Do Not Say We Have Nothing

7

WHEN JIANG KAI, MY FATHER, left China in 1978, one of his suitcases was filled with more than fifty battered notebooks. The notebooks contained drafts of self-criticisms whose final pages must have been submitted, years earlier, to a superior or an authority figure. Self-criticism, samokritika in Russian, 检讨 (jiǎn tǎo) in Chinese, required that the person confess his or her mistakes, repeat the correct thinking of the Party and acknowledge the authority of the Party over him or her. Confession, according to the Party, was “a form of repentance that would bring the individual back into the collective.” Only through genuine contrition and self-criticism could a person who had fallen from grace earn rehabilitation and the hope of “resurrection,” of being returned to life.

I arrived in Shanghai on June 1, 2016. From my hotel room, I looked down at a city wreathed in mist. Skyscrapers and condominiums shouldered together in every direction, erasing even the horizon.

How the city mesmerized me. Shanghai seemed, like a library or even a single book, to hold a universe within itself. My father had arrived here in the late 1950s, a child of the countryside, in the wake of the Great Leap Forward and a man-made famine that took the lives of 36 million people, perhaps more. He had perfected his music, dreamed of both a wider world and a better one, and fallen in love. Day after day, Kai had bent over his desk, feverishly writing and copying pages, revising and reimagining his life and his moral code. We were not unalike, my father and I; we wanted to keep a record. We imagined there were truths waiting for us — about ourselves and those we loved, about the times we lived in — within our reach, if only we had the eyes to see them.

Summer fog slowly erased Shanghai from view. I stepped away from the window. I showered, changed and went down to the subway.

Underground, people gazed at screens or tapped at phones, but many drifted, as I did, through their thoughts. Near me, an old woman discreetly savoured cake, phones chimed and honked, a mother and daughter repeated the multiplication table and a child refused to disembark.

Unexpectedly, the train braked. The old woman stumbled, her cake went flying, and she fell into my lap.

For a moment, she was suspended in my arms, our faces inches from one another. A big whoop went up from people around us, followed by jovial applause. A child reprimanded her for eating on the train, another wanted to know what kind of cake it was. The woman laughed, the sound so unexpected, I nearly dropped her. She was in her late sixties, around the same age Ma would be now. In my imperfect Mandarin, I tried to give her my seat, but the woman waved me off as if I had offered her a ticket to the moon.

“Save yourself, child.” She said something else, words which sounded like, “Enough crumbs, no? Enough.”

“Yes,” I said. “Enough.”

She smiled. The subway hurried on.

I could feel my jet lag now; the world around me seemed far away as if I was carried in a jar of water. A man opened a newspaper so wide, it covered his wife and daughter. Behind them, in the windows, their reflections shifted, one behind the other.

—

In his self-criticisms, my father wrote of his love of music and the fear that he “could not overcome a desire for personal happiness.” He denounced Zhuli, gave up Sparrow and cut all ties to the Professor, his only family. He wrote of how he had stood by helplessly while first his mother, then his young sisters, and finally his father died; he said he owed his family everything, and had a duty to life. For years, Ba tried to abandon music. When I first read his self-criticisms, I glimpsed my father through the many selves he had tried to be; selves abandoned and reinvented, selves that wanted to vanish but couldn’t. That’s how I see him, sometimes, when my anger — on behalf of Ma, Zhuli, myself — subsides and turns to pity. He knew that leaving these self-criticisms behind would endanger others, yet to destroy them was impossible, so he carried them first to Hong Kong and then to Canada. Even here, he would begin new notebooks, denouncing himself and his desires, yet he could not find a way to reinvent himself or change.

Last week, preparing for this trip, I came across a detail: in 1949, Tiananmen Square retained its place as the centre of political power in China by reason of analytic geometry.

An architect, Chen Gang, posited the Square as the “zero point.” He quoted Friedrich Engels: “Zero is a definite point from which measurements are taken along a line, in one direction positively, in the other negatively. Hence the zero point is the location on which all others are dependent, to which they are all related, and by which they are all determined. Wherever we come upon zero, it represents something very definite: the limit. Thus it has greater significance than all the real magnitudes by which it is bounded.”

That summer of 1966, the year Zhuli died, was the zero point for my father. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he went to Tiananmen Square to pledge his loyalty to Chairman Mao and commit himself to fānshēn: literally, to turn over one’s body, to liberate oneself. Decades later, he watched on television as three university students stood before the Great Hall of the People bearing a letter to the government. It was April 22, 1989. The three lifted their arms, raised the petition high and fell to their knees, as if seeking clemency. Behind them in Tiananmen Square, more than 200,000 university students reacted in shock and then grief.

Why are you kneeling?

Stand up, stand up!

This is the People’s square! Why must we address the government from our knees?

How can you kneel in our name? How?

The students, who came from every political and economic background, were distraught. But the three stayed where they were, tiny figures, the petition heavy in the air, waiting for an authority figure to receive it. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes passed, and they remained on their knees. Behind them, agitation grew. When Chinese leaders failed to respond, the Tiananmen demonstrations began in earnest.

I exited the subway at Tiantong Road, emerging at an intersection where condominiums, half-constructed, opened like giant staircases to the sky. I had been to this quarter before: Hongkou is where Swirl and Big Mother Knife grew up before the war, and it is where Liu Feng, a violinist once known as Tofu Liu, now lives.

At different times, Hongkou has been a clothing district, the American-Japanese concession, and, during the rise of Hitler and the Second World War, the Shanghai Ghetto. In the 1930s, the Shanghai port could be legally entered without passport or visa; some forty thousand Jewish and other refugees from Germany, Austria, Russia, Iraq, India, Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine and elsewhere arrived here, bringing not only their languages and traumas, but also their music.

I continued south, past a sidewalk argument, around three men, their bodies fully stretched out on their motorbikes, playing cards.

At Suzhou Creek, I reached the Embankment Building. Up on the tenth floor, Mr. Liu was waiting for me. I had contacted him on WeChat and, at first, when I said I was the daughter of Jiang Kai, he had been wary. But when I told him I was looking for Ai-ming, the daughter of Sparrow, he transformed entirely. Now, the first time we were meeting in person, he greeted me as if he had known me all my life. “Ma-li!” he said. “Come in, come in! Have you eaten? My daughter picked up these sugar pyramids….”

Books, sheet music, compact discs, cassettes and records occupied every inch of space. After a thirty-year teaching career at the Shanghai Conservatory, he had retired last month and moved his office home. “Don’t trip,” he said. “I don’t have insurance.”

We went sideways through the kitchen and into the living room. Across the river, Shanghai’s dramatic skyscrapers floated, surreal. We were a world away, but only a single generation, from the city my father had known.

Mr. Liu told me that, since the 1990s, he had watched this skyline come into existence. “When my daughter was born, none of these buildings were even a scribble on paper. These three,” he said, pointing out the tallest ones, “were meant to symbolize the past, present and future. But the government’s words were very boring. Instead, people call them the ‘three-piece kitchen set.’ You see? There’s the bottle opener. The whisk. And…what would you say in English? A turkey baster.”

I laughed. “I think the whisk is the most beautiful, Mr. Liu.” It was a cylindrical spiral like a ribbon in motion.

“I agree. But Shanghai still looks like a tool belt. By the way, don’t be so formal! Please call me Tofu Liu. That’s what everyone calls me, even my grandkids.”

Before us, the lights of the buildings began to glow.

Tofu Liu turned his back on the city. We sat down at a little table where someone had been sorting pencil crayons. He told me that he had entered the Shanghai Conservatory the same year as Zhuli. “We both studied under the same violin teacher, Tan Hong. My father was a convicted rightist, a counter-revolutionary, just like Zhuli’s father. I was a little in love with her, even while I envied her talent.” During the Cultural Revolution, the Conservatory had closed. “Not one piano survived. Not one.” He himself was sent to a camp in Heilongjiang Province, in the frozen borderlands of the Northeast. “We had to wear either blue, grey or black. Our hair had to be short. We had to wear the same kind of cap. That was only the beginning. The wind was glacial. We were beside a river, and on the other side of the river was Russia. We worked in coal mines. We had no skills in this work and almost every week, someone was seriously injured or killed. The Party replaced them. The only books available to us were the writings of Chairman Mao. We had daily self-criticism and denunciation sessions. This went on for six years.”

In 1977, when the Cultural Revolution ended, Liu ran away from the camp and returned to Shanghai, where he sought out his former teacher, Tan Hong.

“We talked about Zhuli for a long time and about others we had known. Then Professor Tan asked me, ‘Tofu Liu, do you wish to come back to the Conservatory and complete your studies?’

“I said I did.

“ ‘After everything that’s happened, why?’

“His question devastated me. How could I pretend that music was salvation? How could I commit myself to something so powerless? I had been a miner for six years, there was coal dust in my lungs, I’d broken all the fingers of my right hand, how could I possibly hold a violin? I told him, ‘I don’t know.’ But he kept pushing me for an answer. It wasn’t enough for him to hear that I loved music, that it had comforted me all this time, and I had promised myself that if I survived, I would devote my life to it. There were thousands of applicants for a handful of spots at the Conservatory. They all loved music as much as I did. Finally I told him the truth. I said, ‘Because music is nothing. It is nothing and yet it belongs to me. Despite everything that’s happened, it’s myself that I believe in.’

“Tan Hong shook my hand. He said, ‘Young Liu, welcome back to the Conservatory. Welcome home.’ ”

Tofu Liu showed me his mementos. These included a photo of Zhuli performing with the Conservatory’s string quartet when she was nine years old and a wire recording of Zhuli and Kai playing Smetana’s “From My Homeland,” which Liu had kept hidden until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

“But, Mr. Liu, how could you possibly hide these things?”

He shrugged, smiling. “Before I was sent to the Russian border, I cut a small hole in the parquet floor of my bedroom in Shanghai. You know how hard parquet is! All I had was a kitchen knife. It took me two terrible weeks. I was convinced that Red Guards would burst into the room and that would be the end of me. I buried a dozen wire recordings, some photos and scores, and my violin. Ten years later, when I pulled it up, there was a nest of mice inside the violin…But look at this wire.” He lifted the spool and showed it to me. It was pristine. “Would you like to hear it?”

I nodded, unable to speak.

Delicately, he loaded the spool into an antique wire recorder. When it was ready, he turned a knob.

The notes came to me. I half turned away.

I thought I saw curtains shift and Ba looking down at me from a window above. On the ninth floor, he leaned out. Did anyone else see him? Was it only me? My father had blindfolded himself, he had tied a piece of cloth over his face before he took his life. I had learned this only after obtaining copies of the Hong Kong police files, and the detail had broken me.

This was the first time I had ever heard Ba playing the piano. Jiang Kai seemed a stranger to me, someone who had always been more alive, more full of memory, than I could know. And yet, hearing Zhuli’s violin, her measured, open voice, why did I feel as if I had known her all my life?

We listened to the recording three, four, five times. Each time I heard something different, a separation and a unity, the musicians, dust, the machine, our breathing. Music. Each time, at the end, I heard my father’s voice, speaking. I had not heard it since I was ten years old. His voice like no other voice that had ever lived.

I wept. Seeing that I was upset, Mr. Liu brought me a cup of tea. “It’s difficult to understand,” he said. “The pressure on us was unimaginable. Don’t forget, back then, your father was only seventeen years old….we were all too young.”

We returned to the table. I showed him my copy of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records.

“Teacher Liu,” I said, “I’ve made tens of thousands of copies of all the notebooks. With a few keystrokes, it’s possible to send files anywhere in the world, instantaneously. I want it to exist everywhere, to keep growing and changing.” From my bag, I took out Sparrow’s composition, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. “This is the piece of music I mentioned to you. It seems only right to perform it here in Shanghai. To record it. But…I really wonder at my sanity.”

Liu took the pages. Slowly he read through them.

I watched the curtains move and the wind alter; Ba and Ma had left this world, yet I was here in Shanghai. I still breathed and changed and dreamed.

After a long time, Liu looked up from the score. “Ma-li,” he said, “I’m sure you know that, without obsession, there is no life’s work. But where does this attentiveness come from? Have you asked yourself? Surely it’s what we each carry, in greater and greater quantity as we age, remembrance.” He used the word jì yì, which has two meanings: 记忆 (to recall, record) and 技艺 (art). He was silent for a moment, looking down at the pages. “The music reminds me of something Zhuli said when we were rehearsing Prokofiev. She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear? Is it better to have been loved, or to love? Of all his compositions, this is Teacher Sparrow’s most extraordinary.”

He opened his violin case and lifted the instrument out. A phrase filled the room, it seemed to move both backwards and forwards, as if Sparrow wished to rewrite time itself. Note by note, I felt as if I was being reconfigured.

When Teacher Liu set the violin down, he asked me, “Do you play the piano?”

“I never learned.”

“Then I’ll arrange everything. Teacher Sparrow meant for this music to be heard here.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

Before I left, I showed him a photograph of Ai-ming.

“Why, it’s Zhuli isn’t it?” he said in surprise, staring at the image. “It must be. No? It’s Teacher Sparrow’s daughter? Ai-ming. Ah, well. How remarkable. She has the very same face as Miss Zhuli.”

Tofu Liu gave me the recording to keep and I gave him a copy of Sparrow’s music. I remembered, then, something that Ai-ming had said. I assumed that when the story finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. “But that’s how the world is, isn’t it?”

6

SPARROW WAS PEDALLING SLOWLY home from Huizhou Wooden Crate Factory, pushed forward by a steady breeze. It was late August, just after rainfall. Along the road, loudspeakers announced a special program: “Tonight in Beijing, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy, will perform for Madame Mao. This is their third concert in the city, one of a total of six performances in China.”

The newsreader had said the date, September 14, 1973.

But it was 1976. The concert had been almost three years before. Others, too, were staring up at the loudspeakers, just as baffled. It had been nearly a decade since the radio had broadcast any music besides the eighteen approved revolutionary operas. Now, music exploded above them, the feverish opening crescendo of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Sparrow coasted to a stop, bewildered by its detail, the cheerful, almost absurd piano and the tinkling brass.

By the time he reached home, the second half of the program had begun. His daughter ran out to meet him. “It’s a new work by Madame Mao!”

Sparrow smiled, despite himself. “No, Ai-ming. This is Beethoven and it comes from another century.” This is a fragment, he thought, of something that once existed but that no longer grows here, like a field cut down.

He went inside. The Sixth Symphony, Beethoven’s Pastoral, trotted gaily through the rooms. Even Big Mother was lost in thought. He thought the walls were creeping nearer to him, they brushed his arms and scraped the back of his neck. You could close a book and forget about it, knowing it would not lose its contents when you stopped reading, but music wasn’t the same, not for him, it was most alive when it was heard. Year after year, he had wanted to play and replay it, to take it apart into its component pieces and build it once more. And then, finally, after six years, after seven, and then a decade, his memory had gone quiet. Without trying, he had stopped remembering. But this broadcast, what was it? Were they hearing the future or was it only the final outburst of the past? Long ago, He Luting had shouted, “Shame, shame. You should be ashamed,” and Zhuli said, “I will make Prokofiev himself proud.” If the concert truly took place in Beijing, Kai must have attended. A sound inside a sound. But what if all of this was only in his mind?

The applause that came was so fierce, he feared the radio might topple over. Violent catapults of applause, rhythmic, sustained.

From the opposite side of the room, Big Mother said, “What bloody change is coming now?”

The music was nothing more than a broadcast, a simple program, but he turned and saw exultation on his daughter’s face. Little Ai-ming had pressed her forehead up against the radio, his daughter was overjoyed, she had been transported, she looked as if all her nerves were alight. She looked like Zhuli. For a moment he had no idea where he was. He wanted to pull her back, to take the machine away and bury it noiselessly in the ground. Trembling with cold, he walked across the room and switched the radio off.

—

Because her father was so quiet, Ai-ming had, from an early age, turned to Big Mother Knife; her grandmother was her confidante, her teacher and also her pillow. No one in this life cared about her as Big Mother did, and so she took great pleasure in climbing over her, sleeping on her and fluffing Big Mother’s curls. Ling, her actual mother, had been reassigned to Shanghai nearly five years ago, and only visited once each year, during Spring Festival. Her father, Sparrow, was the Bird of Quiet.

“Don’t be fooled,” Big Mother once told her. “He’s not moving, as usual, and he’s not thinking either, sadly. Your father is empty as a walnut shell.” She had leaned close and whispered in Ai-ming’s ear: “The world is like a banana, easily bruised. Now is the time to watch and observe, not to judge. Ai-ming, believing everything in books is worse than having no books at all.”

For weeks after, Ai-ming wondered about these words. On the August night when the Philadelphia Orchestra performance was broadcast, she had spied on her father as he listened to this Beethoven, and she observed how, for at least a year afterwards, the radio returned to its usual music, playing only Shajiabang and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Once, though, there had been a broadcast of Albanian music, and it had made Sparrow stop what he was doing and turn towards the radio, as if it were an intruder. In school, as the daughter of a class enemy she was forbidden to join the Young Pioneers, among other injustices. This was a new word for her, injustice, and she liked to roll it on her tongue for the shock of it. 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. Are you a good person, she thought, looking at her teacher, or are you a good revolutionary? Are you a good revolutionary, she thought, looking at Big Mother Knife, or are you a good grandmother? Was it even possible to be both?

The game intrigued her. How pleasurable it was to bury words inside the soil of her thoughts. She imitated her father’s expression, a studied emptiness. But sometimes his expression failed him. Sometimes Sparrow looked at her with so much anxiety, she felt her hair stand on end. Ba, she thought, are you a good person or a good worker? Is Chairman Mao a good person or a good leader?

One morning, Big Mother unlocked the battered suitcase that was used primarily as their dining table. Inside the trunk was a single straw shoe, a pretty blue dress, a sheaf of music in jianpu notation, and a cardboard box full of notebooks. Her first observation was that the books were grubby.

