Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (48 page)

All afternoon, Ai-ming had been reading
Let the Natural Sciences Contend
and her head was full of geological disturbances. “I’m not good at remembering lyrics.”

“Ai-ming, little country girl. My father told me that your father used to be a musician! Is that true? Like a rock musician? Hey, come on, you’re not really this shy. Are you?”

This was worse than the national examinations. Ai-ming had no idea what the correct answer could be. Fortunately it didn’t matter because Yiwen had her own monologue going. Now she started singing by herself:
“I’ve never stopped asking you, When will you come with me? But you always laugh at me because I have nothing! I’m giving you my aspirations and my freedom, too.”

One of the neighbours, a little boy known as Watermelon, started singing along. He was small but he had big, wet voice.
“I want to grab your hands. Come with me…”

Yiwen stood up, the little dress too small for anything.

“Want to come to the Square, Ai-ming?”

“I can’t.”

“Tomorrow then.” Yiwen tipped over the bucket of soapy water, dumping it out, and then put the clean dishes inside.

“What’s your boyfriend like?” Ai-ming asked.

Yiwen got to her feet, swaying slowly, the dishes clattering like rattled birds. She smiled teasingly. “I like it when you leave your hair down.”

Ai-ming plunged her hands into her own dish water and said, “Yiwen, where did you get your cassette player?”

“From Fat Lips, on the corner. You want one? He always gives me a really good price.”

“I want one. For my father.”

“Sure, anytime. Knock on my window. We’ll go together.”

—

“We’re not Red Guards! We’re the surviving remnants of the May Fourth generation. Can’t you tell the difference?” Ai-ming’s alarm clock hadn’t sounded yet, it must be early. Or maybe it was late, the middle of the night, but Yiwen’s voice was instantly recognizable.

“Queen Mother of the West! We put aside every dream for you and look what a terror you’ve become.” Ai-ming sat up in bed. Yiwen’s father sounded exhausted. His voice seemed to split into three parts as he shouted louder. “Protesting the government at Zhongnanhai in the middle of the night! Getting arrested! You’re not really my daughter, are you?”

Yiwen’s mother kept repeating the same words over and over: “Calling the leaders by their first names!”

“So what if I call Li Peng by his name? They’re just people,” Yiwen shouted. “People have names! Why can’t you see that? You had the Revolution to believe in, but what do we have?”

A door slammed. Someone, it must be Yiwen, was crying. But perhaps it was Yiwen’s father.

Ai-ming sat up. Nobody talked like that so the whole interlude must have been a dream. Patiently, she waited to come to her senses. Shadows fell in waves across the bedclothes and nothing in the room seemed still. She hugged the sheet and remembered Yiwen’s pink dress which expanded, covering her, smelling of jasmine, even as the argument went on, fitfully, only partially overheard, lulling her back to sleep.

—

“If you can solve a physics problem, you can solve this.” The Bird of Quiet was looking over her shoulder, later that morning, examining the study questions on Ai-ming’s desk. “All you have to do in this essay question is demonstrate correct political understanding.
I think you should do a more careful study of Mao Zedong–Marxist-Leninist thought, especially this chapter on methodology, and matter or materialism as objective reality….”

Two cantaloupe seeds had stuck to his hand, and she noticed two on her left hand as well. These four seeds blocked out everything Sparrow was saying.

After her father had closed the door again, she returned to staring out the window. Of course, the people outside, the neighbourhood aunties, Yiwen and Watermelon, could see her as well as she could see them. They were taking down the laundry before the rain resumed, and no one paid any attention to her sitting miserably between her stacks of books. Yiwen’s eyes were puffy. She was singing mournfully to herself,

I grew up beneath the Red Flag
.

I took the oath
.

To dare to think, to speak up, to act
.

