Madeleine Thien: Do Not Say We Have Nothing

I closed my eyes and Ai-ming set the notebook aside.

In teahouses and restaurants, Big Mother Knife and her younger sister, Swirl, could sing harmonies so bewitching that problems large and small disappeared beneath the enchantment of their voices. They travelled from town to village, Ai-ming said, performing on makeshift stages, their dark hair bright with flowers or strings of coins. Story cycles like The Water Margin or Wu Song Fights the Tiger could last a hundred chapters, and the old storytellers could spin them out over months, even years. Listeners couldn’t resist; like clockwork they arrived, eager to hear the next instalment. It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.

IN THOSE DAYS, your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese. How easy it was to mistake your brother for a traitor or your beloved for an enemy, to fear that you yourself were born in the wrong moment of history. But in the teahouses, anyone could share a few songs, anyone could lift their wine cup and toast the validity and the continuity of love. “People knew family and kinship were real,” Big Mother said. “They knew regular life had once existed. But no one could tell them why, just like that, and for no good reason at all, everything they cared for was being ground to dust.”

She was eighteen when she named her newborn baby Sparrow, a humble name rarely used for boys. The little sparrow was a bird so common that gods and men, idealists and thieves, Communists and Nationalists, would pass over him in disdain. The peaceful sparrow was weightless because he had no baggage to carry and no messages to deliver.

Throughout his childhood, Sparrow was startled awake in little towns. Teahouse patrons shouted drunkenly beside his mother and aunt, the men thundering like trombones and the women trilling like flutes. By the age of five, he was earning his keep, performing “Song of the Cold Rain” or “In That Remote Place,” ballads so stirring that even those with nothing but dust in their pockets tried to feed him something, a nibble of turnip or a crust of bread, or even a puff from their foot-long tobacco pipes. “Here is the little sand sparrow (or golden wing, or red sparrow or stone sparrow),” the grandmothers would say, “come to peck at our hearts again.”

Once, in the chaos, they passed a troupe of blind musicians in an abandoned village. The troupe walked — hand to elbow, elbow to hand — guided by a sighted girl who was only eight or nine years old. Sparrow asked his mother how the blind musicians, swaying forward like a rope in the dust, could hide themselves when the warplanes came, strafing houses and refugees, trees and rivers. Big Mother answered brutally, “Their days are numbered. Can a single hand cover the sky?” It was true. Year after year, the roads cratered and collapsed, entire towns vanished, crushed into the mud, leaving behind only garbage, dogs and the putrid, sickly sweet smell of bodies numbering in the hundreds, the thousands, and then the millions. And yet the lyrics of ten thousand songs (“You and I are forever separated by a river / my life and thoughts go in two directions…”) crowded out everything in Sparrow’s memory so that, as an adult, he retained very few memories of the war. Only this troupe of blind musicians could not be erased. Once, at the start of the war and then, astonishingly, near the end, they had reappeared with the sighted girl, now a teenager, coming from nowhere, disappearing to nowhere, a ribbon slipping endlessly between the buildings, their instruments humming as they passed. Were they real? Without realizing it, had he, Big Mother and Swirl, like the musicians, found a way to survive by becoming entirely unseen?

It was 1949 and the civil war was staggering to its conclusion. They were in a town by a large river, and outside, the melting ice made a sound like all the bones in China cracking. At one point, between songs, Big Mother’s face appeared, upside down, wide and soft, peering under the table.

She gave him a single pear syrup candy. “This will keep your voice sweet,” she whispered. “Remember what I say: music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, if we faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.”

Sparrow knew what loneliness was. It was his cousin’s small corpse wrapped in a white sheet. It was the man on the sidewalk who was so old he couldn’t run away when the Reds came, it was the boy soldier whose decapitated head sat on the city gates, deforming and softening in the sun.

Waiting, Sparrow perfected his library of songs, singing to himself, “My youth has gone like a departing bird…”

Months later, when Chairman Mao stood atop the gate of Tiananmen Square, shouts of joy erupted through the airwaves. The radio carried the Chairman’s melodic voice into streets and homes, even under the tables where Sparrow felt he had waited forever, and proclaimed a new beginning, a Communist society, and the birth of the People’s Republic of China. The words wrapped like a filament around every chair, wrist and plate, every cart and person, pulling all their lives into a new order. The war was over. His mother dragged him into the open, embraced him so hard he couldn’t breathe, she wept and gave him so many candies his head spun. The very next morning, they took to the roads once more, walking home to Shanghai.

—

After vanishing for years, Sparrow’s father returned a revolutionary hero. Ba Lute was a tower of a man, round as well as tall, with wide hands, thick feet, and startling triangular-shaped eyebrows. A Flying Horse cigarette was forever crushed between his meaty lips. But the soft waves of jet black hair that Big Mother had once described to Sparrow had disappeared; his father’s enormous bald head gleamed like the moon.

On their first meeting, his father plucked Sparrow from the ground and flew him over his head. “I was a book of zero when I joined the Party!” Ba Lute shouted. Sparrow tried not to vomit. He had always been a slight boy, and this slightness now convinced his father that Sparrow was still a little child. “I was a pig’s ear!” his father cried, strangely triumphant. “But our Supreme Party crushed me down and made me new again. I was reborn by the blood of my brothers in the People’s Liberation Army! Long live the Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao Zedong, the Red Sun, the Great Saving Star!”

Held aloft in the air, Sparrow gazed at his father in painful, dizzying devotion.

—

The Party favoured them with a traditional laneway house, not far from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. It was two storeys, with an inner courtyard and spacious side wings, with room enough for five families, yet despite the dire housing shortage, only two other people shared the courtyard: a husband and wife surnamed Ma, who had lost all three sons in the fighting. Together with Ba Lute, they painted the words, “Trust the Party in Everything” on their common brick wall, their feet tapping an intricate rhythm all the while.

Big Mother was the only one who didn’t have the heart for music. Here in her childhood city, she found herself dreaming of her dead parents and her missing brothers, of Swirl’s lost husband and child, fantasizing that they, like Ba Lute, would miraculously appear. She was going blind in one eye (“From looking at you,” she told her husband) and she saw that her youth, those years of catastrophe and flight, of running along a precipice, had come to an end. Gone were the crushing sorrows and terrors, and gone, too, was her independence. She feared she had no idea how to live in peace.