“Your mouth is hanging open,” Big Mother said.

Her grandmother fanned the notebooks out, removed three and told Ai-ming to close the suitcase. When it was latched and locked, Big Mother set the notebooks down and opened the first one: the pages looked even older than her grandmother. Big Mother’s face swooped down as if to taste the paper. From this position, she turned her head and looked at Ai-ming. “This,” she whispered gruffly, “is what excellent calligraphy looks like.”

Ai-ming went in for a closer look. The characters seemed to hover just above the paper, like ink over water. They had the pristine cleanliness of winter flowers.

“Waaa! Isn’t it strong?” Big Mother said.

Delight squeezed Ai-ming’s heart. “Waaa!” she whispered.

Big Mother straightened, grunting her approval. “Of course, the calligraphy is not as robust as Chairman Mao’s but still, it’s pretty good. Refined yet with a depth of movement. Maybe…you want to read some to me. Chapter 1, but no more. You’re still far too young.”

It was early morning. Her father was at the factory which, last year had been reborn. Now it was Huizhou Semiconductor Factory No. 1, and he had gone from building wooden crates to making radios. The Bird of Quiet could assemble the new Red Lamp 711 shortwave radio in the shake of a feather.

Outside, loudspeakers were chiding the world. Rain fell in continuous sheets, beating the tin roof like a a regiment of horses, so they hid under the blankets. The many wrinkles on Big Mother’s face reminded Ai-ming of the dry, patient earth in February, thirsty for spring.

How can you ignore this sharp awl that pierces your heart? If you yearn for things outside yourself, you will never obtain what you are seeking.

And so the novel of Da-wei and May Fourth began once more.

—

It pleased Big Mother Knife that Ai-ming did not appear to notice the transition from the original Book of Records to the new chapters written by Wen the Dreamer. Unable to recover the rest of the book, he had simply continued on from Chapter 31. He, like the character of May Fourth, would spend the greater part of his life in the deserts of Gansu, Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan, where, they said, more than three hundred ancient settlements lay beneath the sand. Their traces — documents on wood and paper, silks and household objects — had endured, preserved by the dry air. In the new chapters, Wen continued the old code, hiding their whereabouts inside the names of characters. Sometimes the code was descriptive: wěi 暐 (the bright shining of the sun), wēi 微 (a fine rain), or wěi 渨 (a cove, or a bend in the hills). Sometimes heartbreaking: wèi 未 (not) or wéi 偉 (to flow backwards).

Throughout her childhood, little Ai-ming asked for Chapter 23 to be reread so many times, the words must have shown up in her dreams. What the child pictured, or how she made sense of it, Big Mother could not say. “This literary resurrection of yours,” she wrote to Wen the Dreamer, “has won another admirer.” She meant Ai-ming but Wen the Dreamer imagined Zhuli, now grown. It was 1976, and Zhuli would have been twenty-five years old. Big Mother had begun letter after letter, telling Swirl that her daughter was gone, but she did not have the courage to send a single one. In September of that year, she wrote that Zhuli had received permission to study at the Paris Conservatory: their beloved child had crossed over into the West. Big Mother half believed her own letters. It was the first time since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that such a lie was even remotely credible. My beloved Swirl, she thought, I fear you will never forgive me. She sealed the letter and entrusted it to their messenger, Projectionist Bang, who travelled the hinterlands showing movies in the villages, and was a trusted confidant of Wen the Dreamer.

That same September, the end of the beginning came.

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 stood before the newspaper boards and squinted at the text. Squinting made no difference; these were yesterday’s papers. 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 factory 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. And her son had no choice but to accept it all. He let them pour all their words into him as if the life inside him had burned away, as if his own two hands had knotted the rope around Zhuli. Yet Big Mother thought she understood. In this country, rage had no place to exist except deep inside, turned against oneself. This is what had become of her son, he had used his anger to tear himself apart.

Yes, how simple a thing it was to weep, she thought, gazing out at the frenzy of grief and uncertainty around her. She tried not to think of Da Shan and Flying Bear, of Zhuli, of all the names that would disappear completely, relegated to history so as not to disturb the living. White paper flowers, the traditional symbol of mourning, inundated every tree. She wept with rage and helplessness at all the crimes for which the death of an old, treacherous man could never answer.

—

Ai-ming was six years old and had never seen a foreigner before, but she thought the tall Chinese man with the shiny shoes and the pristine shirt with buttons must be from another province, if not from another age, perhaps the future. He had wavy hair, immaculate eyebrows, round eyes, a clean-shaven face and in his pocket, bright as sunlight, a golden pen. She had not known, initially, that there was a stranger in the house. When the music began to play, she had turned, as if in a dream, and rushed towards it. Looking through the open door was like peering into a cave. They were facing her, New Shirt and her father, but they were so busy looking at something, that she snuck inside and melted against the wall. If her father didn’t know she was there, how could he make her go away?

As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the two men sharpened. New Shirt was clearly listening to the music, but Ba looked all chewed up. His elbows and knees contorted, he was folded up as if to protect his hands. Music held them within its downpour. Ai-ming squeezed her eyes shut and popped them open again. No, they were still there. Her father stared at nothing. The music, a joyful dance, made her think of the poem “Famous pieces and grand words,” and of the carcasses of dead radios Sparrow sometimes carried home, tinkering with them in his spare time. Now the music coiled into another feeling, it seemed to start all over again but suddenly it ended. New Shirt reached out to a square box that had a big whisker. He lifted a circle from the square, so shiny black it was almost blue, and he turned the circle upside down. He flicked a switch and pushed the whisker down. Her father said, “No, it’s enough. Don’t play the second side.”

Another switch was turned. Ai-ming felt as if the remains of the music were treading silently from the room. Through the doorway, the light sagged in, pinkish grey.

“Kai, your performance tomorrow…what time will it be?” Even Ba’s words sounded smaller.

“You must come.” Kai reached into the pocket that held his golden pen. He retrieved a square of paper and gave it to her father. “It’s in the factory buildings. We’re doing Beethoven’s ‘Emperor,’ Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 and an American composer.” He said so many foreign words, Ai-ming wanted to cry out at the strangeness of it. “Li Delun is conducting.”

Her father held the paper and stared at it as if he could not read.

“All through the Cultural Revolution, we were able to perform,” Kai said. “Seiji Ozawa visited the Central Philharmonic last year. Did you know he was born in Manchuria? Not everything disappeared, it was only put aside.”

“What happened to He Luting? The last time I saw him was on television….Years ago now, 1968.”

“I heard it was Chairman Mao himself who ordered He Luting released from prison.” The man’s voice was smooth, like unmarked paper. “A few years ago, the charges were dropped and his name cleared.”

Kai picked up a square of cardboard and looked into its image. “These recordings are so rare now, Sparrow. Last October, people in Beijing began to unearth the records they had hidden. After Madame Mao was arested, we thought everything would go back to the way it was but…People know the Cultural Revolution is finally over, it was all the work of Madame Mao, the Gang of Four, and so on, that’s what the government says, but they can’t help being cautious. Not many records have resurfaced. I did meet a professor at Beijing University who has a small treasure of scores, but that’s all. Isaac Stern will visit Beijing and Shanghai, have you heard? Next year.” Sparrow said nothing, Kai adjusted his long legs and continued. “When Ozawa came, he said our ability to interpret the music had fundamentally changed….” He extended his hands as if he were carrying two eggs. “As if an entire emotional range was lost to us, but we ourselves couldn’t hear it. Every musician in the orchestra knew they’d been cheated. But until that moment, we never had to face it so directly.”

“Maybe some people always knew,” Sparrow said. “Maybe they never stopped knowing what was counterfeit.”

Kai brushed his fingers against his own mouth, as if to rid himself of dust.

Now Sparrow addressed the other man as if he were a student, or a younger brother. “Now that things are changing, what will you do, Comrade? Do you still hope to study in the West?”

“Sparrow, please don’t misunderstand.”

Her father shifted his cotton pants, pulling them up slightly as if he was sitting outside and the sun warming his ankles.

“We’ve started auditions at the Shanghai Conservatory,” Kai said. “There are over a thousand applicants for a handful of spots. He Luting will be reinstated as President. The old faculty will be invited back. Your father, too. And you. He Luting specifically asked me to visit you.”

“My father is in Anhui Province. I’ll write down the name of the labour camp for you.”

“Sparrow, some of the applications are from your former students. Remember Old Wu? They don’t forget. Some of them thought they might never touch a violin or a piano again.”

They spoke of names and places Ai-ming didn’t know. In fact, she had never heard her father string together so many sentences in a row. It was as if the Bird of Quiet had taken off a coat of feathers, or put one on, and become another creature. Outside, her grandmother was calling for her, but Ai-ming burrowed even further into the shadows. Eventually Big Mother shouted something about eating frozen pineapple on a stick, and creaked away.

“…but Shostakovich died.”

“When?”

“Two years ago. Li Delun managed to get hold of his last symphony, which none of us had heard. And Symphony No. 4, which he withdrew, remember? And a series of string quartets…Where are your brothers?”

“In the Northwest. Flying Bear is in Tibet. Da Shan joined the People’s Liberation Army.”

“Do they come to see you?”

“No, they don’t have permission.”

Kai said, “These reforms will give us back what was taken. I honestly believe this. You must have faith, Sparrow.”

There was more music. As they listened, Sparrow and the man sat so close together, they made a single confused shape.

“Sparrow, I’ve been thinking about Zhuli—”

“I can’t…Tell me instead, what record is this?”

“This? Don’t you remember, it’s Stokowski’s transcription of Bach. The chorale preludes. ‘For every vital movement in the world around us, there is a corresponding movement within us, a feeling.’ ”

They used foreign words to describe the sound, which made her feel as if the night sky had been slipped into her pocket.

“Since the reform and opening up, I’ve tried to — it’s very difficult — I can’t stop thinking about her, about Zhuli. Do you find that strange?”

“No, Sparrow. But…no one is responsible for what happened.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Come back and teach at the Conservatory. You’ll be able to write again, to continue where you left off. What happened to your symphonies?”

Her father laughed and the sound chilled her. “My symphonies…”

Ai-ming must have slept because when she opened her eyes again, Kai was gone. It was only Sparrow sitting in front of the square box, leaning towards it as if to another, more beloved, child. When Big Mother lit the lamp and found her curled up on the floor, she gave Ai-ming the needle eye.

“I was listening to music,” Ai-ming said. “And I had a stomach ache.” She smiled because her own words sounded preposterous.

“Who gave you permission to have a stomach-anything!”

The Bird of Quiet paid no attention.

Early the next morning, she found him sitting outside, smoking peacefully, oblivious to the breakfast Big Mother had prepared. One by one, Ai-ming ate all his spicy cucumbers.

The Bird of Quiet was a shy creature. One had to approach him softly, as if he were a goat. “Who built that singing box?” she whispered.

He started. She feared that everything she did unsettled him, and it made her so mad she wanted to shout at him and slap herself.

Sparrow said it wasn’t a singing box, it was an “electric singing engine,” a record player.

“I want to see it.”

He brought out the box once more. When he lifted and let go of its sturdy whisker she could not tell if her father was bothered or tired, or only lost. The piece of music with the slow, spare notes turned out to be Variation No. 25 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. She told her father that hearing the music was like looking into a radio. What she meant was that, even looking at the innards of the sets her father brought home, even staring into the belly of the machine, into the thing itself, electricity and sound remained as exquisitely mysterious as the night sky.

He looked at her with such sadness, as if she were someone else entirely. He taught her the first foreign names she ever learned: the first, Bā Hè (Bach) and the second, Gù Ěr Dé (Glenn Gould).

—

Inside Sparrow, sounds accumulated. Bells, birds and the uneven cracking of the trees, loud and quiet insects, songs that spilled from people even if they never intended to make a noise. He suspected he was doing the same. Was he, unconsciously, humming a folk song or a Bach partita, had he done it when he walked with Ai-ming at night, hoping to turn her eyes to something larger? The hiss of small, soldering devices crackled in his ears, the same tired jokes, the same clanking and capacitors, resistors and minuscule shunts, the high-pitched pain in his hands, the sly meetings and self-criticism sessions, the repeated slogans like a knife sharpened to dullness: sound was alive and disturbing and outside of any individual’s control. Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite. One night he dreamed that he sat in a concert hall. Around him programs fluttered, voices hummed, bags opened and closed, the orchestra keened towards harmony. Giddy with joy, full of nervous anticipation, he awaited the performance of his own Symphony No. 3. A chime summoned the last members of the audience. The lights dimmed. Quiet settled. He watched, unable to move, as Zhuli walked onto the stage in a long blue dress. She searched the auditorium for him. Her hands were empty. He woke.

—

In the Cultural Palace of the People, on the grounds of the Huizhou Battery Factory, Sparrow presented his ticket, expecting to be turned away. Instead he was shown to a row of reserved seats. Everywhere was movement. Upwards of a thousand people pressed into the hall, Party cadres (grey), office workers (white), assembly line workers (blue), filing beneath a cascading banner that read: Fully expose and condemn the treason committed by the Gang of Four!

Sparrow found his seat. Beside him, a woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in a pale green skirt and a flowered blouse, was turning heads. A few months ago, the flowered blouse would have been deemed unacceptable, even criminal; but today it was merely odd. The young woman, confusingly familiar, wore her hair loose. Unbraided, it curled in arabesques. There was a mark on the underside of her chin, the shape of a thumb, a violinist’s mark. She turned and met his gaze. Sparrow blinked, embarrassed to be caught staring. He turned back to the stage. Eventually the conductor of the Central Philharmonic, Li Delun, stepped forward. From the podium, Li stared out with a quivery calm. The two pens in his breast pocket shone extravagantly. Li introduced the concert program (Mahler, Beethoven and Copland) and then began speaking, at length, about the successor to Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping. It was extraordinary that Deng had come to power. He, too, had been brought down by the Cultural Revolution, his political career destroyed and his family targeted. His eldest son had been tortured by Red Guards and, in 1966, fell, or was pushed, out of a third-storey window, the same as San Li. But father and son had outlasted the turmoil, the son now famous in his wheelchair. Deng had out-manoeuvred Madame Mao and her admirers, who now languished in prison. Now, with the backing of the Politburo, he was unrolling a series of economic and political reforms. In the auditorium, Li’s speech was a kind of song in itself, in which people intermittently cried out, “Ashes burn once more!” and “Strive to implement the Four Modernizations of Comrade Deng!” The Great Helmsman’s name, xiǎo píng, meant “little bottle” and so, in the trees just outside, someone had hung a collection of small green bottles, along with colourful banners that read, “Deng Blue Skies.” The glass tinkled in the breeze, a hope for better days.

Facing waves of applause, Li cried out, “Let us build a just society, a revolutionary China fit for a musical people!”

Beside Sparrow, the young woman sighed as if wishing to propel herself onto the stage where the musicians were now filing out in solemn rows.

The Central Philharmonic wore their everyday clothing, grey or blue slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirts. Sparrow’s heart was beating so oddly, he felt it was detaching from his body. The sound of the orchestra tuning chilled him; strings, woodwinds and brass made their simultaneous climb or descent to a sustained A, and an oboe fluttered up the scale like a thought set loose. Sparrow had not seen a score since 1968, and the ones used by the Philharmonic appeared to be hand-copied. The music stands, too, were makeshift, held together by tape, string and wooden splints. He felt the clattering tap of Li Delun’s baton on the music stand as if the conductor had rapped on Sparrow’s own spine.

Mahler’s Ninth Symphony rose in a tentative hum.

The house lights had remained up and every face in the audience, every small reaction, was visible. No one fidgeted. On stage, the musicians leaned forward, as if they were sliding across the same tilting boat. A bright red banner gave way at one corner, “Premier Zhou Enlai lives forever in our hearts.” It folded diagonally but didn’t fall.

Danger seemed to come from every side. The young woman’s hands were covering her face and he wanted desperately to take them and place them in her lap. You must not let them see, he thought. If they see that you are devoted to it, they will take it from you.

The reverie of the first movement sharpened to a hallucinatory edge. Sparrow silenced the music by thinking about Mahler himself. Late in life, the composer had discovered, in German translation, the poets Li Bai and Wang Wei, and their poetry had provided the text for Mahler’s song symphony, “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth). The poems had been translated into French, and then into German, and from there Mahler had made his own additions so that the poems, copies of mistranslated copies, were almost untraceable to their beginnings. But some were known, including Wang Wei’s “Farewell,” familiar to everyone of his and his mother’s generation, even if they no longer recited the lines. “At odds with the world, return to rest by the south hill…”

Over the next hour, Sparrow succeeded in pushing away the sound of the orchestra. It was warm in the hall and his shirt was damp, the damp hardening to an icy cold.

There was no intermission. As the piano was being wheeled out for Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, Li Delun came to the microphone again. “We dedicate this Concerto No. 5 to our resurrected comrade, He Luting, President of the Shanghai Conservatory,” he said. “Long live Chairman Deng! Long live the Communist Party of China! Long live our country!” In the hall, surprise and consternation but also sustained applause and even, Sparrow thought, cautious jubilation. Amidst the noise Kai came forward and took his seat at the piano. It was small, the kind a well-to-do family might have kept in their home before the Cultural Revolution. It was the first piano Sparrow had seen since 1966.

Kai sat with his back rigidly straight. He had no score in front of him. Sparrow could see where his trousers, cuffed unevenly, lifted to expose his ankles. The pianist waited, both hands on his thighs, as the concerto opened in controlled exclamations, vibrating across the auditorium. Kai began, traversing the scales with a familiar clarity, only the tips of his body — head, fingers and feet — moving. Inside Sparrow’s head, multiple versions played; he simultaneously saw the performance and heard a memory, a recording. He listened to the immense space between then and now. When the allegro began, Sparrow closed his eyes. Up and down the scales again, as if Kai were telling him there is no way out, there is only the path back again, and even when we think we’re free, we only endlessly return. The concerto’s beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body. He remembered, long ago, playing Flying Bear’s violin for Zhuli. Beside him, the young woman’s eyes were glassy with tears that did not fall. Sparrow could not imagine weeping openly. He inhaled and found himself, against his will, listening. Near the end of the movement, the first, jubilant chords repeated, but the notes no longer conveyed the original feeling. Underneath was an ending, a buried movement, the sound of one life held captive by another. The concerto swept on, never pausing to dwell on its own astonishing constructions.

