Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (46 page)

“I’ll get it.”

She found his favourite, Prokofiev’s
Violin Concerto No. 1
, inside the cardboard sleeve that had a picture of big-jowled, lantern-faced David Oistrakh. She put the record on. Music seeped into the air and Sparrow listened with one elbow on his knee, his entire body curved like a trigger.

Prokofiev composed his pretty music, as if he had not a care in the world.

As a result of yearly gifts from Ling and Big Mother Knife, her father had accumulated one of the largest record collections in Guangxi Province, but he still insisted on hiding them. The first thing they did when they got home each Spring Festival was dig out another part of the floor and bury another stack of music. Her father was paranoid.

What kind of life was this? A record was a kind of storage in which music lay waiting, love letters from Canada stored words that kept Sparrow awake at night. She knew because she had opened the letters and sneakily read them all. But for anything to be alive, it required motion: the current must run, the record must turn, a person must leave or find another path. Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba’s elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time. His tomorrow would always be, somehow, yesterday. Ai-ming knew she was by nature more impulsive, less patient.

In the courtyard now, Sparrow lifted the record player’s thin arm and set another album down. Ai-ming had to fight with all her strength not to push the record player over and smash it on the ground. This was Smetana’s
From My Homeland
, and it made Ai-ming
so irretrievably unhappy her tears started up again. The Bird of Quiet paid no attention. She pulled hard on the skin between her thumb and index finger to extinguish the pain in her heart.

“Ai-ming,” he said.

She lifted her head. The music had finished without her noticing.

“If Beijing University is where you wish to go, then study for another year and write the exam again.”

As if she would ever be accepted into Beida! She felt such bitterness she almost laughed.

“I requested a transfer to Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 and it’s been approved. You know the factory, they make radios and also the new mini-computers. We’ll both move to the capital and have Beijing papers. Your mother used all her connections….anyway, it’s done now. She’s supposed to telephone tonight, that’s why I hadn’t said anything…When your mother calls, try and act surprised.”

She stared.

Sparrow explained, “The university cut-off scores are lower for those with Beijing residency.”

Ai-ming knew that, of course. The cut-off was a full hundred points lower, and she would have passed easily this year, if only she’d had Beijing papers. Worse, their province had only been allocated fifty spots at Beida. The deep injustice of the world flared up inside her all over again and made her want to scream.

“We can move to your mother’s apartment in Beijing or stay here. It’s up to you.”

Ai-ming could barely nod her head. She felt shame crawling through her body like an old self-criticism. “I want to go, Ba.”

Sparrow smiled, delighted.

She began to cry again, she felt a debilitating mix of joy and panic.

“I haven’t been to Beijing since I was a teenager,” he said. “Don’t be upset, Ai-ming. Nothing is ever complete, it’s only a matter of turning one’s head, of focusing on a new place…and I
wouldn’t mind the chance to hear something new. The Central Philharmonic is in Beijing….”

She didn’t know what he was talking about. Her father had turned his attention back to the record player. One record after another was lifted up in his hands and then set down again. She intervened. She chose Shostakovich’s Jazz Suites, and the album opened with Waltz No. 2, which was glorious and lopsided and entirely unapologetic. Sparrow returned to his chair, he gazed up at the clouded night. He closed his eyes.

—

When Sparrow said, “It is good to be cautious,” in the same sure way he might quote Chairman Deng, “To get rich is glorious,” he had swayed a little bit because, these days, he was drinking too much. His hands bothered him, a phantom pain he couldn’t relieve. One evening, a few days before they were due to move to Beijing, Big Mother asked him, “What are you waiting for? What do you need, my son?”

“I’m content.”

“Ba Lute says the conservatory in Guangzhou offered you a position but you said no. Is it true? You’re so stubborn. I don’t know who gave birth to you.”

He smiled. After a moment he said, “What could I teach? I haven’t written in twenty years. There’s a new generation of composers now, better suited than me.” He changed the subject. “You should come to Beijing with us.”

