[…] in poorer countries, people like Ma and me would not be so lonely. On television, poor countries were crowded places, overloaded elevators trying to rise to the sky. People slept six to a bed, a dozen to a room […] In fact, the way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.
My father had once said that music was full of silences. He had left nothing for me, no letter, no message. Not a word.
Remember what I say: music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.
The novel leaped and turned, as if entire chapters or pages had been ripped out; but Swirl, too, had been uprooted by the war, and she had no trouble filling in the missing gaps.
Wen’s nose began to bleed. The man slapped him repeatedly, as if he were disciplining a child. The crowd was laughing and the laughter had a sharp, bleating sound. Two men on the stage were kicked until they no longer moved Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed.
Big Mother continued through the rooms. Now she found herself at the foot of the alcove steps. Putting aside her walking stick. She paused to offer a poem to the God of Literature because, after all, these mysterious notebooks belonged to his domain. She recited:
When the mind is exalted,
the body is lightened
and feels as if it could float in the wind.
This city is famed as a center of letters;
and all you writers coming here
prove that the name of a great land
is made by better things than wealth.
“One should be careful of the sun,” the man said, as if talking to himself. He reached out, pulled the string, and the fan started up once more. “One should learn to practice in the shade.”
The students began offering criticisms of themselves and each other, and the girl next to her, an erhu major, mocked Zhuli for favoring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor, and continuing to play sonatas by revisionist Soviet composers, including the disgraced formalist, Prokofiev. Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys, and ended her self-criticism with, “Long live the Great Revolution to create a proletarian culture, long live the Republic, long live Chairman Mao!”
Both Kai and her cousin had unassailable class backgrounds, they were Sons of the Soil, Sons of Revolutionary Heroes, Sons of…she laughed and drank the wine.
Not knowing what else to do, Ma and I wandered through Chinatown, carrying a photograph of Ai-ming from restaurant to restaurant. One after another, people studied the picture and shook their heads […] A poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thought, Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city.
Written on the inside of the lining were the names of all the men who had died, and the dates of their falling. It is, I believe, the only accurate record that exists. He told me he had a plan to do something more. He would take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. He would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts.
Men whose only crime was honest criticism were digging ditches and wasting away. Meanwhile, back home, their families lived in ignominy, their kids were hounded in schools or kicked out altogether, their houses were confiscated, their possessions trashed, their wives forced to beg on the streets […]
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…
“If the neighborhood can turn in one family of counterrevolutionaries, the whole block might be saved. People are just trying to get by.”
Young people were ransacking the distribution warehouse, even pulling out the workers. Zhuli closed her eyes. “Unmask them!” “Bourgeois rats!” “Drag them out!” The shouting had a merry, dancing quality, a French pierrot two-step. “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” From where had this crowd appeared? She heard a rupture like a pane coming down to land, but it was only this electrified, heaving mass of people. Time was slipping away. Soon it would be too late. “Just shout the slogans,” the girl beside her whispered, “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?”
“I am ready now,” she thought, “to bring all these flowers for…I will find all the flowers, even if I must steal them from the hands of our Great Leader, I will lay them at Prokofiev’s feet.” She had given every bit of her soul to music.
The official news program announced that Lao She, whose plays Wen the Dreamer had loved, and who had once been celebrated as “the People’s artist,” had drowned himself. To celebrate his death, joyful marching music danced from the speakers.
She wrote directly overtop of the denunciations on the poster, so that “brother” appeared over “leader,” “vague” over “reactionary,” and “high bluffs” sat overtop “demon-exposing mirror.”
“You wrote to Chairman Mao? You ridiculous oaf of a man.”
“Our own sons denounced me,” Ba Lute said, broken. “Da Shan and Flying Bear say they want nothing to do with us. But I have faith that Chairman Mao, our Great Leader, our Saving Star, will redeem us.”
It was, and would always be, the only thing he had ever said that made her weep.
In school, they recited essays about what made a good revolutionary. She began to wonder what made a good father, a good grandmother, a good enemy, a good person.
In the morning, loudspeakers cried out the same turbulent song: “The Esteemed and Great Leader of our Party, our army and the People, Comrade Mao Zedong, leader of the international proletariat, has died…” Big Mother walked the shrouded streets. […] She thought of her sister and Wen, of her lost boys and Ba Lute, the unwritten music, the desperate lives, the bitter untruths they had told themselves and passed on to their children. How every day of Sparrow’s factor life was filled with humiliations. Party cadres withheld his rations, demanded self-criticisms, scorned the way he held his head, his pencil, his hands, his silence.
In the new trousers, baby blue shirt, and leather shoes that Ling had given him for the 1988 Spring Festival, her father looked taller. Or, maybe he only looked this way because, when he wore his usual clothes, the uniform of Huizhou Semiconductor Factory No. 1, Sparrow never stood up straight.
“The music you used to write, Ba, was it criminal music?” He could only say, “I don’t know.” That same night, he wrote a new banner for the front door which read, May the Red Sun keep rising for ten thousand years, in calligraphy that was accomplished but empty, a fixed smile. He might as well have written Joy! on a plastic bucket.
For as long as she could remember, right and wrong had been represented by the Party through color. Truth and beauty, for instance, were hóng (red), while criminality and falsehood were hēi (black). Her mother was red, her father was black.
The architecture was intended to make a person feel insignificant, but Ai-ming felt confusingly large, there was so much room here, a child could run in any pattern, any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.
I continue to live my life, to let my parents go and seek my own freedom. I will wait for Ai-ming to find me and I continue to believe that I will find her—tomorrow, perhaps, or in a dozen years. She will reach up for a book on a shelf. […] And when she does, she will disbelieve and then a line will come back to her, words she overheard on the street long ago but has never fully forgotten. Tomorrow beings from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say; not everything will pass.
