Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“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. Three hundred years 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 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 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 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 he were still alive, that is what I would tell him.

I know that 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.