Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (51 page)

In her study, Ai-ming closed her eyes. She missed the companionship of Big Mother’s snoring hulk. In her memory, she was back in Cold Water Ditch, she was the same nosy child snooping into Big Mother’s book trunk. Here were the forty-two notebooks of the Book of Records, a girl’s blue dress, as well as a pamphlet with a yellow cover, and on the cover the words, “Gods and Emperors.”

The pages had fascinated her. Later, she understood it was a political tract and an answer to Deng Xiaoping’s celebrated Four Modernizations. “We want no more gods and emperors,” the writer had proclaimed. “No more saviours of any kind. We want to be masters of our own country. Democracy, freedom and happiness are the only goals of modernization. Without this fifth modernization, the other four are nothing more than a new-fangled lie.”

When she opened her eyes, she looked out and saw Yiwen’s mother sitting in the courtyard, washing clothes. The pink dress rose briefly from the water before it was pushed under again, reemerging tangled up in the arms of a shirt.

As soon as her parents left for work, Ai-ming shut her books. She went outside, walked calmly to the north gate of the alleyway and retrieved her bicycle. She hopped on. As she pedalled away from the books, she felt suddenly free, airborne. At the Chinese Academy of Sciences, she swerved across the intersection, dodged a cart loaded with water drums, and continued on under the big trees of Yuyuantan Park.

Sidestreet and delivery lanes opened up before her, and she flew north until she reached the Third Ring Road. Here, noise pummelled the buildings. At first all she could see were hundreds of green-hatted police. But behind them, just visible on the other side, were the edges of innumerable banners, mostly red and gold, like a wedding. The loudspeakers, out of sync, blurted out garbled warnings, “Demonstrations without official approval are illegal and will be banned! Demonstrations without official approval…”

On Ai-ming’s side of the police lines, two old men in white vests were holding a neatly written banner: “The way ahead is long and far, yet I will search far and wide,” but the two, who reminded her of Ba Lute, already seemed tottery on their skinny, grandfather legs.

Ai-ming locked her bicycle to a grate and squeezed onto the overpass. Looking down, she saw the students pressed right up against the police line, where the officers had hitched themselves together, arm in arm. The students were using the sheer mass of their numbers to slowly, tectonically, exert pressure. It was fierce and sweaty work.

I was a silly egg to think I would be able to find Yiwen
, she told herself, blushing at the unexpected thought. The mass of young people disappeared into the horizon, as if the crowd stretched all the way to Beijing University itself.

A boy who had climbed up a lamppost called out that comrades from the University of Politics and Law had banded together and broken through a blockade at the Second Ring Road. Noise rioted up, vibrating the overpass. She watched as ladies coming to or from work, in factory blues, pink aprons, and green smocks, tried to sweet-talk the officers into letting the students through. Old people sat on their balconies as if watching opera, shouting at everyone to get on with it. Even as it grew increasingly tense, it was clear to Ai-ming that the police had no intention of pulling out their weapons. They were simply placing their bodies in the way.

Minutes passed, another half-hour, and still the agonizing pushing went on.

The students, all neatly dressed, attractive with their earnest glasses, began chanting the words of Comrade Deng himself: “A revolutionary government should listen to the voice of the People! Nothing should frighten it more than silence!”

On this side, the residents joined in, so that the police were pinioned between two tidal waves of sound. This went on for half an hour before everyone stopped to rest. Meanwhile up on the overpass, it was shoulder against shoulder, chest against back, with still more people arriving. Ai-ming was so sweaty she feared she might be squeezed, like a slippery fish, off the bridge.

The students were reorganizing. All the young women had been sent up to the head of the line. A few men around Ai-ming laughed dirtily. A soothing female chorus rose up:

“Raise the incomes of the police!”

“Brothers!” a young woman called. “You have been working hard all morning! Citizens of Beijing! Bring water to the People’s police!”

Amidst laughter and cheering, water materialized. Ai-ming scanned continuously for Yiwen. A few police lifted off their peaked caps, withdrew colourful handkerchiefs, and mopped the sweat from their faces. They smiled shyly at the girls, who giggled. Everyone exhaled, like a rest between sets.

