Do Not Say We Have Nothing Page 3

  Ai-ming had been reading one of my father’s bilingual poetry books. I picked it up now, a book familiar to me because I had used it in my calligraphy lessons. I paged through it until I came to a poem I knew, words my father had underlined,

  Watch little by little the night turn around.

  Echoes in the house; want to go up, dare not.

  A glow behind the screen; wish to go through, cannot.

  It would hurt too much, to see the swallow on her hairpin.

  Truly shame me, to see the phoenix in her mirror.

  To Hengtang I return at dawn

  Fading like light on a jewelled saddle.

  I read the poem twice through and closed the book. I hoped that my father, in the afterlife to which he had gone, was also celebrating Christmas and the New Year, but I feared that he was alone and that, unlike Ai-ming, he had not yet found a family to protect him. Despite my anger at him, despite the pain that wouldn’t leave me, I could not shake my longing for his happiness.

  —

  It was inevitable, of course, that Ai-ming would discover the boxes under the table. In January, I came home from school and found my father’s papers completely exposed–not because she had moved them, but because she had pushed the dining table backwards. One of the boxes had been completely emptied. Ba’s diaries, spread across the table, reminded me of the poverty of the Vancouver flea market. Worse, Ai-ming could read every character while I, his only daughter, couldn’t read a single line.

  She was making cabbage salad and had grated so much horseradish that I wondered whether the cabbage would actually fit.

  I said that I didn’t know if my stomach could handle that much horseradish.

  She nodded distractedly and flung the cabbage in, tossing it wildly. Everything flew up in the air and rained down into the bowl. Ai-ming was wearing Ma’s “Canada: The World Next Door” apron, and her winter coat underneath.

  She went to the table. “Once, when I was very small, I met your father.”

  I remained where I was. Ai-ming and I had never spoken about Ba. That she had known him, that she had never thought to mention this to me before, filled me with a disappointment so intense I could hardly breathe.

  “This afternoon,” she said, “I started looking inside these boxes. These are your father’s things, aren’t they? Of course, I knew I should ask your permission, but there were so many notebooks.”

  I answered without looking at her. “My father moved to Canada in 1979. That’s twelve years of papers. A whole life. He hardly left us anything.”

  “I call this the room of zá jì,” she said. “The things that don’t fit. Bits and pieces…”

  Inside my head, to calm the shivering that had started in my chest and was now radiating to my limbs, I repeated, over and over, the words Ai-ming had used but which I had never heard before: zá jì.

  “You understand, don’t you?” she said. “The things we never say aloud and so they end up here, in diaries and notebooks, in private places. By the time we discover them, it’s too late.” Ai-ming was holding a notebook tightly. I recognized it at once: it was tall but thin, the shape of a miniature door, with a loose binding of cotton thread. The Book of Records.

  “So you’ve seen this before?” When I still didn’t answer, she smiled sadly at me. “This is my father’s handwriting. You see? His writing is so effortless, so artful. He always wrote with care, even if the character was an easy one. It was his nature to be attentive.”

  She opened the notebook. The words seemed to float on the surface and move of their own accord. I backed away. She didn’t need to show me, I knew what it looked like.

  “I have my own zá jì,” she continued. “But it’s everywhere now, and I don’t know how to contain it. Do you know why we keep records, Ma-li? There must be a reason but what good does it do to keep such insignificant things? My father was a great composer, a great musician, but he gave up his talent so that he could protect me. He was an upright and sincere person and even your father wanted to keep a part of him. Even your father loved him. But they let him die. They killed him as if he were an animal. How can anyone explain this to me? If my father were alive, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be alone. And your father, he wouldn’t have…Oh, Ma-li. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Ai-ming did something I had not seen her do since her arrival more than a month ago. Not only did she weep, but she was too overcome to turn away or cover her face. The sound disturbed me so much, a low keening that dismantled everything. I thought she was saying, “Help me, help me.” I was terrified that if I touched her, her pain would swell inside my body and become my own forever. I couldn’t bear it. I turned away from her. I went into my bedroom and closed the door.

  —

  The room felt very small. Family, I whispered to myself, was a precious box that could not open and close at will, just because Ma said so. Ba’s picture on my dresser hurt me so much. No, it wasn’t the picture of him, but the feeling it caused, this chafing emotion that turned everything, even my love for Ma and Ai-ming, bitter. I wanted to throw the picture on the floor but I was afraid that it was real, that it contained my father himself, and if I damaged it, he would never be able to come home. The rain outside hammered against my thoughts. Down the windowpane, it changed and slipped, and all those rivulets of water, growing large and small, joining and shivering, began to confuse and mesmerize me. Was I as insignificant as that? Would I ever change anything? I suddenly remembered the scent of my father, a sweetness like new leaves or freshly mown grass, the smell of his soap. His voice with its oddly formal syntax, “What does daughter wish to say to Father? Why is daughter crying?” His voice like no voice that had ever lived.

