Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  “I would prefer to stay.” Sparrow was afraid he would be criticized, later on, for not working to his full capacity. They would use this weakness to reprioritize him and lay him off. If he lost his job, they might revoke Ai-ming’s Beijing papers, and she would not be allowed to sit the university examinations.

  “I insist,” Baby Corn said, distracted. He wandered a few steps away and gazed into the large face of his brand new watch.

  “Come on,” Fan whispered. “He’s a real pain when he’s angry. Besides, you look awful…Did you injure your back? At your age, you’ve got to take better care of yourself.”

  As he left, he heard the newsreader saying that talks between the government and the students, scheduled for the morning, had been cancelled. Outside, even the breeze felt sticky. He had started cycling to and from work because the buses were not reliable. Ling had told him that youth from across the country were pouring into Beijing by the tens of thousands. They were painting democracy slogans on train cars so that wherever the trains went, the student messages, too, would go. Sparrow pedalled slowly across the factory grounds, ashamed of his exhaustion. If he was not careful, they would all be calling him Grandfather, which was ludicrous because he was not even fifty.

  He ended up on Chang’an Avenue, his bicycle inching through traffic as if he were part of a larger procession. He hadn’t meant to go to Tiananmen Square, it was only that he neglected to turn right after the Muxidi Bridge, and had continued straight. Chang’an Avenue was jammed; now he couldn’t turn around even if he wanted to. He had grown up in Shanghai, the most modern of Chinese cities, and yet he felt like an outsider here, out of his depth. The flood of Beijingers carried him forward until, glimpsing the Square, he saw that it was once more overrun with banners representing more universities than he could count. And now Sparrow truly did not wish to be here. Loudspeakers were broadcasting continuously. A young woman’s frail voice crackled over the street: “The country is our country. The people are our people. The government is our government. Who will shout if not us? Who will act if not us?”

  Sparrow got down from his bicycle and began to push it. The young woman was using the exact words of Chairman Mao, written when Mao Zedong was a young fighter.

  Beside Sparrow, an enormous man with a grizzled face was reading the newspaper as he walked.

  “This hunger strike,” Sparrow said to him. “Is it real? Will the students really refuse food?”

  “Ai! These kids…” The stranger’s badge, stamped with the words Capital Iron and Steel, trembled from a clip on his shirt. “It’ll be over in a few hours. Old Gorbachev will be escorted into the Square tomorrow and the Party will shake the kids off Tiananmen like ants from a stick.” He folded the paper in half. “That’s what my son tells me anyway.”

  “And all these people?”

  “Exactly. I came to see what’s gotten everyone so worked up. Of course, I admire their ideals. Who doesn’t? But even a nothing like me can see that the students and the government aren’t speaking the same language. Everyone wants to fix the country, but everyone wants power, too, don’t they? That’s what we’re talking about in my danwei….” He tapped his badge. “Our work unit alone has over 200,000 workers and if we support the hunger strike, that changes everything, doesn’t it? That’s a bloody revolution.” He took a bag of buns, as if by magic, from his other hand and offered one to Sparrow, who accepted. The man ate half of one in a single bite. “Any kids, Comrade?”

  “A daughter.”

  “Not a university student, I hope.”

  “Thank heavens, no.”

  The man swallowed the bread in his mouth and washed it down with a gulp from his tea thermos. “Frankly, I don’t understand what’s wrong with us. The stupidity we went through, a whole generation slapping its own head…how come we keep arriving at the same point?” He screwed the lid back on his thermos. “Hey, you’re not a plain coat are you? Someone told me there are thousands of plain coats snooping around.”

  “A spy?” Sparrow smiled. “No, but other people have thought the same.”

  “Because you’re so unthreatening,” the man said. “Don’t take offence. It’s just that you’ve got such a listening face.”

