Do Not Say We Have Nothing: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

In the spring of 2000, Li-ling fully dedicates herself to her studies after her mother dies. She finishes her PhD in mathematics, and she begins teaching at a university in Vancouver. A couple of years later, Li-ling goes to Hong Kong. Her life as a professor is isolating, but in Hong Kong she lets loose a little bit, staying out late every night. On her last day in the city, she visits the apartment where her father, Kai, lived before he took his life. When Li-ling goes into the apartment building from which Kai jumped to kill himself, she can’t bring herself to knock on the door of the apartment, afraid that Kai will open the door and that she’ll have to see “the window that he climbed through.” After leaving the building, she fills out paperwork requesting a copy of the file that the police made after Kai died.

A month later, the files arrive at Li-ling’s apartment in Vancouver. Along with her father’s clothes and the autopsy reports, the police have enclosed letters that Li-ling has never seen before, including The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, a 31-page composition that Sparrow wrote and dedicated to Kai. After rereading the documents several times and looking closely at the photographs of her father’s body—which stir up unbearable emotions—Li-ling places the documents back in the box and she puts the box under her desk, resolving to move on with her life and bury herself in the world of numbers. 

Years go by, and Li-ling remains vulnerable and emotionally fragile in spite of her efforts to think only of mathematics. In 2010, she decides to travel to Mainland China, where she continues searching for Ai-ming. She tries searching for Ai-ming on Chinese social media sites, but to no avail—“The Great Firewall,” after all, deletes a significant percentage of online chats in China. Li-ling adjusts her strategy by posting messages encoded in passages from The Book of Records or jokes that she thinks Ai-ming would enjoy. Still, she finds nothing.

In Shanghai, decades prior, Zhuli practices violin at the Conservatory when Kai—who just got back from his trip to the countryside with Sparrow—interrupts her. Irritated, Zhuli asks him what he wants, and Kai insists that she come upstairs with him. “Something has happened,” he says. On the floors above them, Zhuli hears commotion; students are running around chaotically. They see the walls covered with posters denouncing someone or something that has to do with the Conservatory. The language used in the posters seems to the same as the newspaper editorials in which Party cadres endlessly denounce “counter-revolutionaries.” One poster reads, “WE MUST SWEEP AWAY THE HORDE OF DEMONS / WHO HAVE ENTRENCHED THEMSELVES / IN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS.”  Another reads, “BREAK THE BOURGEOIS ‘SPECIALISTS,’ ‘SCHOLARS,’ / ‘AUTHORITIES’ AND ‘VENERABLE MASTERS’ / AND TRAMPLE EVERY BIT OF THEIR PRESTIGE / INTO THE DUST.”

Zhuli and Kai have reached He Luting‘s office. From inside, Zhuli thinks she hears music—specifically, she hears Petite Suite by Debussy, which surprises her so much that she almost laughs. Debussy has been “labelled decadent” by the Beijing papers—so decadent that his music is “an insult to the hardships of the poor.” Near He Luting’s office, Zhuli sees a long poster on which the names of so-called “scholars” and “specialists” are written: included among these are Sparrow and Ba Lute. Seeing a crowd of her chanting classmates pass her, Zhuli says that Ba Lute performed for Chairman Mao and that he was a revolutionary hero. But no one responds to her, and Kai takes her by the hand and pulls her away.

Leaving the Conservatory, Zhuli thinks to herself that Big Mother Knife was right—another campaign is underway. As they walk, Kai tells her that this is not just happening at the Conservatory, but at universities around the country, even in Beijing. Zhuli tells him that she wants to go back and pick up the scores she left in the practice room at the Conservatory, but Kai discourages her from going. “This is the start of a new campaign,” he tells her, “Don’t you understand? […] The Red Guards can turn your life to ashes.” Instead of letting her go back to get the scores she was originally working on, Kai hands her some pieces by Xian Xinghai, a revolutionary hero. Bitterly, Zhuli tells Kai that she’ll “forget Prokofiev” and “play the ‘March of the Volunteers’ and ‘The Internationale’ for all eternity.” She says that should please everyone—most of all, him.

As Kai packs his bag and prepares to walk away, Zhuli wonders how he is seemingly able to agree with the Red Guard’s policies without compromising his values. She thinks to herself that it is impossible to play revolutionary music with fear in one’s heart—“every note would be abject, weak, a lie.” Zhuli walks to the park, where she mulls over the coming campaign as she hears demonstrators shouting slogans. She feels that she will be targeted. Soon, she runs into Tofu Liu, another student at the Conservatory. To her surprise, Tofu asks her if she would like to work on a Prokofiev duet with him, and Zhuli agrees.

