Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (13 page)

In all this time, Big Mother had not opened the box containing the thirty-one notebooks. But halfway through 1958, the sight in her good eye began to deteriorate. She woke up one morning congested, feverish and half blind. Immediately she began cleaning the house, from top to bottom and from right to left. Curtains came down, and blankets and pillows were hurled from their sleeping mats. She polished ledges, scrubbed walls, emptied cabinets, sifted through the boys’ room and discovered pencil drawings of herself and Ba Lute, she fat as a pomelo and her husband tall as a leek. Underneath, in Flying Bear’s rangy writing were the words, yué qìn (moon guitar) and dí zi (flute). The little turds! They were already laughing at authority. She beat the quilts violently, thinking that Mencius himself would have pulled their ears, straightened their handwriting, and introduced some physical deprivation to their lives, but here she was, carrying the drawing in her pocket as if it were a treasured pack of Hatamen cigarettes. “Oh, Mother!” she cried, startling Sparrow who was bent over a sheaf of manuscript paper.

Sparrow watched her with increasing anxiety. He had noticed her bumping into things, favouring her good eye, turning her head this way and that like a pigeon. These last few years, she had grown round and soft, yet also more quick-tempered, like a potentate of former times. The apartment was in great disorder. “Oh, Father!” she sighed, setting a small cardboard box on the table. As if all the woes of the world hung from her shoulders, she collapsed into a chair. There was no string or tape and the box could be readily opened, but Big Mother Knife just stared at it, as if expecting the lid to stand up on its own.

“Shall I open your package for you, Mama?” he asked.

“Eh!” she said, turning her head ninety degrees to peer at him with her left eye. “Do I interrupt you? Do I smash into your thoughts like this?”

“Sorry, Mama.”

“You…men!” she shouted, as Flying Bear padded by in his plastic slippers. “You must have had a brick for a mother. How else could you have grown into such misbehaving capitalist tyrants?” The boy gazed up at her. His mouth, which had been about to close around a piece of steamed bread, froze in indecision.

Sparrow watched covertly as his mother’s attention returned to the battered box. She sat motionless, as if willing the contents to clear their throats and account for themselves. Perhaps it was empty, Sparrow thought. Big Mother reached her hand out for a cup of tea that wasn’t there, and then she sighed and rubbed her forehead and continued looking at the box. When Sparrow poured a fresh cup of tea for her, setting it beside her disconsolate hand, she jumped and glared hatefully at him. He sat back down again. Flying Bear crammed the bread into his mouth and hustled away.

When he next looked up, he saw that she had inched the box nearer to her, opened it and removed a tidy stack of notebooks. She opened the first one and held it up to her good eye. She was looking at the page so hard he thought it might spontaneously
combust. “Ma,” he said, summoning his courage. Her good eye swivelled to face him. “Shall I read it to you?”

“Go away!”

He was so startled his pencil fell out of his hand. Hurriedly, Sparrow gathered his papers and left the table.

“Nosy interfering child!” she yelled after him.

Sparrow retreated to the bedroom, where he found Flying Bear giggling. He cuffed him lightly and the boy let himself roll away in a graceful somersault. Da Shan was standing incongruously in the middle of the room, bent over, touching his fingertips to his bare toes. Sparrow put his papers on the bed and sat in the last light by the window, waiting. When he heard his mother calling him back, he smiled and his brothers smiled back at him. Sparrow heaved himself up, returned to the kitchen, and saw his mother clenching her fists like a toddler. He sat down beside her. Bitterly, Big Mother handed him the first notebook. Without waiting for instructions, he began to read aloud.

The story began halfway through the lyrics of a song.

He read,

How can you ignore this sharp awl

That pierces your heart?

If you yearn for things outside yourself

You will never obtain what you are seeking
.

“M
A
-l
I
,
COME BACK
. Wake up.”

In my dreams, the Book of Records continued.

As I came awake, I couldn’t remember where I was or even who I might have been. I saw lights gliding across my bedroom ceiling, they captured all my attention, endlessly approaching, recurring yet unpredictable.

Outside, it was still dark. Ai-ming was sitting on the edge of my bed, wearing the coat that Ma had given her. Her face was fuller now, her hair was the sea, she looked so lovely sitting there. I stretched out my arms and held her tightly around the waist. Ai-ming scratched my head. She smelled good, like biscuits.

“One day, Ma-li, we’ll go to Shanghai and I’ll introduce you to Big Mother Knife.”

“Big Mother!” I sighed. “She’ll bite my head off.”

“Only if she likes you. Hurry and get up, before I eat all the breakfast.”

I heard the opening and closing of doors and the footsteps of Ma and Ai-ming as if they crossed effortlessly not only from room to room, but between my dreams and my present. What must it feel like, I wondered, to begin again? Would I still be the same
person if I woke up in a different language and another existence? Rubbing my eyes, I climbed out of bed.

It was May 16, 1991. Ai-ming’s suitcase, the same one with which she had arrived, waited beside the sofa. In a little while, she and Ma would drive the rental car to the border and they would cross into the United States. Once through, Ai-ming would board a bus to San Francisco, where her mother’s friend was waiting to receive her.

At the dining table, Ma was setting out French toast. I mixed juice from frozen concentrate, readied three glasses, and served it as if it were champagne.

Ai-ming told us that, for the first time in many months she had not dreamed at all, and this morning, opening her eyes, she’d felt at peace, as if she were standing in the centre of Fuxing Park in Shanghai, in a deep pool of sunlight. Even the surrounding buildings, built in varied times and eras of the past, swayed as if they, too, were made of nothing more than leaves.

