Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  They walked back down the alleyway. The door was open. In a dream, Ai-ming entered, thinking that Sparrow had come home. All the cupboard doors in the kitchen had been flung open. She heard a noise in the back room, her bedroom.

  “Wait,” Yiwen said. “Don’t go in.”

  Ai-ming pulled her hand out of Yiwen’s. She kept going. In her parents’ room the dresser had been overturned.

  She could hear voices, a woman and a man.

  She turned the corner and entered. All her books lay jumbled on the floor. Neither the woman nor the man were familiar to her, nor were they wearing a uniform of any kind. The woman asked for Sparrow’s residency permit and his factory badge. Her voice was almost kind. Ai-ming shook her head. The man was busy rummaging through papers. He tore up her study notes. He began to tear up the piece of music that had been sitting on the table, her father’s composition. The man did it tiredly, almost without thinking, that’s what it looked like to Ai-ming, as if he was just folding laundry or washing dishes. She began to cry for help. Yiwen was there, she shouted at the strangers to get out, to leave them alone. The woman told them to find Sparrow’s work unit ID because they would be back. For reasons Ai-ming could not understand, the man and woman went out through the window, climbing out into the alleyway. Yiwen tried to pick up the pieces of the composition but Ai-ming said, “Leave it, leave it.” She knelt down on the floor. She pulled the pieces from Yiwen’s hand and began to tear them up into smaller and smaller pieces. She wanted it all to disappear. Yiwen kept shouting at her, calling her name, grabbing pages back. It was only later, when Ai-ming finally stopped shaking, that she saw what she had done.

  Yiwen salvaged what she could. But in the end, she and Ai-ming were only able to piece nine pages back together. The rest of Sparrow’s composition was gone.

  —

  Ling opened the front door soundlessly, slipped off her shoes and went into Ai-ming’s room. The moon was faint, the night was utterly quiet, and her daughter slept, curled up on her side, one hand splayed open. The book Ai-ming had been reading weeks before, The Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky, lay on the floor beside her, still open. Three days had passed since officers from Public Security had entered the apartment. Ai-ming had tidied the room and gotten rid of the mess the agents had left behind, but still Ling imagined she could see their footprints beside the desk, as if they had been chiselled into the floor.

  Ling sat down on the floor, beside the footprints.

  Ai-ming seemed to turn slightly. In sleep, her daughter’s fear lifted momentarily, so she appeared younger, more like the child she had been.

  She wished to crawl into the bed beside Ai-ming, to fall asleep and wipe away her own thoughts. Since June 4, her colleagues at Radio Beijing had been pressured, one by one, into writing denunciations of the student movement; a few had been purged. Life had gone on; it had slipped backwards. It was only a matter of time, Ling knew, before she, too, gave in. The new political study sessions, mandatory for everyone, required them to pledge their support to the Party. If someone believed differently, dreamed differently, society could make sure there were no longer jobs, or space, for them. How easily the day-to-day had resumed.

  In any case, her colleagues, too, had seen what she had seen, and they, too, had joined in the weeks of demonstrations. But Ling had gone to the hospitals alone on June 4. She had seen all kinds of people jeering the soldiers, screaming, weeping. Businessmen in suits, cadres from the street offices and residents’ committees, nurses, construction workers, factory men. At Fuxing Hospital, on the ground and in the courtyard, and in a bicycle shed, were bodies. Two long sheets of paper affixed to a wall listed the names of the known dead. She had seen the corpse of a young man, the strap of his camera still looped around his wrist. She had seen women her own age. Bodies lay even at the entrance. A nurse came, begging her to give blood. The hospital had run out, she said, and people were needlessly dying. “At Muxidi. At Xidan…” Around Ling, people moved too fast or too slow. She had given blood in a chaotic room, and then continued on to the Children’s Hospital, the Post Hospital, and then to the Beijing Medical Centre. The injured multiplied and became never-ending. She had looked into every face and examined every piece of clothing. Looking at feet and shoes, at mouths, at eyes, multiple gunshot wounds, wrecked bodies. In the morgue, they were laid on straw mats or strips of stained white cloth. There was a book of records. If the name was unknown, the nurses and doctors had listed the deceased’s sex and estimated age, the objects in his or her pockets, the colour of a jacket or the pattern of a shirt. After leaving People’s Hospital, she had run into soldiers. They had fired at civilians in a senseless, indiscriminate manner, shouting out that the passersby were counter-revolutionaries. Hooligans. Ling had pedalled blindly home, too distraught to be afraid. When she reached her own door, she had gripped the handle, unable to move, an icy numbness spreading out from her heart. In the first few days, she had felt almost nothing.