Before Tofu leaves, Zhuli asks him what is happening with the campaign. Tofu responds that the same thing happens to each generation—he thinks that the demonstrations that are occurring have been repeated in different forms throughout history. He questions the motivations of the demonstrators. “If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how can we talk to one another? We will never find common purpose, I believe in the Party, of course, and I don’t want to lose faith. I will never lose faith…”

Meanwhile, Sparrow is on his way to a meeting that Kai has invited him to on the other side of town. Inside, the apartment is small and dark and the radio is blaring. Someone asks Sparrow if he was followed and another person asks for his ID. But other, lighthearted members of the group discount these questions as paranoia, and soon the conversation turns to books. Most of the people are foreign. A young woman named Ling picks up a book by Fredrich Schiller and begins to read aloud. Someone requests a copy of the book, and people are reluctant to volunteer to copy it. Sparrow says that he’ll do it. As they talk, the radio keeps playing, and on it, the announcer repeats, “Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a group of counter-revolutionary revisionists…”

The next day at the Conservatory, Zhuli arrives in class only to discover that it appears to be cancelled. Only six of the 50 enrolled students are present, and the professor is missing. When Zhuli walks in, none of the students there lift their heads to greet her. Downstairs, she hears shouting and people storming through the classrooms. She hears furniture being broken in the rooms above her. Zhuli had been listening to someone play the piano but suddenly she hears the instrument being smashed, followed by the smell of flames. At that point, she hurries home. That night, Ba Lute instructs Zhuli to cut her hair—having a long braid, he thinks, is “a symbol of vanity.”

The next morning, Zhuli wakes up feeling alone in the city. She goes, again to the Conservatory, and on her way she passes a wall on which someone has written, “IF THE FATHER IS A HERO, SO IS THE SON! IF THE FATHER IS A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY, THE SON MUST BE A SON OF A BITCH! DIG OUT THE CHILDREN OF RIGHTISTS, CAPitalIST ROADERS, AND COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES […] LONG LIVE THE GREAT CULTURAL REVOLUTION!” 

Sparrow, already at the Conservatory, is working on his composition in his office when Kai enters. Sparrow accuses him of not attending class the day before—in fact, only two students showed up. Kai tells Sparrow that he must be the only one in the building, and Sparrow reminds himself that he is “the eldest son of a revolutionary hero,” and, consequentially, he has no reason to be afraid. Sparrow notices that Kai wears a crimson armband on his sleeve and he asks if Kai has joined the Red Guards. “People like me don’t join anymore,” Kai responds, “We are Red Guards, that’s all.” By this, Kai meant people “with revolutionary class backgrounds.” The two stay in Sparrow’s office, talking for hours. Eventually, they fall asleep on the floor. Kai holds Sparrow tightly and he rests his mouth against Sparrow’s neck.

Kai invites Zhuli to the next underground meeting at  one of Kai’s friend’s apartments along with Sparrow. The Old Cat greets them warmly, giving Zhuli a big hug. Surprised to see so many books, Zhuli asks the Old Cat if she isn’t worried about “busybodies.” The Old Cat responds that she’ll need to soundproof her walls. That night, the group decides to read a selection of passages from Faust. Sparrow interprets the reading as being about “seeking a freedom within the mind that would expand [one’s] spirit as well as [one’s] intelligence.”

Once they’ve set down Faust, however, someone picks up a copy of the Beijing Review, in which philosophy students at Beijing University have published a column: “All revolutionary intellectuals, now is the time to go into battle! Resolutely, thoroughly, totally and completely wipe out all the ghosts and monsters.” The Old Cat says there’s no need to read the article aloud—it’s the same stuff they hear on the loudspeakers. But Kai disagrees. He agrees with the young revolutionaries, who say the Chinese people need to “purge [them]selves […] of individualism, privilege.” A member of the group disagrees with Kai, and abruptly, Kai stands and he says he can no longer listen to the conversation. He tells the hosts that they are putting everyone here in danger. He leaves, and Sparrow goes after him.