On stage, the first violinist played with his whole body and then, suddenly, as if remembering the audience, he closed up again. Sparrow tried to place Zhuli before him. Beneath the violin, her supporting arm had always appeared so pale. He remembered her humility before the music, even as a child she had felt accountable to it. The notes went on, as if living another life. He could have followed Kai to Beijing. But he had never known how to write music, to perform music, and yet be silent.

Tumultuous applause swept over him. Kai stood, all the musicians stood, their white shirts, damp with sweat, feathery against their bodies. The encores came.

Sparrow saw the young woman staring straight ahead and he recognized in her an ambition, a desire, that he was certain he no longer possessed. Would he ever contain that hunger, that wholeness, again?

—

Late that night, he played a series of nothings on an erhu that Kai gave him. Songs broke off and became other songs, Shajiabang sliding into “Night Bell from the Old Temple,” breaking into a fragment of Bach’s Partita No. 6 as if music blew through his mind like scattered pages. He kept on this way, playing the beginning of one piece and the end of another, and Kai lay back and gazed at the nearness of the ceiling. Kai had the key to this room where the Philharmonic’s instruments and record players were stored, but they could have been in Room 103, in Shanghai, in the remote Northwest or the far South, anywhere with four walls and only the two of them. Sparrow let himself believe they had found their way back to an earlier time. Kai asked him to play “Moon Reflected on Second Spring,” and Sparrow played it once, and once again, realizing that he could not recall the last time he had heard it. Perhaps on the radio in 1964. After that, it had simply disappeared. He felt a humming in his hands and a renewed, almost unbearable, pleasure. By the time professors from the Central Conservatory had discovered the composer of “Moon Reflected,” the blind erhu player, Ah Bing, was in his seventies. “If only you had come ten years earlier,” Ah Bing had famously said, “I could have played better.” The professors captured six songs on a recorder before they ran out of wire. When the songs reached the capital, Ah Bing was acclaimed as one of the nation’s master composers. He died only a few months later, and those six recorded songs became all that survived of his work. “Moon Reflected on Second Spring” was an elegy, a spiral of both radiance and sorrow.

Kai had other records. Overcome with curiosity, Sparrow set the erhu aside. Going through the collection, he felt like a child standing before a wall of colours. He chose Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Kai pushed blankets under the door to dampen the sound and opened another bottle of baijiu. They lay side by side on the thin mat, the tops of their heads grazing the record player.

“Shostakovich was criticized for the fourth movement,” Kai said. “Do you remember? The Union of Composers said it was inauthentic joy.”

“But inauthentic joy is also an emotion, experienced by us all.”

“The censors are always the first to recognize it, aren’t they?” Kai smiled and time ran backwards. Biscuit. The name came unexpectedly to Sparrow. He had known the young woman in the pale green skirt and flowered blouse. She had been a violinist. She had been the same age as Zhuli.

Kai was still speaking. “Later on, Shostakovich reused pieces of the fourth movement in his patriotic work, cantatas to Stalin and so on. Did you know? All those fragments of inauthentic joy. In 1948, when his music was banned, he publicly accepted the wisdom of the Party. But, each night, after the long meetings, he went home and composed. He was working on his Violin Concerto No. 1 and, for the first time, he hid his name inside the work.”

Sparrow knew but had not thought of it in years. The signature, D, E-flat, C and B, which in German notation read D, Es, C, H, curled like a dissonance, or a question, in Shostakovich’s music.

The Fifth was everything Sparrow remembered, tortured, contradictory, lurid, gleeful. The room ceased to exist, the record itself became superfluous, the symphony came from his own thoughts, as if it had always been there, circling endlessly.

Sip by sip, the wine loosened their reserve. Kai said that in Beijing, in 1968, the struggle sessions had started up all over again. Mass denunciations were moved into stadiums. He saw a student humiliated and tortured in front of thousands of Red Guards.

“For what crime?”

“He said the children of political criminals shouldn’t be persecuted. That class status shouldn’t pass down across generations.”

The children of class enemies. Like Zhuli. Like Ai-ming. “What was his punishment?”

Kai turned, surprised by the question. “He died.”

When Sparrow asked how, he said, simply, “They shot him.”

Kai wiped his hand over his mouth. “Ozawa has promised to bring a few of us to America. I have this hope…”

The last time they had been alone, Shanghai was on the verge of change. This small room seemed to Sparrow like a hidden space inside the Conservatory. When he left this room, perhaps the door would lead him back to the hallway of the fourth floor, where the walls were covered with posters. He would arrive in his office before it was too late, he would tell his cousin that all things, even courage, pass from this world. Everything passes. But he could not get there in time. When he entered the room, he saw her again, just as she was. Each year, as he grew older, as the Zhuli in his memory grew younger, as Da Shan and Flying Bear drifted further away, he knew he should let them go. But how could he explain it? The person inside him, the composer who once existed, would not allow it. And Sparrow, himself, could not erase the composer. The composer wanted to tell Kai that no one, not even Deng Xiaoping, and nothing, no reform or change or disavowal, could return those years to them.

“Sometimes I think of leaving. If you had the chance to go overseas, Sparrow, would you?”

He smiled, wanting to make light of himself. “Even taking the train to Shanghai during Spring Festival feels like crossing the ocean. I never thought I would grow accustomed to the South but, after all this time, I feel at home here.” When he heard the words spoken aloud, they felt true.

Kai gestured towards the ceiling as if it were Inner Mongolia. “All the educated youth are going out of their minds, trying to get back to the city. And in Shanghai, they’re rioting, there are no jobs. Sparrow, look at it from their perspective. It would be unimaginable to them that someone could turn down a position at the Conservatory.”

“I prefer to wire a circuit board than to compose a symphony.” Inside the factory, Sparrow’s hands had learned another language entirely. His body had altered. Chairman Mao had not been wrong, to change one’s thinking, one had only to change one’s conditions.

Kai lit a cigarette and gave it to him. They were the luxury Phoenix brand, which Sparrow had never even seen before. Kai lit another for himself, holding it out to one side. The ashes fell harmlessly onto the concrete floor. The ceiling disappeared behind smoke.

“I used to hear music in everything,” Sparrow said, but the sentence hung between them. He did not know how to finish it.

“Dear Sparrow…” As Kai exhaled, he changed position so that the crook of his left arm partially covered his face. “I’m sorry for everything, I’m truly sorry….we were all alone but Zhuli’s situation was the most desperate. We all betrayed ourselves in some way. Not you…but I responded in the only way that I knew how. All I wanted was to protect those years of effort, to protect what I loved. I know I was wrong.” The words seemed to come from a far corner of the room, detached from Kai. “We all made mistakes….but can’t you see that it’s finished now. More than a decade has passed….She always said your talent was the one that mattered and she was right. What happened to your Symphony No. 3? It was your masterpiece. It was so full of contradictions, so immense and alive. I haven’t heard it in ten years, but I could still play it….You must have finished it by now.”

“I can’t even remember how it began,” he said. He wanted to ask Kai if he had denounced Zhuli, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. And it was true that everyone had denounced another to save themselves, even Ba Lute, even his brothers. Kai’s answer wouldn’t bring her back. “You loved her, too, didn’t you?”

“Zhuli is gone,” he said quietly. “Many people are gone, can’t you see?”

“I don’t see.”

Kai turned onto his side and looked at him, a beseeching look. He crushed out his cigarette and unthinkingly lit another, unable to bear the silence.

“At Premier Zhou Enlai’s funeral,” he said, “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? Around Tiananmen Square, there were so many mourners…hundreds of thousands of workers. Crying openly because for a day or two, they could grieve in public. The police came and gathered up all the funeral wreaths. People were outraged. They gathered in the Square shouting, ‘Give us back our flowers! Give them back!’ They shouted, ‘Long live Premier Zhou Enlai!’ ”

Sparrow wanted to listen to Symphony No. 5 again, to the reflective and reflecting largo. 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.” Did the composer inside Sparrow have the will to do this? But if he knew the will and the talent were gone, what good would it do to begin again?

“Sparrow, remember the classics we memorized? The words are still true. ‘We have no ties of kinship or even provenance, but I am bound to him by ties of sentiment and I share his sorrows and misfortunes.’ We’ve waited our whole lives and now the country is finally opening up. I’ve been thinking…there are ways to begin again. We could leave.”

The possibilities before Sparrow, which should have given him joy, instead broke his heart. He was no longer the same person.

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. Perhaps they had loved one another, but now Sparrow had his parents to care for. They relied on him, and his life was not his own, it belonged to his wife and to Ai-ming as well. And it was true, factory work had brought a peace he had never known before. The routine had freed him.

Kai’s mouth was against his shoulder, the skin of his neck. They lay like this, unable to move forward, unable to continue.

Kai said, “What you said is true. I loved her. I loved you both.”

“There was no shame in that.”

“No,” he said quietly. “But I was ashamed.”

“We were young.”

“It was a kind of love, only I didn’t comprehend.”

“If you have the chance to go to America, you must go. Don’t let the opportunity pass. After all you’ve seen, all that’s been done, don’t turn back. Your family, and Zhuli, too, would have said the same.”

Kai nodded.

Was he weeping, Sparrow thought. The alcohol and the cigarettes had cleared his head and heightened his desire. There was no need to weep, he knew. They were fortunate, they had seen through the illusion. Even if the country went on, they could never be made to forget. I loved you both, Sparrow thought. I love you both.

“I’m sorry, Sparrow,” he said. “I would sacrifice anything to be a different person. Please. Please let me help you leave.”

“No,” Sparrow said. Zhuli is here, he thought. And the composer had long since gone away, only Sparrow himself had failed to recognize it. But he need only to look down at his tired, calloused hands to know. “My life is here.”

—

Ten years later, at the Shanghai Conservatory, Ai-ming was impeded by every kind of music: trills and percussion, a violin reciting a flotilla of notes. The Bird of Quiet walked ahead of her. In the new trousers, baby blue shirt, and leather shoes that Ling had given him for 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.

Her father ran up the narrow road of the Conservatory as if someone up ahead was calling him.

Beside her, Ba Lute moaned, “Ai yo! These young pianists have no understanding of contrapuntal anything. Loud and fast, that’s the only thing they know.”

“But it sounds good, grandfather.”

“Because you have no ear. You never had one, poor kid.”

Which was true. Just the other night, when he tried to give her an erhu lesson, he had screamed at her, “How can a budding scientist be incapable of keeping 4/4 time? Even a buffalo can do it!”

Now Ai-ming took his papery hand. Ba Lute had gotten plump in the belly but not in the legs and he resembled a pear on toothpicks. She feared he would totter over and be crushed.

“Hey, you! Little Sparrow! Slow down,” he shouted.

When her father turned, Ai-ming imagined the sparrow he might have been when he was a boy, a burst of song and a rush of feathers. 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?”

Something so barbaric would never happen now. To mark the beginning of 1988, Big Mother had given her a New Year’s calendar with the words, “Happiness Arrives,” written in running characters above the plump faces of the Gods of Harmonious Union. Those words lifted her thoughts as she tugged on Ba Lute’s hand. Happiness arrives. Pretty violinists, wearing brightly coloured dresses, parted around them. She would like to be a musician, Ai-ming thought, simply to look like them. But no, she had always preferred to dismantle a record player than to listen to any old sonata.

“Oh, oh,” Ba Lute said. “This old fart is running out of air.”

“Don’t rush. We’re not going anywhere.”

“How true, how true.”

The Bird of Quiet remained where he was, waiting patiently, as if he existed in a different dimension from the students zipping past. They were electricity, Ai-ming thought excitedly, sizzling electrons, and her father was the electron gate. Or they were time and he was space. Ai-ming remembered how, when Chairman Mao still breathed, she had regularly written criticisms of her father. (“I cry bitter tears knowing that I am the daughter of a bad element, capitalist-roader….” “In this war, there are no civilians!”) She’d been only a kid at the time, so her father had to help her write the tricky characters. When Chairman Deng came to power, criticisms like these were no longer so common. She and her father had never talked about them. Now, it seemed almost funny to remember that she had called him a snake or a demon, and even a snake-demon, that she had denounced him so naturally. He had taught her how to protect herself by hiding inside the noise.

“Why did we come anyway?” Ai-ming asked. “The Shanghai Conservatory only makes him feel bad.”

“Eh, it’s not my fault. Your father wanted to come. He has old friends here, you know.”

But there were no old friends, or none that came out to see him. He went into one building and out another, searching for someone, and she and Ba Lute waited under various flowering trees. Before they left, her father went into one of the practice rooms. Ai-ming sat on a chair in the corner as her father played the piano, she had never heard him do so before, had not quite realized he was even capable. His entire body, the way he moved, changed. Most of the pieces she recognized from the records (Bach’s Partita No. 6, Couperin, Shostakovich) but there was another piece, a complex figure that seemed to disassemble as she listened, a rope of music, a spool of wire. It seemed to rise even as it was falling, to lift in volume even as it diminished, a polyphony so unfathomably beautiful it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. When it stopped, tears came abruptly to her eyes.

After a moment, her father pushed the bench back. He closed the lid without a sound.

“What music is that?” she asked.

He turned to her and smiled. Ai-ming grinned, too, unsure. She felt an inexpressible sorrow welling up in the room.

“It’s nothing,” Sparrow said.

“Nothing?”

He stood up and went to the wall. “It’s mine,” he said. The lights were off so when he hit the switch they turned on, and he stared up at them, confused, and flicked the switch once more. The number 103 was stencilled in neat black ink on the wall.

“What do you mean it’s yours?”

“It’s me,” he said, more to the light switch than to her. “Music I wrote a long time ago, part of a symphony I never finished.” He went out. In the courtyard, the sun’s glare faded all the colours. “I hadn’t expected to remember, I was sure that after all this time it had completely disappeared.”

She followed him out, the music circling in her mind.

She wondered how many things a person knew that were better forgotten. Her father had looked at the piano as if it were the only solid thing in the room, as if everything and everyone else, including himself, were no more than an illusion, a dream.

—

From the moment she had first looked into the belly of a radio, Ai-ming had known her vocation: to study computer science at Beijing University and to be part of the technological vanguard. Wasn’t it obvious to everyone? Computers would one day hold up half the sky.

When she made this grand announcement to her family, Ai-ming had been six years old. Her father had continued eating but Big Mother had applauded, saying, “So not everyone in this house is half-dead after all.” That year, 1977, the competition had been epic: more than five million people wrote the university entrance examinations, competing for 200,000 precious places. Chairman Deng Xiaoping had reopened general admissions, and this was the first time since 1966 that university entrants would not be selected by the Party. In town, during the student parades, Ai-ming had even waved a banner (“The People love the students!”). How entrancing they were! Exhausted from studying yet defiantly awake. On the day of the exam, the first bells signalling the start of test-taking had brought everything to a stop, no traffic, no noise, no bickering, even Big Mother stopped shouting at passersby. Many weeks later, when the results were announced, the university entrants became the new heroes, young men and women who sweated over books instead of ploughs, who held up not one Little Red Book, but a giant stack of possibilities that teetered towards the skies. Their minds were ever-expanding factories crunching through raw material and spitting out answers. To get an education, Ai-ming thought, is glorious. To go to Beijing University one day would mean freedom.

In 1988, after studying sixteen hours a day for a full year, it was finally Ai-ming’s turn to endure three days of testing on nine subjects. Happiness arrives, she told herself. The first essay question was: “Light and shadow—‘All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.’—Leo Tolstoy. Discuss.’ ” The second was: “Take inspiration from the philosophy expressed by Ruan Yuan’s ‘Poem on Wuxing.’ ” She wrote more than nine hundred characters on each and, by the end of the first day, was giddy from nervous exhaustion. The overhead lights were distractingly bright, they made warning signals in her eyes. The exam was followed by an interminable wait, by tears and sleeplessness and tantrums. Her impressive scores got her hopes up but in the end, although she made the cut-off for South China Institute of Technology, her scores were not good enough for Beijing University or Tsinghua, or her third choice, Fudan. She would not be able to leave the province. All that week, comrade neighbours fell over themselves to congratulate her father and grandparents because Ai-ming was the only one from Cold Water Ditch going on to university. The neighbours couldn’t understand why Ai-ming was inconsolable, curled up in her room, crying her eyes out.

—

The Bird of Quiet gave her two pieces of advice. Study hard. And: It is good to be cautious.

They were eating dinner and Ai-ming, still weeping, said. “Oh, Ba! What’s the point in being timid?”

Sparrow chewed his barbarian eggplant and refrained from giving her Big Mother’s answer (“Oh, you new generation! You think you’re so worldly-wise. You have no idea the rice is already cooked!”) or any answer at all. There had been a time in Ai-ming’s life when her father’s quiet had seemed like another person in their midst. Quiet was alive, like a toy you could just keep hitting. Once, when she was twelve, she had asked him, “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.

Big Mother shouted, “Good question!”

Ba Lute whispered, “Symphony No. 7 in F Minor, ‘Timid,’ ” and giggled at his elderly joke. He leaned across the cluttered table, wanting to wipe her tears, and instead smeared them all over her cheek.

In retirement, Ba Lute was the most content of all. He was forever banging on something or other and making old-time music, and he made Sparrow play music, too, even though Sparrow said his hands were useless. Ba Lute was such a funny-looking old man, too big for his skinny legs. Big Mother would curse him tenderly, “I like you more now that I can see you less.” On sunny mornings, they sat outside like a dragon and a phoenix guarding the gate, or like two flowery portraits of Marx and Engels, Big Mother with her pants rolled up to catch the sun on her knees, and Ba Lute with his vest rolled up to catch the sun on his belly.