The students managed to reformulate themselves so that boys and girls were mixed together once more. Meanwhile, the overpass took up the chant, “What’s so hard? It’s like cutting cabbages and melons!”

By now, Ai-ming had been on the overpass for almost three hours and she, too, felt the moment had arrived. She couldn’t stand to be further compressed. From the boulevard of protesters, more cries came, rolling forward with piercing intensity.

“Reject the verdict of the
People’s Daily
!”

“We are not a mob, we are civilized members of society!”

Under this sustained pressure, Ai-ming could see the sweating police beginning to fray. The students pressed their advantage, all the while chanting, “The People love the People’s police!”

The students heaved through the centre and the green police lines dissolved to the sides like a soft leaf curling open. Ai-ming heard an uprush of sound that felt as if it were coming from the concrete and the buildings themselves. Residents leaned so far out she was afraid they would all tumble off the flyover together. Her own shouts of both astonishment and relief were lost in the tumult. Even though the success of the students seemed inevitable, it also seemed impossible, and everyone looked mildly stunned. A police hat flew nonsensically up onto the overpass, and Ai-ming, finding it in her hands, gently tossed it down to a bareheaded officer, who gazed up into the sun, looking for her. She waved. Carts of water and icy tea appeared. Beside her, a toothless old man was throwing popsicles down to the crowd. A huddle of police were talking into radios, a few were grinning, and students patted their shoulders as they went by. A banner passed, “A new path is opening up: the path we long ago failed to take.”

The marchers moved forward, surrounded on all sides by student marshals with red armbands. Ai-ming ran to unlock her bicycle from the grate. Pushing it beside her, she slipped between the lines of students. Everyone’s clothes were rumpled as if they’d all been wrestling or turning over and over in their sleep.

They weren’t asking for anything impossible, Ai-ming thought. Just room to move, to grow up and be free, and for the Party to criticize itself. A red banner from Beijing University read in proud, golden characters, “Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China.”

The closer they came to the Square, the more the crowd seemed to become a part of her own body, so that Ai-ming herself expanded limitlessly as students from other universities continued to arrive, connecting at intersections between the First and Second Ring Roads. Cooks in tired hats and white aprons stood outside their kitchens, waiters smoked passionately, shopgirls teetered out of department stores, so that around six in the afternoon, when office and factory workers came off their shifts, they were all crushed together in the smaller roads. People her parents’ age kept pressing water, ice cream sandwiches, frozen fruit, and Inch of Gold candies into her hands. Sugar-struck, Ai-ming thought she saw the dazzling pink of Yiwen’s headband. She followed it as if following torchlight.

“Yiwen!” she shouted. Her lungs were bursting. “Yiwen!” Without her realizing that it was happening, what she appeared to be on the outside, and who she was on the inside, had become the same. Rapture felt so strangely light. A knot of journalists from the
People’s Daily
passed by holding hands, they didn’t bother to hide their badges. One carried a signboard that read, “Free Thoughts! Free Speech!” The air was inundated with words like this, banners and posters that covered the street like moveable type, as if the sidewalk itself was an enormous banned book. It was difficult to believe that what she witnessed was real and not a counter-revolutionary’s hallucination. And, stranger still, there was no weeping, no regret or anxiety about the past, and none of the day-to-day insincerity which was a normal part of everyday life. And here was Yiwen, just ahead of her. Ai-ming halved the distance between them and halved it again. The police had evaporated as if they, too, belonged to some other Beijing. And had
someone pulled out the wires of the loudspeakers? Ai-ming ran up to her friend. The uneven pavement made the bicycle bell jingle and, hearing it, Yiwen turned, saw her and broke into a luminous smile.

