Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

She went into her bedroom and, because it was cold, dressed under the covers, her left foot, and then her right, struggling to find their way through her jeans. She lay in bed with just her jeans on and no other clothes, her hand moving between the bare skin of her stomach and the thickness of the denim. She imagined that all the world existed between these two sensations, nakedness and clothing, softness and roughness, within and without. What would it be like to leave the country entirely? Here, a change in Party policy could abruptly exile you to the deserts. She pulled on a shirt and then a sweater. Her bare skin felt as if it were waiting for something that would never happen. Nothing fit properly, she would have to alter all her clothes and re-cut everything differently. I want to live, she thought, but nobody here knows how.

—

Her father suddenly announced he, too, wanted to go to Tiananmen Square to pay his respects to Hu Yaobang, that it was better to go now because the streets would no longer be crowded. It was as if he had just woken up and realized who had died.

“Okay,” Ai-ming said. “I’ll come with you.”

The Bird of Quiet sat down at once to fold two paper carnations. When he was done, he pinned the first carefully to Ai-ming’s coat and the second to his own.

They put on their shoes, untangled their bicycles and pedalled slowly out of the alleyway. How lanky her father was. Maybe it was unavoidable that a man who did wiring all his life would start to look like a wire himself. The streets outside were not crowded. A few teenagers were sitting on a flower pot at the Muxidi Bridge, none as attractive as Yiwen, whose skin was as pale and fragrant as the flesh of a pear. Ai-ming rode up alongside Sparrow, who began humming Beethoven’s Fifth, as if to amuse her.

“Ba, let me fix your haircut.”

He smiled, coasting. “Old Bi told me this haircut would make me look young.”

“It’s a bit crooked, that’s all.” All warfare is based on deception, she thought, and depends on the element of surprise. “Anyway, what if I applied to universities in Canada?”

She noticed no alteration in his pace, only a slight tipping of his bicycle towards the sidewalk which he immediately corrected. She pressed on. “Yiwen said that almost everyone she knows at Beijing Normal has sent out applications to America. Canada is less expensive though. Imagine if I won a scholarship! You could come with me. Because…I wouldn’t want to go alone.” Her recklessness seemed to come from the streets themselves. This is what happens when politicians die all of a sudden, she thought. It’s like a table leg collapsing and things go sliding off.

“Everyone says it’s very cold in Canada,” Sparrow said. He sped forward. “And isn’t your worst subject English?”

“Your daughter can be good at anything if only she applies herself.”

Sparrow had no ready answer for that. Fortunately for him, the road suddenly got crowded. He detoured south, into the smaller alleyways inside the Second Ring Road. Turning a corner, he nearly collided with a line of city workers sweeping the street, but they kept on working as if he had never existed and never would. Some of them looked fifty years older than Big Mother Knife.

“Ai-ming,” he said when she caught up to him again. “First it was Beijing. And now it’s Canada. Once we get to Canada, maybe it will be the moon.”

“Others have done it. Even the moon.”

“I used to imagine I would go to the West, too, and that I would bring my family with me.”

She waited for him to continue, but her father’s thought remained a half-thought. The street was bottling up, but still he pedalled headlong into the mourners, pushing between people like a dumpling between noodles. The sky was so white, as if all colours had been sheared away, there were paper flowers in the trees and on the ground, on the coats of everyone around them, and the air smelled not of dust but of a rich and mouth-watering broth. Along the road, families were sitting down to lunch. Faced with this immovable congestion, Sparrow finally dismounted and they began walking, conspicuously, against the flow of the crowd. She and her father were completely out of tune with the moment. Ai-ming walked with her head down; the grey propriety of Beijing, the ochre goodness of it, belonged to people who knew when to arrive for funerals and what time to eat lunch.

She became aware of a new crowd approaching. They were chanting and at first she couldn’t make out the words, the loudspeaker they used was weak and tinny. Eventually she saw two young men, each wearing a red armband, carrying a banner that read, “We are young. Our country needs us.” The two were unusually tall, and their banner swayed high into the air. Behind them, the students were sweating, their formal clothes had come untucked, some looked like they had been fighting. And they were crying. Their devotion to Hu Yaobang was sincere, Ai-ming thought suddenly, while hers had always been impersonal.

“Do we love our country?”

“Yes!”

“Are we willing to sacrifice our future for the Chinese people?”

“Yes!”

“Did we do anything wrong?”

Sobbing, “No! No!”

They were passing now, linked to one another, like paper dolls.

The lunching families looked up from their tables. Some got to their feet. Sparrow, too, had stopped walking and was staring at the student procession. What’s happened, what’s happened , the words rebounded from person to person. A boy disengaged himself from the long line and was immediately surrounded. He said that student representatives from the universities had tried to present a petition to the government. Three young men had knelt on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, and had remained on their knees for forty-five minutes while all around them the students and Beijing citizens had yelled at them to stand up, to stop kneeling. Yet they had remained, holding the petition up in the air as if they were children before their father, or slaves before an emperor. But no representative from the government had come out. Lines of police, twenty men deep, had stood between the crowd and the Great Hall. Last night, 100,000 university students had walked to Tiananmen Square and slept there overnight, so that when the Square was closed off in the morning, they would already be inside. “We only wanted to pay our respects to Hu Yaobang, just as those before us have always paid their respects in times of mourning.” Even the police had called for the students to stand up. “They asked us why we had to address the government on our knees, but nobody could answer.” Officials had stared at them from inside the glass doors and only one, a professor from Beida, had finally come out and tried to pull the young men up.

“But there was no violence,” the boy said. “There was no violence. The police agreed with us. Some of them were weeping, too. We’re all brothers.”

He looked stunned. He turned away and rejoined the procession, buckling himself back into the connected arms.

“Boycott classes!”

“We must have the courage to stand up!”

A placard floated by, “According to the Chinese Constitution, Article 35, the citizens have the right to free speech and assembly.” Applause rippled down the avenue. Dust had gotten into Ai-ming’s eyes, she tried to rub it out but the rubbing only made it worse. The students looked crushed, their paper flowers were flattened against their chests. In fact, she thought, they looked as if they had come from another country, even though they had only come from a few blocks away. In her distraction, the bicycle slipped from her hands and smacked hard against someone’s knee. She dropped her head and began to apologize, expecting someone to call her an idiot country fool, but instead the bicycle righted itself and floated back into her hands. “Good for you students,” a woman said. Her voice was scratchy, she was rubbing her knee. “You’re braver than we were. Much braver. When my generation gathered in Tiananmen Square, it was a different world.” Ai-ming looked up, but either the woman had melted away or Ai-ming couldn’t affix the voice to the face. All around her, older people were looking at her as if she had given them lucky money. She could not see properly. She felt as if the sidewalks, the tables and chairs were all shifting, but she was frozen. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Everything flowed before her, the crowd grew denser and then it slowly loosened. It was not until they had nearly reached the Square that she could feel her own weight again, her two legs, the solidity of the bicycle.