Ai-ming got up to clear the plates. Until the arrival of the university results, 1988 had been a year of prosperity, there had been meat on the table twice each week and they had a sewing machine, a sofa, the latest Red Lamp upright radio, and quality bicycles for every member of the family. Ma had her own television. She’d just been promoted to news editor at Radio Beijing, and had moved to the capital. When the university results arrived in Cold Water Ditch, Ai-ming realized that fortune had indeed arrived, but had found her wanting.

By the time she finished washing up, her left eye was swollen shut from crying.

She rejoined Sparrow in the courtyard where he was waiting with the record player. A few of the neighbour kids were there too, playing cards, their mouths smeared ridiculous, with some kind of barbecue sauce. They were squabbling and she wanted to kick dirt in their faces. It was Sunday evening, the only night she was allowed to listen to Western music though, in reality, all these years, she had only been keeping her father company. Did her father honestly believe she wanted to spend hours listening to the agonized rumblings of Shostakovich? His Tenth Symphony made it clear life was hopeless.

“You choose, Ba.” She only hoped he wouldn’t choose Bach, whose uptight fugues made her feel like she was trapped in a barrel rolling down a hillside.

“Mmm,” Sparrow said, rolling his cigarettes. His special Xinjiang tobacco had a damp earth smell. “Prokofiev?” he suggested.

“I’ll get it.”

She found his favourite, Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, inside the cardboard sleeve that had a picture of big-jowled, lantern-faced David Oistrakh. She put the record on. Music seeped into the air and Sparrow listened with one elbow on his knee, his entire body curved like a trigger.

Prokofiev composed his pretty music, as if he had not a care in the world.

As a result of yearly gifts from Ling and Big Mother Knife, her father had accumulated one of the largest record collections in Guangxi Province, but he still insisted on hiding them. The first thing they did when they got home each Spring Festival was dig out another part of the floor and bury another stack of music. Her father was paranoid.

What kind of life was this? A record was a kind of storage in which music lay waiting, love letters from Canada stored words that kept Sparrow awake at night. She knew because she had opened the letters and sneakily read them all. But for anything to be alive, it required motion: the current must run, the record must turn, a person must leave or find another path. Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba’s elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time. His tomorrow would always be, somehow, yesterday. Ai-ming knew she was by nature more impulsive, less patient.

In the courtyard now, Sparrow lifted the record player’s thin arm and set another album down. Ai-ming had to fight with all her strength not to push the record player over and smash it on the ground. This was Smetana’s From My Homeland, and it made Ai-ming so irretrievably unhappy her tears started up again. The Bird of Quiet paid no attention. She pulled hard on the skin between her thumb and index finger to extinguish the pain in her heart.

“Ai-ming,” he said.

She lifted her head. The music had finished without her noticing.

“If Beijing University is where you wish to go, then study for another year and write the exam again.”

As if she would ever be accepted into Beida! She felt such bitterness she almost laughed.

“I requested a transfer to Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 and it’s been approved. You know the factory, they make radios and also the new mini-computers. We’ll both move to the capital and have Beijing papers. Your mother used all her connections….anyway, it’s done now. She’s supposed to telephone tonight, that’s why I hadn’t said anything…When your mother calls, try and act surprised.”

She stared.

Sparrow explained, “The university cut-off scores are lower for those with Beijing residency.”

Ai-ming knew that, of course. The cut-off was a full hundred points lower, and she would have passed easily this year, if only she’d had Beijing papers. Worse, their province had only been allocated fifty spots at Beida. The deep injustice of the world flared up inside her all over again and made her want to scream.

“We can move to your mother’s apartment in Beijing or stay here. It’s up to you.”

Ai-ming could barely nod her head. She felt shame crawling through her body like an old self-criticism. “I want to go, Ba.”

Sparrow smiled, delighted.

She began to cry again, she felt a debilitating mix of joy and panic.

“I haven’t been to Beijing since I was a teenager,” he said. “Don’t be upset, Ai-ming. Nothing is ever complete, it’s only a matter of turning one’s head, of focusing on a new place…and I wouldn’t mind the chance to hear something new. The Central Philharmonic is in Beijing….”

She didn’t know what he was talking about. Her father had turned his attention back to the record player. One record after another was lifted up in his hands and then set down again. She intervened. She chose Shostakovich’s Jazz Suites, and the album opened with Waltz No. 2, which was glorious and lopsided and entirely unapologetic. Sparrow returned to his chair, he gazed up at the clouded night. He closed his eyes.

—

When Sparrow said, “It is good to be cautious,” in the same sure way he might quote Chairman Deng, “To get rich is glorious,” he had swayed a little bit because, these days, he was drinking too much. His hands bothered him, a phantom pain he couldn’t relieve. One evening, a few days before they were due to move to Beijing, Big Mother asked him, “What are you waiting for? What do you need, my son?”

“I’m content.”

“Ba Lute says the conservatory in Guangzhou offered you a position but you said no. Is it true? You’re so stubborn. I don’t know who gave birth to you.”

He smiled. After a moment he said, “What could I teach? I haven’t written in twenty years. There’s a new generation of composers now, better suited than me.” He changed the subject. “You should come to Beijing with us.”

“Beijing! Surrounded by cadres and bureaucrats. Eating dust. I’d rather live in Mao Zedong’s coffin.”

“I fear that would wake him.”

Big Mother burped. Carefully, she placed her copy of the Book of Records, still in its shoebox, on the chair beside Sparrow. She nudged it towards him. “Don’t wait anymore,” she said at last, standing up. “Swirl and Wen aren’t coming home. I don’t even know what’s happened to Projectionist Bang. And your two brothers. They could be Americans by now for all I know.” She sighed slowly into the house. “Long, long, long,” she said. “So long is the Revolution.”

Sparrow remained outside. At last, he opened the shoebox.

He lifted out Chapter 42 from the stack of notebooks, its pages were almost pristine, as if it had never been read before. In the chapter, Da-wei has come back to Northwest China. He and his wife are searching for their daughter who has been missing for many years. One day, they come to a mountainous village where all the peasants, cadres and educated youth are too busy to speak, they are engaged in a monumental task: they have been ordered to construct a great dam, and to do so, they must demolish their local mountain piece by piece. Da-wei and his wife can only stand and watch in amazement. The air is choked with the dust of the ground and the dust of the heavens. The peasants are singing a hymn to Chairman Mao, and when Da-wei’s wife asks them if they have seen this girl, the peasants refuse to even look at the photograph.

“My daughter would be grown now, a young woman,” she volunteers, but the peasants shake their heads and continue to haul their baskets.

Someone answers, “Everything comes to rest at the bottom of the river,” but Da-wei and his wife are certain she is not there.

They travel on but year by year the Taklamakan Desert wears them down, their clothes, their shoes, their faith, until the photograph, too, disintegrates. Even their tears refuse to last. The hot sun immediately dries them, leaving behind only flakes of salt. Da-wei tells his wife that the time has come to return home and she answers, “Tell me where our home is, and I’ll go.” They want to make a spirit offering to their lost child, but they have nothing, no money and no goods. It is 1988 and on the former Silk Road, there are no longer any merchants or trains of camels, and countless villages have been abandoned.

They come to a blue oasis in the wilderness, shrouded in mist, where birdsong twists between them. It seems like the edge of the world, but in fact it is the ancient city of Khotan, for they have reached the southwestern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Da-wei thinks of his lost brothers, of May Fourth and now his own child, a girl named Zhuli, and he wonders if he and his wife are the last to pass through this gate. Where does the future exist? If they continue west, they will reach the disputed lands of Kashmir. Do they turn around or keep going? To which side do they belong? On the walls of a school, someone has copied out a letter or a poem and the words read,

I came into this world

bringing only paper, rope, a shadow

Let me tell you, world

I do not believe….

His wife no longer has a photograph to show to strangers, and she simply crouches down against the wall, exhausted. The twisting cascade of her hair has fallen from its hold.

Da-wei touches the words on the wall. A new conjunction adorns the sky now / They are the pictographs from five thousand years / They are the watchful eyes of future generations….

“I know she’s gone,” his wife says. “I know it, but how can I let her go?”

A young man in the schoolyard is playing music. He is playing a violin, what they called a xiǎo tí qin, a small, lifted zither, and Da-wei, recognizes the song. Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, written for two violins, but the man plays alone, the counterpoint is gone, or never was. Da-wei thinks of the duties of a father: there should be gifts of money to see his daughter through the underworld, oranges for sweetness, silk to cover her. His pockets are empty and he is ashamed that he has nothing to give her, in this life or for the next. This music, and the great distance it has come, confounds him. He wants to tell his daughter to return home, but the roads have changed and nothing in this country is familiar, if she turns back towards the cities of the coast, she might lose her way. How can he help her? Why has he been so powerless? Da-wei hears the counterpoint as if it were real, a melody line he knows intimately, having replayed it again and again from the radio station, into the safekeeping of the air. I came into this world bringing only paper, rope, a shadow….In surviving the present, did they sacrifice the future? The world he once believed in has changed its shape once more.

His daughter left so long ago. But he himself does not know how to be free.

“Help me,” his wife says. “Help me to let her go.”

Sparrow closed the notebook. He heard music trickling from somewhere, a radio left on, a memory. Zhuli, he said. He listened as the air answered.

—

Ai-ming sat up in bed. She could hear a recording of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins circling through the house, starting and then stopping. When she crept out of her room, she saw her father seated on the floor, his back to her. He lifted the needle and held it there, as if something in his mind could not be decided, and then he set it back again. The first tension of sound, the air that came before the music, seemed to crackle up from the floor itself. Oistrakh performed the piece with his son, and the two violins circled one another, sometimes warily, sometimes harsh with accusation, disclosing a covetousness, but also an immense feeling, for which she had no words. She watched her father, thinking of Beijing and the future. What if everything was unprescribed, she wondered. What kind of world would that be? What if everything, or anything at all, had the capacity to change and begin again?

5

FROM THEIR TWO-ROOM FLAT beside the Muxidi Bridge, in a traditional Beijing hutong — a maze of alleyway housing — Tiananmen Square was just fifteen minutes away. It was only fifteen minutes but still, pedalling down the wide boulevard, Ai-ming felt as if she were lifting off into outer space. Growing up, she must have seen thousands of pictures of the Square, but the reality was defiantly modern: shadowy couples, long-haired drifters, teenagers listening to rock music, singing, “The world is a garbage dump!” Small children wobbled by in their padded coats, moving at the same sedate pace as their grandparents, as if they had all the time in the world. Today, the afternoon wind had an unkind bite, April could not let go of winter.

Her bicycle leaned on its kickstand. Ai-ming sat on the paving stones and gazed, proprietorially, out into the Square. For as long as she could remember, right and wrong had been represented by the Party through colour. Truth and beauty, for instance, were hóng (red), while criminality and falsehood were hēi (black). Her mother was red, her father was black. But Beijing, resting place of Chairman Mao, turned out to be softly ochre and even the colossal boulevards had a camel-coloured hue. Red existed only in the national flag and the Party banners, but all that red couldn’t make a dent in all this yellow. Sometimes the wind brought sand from the Gobi Desert and the dust got into everything, not only her perceptions but also her food, so that silky tofu tasted crunchy.

“Come on,” a boy whispered, “don’t be like that,” and the girl who leaned on his shoulder said, “If you like her, just tell me honestly. I’m not old-fashioned. I won’t do something foolish…”

Ai-ming closed her eyes and pretended not to be eavesdropping. People in Beijing were different, she thought. They were surprisingly dignified, they were more subtle yet more hopeful creatures.

Today was Ai-ming’s eighteenth birthday. She had undone her braids, emulating the city girls. Pedalling down the eight-lane thoroughfare of Chang’an Avenue, she had felt its soft heaviness floating behind her. Yesterday, instead of studying, she had altered the line of her best dress, and now the cotton tugged firmly at her breasts and hips, giving her a feeling of heightened containment. In the centre of the Square, she looked up at the ochre sky and thought, “Let me tell you world, I wish to believe.”

Alone, she did not feel lonely at all. It was as if she walked upon some miraculous circuit board that made her more powerful. But later on, at twilight, when she met her parents at the Square’s northern edge and they walked to Ai-ming’s favourite restaurant, Comrade Barbarian, she began to feel as if her lungs were being crushed. Her mother radiated anxiety, or perhaps only regret. After dinner, when Ling paid to have their picture taken in front of Tiananmen Gate, Ai-ming had a sudden image of what they must look like: Sparrow, the factory worker, Ling, the diligent cadre and Ai-ming herself, the good student. They even dressed in the bland, inoffensive colours of a model family.

“Don’t even breathe!” the photographer said. “Hold it, hold it….”

She fixed her gaze on a point behind his right ear, where three slim boys in matching windcheaters stood beneath an enormous banner: “Study Hard and Make Progress Every Day.” She thought to herself, I must make myself fortunate. But what was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside? Since childhood, she had been reading Sparrow’s diary, which her father used to write and submit to his superiors every week. Until 1978, her father had been categorized as a criminal element, but with a diary this dull, there was no way he could be a hooligan. Only now did Ai-ming realize she’d underestimated the Bird of Quiet.

Even Big Mother hadn’t known about the bundle of foreign letters hidden in a Glenn Gould album sleeve. At first, it had been the stamps that drew her to them: such glorious images of Canadian mountains and frozen seas, such thick Western paper. Are you writing? Will you send me your recent compositions? My beloved Sparrow, I think of you constantly. Who was this Jiang Kai and what did she look like? How was it possible that the Bird of Quiet had a secret love?

The photographer’s shutter made a big clap.

“Good,” Sparrow said. “Done!” He turned to Ai-ming. There was a tiny piece of fluff on his factory shirt. She removed it.

Ling counted the coins in her purse and gave them to the photographer. The coins made a clicking like a handful of beans.

Sparrow pointed up to a dragon kite in the air. He didn’t seem to realize she was no longer a little child, and could not be so easily diverted. “How beautiful.”

—

At home, in the tiny room that served as her study, magazines occupied her. Not the candy-coloured women’s magazines that had begun to appear in Beijing kiosks but serious journals such as Let the Natural Sciences Contend. She had an affinity for probability theory and Riemannian symmetric spaces, which she continued to study, neglecting politics and English, which had been her downfall the first time around. One of their neighbours, Lu Yiwen, was a glamorous first-year student at Beijing Normal University. She had given Ai-ming a copy of Miyazaki’s China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examination of Imperial China. It was thick. Yiwen had laughed and said she didn’t need it anymore. Now, Ai-ming glared at her desk and felt the ridiculousness of it all. These high towers of books made a futuristic city around her. She hid inside and dozed off, her dreams intersecting like airplanes in the sky. A voice in her head kept saying, nonsensically, “Yiwen is airy like a cloud.” “The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announces with deep sorrow…” She turned and as she did so, a page of Let the Natural Sciences Contend crumpled under her cheek, she reached out to wipe it off, “—long-tested, loyal Communist fighter, Hu Yaobang, a great proletarian revolutionary—”

Big Mother Knife, she muddily thought, used to mutter “yào bāng” when she scrubbed their only rice pot. The words meant “brilliant country,” and they also happened to be the name of the General-Secretary of the Party. The disgraced, former General-Secretary.

“The utmost efforts were made to rescue him….”

Ai-ming opened her eyes.

“At 7:53 a.m., April 15, 1989, he died at the age of seventy-three.”

Her chair shifted. The scratching of wood against wood seemed to come from her own bones. One shoulder burned with pain and the other felt loose and long. She thought she could hear people weeping. The crying came nearer, it entered with the rain that was dripping down and darkening the concrete walkway outside the door. Today was Saturday, but both her parents were at work. She walked across the room and sprawled out on their bed, too restless to study, and watched the rain for a long time.

—

When Sparrow arrived home from the factory he turned their own radio on straightaway, even though they could hear the neighbours’ radios just fine. He had been caught in the rain and his wet hair looked sad on his forehead. Ai-ming took a towel and rubbed it violently over his head.

“What did you study today?” he asked, muffled.

“Everything. Are we bringing flowers to Tiananmen Square?”

He pushed a corner of towel out of his face. “Flowers?”

“Look, all our neighbours are making them.” She could see into the rooms across the narrow alleyway, and also the rooms adjoining their kitchen, where the Gua family were folding white paper chrysanthemums, the symbol of mourning. “For Comrade Hu Yaobang! He died today, you know.”

“Mmm,” Sparrow said. He was tilted over, trying expel water from his ear. Now his hair was standing straight up and he looked like a porpoise.

She said nonchalantly, “You know, when he was asked which of Chairman Mao’s policies might still be relevant in China, Hu Yaobang said: ‘I think, none.’ ”

“You know better than to repeat such things.”

“If the General-Secretary can say it, why can’t I?”

Her father straightened. “Since when did you become the General-Secretary? And wasn’t he purged?”

On the radio, Red Guards were shouting ridiculous slogans at a disgraced Hu Yaobang. This was the 1960s, before Ai-ming was born, and the frenzied sound clip lasted only a few seconds before moving on to better days. Here he was in the new economic zones, here he was with cadres in the Northwest. After the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four, Comrade Hu worked for the rehabilitation of those who had been wrongly accused….He travelled through 1,500 districts and villages, all the way to remote Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, to see how Partly policies manifested in people’s lives….

It rained harder. Ai-ming slowly peeled an orange.

In the alleyway, Yiwen walked by wearing a new pink dress, it swayed against her hips as she went, floating against her long pale legs. Ai-ming felt as vulnerable as this naked orange in her hand. They were the same age but she was a child compared to Yiwen, who was an actual university student. Yiwen had a portable cassette player and she was always listening to music as she walked. It was very modern and deeply Western to listen to music that no one else could hear. Private music led to private thoughts. Private thoughts led to private desires, to private fulfillments or private hungers, to a whole private universe away from parents, family and society.