“What is revolution?” Yiwen said, half laughing, half crying. “Ai-ming, what is revolution?” Could it also look like this, Ai-ming wondered. Yiwen reached around, hugging her waist. “This is revolution,” she said, her mouth brushing Ai-ming’s hair. Because of her father’s low political status in Cold Water Ditch, she had never had a true friend before. They were walking like family who had lost and then found one another. Tiananmen was a gate, the passageway to a square with no walls, no obstacles, just the wind and space to breathe, and even a call to abandon oneself. Couples embraced, they clung to one another in wide-eyed desire. Maybe, she thought, by the time the examinations arrived, the content of her thoughts would be permissible, the only thing that would need measuring would be the quality of her argument. If so, this change had occurred suddenly, with so little forewarning, and before she had even thought to ask for it or dared to imagine that overnight a society could change. Yiwen was singing, “
Now your hands are shaking, now your tears are falling. Maybe what you’re saying is, you love me, with nothing to my name, come with me, come with me!
” She wanted Yiwen’s arm never to lift from her waist. Maybe, if China could get better, she would no longer desire to escape abroad.

—

Celebration rattled the streets. Ling’s bus entered the Third Ring Road before coming to a standstill in the face of bicycles and crowds. She stepped down as if into a different city. Even here, several kilometres away from Tiananmen Square, she could hear the chanting. There were explanations on people’s lips but none that made sense. “The student demonstrations broke through three thousand police….” “The Square is blocked off so they’ve filled Chang’an Avenue….” “All they did was present a petition and our government called them counter-revolutionaries!
Shame!” “Enjoy it while it lasts. No flower can live a hundred days….” Red bits of banners clung to trees just as, only two weeks ago, funeral chrysanthemums had blanketed the boulevards.

At home, Ling pushed her shoes off, went to the dining table and hung her purse on the chair. The apartment was quiet. She knocked at Ai-ming’s door and, receiving no answer, opened it. Sparrow was writing. When he looked up, it was as if he had no idea where he was.

Ling took a breath. The room smelled of alcohol. “Has Ai-ming gone to the Square?”

“She was already gone by the time I came home.”

His hand covered the sheet of paper before him.

Outside, the street noise grew, dissolved and came again, like an explosion.

“Every citizen is on the streets tonight it seems. Except you, dear Sparrow.”

She came nearer, looking closely at her husband’s face. He was extremely pale. “What’s happened?” she asked. “Are you worried about the demonstrators? The government won’t arrest the whole city. They can’t.”

He couldn’t look at her. “What are the students asking for?”

“I’m not sure they know anymore. The government accused them of inciting chaos. They compared them to the Red Guards and the students don’t agree. Nobody does.”

Sparrow stood up. “They have no idea of the risk,” he said. He moved towards the door as if this room was too crowded.

Ling followed him out. The sheet of paper, turned over, remained where it was.

“But what if…” she said, following him into the kitchen. Suddenly exhausted, Ling sat down at the table. “Those students are rebelling against us, too. Against our generation, I mean.”

Sparrow said nothing.

When had they last had an honest conversation, she wondered. Could it be months, or even years, since they last confided in one
another? “We let the Party decide our jobs, our fates, our homes and the education of our children. We submitted because…”

“We thought some good might come.”

“But when did we stop believing it? Look at me, I edit transcripts and I’m grateful for the job. My life is a mountain of paperwork and a sea of meetings.” She laughed, but found her own laugh alarming. “Unlike us, these young people have literally no memory. Without memory, they’re free.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about my life, Sparrow. Not the past but the future. Don’t you ever think about yours?”

“Yes, of course, but here in Beijing…sometimes I imagine that I…but we–”

Ai-ming burst into the apartment, elated. Ling caught a glimpse of another girl darting down the alleyway, a flash of neon colour. It was the neighbour’s wild daughter, Yiwen.

Sparrow turned towards the door. “Where have you been?”

“At the Square, of course! You should see it, all the people–”

He began to berate her. Ai-ming stared at her father as if he were a stranger.

“How can I protect you?” he yelled. “How?” He had drunk more than Ling had supposed. She stood up from the table and went towards him. Sparrow kept on: “The government is right. You’re no different from the Red Guards! You think you know everything, you think you can judge everyone, you think you’re the only ones who love this country. You think you can overturn everything in a day, a moment!”

“Sparrow,” Ling said.

“They stole everything,” Sparrow said, turning to her. “But why did we let them do it? Why did we give in? I remember everything now. My brothers. I couldn’t…Zhuli. They needed me to help them, but I didn’t. Why did we throw away everything that mattered to us?”