Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Beside them, army soldiers were speaking softly in their uncomfortable trucks. They were so crowded that the soldiers had to take turns even to sit down. Ai-ming tried to clear her thoughts. All these slogans and songs had been handed down, she thought, and if the words were not theirs was the emotion that propelled them borrowed, too? What about the students’ desire, their idealism, their righteousness, how many contradictory desires did it serve? Once idealism had belonged to Chairman Mao, the revolutionaries, the heroic Eighth Route Army. Had their generation inherited it? How could a person know the difference between what was real and what was merely illusion, or see when a truth transformed into its opposite? What was theirs and what was something handed down, only a repetition? The loudspeakers kept cutting into the air: Under martial law, soldiers are authorized to use all necessary means, including force ….Hadn’t the government, too, stolen their words from somewhere else? People are forbidden to fabricate or spread rumours, network, make public speeches, distribute leaflets, or incite social turmoil ….As if words alone could make reality, as if there were no people involved, as if words alone could make someone a criminal, or conjure crimes from the air. Hadn’t the Red Guards tried to destroy the old language and bring to life a new one? What if one had to create a whole new language in order to learn to be oneself? She said to Yiwen, “I think we keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.”

Yiwen’s head nodded against her shoulder.

They both smelled the same, like the noodles they had eaten and also the ashy ground. How did Yiwen see her? Was she a sister, a friend, a confidant, something else? Here is the one thing in my life, Ai-ming thought, that has no parameters. She wanted to tell Yiwen how she felt, but she was afraid to damage everything they had.

“I can’t sleep,” Yiwen said. “Tell me a story.”

Ai-ming could think of nothing, no words that belonged to her. I’m eighteen years old, she thought, and I still haven’t begun to know my own thoughts. She felt as if a part of herself was being left behind. She squeezed her eyes shut and recited the only words that came to her, the poem at the opening of Chapter 41 of the Book of Records: “ ‘Of course, no one knows tomorrow. Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything will pass.’ ”

—

It was dawn by the time Sparrow cycled home from the factory. The 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations rippled through his headphones, and the music felt both long and momentary. For this new recording, Glenn Gould had instilled a continuous tempo, a pulse, so that all thirty variations more clearly belonged to a unified piece. A few weeks after the 1981 recording was released, Glenn Gould had died suddenly at the age of fifty. Sparrow had not learned of Gould’s death until years later, and convinced himself the radio announcer was mistaken. So much so that, a few months ago, when a letter from Kai mentioned the death of Glenn Gould, Sparrow had been upset by it all over again. What kind of man had the celebrated pianist been? he wondered. If Gould had been prevented from playing the piano for twenty years, what other form might his music have taken?

It must have rained not long ago. The air felt renewed, the dawn light was the colour of pearls, unreal against the pavement.

Turning onto Guang’an Road, he almost fell off his bicycle when he saw the army trucks. They were surrounded by a restless crowd, people in their nightclothes and others on their way to work. Hastily, he swung his bicycle around and detoured south. The Goldberg Variations continued in his ears. But when he tried to reach the centre, he met checkpoint after checkpoint. Beijing, with its grid of ring roads and bridges, had been solidly designed to protect its heart, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Smaller roads were manned by students, but along all the major thoroughfares, Beijing residents had set up human barricades, crowds so dense no army truck could hope to cross without meeting violent resistance.

He pressed on through ever more congested streets.

Sparrow smelled bonfires even though nothing burned. The smell brought back an image of Wu Bei, struggling to stand on his tiny chair as the Red Guards humiliated him. The monster is waking, Teacher! You have stepped on its head countless times, and now the monster is crawling out of the mud . At the barricades, as if in uneasy counterpoint, people chanted, “We must turn over and awaken! We must sacrifice and serve the Revolution!” Yet Gould continued, unrolling one variation and tipping in slow motion towards the next. By the time Sparrow reached home, it was nearly ten in the morning. The rooms were empty. He sat at the table and drank a cup of tea. Noise from the ongoing demonstrations filled the room. Radio Beijing didn’t broadcast music anymore, instead the loudspeakers kept repeating the fact of martial law. He regretted all the radios he had ever built. He wanted to find some way to cut all the wires, to hush all the voices, to broadcast stillness, quiet, on this city that was coming unmoored.

—

Late in the afternoon, he woke suddenly. Here was his daughter’s face hovering above him, slowly sharpening. “Ba,” she said. “Ba!” She kept repeating that representatives from Wire Factory No. 3 were in the living room. He got up. Ai-ming brought him a basin of cold water. Sparrow dunked his face, thinking he had been reprioritized out of his job. Instead, he came out to find Miss Lu and Old Bi, in their factory uniforms, sitting on the sofa, eating peanuts. They smiled nervously when Sparrow said, “Have you just come off your shift?”

Miss Lu recovered a peanut that had fallen between two cushions. When she had it firmly between her fingers, she pointed it at him and said, “Old Bi and I have finally decided to join the independent union. They’ve been canvassing in Tiananmen Square, you know? The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation.” She cracked the shell and threw the peanuts into her mouth.

Old Bi leaned forward. “Let’s just say we’re tired of sitting on the hilltop and watching the tigers fight. Maybe you are, too, Comrade Sparrow, and if so we should stick together.”

Ai-ming had followed him out, he could hear the flat squeak of her slippers behind him.

“Yes, okay.”

Old Bi and Miss Lu kept looking at him, as if they were still waiting for an answer.

How could he learn to see around corners? What mistake was about to lunge towards him?

Miss Lu said, “You need to show your work unit ID and register your real name. We understand if you’d rather not. After all, you’ve got a family to think of…”

“Wait. I’ll get it.”

Sparrow went to the bedroom, found his ID card and put it into his pocket. A new letter from Kai was sitting on the dresser, in plain sight. Ai-ming must have placed it there. She had followed him in the bedroom, but before she could say anything, he told her he was going to the Square. “I want you to stay inside.” He said it sharply, as if she had already disobeyed him. He picked up the letter and placed it, too, in his pocket.

“But, Ba…”

“For once, Ai-ming, do as I ask.”

Outside, he watched, lightheaded, as Old Bi unlocked his bicycle. As they left the alleyway, Sparrow pedalled behind them. Miss Lu was balanced on the back of Old Bi’s bike, and her old-fashioned cloth shoes sat daintily in the air. She stretched a hand out, handing him a cigarette. It was a good brand, Big Front Gate.

“Baby Corn was on the barricades last night,” Miss Lu said. “He told us two million Beijingers are on the streets. He said he ripped up his Party membership card.”