Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Do you know why I was sentenced to re-education through labour, Young Sparrow?” He smiled, as if he was about to tell a long and satisfying joke. “Let me digress and offer you this tale within a tale. Well, my crime begins with my mother. During the civil war, she left my father and ran away with a Nationalist soldier, a fighter for Chiang Kai-shek. My father, it must be said, was not the easiest man. He used to fall asleep wearing his own shorts on his head to keep out the cold, and when he woke in the morning, he would forget they were there, and go out into the village just as he had gone to sleep. My mother, meanwhile, was the brightest star in the village, intelligent, kind and lovely, and twenty years younger than him. Her Nationalist lover was, in fact, a childhood friend. Just as the civil war was breathing its last, he crept back to the village under cover of night. They disappeared together. Chairman Mao was all but leader by then. My father feared my mother would be caught, charged with sedition and executed. He couldn’t sleep and became so worried that he wasted away, as if he, himself, was on the run. But, one morning, a letter arrived from my mother. She told us she had followed her lover and General Chiang Kai-shek out of the country and into exile in Taiwan. And so, she was gone forever.

“I knew my mother loved me as much as she loved her sweetheart; thus she would never be happy separated from him or me. One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart. My mother only wrote to me the once; I never heard from her again. But I kept that letter all my teenaged years and I felt her suffering and believed that she felt mine. We were connected, as surely as this blade of grass is attached to the soil below.

“My father’s love for her, meanwhile, was set to flow evermore towards her, no matter where she went or what she did, and it burned brightly until the end of his brief and patient life.

“Anyhow, by 1955 I was a bachelor and an orphan, and the Chairman chose this moment to launch his brightest campaign. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom,’ he told us. ‘Let a hundred schools of thought contend!’ We were told we must question ourselves, our superiors, and the state of our nation so as to make a country that was both unified and just. Young Sparrow, I had spent too long in my workshop, alone with my crystal radios, homemade batteries and amplifiers, in a closed room where inanimate objects listened to me and to one another. So I came forward with my mother’s letter in my hand and I asked that her crimes be forgiven and forgotten. I thought that if she was rehabilitated, she would be allowed to come out of exile and return to China, and I could see her once more. Love is a revolutionary act, I argued. My mother had broken with the Old Ways, with the suffocating hierarchies of Confucianism, and she had embraced her destiny.

“What a mistake. I should better have argued that Emperor Hirohito and Chiang Kai-shek deserved a villa in France, paid for by the Communist Party of China. I should have heeded the wise saying, no flower can bloom for a hundred days . Every joke ends! At first, they listened to me and were compassionate. ‘Brave Edison,’ they said, ‘it is right that you show this fidelity to your lost mother. You are a faithful son of the Revolution!’ The Hundred Flowers Movement was still a spring bouquet and anything could be said. It was an exciting time, my friend. All of us, young and old, were awakening towards freedom. I felt a deep pride in my country and I know I wasn’t the only one. So of course, I didn’t stop there. I went on about the waste in the village bureaucracy, the favours and bribes that bankrupted the poor, the laughable quality of our scientific education, even the quality of our trains. ‘With all the gifts of our homeland,’ I proclaimed, ‘we should be the flowering tree of modernity!’

“The Anti-Rightist Campaign began. Everyone with something to lose, from our Great Helmsman to the local village brute, had heard enough. They summoned me to a meeting in town. I was convinced that my mother had finally arrived and I would see her again! I spent a fortune on a new set of clothes and a jade necklace for her. A very bourgeois thing to do, I admit. When I arrived at the hall, there were hundreds of people already there. I searched every face for hers. A dozen times I thought I saw her.

“I heard my name echoing on the loudspeaker. It was as if I was underwater and my name was breaking apart in the current. Two cadres pushed me up onto the stage where a man stood, holding my mother’s letter. I was ecstatic. I looked all around, convinced she waited behind the curtains. The man waved the letter in my face to get my attention. I tried to focus. The man accused me of bourgeois familial tendencies and gross sympathy for the enemy. ‘What enemy?’ I asked, confused. He slapped my face. Enraged, I tried to grab the letter from his hands but it ripped. I had to get away, I thought, so that I could find her. She was somewhere in this room. ‘Ma,’ I called. ‘I am here. Where have they put you?’ The two cadres tied my arms with ropes as if I was a beast. The crowd began to shout my name and curse me. I thought it was a dream. Someone was bleeding but it couldn’t be me. Someone was being beaten for the edification of the crowd, but surely it wasn’t me. I imagined that the letter expanded and covered me and hid me and everything became dark. I woke up when they emptied a bucket of water on me, and then I shouted in rage and called them betrayers, monsters and ghosts. My words touched no one; instead, they were recorded in a file. This is how I know what was said: because the words have been repeated back to me so many times since then.

“I was carted away to Jiabangou. For months I simply refused to believe that I was there. Men whose only crime was honest criticism were digging ditches and wasting away. Meanwhile, back home, their families lived in ignominy, their kids were hounded in schools or kicked out altogether, their houses were confiscated, their possessions trashed, their wives forced to beg on the streets, empty the public toilets and denounce their own husbands. We could protest all we wanted but it made no difference. The guards told us we were lucky that, not only had we been spared execution, but we had a roof over our heads and shoes on our feet.

“There are many stages to hunger. By 1959, they were burying us by the truckload. The cold, young Sparrow, was metallic, bitter, and had appetites of its own. The cold crawls into your body and destroys you from the inside. Even the camp leaders told us not to waste our last days on this earth digging ditches. So we were free: free to wander the desert in search of something to eat. Wen the Dreamer used to say it was like searching an empty pocket for coins. Still, we persevered. There were times when the only thing we carried back, after an entire day of scavenging, was each other. Nothing in our stomachs but an echo. Wen weighed no more than a ten-year-old child. Often we didn’t have the energy to return to the caves and so we slept, unsheltered, in the open.

“When he was weak, we sat so close our heads touched. He would pick up the story he’d been telling me as if he’d just set it down a moment ago, as if he had only to close his eyes and find the right page. His chest had caved in, his eyes had grown frighteningly large, and his bones were knives, but I think Wen was most afraid of silence. Again and again, he told me that his daughter was the light of his days and his wife was the centre of his world. I couldn’t help but fall in love with her, too. Every lovely thing in the air was his beloved Swirl: the turquoise sky, sand that shimmered like stars, the sunlight that touched our rough skins. He spoke to her at night as if she was seated beside us; when he had a fever, he would crawl out of the cave determined to find food for her. Once I saw him washing grains of sand in a pot of water, convinced that he was cleaning the rice for his suffering Swirl. But even mad, he could tell stories. Maybe he told them better than in saner days, I wouldn’t know. We swore never to leave one another because the worst fate would be to feel abandoned in this frozen and beautiful world. It is one thing to suffer, another thing to be forgotten.