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

One day in 1973, Sparrow is pedaling home from work when he hears something unusual on the radio: the Philadelphia Orchestra is playing Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. When Sparrow arrives home, his daughter, Ai-ming, runs out to greet him, saying, “It’s a new work by Madame Mao!” He corrects her, saying that the composer of the music is Beethoven and that he is from another country. Inside, Big Mother Knife, who has relocated to live with Sparrow in the south of China, is rapt, listening to the music.

Young Ai-ming has grown up with Sparrow and her grandmother, Big Mother Knife. Since Ai-ming’s mother, Ling, has been transferred to Shanghai for work, Ai-ming often turns to her grandmother as a motherly figure. She loves listening to Big Mother Knife’s stories and sleeping on her. Her father, meanwhile, is often quiet, though Ai-ming can’t understand why. Since she is “the daughter of a class enemy,” she isn’t allowed to join the Young Pioneers at school. She is allowed, however, to join her fellow students in reciting essays about how to be a good revolutionary. She herself “[begins] to wonder what [makes] a good father, a good grandmother, a good enemy, a good person.” When she looks at her teacher, she wonders if she is a good revolutionary, or a good teacher. 

One day, Big Mother Knife shows Ai-ming an interesting package. Inside are beautiful clothes—an elegant dress, straw sandals—along with copies of The Book of Records. Ai-ming is shocked when she sees the elegant calligraphy, which Big Mother Knife says is extraordinary before quickly correcting herself, explaining that it is not as “robust as Chairman Mao’s.” Soon, Big Mother Knife begins reading The Book of Records to her granddaughter. Neither of the two notice the transition from the original story about May Fourth and Da Wei to the parts written by Wen the Dreamer, who picked up where the original author left off. Ai-ming adores the story, and her grandmother writes to Wen the Dreamer, saying that his story has another admirer. Wen the Dreamer imagines that Zhuli is this admirer—Big Mother Knife hasn’t had the courage to tell him or Swirl that their daughter has died.

In September of 1976, Chairman Mao dies. Big Mother Knife walks slowly through the streets, which are lined with white paper flowers, signs of mourning. She thinks of Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, forced into exile; she thinks of her younger sons, who have abandoned their family; she thinks of Sparrow and his factory life “filled with humiliations. Party cadres with[hold] his rations, demand[] self-criticism, scorn[] the way he [holds] his head […] And her son [has] no choice but to accept it all.” Big Mother Knife weeps, not sad that Chairman Mao has died but rageful that the “old, treacherous man” will never have to answer to his crimes.

One day, Ai-ming and Sparrow receive a visitor in their southern Chinese village. Although Ai-ming has never seen a foreigner before, she knows that the man at the door—with his fancy shoes and differently accented Chinese—is not from their village. Indeed, it is Jiang Kai, comes from Shanghai to pay Sparrow a visit. Ai-ming has never seen her father talk so much to anybody in his life. Jiang Kai brings news about Ling, and the two men reminisce on their days at the Shanghai Conservatory. Sparrow confesses that he feels that what happened to Zhuli was his fault, but Kai assures him that it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

Kai has brought a gift for the family: early the next morning, Ai-ming approaches Sparrow to ask, shyly, “Who built that singing box?” Sparrow responds that it is a record player, and together they listen to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He teaches Ai-ming her first foreign words: “Bach” and “Glenn Gould.” 

Kai also brought another gift for Sparrow: tickets to an orchestra concert in Shanghai, in which Kai himself will perform. When Sparrow goes, he is nervous; he half expects to be turned away at the door. But he isn’t turned away, and once inside, he is surprised to see a young woman in a flowery blouse—he thinks that, years earlier, she would have been criticized as bourgeois for wearing it. Afterward, Sparrow catches up with Kai. The two talk and listen to records. Sparrow chooses Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Kai reminds him that the composer was criticized for the fourth movement—according to the Union of Composers, the piece expresses “inauthentic joy.” “But inauthentic joy is also an emotion, experienced by us all,” Sparrow says, to which Kai responds that the censors are always the first to catch an emotion like that.

Playing music at Kai’s house, Sparrow reflects on his day at the orchestra. He remembers the woman in the floral blouse and he thinks that she watched the orchestra perform with desire and ambition. He knows that he’s lost his own drive to play music.

Ai-ming, meanwhile, still has big dreams. Since she first saw a radio, she’s known that she wants to study computer science at Beijing University. When it comes time for her to take university entrance exams, she studies hard—16 hours a day for a full year. Still, her scores, though impressive, aren’t high enough to enter at the Beijing campus. If she wants to attend university, she’ll have to stay in her home province. Ai-ming cries for two days straight when she gets the bad news, but Sparrow has a solution: he has requested a transfer to work at his factory’s branch in Beijing. If Ai-ming agrees to go with him, the two of them can finally be reunited with Ling, and, what’s more, the entrance scores are 100 points lower for Beijing residents. Ai-ming agrees to go, and the two head to Beijing to begin a new life.