  Now, in Ai-ming’s bedroom, she could see, as clearly as if it were in her hands, the statement she had written but had not yet signed, supporting the use of force by the army against the demonstrators. Pledging her allegiance to Deng Xiaoping, to Premier Li Peng and the Communist Party. She saw the hospitals. She thought of Kai, the Professor, Zhuli, the Old Cat. She saw decades of deception and love, and also a lifetime of fidelity. She saw false surfaces that slice through everything, two-dimensional edges that could cut to the very centre of things.

  Moonlight slid against her daughter’s face, making it appear angular, smooth and cold. She stood up and went to the outer room. Sparrow’s record player had a film of dust that bothered her and she instinctively took a cloth and proceeded to wipe it carefully, every side of it. When she was done, she opened the lid. The record inside was a recording by Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, Bach’s Sonata No. 4 in C Minor. What was the last thing Sparrow had said to her? What was the last look he had given her? Their lives were bound together, Ling knew. She set the needle down and music swayed into life, the steady river of the piano, the lyrical exactitude of the violin.

  Afterwards, when she lifted the record and replaced it in its cardboard sleeve, Ling found letters. All the letters written from Canada and Hong Kong.

  At work the next day, the new director of the station summoned Ling to his office. He informed Ling that her husband’s body had been recovered on the morning of June 4, and that he had already been cremated.

  “His body?” she said. The ceiling fan spun so slowly, as if all the electricity in the building was being funnelled out.

  “You should collect his ashes from the crematorium. I have the address here. Within three days, if the ashes are not collected, the crematorium will have no choice but to dispose of them.”

  “How did my husband die?” she asked.

  He stared at the papers in front of him. “A stroke.”

  They both looked at one another. Ling wanted to close her eyes, but her mind refused to let her. “But where did he suffer this stroke?”

  The director slid the sheet towards her. “At home.”

  She stared down at the page, and the space awaiting her signature, unable to react.

  “Actually, since you’re here,” he continued, “we’re having difficulty with another matter. Your daughter is registered to write the university entrance examinations next month. Unfortunately, since she’s a relatively new Beijing resident, we’ve run into some obstacles. Political background checks, you understand…of course, I’ll do all I can to secure a place for her.”

  He closed his hands together as if they contained something precious.

  “It appears your husband was in contact with a number of people who harbour resentments towards the Party. Any information you can provide would help us in our work. Some are already charged and are in detention. This is a serious class struggle and we must each do our part. The Party will not let you down. The Party understands that many good cadres were led astray by a dangerous few.
The Party says: to those who confess, leniency; to those who resist, severity.”

  What shook Ling most was that she wasn’t even angry. Anger, too, could dissipate, but this emptiness that took its place might never be released.

  “He’s already dead,” she said at last. When the director said nothing, she asked him, “What more do you want from him? I gave my life to the Party. I gave my life. What more do you want from me? I have nothing more to say.”

  When she looked up, the director appeared genuinely ashamed. He remained silent.

  She picked up the pen and signed her name.