“Beijing! Surrounded by cadres and bureaucrats. Eating dust. I’d rather live in Mao Zedong’s coffin.”

“I fear that would wake him.”

Big Mother burped. Carefully, she placed her copy of the Book of Records, still in its shoebox, on the chair beside Sparrow. She nudged it towards him. “Don’t wait anymore,” she said at last, standing up. “Swirl and Wen aren’t coming home. I don’t even know what’s happened to Projectionist Bang. And your two brothers. They could be Americans by now for all I know.” She
sighed slowly into the house. “Long, long, long,” she said. “So long is the Revolution.”

Sparrow remained outside. At last, he opened the shoebox.

He lifted out Chapter 42 from the stack of notebooks, its pages were almost pristine, as if it had never been read before. In the chapter, Da-wei has come back to Northwest China. He and his wife are searching for their daughter who has been missing for many years. One day, they come to a mountainous village where all the peasants, cadres and educated youth are too busy to speak, they are engaged in a monumental task: they have been ordered to construct a great dam, and to do so, they must demolish their local mountain piece by piece. Da-wei and his wife can only stand and watch in amazement. The air is choked with the dust of the ground and the dust of the heavens. The peasants are singing a hymn to Chairman Mao, and when Da-wei’s wife asks them if they have seen this girl, the peasants refuse to even look at the photograph.

“My daughter would be grown now, a young woman,” she volunteers, but the peasants shake their heads and continue to haul their baskets.

Someone answers, “Everything comes to rest at the bottom of the river,” but Da-wei and his wife are certain she is not there.

They travel on but year by year the Taklamakan Desert wears them down, their clothes, their shoes, their faith, until the photograph, too, disintegrates. Even their tears refuse to last. The hot sun immediately dries them, leaving behind only flakes of salt. Da-wei tells his wife that the time has come to return home and she answers, “Tell me where our home is, and I’ll go.” They want to make a spirit offering to their lost child, but they have nothing, no money and no goods. It is 1988 and on the former Silk Road, there are no longer any merchants or trains of camels, and countless villages have been abandoned.

They come to a blue oasis in the wilderness, shrouded in mist, where birdsong twists between them. It seems like the edge of the world, but in fact it is the ancient city of Khotan, for they
have reached the southwestern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Da-wei thinks of his lost brothers, of May Fourth and now his own child, a girl named Zhuli, and he wonders if he and his wife are the last to pass through this gate. Where does the future exist? If they continue west, they will reach the disputed lands of Kashmir. Do they turn around or keep going? To which side do they belong? On the walls of a school, someone has copied out a letter or a poem and the words read,

I came into this world

bringing only paper, rope, a shadow

Let me tell you, world

I do not believe….

His wife no longer has a photograph to show to strangers, and she simply crouches down against the wall, exhausted. The twisting cascade of her hair has fallen from its hold.

Da-wei touches the words on the wall.
A new conjunction adorns the sky now / They are the pictographs from five thousand years / They are the watchful eyes of future generations
….

“I know she’s gone,” his wife says. “I know it, but how can I let her go?”

A young man in the schoolyard is playing music. He is playing a violin, what they called a xiǎo tí qin, a small, lifted zither, and Da-wei, recognizes the song. Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, written for two violins, but the man plays alone, the counterpoint is gone, or never was. Da-wei thinks of the duties of a father: there should be gifts of money to see his daughter through the underworld, oranges for sweetness, silk to cover her. His pockets are empty and he is ashamed that he has nothing to give her, in this life or for the next. This music, and the great distance it has come, confounds him. He wants to tell his daughter to return home, but the roads have changed and nothing in this country is familiar, if she turns back towards the cities of the coast, she might
lose her way. How can he help her? Why has he been so powerless? Da-wei hears the counterpoint as if it were real, a melody line he knows intimately, having replayed it again and again from the radio station, into the safekeeping of the air.
I came into this world bringing only paper, rope, a shadow….
In surviving the present, did they sacrifice the future? The world he once believed in has changed its shape once more.

