Outside were the usual voices–rainfall, laughter, a radio, sirens, good-natured bickering–but here in this room was music that existed in silence. In the Shanghai Conservatory, he remembered, paintings showed musicians playing the qin, a silk-stringed zither, only the qin had no strings as if, at the moment of purest composition, there was no noise. Sparrow had never made a sustained sound, the music came in beginnings and endings like the edges of a table. The life in the middle, what was it? Zhuli, Kai. Himself. Twenty years in a factory. Thousands of radios. A marriage and family. Nearly all of his adult life: the day after day, year upon year, that gives shape to a person, that accrues weight.
He saw himself putting down his pencil and standing up from the desk. He saw himself walking out of this room, this alleyway, this city, without turning back.
The following morning he woke early, put on his uniform and returned to work.
AS I WAITED IN Shanghai, one life unexpectedly opened the door to another. Three days after I met with Tofu Liu, he telephoned me. His niece at Radio Beijing had put him in contact with someone I should meet: Lu Yiwen, the close friend of a Radio Beijing editor who had passed away in 1996. This was the same Yiwen who had known Ai-ming and her parents in 1988 and 1989. I felt the impossible had occurred: I had plucked a needle from the sea.
Tonight, June 6, 2016, I went to her flat on Fenyang Road, near to the Shanghai Conservatory.
Yiwen was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman in her mid-forties. She wore jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals, and her long hair was tied up in a loose knot. She spoke with an intensity that I found riveting. She was restless, she made large gestures as she spoke, as if she were drawing on a screen. We spoke in English. After graduating with a degree in Chinese language and history from Beijing Normal, she had overturned her life and applied to study electrical engineering at Tokyo University. To her surprise, she had been accepted. She had only returned to China the previous year. She was divorced and had a teenaged daughter.
Yiwen had much to tell me. A story is a shifting creature, an eternal mirror that catches our lives at unexpected angles. Partway into our conversation, I opened my laptop and showed her a scan of the composition, The Sun Rises on the Peoples’ Square. I began humming the notes.
“This is Sparrow’s music,” Yiwen said immediately. “But…”
“How do you know?”
“He was singing it all the time. I used to hear him in the evenings, walking home late at night. In 1989, we lived in the Muxidi Hutong, all the flats were small and very close together, we were living almost one on top of the other. Sparrow would pass by my window on the way to his flat. And I could hear him in the little study, where he used to do his writing. His music was like something in the air.” Yiwen leaned closer to the computer. “But how on earth did you get this?”
“A friend performed it for me. A few years ago. I’ve learned to read the music a little.”
“But how did you find a copy of the music? It was destroyed in 1989. Ai-ming had only nine pages. I saw it destroyed.”
I told her that Sparrow had sent it to my father in a letter dated May 27, 1989. That I had only found it a few years ago, in a Hong Kong police file. It had been among my father’s possessions when he died.
Yiwen became suddenly emotional. “Ai-ming thought it was gone.”
“Do you know where Ai-ming’s mother is? I’ve tried to find her but the address I have–”
“Ling? But she died in 1996.”
A wave of emotion gathered in me; I had always suspected Ling had passed away, yet still I had hoped. I thought for a moment, collecting myself. “Ai-ming had a great-aunt who used to own a bookstore. She was very elderly….”
“The Old Cat. She lives in Shanghai. She turned a hundred this year and when you ask the year of her birth, she says she’s been alive forever. I’ll write down her address for you. She doesn’t have a telephone.”
Yiwen continued, “In 1996, Ai-ming came back from the United States.”
“Sometime in May,” I said.
“Yes, mid-May. She came to Beijing for her mother’s funeral. The situation was difficult. Her U.S. visa had never come through and she didn’t have a Chinese hukou, a residency permit, any longer. She took a risk and went to the public security bureau to request one, but they denied her…I saw her a few times while she was in the city. Her mother’s death was unbearable for her. Ai-ming wasn’t well. She told me she was going to live with her grandmother in the South. Later on, about a year later, so 1997 or 1998, she wrote me a letter. She said she was going to Gansu Province in Western China. She asked me to come with her. I was living in Tokyo at that point. I asked her if she was kidding, why in the world was she going to the desert in the middle of summer? All I wanted was for Ai-ming to come to her senses, to see reason. But I said things…I was extremely harsh in my letter, I said too much…I never heard from her after that. It must have been…early 1998.”
The dates matched my own. The things I felt were inexpressible.
“I was young, I didn’t understand. Everything that happened during the demonstrations, the way it ended, the way people died, had left me angry and cynical,” Yiwen said. “Ling’s death changed everything for Ai-ming. Actually…after Ai-ming went away the first time, to Canada in 1990, I became very close to her mother, I admired Ling and saw how courageous she had been. I began to see my life in a different way. She was the one who encouraged me to apply to the University of Tokyo. Ling made it possible for all of us to start our lives again, but she herself never had the chance.” Yiwen stood up and went out of the room. When she came back, she carried two items. The first, a picture of Ling, Sparrow and Ai-ming taken in 1989. They were standing in the centre of Tiananmen Square. The second, Chapter 23 of the Book of Records, which Ai-ming had copied out and given to Yiwen for her twentieth birthday.