  Afterwords, the world outside was made only of intersecting flat surfaces, angle after angle, peel it back and she would only find more of the same, yet another surface. A lifetime of carefulness and sacrifice meant she had no one in whom to confide. At the crematorium, she was given a cardboard box of ashes. They had run out of wooden boxes. Perhaps inside the paper would only be another box, and then another and another, and so on until infinity. Trembling, she undid the string and lifted the lid. Around the bits of bone, the ashes were matted together, they had a softness and a lightness that broke her. She replaced the lid, tied the box to her bicycle and pedalled home.

  Nothing remains unchanging, she thought. Her legs pedalled quickly as if they could leave her self behind. She had seen too much. Yes, things could still change, not for her, not for Sparrow, but for Ai-ming. She could not stop her own heart from breaking. But for her daughter behind this mountain was another mountain, behind this sea, another sea.

  CODA

  IN MY MIND, AI-MING’S story has a hundred possible endings. Perhaps she simply wanted to leave the past behind and she took on a new identity and a new life. Perhaps she became involved in something she could not speak of to us. Perhaps her counterfeit papers came back to haunt her. In recent years, this last possibility consumed me, for there were stories of Chinese migrants lost in the maze of detention centres; many had arrived in the United States in the years following the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and had never obtained proper papers. In the early 1990s, the United States had passed the Chinese Student Protection Act, offering permanent residence to students involved in the protests. However, they were eligible only if they had arrived in America between June 5 1989, and April 11, 1990. Ai-ming had crossed the border in May 1991. Ten years later, in 2001, when detentions in the United States skyrocketed, those without papers were swept up in the crackdown.

  Sometimes, in Vancouver, I go to the apartment where my mother, my father and I used to live. I imagine that Ai-ming and I, in the most extraordinary of circumstances, will meet one another there. The street is the same, the apartment blocks have barely changed. Sometimes people’s lives fold back together, sometimes all they need is a meeting place, good fortune, faith. Years ago, Ai-ming told me that her mother used to stand in the intersection of Muxidi, waiting for Sparrow, remembering, long after his life had ended.

  —

  June 20, 2016. In Shanghai, two lamps shone by the window where Professor Liu stood holding his violin. With his great, white eyebrows, he reminded me of a snow lily. The pianist, Mrs. Wang, in a midnight-blue silk dress, sat at the piano, ready.

  Beside me, Professor Liu’s daughter, our sound engineer, gazed sternly into her laptop. She dragged her headphones off, massaged her forehead and dropped the headphones back on. In Shanghai dialect, she asked for a sound check. The musicians played the opening of Bach’s Sonata No. 4 in C Minor.

  There were thirty people in the room, mostly musicians and composers, some of whom had known Sparrow decades ago. In the first row, Yiwen was hugging her daughter to her side. To her left was Ai-ming’s great-aunt, the Old Cat.

  The room stilled. Professor Liu lifted his violin. Sparrow’s Sonata for Piano and Violin, dedicated to my father, began.

  At first, the violin played alone, a seam of notes that slowly widened. When the piano entered, I saw a man turning in measured, elegant circles, I saw him looking for the centre that eluded him, this beautiful centre that promised an end to sorrow, the lightness of freedom. The piano stepped forward and the violin lifted, a man crossing a room and a girl weeping as she climbed a flight of steps; they played as if one sphere could merge into the other, as if they could arrive in time and be redeemed in a single overlapping moment. And even when the notes they played were the very same, the piano and violin were irrevocably apart, drawn by different lives and different times. Yet in their separateness, and in the quiet, they contained one another. Long ago, Ai-ming copied out a poem for me:

  We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world

  That we wished to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree.

  Earth endures, heaven endures, even though both shall end.

  Sound waves walked across the computer screen, recurring yet unpredictable, repeating yet never the same. I saw the Old Cat’s head, nodding. Against the window, the curtains continued to move.

  In this room, there was only the act of listening, there was only Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. A counting down and a counting up, an ending that could never be a true ending. The not yet was still to come, and the book remained unfinished. We loved and were loved.

  Ai-ming, I thought, you and I are still here.

  Around us, the first movement expanded, turning like smoke.

