Madeleine Thien: Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The parcels arrived on Sunday or Thursday evenings, when she was occupied in the teahouse downstairs, performing The Dream of the West Chamber . Could the writer be someone in the audience, or did he or she simply take the opportunity to slip in unnoticed, leaving the parcel at her door? Sleepless, she burned candles she couldn’t afford to waste and reread the notebooks, searching for clues. Something else had caught Swirl’s attention. The writer was playing with the names of Da-wei and May Fourth. In the first notebook, for instance, wèi had been written 位 which means place or location. In the third, wèi 卫, an ancient kingdom in Henan or Hebei Province. And in the sixth notebook, wēi 危, another name for Taiwan, as if the writer’s location was coded into the book itself.

The day she received the twenty-fifth notebook, she met her sister in Fuxing Park. “I can’t shake the feeling that I know this person,” Swirl said. “But why such an elaborate game and why am I the recipient? I’m just a widow with no literary taste whatsoever.”

“You mean those packages are still arriving?” Big Mother said, incredulous. “You should have told me sooner. It could be a criminal gang or a political trap!”

Swirl could only laugh.

“And please don’t give me this nonsense about literary taste,” her sister continued. “That kind of talk is just camel’s lips and horse’s mouth. Speaking of which, when will you stop living with those miserable widows and come stay with me?”

The next time they met, Swirl didn’t mention the novel at all. Big Mother brought it up, saying that such fictions were a false world in which her younger sister, if she was not careful, would lose her corporeal being and become only air and longing.

But Swirl was only half-listening. She was thinking of the novel’s characters: Da-wei, the adventurer, and May Fourth, the scholar. Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life. She recognized in them desires which, until now, had gone unexpressed in her. She smiled at her sister, unable to mask her sadness. “Big Mother,” she said, “don’t take it so seriously. It’s only a book after all.”

After the thirty-first notebook, she waited as usual. But day after day, and then week after week, no more deliveries came.

As time passed, the cold loneliness of Swirl’s life reasserted itself. She ate her dinners and the notebooks piled up across from her, like a friend gone quiet.

Downstairs, rumours abounded.

The manager was worried that, with Chairman Mao in power, teahouses would be denounced as bourgeois frivolities, singers would be assigned to work units, and the lyrics of every song monitored. Bread Crumb fretted that the government would ban all games, especially and including chess. Not for the first time, Swirl wondered if it was time to leave Shanghai; passage to Hong Kong was getting more expensive by the day. But down at the train ticket office, she ran into the owner of the Library of the Gods, who was out taking the air with his cockatoo. In her distraction, she mentioned the mysterious notebooks. The bookseller teased her and said she had a twin in this district — a failed poet known as Wen the Dreamer was going from place to place, seeking a copy of the very same book.

“Try the Old Cat at the Perilous Heights bookstore. Suzhou Creek Road,” he said. “Third lane down. She’s got her whiskers in everything.”

Swirl thanked him. She took the tram to the bookshop, thinking she would buy the rest of the novel and take it with her to Hong Kong. The Perilous Heights Bookstore was housed in one wing of a stout courtyard house, and the books were three-deep from floor to ceiling. In the literature section, she climbed a sliding ladder and began scanning shelves. But with neither title nor author, the search was futile. Meanwhile a steady stream of patrons arrived, young men and women who gazed all around, from north to south, as if looking for something they had dropped. One approached the bookseller and began whispering urgently. He was pushed aside by a grandfather wearing a Western jacket over a dark blue gown.

“Is it ready?” he said, between dry coughs. The Old Cat, who didn’t look all that old, handed him a mimeographed sheaf of papers. From her vantage point, Swirl could see it was a copy of Guo Moruo’s translation of Dr. Faustus.

The Grandfather’s lips began to tremble. “But what about Part 2!”

“This is not a factory,” the Old Cat said, slapping a lozenge on the counter. “Come back next week.”

Others wanted foreign novels, works by philosophers, economists and nuclear physicists. As she fielded questions the Old Cat barely looked up. She herself was copying endless pages in her flowing script. Apparently the mimeograph was in need of a part that might never be replaced.

When Swirl climbed down from her ladder and inquired after Da-wei and May Fourth, the bookseller muttered, “Not again.”

Every morning, Swirl would go to the bookstore; it was calm inside and the shelves were full of treasures. Surely another story could serve the same purpose, and lift her out of her solitude. She lost herself in travel books about Paris and New York, imagining a journey that would bring her to the far west.

Behind her table, the Old Cat rarely lifted her eyes; the only movement came from her ballpoint pen which slid efficiently up and down the page, so that the pen seemed to be the one delivering advice, information and succour. A bestseller, Poor Persons Take Up Guns to Revolution , kept the papers from flying away.

Several weeks into her new routine, Swirl saw another tower of paper settle on the desk, as if the first stack had drawn an admirer. Then, her eyes lifting, she took in a clean grey coat with cloth buttons, a pocket filled with papers, and finally, smooth, ink-stained hands. She looked again and saw a young man with wavy hair looking at her with embarrassed recognition in his eyes.

“Wen the Dreamer,” she said.

“Miss Swirl,” he answered.

“Took long enough,” the Old Cat said. Her pen bobbed against the sea of the page.

The young man’s manuscript threatened to fall, and he steadied the pages with the fingertips of his right hand. Swirl climbed down from the ladder and stared unashamedly at the top sheet, studying the neat columns of words, the calmly passionate calligraphy that had described the impossible love affair between May Fourth and Da-wei. She wanted to scoop the manuscript up, to rejoin May Fourth in the train to Hohhot, peering through the dust-caked windows to see her beloved smoking on the platform; he would still be there in a week, a month, a lifetime, if she asked him to. It is not in me, she realized, to fall in love with someone who would wait. I can never settle for half a freedom .

“May I?” she said, nodding at the manuscript.

The young man’s fingertips refused to lift from the pages.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “unfortunately, due to my negligence…”

He was not at all like her husband. So this was the writer, the mysterious sender of packages. Wen the Dreamer was wispy and pale, while her husband’s Nationalist uniform had barely seemed to contain him. She blushed.

“Forgive me,” he said, beginning again. “I’m afraid this manuscript is a different story. A different writer.”

“It’s yours, though.”

“Yes,” he said. “No. Well, you understand, the writing is mine.”

She had inched nearer to him. Almost there.

“Quit cowering in the bushes,” the Old Cat said. The pen lifted its head and pointed its nib at Swirl. “If you, Little Miss, are looking for Da-wei’s creator, good luck! I’ll be the first to congratulate you when you find him, and to offer him, of course, a generous remittance, excellent terms, etc. But the author’s whereabouts are as big a mystery to you as they are to poor Wen here. That said, if you need someone to copy your letters or write out your correspondence, well! There’s no finer hand or gentler soul than his.”