To devote myself to Revolution
,

The air had the icy kiss of winter, which was perfect, really, for a funeral. Hu Yaobang would have approved. A week had passed since the announcement of his death, and today, a Saturday, the whole city was going to Chang’an Avenue to pay their respects. Sparrow, however, said they weren’t going, Tiananmen Square had been barricaded off, so they would watch it on the neighbourhood television. Television was better, he said. Her father had allowed one of his co-workers to give him a haircut, she didn’t know how much baijiu the comrade had drunk, but it all looked a little lopsided. She found it difficult to argue with him, that bad haircut evoked too much pity. Meanwhile Ma unexpectedly announced she was going to the funeral procession because it was the correct thing to do. “You can come with me, Ai-ming. If you like.”

To go or not to go? In the end, the bad haircut won.

“It’s okay. I’ll keep Ba company.”

If Ling was hurt she didn’t show it. She put on her good shoes and walked elegantly out. Her mother was unfailingly elegant, as if she were a stranger in her own house, which she was. Ai-ming hadn’t lived with her since she was three years old, and even though it wasn’t Ling’s fault, she still felt as if Ling was only impersonating a mother. Ai-ming had always felt more at ease with her great-aunt, the Old Cat, a rare books collector who ran a mobile library, she drove it around in the back of a vegetable truck. The Old Cat lived by herself in Shanghai–“I’m a single modern woman”–and was almost seventy years old.

The funeral was due to start at 10 a.m., so Ai-ming and Sparrow had a slow breakfast. He read the newspaper and she alternated between
Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky
and Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
, and the only sound was the crackling of the pages and her father grunting softly in response to an article or maybe just an advertisement. Radio Beijing was announcing things that everyone already knew, and then repeating them again. For security, Tiananmen Square had been closed to the public, people would have to gather on the surrounding boulevards, etc., etc. Ai-ming realized she was looking forward to the few seconds of silence during the funeral because, finally, the radio would have to stop lecturing.

Sparrow poured her a glass of pear juice. “It’s strange that the government would close the Square. I suppose Comrade Hu Yaobang was very popular…”

Oh, poor Hu! she thought. She had seen pictures of Hu Yaobang all her life, his perfectly egg-shaped head, the man who thought he could change China from within, introduce economic freedom step by step, serve prosperity one sip at a time. Ai-ming wondered: could such a method ever work? Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious–economic freedom and political reform–a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one mouthful? Who could wait patiently for nearly
a billion other people
to also have a taste? No, anyone would try to get a second mouthful, a third, a
whole bowl for themselves. Of course Hu Yaobang had failed, and of course he had been purged! Her thoughts disturbed her. All sorts of private thoughts had been opened up by the sight of Yiwen’s pink dress. Even in these modern times, few people wore pink and Ai-ming supposed Yiwen had dyed the dress herself. What about that boy with the glasses slipping down his nose? She had wanted to reach out and touch his slender waist and ask him…ask him what?
Doesn’t it all seem absurd to you? Why do we have no words for what we truly feel? What’s wrong with our parents?

She went into her bedroom and, because it was cold, dressed under the covers, her left foot, and then her right, struggling to find their way through her jeans. She lay in bed with just her jeans on and no other clothes, her hand moving between the bare skin of her stomach and the thickness of the denim. She imagined that all the world existed between these two sensations, nakedness and clothing, softness and roughness, within and without. What would it be like to leave the country entirely? Here, a change in Party policy could abruptly exile you to the deserts. She pulled on a shirt and then a sweater. Her bare skin felt as if it were waiting for something that would never happen. Nothing fit properly, she would have to alter all her clothes and re-cut everything differently. I want to live, she thought, but nobody here knows how.

—

Her father suddenly announced he, too, wanted to go to Tiananmen Square to pay his respects to Hu Yaobang, that it was better to go now because the streets would no longer be crowded. It was as if he had just woken up and realized who had died.

“Okay,” Ai-ming said. “I’ll come with you.”

The Bird of Quiet sat down at once to fold two paper carnations. When he was done, he pinned the first carefully to Ai-ming’s coat and the second to his own.

They put on their shoes, untangled their bicycles and pedalled slowly out of the alleyway. How lanky her father was.
Maybe it was unavoidable that a man who did wiring all his life would start to look like a wire himself. The streets outside were not crowded. A few teenagers were sitting on a flower pot at the Muxidi Bridge, none as attractive as Yiwen, whose skin was as pale and fragrant as the flesh of a pear. Ai-ming rode up alongside Sparrow, who began humming Beethoven’s Fifth, as if to amuse her.

