Do Not Say We Have Nothing: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

After Ai-ming leaves for the United States, Li-ling and her mother don’t hear from her for years. But one day close to Li-ling’s birthday, Ai-ming calls from New York, where she’d been working odd jobs for the past couple of years. On the phone, Ai-ming sounds sadder and more distracted than Li-ling remembers. Li-ling promises to visit her soon in New York. Just before they hang up, Ai-ming recites a couple of lines from a poem: “I am lovesick for some lost paradise / I would rise free and journey far away,” she tells Li-ling, who worries that Ai-ming has fallen into hopelessness and despair.

A couple of months later, Li-ling and her mother get a letter from Ai-ming in which she tells them that her own mother’s health has deteriorated, and that she is going back home to China. Worried, Li-ling and her mother go to New York to Ai-ming’s last known address to see if they can get more details as to how and when she went to China. But no one seems to have any details, so the two just wander through Chinatown carrying a picture of Ai-ming. As they walk, Li-ling recalls a poem from The Book of Records: “Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city.”

In 1998, Li-ling’s mother is diagnosed with cancer. Distraught, Li-ling buries herself in numbers and facts, trying to discover for herself the statistical probability of her mother’s survival. Her mother approaches the illness with more practicality, altering her diet and dealing with sick leave, health and life insurance, and other unpleasant aspects of bureaucracy. When she writes her will, she leaves some money for Ai-ming, who will never claim it. In 1999, Li-ling’s mother begs Li-ling to go find Ai-ming. She feels guilty that she promised Ai-ming’s mother she’d look after Ai-ming and that she’s now lost contact with her. Certain that Ai-ming has gone to Shanghai or Beijing, Li-ling’s mother tells Li-ling to try those cities first.

It was 15 years ago that Li-ling’s mother died and left her with the responsibility of finding Ai-ming. Li-ling still hasn’t succeeded, but she has dedicated much of her time to reconstructing the story of her own family and Ai-ming’s, and the ways in which the two families have interwoven histories. Every now and then, she sends letters to Ai-ming’s last known address. She longs to tell Ai-ming what she remembers of The Book of Records.

In 1965 Shanghai, Sparrow has just recited the lost letter from Wen the Dreamer to Big Mother Knife and Swirl. Both are delighted, and Swirl instructs Sparrow that if he’s ever able to contact Wen, he should tell Wen to meet her at Notes from the Underground, Lady Dostoevsky’s plant and flower clinic in Lanzhou City. Swirl and Big Mother Knife are about to leave on their mission to find Wen and they make Sparrow promise to look after Zhuli.

Meanwhile, Sparrow is off on an adventure of his own: the Conservatory has commissioned him to go collect folk songs from a rural province. Kai will accompany him, serving as a research assistant. The next morning, Sparrow meets Kai at the bus station and the two board an over-crowded bus. During the ride, Sparrow falls asleep and he wakes up to find Kai’s arm wrapped protectively around him. On the next leg of the journey, there is no room inside the bus, and so Sparrow and Kai must ride on the roof—which is almost equally crowded. Kai, “bewitching” as always, “[takes] center stage”—he can “speak with both the quickstep of the city and the balladry of the countryside.” Soon enough, Kai hands the spotlight over to Sparrow, asking him to play a song. Sparrow obliges and he gets the students singing along, to the chagrin of the passengers below. 

The first two days of the trip, Kai and Sparrow stay in villages outside of Wuhan City. Before Sparrow left, Ba Lute  told him before he left to look for a man named Comrade Glass Eye—Ba Lute believes this man may be able to help the family locate Wen the Dreamer. On the second day, a friendly villager invites Sparrow and Kai to eat at his home after seeing them perform in the village. It turns out that the man knows Comrade Glass Eye and he promises to take Sparrow and Kai to see him the next day. That night, Sparrow and Kai sleep in the same bed, and, in the middle of the night, Kai turns and rests his hand on Sparrow’s collarbone. Sparrow feels aroused, and ashamed of being aroused, but he doesn’t move Kai’s hand. Kai, in turn, doesn’t move away.   

The next day, Sparrow and Kai go with their host to meet Comrade Glass Eye. Ba Lute had sent gifts for his old friend with Sparrow—cigarettes and candies. The old man is grateful and he invites them in. He begins to share stories about his past. Labelled a rightist and sent to re-education camps, Comrade Glass Eye used to work in experiments with electricity. When he was in the camps, though, the villagers raided his workroom—the government mandated that people “struggle to produce 10.7 million tons of steel,” so the people took all of Comrade Glass Eye’s tools and they gave them over to the steel collection effort. Unfortunately, according to Comrade Glass Eye, the metal from those tools and machines couldn’t be repurposed, and so it went completely to waste.

