Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“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 .

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.