Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (8 page)

“Yes,” Swirl said, as if his words were a prayer. “Let us.”

O
NCE, AI-MING SAID TO ME
, “Ma-li, I’m sure I’ve disappeared. Have I? Can you
really
see me?” She lifted her right hand and then her left, ever so slowly. Unsure if she was teasing or not, I echoed her movements, imagining I was at the mercy of the wind, pushed forward, turned sideways, only by forces unseen. “I’m invisible, too, Ai-ming. See?” I pulled her into the bathroom where we stared at our reflections as if they, and thus we, ourselves, were a mirage. It’s only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.

It was 1991, mid-March, and Ai-ming had been with us for three months. Ma was working all the time now, and had taken an extra job to cover expenses for Ai-ming, for the future. I decided to use my Chinese New Year money, my lucky money, to treat Ai-ming to dinner. My plan was to take her to my father’s favourite restaurant. The night we set out, the weather was mild, and we held hands as we walked beside the shrubs on 18th Avenue, past sagging houses and unkempt lawns, beneath cherry blossoms that perfumed even the saddest-looking blocks.

At Main Street, we turned north. I remember that an old grey cat lay in the middle of the pavement and didn’t move as we
approached, she only stretched one foot further away, and swiped her tail from from side to side. The restaurant seemed to step out from the shadows wearing a vest of lights. It was a Polish place called Mazurka. It was warm inside and a quarter full, and there were white napkins and heavy utensils, and tea lights in miniature glasses. With Ai-ming, I felt grown-up and worldly, a true sophisticate. She, after all, came from Beijing, a city that, in 1991, had eleven million people. Ai-ming had explained to me the law of large numbers (LLN), and the various methods of constructing a mathematical proof, including the “proof without words” which used only visual images. I marvelled at statements like

If we know x, we also know y, because
…or

If p then q…

In the summer of 1989, while still in Beijing, Ai-ming had sat the national university entrance examinations. Shortly after, she had been offered a place in the newly established computer science department at Tsinghua University, the most prestigious scientific university in China.

“I should have gone,” she told me. “But how could I?”

Her decision not to attend Tsinghua, a principled but reckless choice, astonishes me now. But when I was eleven years old, I told her it all made sense.

Over cabbage rolls and perogies, Ai-ming told me that she was grateful for my mother’s generosity but she felt unworthy. She felt vulnerable in the daytime, afraid to be seen, but she needed to be courageous and start her life again. Ai-ming told me that solitude can reshape your life. “Like a river that gets cut off from the sea,” she said. “You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself. That’s how I feel. Do you understand, Ma-li?”

I remembered a night before Ai-ming came to live with us, when I had submerged my face under the bath water and imagined what it would be like to stop breathing, to stop time, as Ba had done. I said I understood. How I yearned to understand everything.

The candlelight grazed all the objects of the room. The waiter spoke to us kindly, as if we had come from very far away, from a place where words waited for their echo. I feared my childhood would pass before he finished a sentence. And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists had proved it was, so perhaps Ai-ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.

By then, Ai-ming had decided that she would attempt to enter the United States. The amnesty for Chinese students arriving after the Tiananmen demonstrations had ended, but, in March, a school friend of her mother’s wrote to say that the U.S. Congress was considering a new immigration bill, similar to the 1986 blanket amnesty that had pardoned 2.8 million illegal aliens and granted them permanent residence. The stipulation then had been that the applicant had to have been residing in the United States for at least four years; no one knew what the new restrictions might be. The friend, who lived in San Francisco, offered Ai-ming a place to live temporarily; she said that to delay was foolish.

My mother had already obtained a forged passport for Ai-ming and other related papers. Neither of us wanted her to leave, but the decision was not ours. My mother’s low income meant that we did not qualify to sponsor Ai-ming’s immigration to Canada.

Ai-ming felt sure that one day, later in our lives, I would visit her in the United States. She would boast that she knew me because, by then, I would be well known. “An actor,” she guessed. I shook my head. “A painter?” “No way.” “A magician!” “Ai-ming!” I groaned, aghast. She smiled and said, “A writer? Sentences are equations, too.” “Maybe.” “An expert in substituting numbers for numbers.” I had no idea what that was but I smiled anyway and
said, “Sure.” Only later did I find out it was the Chinese term for algebraic number theory. She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry. I felt she saw into me, past every facade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one’s life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security–Ai-ming’s love, the love of an older sister–out of my childhood and into my adult life.

