Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Had he been dishonest, Sparrow wondered. To whom had been dishonest? Hadn’t he said what needed to be said?

“Forgive me for speaking so directly, Ba. Only…you raised me to think my own thoughts, even if I couldn’t say them aloud, isn’t that so? I think the time has come to say, sincerely, what I feel.”

The brutality of children never ceased to surprise him.

He had to stop and rest. His heart was beating strangely and his hands felt full of paper cuts, even though there was no visible injury. Ai-ming caught hold of his arm. She looked suddenly alarmed and he wanted to smooth the terror from her face. Big Mother Knife and Aunt Swirl used to trace their fingers over his forehead, his eyebrows; when he was a child, it would help him fall asleep. But that was almost fifty years ago, when Shanghai was occupied. How funny, Sparrow thought, to think that he had been a child of a former world. When had he ceased to be that person? Ai-ming pulled him to a sidewalk bench and then she ran to fill her tea thermos. She also came back with fish balls on a stick. They looked so unappealing his mouth twisted in disgust. Relieved, Ai-ming laughed. He drank the tea and she ate the fish balls, savouring their saltiness as only a young person can. He fought the urge to put his arm around her. Did he want to hold on to her to keep her safe, he wondered, or just to keep himself from being lonely? Ai-ming was eighteen years old and she was ready to find a new beginning, entirely different from his own. This realization shocked him: Ai-ming was still so young, and already she had judged him.

—

Over the weekend, the Square came into Sparrow’s thoughts like a continuous sound. He had heard from his co-workers that hundreds of thousands of people continued to gather there, they were writing public messages, using Hu Yaobang’s funeral as a pretext to mourn others, those who’d never been given a proper burial.

On Tuesday, when Sparrow arrived home from work, Ai-ming and Ling were engrossed by the apricots they were eating and barely noticed him. He changed out of his factory clothes. The previous night, while his wife and daughter slept, he’d written a wall poster to bring to the Square. Now he tucked the narrow roll of paper into his coat.

By the time Sparrow reached Tiananmen Square, it was twilight; thousands of others like him had come to feel the breeze of the open air. Walking across the Square’s infinite greyness, he felt as if he had been exiled to some distant moon. The memorial to Hu Yaobang remained, more flowers had arrived and more posters. In 1976, after Premier Zhou Enlai died, similar events had taken place. Beijingers had come to the Square and mourned openly, provocatively; his death had allowed people to demonstrate loyalty to the disappeared, to people like Zhuli. The government must know that allegiance to the dead was a stubborn loyalty that no policy could eradicate.

He took the poster from his coat. Nearby two girls were mixing glue, and he asked for their assistance. “No problem, grandfather!” one said. She had a Shanghai accent. “I’ll stick that up for you.” She read over his poster, nodded with a kind of bureaucratic approval, and pasted it up in a prominent position. Sparrow had copied a quote from the scholar Kang Youwei, whose treatises he had read in Kai’s room, with the Professor, San Li, Ling and the Old Cat, and still remembered: “And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered help to them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.”

The contours of Hu Yaobang’s portrait were disappearing bit by bit. In the openness of the Square, he allowed himself, for the first time in many years, to remember. Zhuli was in Room 103 playing Prokofiev. His Symphony No. 3 had been finished in his head a thousand times, but he couldn’t hear the ending. Perhaps the places in ourselves that appear empty have only been dormant, unreachable.

Zhuli, he thought. I’m sorry that I came too late. Of course he knew that she had forgiven him long ago, so why did he hold on to this guilt? What was the thing he was most afraid of?

—

The next afternoon, Sparrow gazed once more into the chassis of the Model 3812 radio. At the next work station, Old Bi and Miss Lu were arguing over the ongoing demonstrations, which had spread to a boycott of classes at thirty-nine universities by sixty thousand students. Despite the fact that university students were now banned from factory grounds, someone had managed to smuggle pamphlets into the cafeteria, “Ten Polite Questions for the Chinese Communist Party.”

Bi’s foot kept kicking the table leg to punctuate his words, which seemed to be directed at no one. “Donkeys, donkeys, donkeys!”

“Just last month, fifty people here got reprioritized,” Miss Lu said placidly. “They’ve no jobs and no rations. Modernization stinks.”

“But we need to be practical.” Bi made a triple kick. “We don’t need a million kids in the Square. We need a few smart bosses who know how to run the shop.”

The young woman beside Sparrow shouted, “Fuck this wire! These new 1432s are shit.” Her name was Fan and she was hot-tempered. “Old Bi, if you kick the table one more time, I’m going to stab both your eyes.”

“Give it to me,” Sparrow said. He took the chassis, realigned a crooked filter capacitor, connected it straight to the chassis, soldered it with his hot iron, checked the circuit ground and the alignment, and handed it back. It made him think of an electrified violin.

“Comrade Sparrow has the fingers of a little girl,” Dao-ren joked.

Radio Beijing was playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major . Ever since the announcement of Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May, they had been bombarded by Tchaikovsky and Alexander Glazunov.

“The fact is,” Fan said, pointing her soldering gun at Old Bi, “these Beijing kids took one look at our lives and decided it wasn’t for them. I thought I would study at Fudan University and become a doctor, but look where I am now, not that you comrades aren’t a daily joy to be with! I didn’t see my parents or my siblings for fifteen years! I know for a fact that Comrade Sparrow here hasn’t seen his brothers since they were kids! These days, if you curse the wrong person, you might as well shoot yourself! My sister’s kid complained about his corrupt boss. Poor little shit was re-prioritized and hasn’t been assigned a job for three years! He’s going to the Square every day now!”

Sparrow pivoted the chassis and began working at it from the opposite corner.

As the others argued, Tchaikovsky’s triplet configurations and double stops rained from the speakers like the beating of a thousand wings. When at last the shift ended and they all shuffled towards the exit, Sparrow felt as if a century had passed. On the way home, he nearly fell asleep on the crowded tram, pinned between the window and someone’s dried beans. His fingers were completely numb. When he finally tumbled out at Beijing West Railway Station, a large crowd was jostling in front of the post office. Lunch tins cracked against his elbows. Sparrow tried to push his way through but was impeded by the cart of a candy maker. If we let this turmoil go unchecked, a China with a bright future will become a chaotic China with no future . Loudspeakers were broadcasting the seven-o’clock news, which meant he had gotten home later than normal. “These children are creating political turmoil?” people around him were muttering. “Counter-revolutionaries? Is that the verdict?” The broadcast continued: Under no circumstances should the formation of any illegal organizations be allowed . He would have to…pain sparked along his arms, as if strings had been tied around his fingers and slowly tightened. Wasn’t this what Red Guards had done to…he couldn’t think. The bystanders around him were staring malevolently at the speakers. “Are they kidding?” someone asked. “Do they plan on using tanks on a bunch of math students?” Uneasy shifting. “This is turmoil? This is like the Cultural Revolution? I’ve seen more political turmoil in my soup pot.”