Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  “We’ve got to sleep here in the road, right in front of the trucks,” Faye said. She had sleepy eyes and a demure chin, making her words all the more shocking. “I don’t care what happens to me anymore. I don’t care. What future is there for us anyway?”

  “I’m so tired,” Yiwen said. “Doesn’t it seem a lifetime ago that Hu Yaobang died and we all brought flowers to the Square? That was April 22. All we wanted was to deliver a funeral wreath to the Great Hall of the People. That was the beginning, wasn’t it? What’s the date today? May 20. Only four weeks since Comrade Hu’s funeral.”

  Was that really how it had begun? Ai-ming wondered. Could it have been so simple?

  Girls at a nearby table sang an old Cultural Revolution song, and the words seemed both to lull the students and rouse them.

  “All these songs,” Yiwen said. Her hand felt small and damp. “I never understood. I thought they were real.”

  “They were just words,” Ai-ming said.

  Lily looked at her, forthrightly, calmly. “But what else did we have?”

  When they finished eating, Lily and Faye went off to look for friends from Beijing Normal, and never returned. Ai-ming and Yiwen joined the other students sleeping on newspapers on the ground. Ai-ming lay on her back. From here, the tanks appeared even more monstrous. Frightened, she closed her eyes against the increasing clarity of the stars. The most important people in her life were Sparrow, Ling, Big Mother Knife, Ba Lute, and now Yiwen, and it was like they had all been raised on different planets.

  “It’s easy to say we’ll sacrifice our lives for the country,” Yiwen said quietly. “At the beginning it feels very brave. Is that what you meant, Ai-ming? You said it was just words. You think that the things that matter are more difficult than words–to retreat from a confrontation, for instance, to work at changing something, truly changing something.” She lifted her hand towards the bodies and the tanks. “Ai-ming, you’re studying history to prepare for the examinations. What if revolution and violence are the only way?”

  Beside them, army soldiers were speaking softly in their uncomfortable trucks. They were so crowded that the soldiers had to take turns even to sit down. Ai-ming tried to clear her thoughts. All these slogans and songs had been handed down, she thought, and if the words were not theirs was the emotion that propelled them borrowed, too? What about the students’ desire, their idealism, their righteousness, how many contradictory desires did it serve? Once idealism had belonged to Chairman Mao, the revolutionaries, the heroic Eighth Route Army. Had their generation inherited it? How could a person know the difference between what was real and what was merely illusion, or see when a truth transformed into its opposite? What was theirs and what was something handed down, only a repetition? The loudspeakers kept cutting into the air: Under martial law, soldiers are authorized to use all necessary means, including force….Hadn’t the government, too, stolen their words from somewhere else? People are forbidden to fabricate or spread rumours, network, make public speeches, distribute leaflets, or incite social turmoil….As if words alone could make reality, as if there were no people involved, as if words alone could make someone a criminal, or conjure crimes from the air. Hadn’t the Red Guards tried to destroy the old language and bring to life a new one? What if one had to create a whole new language in order to learn to be oneself? She said to Yiwen, “I think we keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.”

  Yiwen’s head nodded against her shoulder.

  They both smelled the same, like the noodles they had eaten and also the ashy ground. How did Yiwen see her? Was she a sister, a friend, a confidant, something else? Here is the one thing in my life, Ai-ming thought, that has no parameters. She wanted to tell Yiwen how she felt, but she was afraid to damage everything they had.

  “I can’t sleep,” Yiwen said. “Tell me a story.”

  Ai-ming could think of nothing, no words that belonged to her. I’m eighteen years old, she thought, and I still haven’t begun to know my own thoughts. She felt as if a part of herself was being left behind. She squeezed her eyes shut and recited the only words that came to her, the poem at the opening of Chapter 41 of the Book of Records: “ ‘Of course, no one knows tomorrow. Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything will pass.’ ”

  —

  It was dawn by the time Sparrow cycled home from the factory. The 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations rippled through his headphones, and the music felt both long and momentary. For this new recording, Glenn Gould had instilled a continuous tempo, a pulse, so that all thirty variations more clearly belonged to a unified piece. A few weeks after the 1981 recording was released, Glenn Gould had died suddenly at the age of fifty. Sparrow had not learned of Gould’s death until years later, and convinced himself the radio announcer was mistaken. So much so that, a few months ago, when a letter from Kai mentioned the death of Glenn Gould, Sparrow had been upset by it all over again. What kind of man had the celebrated pianist been? he wondered. If Gould had been prevented from playing the piano for twenty years, what other form might his music have taken?