  IN DUNHUANG, in the far west of China, Swirl, Wen the Dreamer and Projectionist Bang were sorting through photocopies. It was 1990. Ai-ming sat across the table from them, watching the slight movement of their three grey heads. They were all staying in the rooms of Projectionist Bang, resting for several weeks so that onward travel arrangements could be made. Here, the summer sky was a deep, silvery white.

  Projectionist Bang, who had a face like a dried pink plum, made his living sweeping the grounds of the famous Mogao Caves. Ai-ming liked to hear about the caves, and so she asked him now which was his favourite. Projectionist Bang welcomed the interruption. He said that some of the Mogao Caves were painted with visions of paradise, images that dated to the fourth century. “But the painters’ idea of paradise was only a copy of life on earth,” he said. “Dancing, wine, books, meat and music. Paradise offers all the things we’ve never learned to properly distribute, despite the excellence of our residents’ committees and our people’s communes.”

  Behind his small brick house, the dirt road led out into the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Just this morning, a camel train had swayed by, returning home after a seventy-eight-day journey across the Gobi, the emptied humps of the animals sagging over like devastated pillows. Having never seen a camel in her life, Ai-ming had thought their humps were injured. Projectionist Bang had laughed so hard, his hearing aid had fallen out. Ai-ming had wanted to disappear into the ground, or though the nearby gate of Jiayuguan, the Gate of Sorrows, where the western reach of the Great Wall came to an end. She had once fancied herself a scholar, but she didn’t even know that a camel’s hump emptied and grew soft like a deflated balloon.

  Swirl had intervened, reminiscing of a camel she had known in her thirties, during her time at Farm 835. The camel’s name had been Sasha.

  Now, again, Projectionist Bang was struggling with his hearing aid and it looked like he was trying to reattach his ear. “Oh,” he said, when he had managed to get it right. “About the piano you wanted, I found one. The pianist is an old rightist, exiled to Dunhuang in 1958, used to be a physicist. His sentence finally ended last year but he hasn’t got around to going home. It’s just like the old books say, ‘Even the Emperor is an exile on these dusty roads.’ Anyway, we looked over the piece of music, those nine pages, and he said he could prepare it in a few days. Stitch it together somehow. At least we’ll get an idea of what it sounded like.”

  “Projectionist Bang,” Swirl said, “if you play the violin part, I think it will be just right. Can you do it on your erhu?”

  “Sure, sure,” Bang said. “We’re a bloody orchestra out here.”

  —


  Ai-ming, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer had been travelling together for five weeks, 2,500 kilometres, by train, bus, cart, moped and foot. Her great-uncle and great-aunt, already in their seventies, had the tenacity of llamas. Everything they owned was packed in a single suitcase, a piece of luggage meticulously cared for, yet so battered it looked as if it had lived ten thousand lives. Swirl and Wen could survive on hot water and radishes, eating sunlight and dusty air. She wasn’t sure if they slept because whenever she opened her eyes, at midnight or 3 a.m. or dawn, they were always awake.

  Wen had told her stories of the desert, Comrade Glass Eye and her own father, the Bird of Quiet. Swirl told her about Big Mother Knife, Lady Dostoevsky and Zhuli. Sometimes Ai-ming cried for no reason, even when the story was a happy one. Sometimes, when the story was sad, she felt nothing, not even the beating of her own heart.

  Now, Swirl was sorting through the pages of another set of the Book of Records because they had fallen on the ground and gotten out of order. Ai-ming was watching Wen the Dreamer. His face had an angular sharpness, an immense calm. In the sunlight, his white hair was nearly transparent.

  Wen had decided to hand-copy the last chapter. He was using the cursive script and, as he drew each character, the brush barely left the page. There was something circular, watery and eternal about it all.

  He looked up at her and set aside his brush. The word he had just written was 宇 (yǔ) which meant both room and universe. “Child, do you know where you want to go?”

  She remembered walking with her father to Tiananmen Square and how she had said to him: Canada. Now she said, “I don’t know. I just want to leave everything behind.”