Sparrow mentions Wen the Dreamer to Comrade Glass Eye, and at first, the older man doesn’t show signs of recognizing the name of Sparrow’s uncle. Later during their visit, however, Comrade Glass Eye takes Sparrow aside and he tells him that according to rumor, Wen the Dreamer has escaped the re-education camp. In fact, Comrade Glass Eye was at the same camp as Wen the Dreamer. He tells Sparrow that at the camp, during the cold, bitter winter, the men slept in caves. Many of them starved to death. Comrade Glass Eye is aware there are spies everywhere and he worries that Sparrow may be one himself. But, Comrade Glass Eye says, since he is very old, he has little to lose—and he can’t betray Wen the Dreamer since he doesn’t know where Wen has gone.

Comrade Glass Eye resents the time he spent at the re-education camp, saying, “Men whose only crime was honest criticism were digging ditches and wasting away. Meanwhile, back at home, their families lived in ignominy, their kids were hounded in school or kicked out altogether…”And, at the camp, he and Wen the Dreamer were starving—by 1959, according to Comrade Glass Eye, they were burying the men “by the truckloads.” But the intrepid Wen was able to survive by pilfering food from the camp directors. He helped Comrade Glass Eye get food, as well. Luckily, Comrade Glass Eye’s mother had a childhood friend who “worked discreetly to get [him] freed,” which meant he had to abandon Wen. When Wen told Comrade Glass Eye that he had a plan to escape the camp, Comrade Glass Eye thought he had gone mad.

Before Comrade Glass Eye left the camp, Wen the Dreamer made sure to show him the lining of his suitcase. There, Wen had written all of the names of the men who starved to death at the re-education camp. Comrade Glass Eye thinks that this is “the only accurate record that exists” of these men. Wen the Dreamer told his friend that he planned to hide all of the names in The Book of Records, that he planned to “populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. [The men] would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts.” Wen the Dreamer believed that his fate was to continue distributing copies of the story wherever he went, to spread the knowledge to the world of the suffering that was hidden in plain sight.

Meanwhile, back in Shanghai, Zhuli practices at the conservatory and thinks of Big Mother Knife and Swirl. She wonders if they’ve reached their destination safely and she gets lost in the memory of the crime she committed that made her parents disappear for the first time, that landed her mother in the re-education camp. At only six years old, Zhuli is kicked out of the village school for being the “child of a disgraced landlord.” The peasants’ association decides that it would be better for Zhuli to study to become a farmer, so she tries to join her parents in the field—but, being so young, Zhuli isn’t much use and she just gets in the way. Her mother tells her to go home, and Zhuli does, but she is unbearably lonely by herself in the hut.

One day, Zhuli decides to explore. She ends up back on the property that used to belong to Wen’s family and she finds a trapdoor underneath a tree. Small enough to fit through the narrow space, Zhuli clambers down and she finds herself in a spacious library full of books and musical instruments. From that day on, she goes down into the special place every day, learning to play some of the classical musical instruments, to which she becomes particularly attached.

Because the harvest is late that year, the farmers and their children are all watching the ground closely. One day, a neighborhood boy sees Zhuli emerge from the ground, and that same day, the villagers come to dig up the secret hiding space and confiscate everything that it contains. To the village, this is “proof that [Wen the Dreamer’s family] were biding their time and continued to conceal their wealth.” Zhuli is shunned by all the neighbors, even those who had previously been kind to her. That same night, members of the village come to her hut and take Swirl and Wen the Dreamer away.

Zhuli is left for three days in the old hut without her parents. She has nothing to eat or drink until the third day, when the wife of the village head comes to fetch her. Muttering that her parents “were lucky not to have their heads chopped off,” the woman carts Zhuli off to the bus station, where they soon embark for Shanghai.

Now, in Shanghai, Zhuli remembers how she’d wanted to apologize to Swirl when her mother came back from the re-education camps. Zhuli imagines what would have happened if she had never discovered the trapdoor, if her parents had never been sent to the camps. “And yet,” Zhuli thinks, “we are alive now. I am alive. My mother is alive. It is a new age, a new beginning, and we are here.”