  It must have rained not long ago. The air felt renewed, the dawn light was the colour of pearls, unreal against the pavement.

  Turning onto Guang’an Road, he almost fell off his bicycle when he saw the army trucks. They were surrounded by a restless crowd, people in their nightclothes and others on their way to work. Hastily, he swung his bicycle around and detoured south. The Goldberg Variations continued in his ears. But when he tried to reach the centre, he met checkpoint after checkpoint. Beijing, with its grid of ring roads and bridges, had been solidly designed to protect its heart, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Smaller roads were manned by students, but along all the major thoroughfares, Beijing residents had set up human barricades, crowds so dense no army truck could hope to cross without meeting violent resistance.

  He pressed on through ever more congested streets.

  Sparrow smelled bonfires even though nothing burned. The smell brought back an image of Wu Bei, struggling to stand on his tiny chair as the Red Guards humiliated him. The monster is waking, Teacher! You have stepped on its head countless times, and now the monster is crawling out of the mud. At the barricades, as if in uneasy counterpoint, people chanted, “We must turn over and awaken! We must sacrifice and serve the Revolution!” Yet Gould continued, unrolling one variation and tipping in slow motion towards the next. By the time Sparrow reached home, it was nearly ten in the morning. The rooms were empty. He sat at the table and drank a cup of tea. Noise from the ongoing demonstrations filled the room. Radio Beijing didn’t broadcast music anymore, instead the loudspeakers kept repeating the fact of martial law. He regretted all the radios he had ever built. He wanted to find some way to cut all the wires, to hush all the voices, to broadcast stillness, quiet, on this city that was coming unmoored.

  —

  Late in the afternoon, he woke suddenly. Here was his daughter’s face hovering above him, slowly sharpening. “Ba,” she said. “Ba!” She kept repeating that representatives from Wire Factory No. 3 were in the living room. He got up. Ai-ming brought him a basin of cold water. Sparrow dunked his face, thinking he had been reprioritized out of his job. Instead, he came out to find Miss Lu and Old Bi, in their factory uniforms, sitting on the sofa, eating peanuts. They smiled nervously when Sparrow said, “Have you just come off your shift?”

  Miss Lu recovered a peanut that had fallen between two cushions. When she had it firmly between her fingers, she pointed it at him and said, “Old Bi and I have finally decided to join the independent union. They’ve been canvassing in Tiananmen Square, you know? The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation.” She cracked the shell and threw the peanuts into her mouth.

  Old Bi leaned forward. “Let’s just say we’re tired of sitting on the hilltop and watching the tigers fight. Maybe you are, too, Comrade Sparrow, and if so we
should stick together.”

  Ai-ming had followed him out, he could hear the flat squeak of her slippers behind him.

  “Yes, okay.”

  Old Bi and Miss Lu kept looking at him, as if they were still waiting for an answer.

  How could he learn to see around corners? What mistake was about to lunge towards him?

  Miss Lu said, “You need to show your work unit ID and register your real name. We understand if you’d rather not. After all, you’ve got a family to think of…”

  “Wait. I’ll get it.”

  Sparrow went to the bedroom, found his ID card and put it into his pocket. A new letter from Kai was sitting on the dresser, in plain sight. Ai-ming must have placed it there. She had followed him in the bedroom, but before she could say anything, he told her he was going to the Square. “I want you to stay inside.” He said it sharply, as if she had already disobeyed him. He picked up the letter and placed it, too, in his pocket.

  “But, Ba…”

  “For once, Ai-ming, do as I ask.”

  Outside, he watched, lightheaded, as Old Bi unlocked his bicycle. As they left the alleyway, Sparrow pedalled behind them. Miss Lu was balanced on the back of Old Bi’s bike, and her old-fashioned cloth shoes sat daintily in the air. She stretched a hand out, handing him a cigarette. It was a good brand, Big Front Gate.

