Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Army trucks, stretching as far as she could see.

Ai-ming walked towards them. Tears, confusion, hysteria. The military trucks were surrounded by people. “Brother soldiers!” an old man was shouting. He lurched in front of Ai-ming. His blue factory uniform sagged around him like a riverbed. “Do not become the shame of our nation! You are the sons of China. You, who should be defending these students with your lives! How can you enter our city with guns and bullets? Where is your conscience?”

A few officers tried to make themselves heard above the commotion, they said their only mission was to keep the peace. Everyone was hysterical and calling out.

An ancient grandmother had taken it upon herself to lie down in the road, in front of the trucks. “Who are you retaking the streets from, eh?” she said hoarsely. “I’m no rebel! I was living here when your great-grandfather still wore short pants!”

A man in a factory uniform, carrying dozens of individually wrapped cakes, began dropping them, indiscriminately, over the railings of the trucks. “My daughter is in the Square,” he said. “My only child. I appeal to your courage! I appeal, I appeal…”

Ai-ming could not see Yiwen anywhere, it was a thousand times more crowded here than it had been at Tiananmen Square. She hugged the bag of clothes to her chest and stood in the mayhem, hungry, thirsty, shivering with fear, ashamed at having disobeyed her father. A soldier her age stared at her with palpable longing. How did I end up here? Ai-ming thought. This is my country, this is the capital, but I don’t belong in Beijing. Where is Yiwen? If I only I could find Yiwen, I would know what to do.

The afternoon was disappearing but the crowds only grew larger. Some soldiers climbed out of their vehicles and stood in the road, humiliated. Some were in shock, some looked angry, some wept.

—

On the fifth floor of the factory, all the seats were empty. Sparrow sat at his work station, basking in the absolute stillness. This was the first peace he had known in days, and the quiet inside him now felt freed, it sat on the table, uncaged, like a house bird. Despite the emptiness, he felt as if his co-workers had left an afterimage: every work station belonged unassailably to someone. Perhaps, in a moment, Dao-ren, Old Bi and Fan would reappear, and it would be Sparrow himself who would dissolve, as if he had always been the illusion. The freedom of departure comforted him, and he put his head down on his arms and fell into a sound, peaceful sleep.

—

It was nearly ten at night by the time Ai-ming found Yiwen, huddled with two other girls. One was called Lily and one was called Faye. The girls were draped over one another and looked like a single body with three heads. Yiwen’s father had told her that, until she quit the student demonstrations, she was no longer welcome at home. She had been sleeping in Faye’s dormitory room.

After learning that all three had been part of the hunger strike, which had officially been called off this afternoon, Ai-ming coaxed them to a nearby noodle stall.

The vendor was a sleepy-eyed woman with a thick northeastern accent. “Take your money back,” she said to Ai-ming, after the other girls had floated away to a table. “No, no, I mean it. I’ve got nothing to offer you kids but these noodles. They’re good noodles but they won’t change the world.”

Embarrassed, Ai-ming thanked her.

“So, what do you study?” the vendor asked.

Ai-ming looked into the woman’s puckered, hopeful face. “Um, Chinese history.”

The woman pulled her head back like a bird. “What’s the use of that? Well, at least you know that my generation was tossed around by Chairman Mao’s campaigns. Our lives were completely wasted…We’ve pinned all our hopes on you.”

“The other girls study mathematics,” Ai-ming said, trying again.

“That’s what we need!” the vendor said, smacking her chopsticks against the metal pot. “Real numbers. Without real numbers, how can we fix our economy, make plans, understand what we need? Young lady, I don’t mean to be rude but you should really think about studying mathematics, too.”

“I will.”

She carried the noodles to their table. There was something wary in the girls’ eyes, but they softened when they saw the food.

“What will you do now?” Ai-ming asked.

Lily swallowed a mouthful of noodles. “What can we do? I’m afraid to go back to the university. Maybe it’s all a trap and they’re waiting to arrest us on campus. In 1977, Wei Jingsheng got seventeen years in solitary confinement for writing one wall poster.”

“We can’t let them take the Square.” Yiwen’s voice seemed to come from the plastic tabletop. “We have to stop them here, in the streets, we have to fight the army. We can’t let them through.”

“The Square is our headquarters,” Lily said. “If we lose the Square, we lose everything. Everything. Do you even know what they did to the protesters in 1977? That’s what scares me. Nobody even remembers.”

The table was low compared to the height of the chairs, and it made them all lean forward as if they were planning a conspiracy. Lily, Faye and Yiwen kept talking, using other military terms. How could they talk about fighting the army? Ai-ming found her thoughts drifting nervously; if she didn’t hear them, she wouldn’t be implicated. Yiwen picked up her hand and held it, squeezing it so hard that a jolt of pain flashed in Ai-ming’s eyes. On the public speakers, the grating repetition of the martial law announcement had started up again. In accordance with Article 89, Item 16, of the Constitution of the People’s Republic …Waves of sound broke through the street, “Down with Li Peng! Down with Li Peng!” Still the voice on the loudspeaker crept out, insistent: Under martial law, demonstrations, student strikes, work stoppages, are banned…

“We’ve got to sleep here in the road, right in front of the trucks,” Faye said. She had sleepy eyes and a demure chin, making her words all the more shocking. “I don’t care what happens to me anymore. I don’t care. What future is there for us anyway?”

“I’m so tired,” Yiwen said. “Doesn’t it seem a lifetime ago that Hu Yaobang died and we all brought flowers to the Square? That was April 22. All we wanted was to deliver a funeral wreath to the Great Hall of the People. That was the beginning, wasn’t it? What’s the date today? May 20. Only four weeks since Comrade Hu’s funeral.”

Was that really how it had begun? Ai-ming wondered. Could it have been so simple?

Girls at a nearby table sang an old Cultural Revolution song, and the words seemed both to lull the students and rouse them.

“All these songs,” Yiwen said. Her hand felt small and damp. “I never understood. I thought they were real.”

“They were just words,” Ai-ming said.

Lily looked at her, forthrightly, calmly. “But what else did we have?”

When they finished eating, Lily and Faye went off to look for friends from Beijing Normal, and never returned. Ai-ming and Yiwen joined the other students sleeping on newspapers on the ground. Ai-ming lay on her back. From here, the tanks appeared even more monstrous. Frightened, she closed her eyes against the increasing clarity of the stars. The most important people in her life were Sparrow, Ling, Big Mother Knife, Ba Lute, and now Yiwen, and it was like they had all been raised on different planets.

“It’s easy to say we’ll sacrifice our lives for the country,” Yiwen said quietly. “At the beginning it feels very brave. Is that what you meant, Ai-ming? You said it was just words. You think that the things that matter are more difficult than words — to retreat from a confrontation, for instance, to work at changing something, truly changing something.” She lifted her hand towards the bodies and the tanks. “Ai-ming, you’re studying history to prepare for the examinations. What if revolution and violence are the only way?”