I said that I had dreamed of the border.

Ma sighed.

“Please take me with you,” I said, even though I knew it was futile. “What if you get thrown in prison? How will you send me a message? They don’t put children in jail. I’m the only one who can rescue you.”

“Let’s hope it won’t come to that,” Ma said.

Part of me understood that Ai-ming and Ma wished this leave-taking to be a hopeful one, and so I picked up my fork and went along with them. How I longed to be older, to be able to play a role. We lingered over breakfast, inventing a game that involved drawing words in the air. Ai-ming said that to arrive 来 is made up of the radical for tree 木 and the word not yet 未 : arrival is a tree that is still to come. Ma said that the word onion includes the character 洋 yáng (infinity, to contain multitudes), thus the onion as the root of infinity. I wanted to know why “infinity” consisted of 氵(water) and 羊 (sheep), but no one could tell me.

If I pass over what follows, it is because, even now, more than twenty-five years later, I regret this parting. In Canada, no amnesty had been passed since 1983, and Ma didn’t have the financial resources to help Ai-ming in the ways she needed. In America, we all wanted to believe, Ai-ming would have the best chance for a stable future.

Before she left, she hugged me for a long while. She had been with us so short a time but now that she was leaving, I saw how deeply, how effortlessly, she had altered us. I feared that Ma and I could not take care of one another on our own.

“There’s no shame in crying,” Ai-ming whispered. “No shame in remembering. Don’t forget, Ma-li. Nothing’s gone. Not yet.”

Her arms released me. I opened my eyes. Because I loved her, I said goodbye. I held on to the character she had drawn for me, 未 (wèi), not yet, the future, a movement or a piece of music, a question still unanswered.

Afterwards, I lay on the sofa. I didn’t cry. Poetry and memory, Ai-ming had said, were strong in me; I had been made for mathematics. I set myself to remembering everything she had told me, the beautiful, cruel and courageous acts, committed by her father and by mine, which bound our lives together.

BIG MOTHER KNIFE
was ill. Exhaustion from her last visit to Bingpai, the nineteen-hour journey and an overdose of folded-egg pancakes, had all combined to wreck her bowels. When the worst had passed, she lay in bed, miserable. Even her eyelids felt overworked, they drooped and blocked the light.

Sparrow took his magazines and scores and stationed himself in his parents’ bedroom, bringing his mother tea, peeling oranges for her, shifting the curtains according to the passage of the sun and his mother’s whims, and waiting, always waiting,
until she was lucid enough to ask him to come to her bedside, to bring the stack of notebooks she called the Book of Records and continue the story.

The desert setting of the early chapters became Sparrow’s second home, until even the skin on his own hands felt patchy and rough. Sometimes he forgot that he was reading aloud. Instead, the words became his own; he was Da-wei himself, trapped in a radio station in the Gobi Desert, as war came like a tornado and tore the ground apart, until he feared he was the last person left in this overturned world. To comfort himself, Da-wei imagined listeners he couldn’t see and never heard from, he made up letters and, day by day, embroidered their lives:

“Isn’t it true, Mister Da-wei, that some are fated to disappear just as certain lakes evaporate in the driest season? Meanwhile, others must cross the ceiling of the world. Long live those fighting for our independence! May we spare one another and find peace, may we one day forgive our brothers because this war is both our illness and our hope. Mister Da-wei, I ask you to dedicate the third movement of Old Bei’s Symphony No. 3 to my son, Harvest Wang. I wish to say: Big Harvest, stand tall and serve your country bravely. Happy birthday, my son.”

Listeners followed Da-wei’s voice through the twilight of their small rooms, into the chill of night and along the first seam of morning. People waited, crowded together or all alone, for the fighting to pass by, for the calm that came before the next storm, for the storm that would follow this small reprieve.
This next piece of music came to me by way of my grandfather
, Da-wei said. His voice was so intimate, it was as if he sat across from you in your warmest room.
He was taught to play it by a German musician in Qingdao
, who played an instrument as tall as he was and twice as round, called a chai-lou.
Have a listen
. And then, when the music was finished,
Wasn’t it beautiful! Let’s listen again. Once more, Old Bach and his suites for chai-lou
.

“Do I know this person,” Big Mother said, turning a plum contemplatively in her hand. “Who is this devil writer?”

I’ve been alone in this radio station so long that I can recognize every record by its marks, as if each one is a face I know
.

The story ran on and the afternoons disappeared. As spring of 1958 gave way to summer, Sparrow went back and reread earlier chapters, he crowded the open spaces of the novel with landscapes and wishes of his own so that he, too, could become an inseparable part of this new world where desires he had never acknowledged were, in these characters, given form and substance and freedom.

“Sparrow,” his mother would call, after waking and turning her face towards the afternoon light. And he would rise, walk calmly to the chair beside her bed, and pick up the chapter that waited on the bedside table, as if going to meet his future.

—

Sparrow was caught up in Da-wei’s desperate flight to the port of Shanghai when the rat-a-tat on the back gate sounded, and kept sounding as if the mechanism had jammed and the door was now destined to clap forever. His hands did not wish to release the notebook. Only his mother’s cursing forced him to tuck it under his arm, leap up and run out to the courtyard. Da Shan had gotten into another fight, he thought, or Flying Bear was being bullied by the intimidating neighbour he had nicknamed Wind Factory. But when Sparrow opened the back gate, he saw no one. There was a beggar child, not more than six years old. He would have closed the door again except that she didn’t say anything. She only stood there with a plastic bag in her hand. In the plastic bag he glimpsed clothes, a towel and, strangely, two records.