  —

  It was twilight. Behind the Monument of the People’s Heroes, hundreds of students were lying on the ground. They were guarded by other students, wearing red armbands, who made a kind of human barricade around them. Sparrow felt that a world he had been living inside was being forced open. But weren’t these students also living inside a world of their own construction? The hunger strikers had the brightest futures in the entire country. As Beijing university graduates they would be responsible for their parents and grandparents, for their siblings if they had any, yet here they were, lying on the bare concrete. He felt a gnawing fear scraping against his lungs. Three boys on one bicycle rolled by, acrobatic, joyful. They shouted, “We won’t eat fried democracy!” and a ripple of laughter came from the pyjama-clad students. Where were their parents? he wondered. But now a boy with a red armband came to him and said sternly, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Comrade, but only we are allowed here. It’s for the security of our hunger strike revolutionaries.” Sparrow nodded, backing away. The recording on the loudspeaker began again, it was the same fragile voice as before, “Today freedom and democracy must be bought with our lives. Is this fact something the Chinese people can be proud of?”

  Sparrow looked up, trying to find the source of the broadcast, but the endlessness of the sky made it difficult to see what was near.

  I have grown old, he thought. I no longer understand the ways of this world.

  —

  The following morning, as they stood beneath Fan’s flowery umbrella outside the factory gates, Fan gave Sparrow a pamphlet that listed the demands of the hunger strikers. There were just two: immediate dialogue on an equal footing, and an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the student movement. Fan told him that the workers of Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 would be marching in support of the students on May 16. She had heard that almost all of Beijing’s factories, as well as scientific and educational institutes, were planning the same. Fan was unusually subdued, and when Sparrow asked if she was well, she told him that her sister in Gansu Province had suffered a work accident but Fan didn’t know the severity. “And I’ve been going to the Square every night after work,” she said, “to help out where I can, because these skinny kids haven’t eaten in three days, and the government has yet to lift a finger. How did we come to this?” Fan’s troubled face turned away from him. “And I don’t want to make radios anymore.” She looked back and laughed, a lost, unhappy laugh. “Does anyone want to make radios?” she said. “Oh, damn your second uncle!”

  This was a special Beijing curse and it made Sparrow smile.

  Fan raised her eyebrows, which made her ears wiggle slightly. She leaned mischievously towards him, so close their noses nearly touched. “What would you like to do, Comrade Sparrow, if you were free to choose a vocation?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “I’d like to play the piano.”

  Fan let out a honking laugh. Someone coming up the stairs dropped their lunch tin in surprise and let out a sad, soft, Waaaaa! “It’s never too late to learn!” Fan shouted.

  Sparrow smiled. “I suppose.”

  “But the piano kind of thing, Comrade,” she said, turning serious, “is a hobby and can be done in addition to a steady job and what I meant with my question is the kind of vocation that requires a lifetime’s commitment. I wanted to be a doctor, I think I told you once, I wanted to open a clinic in my sister’s town but you know how it was back then. It wasn’t up to me.”

  Rain battered dully on the umbrella. I want to see my daughter grow up, Sparrow thought. The premonition scared him so much he reached out his hand, intending to grasp the wall, and caught only air.

  Fan didn’t notice. Her fingers were idly tapping the handle of the umbrella, playing an imaginary instrument. “Speak
ing of pianos,” she said. “Remember that musician in 1968, the composer from Shanghai, the tall one with the long face, what was his name? They locked us in a room and made us watch his struggle session. Old guy was being kicked around on live television and we still had to call him names.”

  “He Luting.”

  “That’s it! Right on television, they were going to make a big example out of him. I haven’t thought of him in years. Do you remember it?”

  “I remember.”

  “Oh, boy. Everyone had to watch, it didn’t matter whether you worked upstairs or in the basement. So we all heard it when he shouted, ‘How dare you, how dare you….Shame on you for lying.’ That’s what he said, he kept yelling out, ‘Shame! Shame!’ Those Red Guards couldn’t believe it. I can still see their faces, big eyes and dumb-dumb mouths. Nobody could believe it, the nerve of this guy. I wonder if he’s still alive.”

  “I think so,” Sparrow said.