  I remembered, against my will, how I’d overheard Ma saying that when Ba was found, he’d had almost no belongings. She’d been speaking on the telephone, long distance, to a friend in Hong Kong. She said that the suitcase, full when he left, was empty. He’d gotten rid of everything, including his wedding ring, his Sony portable CD player and his music. He hadn’t even been carrying a photograph of us. The only note he left was not a goodbye. All it said was that there were debts he couldn’t pay, failures he couldn’t live with, and that he wished to be buried in Hong Kong, at the Chinese border. He said that he loved us.

  Once each year, my father used to take us to the symphony. We never had good seats but Ba said it didn’t matter, the point was to be there, to exist in the room while music, however old it might be, was being renewed. Life was full of obstacles, my father used to tell me, and no one could be sure that tomorrow or next year, anything would remain the same. He told me that, when he was a young boy, his adoptive father, the Professor, had gone with him to the symphony in Shanghai and that the experience had changed him forever. Inside him, walls that he had never realized existed suddenly revealed themselves. “I knew I was destined to have a different kind of life,” he said. Once he became aware of these walls, all he could think about was how to pull them down.

  “What walls?” I had asked.

  “Mìng,” he said. “Fate.” It was only later, when I looked up the word again, that I saw that mìng 命 meant fate but it also meant life.

  The knock on the door brought me back to the rain, to the room and myself.

  —

  “Ma-li,” Ai-ming began, sitting at the foot of my bed. She had turned the desk lamp on, and she looked like a pale shadow I had cast. “I shouldn’t have read your father’s diaries. This is what I wanted to tell you. I’m truly sorry, Ma-li. Please forgive me.”

  The quiet intensified. I was sitting as far away from her as I could, on top of my pillows.

  Ai-ming whispered, “I am truly a very fearful person.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “That your mother will ask me to leave. I can’t survive by myself again. I know I can’t.”

  Shame welled up in me. Her words reminded me, somehow, of Ba. “You’re family, Ma said so.”

  “It’
s just, Ma-li, our lives are confused. And there is this…heartbreak between your family and mine.”

  I nodded as if I understood.

  Ai-ming continued, “My father loved music, like yours. He used to teach at the Shanghai Conservatory, but that was before I was born.”

  “What did he do afterwards?”

  “He worked in factories for twenty years. First, he built wooden crates and, later on, he built radios.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would he do that if loved music?” The rain was falling so hard it was hitting the window like flecks of silver. Without warning, I pictured Ma waiting at the bus stop, her coat sticking to her, the wind and the wet chilling her bones.

  “I met your father,” Ai-ming said, evading my question. “When I was a little girl, Jiang Kai came to my village. My father was very happy to see him after so many years. It was 1977 and Chairman Mao had died and it was the beginning of a new era. Many things were changing but, even so, my father was careful about showing his emotions. But I saw how much Jiang Kai’s visit meant to him, and that’s why I’ve always remembered it. And then, after my father died, Jiang Kai called us. Your Ba was in Hong Kong. I spoke to him on the telephone.”

  “Ai-ming, I don’t want you to talk about my Ba. I never, never want to hear his name.”

  “Mmmm,” she said. She put her hands inside her coat pocket and immediately took them out again.

  “Why are you always so cold!?” I asked, confused.

  She clapped her hands together to warm them. “I left Beijing in winter and I think the cold got stuck in my bones because I can’t get warm anymore. My mother and my grandmother helped me leave China. They were afraid because…I couldn’t pretend. I couldn’t go on as if nothing had changed.” Ai-ming burrowed further inside her coat. She looked terribly young and alone.

  “You miss your mother a lot, don’t you?”

  Ai-ming nodded.

  Something clicked in my mind. I clambered off the bed and went out. The notebook with her father’s writing, the Book of Records, was easy to find. I picked it up, knowing it would please her. But when I offered the notebook to Ai-ming, she ignored me.

  I tried again. “Ma told me it’s a great adventure, that someone goes to America and someone else goes to the desert. She said the person who made this copy is a master calligrapher.”

  Ai-ming emerged from coat. “It’s true my father had excellent handwriting, but he wasn’t a master calligrapher. And anyway, no matter how beautiful the Book of Records is, it’s only a book. It isn’t real.”

  “That’s okay. If you read it to me, I can improve my Chinese. That’s real.”

  She smiled. After a few moments of turning pages, she returned the notebook to the bedcover, which had become a kind of neutral ground between us. “It’s not a good idea,” she said. “This is Chapter 17. It’s useless to start halfway, especially if this is the only chapter you have.”

  “You can summarize the first sixteen chapters. I’m sure you know them.”

  “Impossible!” But she was laughing. “This is how I used to badger my grandmother into doing things she had no intention of doing.”

  “Did your grandmother give in?”

  “Occasionally.”

  I pulled the blanket around me as if the question was settled.

  “Before you feel too comfortable,” Ai-ming said, “I should tell you that my grandmother was known to everyone as Big Mother Knife.”

  “That’s not a real name!”

  “In this story, every name is true.” She tilted her head mischievously. “Or should I be saying Girl? Or Ma-li? Or Li-ling? Which one is your real name?”

  “They’re all real.” But even as I said the words, I doubted and wondered, and feared that each name took up so much space, and might even be its own person, that I myself would eventually disappear.