“I didn’t know how Ling was connected to your family in Canada. I only knew that a lot of letters went back and forth. But Ai-ming never told me the details, even when she came back in 1996.”
“And Ling, she never told you?” I asked.
Yiwen looked at me searchingly, as if I was the one with the answers to give her. “It was just the way life was back then,” she said finally. “People lost one another. You could be sent five thousand kilometres away, with no hope of coming back. Everyone had so many people like this in their lives, people who had been sent away. This was the bitterness of life but also the freedom. You couldn’t live against the reality of the time but it was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private. You had to keep something for yourself, and to do that, you had to turn away from reality. It’s hard to explain if you didn’t grow up here. People simply didn’t have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted. Everything was decided by the Party. When the demonstrations began, the students were asking for something simple. In the beginning it wasn’t about changing the system, or bringing down the government, let alone the Party. It was about having the freedom to live where you chose, to pursue the work you loved. All those years, our parents had to pretend. To see the future in a different light takes time. But we thought everything could begin with this first movement.”
We sat in silence for a moment. The notebook–Ai-ming’s handwriting, Chapter 23–felt both real and weightless in my hands, so near and so far away. “What made you decide to come home?”
Yiwen set the notebook on the table, beside a photograph I had given her, showing Ai-ming, Ma and me, in 1991. “The first movement is finished. It will never come back again. But, Marie, how can I put it? It might be finished, it might be over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped hearing it.”
—
Just recently, I began listening to the transcriptions and reimaginings of Bach’s music written by the Italian pianist Ferrucci Busoni; these albums had been part of my father’s music collection and now they are part of mine. Two hundred year
s separate the births of Bach and Busoni, yet I find these transcriptions intricate and terribly beautiful. Why did Busoni transcribe Bach? How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before? What answer would my father give?
In 1989, when he left my mother and me, he waited in Hong Kong for Sparrow to come. I was so young when he abandoned us; the regrets he carried can never be known to me. I fear to imagine his suffering and yet the details I do know will not leave me. Pills and drinking, my mother was later told. A debilitating depression. Gambling. Perhaps he felt that what had happened to Sparrow must be his fault somehow, that the Hong Kong visa, the travel papers, the ticket, had made Sparrow a target. Of course, it wasn’t true, but Ba couldn’t know that, and he came to what seemed to be a logical explanation. He had betrayed my mother and me, and didn’t know how to go back, to become what he was. Sparrow, Zhuli, the Professor, his own family, they were gone; all the selves he had tried to be, everything that he had lost, could no longer be denied. My father had loved Sparrow almost all of his life; of this I have no doubt. It was early in the morning, still dark, when he went to the window of his ninth-floor room. He climbed out. Nobody looked up, nobody saw him; he was entirely alone. I understand that he wanted to stop his heartbreak, no matter the cost, and to end the enormity of his emotions. Maybe he hoped we, his family, would forget, but my mother and I, waiting in Vancouver, held on to the person we had known. Ma had truly loved him–the part of him that he had shown her.
Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn’t render each variation false. I don’t believe so. If Ba were still alive, this is what I would tell him.
Throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself. In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go. That’s what I would tell my father. To have faith that, one day, someone else will keep the record.
MONDAY AND TUESDAY FELT like a single continuous day in Sparrow’s life.
Production had slowed to almost nothing, Old Bi and Miss Lu were listless, and Dao-ren looked as if she was dismantling radios rather than building them; but Sparrow felt glad for the distraction of work and actually surpassed his quota for the day. Music joined all the movements he made, it slid between his thoughts like a staircase reaching in multiple directions, until he was nothing more than sound. Around him conversation continued: rumours and truth crumpled together. Someone said that the People’s Liberation Army was planning a coup. Miss Lu reported that police had arrested a dozen members of the Iron Mounted Soldiers, who had renamed themselves the Flying Tigers. Old Bi said that high-ranking generals in the army had been purged, and that new battalions of the PLA would re-enter Beijing tonight.
“Tomorrow,” Miss Lu said.
“Never,” said Fan.
Meanwhile, in the Square, Hong Kong entrepreneurs had donated hundreds of brand new tents and the students had erected a statue, the Goddess of Democracy. A new open-air forum, the Tiananmen University of Democracy, had been inaugurated the previous night.
On Wednesday, Fan did not arrive for her shift.
By Thursday, the temperatures were reaching forty degrees and the wires in Sparrow’s hands felt alive. On Radio Beijing, a powerful member of the standing committee said that the youth were “good, pure and kind-hearted,” and were not the problem. It was the workers, in particular the leaders of the autonomous union, who had created a cancer cell made up of the “dregs of society.”
But where was Fan?
