Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  He looked at her sadly. “But after doing even that, one day you might have to find another way to continue.”

  “How?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. His picked up his brush and continued writing. The small stack of notebooks beside him seemed to lift slightly, like the ribs of an accordion. She studied the photo he kept beside him. Zhuli was holding her violin as if it was the instrument, the wood and strings–and not her thoughts, not her future–that needed protecting. What if this is where I should stay, Ai-ming wondered. What if I can’t survive on my own? She felt like a stranger to herself, as if her body was in fact a giant house, but she had only ever bothered to visit one room.

  “How to continue,” Wen said. “Your father wondered this too. For many years he didn’t write music at all. Chairman Mao gave us one way of looking at the world, and so did Marx, Engels and Lenin. All the poets and writers, all the philosophers. They agreed on the problems but never the solutions. Shostakovich and Bach gave your father another way of listening. I think about your father every day…Perhaps, later on, when he composed again, he tried to hear these different voices simultaneously with his own, so that his music would have to come from broken music, so that the truths he understood wouldn’t erase the world but would be part of it. When I was alone, I often asked myself, Can a single hand cover the sky? How can we live like this and see so little? Ai-ming…I have so many regrets. Everyone tells me how much you resemble Zhuli. Don’t ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?”

  She didn’t understand.

  His brush came to the end of a line. Chapter 42, when May Fourth reaches the end of the desert. She’s aged so much, and her friend Da-wei has long since passed on from this world.

  “Uncle Wen, how many chapters do you think there are?”

  “Once I asked my wife the very same question. She told me, Wen the Dreamer, it’s foolhardy to think that a story ends. There are as many possible endings as beginnings.’ ”

  —

  The desert air made Ai-ming feel lightheaded. She had taken to sleeping early, waking late, and to napping after lunch and before dinner. Each time she opened her eyes, she felt as if her head was enormous, her hands tiny, and her lungs crushed. One afternoon, she woke up and heard the voices of her three caretakers and Big Mother Knife, who had arrived from the South to be with them, and had managed to obtain false papers for Ai-ming. Big Mother could see very little now, and sometimes, when she thought too much about Sparrow and her boys, tears leaked from her good eye, itself now failing. Ai-ming had never seen her grandmother mourn, she would gently wipe the tears and Big Mother would grumble, “Who’s that?” “It’s me.” “Ah, you.”

  “If my granddaughter crosses into Kyrgyzstan,” Big Mother was saying now, “what’s the next logical step?”

  “Are you kidding? If she makes it even that far, the next step would be a generous cash offering to the Queen Mother of the West.” This was Projectionist Bang.

  “What about arranging passage through Istanbul? She says she wants to go to Canada.”

  “Canada?”

  “Sparrow has a friend there. A musician.” Big Mother paused. “Sparrow had.”

  Ai-ming stared unblinking at the bright room. The truth was, she was terrified of the future. She would never study at Beijing University, never follow Yiwen, never join the Communist Party and then never renounce her membership, never leave flowers at Tiananmen Square. Ai-ming had written the examinations, she had scored high, but when the results came, she had told her mother she would not, could not, stay. Ling had not seemed surprised. “Your father wanted you to be able to choose,” she said. But what if it was all a mistake? What if she simply didn’t have the courage? It would take courage to continue living in Beijing. Her mother had already quit her job at the radio station, and moved back to Shanghai to be with the Old Cat. Ai-ming was afraid that life, which had seemed to be expanding forward, had stopped and turned around. That it would carry her forever backwards.

  She thought she had been weeping soundlessly, but Swirl came into the room. She was as graceful and beautiful as a written word, but any word could be so easily erased. One day, Ai-ming thought, unable to stop the flow of emotion, I’ll open my eyes and every one of you will be gone, and I’ll be all alone. Swirl stroked her hair. When her great-aunt looked at her, what did she see? Am I truly a construction? One day, will someone become a construction of me, a replica?

  “I’m so afraid, Aunt Swirl. I’m afraid to be alone.”

