Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (21 page)

Neither of us had ever been to New York before, and I felt like a blade of grass in a world of fish. Every vehicle, it seemed, was in disguise, dressed up as a yellow cab. Ma, dazed, barely seemed to notice the city. As if in a dream, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, above the rippling water.

That night, Ma used her credit card so that we could attend a concert in Carnegie Hall; in the foyer and the main hall, I studied every face, row after row, up the steep balcony until everything disappeared into shadow. A poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thoughts,
Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city
. The music, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which my father had
performed decades ago with China’s Central Philharmonic, made Ma weep. I sat in the dark, grown up now. I felt too wide, too full of feeling, for the small space I inhabited.

On the plane home, I told Ma it was only a matter of time before Ai-ming contacted us. All we could do was wait.

—

After Ma’s diagnosis in 1998, everything changed. We no longer fit into the hours, days and weeks of the regular world. She began to speak of the future not as an open and undetermined place, but as a fixed measure of time; a year, maybe two, if she was lucky. Her pragmatism hurt me. I was only nineteen years old, and needed to believe she would be the one to defy the numbers. When her chemotherapy began, I had been at university, a mathematics major at last, and I could think of all sorts of statistical reasons why she should not die. I spent many hours brooding over just this problem, as if Ma’s life and death were a simple question of numbers and probabilities. To my surprise, but probably not to Ma’s, all the anger I had stored up since my father’s death returned. When I looked at my university classmates, I heard in their voices and saw in their lives a freedom I felt had been unfairly taken from me. How oblivious they seemed of their good fortune. I compensated by studying harder, by trying to outdo everyone, to defy–what? I didn’t know. It’s no wonder that I became such a solitary young woman. I was irrationally upset with Ma and angry all over again with Ba. I saw that I might lose my mother no matter what the numbers said, no matter how many things she still had left to experience.

As usual, Ma let me think what I wanted.

In the meantime, she altered her diet and dealt with the unending bureaucracy of sick leave, sick pay, health and life insurance, the web of paperwork and medication that quickly encircled her life, so that the measurement of time became divorced from the rising and the falling of the sun, and became instead about the intervals between treatment regimens, hospital stays, meal times, rest and
recovery. She made a will and left a sum of money to Ai-ming, which to this day has not been claimed; neither I nor my mother’s lawyer have been able to locate her. That year, I published a paper in a prestigious mathematics journal and I am glad that Ma lived to see this small success, this glimpse of a future stability.

During those long hours at the hospital, I willed myself to understand everything there was to know about algebraic geometry; somehow, the impossibility of my task saved me. I wrote my papers and tried to find my mother’s strength within myself. In the last two years of her life, I changed. Ma’s diagnosis was an end but also a beginning, a period of time intensely lived. We were lucky because, finally, we had time to talk, to go back to subjects we might not have raised in a lifetime of reserve, of quiet. In those two years, I knew only two constants: mathematics and Ma. I learned a great deal about the tenacity of love and also the terrible pain of letting it go. The brevity of my parents’ lives has shaped me.

In 1999, Ma asked me to find Ai-ming. “You’re the only one who knows,” she said.

What did I know, I wondered, what had I truly understood back then? “I’ll try, Ma.”

“I couldn’t find her. I tried so hard but I couldn’t do it. There’s no more time.”

But what if there had been an accident? What if Ai-ming had passed away? I wanted to say these things but could not imagine speaking the words aloud.

The painkillers made her words slow and heavy. “She went back to Beijing. Maybe Shanghai. I’m sure of it.”

“I’ll look, Ma.”

“I wrote a letter to Ai-ming.”

“How?”

“I sent it to her mother in Shanghai. But it was returned, her mother had moved. There was no forwarding address. I called that number so many times.” Ma’s eyes filled with tears. “I promised her
mother that I would take care of Ai-ming. I gave her my word. They were family to us.”

“Please don’t be upset,” I said. “Please. I’ll find them.”

“Look straight ahead and don’t turn back. Don’t follow illusions, don’t forget to come home.” It was as if she could see into the future, she knew I would take on my father’s regret and guilt. “You’re listening to me, aren’t you, Marie? Li-ling…”

“You don’t have to worry about anything, Ma. I promise.”

Not once did she ask for my father, yet I believe that somehow it was the same, that to hope for Ai-ming was also to hope for his return.

Before she passed away, Ma gave me a photograph Ai-ming had left us. The picture was a duplicate of one Ai-ming carried, which had belonged to her father. It showed Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. On the back, my mother had written
Shanghai Conservatory of Music, 1966
.

—

My mother died fifteen years ago but I have been thinking about her more than ever, the way it felt when she put her arms around me, about her qualities, especially her loyalty, pragmatism and quickness to laughter. She wanted to give me a different example of how to live my life and how to let hers go. And so, at the end, her words were contradictory. Look forward or look back? How could I find Ai-ming and also turn away from my father? Or did she think both acts were the same thing? It’s taken me years to begin searching, to realize that the days are not linear, that time does not simply move forward but spirals closer and closer to a shifting centre. How much did Ma know? How will I know when to stop looking? I think it’s possible to build a house of facts, but the truth at the centre might be another realm entirely.

It’s possible that I have lost track of the dates, the time, the chapters and permutations of the story. That afterwards, I reconstructed what I could about Ai-ming’s family and mine. Years later, certain images persisted in my memory–a vast desert, a poet
who courted beautiful Swirl with a story not his own, music that made not a sound–and I returned to them with greater frequency. I wanted to find her again, to let her know what I remembered, and to return something of what she had given me.

Even now, I send letters to all the last known addresses.

