Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Who am I at the base of things?”

“Do I have the ability to change?”

Say all you know , the Chairman had written, and say it without reserve.

“But there is more and more that I question! I’m afraid to hear what I think. I know that the Party is right in all things. I say it is right but even the simplest truths don’t seem like truths at all.”

We can learn what we did not know. We are not only good at destroying the old world, we are also good at building the new .

“What if the new is nothing but a virus of the same sickness? And what about devotion, what about duty and filial love? Must everything that is old be contemptible? Weren’t we also something before?”

Why are you defending a musical culture that is not your own?

She pinched her hands and the pain shot all the way to her neck. “Enough of these thoughts! They’re all useless because at the base somewhere I know what the Party says is right. Only I’m so selfish, so selfish…”

She heard scuffling nearby. Zhuli stood. A low moaning was coming from the cellars in the basement. Had someone been down there this entire time? Her body began to tremble. No, she told herself, her mind was troubled, she’d hardly slept. Still, she heard someone moaning in pain. Room 103 struck her, for the first time, as an echo of the underground library. Zhuli left the room, rushed up the stairs and out into the warm air. It was still early, still dark outside, as if the counting of time had paused and was only now being restarted again.

She had the family’s oil and grain coupons in her pocket and she walked in a daze, her hand over the opening, hiding them and protecting them. Since Big Mother and Swirl’s departure, it had been her responsibility to pick up the rations.

The queue for oil had already reached Julu Road. When she saw how long the line would take, her distraction turned into guilt. She should have come here first thing. It had been a mistake to go to the Conservatory, she had known better and yet, once again, she had followed stupidity and selfishness. She took her place at the end of the line, behind a girl who wore nothing on her feet and whose eyes were squeezed shut. The cut of her hair was as blunt as an anvil. Nobody spoke. Every building was shrouded in red banners. A broken chair lay in the road beside a length of rope caked in what looked like ink. Three phrases swung together in her thoughts: Party-mindedness, people-mindedness, ideological content. It is my thinking, Zhuli thought. Everything correct becomes something poisoned. If only I could quiet my thoughts. She felt as if she hadn’t closed her eyes in days.

Distribution wouldn’t begin for another hour. Perhaps, if she was lucky, she would reach the front of the line by noon. If they ran out of oil, she would come again the next day. She would give in, she would forget the Conservatory and walk away. A weight lifted from her shoulders at this thought. “Yes,” she said, startling the girl beside her. She was addressing these thoughts to Kai, but the thoughts no longer seemed like hers. “There is always tomorrow and the day after and the day after. It is not too late to reform and grow.”

Around her, people, buildings, objects all appeared disproportionately large, not only their substance but their shadows too. Had there ever been such a light-filled July? She saw now that she was standing beside a wall covered in posters. “Denounce the…” “Destroy the…” “Rise up and…eradicate…shame.” The words, written in colossal characters of red ink, buzzed in her thoughts. “Bombard the headquarters!” It sounded like a game that Flying Bear and Da Shan had invented. How odd it must feel to write violent words in such orderly calligraphy. Zhuli shook the thought away. Dissonance required as precise a technique as beauty. In her mind, Prokofiev’s libretto kept repeating: The philosophers have tried in different ways to explain the world; the point is to change it . Prokofiev quoted Marx, the Red Guards quoted Chairman Mao, everyone shouted borrowed ideas, her classmates memorized the Chairman’s slogans and adopted his poetry as their own. So we are not so different from one another after all, Zhuli thought, except that I speak in the language of Bach and the musical ideas of Prokofiev but still, none of us knows the true nature of our voices, no matter the cause, none of us speaks with our own words. At the core, is there only desire but no justice? All we’ve learned since the fall of the old dynasties is how to amplify the noise.

This noise was splitting inside her now. She heard Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3 , as if from the air itself. Her own voice wept, “There is always tomorrow and the day after. It must not be too late.”

The line nudged forward.

—

Zhuli had nearly reached the head of the line. Each time she saw another person leaving, their full quota of rations in their exultant hands, she felt increasingly giddy. She allowed herself to count the people in front of her. Eighteen. It was midday, the shade had long retreated and, in the glare, the buildings were dissolving into watery reflections. She stepped to the side and peered ahead. Seventeen. The pavement had a dulled to grainy whiteness. There was a growing disturbance behind but Zhuli, focused only on obtaining the rations, didn’t turn. Voices chafed, followed by a woman’s fearful answer, a sagging E minor tone. She was easily drowned out by taunts. Still, Zhuli wouldn’t turn. Ahead of her the queue had begun to shift and in her exhausted thoughts, she saw the line as if from above, a millipede straining its tiny head forward. Zhuli was up against the barefoot girl in front of her, and when the girl turned, Zhuli turned as well, as if they were joined. She saw a woman being pulled from the lineup. The woman was her mother’s age. A Red Guard, a tall, spindly girl, was pushing down on the back of the woman’s neck as if the woman were an ox.

The woman was wearing a pale blouse and a navy skirt that fell below her knees. It must be her clothing, Zhuli thought dully, that had attracted the fury of the Red Guards. “Comrades, look at this trash!” the tall girl shouted, dragging the woman along the line. The girl was yelling so loudly her pink mouth seemed to swallow her face. Zhuli fought the urge to giggle, to dissolve in skittishness, to turn away and hide her shock, but just at that moment the girl pushed the woman straight towards her. “Slap her insolent face!” the girl screamed. Zhuli froze. “Slap her!” the girl shouted. Someone next to Zhuli reached out and gave the woman a stinging slap. The sound, or was it the echo, was soft and drawn out. The woman’s face was hidden by her dark hair which had come loose from its elastic, and then her head was yanked back and Zhuli saw blood on the woman’s mouth, both full and delicate. The woman, she thought dully, was being punished because of the desire, the degeneracy, inside her. “You, Comrade!” the girl cried. Zhuli lifted her eyes. “Teach this whore a lesson!” Someone very near, a man, was speaking in her ear, “Go ahead, don’t be afraid. We all have lessons to learn, don’t hesitate!” The woman was so close to Zhuli she could see the trembling of her eyelids and new droplets of blood starting to form. The girl was screaming words that made no sense. “Where have I put the ration coupons?” Zhuli thought, perplexed. “Has the line moved? I don’t want to lose my place. I’ve been waiting such a very, very long time.” She lifted her right hand but nothing happened. “Go on,” the man urged. Softly, so softly: “What’s wrong? Don’t hesitate!” More and more people pressed towards them. The woman was suddenly yanked away. Zhuli’s hand remained open, as if she was waiting to catch something in the air. “Little capitalist spy,” the girl was saying. “Stinking whore!” The line was running forward. Someone appeared in the corner of her eye with an unthinkably large bag of flour. Young people were ransacking the distribution warehouse, even pulling out the workers. Zhuli closed her eyes. “Unmask them!” “Bourgeois rats!” “Drag them out!” The shouting had a merry, dancing quality, a French pierrot two-step. “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” From where had this crowd appeared? She heard a rupture like a plane coming down to land, but it was only this electrified, heaving mass of people. Time was slipping away. Soon it would be too late.