  “I promise you, Ai-ming, it will get easier in time.”

  She slept and when she woke again it was dark. The voices of Swirl and Big Mother circled in the night.

  “And the camp that Wen escaped from…”

  Swirl said, “Did I ever tell you? He went back to see it but it had disappeared. The entire camp has been swallowed by the desert as if it never was.”

  “Do you remember…” The stop and start of Big Mother’s voice broke Ai-ming’s heart.

  “The Red Mountain People’s Refreshment House,” Swirl said.

  Big Mother murmured.

  “Shanghai during the Occupation,” Swirl said. “The green hat you made for Sparrow. The words to ‘Jasmine.’ The Old Cat. Da-wei and May Fourth. Zhuli snoring in our little hut, and kicking you off the bed.”

  “The four widows you lived with.”

  “The little boy who led the line of blind musicians, hand to elbow, elbow to hand. The three of us walking the length of the country.”

  “So many children,” Big Mother said.

  Ai-ming heard the sound of a cup set down.

  “You’ll come back to live with me, won’t you? You and Wen.”

  “You won’t be able to get rid of us,” Swirl answered.

  “She was a good child,” Big Mother said. “A courageous girl.”

  Swirl was humming a fragment of music, a small piece of the unending sonata that Sparrow had written. Big Mother took the words from “Song of the Cold Rain,” from “In That Remote Place,” and joining in, sang them over Swirl’s music. The melodies came from songs and poems Ai-ming half recognized, songs her father had sung when she was a child. The harmony was rich and also broken, because the two women were so much older now, and they had loved and let go of so many things, but still the music and its counterpoint remained. “Destined to arrive in a swirl of dust,” Big Mother sang. “And to rise inexorably like mist on the river.”

  Ai-ming sat up in bed. She listened.

  AI-MING CARRIED A small suitcase. At the beginning it was full and heavy, but it was depleted little by little over the course of a journey that took more than three months.

  An elderly woman who had once been a translator met her at the Kyrgyzstan border and went with her to Istanbul.

  From Istanbul, she flew to Toronto.

  In her suitcase she had packed a single change of clothes, toothbrush, washcloth, soap and a tea thermos; a photograph of Zhuli, Kai and her father; a letter from Yiwen. She felt like Da-wei crossing the sea, like a smuggler or a piece of code. Her father had never had the chance to cross the borders of his country.

  I have done these things for my parents, she thought, and for myself. Could it be that everything in this life has been written from the beginning? Ai-ming could not accept this. I am taking this written record with me, she thought. I am keeping it safe. Even if everything repeats, it is not the same. It was just as Wen the Dreamer said: she could take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. She would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts.

  In Toronto, she waited for my mother to call her.

  In Vancouver, I reached out and took her suitcase.

  It is a simple thing to write a book. Simpler, too, when the book already exists, and has been passed from person
to person, in different versions, permutations and variations. No one person can tell a story this large, and there are, of course, missing chapters in my own Book of Records. The life of Ai-ming, the last days of my father: day by day, year by year, I try to see a little more. In Shanghai, Tofu Liu told me that Bach reworked psalms and folk songs, Mahler reworked Li Bai and Wang Wei, Sparrow quoted Prokofiev in his own compositions, and others, like Zhuli and my father, devoted themselves to interpreting this music that was never written for them. The entire book of records is lost, but some objects and compositions remain. In Dunhuang, where Ai-ming stayed with Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, forty thousand manuscripts were recovered in a cave sealed around 1000 AD. In 1900, when an earthquake caused the rocks to split, an abbott, the guardian of the caves, discovered the cache, towers of pages preserved by the dry air of the desert. Mixed in with Chinese prayers were documents in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uighur, Sogdian, Judeo-Persian, Syriac and Khotanese; a Parthian fragment written in Manichean, a tantric instruction manual in the Uighur alphabet, a past due bill for a camel. Ballads, inventories, circulars and donations. A letter to a husband that reads, “I would rather be a pig’s wife than yours.” Astronomical maps. Board game instructions. A guest’s apology for getting drunk and behaving badly. A poem for a beloved donkey. The sale of a brother. Variations of Sparrow’s complete composition, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, can be heard all over China. In shopping malls, public parks, private homes, on personal computers, in night clubs; on headphones in Tiananmen Square, that place that Chinese architects once imagined as the zero point, the location that determines all others. Maybe no one knows where the original recording came from, or that it arrived, like a virus, over the internet. The composer’s name may ultimately be lost. Mathematics has taught me that a small thing can become a large thing very quickly, and also that a small thing never entirely disappears. Or, to put it another way, dividing by zero equals infinity: you can take nothing out of something an infinite number of times.