Zhuli stays behind and keeps talking with the Old Cat and the other members of the group. At first they venture away from the topic of politics, but inevitably they begin discussing the new campaign again. The Old Cat believes that those identified as “enemies of the People” are really just unlucky. Zhuli defends those who participate in the revolution,  reminding the Old Cat that if a neighborhood turns in a single counter-revolutionary family, they might save their whole block from persecution at the hands of the authorities.

Sparrow catches up with Kai on his bicycle, and Kai begs him to understand why he left the meeting, saying he has to “draw a clear line” to protect his family. “We must trust the Party with everything,” Kai tells his friend before pedaling off. Once Kai is gone, Sparrow is suddenly inspired to keep working on his composition and he heads to the Conservatory. As he makes his way over to his office, he thinks to himself that in the span of just a few days, the Shanghai he grew up in has changed forever.

Indeed, Sparrow soon comes across a demonstration that the Red Guards are putting on. Even though it is raining, he finds himself in the middle of a huge crowd that has gathered outside to take part in the protest. In the middle, he sees an old man standing on a chair, the crowd pressing in closer and closer. Meanwhile, a girl holding a broom paces back and forth in front of the old man, mocking him. She accuses him of “teaching literary works that mock[] the reality of every man and woman standing before him.”

In the crowd, Sparrow hears words like “counter-revolutionary” and “demon” being tossed around. The girl begins to use the broom to beat the old man, who is shaking with cold and drenched from the rain. Another member of the Red Guard steps forward to put a dunce cap on the old man, on which it is written, “I am an enemy of the People, a spreader of lies! I am a demon!”  The girl forces the old man to repeat after her, phrases like “I have fed foreign shit to [my students’] bright and beautiful minds” and even “I deserve death.” The crowd throws the old man’s books and papers onto an ever-growing fire, and the girl continues beating him. When she gets tired, a boy replaces her. He takes a razor to the old man’s head, shaving off his long white hair.

Sparrow sees Zhuli in the crowd, carrying her violin. He immediately thinks that she shouldn’t be in such a space with her instrument and he walks toward her to take her home. He tries to steer them in the direction of their family’s house, but Zhuli is intent upon going to the Conservatory—she can’t seem to memorize the Ravel that she needs to learn for her next performance. Along the way, the two cousins come across various members of the Red Guard. When they do, Sparrow shouts to them about the demonstration going on in the center. “The coward has already pissed himself!” he says.

When Sparrow and Zhuli arrive at home, they find Ba Lute staring out the window. He is startled when they walk in, and he tells them that the Red Guards are going door by door to every house. Zhuli reminds her uncle that he is a Party member, but Sparrow quickly counters that the man being tortured in the center of the city is, too. Ba Lute recalls how, at Party meetings, he once encouraged the Party members to give a reward to those citizens willing to surrender their counter-revolutionary compatriots over to government hands. Eventually, he leaves the room, seeming small despite his large frame. “In everything, I trust the Party,” he says, “I trust Chairman Mao. But no, no. I never wanted this.”

Sparrow and Zhuli remain in the living room, sitting in uncomfortable silence. Zhuli tells her cousin that she saw he’d been denounced, and he responds that the Conservatory’s entire faculty has been denounced. “They can’t shoot all of us,” he reasons. Zhuli shares with Sparrow that yesterday, on her way out of the Conservatory, Zhuli’s classmates surrounded her, grabbed her violin, and taunted her. She told them that she was a patriot, but they jeered “The butterfly belongs to no country.” Luckily, Tofu Liu arrived and ran away with Zhuli. Zhuli reflects that it is strange that they were the ones running—after all, the Red Guards “are the ones afraid of a world they can’t control.”

In response, Sparrow forbids Zhuli from practicing in the Conservatory, but Zhuli asks what she should do if not practice. Kai, she says, is a Red Guard now—he led the attack on Tofu Liu’s parents and he was with the group of classmates that surrounded and attached her. But Sparrow insists that Kai could not have led the attack on Tofu’s home, lying that Kai was with him all of the previous night. Disappointed that her cousin doesn’t believe her, Zhuli reflects in silence now on the attacks. She thinks to herself that without music, if the Red Guards prevented her from being able to play and practice, she would die. Before going to bed, she tells her cousin, “These are professors’ lodgings […] Even if they don’t come here tonight, we’re like eggs in a nest.” Sparrow says nothing but he reminds himself that Zhuli is a child and that “children would not be harmed. Children, the Charmian said, carried the seeds of the revolution.”