  “Shame on you! I’ll never forget.” She disappeared for a moment into her own searching. “We all knew that, once the cameras were switched off, pow, that would be the end of him. They wouldn’t let him get away with it.”

  “But afterwards, were you yourself different?”

  Fan looked at him, startled. “Comrade Sparrow, what kind of question is that?…how could anyone be different?” She gave an irritated sigh. “Sure this He Luting proved that it was possible to fight back, to stand up…but I still didn’t know how it was done. The Red Guards back then, the youth, you know how vicious they were…” She reached into her pocket and took out a handful of candies. “You like these, don’t you? White Rabbits. Have a few of these and don’t ask me any more questions. All right, I’m a coward! But damn your questions, they make me feel like I belong in a factory and will never deserve better.”

  “Don’t be upset,” Sparrow said, accepting the candy. “I’m the same as you. I had the desire, but never the will.”

  “And now?” Fan asked.

  He shook his head, but it occurred to him that now, finally, when he had the will, desire itself might have disappeared. For twenty years, Sparrow had convinced himself that he had safeguarded the most crucial part of his inner life from the Party, the self that composed and understood the world through music. But how could it be? Time remade a person. Time had rewritten him. How could a person counter time itself?

  —

  That night, when Ai-ming came home in tears, Sparrow helplessly gave her the candy. He knew that Ai-ming stayed in the Square each day and passed herself off as a student. His daughter said that hundreds of students had lost consciousness, they were on IV drips. She had spent the day trying to keep a path clear for the stream of ambulances. How could he yell at her? More than three thousand had joined the hunger strike and some were threatening to set themselves on fire. But he saw, when he passed the neighbourhood television, that this confrontation with the government could not go on indefinitely. He watched clips of Gorbachev’s arrival in Beijing, all the members of the Politburo standing stiffly on the tarmac, their faces as grey as their colourless coats. General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang had met with Gorbachev, they had sat on chairs too large for their bodies. Comrade Zhao said that some young people had doubts about socialism, that their concerns were sincere, and for this reason reform was crucial. The anchor read without looking up. The grand celebration that had been planned for Tiananmen Square, intended to celebrate the first visit by a Soviet head of state since 1959, had been cancelled.

  —

  The following morning, Wednesday, Sparrow met his workmates at the Muxidi Bridge. Everyone was neatly turned out in their dark blue uniforms, while around them Chang’an Avenue swelled in a kind of euphoria and sadness. People from factories across the city arrived continuously in trucks and re-purposed buses. Fan was busy giving orders, she had a voice sharp enough to crack glass. Old Bi was there, too, with Dao-ren, who carried one side of a banner that read, “We can no longer stay silent.” Even the floor supervisors, managers and superiors were walking with them. He had heard that some, including Baby Corn, had children who had joined the hunger strike, and it was true, Baby Corn did not look well. An enlivening breeze made all the banners crease and ripple, and an expression of Big Mother’s caught in his mind, Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. At last they set out, behind the banner of Beijing Wire Factory No. 3. The sky was like a yellow curtain they could never quite pass through.

  The air was tumultuous as Tiananmen Square came into sight. He saw banners announcing the Beijing Bus Company, Xidan Department Store and, shockingly, the Beijing Police Academy. Ling was here, too, walking alongside her co-workers at Radio Beijing. Men from Capital Iron and Steel waved orange flags that caught the sun. They were sturdy and mountainous, and had taken it upon themselves to direct traffic. Life was in flux, orchestral and completely unrecognizable. Through the loudspeakers a student was saying, “Mother China, witness now the actions of your sons and daughters,” while foreign journalists, having come to report on the Sino-Soviet summit, were so numerous they seemed to be replicating themselves from moment to moment. Journalists and editors from the People’s Daily walked under a red-and-gold banner, the colours of sunset. Everywhere, students, almost drunk with exhaustion, collected donations, and their plastic buckets and biscuit tins overflowed. The workers around Sparrow started buying up all the water, nourishing biscuits, popsicles and sticks of frozen fruit, and carting them to the hunger strikers. Sparrow felt as if all his past lives, all his selves, were walking beside him.

