Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

They came to an archway, a lane and then an alleyway. She followed the woman along the rows of doors, so similar they all seemed to be children of one another. The White Rabbit chose one and stopped. “These are your relatives. Knock here and ask for your aunt.” The lady knelt down and gave her one last candy and an envelope with red letterhead. She touched Zhuli’s knee and the big, round bruise, which Zhuli had forgotten about, shot pain up her leg all the way to her eyes. “Good luck, Zhuli,” the woman said and then she, too, disappeared. Zhuli faced the door, listening to the echoing sound of the woman’s footsteps. She waited for the pain in her knee to subside, and she slipped the candy into the envelope. After waiting what seemed a long time, she lifted her hand and knocked.

The eerie creaking of the door made her shiver. A teenaged boy appeared. He had uncombed hair and nice eyebrows.

“I’m looking for my aunt,” Zhuli cried.

His eyebrows lifted. He saw the two records angling out of her plastic bag.

“Bā Hè,” she said. Bach. The teenager’s eyes and the door opened wider. “You should tell my aunt that I am here,” she said firmly. She shoved the paper with red letterhead against his stomach.

Late that night, she woke up, alert, and saw moonlight on her exposed feet. There were monsters beside her on the bed — her cousins, she later learned, Flying Bear and Da Shan. She crawled away from them and out of the room, towards a light waving at her in the distance. To mother, to mother . Zhuli was pulled forward until she reached that room. Two candles were lit and their fire swayed like unsteady feet. She saw Sparrow’s teacup first, and then his hand, and then his arm connected to his shoulder, and so on, until she reached his eyes. He was not surprised to see her.

She wanted to cry but she climbed onto a chair beside him as if waiting to have her fortune read.

Her cousin was doing his homework and she picked up a pencil thinking that she could do something for him. Sparrow got up and gave her a cup of tea. She requested a task and he thought for a moment, then gave her some paper and a list of words which he instructed her to copy. She could not read all of them but reading seemed secondary; Ba had taught her how to copy neatly. All she wanted was the paper and the pencil and something to do. The list of words must have come from Flying Bear’s homework, some kind of vocabulary lesson around the word shū 书 (book). For years, she kept this sheet of paper written in her child’s hand:

Qin shū (a story that is sung), jìn shū (a banned book), tīng shū (to listen to a performance of storytelling), shī shū (the Book of Songs and the Book of History), mò shū (to write from memory), chuán shū gē (carrier pigeon), huǐ guò shū (a written repentance), niǎo chóng shū (bird writing, a style of calligraphy), jiǎn tǎo shū (self-criticism).

After her pencil was dull and her teacup twice emptied, Sparrow lifted her up and returned her to the shared bed. She asked him where the plastic bag had gone away to. He said nothing. She told him that she had wanted to keep the old qin but it was too late. What had they done to it? Had her devotion to the qin caused her parents suffering? Perhaps she was not speaking aloud because he still didn’t answer. I did this, Zhuli thought. How did I do this? Because of me, Old West’s treasures have all been taken away. Her parents came back to her in a rush of images. Was she powerless or powerful? Had Zhuli, herself, opened the door to the demons who barged in? Her parents had been roped together as if they were oxen. Why had her mother wept for pity? How had the men known, Zhuli thought, that she was part girl and part sky, a yāo who had been seduced by wood and strings that were not alive. But the qin was alive, she thought, fighting sleep. She and it were the very same thing.

The next day, Sparrow sat her down in front of the record player and played all the music he could find. Her cousin listened with his eyes closed and Zhuli copied him and did the same. Inside her head, the music built columns and arches, it cleared a space within and without, a new consciousness. So there were worlds buried inside other worlds but first you had to find the opening and the entryway. Sparrow showed her how to remove the record from its paper sleeve, how to set it on the turntable, how to place the needle in its groove. Everything in Big Mother Knife’s house was careful and considered; a world away from the bullying she had recently endured. Everything in Ba Lute’s home made music. Zhuli watched them all playing their instruments, she watched their hands and bodies, she let the music write itself into her memory. She felt, as with the qin, that she had always known this music. That they recognized one another.

There was a small violin that belonged to Flying Bear, which he shunned. One day she sat beside it for several hours and finally, she placed it on her lap like the old qin and tentatively plucked the strings. She did this day after day but her cousin told her: “It’s not a zither and, in any case, you are too young to learn the violin.” She continued for nearly a week and finally Sparrow took the violin from her, lifted Flying Bear’s bow and began to play. It was too small for him, and his body folded around the instrument as if to prevent its voice from escaping. Zhuli recognized that voice, she felt she had known it longer than she had known life. Sparrow became her first violin teacher. Later, when she was eight, he passed her on to Professor Tan at the Conservatory. She accepted every word, gesture and criticism; her teacher was blunt and, during his tantrums, Zhuli feared he would smash her violin on the floor or break it on her head. But it was all drama. Professor Tan recognized that, in each piece that she played, she heard more and more music. But what was music? Every note could only be understood by its relation to those around it. Merged, they made new sounds, new colours, a new resonance or dissonance, a stability or rupture. Inside the pure tone of C was a ladder of rich overtones as well as the echoes of other Cs, like a man wearing many suits of clothes, or a grandmother carrying all her memories inside her. Was this what music was, was it time itself containing fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, and all the ages, all the generations? What was chronology and how did she fit into it? How had her father and mother escaped from time, and how could they ever come back?

When Ma finally returned home after six years in the desert camps, Zhuli wondered what words she could possibly say to her. There were no words adequate to the feeling between them. One night, Zhuli played the opening of Handel’s Xerxes for her mother. It was the simplest of songs, romantic, maybe even deadly with bourgeois sentiment, of course it was no Stravinsky, and yet in the middle of the aria, Zhuli felt as if her arms and her body were disappearing. She felt the only reality was this wire of tension between herself and Ma: it was the one true, unfinished movement of her life. In this room, there was only the act of listening, there was only Swirl, a counting down and a counting up, the beginning that could never be a real beginning. Her mother stared at her as if she did not recognize her daughter.

“Ma,” Zhuli had wanted to say, “it was my fault. I found this opening in the ground….I should have been sent away, not you. But don’t you see how long I waited for you, don’t you see how much I have tried to improve myself. I only exist now, I only…” If she put the violin down, would the real Zhuli, the one they had left behind, appear as surely as night after day? If there was no me, she thought, Great-grandfather West’s container would never have been discovered. Her parents would not have been condemned. These notes would not sound. An insignificant soul like hers could break the world but never remake it. What was the world becoming? Her mother was sickly pale and the hollows in her face reminded Zhuli of the grave itself. One blunt motion and Swirl would fold. And yet, Zhuli thought, we are alive now. I am alive. My mother is alive. It is a new age, a new beginning, and we are here.