Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Sparrow, too, was quiet. He had lost his paper flower and his coat looked naked. His bicycle creaked. She unfastened her own flower, pulled him to a stop, and pinned it to him. Behind him, the last remnants of the student procession turned right, north towards the university district. What world had they come from and to what world were they returning?

“Ai-ming, what are you thinking?”

What had the Square looked like this morning when the sun rose on a hundred thousand youth curled together on the concrete? She felt embarrassed because, in response to her father’s question, she, a young scholar, could only think of Yiwen’s favourite song, It’s not that I don’t understand. It’s that things are changing so fast .

Sparrow rephrased. “What were these students thinking?”

They had entered the Square now. The phalanxes of police remained, guarding the Great Hall of the People, even though it was probably empty. The day was quickly getting on. A conscientious few students were meticulously picking up garbage, but they left the paper flowers, which tumbled like pollen whenever a breeze came. The oversized Hu Yaobang gazed sorrowfully down from the Monument.

“I came here when I was a small child,” Sparrow said. “Big Mother brought me. She told me the Square is a microcosm of the human body. The head, the heart, the lungs…She told me not to get lost.”

“Did you get lost?” Ai-ming asked.

“Of course. The space is so large. It takes more than a million people to fill it. Even in 1966, the Red Guards couldn’t do it.”

“Ba,” Ai-ming said. “I want to go abroad.” There was some part of her that remained untapped, she thought, that would never come to life unless it was given space.

“A person needs money to go abroad. Your mother and I don’t have that kind of money.”

“The ones without money try to find outside sponsorship.”

Sparrow was quiet.

The Art of War , Ai-ming thought, ashamed. Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business. “If you know someone in Canada who could sponsor me, I could go.”

Her father looked at her as if from a great distance. Had she been too direct? Was it obvious she had invaded his privacy?

“Yiwen told me,” she said hurriedly, baldly lying. “She said she has an uncle in America. That’s why she applied to go overseas. I thought we might know someone.”

“But why would I know anyone in Canada?” Ba said. His voice was piercingly gentle, cutting her like a toothpick.

“I don’t know….you must know musicians who went away,” she said wretchedly. “With my grades. If I studied hard, I could…”

“Beida is a the best university in the country. Your mother and I don’t want you to study in Canada, it’s so far away.”

“But you could come with me!”

Sparrow shook his head, but not in a way that said no.

She said, “Once you told me that when you were young, you wanted to go abroad. To write your music. To hear other influences. Why is it too late? Ba, you’ve been working in the factory for twenty years and this is a long time in a person’s life. I think…I have a sense that things are changing. The whole point of Hu Yaobang’s reforms was to give opportunities to people like you, people who were unfairly treated.”

“Is that what you think, Ai-ming, that I was unfairly treated?” He touched the flower she had pinned to his coat, as if he had just noticed it.

She wanted to curl up into a ball. Even though her intent was good, the directness of her words made her feel as if she was poking him repeatedly with a sharpened stick.

After a moment, Sparrow said, “And what about your mother?”

“Ma lived nearly twenty years away from us. What difference would it make to her?”

“She lived far away because the government assigns our jobs and our housing.”

“But why? Why can’t we choose for ourselves?” Across from them, in the emptiness of the Square, there were posters asking this very same question. She was not alone in her thinking, she had nothing to fear. Ba doesn’t even know how afraid he is, she thought. His generation has gotten so used to it, they don’t even know that fear is the primary emotion they feel.

“I chose my life, Ai-ming,” he said. “I chose the life that I could live with. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way from the outside.”

She wondered if he believed his own words. She said, “I know, Ba.”

They stood together in the Square where funeral wreaths softened the emptiness. The architecture was intended to make a person feel insignificant, but Ai-ming felt confusingly large, there was so much room here, a child could run in any pattern, make any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.

“I want to know what it’s like in a young country with lots of space,” she said. “If you say something out loud, you hear your own voice differently.”

Sparrow nodded.

She said, “Canada.”

—

In Sparrow’s mind, lines of Chairman Mao came back unbidden.

We had much to do

and quickly.

The sky-earth spins

and time is short.

Ten thousand years is long

and so a morning and an evening count.

Near to them, in front of the Great Hall of the People, the first line of police, too, seemed to be melting. It could be, Sparrow thought, that a person does not even know that they have gone quiet. Qù could be a substance that begins as a strength and transmutes, imperceptibly, into loss.

They had reached the southern edge of the Square.

Now Ai-ming asked him, “Why did the students kneel down?”

“I imagine…they wanted to show respect. They followed the ways in which petitioners have always approached the government.”

“But why did no government official come out?”

“Because…even though they were kneeling, if a member of the government had come and addressed their demands, the students would have been in a position of power.”

The sun was luminous but the wind was cold. His daughter hugged herself tightly. Paper flowers jumbled over the ground, paper carnations grew from the trees, though some had fallen and been mashed by the everlasting stream of bicycles. He heard their tinkling bells and also a music in his head, shaken loose, the Twelfth Goldberg Variation , two voices engaged in a slightly out-of-breath canon, like a knot that never got tied. He could still write music. The thought jolted him. It might be possible to procure a piano, he could visit the Central Conservatory and ask for the use of a practice room. But then Sparrow had an image of himself, waiting beneath their turning fans, and smiled to think of himself appearing in his Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 uniform and his blue worker’s cap. The absurdity of it made a deep impression. His age struck him forcefully, as if some blindfold had momentarily loosened and allowed him to see things as they were.

He wanted to take Ai-ming’s hand. Sometimes, when Ai-ming bruised her knee on the table or suffered some psychological melancholy, it seemed to lodge inside him as well. Where did the line between parent and child exist? He’d always tried to refrain from pushing her in one direction or the other, ever fearful he might drive her towards the Party, but what if his silence had let her down or failed her in some crucial way? But maybe, he thought, a parent should always have failings, some place into which a child can sink her teeth, because only then can a child come to know herself. He thought about those young students kneeling with their petition. Eventually, they would be arrested. It was inevitable.

“What happened to all that music, Ba? What if…I wish you’d been able to get away, to the West or some other place. I think, if it weren’t for me, maybe you would have tried to live a more honest life.”