Or perhaps it could be that I have taken all our remaining conversations, all the half-finished and barely begun ones, and put each word into this particular night, that I have projected back in time some explanation for the inexplicable, and the reasons that I loved her and waited eagerly for each and every letter until the day arrived when no more letters came. Did she try to return to Shanghai and to her mother? Did she make a success of herself in the United States? Had there been an accident? Despite my efforts, I still do not know. It could be that I am misremembering everything. I had only a small understanding of the things that had happened in her country, my father’s country, in 1989, at the end of spring and the beginning of summer, the events that had necessitated her leaving. Here, inside my father’s favourite restaurant, I asked the question I had been longing to speak aloud, to ask if she been part of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Ai-ming hesitated for a long time before answering. Finally, she told me about days and nights when more than a million people had come to the Square. Students had begun a hunger strike that lasted seven days and Ai-ming herself had spent nights on the concrete, sleeping beside her best friend, Yiwen. They sat in the open, with almost nothing to shelter them from the sun or rain. During those six weeks of demonstrations, she had felt at home in China; she had understood, for the first time, what it felt like to look at her country through her own eyes and her own history, to come awake alongside millions of others. She didn’t want
to be her own still river, she wished to be part of the ocean. But she would never go back now, she said. When her father died, she had been dispossessed. She, too, had passed away.

Ai-ming told me that I would always be family to her, I would always be her little sister, Ma-li, Marie, Girl. With my many names, I felt like a tree with crowns of branches. She sang snippets of songs Big Mother had taught her and we laughed all the way home. When we arrived, I felt that, little by little, our arms disappeared, the shape of our bodies ceased to exist, even our faces, so that inside we were well and truly hidden, erased from the world. But this did not seem a loss; we embraced the possibility of being part of something larger than ourselves.

Back in our apartment, Ai-ming had not turned the lights on. She made tea and we lay in the darkness and stared out the windows, into the courtyard and the neighbouring, mysterious homes. Ai-ming continued to tell me the story of the Book of Records, which was not, after all, a recapitulation of those thirty-one notebooks, but about a life much closer to my own. A story that contained my history and would contain my future.

WHEN SWIRL AND
Wen the Dreamer married in Bingpai in 1951, the singers and booksellers of Shanghai arrived bristling with musical instruments and hand-copied books. Wen’s uncles slapped his back, sucked the ends of their long pipes and shouted, “Your wife is a treasure. Old West is smiling down on you!” They played cards and smoked so heavily, the resulting thick fog washed out into the road and confused passing bicyclists. The Old Cat, in a three-piece suit, danced with such elegance that even Ba Lute, itchy in his peasant clothes, wept as he played. Afterwards, the Old Cat proposed a toast to “that infamous explorer, that giant among men, Da-wei!” Everyone drank, most
thinking this must be the scoundrel who had broken her heart. The party seemed to expand beyond its limits, twirling forward like a well-known song with extra verses.

Sparrow had written a piece of music, a truncated sonata with main theme and development, and he hummed it to Wen the Dreamer as the sun rose into the fog on the second day. In the echoing hum after he had finished, Wen said, “You are, of course, an acolyte of the illustrious Herr Bach?”

Sparrow didn’t understand four of the words in that sentence but he nodded just in case.

“In that case, I have something for you,” Wen said. He presented him with three precious records, imported from America.

Finally, on the third day, as the afternoon drew to a close, Swirl and Big Mother Knife sang a duet, and in their singing bade farewell to one another, to the narrow beds and the childhood fears they had shared, and the open roads that had marked this passage from one breath of life to the next. “I have fulfilled my duty to our parents,” Big Mother told herself. Swirl would live here, in the village of Bingpai, in Wen the Dreamer’s family home. She clutched her sister one more time, before turning away.

Everything passes, Big Mother thought, as she sat in the low bunk of the train returning home.

Dry shells of sunflower seeds cracked like kindling beneath her shoes. Ba Lute had met old friends from Headquarters and gone to play cards in their private compartment; Sparrow was reading a discarded copy of
Literary and Artistic Issues in the Soviet Union
. The landscape passed in waves of green and yellow as if the country were an endless unharvested sea. West of Suzhou the train stopped and goods were hustled out by a long line of porters. Big Mother stared out the window and saw a woman her age standing on the opposite platform, a small child in front of her. The little girl seemed lost in thought. The mother’s hands rested protectively on the child’s shoulders. Big Mother closed her bad eye and pressed the other to the glass.

The woman, on closer inspection, was crying freely. Tears slipped unchecked down her cheeks. Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army moved behind her, circling the mother and child with a sly friendliness. The whistle sounded and the doors of the train slammed closed. Still the woman didn’t move.

The train pulled away and the mother, child and soldiers vanished from sight.

Ba Lute returned, half-drunk, his limbs clumsy. He tried to fold himself into the space beside her, only partly succeeding. “Despite your meanness, you’re the one I come back to,” he mumbled, eyes closed. “Home from the tiresome world.” Big Mother wanted to insult him but she restrained herself. Her husband’s lips were thin with sadness and his face had aged. Even his grey stubble looked desolate. Outside the window, the landscape hurried past as if it to erase everything that had come before.

—

A year passed, and then four or five, in which Big Mother Knife rarely saw her sister. Swirl and Wen now had a daughter, Zhuli, who had been born a ten-pound juggernaut before stretching into a lithe and sweet-natured child. “The girl,” wrote Swirl, “sings all the time. This child is the mystery at the centre of my life.”