The squeak of Sparrow’s plastic slippers interrupted her thoughts. Ai-ming gave him the peeled orange and he smiled as if she had given him the sun. He went to the record player and Ai-ming flicked off the radio, silencing Hu Yaobang in mid-sentence.

She crawled into bed even though it was still early. The fugue of Bach’s Musical Offering circled in the darkness like a dog chasing its tail. Ai-ming heard her mother come home, and the routine words her parents exchanged. Same bed, different dreams. The old saying described Sparrow and Ling perfectly. How could it be that her mother was such an independent, modern creature? Why did her father love someone so far away from his present reality? How could Ai-ming live a better life than theirs? To her, the only essay question that mattered was, How was it possible for a person to write her own future?

—

On Monday, Ai-ming ran into the neighbour Yiwen at the water spigot. “You’re going to Tiananmen Square this morning, aren’t you?” the older girl asked.

Taken aback, Ai-ming could only say, “Why?”

The girl laughed. She lifted her full water bucket, staggering backwards. “Yes, why?” Yiwen said, still laughing. “I almost believed you! Ai-ming, you really tricked me. What a straight face! If I ever need someone to give an alibi for me, I’m coming to you first.”

Ai-ming smiled. She watched Yiwen’s pink dress float down the alley.

Back in her room, she stood for a moment looking at the stack of books on the desk. The university examinations were still three months away. She drew the curtain across the window, changed her dress and left the apartment.

She pedalled slowly, in love with the wind against her face. Long before Jianguomen changed into Chang’an Avenue, she saw bits of flowers, paper and ribbon all over the road, accumulating like clouds until, at the Square, she arrived at an unreal scene. Thousands of funeral wreaths, with their paper ribbons, were pulsating in the breeze. Just off the Avenue, factory workers were having a public meeting, some girls were reciting poetry, and a group of university students huddled on the ground with ink, brushes and paper, writing essay-length posters. She walked deeper into the Square, searching ludicrously for Yiwen. The concrete seemed to expand from her own feet like an endless grey footprint.

At the Monument to the People’s Heroes, three grandmothers were muttering subversively. “Heart attack.” “Just like that! Right in the middle of a Politburo meeting.” “Those foxes humiliated him, they bullied him until his heart gave out….” A colossal black-and-white Hu Yaobang towered above them, the photo blown up so big that Comrade Hu’s nose was the height of a man. Posters were everywhere, on the ground, affixed to the Monument, on makeshift boards. The ones who should drop dead still live. The one who should live has died. Just reading the poster made Ai-ming feel as if she had cursed the government or ratted out her father.

She actually lifted a hand to cover her eyes. Still the words on the posters slipped between her fingers. Why is it that we can’t choose our own jobs? What right does the government have to keep a private file on me?

She turned around only to find herself facing another wall of paper.

Is it not time to live like human beings?

Do you remember?

I am lonely.

She stepped closer, squinting at the characters. Do you remember?

What illegal thoughts. The ones who should die…But actually, why should anyone’s thoughts be illegal? In the distance, the concrete was shifting, it metamorphosed into a small crowd. The small crowd seemed to replicate itself, more and more demonstrators appeared with banners elongated like ships above their heads. “Arise, slaves, arise! We shall take back the fruits of our labour…” A Tsinghua University flag dipped and slid sideways, and there were others, too, flags announcing the Institute of Aeronautics and People’s University. The students met a line of police. From far away, it looked like a grey wave gulping up a string of fish. The police disappeared and the crowd grew fatter. A banner floated, delicate as a finger, towards her, “Long live education!”

She couldn’t help but wonder how the first-years among them had answered the examination question, “Leo Tolstoy. Discuss.” Turning awkwardly, she tripped over a schoolbag. The owner apologized and kicked the bag carelessly away from them, she thought she heard something snap. When he smiled the shadows under his eyes widened. The boy asked what department she was in and, when Ai-ming stared, he pointed to a pendant above his head (“Education Department”) and then, answering a question she hadn’t asked, he said, “An official re-evaluation of Hu Yaobang’s life and career. An end to the spiritual pollution campaign. That’s number one and two. And also…we’re asking the government to free those arrested in 1977 for speaking the truth. The heroes of Democracy Wall, you know. Twelve years later, and they’re still in prison!” It turned out he was speaking to someone behind her. Humiliated, she stepped sideways and out of his line of vision. His glasses had no nose rests and the frames were sliding down. She wanted, tenderly, to push them up. The students started shouting, “Yaobang forever!”

The sweetness of a piece of cake she had eaten earlier in the day persisted in her mouth. Bits of paper carnations were stuck to her shoes and Ai-ming tried to scrub them off against the grey concrete, not wanting to trail them, like evidence, back home. She found her bicycle and pedalled slowly back, against the constant stream of Beijingers moving towards the Square.

—

That evening, she crouched with Yiwen in the courtyard and they washed dishes together. “Okay, tell me,” Yiwen whispered, “what exactly is revolution?” Ai-ming coughed softly and said, “What?”

“Okay, okay,” Yiwen said, “just joking. I thought I would help you study! But, seriously, don’t you think citizens should own themselves, be their own people? Isn’t a self only a body combined with a system of thought?”

“A self?”

A plastic dish slid out of Yiwen’s soapy fingers and spluttered back into the water. She was wearing sneakers, a white T-shirt that served as a dress, and a pink bandana. She’d recently gotten a violently short haircut. Ai-ming had noticed that she carried a spray bottle and every now and then would squirt a big cloud of homemade insect repellent at her bare legs. When she got bitten, she roughly slapped her calves and thighs as if they belonged to someone else.

“My Beida boyfriend,” Yiwen said, as if she had other boyfriends at other universities, “says that thousands of wall posters calling for reform have gone up in the last twenty-four hours. His best friend carried a banner to the Square last night. You know what it said? It said, ‘The Soul of China.’ ” She sighed and scrubbed her family’s rice pot. “The job assignments are pitiful these days…Who knows where they’ll unload us once we graduate? I have a cousin who works alone in a closed-down factory in Shaanxi Province. Completely alone! She’s supposed to be an accountant. What kind of job is that?”

“If you study at a Beijing university you end up with a good job. Don’t you?”

“Beijing!” Yiwen made a face. “We should all go to the West. America owns the past and they own the future, too. What do we own?” She slapped the water. “Hey, what kind of rock music do you like?” Her T-shirt dress had soaked over her thighs and soap bubbles slid down her knee.

“Are there different kinds?”

Yiwen giggled. “Like Northwest Wind style. Do you like that? Let’s sing something. You know anything by White Angel? Or Mayday?”

All afternoon, Ai-ming had been reading Let the Natural Sciences Contend and her head was full of geological disturbances. “I’m not good at remembering lyrics.”

“Ai-ming, little country girl. My father told me that your father used to be a musician! Is that true? Like a rock musician? Hey, come on, you’re not really this shy. Are you?”

This was worse than the national examinations. Ai-ming had no idea what the correct answer could be. Fortunately it didn’t matter because Yiwen had her own monologue going. Now she started singing by herself: “I’ve never stopped asking you, When will you come with me? But you always laugh at me because I have nothing! I’m giving you my aspirations and my freedom, too.”

One of the neighbours, a little boy known as Watermelon, started singing along. He was small but he had big, wet voice. “I want to grab your hands. Come with me…”

Yiwen stood up, the little dress too small for anything.

“Want to come to the Square, Ai-ming?”

“I can’t.”

“Tomorrow then.” Yiwen tipped over the bucket of soapy water, dumping it out, and then put the clean dishes inside.

“What’s your boyfriend like?” Ai-ming asked.

Yiwen got to her feet, swaying slowly, the dishes clattering like rattled birds. She smiled teasingly. “I like it when you leave your hair down.”

Ai-ming plunged her hands into her own dish water and said, “Yiwen, where did you get your cassette player?”

“From Fat Lips, on the corner. You want one? He always gives me a really good price.”

“I want one. For my father.”

“Sure, anytime. Knock on my window. We’ll go together.”

—

“We’re not Red Guards! We’re the surviving remnants of the May Fourth generation. Can’t you tell the difference?” Ai-ming’s alarm clock hadn’t sounded yet, it must be early. Or maybe it was late, the middle of the night, but Yiwen’s voice was instantly recognizable.

“Queen Mother of the West! We put aside every dream for you and look what a terror you’ve become.” Ai-ming sat up in bed. Yiwen’s father sounded exhausted. His voice seemed to split into three parts as he shouted louder. “Protesting the government at Zhongnanhai in the middle of the night! Getting arrested! You’re not really my daughter, are you?”

Yiwen’s mother kept repeating the same words over and over: “Calling the leaders by their first names!”

“So what if I call Li Peng by his name? They’re just people,” Yiwen shouted. “People have names! Why can’t you see that? You had the Revolution to believe in, but what do we have?”

A door slammed. Someone, it must be Yiwen, was crying. But perhaps it was Yiwen’s father.

Ai-ming sat up. Nobody talked like that so the whole interlude must have been a dream. Patiently, she waited to come to her senses. Shadows fell in waves across the bedclothes and nothing in the room seemed still. She hugged the sheet and remembered Yiwen’s pink dress which expanded, covering her, smelling of jasmine, even as the argument went on, fitfully, only partially overheard, lulling her back to sleep.

—

“If you can solve a physics problem, you can solve this.” The Bird of Quiet was looking over her shoulder, later that morning, examining the study questions on Ai-ming’s desk. “All you have to do in this essay question is demonstrate correct political understanding. I think you should do a more careful study of Mao Zedong — Marxist-Leninist thought, especially this chapter on methodology, and matter or materialism as objective reality….”

Two cantaloupe seeds had stuck to his hand, and she noticed two on her left hand as well. These four seeds blocked out everything Sparrow was saying.

After her father had closed the door again, she returned to staring out the window. Of course, the people outside, the neighbourhood aunties, Yiwen and Watermelon, could see her as well as she could see them. They were taking down the laundry before the rain resumed, and no one paid any attention to her sitting miserably between her stacks of books. Yiwen’s eyes were puffy. She was singing mournfully to herself,

I grew up beneath the Red Flag.

I took the oath.

To dare to think, to speak up, to act.

To devote myself to Revolution,

The air had the icy kiss of winter, which was perfect, really, for a funeral. Hu Yaobang would have approved. A week had passed since the announcement of his death, and today, a Saturday, the whole city was going to Chang’an Avenue to pay their respects. Sparrow, however, said they weren’t going, Tiananmen Square had been barricaded off, so they would watch it on the neighbourhood television. Television was better, he said. Her father had allowed one of his co-workers to give him a haircut, she didn’t know how much baijiu the comrade had drunk, but it all looked a little lopsided. She found it difficult to argue with him, that bad haircut evoked too much pity. Meanwhile Ma unexpectedly announced she was going to the funeral procession because it was the correct thing to do. “You can come with me, Ai-ming. If you like.”

To go or not to go? In the end, the bad haircut won.

“It’s okay. I’ll keep Ba company.”

If Ling was hurt she didn’t show it. She put on her good shoes and walked elegantly out. Her mother was unfailingly elegant, as if she were a stranger in her own house, which she was. Ai-ming hadn’t lived with her since she was three years old, and even though it wasn’t Ling’s fault, she still felt as if Ling was only impersonating a mother. Ai-ming had always felt more at ease with her great-aunt, the Old Cat, a rare books collector who ran a mobile library, she drove it around in the back of a vegetable truck. The Old Cat lived by herself in Shanghai—“I’m a single modern woman”—and was almost seventy years old.

The funeral was due to start at 10 a.m., so Ai-ming and Sparrow had a slow breakfast. He read the newspaper and she alternated between Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and the only sound was the crackling of the pages and her father grunting softly in response to an article or maybe just an advertisement. Radio Beijing was announcing things that everyone already knew, and then repeating them again. For security, Tiananmen Square had been closed to the public, people would have to gather on the surrounding boulevards, etc., etc. Ai-ming realized she was looking forward to the few seconds of silence during the funeral because, finally, the radio would have to stop lecturing.

Sparrow poured her a glass of pear juice. “It’s strange that the government would close the Square. I suppose Comrade Hu Yaobang was very popular…”

Oh, poor Hu! she thought. She had seen pictures of Hu Yaobang all her life, his perfectly egg-shaped head, the man who thought he could change China from within, introduce economic freedom step by step, serve prosperity one sip at a time. Ai-ming wondered: could such a method ever work? Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious — economic freedom and political reform — a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one mouthful? Who could wait patiently for nearly a billion other people to also have a taste? No, anyone would try to get a second mouthful, a third, a whole bowl for themselves. Of course Hu Yaobang had failed, and of course he had been purged! Her thoughts disturbed her. All sorts of private thoughts had been opened up by the sight of Yiwen’s pink dress. Even in these modern times, few people wore pink and Ai-ming supposed Yiwen had dyed the dress herself. What about that boy with the glasses slipping down his nose? She had wanted to reach out and touch his slender waist and ask him…ask him what? Doesn’t it all seem absurd to you? Why do we have no words for what we truly feel? What’s wrong with our parents?

She went into her bedroom and, because it was cold, dressed under the covers, her left foot, and then her right, struggling to find their way through her jeans. She lay in bed with just her jeans on and no other clothes, her hand moving between the bare skin of her stomach and the thickness of the denim. She imagined that all the world existed between these two sensations, nakedness and clothing, softness and roughness, within and without. What would it be like to leave the country entirely? Here, a change in Party policy could abruptly exile you to the deserts. She pulled on a shirt and then a sweater. Her bare skin felt as if it were waiting for something that would never happen. Nothing fit properly, she would have to alter all her clothes and re-cut everything differently. I want to live, she thought, but nobody here knows how.

—

Her father suddenly announced he, too, wanted to go to Tiananmen Square to pay his respects to Hu Yaobang, that it was better to go now because the streets would no longer be crowded. It was as if he had just woken up and realized who had died.

“Okay,” Ai-ming said. “I’ll come with you.”

The Bird of Quiet sat down at once to fold two paper carnations. When he was done, he pinned the first carefully to Ai-ming’s coat and the second to his own.

They put on their shoes, untangled their bicycles and pedalled slowly out of the alleyway. How lanky her father was. Maybe it was unavoidable that a man who did wiring all his life would start to look like a wire himself. The streets outside were not crowded. A few teenagers were sitting on a flower pot at the Muxidi Bridge, none as attractive as Yiwen, whose skin was as pale and fragrant as the flesh of a pear. Ai-ming rode up alongside Sparrow, who began humming Beethoven’s Fifth, as if to amuse her.

“Ba, let me fix your haircut.”

He smiled, coasting. “Old Bi told me this haircut would make me look young.”

“It’s a bit crooked, that’s all.” All warfare is based on deception, she thought, and depends on the element of surprise. “Anyway, what if I applied to universities in Canada?”

She noticed no alteration in his pace, only a slight tipping of his bicycle towards the sidewalk which he immediately corrected. She pressed on. “Yiwen said that almost everyone she knows at Beijing Normal has sent out applications to America. Canada is less expensive though. Imagine if I won a scholarship! You could come with me. Because…I wouldn’t want to go alone.” Her recklessness seemed to come from the streets themselves. This is what happens when politicians die all of a sudden, she thought. It’s like a table leg collapsing and things go sliding off.

“Everyone says it’s very cold in Canada,” Sparrow said. He sped forward. “And isn’t your worst subject English?”

“Your daughter can be good at anything if only she applies herself.”

Sparrow had no ready answer for that. Fortunately for him, the road suddenly got crowded. He detoured south, into the smaller alleyways inside the Second Ring Road. Turning a corner, he nearly collided with a line of city workers sweeping the street, but they kept on working as if he had never existed and never would. Some of them looked fifty years older than Big Mother Knife.

“Ai-ming,” he said when she caught up to him again. “First it was Beijing. And now it’s Canada. Once we get to Canada, maybe it will be the moon.”

“Others have done it. Even the moon.”

“I used to imagine I would go to the West, too, and that I would bring my family with me.”

She waited for him to continue, but her father’s thought remained a half-thought. The street was bottling up, but still he pedalled headlong into the mourners, pushing between people like a dumpling between noodles. The sky was so white, as if all colours had been sheared away, there were paper flowers in the trees and on the ground, on the coats of everyone around them, and the air smelled not of dust but of a rich and mouth-watering broth. Along the road, families were sitting down to lunch. Faced with this immovable congestion, Sparrow finally dismounted and they began walking, conspicuously, against the flow of the crowd. She and her father were completely out of tune with the moment. Ai-ming walked with her head down; the grey propriety of Beijing, the ochre goodness of it, belonged to people who knew when to arrive for funerals and what time to eat lunch.

She became aware of a new crowd approaching. They were chanting and at first she couldn’t make out the words, the loudspeaker they used was weak and tinny. Eventually she saw two young men, each wearing a red armband, carrying a banner that read, “We are young. Our country needs us.” The two were unusually tall, and their banner swayed high into the air. Behind them, the students were sweating, their formal clothes had come untucked, some looked like they had been fighting. And they were crying. Their devotion to Hu Yaobang was sincere, Ai-ming thought suddenly, while hers had always been impersonal.

“Do we love our country?”

“Yes!”

“Are we willing to sacrifice our future for the Chinese people?”

“Yes!”

“Did we do anything wrong?”

Sobbing, “No! No!”

They were passing now, linked to one another, like paper dolls.

The lunching families looked up from their tables. Some got to their feet. Sparrow, too, had stopped walking and was staring at the student procession. What’s happened, what’s happened, the words rebounded from person to person. A boy disengaged himself from the long line and was immediately surrounded. He said that student representatives from the universities had tried to present a petition to the government. Three young men had knelt on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, and had remained on their knees for forty-five minutes while all around them the students and Beijing citizens had yelled at them to stand up, to stop kneeling. Yet they had remained, holding the petition up in the air as if they were children before their father, or slaves before an emperor. But no representative from the government had come out. Lines of police, twenty men deep, had stood between the crowd and the Great Hall. Last night, 100,000 university students had walked to Tiananmen Square and slept there overnight, so that when the Square was closed off in the morning, they would already be inside. “We only wanted to pay our respects to Hu Yaobang, just as those before us have always paid their respects in times of mourning.” Even the police had called for the students to stand up. “They asked us why we had to address the government on our knees, but nobody could answer.” Officials had stared at them from inside the glass doors and only one, a professor from Beida, had finally come out and tried to pull the young men up.