  Perplexed, I curled up into the empty space between us. Ai-ming was still turning the pages of the notebook. I asked what Big Mother Knife looked like. Ai-ming stroked my hair and thought for a moment. She said that everything about Big Mother was both big and small: long eyebrows over slender eyes, a small nose and big cheeks, shoulders like hilltops. From the time Big Mother Knife was a little girl, she had curled her hair; by the time she was old, the curls were so fine and thin they seemed made of air. Big Mother had a jackdaw laugh, a terrible temper, and a shouting voice, and even when she was a small child, nobody dared to treat her lightly.

  I closed my eyes and Ai-ming set the notebook aside.

  In teahouses and restaurants, Big Mother Knife and her younger sister, Swirl, could sing harmonies so bewitching that problems large and small disappeared beneath the enchantment of their voices. They travelled from town to village, Ai-ming said, performing on makeshift stages, their dark hair bright with flowers or strings of coins. Story cycles like The Water Margin or Wu Song Fights the Tiger could last a hundred chapters, and the old storytellers could spin them out over months, even years. Listeners couldn’t resist; like clockwork they arrived, eager to hear the next instalment. It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.

  IN THOSE DAYS, your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese. How easy it was to mistake your brother for a traitor or your beloved for an enemy, to fear that you yourself were born in the wrong moment of history. But in the teahouses, anyone could share a few songs, anyone could lift their wine cup and toast the validity and the continuity of love. “People knew family and kinship were real,” Big Mother said. “They knew regular life had once existed. But no one could tell them why, just like that, and for no good reason at all, everything they cared for was being ground to dust.”

  She was eighteen when she named her newborn baby Sparrow, a humble name rarely used for boys. The little sparrow was a bird so common that gods and men, idealists and thieves, Communists and Nationalists, would pass over him in disdain. The peaceful sparrow was weightless because he had no baggage to carry and no messages to deliver.

  Throughout his childhood, Sparrow was startled awake in little towns. Teahouse patrons shouted drunkenly beside his mother and aunt, the men thundering like trombones and the women trilling like flutes. By the age of five, he was earning his keep, performing “Song of the Cold Rain” or “In That Remote Place,” ballads so stirring that even those with nothing but dust in their pockets tried to feed him something, a nibble of turnip or a crust of bread, or even a puff from their foot-long tobacco pipes. “Here is the little sand sparrow (or golden wing, or red sparrow or stone sparrow),” the grandmothers would say, “come to peck at our hearts again.”

  Once, in the chaos, they passed a troupe of blind musicians in an abandoned village. The troupe walked–hand to elbow, elbow to hand–guided by a sighted girl who was only eight or nine years old. Sparrow asked his mother how the blind musicians, swaying forward like a rope in the dust, could hide themselves when the warplanes came, strafing houses and refugees, trees and rivers. Big Mother answered brutally, “Their days are numbered. Can a single hand cover the sky?” It was true. Year after year, the roads cratered and collapsed, entire towns vanished, crushed into the mud, leaving behind only garbage, dogs and the putrid, sickly sweet smell of bodies numbering in the hundreds, the thousands, and then the millions. And yet the lyrics of ten thousand songs (“You and I are forever separated by a river / my life and thoughts go in two directions…”) crowded out everything in Sparrow’s memory so that, as an adult, he retained very few memories of the war. Only this troupe of blind musicians could not be erased. Once, at the start of the war and then, astonishingly, near the end, they had reappeared with the sighted girl, now a teenager, coming from nowhere, disappearing to nowhere, a ribbon slipping endlessly between the bu
ildings, their instruments humming as they passed. Were they real? Without realizing it, had he, Big Mother and Swirl, like the musicians, found a way to survive by becoming entirely unseen?

  It was 1949 and the civil war was staggering to its conclusion. They were in a town by a large river, and outside, the melting ice made a sound like all the bones in China cracking. At one point, between songs, Big Mother’s face appeared, upside down, wide and soft, peering under the table.

  She gave him a single pear syrup candy. “This will keep your voice sweet,” she whispered. “Remember what I say: music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, if we faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.”

  Sparrow knew what loneliness was. It was his cousin’s small corpse wrapped in a white sheet. It was the man on the sidewalk who was so old he couldn’t run away when the Reds came, it was the boy soldier whose decapitated head sat on the city gates, deforming and softening in the sun.

  Waiting, Sparrow perfected his library of songs, singing to himself, “My youth has gone like a departing bird…”

  Months later, when Chairman Mao stood atop the gate of Tiananmen Square, shouts of joy erupted through the airwaves. The radio carried the Chairman’s melodic voice into streets and homes, even under the tables where Sparrow felt he had waited forever, and proclaimed a new beginning, a Communist society, and the birth of the People’s Republic of China. The words wrapped like a filament around every chair, wrist and plate, every cart and person, pulling all their lives into a new order. The war was over. His mother dragged him into the open, embraced him so hard he couldn’t breathe, she wept and gave him so many candies his head spun. The very next morning, they took to the roads once more, walking home to Shanghai.