  To date, Yiwen and I have left innumerable copies of the Book of Records online and even in bookshops in Beijing, Shanghai, Dunhuang, Hong Kong. When I met the Old Cat in Shanghai, she showed me her copy of the thirty-one chapters of the Book of Records copied by Wen the Dreamer back in 1950.

  The Old Cat told me that one day in the near future this library, which itself had gone through so many transformations, would pass from her hands into Ai-ming’s keeping. She said, “I understood from the time I was a child that the boundless vista is at the perilous heights.” Later, as if speaking to another, she said, “Ling, you must give my regards to the future.” And then the Old Cat, who was wearing a suit as she sat in her wheelchair, who carried a bright silver pen in her pocket, smiled at me. She said, “My goodness. How much you resemble your father.”

  When she said this I understood that these pages, too, are just one variation. Some must remain partial chapters, they have no end and no beginning.

  I continue to live my life, to let my parents go and to seek my own freedom. I will wait for Ai-ming to find me and I continue to believe that I will find her–tomorrow, perhaps, or in a dozen years. She will reach up for a book on a shelf. Or she will switch on the radio, she will hear a piece of music that she recognizes, that she has always known. She will come closer. At first, she will disbelieve and then a line will come back to her, words she overheard on the street long ago but has never fully forgotten.

  Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep.

  Remember what I say: not everything will pass.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To Charles Buchan and Sarah Chalfant, my gratitude and love. Your confidence and wisdom have sustained me.

  Thank you to Lynn Henry at Knopf Canada, Bella Lacey at Granta Books and Christine Popp at Luchterhand Literaturverlag, for their profound insight, generosity and commitment to this book of records. I am deeply fortunate to have traveled this road with you.

  I am grateful for financial support from Simon Fraser University, University of Guelph, Nanyang Technological University Singapore and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Thank you to Katharina Narbutovič and the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm who hosted my partner, and welcomed me not only as family but as an artist in my own right. Do Not Say We Have Nothing began in the freedom and openness offered to us in Berlin.

  To my students and fellow faculty in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at City University of Hong Kong, which was closed down as a result of internal and external politics, and to my friends in Hong Kong, thank you for six beautiful years.

  A small group carried me through difficult times, financially, artistically and spiritually. Thank you Ellen Seligman, Y-Dang Troeung, David Chariandy, Sophie McCall, Steven Galloway, Sarah Blacker, Phanuel Antwi, Johanna Skibsrud, Amanda Okopski, Priya Basil, Xu Xi, Sara O’Leary, Anita Rau Badami, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Michelle Garneau, Dionne Brand, Guylaine Racine, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Claudia Kramatschek and Tobias Wenzel.

  To Emily Wood and John Asfour, and to my mother, Matilda Thien, who left this world far too soon. As John wrote, “When death catches me on the sidewalk of a poem, I will only regret not having had you in my arms long enough.”

  To my father and Katherine Luo, for their love and faith. To Rawi Hage, for everything.

  Not everyone who supported and strengthened this story can be named. To my beloved friends in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing and Dunhuang, thank you for accompanying me through this book of records and an alternate memory of history. Remember what I say: Not everything will pass.

  NOTES

  “Watch little by little the night turn around…” Adapted from Pink Floyd lyrics for “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” adapted from Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin’s “Untitled Poem(iii)”, from Poems of the Late T’ang, transl. by A. C. Graham (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), 147.