“But there was no violence,” the boy said. “There was no violence. The police agreed with us. Some of them were weeping, too. We’re all brothers.”

He looked stunned. He turned away and rejoined the procession, buckling himself back into the connected arms.

“Boycott classes!”

“We must have the courage to stand up!”

A placard floated by, “According to the Chinese Constitution, Article 35, the citizens have the right to free speech and assembly.” Applause rippled down the avenue. Dust had gotten into Ai-ming’s eyes, she tried to rub it out but the rubbing only made it worse. The students looked crushed, their paper flowers were flattened against their chests. In fact, she thought, they looked as if they had come from another country, even though they had only come from a few blocks away. In her distraction, the bicycle slipped from her hands and smacked hard against someone’s knee. She dropped her head and began to apologize, expecting someone to call her an idiot country fool, but instead the bicycle righted itself and floated back into her hands. “Good for you students,” a woman said. Her voice was scratchy, she was rubbing her knee. “You’re braver than we were. Much braver. When my generation gathered in Tiananmen Square, it was a different world.” Ai-ming looked up, but either the woman had melted away or Ai-ming couldn’t affix the voice to the face. All around her, older people were looking at her as if she had given them lucky money. She could not see properly. She felt as if the sidewalks, the tables and chairs were all shifting, but she was frozen. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Everything flowed before her, the crowd grew denser and then it slowly loosened. It was not until they had nearly reached the Square that she could feel her own weight again, her two legs, the solidity of the bicycle.

Sparrow, too, was quiet. He had lost his paper flower and his coat looked naked. His bicycle creaked. She unfastened her own flower, pulled him to a stop, and pinned it to him. Behind him, the last remnants of the student procession turned right, north towards the university district. What world had they come from and to what world were they returning?

“Ai-ming, what are you thinking?”

What had the Square looked like this morning when the sun rose on a hundred thousand youth curled together on the concrete? She felt embarrassed because, in response to her father’s question, she, a young scholar, could only think of Yiwen’s favourite song, It’s not that I don’t understand. It’s that things are changing so fast.

Sparrow rephrased. “What were these students thinking?”

They had entered the Square now. The phalanxes of police remained, guarding the Great Hall of the People, even though it was probably empty. The day was quickly getting on. A conscientious few students were meticulously picking up garbage, but they left the paper flowers, which tumbled like pollen whenever a breeze came. The oversized Hu Yaobang gazed sorrowfully down from the Monument.

“I came here when I was a small child,” Sparrow said. “Big Mother brought me. She told me the Square is a microcosm of the human body. The head, the heart, the lungs…She told me not to get lost.”

“Did you get lost?” Ai-ming asked.

“Of course. The space is so large. It takes more than a million people to fill it. Even in 1966, the Red Guards couldn’t do it.”

“Ba,” Ai-ming said. “I want to go abroad.” There was some part of her that remained untapped, she thought, that would never come to life unless it was given space.

“A person needs money to go abroad. Your mother and I don’t have that kind of money.”

“The ones without money try to find outside sponsorship.”

Sparrow was quiet.

The Art of War, Ai-ming thought, ashamed. Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business. “If you know someone in Canada who could sponsor me, I could go.”

Her father looked at her as if from a great distance. Had she been too direct? Was it obvious she had invaded his privacy?

“Yiwen told me,” she said hurriedly, baldly lying. “She said she has an uncle in America. That’s why she applied to go overseas. I thought we might know someone.”

“But why would I know anyone in Canada?” Ba said. His voice was piercingly gentle, cutting her like a toothpick.

“I don’t know….you must know musicians who went away,” she said wretchedly. “With my grades. If I studied hard, I could…”

“Beida is a the best university in the country. Your mother and I don’t want you to study in Canada, it’s so far away.”

“But you could come with me!”

Sparrow shook his head, but not in a way that said no.

She said, “Once you told me that when you were young, you wanted to go abroad. To write your music. To hear other influences. Why is it too late? Ba, you’ve been working in the factory for twenty years and this is a long time in a person’s life. I think…I have a sense that things are changing. The whole point of Hu Yaobang’s reforms was to give opportunities to people like you, people who were unfairly treated.”

“Is that what you think, Ai-ming, that I was unfairly treated?” He touched the flower she had pinned to his coat, as if he had just noticed it.

She wanted to curl up into a ball. Even though her intent was good, the directness of her words made her feel as if she was poking him repeatedly with a sharpened stick.

After a moment, Sparrow said, “And what about your mother?”

“Ma lived nearly twenty years away from us. What difference would it make to her?”

“She lived far away because the government assigns our jobs and our housing.”

“But why? Why can’t we choose for ourselves?” Across from them, in the emptiness of the Square, there were posters asking this very same question. She was not alone in her thinking, she had nothing to fear. Ba doesn’t even know how afraid he is, she thought. His generation has gotten so used to it, they don’t even know that fear is the primary emotion they feel.

“I chose my life, Ai-ming,” he said. “I chose the life that I could live with. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way from the outside.”

She wondered if he believed his own words. She said, “I know, Ba.”

They stood together in the Square where funeral wreaths softened the emptiness. 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, make any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.

“I want to know what it’s like in a young country with lots of space,” she said. “If you say something out loud, you hear your own voice differently.”

Sparrow nodded.

She said, “Canada.”

—

In Sparrow’s mind, lines of Chairman Mao came back unbidden.

We had much to do

and quickly.

The sky-earth spins

and time is short.

Ten thousand years is long

and so a morning and an evening count.

Near to them, in front of the Great Hall of the People, the first line of police, too, seemed to be melting. It could be, Sparrow thought, that a person does not even know that they have gone quiet. Qù could be a substance that begins as a strength and transmutes, imperceptibly, into loss.

They had reached the southern edge of the Square.

Now Ai-ming asked him, “Why did the students kneel down?”

“I imagine…they wanted to show respect. They followed the ways in which petitioners have always approached the government.”

“But why did no government official come out?”

“Because…even though they were kneeling, if a member of the government had come and addressed their demands, the students would have been in a position of power.”

The sun was luminous but the wind was cold. His daughter hugged herself tightly. Paper flowers jumbled over the ground, paper carnations grew from the trees, though some had fallen and been mashed by the everlasting stream of bicycles. He heard their tinkling bells and also a music in his head, shaken loose, the Twelfth Goldberg Variation, two voices engaged in a slightly out-of-breath canon, like a knot that never got tied. He could still write music. The thought jolted him. It might be possible to procure a piano, he could visit the Central Conservatory and ask for the use of a practice room. But then Sparrow had an image of himself, waiting beneath their turning fans, and smiled to think of himself appearing in his Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 uniform and his blue worker’s cap. The absurdity of it made a deep impression. His age struck him forcefully, as if some blindfold had momentarily loosened and allowed him to see things as they were.

He wanted to take Ai-ming’s hand. Sometimes, when Ai-ming bruised her knee on the table or suffered some psychological melancholy, it seemed to lodge inside him as well. Where did the line between parent and child exist? He’d always tried to refrain from pushing her in one direction or the other, ever fearful he might drive her towards the Party, but what if his silence had let her down or failed her in some crucial way? But maybe, he thought, a parent should always have failings, some place into which a child can sink her teeth, because only then can a child come to know herself. He thought about those young students kneeling with their petition. Eventually, they would be arrested. It was inevitable.

“What happened to all that music, Ba? What if…I wish you’d been able to get away, to the West or some other place. I think, if it weren’t for me, maybe you would have tried to live a more honest life.”

Had he been dishonest, Sparrow wondered. To whom had been dishonest? Hadn’t he said what needed to be said?

“Forgive me for speaking so directly, Ba. Only…you raised me to think my own thoughts, even if I couldn’t say them aloud, isn’t that so? I think the time has come to say, sincerely, what I feel.”

The brutality of children never ceased to surprise him.

He had to stop and rest. His heart was beating strangely and his hands felt full of paper cuts, even though there was no visible injury. Ai-ming caught hold of his arm. She looked suddenly alarmed and he wanted to smooth the terror from her face. Big Mother Knife and Aunt Swirl used to trace their fingers over his forehead, his eyebrows; when he was a child, it would help him fall asleep. But that was almost fifty years ago, when Shanghai was occupied. How funny, Sparrow thought, to think that he had been a child of a former world. When had he ceased to be that person? Ai-ming pulled him to a sidewalk bench and then she ran to fill her tea thermos. She also came back with fish balls on a stick. They looked so unappealing his mouth twisted in disgust. Relieved, Ai-ming laughed. He drank the tea and she ate the fish balls, savouring their saltiness as only a young person can. He fought the urge to put his arm around her. Did he want to hold on to her to keep her safe, he wondered, or just to keep himself from being lonely? Ai-ming was eighteen years old and she was ready to find a new beginning, entirely different from his own. This realization shocked him: Ai-ming was still so young, and already she had judged him.

—

Over the weekend, the Square came into Sparrow’s thoughts like a continuous sound. He had heard from his co-workers that hundreds of thousands of people continued to gather there, they were writing public messages, using Hu Yaobang’s funeral as a pretext to mourn others, those who’d never been given a proper burial.

On Tuesday, when Sparrow arrived home from work, Ai-ming and Ling were engrossed by the apricots they were eating and barely noticed him. He changed out of his factory clothes. The previous night, while his wife and daughter slept, he’d written a wall poster to bring to the Square. Now he tucked the narrow roll of paper into his coat.

By the time Sparrow reached Tiananmen Square, it was twilight; thousands of others like him had come to feel the breeze of the open air. Walking across the Square’s infinite greyness, he felt as if he had been exiled to some distant moon. The memorial to Hu Yaobang remained, more flowers had arrived and more posters. In 1976, after Premier Zhou Enlai died, similar events had taken place. Beijingers had come to the Square and mourned openly, provocatively; his death had allowed people to demonstrate loyalty to the disappeared, to people like Zhuli. The government must know that allegiance to the dead was a stubborn loyalty that no policy could eradicate.

He took the poster from his coat. Nearby two girls were mixing glue, and he asked for their assistance. “No problem, grandfather!” one said. She had a Shanghai accent. “I’ll stick that up for you.” She read over his poster, nodded with a kind of bureaucratic approval, and pasted it up in a prominent position. Sparrow had copied a quote from the scholar Kang Youwei, whose treatises he had read in Kai’s room, with the Professor, San Li, Ling and the Old Cat, and still remembered: “And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered help to them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.”

The contours of Hu Yaobang’s portrait were disappearing bit by bit. In the openness of the Square, he allowed himself, for the first time in many years, to remember. Zhuli was in Room 103 playing Prokofiev. His Symphony No. 3 had been finished in his head a thousand times, but he couldn’t hear the ending. Perhaps the places in ourselves that appear empty have only been dormant, unreachable.

Zhuli, he thought. I’m sorry that I came too late. Of course he knew that she had forgiven him long ago, so why did he hold on to this guilt? What was the thing he was most afraid of?

—

The next afternoon, Sparrow gazed once more into the chassis of the Model 3812 radio. At the next work station, Old Bi and Miss Lu were arguing over the ongoing demonstrations, which had spread to a boycott of classes at thirty-nine universities by sixty thousand students. Despite the fact that university students were now banned from factory grounds, someone had managed to smuggle pamphlets into the cafeteria, “Ten Polite Questions for the Chinese Communist Party.”

Bi’s foot kept kicking the table leg to punctuate his words, which seemed to be directed at no one. “Donkeys, donkeys, donkeys!”

“Just last month, fifty people here got reprioritized,” Miss Lu said placidly. “They’ve no jobs and no rations. Modernization stinks.”

“But we need to be practical.” Bi made a triple kick. “We don’t need a million kids in the Square. We need a few smart bosses who know how to run the shop.”

The young woman beside Sparrow shouted, “Fuck this wire! These new 1432s are shit.” Her name was Fan and she was hot-tempered. “Old Bi, if you kick the table one more time, I’m going to stab both your eyes.”

“Give it to me,” Sparrow said. He took the chassis, realigned a crooked filter capacitor, connected it straight to the chassis, soldered it with his hot iron, checked the circuit ground and the alignment, and handed it back. It made him think of an electrified violin.

“Comrade Sparrow has the fingers of a little girl,” Dao-ren joked.

Radio Beijing was playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major. Ever since the announcement of Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May, they had been bombarded by Tchaikovsky and Alexander Glazunov.

“The fact is,” Fan said, pointing her soldering gun at Old Bi, “these Beijing kids took one look at our lives and decided it wasn’t for them. I thought I would study at Fudan University and become a doctor, but look where I am now, not that you comrades aren’t a daily joy to be with! I didn’t see my parents or my siblings for fifteen years! I know for a fact that Comrade Sparrow here hasn’t seen his brothers since they were kids! These days, if you curse the wrong person, you might as well shoot yourself! My sister’s kid complained about his corrupt boss. Poor little shit was re-prioritized and hasn’t been assigned a job for three years! He’s going to the Square every day now!”

Sparrow pivoted the chassis and began working at it from the opposite corner.

As the others argued, Tchaikovsky’s triplet configurations and double stops rained from the speakers like the beating of a thousand wings. When at last the shift ended and they all shuffled towards the exit, Sparrow felt as if a century had passed. On the way home, he nearly fell asleep on the crowded tram, pinned between the window and someone’s dried beans. His fingers were completely numb. When he finally tumbled out at Beijing West Railway Station, a large crowd was jostling in front of the post office. Lunch tins cracked against his elbows. Sparrow tried to push his way through but was impeded by the cart of a candy maker. If we let this turmoil go unchecked, a China with a bright future will become a chaotic China with no future. Loudspeakers were broadcasting the seven-o’clock news, which meant he had gotten home later than normal. “These children are creating political turmoil?” people around him were muttering. “Counter-revolutionaries? Is that the verdict?” The broadcast continued: Under no circumstances should the formation of any illegal organizations be allowed. He would have to…pain sparked along his arms, as if strings had been tied around his fingers and slowly tightened. Wasn’t this what Red Guards had done to…he couldn’t think. The bystanders around him were staring malevolently at the speakers. “Are they kidding?” someone asked. “Do they plan on using tanks on a bunch of math students?” Uneasy shifting. “This is turmoil? This is like the Cultural Revolution? I’ve seen more political turmoil in my soup pot.”

Sparrow pushed his way around the candy man. The vendor tried to interest people in the fantastical shapes he created by pulling sugar syrup, he made words and even the heads of famous figures. Sparrow had loved these sweets when he was a boy. He bought three, one that seemed to be in the shape of Chairman Mao, another that was clearly Beethoven, and a third unidentifiable. He pushed his way through the crowd.

Home at last, he could smell the starchy sweetness of the rice Ai-ming had prepared. His daughter had already laid out pickled turnips and spicy eggplant. On radios and speakers up and down the hutong, the government verdict on the the student demonstrations repeated: This is a serious political struggle confronting the whole Party and People….The announcer let it be known that the editorial would appear in People’s Daily the following morning, April 26, and the Party urged all citizens to study it carefully. Sparrow thought he must ask Ai-ming to design a device that surreptitiously turned off other people’s radios.

A translation of the Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky sat on the television. Why in the world was Ai-ming reading this? He turned its thin pages. He couldn’t concentrate on the words but in the photos, he observed that Tchaikovsky had the large belly of a fortunate man. The composer looked stout and stylish.

He turned the pages of the book as loudly as he could, hoping Ai-ming might emerge, missing her company. The letters of Tchaikovsky were full of banter, he seemed to have several brothers. Here Tchaikovsky was, writing to one brother about the composition of his famous Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35: “It goes without saying that I would have been able to do nothing without him. He plays it marvellously. When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and I run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it…passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength….”

Sparrow stared down at the page.

Where was the record player? This was a fever pervading his limbs, causing turmoil in his thoughts. He felt such an intense longing for music that he was almost a child again, listening to his mother and Swirl as he waited beneath a teahouse table. And where were Kai’s letters? They were missing from the record sleeve where he normally kept them. For years, he had heard nothing of Kai and then, out of the blue in 1985, as reforms intensified, a letter had gotten through. Only then did he learn that Kai had left the country. In 1978, after visiting Sparrow in Cold Water Ditch, he had crossed the border into Hong Kong where he applied for asylum. Within a year, he had married, left for Canada and had a daughter. The first letters had trickled into Cold Water Ditch, arriving every six months. Now, in Beijing, the letters from Canada came every few weeks. Kai said he no longer played the piano. This turning away from music was impossible to explain, he was haunted by people and events; he felt he had been sleeping all these years. He wanted desperately to return to China, however briefly, but his defection made it impossible. The government refused to grant him a visa. Could Sparrow come and see him in Hong Kong? He had already looked into all the particulars. Kai would wire money that might serve as a guarantee for Sparrow’s exit visa. This detail was entered into the letter as if it were an ordinary passing thought. Sparrow did not comprehend, but the texture of Kai’s writing, the inability to picture either of them in a foreign country, the inability, in truth, to picture the outside world at all, embarrassed him. Sparrow wrote a hesitant reply. And then, last month, Kai had written to him. Long ago, you told me not to turn back but I know now that you were mistaken, I knew it then, Sparrow, but I was too afraid to see it. I was too selfish. And what right did I have to ask you for anything? But Sparrow, the future depends on knowing what we loved and who we have become…Please, if you can, please come to Hong Kong. There are too many things between us. There is a lifetime. I recently learned that the Professor was imprisoned and survived the turmoil. He passed away in 1981. We never reconciled. How could I not know of his death until now?