The next morning before dawn, Zhuli once again makes her way to the Conservatory. She stayed up late the previous night reading Chairman Mao’s discourse on art and literature and, although she enjoyed the language, she felt that she fundamentally disconnected with the piece. Zhuli stayed up late writing self-criticism, but not the kind she’s accustomed to. The questions central to her criticism were, “Who am I at the base of things?” and, “Do I have the ability to change?”

Inside the Conservatory, Zhuli suddenly hears sounds coming from the basement: someone down there is moaning in pain. She rushes out of the Conservatory and, discovering that she has the family’s oil and grain ration coupons in her pockets, she decides to go and pick up their rations—since Big Mother Knife and Swirl left, this is her responsibility. The line for rations is very long; Zhuli stands behind a girl who is barefoot, with a plain, ugly haircut. Red posters cover all the walls of the nearby buildings.

At noon, Zhuli has almost reached the head of the line. She worried that they might run out of oil but she sees the people ahead of her leave with their full quota of food and she feels hopeful. But behind her, there is growing commotion. Focused on the food, Zhuli doesn’t turn around, even when she hears a woman fearfully answering the Red Guards in a “sagging E minor tone.” But the girl with the blunt haircut in front of Zhuli turns around, so she does too. They see a woman about Swirl’s age being pulled from the line by a Red Guard. She is wearing a blouse and a navy skirt, and immediately Zhuli thinks to herself that the woman must be being punished because of her clothing.

Zhuli almost starts giggling nervously, but suddenly, a Red Guard shoves the woman in front of Zhuli. “Slap her insolent face,” the Red Guard commands. Zhuli freezes. The Red Guard keeps screaming at her, and Zhuli’s neighbors in the ration line encourage her to slap the woman. “We all have lessons to learn, don’t hesitate!” the man next to her says. Zhuli lifts her right hand to slap the woman, but nothing happens, so the Red Guard starts criticizing Zhuli too. “Little capitalist spy,” she calls her, “Stinking whore!”

Meanwhile, young people have started raiding the distribution warehouse, pulling out the workers and shouting merrily, “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” Zhuli is shocked—she has no idea how such a large crowd has formed so quickly. Beside her, the barefoot girl gives her advice: “Just shout the slogans,” she whispers. “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?” The line for the food rations dissolves and morphs into a mob, which Zhuli feels protects her from the wild Red Guards. But soon, she finds herself in another line of old women, mothers, and young girls being pushed to their knees by swaggering Red Guards. One of the Guards has scissors and she yanks each woman’s head back to cut off large clumps of hair, all the while criticizing them. “Disgusting bitches,” she calls them. Zhuli, dissociating, comes in and out of awareness. 

Soon, the Red Guards are in front of Zhuli, and one of them says, “Oh, this is the violinist. The stuck-up bitch whose father is a counter-revolutionary.” They rip Zhuli’s bag away from her and its contents fall: a Beethoven score scatters across the street. The Red Guards stomp on the pages and, pretending to read them, begin to sing. One of them arrives with a bucket of black ink or paint, throwing it all over the women they’ve forced to kneel on the ground.  The Red Guards jeer and spit on members of the crowd. After the being slapped a dozen or so times, Zhuli simply begins to lose feeling in her body.

As Zhuli begins to lose consciousness, she thinks again of the time that she got her parents in trouble by being discovered in the family’s hidden library. She wonders if it is this crime that the Red Guards are able to see inside her, if it is for this that she is being punished. She thinks to herself, “Every slap, kick, and humiliation that I receive is one less for my mother.” Soon, the Red Guards gather and focus on Zhuli—it seems to Zhuli that she is the only one still kneeling on the ground. They demand that she confess, slapping her head continuously. “Open your mouth, you demon!” they scream.

Eventually, the Red Guards leave Zhuli. When Zhuli is alone, she thinks to herself that she is now ready “to bring all these flowers […] for [she] will find all the flowers, even if [she] must steal them from the hands of [their] Great Leader, and [she] will lay them at Prokofiev’s feet.” She remembers that she has dedicated her entire life to music—now, she thinks to herself, “the quiet would show her the way out. Silence would expand into a desert, a freedom, a new beginning.”

