Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (2 page)

Most nights, Ma would sit among them, still in her office clothes.

I tried not to bother her. I stayed in the adjoining living room and heard, now and then, the nearly soundless turning of pages.

The qù of her breathing.

Rain exploding and slicing down the window panes.

We were suspended in time.

Over and over, the No. 29 electric bus clattered past.

I fantasized conversations. I tried to imagine Ba reborn in the underworld, buying another new diary, using a different currency, and slipping his change into a new coat pocket, a lightweight coat made of feathers or maybe a cloak of camel wool, a coat sturdy enough for both heaven and the underworld.

Meanwhile, my mother distracted herself by trying to find my father’s family, wherever they might be, to tell them that their long-lost son or brother or uncle no longer survived in this world. She began searching for Ba’s adoptive father, a man who had once lived in Shanghai and had been known as “the Professor.” He was the only family Ba had ever mentioned. The search for information
was slow and painstaking; there was no e-mail or internet back then and so it was easy for Ma to send a letter but difficult to obtain a true answer. My father had left China a long time ago and if the Professor were still alive, he would be a supremely old man.

The Beijing we saw on television, with mortuaries and grieving families, with tanks stationed at the intersections, bristling with rifles, was a world away from the Beijing my father had known. And yet, I sometimes think, not so different after all.

—

It was a few months later, in March 1990, that my mother showed me the Book of Records. That night, Ma was seated at her usual place at the dining table, reading. The notebook in her hand was tall and narrow, the dimensions of a miniature door. It had a loose binding of walnut-coloured cotton string.

Long past my bedtime, Ma suddenly noticed me.

“What’s wrong with you!” she said. And then, confused by her own question: “Have you finished your homework? What time is it?”

I had finished ages ago and had been watching a horror movie on mute. I still remember: a man had just been killed with an ice pick. “It’s midnight,” I said, disturbed, because the man had been soft as dough.

My mother extended a hand and I went to her. She closed one arm around my waist and squeezed. “Do you want to see what I’m reading?”

I leaned over the notebook and stared at the gathering of words. Chinese characters tracked down the page like animal prints in the snow.

“It’s a story,” Ma said.

“Oh. What kind of story?”

“I think it’s a novel. There’s an adventurer named Da-wei who sets sail to America and a heroine named May Fourth who walks across the Gobi Desert…”

I stared harder but the words remained unreadable.

“There was a time when people copied out entire books by hand,” Ma said. “The Russians called it samizdat, the Chinese called it…well, I don’t think we have a name. Look how dirty this notebook is, there’s even bits of grass on it. Goodness knows how many people carried it all over the place….it’s decades older than you, Li-ling.”

I wondered: What wasn’t? I asked if this notebook had been copied by Ba.

My mother shook her head. She said the handwriting was beautiful, the work of a refined calligrapher, while my father’s writing was only so-so. “This notebook is one chapter from something longer. Here it says: Number 17. It doesn’t say who the author is, but look, here’s a title, the Book of Records.”

She set the notebook down. On the dining table, my father’s papers had the appearance of whitecaps, surging forward, about to crest off the surface and explode onto the carpet. All our mail was here, too. Since the New Year, Ma had begun receiving letters from Beijing, condolences from musicians in the Central Philharmonic who had only lately learned of my father’s death. Ma read these letters with a dictionary at hand because the letters were written in simplified Chinese, which she had never learned. Educated in Hong Kong, my mother had studied the traditional Chinese script. But on the mainland, in the 1950s, a new, simpler script had become law in Communist China. Thousands of words had changed; for instance, “to write” (xiě) went from 寫 to 写, and “to know” (shí) went from
to 识. Even “Communist Party” (gòng chǎn dǎng) went from 共 產 黨 to 共 产 党. Sometimes Ma could see the word’s former self, other times she guessed at meanings. She said it was like reading a letter from the future, or talking to someone who had turned their back on her. All this was complicated by the fact that she rarely read in Chinese anymore, and expressed most of her thoughts in English. She didn’t like my speaking Cantonese because, as she said, “Your accent is completely crooked.”

“It’s cold in here,” I whispered. “Let’s put on our pyjamas and go to bed.”

Ma stared at the notebook, not even half-listening.

“Mother will be tired in the morning,” I persisted. “Mother will hit snooze twenty times.”

She smiled but her eyes beneath her glasses tightened against something. “Go to bed,” she said. “Don’t wait up for Mother.”

I kissed her soft cheek. She said, “What did the Buddhist say to the pizza maker?”

“What?”

“Make me one with everything.”

I laughed and groaned and laughed again, then shivered, thinking of the victim on the television, his doughy skin. Smiling, she nudged me firmly away.

—

Lying in bed, I considered several facts.

First, that in my grade five class, I was an entirely different person. I was so good-natured and well-adjusted there, so high-achieving, I wondered if my brain and soul were separating.

Second, that in poorer countries, people like Ma and me would not be so lonely. On television, poor countries were crowded places, overloaded elevators trying to rise to the sky. People slept six to a bed, a dozen to a room. There you could always speak your thoughts out loud, assured that someone would hear you even if they didn’t want to. In fact, the way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.

Third, and this was not a fact but a question: Why had our love meant so little to Ba?

I must have slept because I woke abruptly to see Ma leaning over me. Her fingertips wiped my face. I never cried in the daytime, only at night.

“Don’t be like this, Li-ling,” she said. She was mumbling a lot of things. She said, “If you’re trapped in a room and nobody is
coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It’s obvious, Li-ling, that crying doesn’t help a person live.”

“My name is Marie,” I shouted. “Marie!”

She smiled. “Who are you?”