Even when he tried to remember, it came to him like another life. Love was his devotion to his parents, to Ling, to Ai-ming, to this life. But if this was love, what was the other?

“Ba, what’s wrong?”

Where were the letters? He had looked at them only a few weeks ago, and had left them hidden in the sleeve of a Glenn Gould album.

“What are you doing on the floor?” Ai-ming said.

“I’m looking for the record,” he said.

“What record?”

In the evenings, before the lamps were lit, a person could mistake her for Zhuli. The same querying eyes. The same persistent observation. Leave me, he thought. One day, won’t Zhuli leave me? But the thought shamed him.

“Is it your hands? They’re giving you pain again, aren’t they? Come and sit on the sofa.”

Kai had a daughter, too.

How did a person know, he wondered, what was love and what was a facsimile of it? Did it matter? Was the thing that mattered most the action that one took — or failed to take — in the name of that feeling?

“Tell me what record it is, Ba.”

Those radios outside kept up their warnings. This is a planned conspiracy and chaos. Its essence is to negate the leadership of the Party and the socialist system once and for all.

Ai-ming was kneeling on the floor beside him.

His daughter chose a record. She chose Scarlatti’s Sonatas in D. Sparrow had a sickly desire to crawl into the machine. In 1977, he remembered hearing that, during the Democracy Wall protests, a man his age named Huang Xiang had pasted up a poem he had written during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the 1970s, as he wrote the poem, he had covered each page in plastic, wrapped it around a candle, then added another layer of wax around it. When the Cultural Revolution ended, he melted the candles and removed all 94 pages of his poem. Was this a real story, Sparrow had wondered, or was it something like the Book of Records, an imagined survival? How was it possible that people of his generation had taken part in such acts and yet these acts remained so desperately hidden? What happened if you melted a person down layer by layer? What if there was nothing between the layers, and nothing at the centre, only quiet?

Grief for Comrade Hu Yaobang is being used to confuse and poison people’s minds.

Yes, he thought. This is what grief does. It is a confusion, perhaps a poison, that breaks us apart until finally we become something new. Or had he been lying to himself? What if he had failed to create someone new?

“Father…”

She put a glass in his hand and he tasted baijiu. How sweet the alcohol was on his tongue, a few quick sips and it might numb his body, thereby releasing him, as in the old saying, “When wine sinks, words swim.”

“Ai-ming,” he said. “No matter what happens, you must write these examinations. You must do well.” University was the only way, he thought, to force open the door.

“Ba,” she said, “it’s not too late for you to go abroad. Don’t you still need to write your music?”

Why did everyone keep mentioning his music? Couldn’t they just let it go? He drank the liquid down, pretending he had not heard her properly. Before the watchful eyes of Ai-ming, he felt exposed. As if the weakness of the times had lodged inside him, slowly pulverizing all that was unique and his alone, because he had allowed it to do so.

To his great relief, Ai-ming stood up and left him.

He sat in front of the record player. The composer inside him had fallen silent because Sparrow had allowed him to do so.

All revolutionary intellectuals, now is the time to go into battle! Let us unite, holding high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought, unite around the Party’s Central Committee….But no, those words, that editorial, had come from a different era, a different movement. It was only a memory.

Hidden in the record sleeve of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, conducted by Leopold Stokowski with Glenn Gould as soloist, along with the letters from Kai, was a photo of the three of them together: Sparrow, Zhuli and Kai. His cousin was in the middle, fourteen years old, the only one who looked straight into the camera, the only one with nothing to hide. She had been learning Prokofiev, it had been around the time of Spring Festival, and he remembered how much she had fallen for that composer. “Sparrow, do you think it’s possible to love something too much?” She had grasped his hand, the way a child does. She had still been a child in that summer of 1966. “But each phrase is so full, if I tried to hear all its overtones and undertones, nothing would ever get played!” Yet she had learned to hear a great deal, he thought. She’d heard too many voices and given credit to them all. They had been taught, through the lessons of Chairman Mao and the ecstasy of revolution, that death could preserve a truth. But death preserved nothing, he thought. It removed the wholeness of those left behind, and the truth they once knew vanished, unrecorded, unreal, like sound dissipating. He had lived only half a life. Without intending to, he had silenced Zhuli. He remembered how much of himself he had poured into that Symphony No. 3. He could have left the papers in the trusses of the roof, he could have hidden them with the Book of Records. Why had he not done so? Why had he destroyed them with his own hands?

A line from Big Mother’s most recent letter from Cold Water Ditch came back to him: There is no way across the river but to feel for the stones.

4

YIHEN HAD TOLD AI-MING that students from every Beijing university would be demonstrating the following day, in defiance of the April 26th editorial. “I’m going,” Yiwen had said. She had been in the middle of braiding Ai-ming’s hair and unconsciously gave the braid an angry tug. “I don’t care what my parents say. We went to a funeral and the government called us criminals! Do they expect us to just shut our mouths? We’re not the same as they are….”

In her study, Ai-ming closed her eyes. She missed the companionship of Big Mother’s snoring hulk. In her memory, she was back in Cold Water Ditch, she was the same nosy child snooping into Big Mother’s book trunk. Here were the forty-two notebooks of the Book of Records, a girl’s blue dress, as well as a pamphlet with a yellow cover, and on the cover the words, “Gods and Emperors.”

The pages had fascinated her. Later, she understood it was a political tract and an answer to Deng Xiaoping’s celebrated Four Modernizations. “We want no more gods and emperors,” the writer had proclaimed. “No more saviours of any kind. We want to be masters of our own country. Democracy, freedom and happiness are the only goals of modernization. Without this fifth modernization, the other four are nothing more than a new-fangled lie.”

When she opened her eyes, she looked out and saw Yiwen’s mother sitting in the courtyard, washing clothes. The pink dress rose briefly from the water before it was pushed under again, reemerging tangled up in the arms of a shirt.

As soon as her parents left for work, Ai-ming shut her books. She went outside, walked calmly to the north gate of the alleyway and retrieved her bicycle. She hopped on. As she pedalled away from the books, she felt suddenly free, airborne. At the Chinese Academy of Sciences, she swerved across the intersection, dodged a cart loaded with water drums, and continued on under the big trees of Yuyuantan Park.

Sidestreet and delivery lanes opened up before her, and she flew north until she reached the Third Ring Road. Here, noise pummelled the buildings. At first all she could see were hundreds of green-hatted police. But behind them, just visible on the other side, were the edges of innumerable banners, mostly red and gold, like a wedding. The loudspeakers, out of sync, blurted out garbled warnings, “Demonstrations without official approval are illegal and will be banned! Demonstrations without official approval…”

On Ai-ming’s side of the police lines, two old men in white vests were holding a neatly written banner: “The way ahead is long and far, yet I will search far and wide,” but the two, who reminded her of Ba Lute, already seemed tottery on their skinny, grandfather legs.

Ai-ming locked her bicycle to a grate and squeezed onto the overpass. Looking down, she saw the students pressed right up against the police line, where the officers had hitched themselves together, arm in arm. The students were using the sheer mass of their numbers to slowly, tectonically, exert pressure. It was fierce and sweaty work.

I was a silly egg to think I would be able to find Yiwen, she told herself, blushing at the unexpected thought. The mass of young people disappeared into the horizon, as if the crowd stretched all the way to Beijing University itself.

A boy who had climbed up a lamppost called out that comrades from the University of Politics and Law had banded together and broken through a blockade at the Second Ring Road. Noise rioted up, vibrating the overpass. She watched as ladies coming to or from work, in factory blues, pink aprons, and green smocks, tried to sweet-talk the officers into letting the students through. Old people sat on their balconies as if watching opera, shouting at everyone to get on with it. Even as it grew increasingly tense, it was clear to Ai-ming that the police had no intention of pulling out their weapons. They were simply placing their bodies in the way.

Minutes passed, another half-hour, and still the agonizing pushing went on.

The students, all neatly dressed, attractive with their earnest glasses, began chanting the words of Comrade Deng himself: “A revolutionary government should listen to the voice of the People! Nothing should frighten it more than silence!”

On this side, the residents joined in, so that the police were pinioned between two tidal waves of sound. This went on for half an hour before everyone stopped to rest. Meanwhile up on the overpass, it was shoulder against shoulder, chest against back, with still more people arriving. Ai-ming was so sweaty she feared she might be squeezed, like a slippery fish, off the bridge.

The students were reorganizing. All the young women had been sent up to the head of the line. A few men around Ai-ming laughed dirtily. A soothing female chorus rose up:

“Raise the incomes of the police!”

“Brothers!” a young woman called. “You have been working hard all morning! Citizens of Beijing! Bring water to the People’s police!”

Amidst laughter and cheering, water materialized. Ai-ming scanned continuously for Yiwen. A few police lifted off their peaked caps, withdrew colourful handkerchiefs, and mopped the sweat from their faces. They smiled shyly at the girls, who giggled. Everyone exhaled, like a rest between sets.

The students managed to reformulate themselves so that boys and girls were mixed together once more. Meanwhile, the overpass took up the chant, “What’s so hard? It’s like cutting cabbages and melons!”

By now, Ai-ming had been on the overpass for almost three hours and she, too, felt the moment had arrived. She couldn’t stand to be further compressed. From the boulevard of protesters, more cries came, rolling forward with piercing intensity.

“Reject the verdict of the People’s Daily!”

“We are not a mob, we are civilized members of society!”

Under this sustained pressure, Ai-ming could see the sweating police beginning to fray. The students pressed their advantage, all the while chanting, “The People love the People’s police!”

The students heaved through the centre and the green police lines dissolved to the sides like a soft leaf curling open. Ai-ming heard an uprush of sound that felt as if it were coming from the concrete and the buildings themselves. Residents leaned so far out she was afraid they would all tumble off the flyover together. Her own shouts of both astonishment and relief were lost in the tumult. Even though the success of the students seemed inevitable, it also seemed impossible, and everyone looked mildly stunned. A police hat flew nonsensically up onto the overpass, and Ai-ming, finding it in her hands, gently tossed it down to a bareheaded officer, who gazed up into the sun, looking for her. She waved. Carts of water and icy tea appeared. Beside her, a toothless old man was throwing popsicles down to the crowd. A huddle of police were talking into radios, a few were grinning, and students patted their shoulders as they went by. A banner passed, “A new path is opening up: the path we long ago failed to take.”

The marchers moved forward, surrounded on all sides by student marshals with red armbands. Ai-ming ran to unlock her bicycle from the grate. Pushing it beside her, she slipped between the lines of students. Everyone’s clothes were rumpled as if they’d all been wrestling or turning over and over in their sleep.

They weren’t asking for anything impossible, Ai-ming thought. Just room to move, to grow up and be free, and for the Party to criticize itself. A red banner from Beijing University read in proud, golden characters, “Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China.”

The closer they came to the Square, the more the crowd seemed to become a part of her own body, so that Ai-ming herself expanded limitlessly as students from other universities continued to arrive, connecting at intersections between the First and Second Ring Roads. Cooks in tired hats and white aprons stood outside their kitchens, waiters smoked passionately, shopgirls teetered out of department stores, so that around six in the afternoon, when office and factory workers came off their shifts, they were all crushed together in the smaller roads. People her parents’ age kept pressing water, ice cream sandwiches, frozen fruit, and Inch of Gold candies into her hands. Sugar-struck, Ai-ming thought she saw the dazzling pink of Yiwen’s headband. She followed it as if following torchlight.

“Yiwen!” she shouted. Her lungs were bursting. “Yiwen!” Without her realizing that it was happening, what she appeared to be on the outside, and who she was on the inside, had become the same. Rapture felt so strangely light. A knot of journalists from the People’s Daily passed by holding hands, they didn’t bother to hide their badges. One carried a signboard that read, “Free Thoughts! Free Speech!” The air was inundated with words like this, banners and posters that covered the street like moveable type, as if the sidewalk itself was an enormous banned book. It was difficult to believe that what she witnessed was real and not a counter-revolutionary’s hallucination. And, stranger still, there was no weeping, no regret or anxiety about the past, and none of the day-to-day insincerity which was a normal part of everyday life. And here was Yiwen, just ahead of her. Ai-ming halved the distance between them and halved it again. The police had evaporated as if they, too, belonged to some other Beijing. And had someone pulled out the wires of the loudspeakers? Ai-ming ran up to her friend. The uneven pavement made the bicycle bell jingle and, hearing it, Yiwen turned, saw her and broke into a luminous smile.

“What is revolution?” Yiwen said, half laughing, half crying. “Ai-ming, what is revolution?” Could it also look like this, Ai-ming wondered. Yiwen reached around, hugging her waist. “This is revolution,” she said, her mouth brushing Ai-ming’s hair. Because of her father’s low political status in Cold Water Ditch, she had never had a true friend before. They were walking like family who had lost and then found one another. Tiananmen was a gate, the passageway to a square with no walls, no obstacles, just the wind and space to breathe, and even a call to abandon oneself. Couples embraced, they clung to one another in wide-eyed desire. Maybe, she thought, by the time the examinations arrived, the content of her thoughts would be permissible, the only thing that would need measuring would be the quality of her argument. If so, this change had occurred suddenly, with so little forewarning, and before she had even thought to ask for it or dared to imagine that overnight a society could change. Yiwen was singing, “Now your hands are shaking, now your tears are falling. Maybe what you’re saying is, you love me, with nothing to my name, come with me, come with me!” She wanted Yiwen’s arm never to lift from her waist. Maybe, if China could get better, she would no longer desire to escape abroad.

—

Celebration rattled the streets. Ling’s bus entered the Third Ring Road before coming to a standstill in the face of bicycles and crowds. She stepped down as if into a different city. Even here, several kilometres away from Tiananmen Square, she could hear the chanting. There were explanations on people’s lips but none that made sense. “The student demonstrations broke through three thousand police….” “The Square is blocked off so they’ve filled Chang’an Avenue….” “All they did was present a petition and our government called them counter-revolutionaries! Shame!” “Enjoy it while it lasts. No flower can live a hundred days….” Red bits of banners clung to trees just as, only two weeks ago, funeral chrysanthemums had blanketed the boulevards.

At home, Ling pushed her shoes off, went to the dining table and hung her purse on the chair. The apartment was quiet. She knocked at Ai-ming’s door and, receiving no answer, opened it. Sparrow was writing. When he looked up, it was as if he had no idea where he was.

Ling took a breath. The room smelled of alcohol. “Has Ai-ming gone to the Square?”

“She was already gone by the time I came home.”

His hand covered the sheet of paper before him.

Outside, the street noise grew, dissolved and came again, like an explosion.

“Every citizen is on the streets tonight it seems. Except you, dear Sparrow.”

She came nearer, looking closely at her husband’s face. He was extremely pale. “What’s happened?” she asked. “Are you worried about the demonstrators? The government won’t arrest the whole city. They can’t.”

He couldn’t look at her. “What are the students asking for?”

“I’m not sure they know anymore. The government accused them of inciting chaos. They compared them to the Red Guards and the students don’t agree. Nobody does.”

Sparrow stood up. “They have no idea of the risk,” he said. He moved towards the door as if this room was too crowded.

Ling followed him out. The sheet of paper, turned over, remained where it was.

“But what if…” she said, following him into the kitchen. Suddenly exhausted, Ling sat down at the table. “Those students are rebelling against us, too. Against our generation, I mean.”

Sparrow said nothing.

When had they last had an honest conversation, she wondered. Could it be months, or even years, since they last confided in one another? “We let the Party decide our jobs, our fates, our homes and the education of our children. We submitted because…”

“We thought some good might come.”

“But when did we stop believing it? Look at me, I edit transcripts and I’m grateful for the job. My life is a mountain of paperwork and a sea of meetings.” She laughed, but found her own laugh alarming. “Unlike us, these young people have literally no memory. Without memory, they’re free.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about my life, Sparrow. Not the past but the future. Don’t you ever think about yours?”

“Yes, of course, but here in Beijing…sometimes I imagine that I…but we—”

Ai-ming burst into the apartment, elated. Ling caught a glimpse of another girl darting down the alleyway, a flash of neon colour. It was the neighbour’s wild daughter, Yiwen.

Sparrow turned towards the door. “Where have you been?”

“At the Square, of course! You should see it, all the people—”

He began to berate her. Ai-ming stared at her father as if he were a stranger.

“How can I protect you?” he yelled. “How?” He had drunk more than Ling had supposed. She stood up from the table and went towards him. Sparrow kept on: “The government is right. You’re no different from the Red Guards! You think you know everything, you think you can judge everyone, you think you’re the only ones who love this country. You think you can overturn everything in a day, a moment!”

“Sparrow,” Ling said.

“They stole everything,” Sparrow said, turning to her. “But why did we let them do it? Why did we give in? I remember everything now. My brothers. I couldn’t…Zhuli. They needed me to help them, but I didn’t. Why did we throw away everything that mattered to us?”

Ling’s heart was breaking. She had never seen him come apart, she had stopped thinking that he could. It was as if someone had cut a single wire inside him on which everything had depended. “Sparrow, let it go.”

“How?”

“Ai-ming,” Ling said, wanting to shield their daughter. “Go to your room.” Ai-ming obeyed. Tears streamed down her face.

“How can I forget?” Sparrow’s face was drained of colour. He looked at Ling as if she had always known the answer. “If I forget, what’s left? There’s nothing.”

All she wanted was to lie down, close her eyes and rest, but she had to get out of this room, out of the falseness of this home. Ling picked up her purse from the chair. The walls were pressing in on her and she couldn’t breathe, thinking of everything she had given up for her family, but most of all for the Party. She looked once more at her husband, who had covered his face with his hands. “Don’t you see?” she said. “Things are changing.”

He didn’t answer.

“Live your life, Sparrow. It’s the best thing either of us can do for our daughter.” She went out the door, through the alleyway, and into the street.