Hours later, Zhuli regains consciousness. It is now dark, and she is still on the pavement. She can’t feel her fingers and she thinks to herself that they have gone to gather her hair, which the Red Guards chopped off hours earlier. Ink has dried in Zhuli’s eyes and they are now crusted shut—she is totally unable to open them. She feels a trickle of water on her eyes and lips and she hears Kai’s voice. Zhuli distrusts him and she feels fearful, but at the same time she mourns the fact that she and Kai will never be able to be the lifelong musical collaborators that she dreamed they might one day become. She is full of both love and fear for him and she thinks of the “solitude that comes from being at odds with oneself. It is loneliness.”

Zhuli loses sense of time and she wakes up to hear Ba Lute speaking and Flying Bear crying. She hears Kai saying that the two women targeted at the demonstration earlier have died. One of them was “dragged along the pavement for a kilometer.” Zhuli feels a breeze against her skin and she realizes that  Sparrow is washing her. Soon after, Red Guards arrive at the house, and Zhuli hears shouting, a neighbor crying. One of Zhuli’s ears has been damaged and she wonders to herself “what would persist” without music and words. She imagines that in her next lifetime, there will be more colors than in the human world. In the middle of the night, Zhuli wakes up, gets out of bed, and walks outside.

Sparrow, who’s fallen asleep beside Zhuli in a chair, hears her wake up and leave. He feels he cannot move he and worries that Zhuli will see the posters that Ba Lute forced Flying Bear and Da Shan to write denouncing Zhuli, Swirl, and Wen the Dreamer. Ba Lute told his younger sons to call Zhuli “the daughter of rightist filth” and Ba Lute plans to paste the posters in front of the house come morning.

At this point, Ba Lute has been summoned to the “struggle sessions” at the Conservatory twice. He returned with his entire body bruised and his face bloody and lopsided. Still, Ba Lute insists that the “criticism” he has received is far better than the punishments reserved for convicted rightists—even the rehabilitated ones like Swirl. Sparrow, too, had been taken by the Red Guards, but he was just locked in a room at the Conservatory. No one came to beat or even criticize him. Sparrow observes that the counterrevolutionaries who had already been targeted during Red Guard demonstrations are targeted again and again. He thinks of the family of a famous writer who has translated Balzac and Voltaire: the Red Guards have burned all of the writer’s books and destroyed his family’s piano.

When Sparrow wakes up in the morning, he sees Zhuli sitting in bed and he observes that her short hair makes her look even younger. She asks her cousin if he’s seen her violin, and he tells her that it has been destroyed—when the Red Guards came to the house, they smashed all of the instruments. He tells her that Da Shan and Flying Bear have left the city to stay with Ba Lute’s cousin, but Zhuli counters, saying that the demonstrations are everywhere. Sparrow chooses not to reveal to Zhuli that within the last week, four Conservatory professors have killed themselves.

Zhuli starts telling Sparrow about how prideful she has been, how she believed that one day she would perform for Chairman Mao and travel the world as a violinist. She tells him that it was for this pride that her classmates have mocked her. But Zhuli is committed to her dreams. “I don’t know anymore,” she tells Sparrow, “I never stopped loving my country but I want to be loyal to something else, too.” Zhuli reaches under the bed and pulls out Chapter 17 of The Book of Records, saying that she’d hidden it from Ba Lute. She tells Sparrow how much The Book of Records makes her think of her father and she makes Sparrow promise not to let Ba Lute burn the notebooks.

At that moment, Wen has just arrived in Yumen City. For the past two years, he has been crossing and re-crossing the Northwest region of the country. His time in the re-education camps and on the run has transformed him: no longer young and bookish, he is tan, lithe, and prematurely aged. Each month, Wen steals another stranger’s identity card, occasionally stopping to work at a farm when he needs food or money. One day, Wen came across Chapter 6 of The Book of Records in a village. He found a clue left in the book telling him to go to another city, where he found yet another chapter. In this way, he eventually arrived at Notes from the Underground, Lady Dostoevsky’s plant and flower clinic.

There, Lady Dostoevsky told Wen the Dreamer that Swirl and Big Mother Knife are waiting for him in Yumen City, where they work with the local song and dance troupe. So now, in Yumen City, Wen appears at the sisters’ home—he yearns to see his wife but he is “afraid of the cessation of his loneliness.” Eventually, Wen knocks on the door and reunites with Swirl. That same night, the two leave, planning to escape into Mongolia, where Wen has contacts that will help them cross the country. Big Mother Knife writes a letter to Zhuli saying that her parents have been reunited and have escaped. The next morning, Big Mother Knife goes to the local Party secretary and tells him that Swirl has fallen into a river and drowned. Within five days, the search team hasn’t found a body, and Swirl is pronounced dead.