When I walk through our old neighbourhood, Ai-ming’s voice comes back, as does my mother’s. I wish to describe lives that no longer have a physical counterpart in this world; or perhaps, more accurately, lives that might continue if only I had the eyes to see them. Even now, certain memories are only growing clearer. “Once more, Sparrow recited the letter he had received from Wen the Dreamer. It had its own cadence now, the pulse of a libretto: My dear friend / I trust this letter finds you well! / And that you remember me / your dreaming friend….”

THE PREVIOUS NIGHT
, Sparrow had told Swirl and Big Mother about the letter, reciting it by heart. Big Mother had punched her knee joyfully, and then punched the other one. “The puny bird picks up all the news!”

“So it’s true,” Swirl said. “I knew it was true.” For a moment she appeared as Sparrow remembered her, long before the camps, a teenaged girl outrunning the war. “If he contacts you again, tell him to go to the plant and flower clinic of the Lady Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground. Lanzhou City, Gansu Province.”

“Notes from the Underground,” Sparrow repeated. “Lanzhou City.”

“You’ll take care of Zhuli, won’t you?”

“Between Ba Lute and me, Zhuli will want for nothing. I promise.”

“Be vigilant and keep your wits about you,” Big Mother said. “Shanghai is full of walking sticks.” She meant informers and
spies. Beside her, the rucksacks, packed and waiting, hunched together like conspirators.

“I will.”

Light from the moon slid through the window, gathering in Big Mother’s water basin. Slapping her belly like a drum, she recited,

“Moonlight in front of my bed

I took it for frost on the ground

I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon

Lower it, and think of home.”

To Sparrow, she said roughly: “Watch over your father. He has no clue how to live without me.” Her eyes reddened.

“Be careful, Ma.”

Big Mother laughed, a cackling that sliced across moon and water.

Perhaps one day in the future, Sparrow thought now, as he lay in bed, he would write an opera about the life of Wen the Dreamer. And now the messenger sets out to Hubei Province to find the mysterious Comrade Glass Eye, bringing a copy of a copy of a copy of the Book of Records. The opera would open with a flourish, with the bravado of Shostakovich, before modulating towards the aligned, careful beauty of Kurt Weill, a libretto from Mayakovsky:

The streets our brushes

the squares our palettes

The thousand-paged book of time

says nothing about the days of revolution.

Futurists, dreamers, poets

come out into the street

and Li He:

Yellow dust, clear water under three mountains

the change of a thousand years is rapid as a galloping horse.

In the distance China is nine wisps of smoke

and in a single cup of water the ocean churns.

Could such an opera be more than an idea, a counterfeit, an imitation? Could he sit down and write an original work, a story about the possible future rather than the disputed past?

How difficult would it be to track down Comrade Glass Eye? Surely in the Village of Cats, outside of Wuhan, he would be easy to find.

Two days later, he told Ba Lute that he had accepted the Conservatory’s commission to collect folk songs in Hebei Province. His composition student, Jiang Kai, would accompany him during the six-day trip, and serve as research assistant. Sparrow even showed his father the steel wire recorder and wire reels he had borrowed from the Conservatory. Ba Lute nearly levitated with pride. He unpacked crumbling maps and expired train schedules; he weighed Sparrow down with letters for long-lost comrades from Headquarters until Flying Bear giggled and said, “He doesn’t work for China Post, Ba!”

Da Shan said morosely, “Who knows if your friends are still alive?”

Ba Lute gaped at him. Sparrow gathered up the letters and said, “Don’t worry, Ba, I’ll deliver them all.”

Zhuli tapped her fingers on the cracker in her hand, swept her long hair over her shoulders and said, “Careful with the ruffian.”

He smiled and resumed packing and she slowly ate her cracker. She whispered to him, “I’m not going anywhere until my mother gets back. She and Big Mother must be halfway to the desert by now. You’d like me to go with you and Jiang Kai…wouldn’t you?”

He kept packing.

Zhuli continued. “I would love to but…what if there’s a visitor or a message from my father?” And she stared at him with her searching eyes.

“Yes,” Sparrow said. “Good idea.”

Then he told her: “Think only of your concert, Zhuli. Practise every moment, don’t let this opportunity slip away. Think what it will mean to your parents if the Party allows you to study overseas.”

She blinked away sudden tears. “I won’t let them down, cousin.”

—

He met Kai at the bus station early the next morning. Beside the squat buildings, the ration lineups shifted in blurred congestion, winding around corners and disappearing into the horizon. The streets felt tense and watchful. When their bus flapped open its doors, they managed to find two seats near the back, over the tire. Kai insisted on carrying the wire recorder. Meanwhile Sparrow held his erhu against his chest and tried not to be crushed. More and more people shouldered on and the bus seemed to expand and contract like a lung, and then only contract. A supremely old lady folded herself onto Sparrow’s seat, and he found himself squeezed against Kai’s shoulder. As the bus bounced onto Jintang Road, Sparrow saw the city change, the concrete blocks giving way to open spaces, patches of light gliding into the flatlands of the outskirts. Kai’s unruly hair shuddered in the breeze. Sparrow began to sweat. The bus laboured on.

At some point, he must have fallen asleep. He woke up to find Kai’s arm around him, protecting him and the erhu from the old lady who had the concentrated heft of a bowling ball. Inch by inch, she was appropriating the seat, and at the same time cracking sunflower seeds in her teeth. Sparrow tried to return to the dream he’d just awoken from, which involved Herr Bach seated before a comically small pianoforte, playing No. 13 of the
Goldberg Variations
in order to demonstrate a particular subtlety of strict counterpoint. The composer’s name brought together the words
bā (longing) and hè (awe). Bach’s face was as solemn as the moon. In the sticky, sweaty rocking of the bus, music rippled in his memory as he walked on stepping stones marked bā, hè, bā, hè, Sparrow fell asleep again.