  “Baby Corn was on the barricades last night,” Miss Lu said. “He told us two million Beijingers are on the streets. He said he ripped up his Party membership card.”

  The cigarette tasted opulent in his mouth.

  “It’s all getting so emotional,” Old Bi said. “All these tears and threats are obscuring the bigger issues. We could help these students steer the ship but who listens to the older generation?”

  Smoke clouded from Miss Lu’s mouth. “That’s right. We had our day and look how well we served the country. Oh yes, we Red Guards were very first class, very rational.”

  Old Bi pretended he hadn’t heard.

  They came to a large tent on the northwest corner of the Square, temporary headquarters of the independent union, where a lineup of uniformed workers stretched along the boulevard. Jokes were passed from person to person like midday snacks. Two hours later, upon reaching the front, Sparrow signed his name below thousands of others. He felt too afraid to be afraid. A giddy volunteer informed him, hands gesticulating, that workers were organizing themselves into various battalions, some were in charge of gathering supplies, some would battle the army at the roadblocks, and others had joined the Iron Mounted Soldiers, a motorcycle reconnaissance network.

  Distracted by the sound of helicopters, Sparrow told the volunteer he would do whatever was needed, but he didn’t own a motorcycle.

  “Oh-oh,” Fan said, suddenly appearing with her booming voice. “Be practical, Old Sparrow! You’re not a kid anymore! I don’t see you leaping up on barricades, just falling off them!”

  “Falling down is also a form of obstruction.”

  Fan rumbled a laugh, gave him a stinging slap on the back, and then another.

  On a nearby bench, Old Bi and Miss Lu were sharing a cigarette, entranced by the workers’ radio broadcast, read by a young woman with a heart-shaped face and a soprano voice.

  Sparrow went outside and onto the Square. Conditions had deteriorated, the students looked bedraggled and destitute. There was garbage everywhere and the camp smelled very bad. One after another, people scrambled up to the microphone, identifying themselves as teachers, intellectuals, or student leaders.

  He watched for a long time. Their speeches (“No kneeling!”) grew increasingly vehement until, driven by their passions (“No compromise!”) and by the high tide of emotions, they, too, finished by asking the protesters to stand firm and risk everything (“No retreat!”). The sky opened and heavy rain broke free. Tarps collapsed onto the huddled students, and he heard them cry out, a mix of laughter, groaning and cursing. Banners drooped, flags stuck to their poles, a pair of abandoned shorts and a few wet T-shirts sat like turtlebacks before the portrait of Chairman Mao. Sparrow saw a tall girl standing alone, a pink headband in her hair, and wondered if it was Yiwen, the neighbours’ daughter. The rain blurred her figure, and he felt he was looking into the past, or into a future that would not arrive. He heard footsteps behind him and turned. Fan was running towards him, a graceful hop-skip-jump-jog, holding a bright blue umbrella like a prize in the air.

  —

  He was assigned to the blockade at Muxidi Bridge, which was so close to home it was like watching over his backyard. Sparrow and a dozen neighbours took up a position on the roof of a city bus, whose tires had been punctured. Songs from the 1920s and 1930s proliferated around them, and neighbours, including Ling, handed out candy nougats, tea and pastries. All night, he followed Ling’s figure in the crowd below. She was distributing copies of an unauthorized supplement to the People’s Daily, printed covertly by the newspaper’s staff. In the last week, Sparrow had hardly seen her. Ling was never home, she had thrown all her energy into the ongoing dispute at Radio Beijing. Journalists and editors, including Ling, had come down firmly on the side of the students and were no longer waiting for official approval before broadcasting their reports. The Ling he had first met in Kai’s room, the sharp-eyed philosophy student, had been biding her time and here she was now, as if she had never been away. In fact, all over Beijing, people who had seemingly resigned themselves to always wearing ten layers of coats were now shedding them all at once. They carried themselves differently, they were proud, even joyful, in bloom.

