Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

When summer came, we flew to New York and took the subway to Ai-ming’s last known address. One of her roommates, Ida, an older woman, said that she had warned Ai-ming not to go. If the INS found out she’d left the country, Ai-ming’s application would be thrown out. Worse, if she was caught re-entering, she’d be barred from the United States for a decade. Ida, herself, had just been granted amnesty under the same program. She gave us directions to the plastic flower factory where Ai-ming had been working, but when we arrived, no one in the office would speak to us. Finally, just as we were leaving, a teenaged girl ran out. She spoke to us in Cantonese. She said that Ai-ming had been expected back weeks ago but had never turned up.

Not knowing what else to do, Ma and I wandered through Chinatown, carrying a photograph of Ai-ming from restaurant to restaurant. One after another, people studied the picture and shook their heads.

Neither of us had ever been to New York before, and I felt like a blade of grass in a world of fish. Every vehicle, it seemed, was in disguise, dressed up as a yellow cab. Ma, dazed, barely seemed to notice the city. As if in a dream, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, above the rippling water.

That night, Ma used her credit card so that we could attend a concert in Carnegie Hall; in the foyer and the main hall, I studied every face, row after row, up the steep balcony until everything disappeared into shadow. A poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thoughts, Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city . The music, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which my father had performed decades ago with China’s Central Philharmonic, made Ma weep. I sat in the dark, grown up now. I felt too wide, too full of feeling, for the small space I inhabited.

On the plane home, I told Ma it was only a matter of time before Ai-ming contacted us. All we could do was wait.

—

After Ma’s diagnosis in 1998, everything changed. We no longer fit into the hours, days and weeks of the regular world. She began to speak of the future not as an open and undetermined place, but as a fixed measure of time; a year, maybe two, if she was lucky. Her pragmatism hurt me. I was only nineteen years old, and needed to believe she would be the one to defy the numbers. When her chemotherapy began, I had been at university, a mathematics major at last, and I could think of all sorts of statistical reasons why she should not die. I spent many hours brooding over just this problem, as if Ma’s life and death were a simple question of numbers and probabilities. To my surprise, but probably not to Ma’s, all the anger I had stored up since my father’s death returned. When I looked at my university classmates, I heard in their voices and saw in their lives a freedom I felt had been unfairly taken from me. How oblivious they seemed of their good fortune. I compensated by studying harder, by trying to outdo everyone, to defy — what? I didn’t know. It’s no wonder that I became such a solitary young woman. I was irrationally upset with Ma and angry all over again with Ba. I saw that I might lose my mother no matter what the numbers said, no matter how many things she still had left to experience.

As usual, Ma let me think what I wanted.

In the meantime, she altered her diet and dealt with the unending bureaucracy of sick leave, sick pay, health and life insurance, the web of paperwork and medication that quickly encircled her life, so that the measurement of time became divorced from the rising and the falling of the sun, and became instead about the intervals between treatment regimens, hospital stays, meal times, rest and recovery. She made a will and left a sum of money to Ai-ming, which to this day has not been claimed; neither I nor my mother’s lawyer have been able to locate her. That year, I published a paper in a prestigious mathematics journal and I am glad that Ma lived to see this small success, this glimpse of a future stability.

During those long hours at the hospital, I willed myself to understand everything there was to know about algebraic geometry; somehow, the impossibility of my task saved me. I wrote my papers and tried to find my mother’s strength within myself. In the last two years of her life, I changed. Ma’s diagnosis was an end but also a beginning, a period of time intensely lived. We were lucky because, finally, we had time to talk, to go back to subjects we might not have raised in a lifetime of reserve, of quiet. In those two years, I knew only two constants: mathematics and Ma. I learned a great deal about the tenacity of love and also the terrible pain of letting it go. The brevity of my parents’ lives has shaped me.

In 1999, Ma asked me to find Ai-ming. “You’re the only one who knows,” she said.

What did I know, I wondered, what had I truly understood back then? “I’ll try, Ma.”

“I couldn’t find her. I tried so hard but I couldn’t do it. There’s no more time.”

But what if there had been an accident? What if Ai-ming had passed away? I wanted to say these things but could not imagine speaking the words aloud.

The painkillers made her words slow and heavy. “She went back to Beijing. Maybe Shanghai. I’m sure of it.”

“I’ll look, Ma.”

“I wrote a letter to Ai-ming.”

“How?”

“I sent it to her mother in Shanghai. But it was returned, her mother had moved. There was no forwarding address. I called that number so many times.” Ma’s eyes filled with tears. “I promised her mother that I would take care of Ai-ming. I gave her my word. They were family to us.”

“Please don’t be upset,” I said. “Please. I’ll find them.”

“Look straight ahead and don’t turn back. Don’t follow illusions, don’t forget to come home.” It was as if she could see into the future, she knew I would take on my father’s regret and guilt. “You’re listening to me, aren’t you, Marie? Li-ling…”

“You don’t have to worry about anything, Ma. I promise.”

Not once did she ask for my father, yet I believe that somehow it was the same, that to hope for Ai-ming was also to hope for his return.

Before she passed away, Ma gave me a photograph Ai-ming had left us. The picture was a duplicate of one Ai-ming carried, which had belonged to her father. It showed Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. On the back, my mother had written Shanghai Conservatory of Music, 1966 .

—

My mother died fifteen years ago but I have been thinking about her more than ever, the way it felt when she put her arms around me, about her qualities, especially her loyalty, pragmatism and quickness to laughter. She wanted to give me a different example of how to live my life and how to let hers go. And so, at the end, her words were contradictory. Look forward or look back? How could I find Ai-ming and also turn away from my father? Or did she think both acts were the same thing? It’s taken me years to begin searching, to realize that the days are not linear, that time does not simply move forward but spirals closer and closer to a shifting centre. How much did Ma know? How will I know when to stop looking? I think it’s possible to build a house of facts, but the truth at the centre might be another realm entirely.

It’s possible that I have lost track of the dates, the time, the chapters and permutations of the story. That afterwards, I reconstructed what I could about Ai-ming’s family and mine. Years later, certain images persisted in my memory — a vast desert, a poet who courted beautiful Swirl with a story not his own, music that made not a sound — and I returned to them with greater frequency. I wanted to find her again, to let her know what I remembered, and to return something of what she had given me.