On Friday, Old Bi came in late. His normally neat and clean hair was damp with sweat, and he had to smoke three of his Big Front Gate cigarettes in quick succession before he could tell them what had happened. Old Bi described the crowds in front of the public security office on Qianmen Avenue. “They’ve been arresting people all week,” he said. “So I went up there to find out what happened to Fan. These bastards asked me why I was looking for a counter-revolutionary. A political criminal! They said, ‘Run along home before we arrest you, too.’ ‘Oh, really?’ I said. ‘For what crime?’ ‘Comrade, you’re in violation of martial law.’ ‘Fuck me,’ I said. ‘You’re in violation of the Constitution!’ ” Old Bi took out another cigarette. “Idiot that I am, I was wearing my ID card on my shirt. They wrote everything down.”
Miss Lu yanked the cigarette out of Old Bi’s mouth. “You shouldn’t have gone by yourself! You have no self-control.”
Sparrow poured him a cup of tea.
“I’m going back tomorrow,” Old Bi said, grabbing back the cigarette. “They can’t arrest us all.”
That night, Sparrow called Cold Water Ditch. Big Mother Knife was out of breath from being summoned to the neighbourhood phone. After she had huffed for some minutes, she told him that the student demonstrations had spread to Shenzhen and Guangzhou. When he asked if she had joined the protests, she shouted, “Deng Xiaoping and those old farm tools in Beijing should retire! All those old men, it’s like they breathe through the same nostril!”
Beside Sparrow, the caretaker of the phone, Mrs. Sun, was smoking and pretending to read the People’s Daily. Her children clambered around her like sparks going off.
On the other end of the line, Big Mother had grown quiet and Sparrow thought she was done speaking.
He was in the middle of saying goodbye when Big Mother interrupted to tell him she had news. Last week, she had received a letter from Aunt Swirl and Wen the Dreamer.
“Ma,” he said.
“Don’t interrupt!” she shouted. And then, sighing, “I’m getting old. I keep losing my train of thought.”
Now Big Mother filled in the years, speaking rapidly as if she were running across a narrow beam. Back in 1977, Wen had nearly been rearrested. If it weren’t for his friend, Projectionist Bang, they could never have gotten away. They had retreated deeper into Kyrgyzstan. Last year, word finally reached them that Big Mother’s petitioning had been successful: during the reforms initiated by Hu Yaobang, the convictions against Wen the Dreamer had been overturned and his criminal label had been removed. “It only took ten years,” Big Mother said bitterly. Swirl and Wend were coming home. In the letter, Swirl said they’d already crossed Inner Mongolia and reached Lanzhou. After nearly twenty years in the desert regions, they wanted to visit the sea. They planned to stop in Beijing before continuing on to Shanghai and Cold Water Ditch. Big Mother had already given them Sparrow’s address, even though it would be another few months before the official paperwork reached them. He should expect them in the winter.
“Will you recognize Swirl?” his mother asked.
“Always,” he said. Sparrow shifted the phone to his other ear. “Do they know everything that’s happened?”
He feared he had inadvertently pushed his mother off the balance beam and that she had toppled over and fallen into the quiet. But Big Mother’s voice, when it came back, was steady. “She knows. They both know.”
Over the line, the faint echoes of other conversations broke through and fell back.
“My son, have you been writing music?”
Sparrow, surprised by her question, answered truthfully, “Yes.”
“Well, what is it?”
“A sonata for piano and violin.” He wanted to tell his mother about an entirely different recording, Bach’s six sonatas for the same two instruments. Throughout his life, Bach had returned to these six pieces, polishing and revising them, rewriting them as he grew older. They were almost unbearably beautiful, as if the composer wanted to find out how much this most of basic of sonata forms-exposition, development, recapitulation-could hold, and in what ways containment could hold a freedom, a life.
His mother sounded illogically near. “What did you name it? I h
ope you didn’t just give it a number.”
Sparrow smiled into the phone. He was aware of Mrs. Sun staring up at the ceiling, at a particularly large spider. “I called it The Sun Shines on the People’s Square.”
“Did you?” She gave a big, round pop of a laugh.
He couldn’t help but laugh as well. “Yes, I did.”
“You’ll find a way to play it for Swirl and Wen the Dreamer?”
“Of course.”
“It’s a joyful title, isn’t it?” his mother said.
He nodded, surprised by the grief that overtook him. He remembered something Zhuli had once said. Luckily, joy seeps into all your compositions. Some part of him had always existed separately, it had continued even after he had ceased to listen. “Yes.”
—
The next day, Saturday, Ai-ming slept until noon. It was so hot, even the bed felt as if it were melting. Last night, she and Yiwen had stayed late at Tiananmen Square, where the rock star Hou Dejian had given a concert, his voice reverberating up to Chairman Mao’s portrait like a dream they were all letting go.
Now Ai-ming sat up, sweaty, nauseous, the whine of electric guitars pulsating in her head. She felt as if she had not slept at all. The racket of the helicopters continued, they were circling Beijing again, dropping pamphlets. She sat up. The calendar said June 3, the month of May had vanished, dissolved by history. Today, Ai-ming would copy Chapter 23 of the Book of Records as a birthday present for Yiwen. This evening, she would go to Tiananmen, but she would come home early, she would have a good rest.
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