“Ba, let me fix your haircut.”

He smiled, coasting. “Old Bi told me this haircut would make me look young.”

“It’s a bit crooked, that’s all.”
All warfare is based on deception, she thought, and depends on the element of surprise. “Anyway, what if I applied to universities in Canada?”

She noticed no alteration in his pace, only a slight tipping of his bicycle towards the sidewalk which he immediately corrected. She pressed on. “Yiwen said that almost everyone she knows at Beijing Normal has sent out applications to America. Canada is less expensive though. Imagine if I won a scholarship! You could come with me. Because…I wouldn’t want to go alone.” Her recklessness seemed to come from the streets themselves. This is what happens when politicians die all of a sudden, she thought. It’s like a table leg collapsing and things go sliding off.

“Everyone says it’s very cold in Canada,” Sparrow said. He sped forward. “And isn’t your worst subject English?”

“Your daughter can be good at anything if only she applies herself.”

Sparrow had no ready answer for that. Fortunately for him, the road suddenly got crowded. He detoured south, into the smaller alleyways inside the Second Ring Road. Turning a corner, he nearly collided with a line of city workers sweeping the street, but they kept on working as if he had never existed and never would. Some of them looked fifty years older than Big Mother Knife.

“Ai-ming,” he said when she caught up to him again. “First it was Beijing. And now it’s Canada. Once we get to Canada, maybe it will be the moon.”

“Others have done it. Even the moon.”

“I used to imagine I would go to the West, too, and that I would bring my family with me.”

She waited for him to continue, but her father’s thought remained a half-thought. The street was bottling up, but still he pedalled headlong into the mourners, pushing between people like a dumpling between noodles. The sky was so white, as if all colours had been sheared away, there were paper flowers in the trees and on the ground, on the coats of everyone around them, and the air smelled not of dust but of a rich and mouth-watering broth. Along the road, families were sitting down to lunch. Faced with this immovable congestion, Sparrow finally dismounted and they began walking, conspicuously, against the flow of the crowd. She and her father were completely out of tune with the moment. Ai-ming walked with her head down; the grey propriety of Beijing, the ochre goodness of it, belonged to people who knew when to arrive for funerals and what time to eat lunch.

She became aware of a new crowd approaching. They were chanting and at first she couldn’t make out the words, the loudspeaker they used was weak and tinny. Eventually she saw two young men, each wearing a red armband, carrying a banner that read, “We are young. Our country needs us.” The two were unusually tall, and their banner swayed high into the air. Behind them, the students were sweating, their formal clothes had come untucked, some looked like they had been fighting. And they were crying. Their devotion to Hu Yaobang was sincere, Ai-ming thought suddenly, while hers had always been impersonal.

“Do we love our country?”

“Yes!”

“Are we willing to sacrifice our future for the Chinese people?”

“Yes!”

“Did we do anything wrong?”

Sobbing, “No! No!”

They were passing now, linked to one another, like paper dolls.

The lunching families looked up from their tables. Some got to their feet. Sparrow, too, had stopped walking and was staring at the student procession.
What’s happened, what’s happened
, the words rebounded from person to person. A boy disengaged himself from the long line and was immediately surrounded. He said that student representatives from the universities had tried to present a petition to the government. Three young men had knelt on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, and had remained on their knees for forty-five minutes while all around them the students and Beijing citizens had yelled at them to stand up, to stop kneeling. Yet they had remained, holding the petition up in the air as if they were children before their father, or slaves before an emperor. But no representative from the government had come out. Lines of police, twenty men deep, had stood between the crowd and the Great Hall. Last night, 100,000 university students had walked to Tiananmen Square and slept there overnight, so that when the Square was closed off in the morning, they would already be inside. “We only wanted to pay our respects to Hu Yaobang, just as those before us have always paid their respects in times of mourning.” Even the police had called for the students to stand up. “They asked us why we had to address the government on our knees, but nobody could answer.” Officials had stared at them from inside the glass doors and only one, a professor from Beida, had finally come out and tried to pull the young men up.