Back in Shanghai, the Red Guards have come for Sparrow once again, and this time they keep him in custody for a week. Zhuli, too, is taken several times. When Sparrow is in the Red Guard’s custody, he is simply placed in a room in isolation and then, inexplicably, let go. The loudspeakers never stop blaring outside, and the family hears news that playwright once celebrated as “the People’s artist” has drowned himself. The loudspeakers play “joyful marching music” to celebrate his death. It is during this broadcast that the Red Guards arrive once more at the family’s home to take Zhuli, in spite of Sparrow’s protests. 

At the hands of her classmates, Zhuli is forced to repeat slogans, beaten with conductor’s batons, and shaved with a razor. They are creative with their torture tactics. Constantly singing, the Red Guards’ favorite song goes, “The water of socialism nourished me, I grew up beneath the Red Flag / I took the oath / To dare to think, to speak, to act, / To devote myself to revolution.” 

Zhuli can’t bear the way her classmates—Kai among them—look at her with contempt and disgust. In front of everyone, Kai announces that Zhuli cares more about music and her personal wishes than the Party, sharing that he “had tried to instruct her on the correct works,” copying out more appropriate musical material for her by hand. He condemns Zhuli for refusing to denounce her rightist parents, calling her loose and immoral. “All passions should be subsumed to the revolution,” he adds. For all of his talking, Kai never mentions Sparrow’s name.

It is Sparrow who brings Zhuli home that evening. Sparrow weeping uncontrollably—Zhuli has never seen him so emotional, and it frightens her. Still, she feels safe in his arms. She recognizes that Kai is protecting Sparrow from suffering the same fate to which Zhuli is being subjected. Zhuli longs to ask Kai many questions, to tell him that no matter what happens, one day he will be alone, and will have to be accountable to himself for his actions.

The next morning, Zhuli wakes up early and she puts on her favorite dress. She pins down the rough parts of her short hair, thanking the gods of silence that Sparrow and Ba Lute do not wake up. She makes her way to the Conservatory, observing the small fires that burn along the roadside, an intersection where books have been placed in enormous piles. Posters are everywhere. When Zhuli enters the Conservatory, she begins to tear down the denunciation posters that crowd the walls. Instead of tearing down the last one, she decides to write over it a passage from a novel. She “[writes] directly overtop of the denunciations […] so that ‘brother’ appear[s] over ‘leader,’ ‘vague,’ over ‘reactionary,’ and ‘high bluffs’ [sits] overtop ‘demon-exposing mirror.” She thinks to herself that these are “borrowed words over borrowed words […] all attached to one another now.”

When Zhuli is finished writing on the poster, she heads to Sparrow’s office. She thinks to herself that he will understand, although inside she knows this may not be true. She puts one of Sparrow’s Bach records on the player. Zhuli thinks to herself that she knows who she is, that “before they [break] her down, she wish[es] to choose a future and to leave.” She wonders what would become of her if the Red Guards took away her music or broke her hands. As soon as the record finishes playing, Zhuli removes a rope from her pocket and climbs onto Sparrow’s desk. She attaches the rope to a pipe and pushes the desk away but leaves the chair in its place. She thinks of Sparrow, that she is both abandoning and protecting him by leaving this life. She lets go. 

That morning, Sparrow wakes up while it is still dark. He thinks to himself that Zhuli has gone to see the Old Cat—there would be no other reason for her to leave so early. Before leaving the house, Sparrow puts on Da Shan’s red armband to make himself “invisible.” He walks to the Conservatory.

Only later does Sparrow recognize that he was the one to take the rope from around Zhuli’s neck, gather her in his arms, and carry her home. He ran into Ling on the way, and she walked with him—the two passed many Red Guards, but Sparrow felt he could not hear them even when they screamed in his face. Now, at home, Sparrow feels he can hear again—Ba Lute is holding Zhuli’s body, calling her name. “What mistakes did we make?” Ba Lute cries. “Didn’t we win this country? Didn’t we sacrifice ourselves for the Revolution?” He shakes Zhuli as if trying to bring her back to life. Sparrow recalls that when he arrived, the tears on Zhuli’s face were wet—had he almost arrived in time?  He thinks of Swirl and Wen the Dreamer. Ling places a blanket around Sparrow’s shoulders. Sparrow laughs and weeps until midday.