“I’m Li-ling!”

“You’re Girl.” She used my father’s pet name for me, because the word 女 meant both girl and daughter. He liked to joke that, where he came from, the poor didn’t bother to name their daughters. Ma would smack his shoulder and say, in Cantonese, “Don’t fill her head like a garbage can.”

Protected in her arms, I curled once more towards sleep.

Later I woke to the sound of Ma mumbling run-on thoughts and she was cackling. These winter mornings were so lightless, but Ma’s unexpected laugh cut through the room like buzzing from the electric heater. Her skin had the fragrance of clean pillows, of the sweet osmanthus cream that she used.

When I whispered her name, she mumbled, “Heh.” And then, “Heh heh.”

I asked her, “Are you walking on land or in the sea?”

Very distinctly, she said,
“He’s here.”

“Who?” I tried to see into the darkness of the room. I truly believed that he was here.

“Adoptive man. That hmmm. That…Professor.”

I held tight to her fingers. On the other side of the curtains, the sky was changing colour. I wanted to follow her into my father’s past, and yet I didn’t trust it. People could walk away towards illusions, they might see something so entrancing they would neglect to turn around. I feared that, like my father, she would no longer remember the reasons for coming home.

—

Life outside–the start of a new school year, the regularity of tests, the pleasures of math camp–continued as if it would never cease, driven forward by the circular world of seasons. My father’s
summer and winter coats still waited beside the door, beneath his hats and above his shoes.

In early December, a thick envelope arrived from Shanghai and Ma once again sat down with her dictionary. The dictionary is a small-format, extremely fat hardback with a green-and-white cover. The pages, as I turn them, are diaphanous, and seem to weigh nothing. Here and there, I find a spot of grease or a ring of coffee, from my mother’s cup or perhaps my own. Each word is filed under its root, also known as a radical. For instance, 門 means gate, but it is also a radical, that is, the building block for other words and concepts. If light, or the sun 日, shines through the gate, we have space 間. If there is a horse 馬 inside the gate, this is an ambush 闖, and if there is a mouth 口 inside the gate, we have a question 問. If there is an eye 目 and a dog 犬 inside, we have quiet 闃.

The letter from Shanghai was thirty pages long and written in a spidery hand; after some minutes I tired of watching my mother struggle through it. I went to the front room and gazed at the neighbours. Across the courtyard, I saw a miserable Christmas tree. It looked like someone had tried to strangle it with tinsel.

Rain gusted and the wind whistled. I brought my mother a glass of eggnog.

“Is it a good letter?”

Ma set the pages down. Her eyelids looked swollen. “It’s not what I expected.”

I ran my finger across the envelope and began to decipher the name on the return address. It surprised me. “A woman?” I asked, suddenly afraid.

My mother nodded.

“She has a request,” Ma said, taking the envelope from me and shoving it beneath some papers. I moved closer as if she was a vase about to slide off the table, but Ma’s puffy eyes conveyed an unexpected emotion. Comfort? Or maybe, and to my astonishment, joy. Ma continued: “She’s asking for a favour.”

“Will you read the letter to me?”

Ma pinched the bridge of her own nose. “The whole thing is really long. She says she hasn’t seen your father in many years. But, once, they were like family.” She hesitated on the word family. “She says her husband was your father’s composition teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. But they lost touch with one another. During the difficult years.”

“What difficult years?” I began to suspect that any favour would involve American dollars or a new refrigerator, and feared that Ma would be taken advantage of.

“Before you were born. The 1960s. Back when your father was a music student.” Ma looked down with an unreadable expression. “She says that your father made contact with them last year. Ba wrote to her from Hong Kong a few days before he died.”

A string of questions rose in me. I knew I shouldn’t pester her but at last, because I wished only to understand, I said, “Who is she? What’s her name?”

“Her surname is Deng.”

“But her given name.”

Ma opened her mouth but no words came out. Finally, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Her given name is Li-ling.”

She had the same name as me, only it had been written in simplified Chinese. I reached for the letter. Ma put her hand firmly over mine. Forestalling my next question, she lunged ahead. “These thirty pages are about the present not the past. Deng Li-ling’s daughter arrived in Toronto but her passport can’t be used. Her daughter has nowhere to go, she needs our help. Her daughter…” Nimbly, Ma slid the letter into its envelope. “Her daughter will come and live with us for a little while. Do you understand? This letter is about the present.”

I felt sideways and upside down. Why would a stranger live with us?

“Her daughter’s name is Ai-ming,” Ma said, trying to lead me back. “I’m going to telephone now and arrange for her to come.”

“Are we the same age?”

Ma looked confused. “No, she must be at least nineteen years old, she’s a student. Deng Li-ling says that her daughter…she says that Ai-ming got into trouble in Beijing during the Tiananmen demonstrations. She ran away.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Enough,” my mother said. “That’s all you need to know.”

“No! I need to know more.”

Exasperated, Ma slammed the dictionary shut. “Who brought you up? You’re too young to be this nosy!”

“But–”

“Enough.”

—

Ma waited until I was in bed before she made the telephone call. She spoke in her mother tongue, Cantonese, with brief interjections of Mandarin, and I could hear, even through the closed door, how she hesitated over the tones which had never come naturally to her.

“Is it very cold where you are?” I heard Ma say.

And then: “The Greyhound ticket will be waiting for you at…”

I took off my glasses and stared out the blurred window. Rain appeared like snow. Ma’s voice sounded foreign to me.

After a long period of silence I re-hooked my glasses over my ears, climbed out of bed and went out. Ma had a pen in her hand and a stack of bills before her, as if waiting for dictation. She saw me and said, “Where are your slippers?”