  “Comrade Sparrow,” Fan said, taking hold of his arm, “are you okay? We should find some ice for your back injury–”

  “I’m fine,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I never imagined so many people…”

  Fan’s smile was so wide he was surprised to realize she was weeping.

  On the loudspeakers, a scholar was addressing the crowds, “There are things that I can’t accept from the government, and there are extreme elements within the student movement. But history is this kind of process, it’s all mixed up….”

  In two weeks, he would fly to Hong Kong to see Kai, yet he had neglected to tell Ling or his daughter this important detail, and the fact that he was hiding so many crucial things could no longer be brushed away. Chanting reverberated off all the bodies and all the buildings: Can lies go on forever? When he reached the Square, he thought, So this is what Tiananmen Square looks like when it is truly full. Even Chairman Mao never lived to see it like this. Mao’s portrait on the gate, so familiar it might as well be the moon in the sky, appeared smug and overdressed for the spring humidity. Despite the million demonstrators, the only visible police were the ones marching in support of the students. The student loudspeakers were exhorting the hunger strikers to be orderly, to “sleep neatly,” and to refrain from playing cards, because such behaviour would compromise the purity of their goals. The fasting students had no mats or tarps to lie on, only sheets of grubby newspaper. A sign read, “The Party maintains its power by accusing the People of fabricated political crimes.”

  Sparrow could not imagine what this scene would like through Zhuli’s eyes, at the age she would be now. How many deceits had the Red Guards accused her of? How many crimes had the government fabricated? How could a lie continue so long, and work its way into everything they touched? But maybe Ai-ming would be allowed to come of age in a different world, a new China. Perhaps it was naive to think so, but he found it difficult not to give in, not to hope, and not to desire.

  —

  Everyday there were more demonstrations: a million people on Wednesday, and another million on Thursday despite rainstorms. By now the hunger strike was in its sixth day and even the official People’s Daily was reporting that more than seven hundred strikers had collapsed. When Sparrow went out, no matter the hour, he could hear ambulances racing to and from the Square. His factory, perhaps every factory in the city, had all but closed. His new composition was almost done. Reading it over, he heard a cou
nterpoint to Gabriel Fauré’s Op. 24, a similar descending sweep, and the three twisting voices of Bach’s organ prelude, “Ich ruf zu dir,” which he had always loved. But perhaps, rather than a counterpoint, the other works were sounds overheard, lives within lives. He no longer knew. The structure of his sonata felt unbalanced, even monstrous, and even though he knew it was nearly finished, he had no idea how it would end.

  He called it, tentatively, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, a title that echoed Ding Ling’s novel of revolutionary China, The Sun Shines over Sanggam River. But the Square in Sparrow’s mind was not the Tiananmen Square of 1989. Instead it was multiple places from throughout his life: the Tiananmen Square he had walked on in 1950 with Big Mother Knife. The People’s Square of Shanghai. The square courtyards of the laneway house, the sheets of Zhuli’s music, the portraits of Chairman Mao, the bed he shared with Ling, the square record jackets he had burned, the frames of the radios that he built every day. The ancient philosophers believed in a square earth and a round (or egg-shaped) sky. The head is round and the feet are square. The burial tomb is square. What might cause something to change shape, to expand or be transformed? Weren’t the works of Bach, the folded mirrors, the fugues and canons, both square and circular? But what if the piece of music in his mind could not be written? What if it must not be finished? The questions confused him, he knew they came from that other life inside him.

  Ai-ming appeared in the doorway. “Are you writing, Ba?”

  He put down his pencil. She was wearing clothes he didn’t recognize, a dress that must have come from the neighbour, and it made Ai-ming look more grown up, more like a northern city girl.

  “Yiwen asked me to bring some blankets to Tiananmen Square,” she said. “These are donations from the neighbours, but she couldn’t carry them all. Ma is going to help me. Do you want to come, too?” Ai-ming appeared thin, exhilarated. In the last few weeks, she had said nothing of Canada.