  “You and I are forever separated by a river…” “A Trip to Xinjiang”, News Plus, China Radio International, Beijing. November 1, 2013. Radio.

  Lyrics from a folk song translated from Russian to Chinese, collected by musician Wang Luobin who once dreamed of studying at the Paris Conservatory. At the age of 25, he encountered and fell in love with Xinjiang music and, over decades, traveled throughout the region, collecting and adapting more than 700 songs into eight albums. He spent 19 years of his life imprisoned.

  “My youth has gone like a departing bird…” “A Trip to Xinjiang.”

  “I would also like to be wise…” Bertolt Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” transl. by John Willett, The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century German Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 71.

  “The marriage of a girl, away from her parents…” Adapted from Wei Yingwu, “To My Daughter on Her Marriage into the Yang Family,” in Witte Bynner, The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, Being Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang Dynasty, 618-906 (New York: Knopf, 1930), 212.

  “When the mind is exalted…” adapted from Wei Yingwu, “Entertaining Literary Men in My Official Residence on a Rainy Day,” The Jade Mountain, 208.

  “How can you ignore this sharp awl that pierces your heart?…” From a song by Jesuit missionary, China scholar and musician, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), as quoted in Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese (New York: Algora Publishing, 2004), 59.

  “These kids have never even seen an instrument in their dreams!” Li Delun, who brought donated musical instruments to Communist headquarters at Yan’an in 1946, and became the founder, instructor and conductor of the orchestra. As quoted by Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai in Rhapsody in Red, 176.

  “We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world….” Adapted from Bai Juyi, “Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” in Witter Bynner, The Jade Mountain, 120.

  “I am lovesick for some lost paradise…” adapted from Ch’u Tz’u, or Songs of Ch’u, “The Far Journey,” transl. by J. Peter Hobson, Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 15, No. 1 & 2 (Winter-Spr
ing, 1983).

  “Family members wander…” Adapted from Bai Juyi, “Feelings on Watching the Moon” http://www.​chinese-poems.​com/​bo3.​html

  “Moonlight in front of my bed…” Li Bo, “Quiet Night Thoughts,” transl. by Burton Watson in Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 204.

  “The streets our brushes…” Vladimir Mayakovsky, “An Order to the Art Army,” December 1918. Transl. Anna Bostock, as quoted in John Berger, Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist (New York: Vintage, 2011), 44.

  “Yellow dust, clear water under three mountains…” Li He, “A Sky Dream,” in Tony Barnstone and Ping Chou’s The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (New York: Anchor, 2005), 199.

  “We shouldn’t be afraid of our own voices….” adapted from Chin-chin Yap’s interview with Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei: Beijing–Works, 1993-2003 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003), 41.

  “The beauty is in the machinery,” Prof. Henryk Iwaniec, from Alec Wilkinson, “The Pursuit of Beauty: Yitang Zhang solves a pure-math mystery,” The New Yorker, February 2, 2015.

  “…deletes 16 percent of all Chinese internet conversations” David Bammam, Brendan O’Connor and Noah A. Sing, “Censorship and Deletion Practices in Chinese Social Media,” First Monday, 17.3 (March 2012).

  “Could I awake now and cross towards her?” Inspired by “Thus, in fainting we yunguoqu 暈 過 去 ‘faint and cross away’, and in awakening we xingguolai 醒 過 來 ‘awake and cross toward here,’ ” Perry Link, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 9.

  “Even the beautiful must die…” Friedrich Schiller, as quoted by Jan Swafford in Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2012), 463.

  “A birch tree, a spruce, a poplar is beautiful…” Excerpted from the section of Schiller’s letter to Körner of February 23, 1793, which is entitled, “Freedom in the appearance is one with beauty.” This translation is taken from Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom, Vol. II, Schiller Institute, Washington, D.C., 1988, pp. 512-19. See http://www.​schillerinstitute.​org/​transl/​trans_schil_essay.​html