentions were good, but their methods were immature, and
it was imperative that they refrain from damaging the nation’s image. The news also seemed to be wrestling with its own head; the newsreader announced that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang favoured far-reaching press reforms, so that content and analysis would be decided by news editors and not Party officials. A sharp pain in Sparrow’s back flared unexpectedly, and he felt like an old piano that couldn’t be tuned.

  At work the following day, the factory was unproductive. Half his co-workers had signed on to the new independent workers’ union operating from under a tarp on Chang’an Avenue. They had gone so far as to identify themselves by their real names, even showing their work badges. His co-workers only wanted news of the Square. Sparrow hadn’t yet signed on, he was trying to imagine himself boarding the plane for Hong Kong. Kai had been true to his word and Sparrow’s exit visa had been approved. For the first time in his life, he would travel outside China. Kai had begun to float other ideas. We could teach at the Hong Kong Conservatory. I have also made inquiries at the Vancouver Conservatory of Music. What have you been composing? Send me what you have. He began to suspect that Kai was living an illusion more complex than his own.

  Fan, who worked the line with him, tapped her pencil on his desk. “Comrade Sparrow,” she said. “You look hideous. Do you have a fever? Is it contagious? Maybe you should get home and rest.”

  Fan was still so young, Sparrow thought suddenly. If Zhuli were alive, she would be thirty-seven years old. These days, she entered his thoughts freely, as if some barrier between them had broken down.

  “I’m not…”

  “Go on. Production is non-existent anyway.” Fan got up, he could see her in the next aisle talking to the floor supervisor, known to everyone as Baby Corn, Sparrow didn’t know why. His hands were trembling. Perhaps he did have a fever. Baby Corn came over, deferential, as if Sparrow were his ancestor.

  “Comrade Sparrow, you’re looking dead on your feet. Take the afternoon off. You’re back on shift tomorrow anyway, aren’t you?”