Madeleine Thien: Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Ai-ming did something I had not seen her do since her arrival more than a month ago. Not only did she weep, but she was too overcome to turn away or cover her face. The sound disturbed me so much, a low keening that dismantled everything. I thought she was saying, “Help me, help me.” I was terrified that if I touched her, her pain would swell inside my body and become my own forever. I couldn’t bear it. I turned away from her. I went into my bedroom and closed the door.

—

The room felt very small. Family , I whispered to myself, was a precious box that could not open and close at will, just because Ma said so. Ba’s picture on my dresser hurt me so much. No, it wasn’t the picture of him, but the feeling it caused, this chafing emotion that turned everything, even my love for Ma and Ai-ming, bitter. I wanted to throw the picture on the floor but I was afraid that it was real, that it contained my father himself, and if I damaged it, he would never be able to come home. The rain outside hammered against my thoughts. Down the windowpane, it changed and slipped, and all those rivulets of water, growing large and small, joining and shivering, began to confuse and mesmerize me. Was I as insignificant as that? Would I ever change anything? I suddenly remembered the scent of my father, a sweetness like new leaves or freshly mown grass, the smell of his soap. His voice with its oddly formal syntax, “What does daughter wish to say to Father? Why is daughter crying?” His voice like no voice that had ever lived.

I remembered, against my will, how I’d overheard Ma saying that when Ba was found, he’d had almost no belongings. She’d been speaking on the telephone, long distance, to a friend in Hong Kong. She said that the suitcase, full when he left, was empty. He’d gotten rid of everything, including his wedding ring, his Sony portable CD player and his music. He hadn’t even been carrying a photograph of us. The only note he left was not a goodbye. All it said was that there were debts he couldn’t pay, failures he couldn’t live with, and that he wished to be buried in Hong Kong, at the Chinese border. He said that he loved us.

Once each year, my father used to take us to the symphony. We never had good seats but Ba said it didn’t matter, the point was to be there, to exist in the room while music, however old it might be, was being renewed. Life was full of obstacles, my father used to tell me, and no one could be sure that tomorrow or next year, anything would remain the same. He told me that, when he was a young boy, his adoptive father, the Professor, had gone with him to the symphony in Shanghai and that the experience had changed him forever. Inside him, walls that he had never realized existed suddenly revealed themselves. “I knew I was destined to have a different kind of life,” he said. Once he became aware of these walls, all he could think about was how to pull them down.

“What walls?” I had asked.

“Mìng,” he said. “Fate.” It was only later, when I looked up the word again, that I saw that mìng 命 meant fate but it also meant life.

The knock on the door brought me back to the rain, to the room and myself.

—

“Ma-li,” Ai-ming began, sitting at the foot of my bed. She had turned the desk lamp on, and she looked like a pale shadow I had cast. “I shouldn’t have read your father’s diaries. This is what I wanted to tell you. I’m truly sorry, Ma-li. Please forgive me.”

The quiet intensified. I was sitting as far away from her as I could, on top of my pillows.

Ai-ming whispered, “I am truly a very fearful person.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“That your mother will ask me to leave. I can’t survive by myself again. I know I can’t.”

Shame welled up in me. Her words reminded me, somehow, of Ba. “You’re family, Ma said so.”

“It’s just, Ma-li, our lives are confused. And there is this…heartbreak between your family and mine.”

I nodded as if I understood.

Ai-ming continued, “My father loved music, like yours. He used to teach at the Shanghai Conservatory, but that was before I was born.”

“What did he do afterwards?”

“He worked in factories for twenty years. First, he built wooden crates and, later on, he built radios.”

“I don’t understand. Why would he do that if loved music?” The rain was falling so hard it was hitting the window like flecks of silver. Without warning, I pictured Ma waiting at the bus stop, her coat sticking to her, the wind and the wet chilling her bones.

“I met your father,” Ai-ming said, evading my question. “When I was a little girl, Jiang Kai came to my village. My father was very happy to see him after so many years. It was 1977 and Chairman Mao had died and it was the beginning of a new era. Many things were changing but, even so, my father was careful about showing his emotions. But I saw how much Jiang Kai’s visit meant to him, and that’s why I’ve always remembered it. And then, after my father died, Jiang Kai called us. Your Ba was in Hong Kong. I spoke to him on the telephone.”

“Ai-ming, I don’t want you to talk about my Ba. I never, never want to hear his name.”

“Mmmm,” she said. She put her hands inside her coat pocket and immediately took them out again.

“Why are you always so cold!?” I asked, confused.

She clapped her hands together to warm them. “I left Beijing in winter and I think the cold got stuck in my bones because I can’t get warm anymore. My mother and my grandmother helped me leave China. They were afraid because…I couldn’t pretend. I couldn’t go on as if nothing had changed.” Ai-ming burrowed further inside her coat. She looked terribly young and alone.

“You miss your mother a lot, don’t you?”

Ai-ming nodded.

Something clicked in my mind. I clambered off the bed and went out. The notebook with her father’s writing, the Book of Records, was easy to find. I picked it up, knowing it would please her. But when I offered the notebook to Ai-ming, she ignored me.

I tried again. “Ma told me it’s a great adventure, that someone goes to America and someone else goes to the desert. She said the person who made this copy is a master calligrapher.”

Ai-ming emerged from coat. “It’s true my father had excellent handwriting, but he wasn’t a master calligrapher. And anyway, no matter how beautiful the Book of Records is, it’s only a book. It isn’t real.”

“That’s okay. If you read it to me, I can improve my Chinese. That’s real.”

She smiled. After a few moments of turning pages, she returned the notebook to the bedcover, which had become a kind of neutral ground between us. “It’s not a good idea,” she said. “This is Chapter 17. It’s useless to start halfway, especially if this is the only chapter you have.”

“You can summarize the first sixteen chapters. I’m sure you know them.”

“Impossible!” But she was laughing. “This is how I used to badger my grandmother into doing things she had no intention of doing.”

“Did your grandmother give in?”

“Occasionally.”

I pulled the blanket around me as if the question was settled.

“Before you feel too comfortable,” Ai-ming said, “I should tell you that my grandmother was known to everyone as Big Mother Knife.”

“That’s not a real name!”

“In this story, every name is true.” She tilted her head mischievously. “Or should I be saying Girl? Or Ma-li? Or Li-ling? Which one is your real name?”

“They’re all real.” But even as I said the words, I doubted and wondered, and feared that each name took up so much space, and might even be its own person, that I myself would eventually disappear.

Perplexed, I curled up into the empty space between us. Ai-ming was still turning the pages of the notebook. I asked what Big Mother Knife looked like. Ai-ming stroked my hair and thought for a moment. She said that everything about Big Mother was both big and small: long eyebrows over slender eyes, a small nose and big cheeks, shoulders like hilltops. From the time Big Mother Knife was a little girl, she had curled her hair; by the time she was old, the curls were so fine and thin they seemed made of air. Big Mother had a jackdaw laugh, a terrible temper, and a shouting voice, and even when she was a small child, nobody dared to treat her lightly.