Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

I took everything home. That night, I read through the pages slowly, once, twice, three times. I woke up in the night and reread it. The photographs of my father’s body, the cold detachment of the report and the details of the inquiry opened up emotions I could not stand to feel.

Finally, I put the papers back into the box, and the box under my desk. I went on with my life, returning to the world of numbers. Their possibilities, their language and structure, filled me. They were as beloved, alive and universal as music.

—

Not long after, I met a colleague who was also a professional musician, a violinist. His name was Yasunari, and he became my closest friend. One night, I gave Sparrow’s manuscript to him, confiding its origins. Yasunari said he would arrange everything.

A few weeks later, I went to his apartment. We opened a bottle of wine, toasted the composer, and then I sat on the sofa and listened. I had never heard Sparrow’s music before, but as the violin and piano began, I felt a strange humming, as if I’d heard this music in my childhood. Perhaps it was an echo of Bach’s Sonata No. 4, an echo of that recording of Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin I would later chance upon in Chinatown: it was as if I knew this person, and had always known him. In that piece of music, I imagined I heard three voices — piano, violin and composer — and in their separateness, they carried sorrow, yes, but also…how can I describe it? Inside The Sun Shines on the People’s Square , I heard an unbroken space protecting all three, and also a limitlessness, an ever-expanding room like the desert. All of my unanswerable questions seemed to circle within the notes, at the intersection of piano and violin, between the music and the pauses, the rests. How did a composer live his life unheard? Could music record a time that otherwise left no trace?

I walked home. Lights on the ski hills gleamed faintly behind the clouds, leaving a blue wash in an otherwise darkened sky. I thought about my father, about his love for Sparrow and Zhuli. How many notes are there in Bach’s Goldberg Variations ? In Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony? How many words are each of us granted over the course of a lifetime? That night, I began writing down my memories of Ai-ming. I wrote slowly at first, and then the story quickened. I hoped that writing would allow me, finally, to keep the promise I had made to Ma. I wanted, as Ai-ming did, to move forward, to take a further step.

A few months later, Yasunari asked me to marry him and I did. I was twenty-eight years old, but still far too young and unsettled in myself. Indeed I might go so far as to say that I was hostile to myself; I was, in so many ways, my father’s daughter. I broke Yasunari’s heart when, after only a short time, I abandoned our marriage, and I felt as if I had torn my own future into pieces. My father’s death consumed me, a rift had opened between my thoughts and my emotions, and one day I woke with the sensation that I was falling through that rift and would fall forever. I was drawn to suicide.

Time passed. My emotional life was, as Big Mother Knife would say, as firm as a stack of eggs.

And yet, during this time, my research flourished. Blindly, I followed the first principle of pure mathematics, the hunger for beauty; in number theory we say that beauty exists in the machinery. Unexpectedly, my work on elliptic curves won a French number theory award and the revered journal, Annals of Mathematics , published one of my papers. My name was put forward for a Meadows Prize. I wondered at the absurdity of things. I had no explanation, except perhaps that I fell asleep as one person and woke as another. The surface of my life confounded me. Yet, in the world of numbers, everything felt possible: numbers had no substance and were made entirely of thought.

My mother’s voice returned to me. If you’re trapped in a room and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. Li-ling, you have to climb out by yourself . Month after month, my father’s copy of Sparrow’s sonata sat in a drawer, waiting. I woke one morning unable to deny this truth, that the love I carried for Ba had survived undimmed.

—

In 2010, I travelled, for the first time, to mainland China.

I was attending a number theory conference in Hangzhou, but it was Weibo and QQ, Chinese social media sites, that absorbed me. As many as 700 million Chinese, more than 50 percent of the population, regularly access the internet; until recently, 60 percent of internet users did not use their real names (as of 2013, anonymity became illegal). The Great Firewall, as it is commonly known, routinely deletes 16 percent of all Chinese internet conversations. Looking for Ai-ming in cyberspace was like trying to pluck a needle from the sea, but I saw, too, that the internet was a series of doors: all I had to do was create the door she could open. I began posting scanned copies of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records; I also posted jokes I knew Ai-ming would love. For instance, “The Yoda embedding, contravariant it is.” Or, “Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.” Every post was a letter to the possible.

From Hangzhou I took the train to Shanghai, where I visited the Conservatory. I found nothing on Kai, Zhuli or Sparrow; it was as if they had never been.

That night in Shanghai, I fell asleep to the clamour of radios, a profusion of opera, disco, Beethoven, shouting and speech. When I woke, nothing stirred. It was as if my bed had fallen into outer space. In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ←. Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is “the year above” ↑ and next year is “the year below” ↓. The day before yesterday (前 天) is the day “in front” ↑ and the day after tomorrow (後天) is the day “behind” ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind (後 代). Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around, a mirroring echo of Walter Benjamin’s famous evocation of the angel of history, “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” How we map time, how it becomes lived and three-dimensional to us, how time is bent and elastic and repeated, has informed all my research, proofs and equations.

When I was a child, I would continuously pester Ai-ming. “Don’t stop!” “What happened to Swirl and Big Mother Knife?” Or: “What happened to Zhuli? Don’t let it finish!” She had come into my life at the crux of her own. She was a sister to me; from the beginning we were joined, two halves of the world Sparrow and Kai had left behind. Long after she departed, Ai-ming’s voice tugged away at my thoughts, returning me again and again to the same ever-expanding, ever-contracting piece of music. Could I awake now and cross towards her? Near the end, she seemed almost to forget that I was there and it was as if the story came from the room itself: a conversation overheard, a piece of music still circling the air.

ZHULI WAS IN ROOM 103, following the magisterial Prokofiev up his porcelain staircases, when Kai entered without knocking. She ignored him: Prokofiev required all her concentration. Every measure brought her closer to the disgraced Russian, who had been accused by Stalin of formalism, his major compositions banned; yet in this room, Prokofiev was becoming flesh and blood while Zhuli herself was vanishing. From eighths to sixteenths then three times as fast, the notes chipped into one another, every note had to touch the air, make its singular gesture, and elaborate this unending melody.