Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn’t render each variation false.

She was still so young but why did she already look so empty?

Big Mother had told her that in the early 1960s, Conservatory students had been sent out to the fields to wage war. They played their instruments loudly and dissonantly from morning until night so that no little birds could land in the fields and eat the grain. Day after day, thousands of sparrows, killed by exhaustion, had fallen dead from the sky. “Yet another solicitous idea from Chairman Mao,” Big Mother had said solemnly. “Who said Western music never killed anyone?”

I used to be humbled before music, he thought. I loved music so much it blinded me to the world. What right do I have, do any of us have, to go back? Repetition was an illusion. The idea of return, of beginning over again, of creating a new country, had always been a deception, a beautiful dream from which they had awoken.

Shostakovich was a composer who had finally written about scorn and degradation, who had used harmony against itself, and exposed all the scraping and dissonance inside. For years his public self had told the world that he was working on a symphony dedicated to Lenin, but no trace of that manuscript had yet been found. When he was denounced in 1936, and again in 1948, Shostakovich answered, “I will try again and again.”

I went to Tiananmen Square, I read the posters and the letters people had left behind. I memorized them. Let me tell you, world / I do not believe / I don’t believe the sky is blue / I don’t believe that dreams are false / I don’t believe that death has no revenge. Everyone read them and I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?

He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also be a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?

Each day, the darkness fell fast. Black was the colour of the northern sky and therefore the heavens, the colour of the oceans, of everything profound and necessary, and so it must contain the life she was trying to reach. Her hands trembled all the time.

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?”

peering through the dust-caked windows to see her beloved smoking on the platform; he would still be there in a week, a month, a lifetime, if she asked him to. It is not in me, she realized, to fall in love with someone who would wait. I can never settle for half a freedom.