Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Come on,” a boy whispered, “don’t be like that,” and the girl who leaned on his shoulder said, “If you like her, just tell me honestly. I’m not old-fashioned. I won’t do something foolish…”

Ai-ming closed her eyes and pretended not to be eavesdropping. People in Beijing were different, she thought. They were surprisingly dignified, they were more subtle yet more hopeful creatures.

Today was Ai-ming’s eighteenth birthday. She had undone her braids, emulating the city girls. Pedalling down the eight-lane thoroughfare of Chang’an Avenue, she had felt its soft heaviness floating behind her. Yesterday, instead of studying, she had altered the line of her best dress, and now the cotton tugged firmly at her breasts and hips, giving her a feeling of heightened containment. In the centre of the Square, she looked up at the ochre sky and thought, “Let me tell you world, I wish to believe.”

Alone, she did not feel lonely at all. It was as if she walked upon some miraculous circuit board that made her more powerful. But later on, at twilight, when she met her parents at the Square’s northern edge and they walked to Ai-ming’s favourite restaurant, Comrade Barbarian, she began to feel as if her lungs were being crushed. Her mother radiated anxiety, or perhaps only regret. After dinner, when Ling paid to have their picture taken in front of Tiananmen Gate, Ai-ming had a sudden image of what they must look like: Sparrow, the factory worker, Ling, the diligent cadre and Ai-ming herself, the good student. They even dressed in the bland, inoffensive colours of a model family.

“Don’t even breathe!” the photographer said. “Hold it, hold it….”

She fixed her gaze on a point behind his right ear, where three slim boys in matching windcheaters stood beneath an enormous banner: “Study Hard and Make Progress Every Day.” She thought to herself, I must make myself fortunate . But what was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside? Since childhood, she had been reading Sparrow’s diary, which her father used to write and submit to his superiors every week. Until 1978, her father had been categorized as a criminal element, but with a diary this dull, there was no way he could be a hooligan. Only now did Ai-ming realize she’d underestimated the Bird of Quiet.

Even Big Mother hadn’t known about the bundle of foreign letters hidden in a Glenn Gould album sleeve. At first, it had been the stamps that drew her to them: such glorious images of Canadian mountains and frozen seas, such thick Western paper. Are you writing? Will you send me your recent compositions? My beloved Sparrow, I think of you constantly . Who was this Jiang Kai and what did she look like? How was it possible that the Bird of Quiet had a secret love?

The photographer’s shutter made a big clap.

“Good,” Sparrow said. “Done!” He turned to Ai-ming. There was a tiny piece of fluff on his factory shirt. She removed it.

Ling counted the coins in her purse and gave them to the photographer. The coins made a clicking like a handful of beans.

Sparrow pointed up to a dragon kite in the air. He didn’t seem to realize she was no longer a little child, and could not be so easily diverted. “How beautiful.”

—

At home, in the tiny room that served as her study, magazines occupied her. Not the candy-coloured women’s magazines that had begun to appear in Beijing kiosks but serious journals such as Let the Natural Sciences Contend . She had an affinity for probability theory and Riemannian symmetric spaces, which she continued to study, neglecting politics and English, which had been her downfall the first time around. One of their neighbours, Lu Yiwen, was a glamorous first-year student at Beijing Normal University. She had given Ai-ming a copy of Miyazaki’s China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examination of Imperial China . It was thick. Yiwen had laughed and said she didn’t need it anymore. Now, Ai-ming glared at her desk and felt the ridiculousness of it all. These high towers of books made a futuristic city around her. She hid inside and dozed off, her dreams intersecting like airplanes in the sky. A voice in her head kept saying, nonsensically, “Yiwen is airy like a cloud.” “The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announces with deep sorrow…” She turned and as she did so, a page of Let the Natural Sciences Contend crumpled under her cheek, she reached out to wipe it off, “—long-tested, loyal Communist fighter, Hu Yaobang, a great proletarian revolutionary—”

Big Mother Knife, she muddily thought, used to mutter “yào bāng” when she scrubbed their only rice pot. The words meant “brilliant country,” and they also happened to be the name of the General-Secretary of the Party. The disgraced, former General-Secretary.

“The utmost efforts were made to rescue him….”

Ai-ming opened her eyes.

“At 7:53 a.m., April 15, 1989, he died at the age of seventy-three.”

Her chair shifted. The scratching of wood against wood seemed to come from her own bones. One shoulder burned with pain and the other felt loose and long. She thought she could hear people weeping. The crying came nearer, it entered with the rain that was dripping down and darkening the concrete walkway outside the door. Today was Saturday, but both her parents were at work. She walked across the room and sprawled out on their bed, too restless to study, and watched the rain for a long time.

—

When Sparrow arrived home from the factory he turned their own radio on straightaway, even though they could hear the neighbours’ radios just fine. He had been caught in the rain and his wet hair looked sad on his forehead. Ai-ming took a towel and rubbed it violently over his head.

“What did you study today?” he asked, muffled.

“Everything. Are we bringing flowers to Tiananmen Square?”

He pushed a corner of towel out of his face. “Flowers?”

“Look, all our neighbours are making them.” She could see into the rooms across the narrow alleyway, and also the rooms adjoining their kitchen, where the Gua family were folding white paper chrysanthemums, the symbol of mourning. “For Comrade Hu Yaobang! He died today, you know.”

“Mmm,” Sparrow said. He was tilted over, trying expel water from his ear. Now his hair was standing straight up and he looked like a porpoise.

She said nonchalantly, “You know, when he was asked which of Chairman Mao’s policies might still be relevant in China, Hu Yaobang said: ‘I think, none.’ ”

“You know better than to repeat such things.”

“If the General-Secretary can say it, why can’t I?”

Her father straightened. “Since when did you become the General-Secretary? And wasn’t he purged?”

On the radio, Red Guards were shouting ridiculous slogans at a disgraced Hu Yaobang. This was the 1960s, before Ai-ming was born, and the frenzied sound clip lasted only a few seconds before moving on to better days. Here he was in the new economic zones, here he was with cadres in the Northwest. After the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four, Comrade Hu worked for the rehabilitation of those who had been wrongly accused….He travelled through 1,500 districts and villages, all the way to remote Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, to see how Partly policies manifested in people’s lives ….

It rained harder. Ai-ming slowly peeled an orange.

In the alleyway, Yiwen walked by wearing a new pink dress, it swayed against her hips as she went, floating against her long pale legs. Ai-ming felt as vulnerable as this naked orange in her hand. They were the same age but she was a child compared to Yiwen, who was an actual university student. Yiwen had a portable cassette player and she was always listening to music as she walked. It was very modern and deeply Western to listen to music that no one else could hear. Private music led to private thoughts. Private thoughts led to private desires, to private fulfillments or private hungers, to a whole private universe away from parents, family and society.