  Battling sleep, Sparrow found himself remembering the swaying of the Wuhan bus, when he and Kai had gone in search of Comrade Glass Eye, when a red-cheeked girl had fallen asleep in Sparrow’s lap as he played “Bird’s Eye View.” He, too, had felt purely happy then. The music had seemed to scour everyone clean. Perhaps the messages of the students had done something similar: simplified ideas had set in motion a train of desires. A slogan on a headband or a T-shirt, “Give me liberty or give me death,” had led to a hunger strike and a political impasse, and both the will and desire to change one’s conditions.

  On the second night, Sparrow was told to bring a cotton mask, towels and handkerchiefs, because the army was expected to use tear gas.

  And yet, and yet. The next morning, the People’s Liberation Army started up their convoys, and began reversing out of the neighbourhood. The exhausted soldiers waved as they departed, some weeping and others laughing. Bright ropes of flowers flooded the streets they had left behind.

  On Saturday, Ai-ming came home breathless, jubilant. She said that the students had entered into discussions with the government, and agreed to a full withdrawal from Tiananmen Square. “Yiwen is coming home.” She turned to Sparrow and said, “You don’t have to sit on that broken bus anymore pretending to be a fighter.”

  When he touched his daughter’s cheek, Sparrow felt almost harmed by the softness of it. “Will you eat at home tonight, Ai-ming?”

  “I’ll even cook. And you’ll be sorry you asked!”

  Ling went out to buy groceries. The news of the students’ decision had not yet been broadcast, but in the alleyways, everyone seemed to know what had occurred. The streets vibrated with a hopefulness she had not witnessed since the first years of the Republic, as if all the years between then and now had only been a hallucination or a detour. Returning home, she ran into Yiwen’s father at the water spigot. Yiwen had not been home since the start of the hunger strike, yet it was her father, Comrade Zhu, who had lost so much weight. Seeing Ling, he said, “These children, ah! You give your life to them and they crush your heart!”

  Ling took out the good cut of beef she’d bought and gave it to her neighbour. He lifted both hands, refusing. “Take it,” she said. “The students have called off the demonstrations. Now you can welcome Yiwen home.”

  Water overflowed the bucket and Zhu turned the tap off. “You see how it is,” he said, accepting the gift, and beckoning her into his flat. “We
sacrificed everything so that Yiwen could get a good education. She’s our only child. When Yiwen was accepted into Beijing Normal, I held the letter in my hands and wept. The first time I had wept in forty years! I thought I might have a heart attack. Yiwen is the first in both our families to go to university. She’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever known. I tried to make her understand how fortunate she was, to be born into this time, to have opportunities we never had.” He shook his head. “But these kids think it’s all up to them. They have no understanding of fate.” He took a container from his ice box and gave it to her. It was a chicken, already marinated. She tried to refuse but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Perhaps it was us,” Ling said, picking up where they had left off. “We understood fate all too well.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You’re right about that. Our children have ‘stood up,’ and now it’s we, their parents, down on our knees and begging forgiveness! But okay, okay, whatever. Look,” and Zhu pulled a small badge from his pocket. “I even joined the Beijing autonomous residents’ federation. You should join, too. There are all sorts of initiatives under discussion.”

  —

  Late that night, Radio Beijing announced that the students had overturned their own decision. They had decided to stay in the Square after all, until the Party conference scheduled for June 20. The date jolted Sparrow. It was the same day he was scheduled to fly to Hong Kong to see Kai. The radio also announced that General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had already been removed from his post, had been stripped of all remaining duties and placed under house arrest.

  Through the window of the little office, he saw Ai-ming and Yiwen sitting in the courtyard. They were holding hands and looking up at something in the sky. At the stars, he thought, or at the helicopters, maybe one could no longer be untangled from the other. His sonata for piano and violin, the first piece of music he had written in twenty-three years, was finished, he could do no more. He made a clean copy, signed his name and wrote the date, May 27, 1989, and the title, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. He put the copy in an envelope to send to Kai. He wished to hear it performed, and he remembered how, despite his protests, Zhuli used to play all his half-finished pieces. When he looked over the music, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it had come from someone else entirely, or more accurately, that it had been written by himself and another, a counterpoint between two people alive and awake, young and old, who had lived entirely different worlds.