Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Zhuli went to investigate. After the land reform had been achieved, after they had been assigned the mud brick house, Zhuli had been expelled from the village school. The child of a disgraced landlord, the peasants’ association decided, should study the textbook of the fields and the equations of the sky. Besides, she already knew how to read and should no longer take up precious space. With nowhere to go and no one to play with, Zhuli had tried to stay with her parents in the fields, but she got in the way of the plough and cut her feet on the sharp rice stalks. Her mother, exasperated, yelled at her to go home. She obeyed but inside the hut, the loneliness became unbearable.

Zhuli decided to investigate the spot where the old man had emerged. Crouching in the shade of a gnarled tree, she saw a clean, dark stone and, beneath it, flattened grass and a branch worn smooth: it was a handle. She lifted the trap door. There was a rope with knots. She was small and, even in her bulky, padded coat, climbed down easily.

In some ways, this hidden space was more comfortable than the bare room in which she lived with her parents. It was just below ground, as if a very large and well-made wooden box, a shipping container, had been buried with a living room inside it, like an afterlife for Old West. There was a cushioned chair large enough for six Zhulis, an imported kerosene lamp and a full case of oil, stacks and stacks of books, and a soft, woven mat on the floor. She lit one of the lamps and, pulling shut the trap door, glimpsed two musical instruments, a qin and an erhu, though she hadn’t known their names at the time. When she set it on her lap, the qin was heavy and cold. It had a creaking roughness and, at first, she simply sat with it and stared at the room which, in comparison to the mud house, seemed modern and strange. The crumbling books were from another age, they were literally from another continent, but the heavy qin felt alive. On her lap it seemed to breathe in and out, like the great-grandfather to whom it must have belonged.

Zhuli went down almost every day, even if only for an hour. Over an entire season, she tested the range of the qin’s five, battered strings. She did not know how to tune the instrument but quickly settled on a harmony that seemed to suit both the strings and herself. Later on, she learned that the classical guqin was associated with elderly scholars and erudite books (“With snakes, conservatives and reactionaries,” her classmates said) and it was true, Old West’s qin had made her feel part of a floating darkness. The sounds it made were otherworldly, and had more in common with punctuation than with words. At night, Zhuli slept curled up beside her mother, longing to be in the underground library. She needed to make sure the instrument was still breathing. Truly, it felt as if the old qin was her stronger, braver twin.

Spring was late that year and all the farmers and the hungry people were anxiously watching the ground. An otherwise kind boy named Lu saw her emerge from the soil, just as she had glimpsed the old man. That very day, the container was dug up and all the objects carted off. The books, the soft carpets and the cushioned chair were confiscated, proof that Old West’s descendants were biding their time and continued to conceal their wealth. Neighbours whom Zhuli knew, who always greeted her on the paths and sometimes gave her something small to eat, came and plastered the mud brick house with hastily written denunciations, the words so large they could be read from the road. She knew only a handful of characters, but she recognized the ones for girl/daughter 女 and sky 天, which had been linked together to form a single word, witch 妖 (yāo).

That evening, the little hut was very quiet. Zhuli asked her mother why the word yāo was written on their house. Her mother combed Zhuli’s hair and said it was nothing, a small disagreement with the neighbours and, anyway, what an odd word to recognize. Swirl did something she never did, she mixed a paste of herbs and eucalyptus oil and rubbed the mixture over Zhuli’s arms and legs, gently massaging her arms, legs, feet, fingers and even her toes. With every circular motion of her mother’s fingers, Zhuli disappeared piece by piece. She remembered the soothing warmth of the kang and her father’s suitcase with its dulled fabric and brass clasps, and a keyhole the size of her pinky. Once she had asked for the key but he said it didn’t exist.

Night fell. Into the silence a true demon came. It shouted and raged as if to topple the hut. All at once there were people everywhere, some holding ropes and even singing, then hands shoving her aside as she tried to reach her mother, who had been forced to her knees. Swirl was saying, “Pity…pity.” There was a loud clap and her mother cried out. Wen the Dreamer’s voice shook as if it was coming from the foundations of the little house itself. Zhuli cried and cried. Was it her screaming that frightened all the demons away? She imagined she was the daughter and sky twisted up, demonic, and all the neighbours were afraid of her now. The men left, half carrying, half dragging her parents with them, as if they, too, were objects retrieved from underground. And then the room, in shambles, was silent. She climbed up onto the kang even though its warmth had dulled. She was afraid to feed coal into its mouth and heat the bed again, so she pulled all the quilts around herself, lay down and closed her eyes. She asked herself how the underground room could harm anyone, and why knowing of its existence was enough to bring forth demons. No answers came to her. Events were like dreams, she concluded, and thus could not be real. When she awoke from this dream, she told herself, the bed would be warm and her parents would be here and it would be morning. This time she would be very careful when she climbed into Old West’s buried library, she would smuggle the qin out and hide it here. Was it still breathing? A day passed and then another. There was nothing to eat but she stole a few leaves from the young plants in the communal garden, and her dreams grew lengthy and warm and elastic. Was it then that she saw the excavation and the hole in the ground? Perhaps other events occurred as well but she no longer recalled them. She drummed her fingers on the cold bed and hummed to herself, and the music comforted her.

—

When she woke after the third night, a young woman was sitting in her father’s chair with a bag of White Rabbit sweets in her lap. Zhuli stared at the woman but could not remember who she was. Nevertheless, she said politely, “Good morning, older sister.”

“Pack your things,” the woman said firmly. Her words were oddly accented because the candy had made her teeth sticky. Zhuli took the five objects that were nearest to her, which included a dress, a washcloth, and two of her father’s records.

They walked under the village gates and towards the next town. Zhuli knew she had been to town before but she could not remember why. Nothing looked familiar. They came to a roundabout with a half-dozen soot-covered minibuses. The White Rabbit muttered that her parents were lucky not to have their heads chopped off, they were fortunate that the worst excesses were a thing of the past. “They’ve been sent for re-education, that’s all,” she said. “Since you’ve never been educated at all, it seemed pointless to send you along with them.”

Inside the bus, the rim of the windowsill overflowed with the husks of sunflower seeds. Every time Zhuli moved, the plastic bag with her belongings crackled like a witch laughing.

The countryside appeared to be breaking up into a rubble of shapes, tilting huts, splattered concrete and blocks of ash. People appeared from every road, moving and running to keep up with something she couldn’t see. The White Rabbit talked a lot but her voice seemed to pass over Zhuli’s head and out the window. She looked down at her feet and saw that her cloth shoes were muddy and that she had violet bruise on her left knee. The more she stared at it, the bluer and deeper it seemed to grow. She must have fallen asleep because when she woke there was a big moon outside the bus, and also a patter of electric lights, but everything else was darkness. The bus seemed to turn around in many circles before finally stopping and everyone suddenly leaped into action, pulling down bags and birds and chickens. A dog ran onto the bus and people ran off. The woman smelled of the sweets she had been eating all evening. They walked. There were many people on the sidewalks and Zhuli’s bag scratched against their legs. The White Rabbit is taking me to my mother, she thought. Zhuli quickened her steps and, as the woman hurried along, too, Zhuli feared that she might snap, lift with happiness and break apart as soon as her mother took her in her arms. The bag cackled and snickered beside her, To my mother, to my mother! To Ma, to Ma !