His daughter left so long ago. But he himself does not know how to be free.

“Help me,” his wife says. “Help me to let her go.”

Sparrow closed the notebook. He heard music trickling from somewhere, a radio left on, a memory. Zhuli, he said. He listened as the air answered.

—

Ai-ming sat up in bed. She could hear a recording of Bach’s
Concerto for Two Violins
circling through the house, starting and then stopping. When she crept out of her room, she saw her father seated on the floor, his back to her. He lifted the needle and held it there, as if something in his mind could not be decided, and then he set it back again. The first tension of sound, the air that came before the music, seemed to crackle up from the floor itself. Oistrakh performed the piece with his son, and the two violins circled one another, sometimes warily, sometimes harsh with accusation, disclosing a covetousness, but also an immense feeling, for which she had no words. She watched her father, thinking of Beijing and the future. What if everything was unprescribed, she wondered. What kind of world would that be? What if everything, or anything at all, had the capacity to change and begin again?

F
ROM THEIR TWO-ROOM FLAT
beside the Muxidi Bridge, in a traditional Beijing hutong–a maze of alleyway housing–Tiananmen Square was just fifteen minutes away. It was only fifteen minutes but still, pedalling down the wide boulevard, Ai-ming felt as if she were lifting off into outer space. Growing up, she must have seen thousands of pictures of the Square, but the reality was defiantly modern: shadowy couples, long-haired drifters, teenagers listening to rock music, singing, “The world is a garbage dump!” Small children wobbled by in their padded coats, moving at the same sedate pace as their grandparents, as if they had all the time in the world. Today, the afternoon wind had an unkind bite, April could not let go of winter.

Her bicycle leaned on its kickstand. Ai-ming sat on the paving stones and gazed, proprietorially, out into the Square. For as long as she could remember, right and wrong had been represented by the Party through colour. Truth and beauty, for instance, were hóng (red), while criminality and falsehood were hēi (black). Her mother was red, her father was black. But Beijing, resting place of Chairman Mao, turned out to be softly ochre and even the colossal boulevards had a camel-coloured hue. Red existed only in the national flag and the Party banners, but all that red couldn’t make
a dent in all this yellow. Sometimes the wind brought sand from the Gobi Desert and the dust got into everything, not only her perceptions but also her food, so that silky tofu tasted crunchy.

“Come on,” a boy whispered, “don’t be like that,” and the girl who leaned on his shoulder said, “If you like her, just tell me honestly. I’m not old-fashioned. I won’t do something foolish…”

Ai-ming closed her eyes and pretended not to be eavesdropping. People in Beijing were different, she thought. They were surprisingly dignified, they were more subtle yet more hopeful creatures.

Today was Ai-ming’s eighteenth birthday. She had undone her braids, emulating the city girls. Pedalling down the eight-lane thoroughfare of Chang’an Avenue, she had felt its soft heaviness floating behind her. Yesterday, instead of studying, she had altered the line of her best dress, and now the cotton tugged firmly at her breasts and hips, giving her a feeling of heightened containment. In the centre of the Square, she looked up at the ochre sky and thought, “Let me tell you world, I wish to believe.”

Alone, she did not feel lonely at all. It was as if she walked upon some miraculous circuit board that made her more powerful. But later on, at twilight, when she met her parents at the Square’s northern edge and they walked to Ai-ming’s favourite restaurant, Comrade Barbarian, she began to feel as if her lungs were being crushed. Her mother radiated anxiety, or perhaps only regret. After dinner, when Ling paid to have their picture taken in front of Tiananmen Gate, Ai-ming had a sudden image of what they must look like: Sparrow, the factory worker, Ling, the diligent cadre and Ai-ming herself, the good student. They even dressed in the bland, inoffensive colours of a model family.