—

When Sparrow woke, the room, the city, was quiet. He got out of bed, lit the lamp and took the letter out of its hiding place. On the kitchen table, the paper gleamed whitely.

Even if I had the means to leave

I was content in my life

The night sky was a thickening dark. He would like to have a piano, he would like to sit, right now, in the darkness of a practice room. Music, for him, had always been a way of thinking. He pushed the pages away. Sparrow could not imagine leaving his daughter behind. Ai-ming was so much like Zhuli. Were they similar because of him, had he failed to give his daughter the room she needed? In the eighteen years of Ai-ming’s life, he had never been separated from her, not for a day. He covered the letter with his hands and chided himself for being mournful. If he could sweep away all this mournfulness, which must only be a kind of dust from his previous lives, he would be a better father and a kinder husband. Ling’s confidence and goodness had always sustained him. He had no right to grieve. Their neighbour was listening to the radio, Sparrow could hear the anchor’s even drone but not the words. Music began, echoing through the alleyway, but it was music he couldn’t recognize, music from an era he didn’t know, music composed in the present.

—

Ongoing disruptions in the street, in the factory and in his home continued. He suspected Ai-ming was going to the Square every day, but neither he nor Ling had the will or influence to stop her. On the May First holiday, he telephoned Cold Water Ditch on the neighbourhood phone. Big Mother came onto the line and shouted, “Workers’ Day? We live in a Communist country. Every day is workers’ day!” He could hear Ba Lute giggling behind her. Big Mother grumbled, “Tell that lazy Ai-ming to study hard.” When he said there was unrest in Beijing, she said, “Good! Nobody should be at rest.”

How, he wondered, when he put down the phone, had Big Mother managed to raise a son like him? It was impossible not to believe in the mischief of the gods.

The May Fourth demonstrations came and went, as large as the preceding April 27th demonstration, and included a contingent from Sparrow’s own Beijing Wire Factory No. 3. But he did not go.

Sleep became impossible. Sparrow took to walking at night. Even at two or three in the morning, bicycles roamed the streets, students flitting from one place to another. Time felt elastic, stretching into unfamiliar shapes, so that he could be both in Beijing and in Shanghai, an old man and a young man, in the world and in his thoughts.

One night, he came across three men and two women playing music at the closed gates of Jade Pond Park. The musicians made time disappear. On Chinese instruments, they played the dignified promenade from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Mussorgsky’s ten movements depicted an imaginary tour of an art collection, and the composition had been written in honour of his friend, a painter who had died suddenly at the age of thirty-nine. A deep and unfamiliar calm pervaded Sparrow. On a nearby pillar, someone had pasted up a letter, “I’ve been searching for myself, but I didn’t expect to find so many selves of mine.” When morning came, the musicians packed up their instruments. Sparrow bought a dough stick and savoured it as he watched the night workers go off duty and the day workers go on.

One evening, he arrived home from the factory to find a gift from Ai-ming. She had bought one of the new Japanese cassette players, small enough to fit into one hand. His daughter was so delighted with the gadget, she could not restrain herself from testing all the buttons and trying the headphones herself, adjusting and readjusting the volume. They might have toyed with it all night had Ling not dragged them out for supper.

He continued his nighttime walks, listening to the Walkman. Ai-ming had made a dozen tapes for him, copying them, she said, from someone called Fat Lips. Lately, she had friends all over the place. One evening, Sparrow walked all the way to the university district listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In the darkness, one could always hear better. The music became as real as the concrete sidewalks and stout brick walls. Elderly guards at the entrance to Beijing University were immersed in their midnight card game, and so Sparrow passed through the gate unimpeded. Perhaps in his innocuous clothes, he had been mistaken for a cleaner or a parent visiting from the countryside.

Low lights flickered in the student dormitories where, now and again, excited figures were visible in the narrow windows. The tape ended and he hit the eject button, removed the cassette and turned it over. The machine made satisfying clicks. Cannonades of laughter came from the dormitories, arriving in staggered bursts. Posters clung to every surface, banners wept from the windows, the ground was a deluge of papers and empty bottles. Workers were sweeping up the debris, twig brooms scratching the cement. The Variations started up again. The cassette was Glenn Gould, Ai-ming had told him, but a different, 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations. In the opening aria, each note seemed to Sparrow as if it had been pulled open rather than pressed down. Occasionally, he heard Glenn Gould himself, humming. Why had Gould gone back to record the same piece of music again? No one could tell him. Fat Lips only had this one edition, Ai-ming had said, a copy of a copy that a foreigner had given him.

The counterpoint folded over in his mind. The further Sparrow walked into Beijing University, the greater the quantity of political posters. Even the trees had not been spared. Torches had been set up, and here and there boys wandered by in shorts, reading the posters, just as people of Sparrow’s generation, at the post office and elsewhere, studied the newspapers displayed in their plastic boxes. More posters were being pasted up over the old ones, making an ever-thickening book of protest. In 1966, Beijing Red Guards had written, “We must tell you, a spider cannot stop the wheel of a cart! We will carry socialist revolution through to the end!” Twenty-three years later, Beijing students wrote, “Democracy takes time to achieve, it cannot be accomplished overnight.” But several proposed an immediate hunger strike that would occupy Tiananmen Square before the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in four days’ time.

A tall boy gestured menacingly at him, but Glenn Gould prevented Sparrow from hearing the shouted words. Sparrow pushed his headphones off. “I said, don’t think of tearing anything down!” the student said impatiently. “I know you’re a fucking government spy!” Sparrow was so surprised he mumbled an apology.

He backed away, nearly tripping over a gracefully written pennant with the words, “A society that speaks with only one voice is not a stable society.”

The breeze cooled him. He left the grassy hill and exited through the gates of Beida, to the tree-lined edge of Haidian Park. In this unfamiliar city, Glenn Gould seemed his only confidant, the most familiar presence. Do I really look like a spy, Sparrow wondered. Are there spies who behave like me?

—

A hundred radios passed through Sparrow’s hands.

In the evenings, when he went to Tiananmen Square, the boulevards had a serene yet haunting openness, the wide streets themselves seemed to promise an end to this impasse. The government had not reversed its condemnation of the student protest, but had begun to speak in soothing tones. General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had worked closely with the deceased Hu Yaobang, had used a May 4th speech to air his own point of view. The students, he said, were calling on the Communist Party to correct its mistakes and improve its work style, and these criticisms were in line with the Party’s own assessment of itself. “We should meet the students’ reasonable demands through democracy and law. We should be willing to reform and we should use rational and orderly methods.” To Sparrow’s great surprise, the press had begun reporting on student demonstrations that were occurring not only in Beijing, but outside the capital, in some fifty-one cities. A fracture had appeared in the system, and now water was rushing in to widen it. Ling said that even within her work unit at State Radio, the consensus was that the government had been too harsh. The demonstrations offered an opportunity: if the Party could prove its sincerity, it would win the loyalty of a further generation.

The nights continued, growing ever warmer. He wrote to Kai to say, “Yes, I will come,” and having sent the letter off, lost himself by walking the Muxidi alleyways, listening to another of Ai-ming’s tapes, this one Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which had gone unperformed for twenty-five years. What would it be like to go to Canada at this stage in his life? What if Kai could sponsor Ai-ming? He would pay the money back. But what about Ling and this life? What about his parents? In what way was he still a composer if he had made not a sound for more than twenty years? There were no answers to his questions.

Yet the knowledge that he would see Kai brought him an undeniable, undiluted pleasure. Upon sending the letter, Sparrow had felt abruptly changed. That a few simple words could transform him, Yes, I will come, unsettled him. But why should he continue to fear? Wasn’t society changing? Nearly a month had passed since Hu Yaobang’s death, a month in which Beijing students continued to boycott classes. There were rumours that high-ranking members of the Communist Party were prepared to sit down with the students, face to face, and take part in a televised dialogue. If so, this would be the first time such an event had occurred in Sparrow’s lifetime; he could not fathom it, and remembered, still, He Luting, his head forced down by Red Guards.

A change in the system of government had the power to change the fundamental construction of the world he knew. He would go to Hong Kong. A truthful end could come at last. He and Kai were no longer young, they had families of their own. It was difficult to move on without an end…but move on to what? He could not think so far into the future and if he thought of Ling, all his childish imaginings evaporated. Everything changed in a day, an hour, a moment. In the past, he had misread events, he had reacted too slowly. Sparrow had made mistakes but he promised himself he would not make them again. Now, in the afternoons, when he came home from work, Sparrow sat down at Ai-ming’s desk and composed. The old Symphony No. 3 was gone, he could no longer retrieve what it might have been, and so he had started a new work, a simpler piece, a sonata for piano and violin. The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu once described his own work as “a picture scroll unrolled,” and Sparrow felt a kinship with this image. He could hear this sonata in his head as surely as he could hear Bach and Shostakovich on the cassette player. The sonata was real and had already been created. One’s own mind, the saying went, concealed more information than five cartloads of books. It was like learning to breathe again, not just with his lungs but with his whole mind.

On May 13, the students went on hunger strike. Sparrow was working in Ai-ming’s room when the announcement was broadcast on the radio. He sensed that the piano and violin piece was unfolding at a sped-up tempo, and he erased the last hour’s work and began again, re-counting the measures, altering the space between development and return, two themes supporting one another. The line of the piano was difficult to hold, but the violin felt supple and unceasing. It was not heroic, it wished only to play for itself alone, even if it knew such a thing was not truly possible.

A commentator on the radio argued that these revolutionary youth were part of a deliberate attempt to humiliate the government and the nation. “Why else begin a hunger strike two days before our historic summit with Mikhail Gorbachev? This is the first visit from a Soviet leader in forty years….” Another said the students’ intentions were good, but their methods were immature, and it was imperative that they refrain from damaging the nation’s image. The news also seemed to be wrestling with its own head; the newsreader announced that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang favoured far-reaching press reforms, so that content and analysis would be decided by news editors and not Party officials. A sharp pain in Sparrow’s back flared unexpectedly, and he felt like an old piano that couldn’t be tuned.

At work the following day, the factory was unproductive. Half his co-workers had signed on to the new independent workers’ union operating from under a tarp on Chang’an Avenue. They had gone so far as to identify themselves by their real names, even showing their work badges. His co-workers only wanted news of the Square. Sparrow hadn’t yet signed on, he was trying to imagine himself boarding the plane for Hong Kong. Kai had been true to his word and Sparrow’s exit visa had been approved. For the first time in his life, he would travel outside China. Kai had begun to float other ideas. We could teach at the Hong Kong Conservatory. I have also made inquiries at the Vancouver Conservatory of Music. What have you been composing? Send me what you have. He began to suspect that Kai was living an illusion more complex than his own.

Fan, who worked the line with him, tapped her pencil on his desk. “Comrade Sparrow,” she said. “You look hideous. Do you have a fever? Is it contagious? Maybe you should get home and rest.”

Fan was still so young, Sparrow thought suddenly. If Zhuli were alive, she would be thirty-seven years old. These days, she entered his thoughts freely, as if some barrier between them had broken down.

“I’m not…”

“Go on. Production is non-existent anyway.” Fan got up, he could see her in the next aisle talking to the floor supervisor, known to everyone as Baby Corn, Sparrow didn’t know why. His hands were trembling. Perhaps he did have a fever. Baby Corn came over, deferential, as if Sparrow were his ancestor.

“Comrade Sparrow, you’re looking dead on your feet. Take the afternoon off. You’re back on shift tomorrow anyway, aren’t you?”

“I would prefer to stay.” Sparrow was afraid he would be criticized, later on, for not working to his full capacity. They would use this weakness to reprioritize him and lay him off. If he lost his job, they might revoke Ai-ming’s Beijing papers, and she would not be allowed to sit the university examinations.

“I insist,” Baby Corn said, distracted. He wandered a few steps away and gazed into the large face of his brand new watch.

“Come on,” Fan whispered. “He’s a real pain when he’s angry. Besides, you look awful…Did you injure your back? At your age, you’ve got to take better care of yourself.”

As he left, he heard the newsreader saying that talks between the government and the students, scheduled for the morning, had been cancelled. Outside, even the breeze felt sticky. He had started cycling to and from work because the buses were not reliable. Ling had told him that youth from across the country were pouring into Beijing by the tens of thousands. They were painting democracy slogans on train cars so that wherever the trains went, the student messages, too, would go. Sparrow pedalled slowly across the factory grounds, ashamed of his exhaustion. If he was not careful, they would all be calling him Grandfather, which was ludicrous because he was not even fifty.

He ended up on Chang’an Avenue, his bicycle inching through traffic as if he were part of a larger procession. He hadn’t meant to go to Tiananmen Square, it was only that he neglected to turn right after the Muxidi Bridge, and had continued straight. Chang’an Avenue was jammed; now he couldn’t turn around even if he wanted to. He had grown up in Shanghai, the most modern of Chinese cities, and yet he felt like an outsider here, out of his depth. The flood of Beijingers carried him forward until, glimpsing the Square, he saw that it was once more overrun with banners representing more universities than he could count. And now Sparrow truly did not wish to be here. Loudspeakers were broadcasting continuously. A young woman’s frail voice crackled over the street: “The country is our country. The people are our people. The government is our government. Who will shout if not us? Who will act if not us?”

Sparrow got down from his bicycle and began to push it. The young woman was using the exact words of Chairman Mao, written when Mao Zedong was a young fighter.

Beside Sparrow, an enormous man with a grizzled face was reading the newspaper as he walked.

“This hunger strike,” Sparrow said to him. “Is it real? Will the students really refuse food?”

“Ai! These kids…” The stranger’s badge, stamped with the words Capital Iron and Steel, trembled from a clip on his shirt. “It’ll be over in a few hours. Old Gorbachev will be escorted into the Square tomorrow and the Party will shake the kids off Tiananmen like ants from a stick.” He folded the paper in half. “That’s what my son tells me anyway.”

“And all these people?”

“Exactly. I came to see what’s gotten everyone so worked up. Of course, I admire their ideals. Who doesn’t? But even a nothing like me can see that the students and the government aren’t speaking the same language. Everyone wants to fix the country, but everyone wants power, too, don’t they? That’s what we’re talking about in my danwei….” He tapped his badge. “Our work unit alone has over 200,000 workers and if we support the hunger strike, that changes everything, doesn’t it? That’s a bloody revolution.” He took a bag of buns, as if by magic, from his other hand and offered one to Sparrow, who accepted. The man ate half of one in a single bite. “Any kids, Comrade?”

“A daughter.”

“Not a university student, I hope.”

“Thank heavens, no.”

The man swallowed the bread in his mouth and washed it down with a gulp from his tea thermos. “Frankly, I don’t understand what’s wrong with us. The stupidity we went through, a whole generation slapping its own head…how come we keep arriving at the same point?” He screwed the lid back on his thermos. “Hey, you’re not a plain coat are you? Someone told me there are thousands of plain coats snooping around.”

“A spy?” Sparrow smiled. “No, but other people have thought the same.”

“Because you’re so unthreatening,” the man said. “Don’t take offence. It’s just that you’ve got such a listening face.”

—

It was twilight. Behind the Monument of the People’s Heroes, hundreds of students were lying on the ground. They were guarded by other students, wearing red armbands, who made a kind of human barricade around them. Sparrow felt that a world he had been living inside was being forced open. But weren’t these students also living inside a world of their own construction? The hunger strikers had the brightest futures in the entire country. As Beijing university graduates they would be responsible for their parents and grandparents, for their siblings if they had any, yet here they were, lying on the bare concrete. He felt a gnawing fear scraping against his lungs. Three boys on one bicycle rolled by, acrobatic, joyful. They shouted, “We won’t eat fried democracy!” and a ripple of laughter came from the pyjama-clad students. Where were their parents? he wondered. But now a boy with a red armband came to him and said sternly, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Comrade, but only we are allowed here. It’s for the security of our hunger strike revolutionaries.” Sparrow nodded, backing away. The recording on the loudspeaker began again, it was the same fragile voice as before, “Today freedom and democracy must be bought with our lives. Is this fact something the Chinese people can be proud of?”

Sparrow looked up, trying to find the source of the broadcast, but the endlessness of the sky made it difficult to see what was near.

I have grown old, he thought. I no longer understand the ways of this world.

—

The following morning, as they stood beneath Fan’s flowery umbrella outside the factory gates, Fan gave Sparrow a pamphlet that listed the demands of the hunger strikers. There were just two: immediate dialogue on an equal footing, and an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the student movement. Fan told him that the workers of Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 would be marching in support of the students on May 16. She had heard that almost all of Beijing’s factories, as well as scientific and educational institutes, were planning the same. Fan was unusually subdued, and when Sparrow asked if she was well, she told him that her sister in Gansu Province had suffered a work accident but Fan didn’t know the severity. “And I’ve been going to the Square every night after work,” she said, “to help out where I can, because these skinny kids haven’t eaten in three days, and the government has yet to lift a finger. How did we come to this?” Fan’s troubled face turned away from him. “And I don’t want to make radios anymore.” She looked back and laughed, a lost, unhappy laugh. “Does anyone want to make radios?” she said. “Oh, damn your second uncle!”

This was a special Beijing curse and it made Sparrow smile.

Fan raised her eyebrows, which made her ears wiggle slightly. She leaned mischievously towards him, so close their noses nearly touched. “What would you like to do, Comrade Sparrow, if you were free to choose a vocation?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I’d like to play the piano.”

Fan let out a honking laugh. Someone coming up the stairs dropped their lunch tin in surprise and let out a sad, soft, Waaaaa! “It’s never too late to learn!” Fan shouted.

Sparrow smiled. “I suppose.”

“But the piano kind of thing, Comrade,” she said, turning serious, “is a hobby and can be done in addition to a steady job and what I meant with my question is the kind of vocation that requires a lifetime’s commitment. I wanted to be a doctor, I think I told you once, I wanted to open a clinic in my sister’s town but you know how it was back then. It wasn’t up to me.”

Rain battered dully on the umbrella. I want to see my daughter grow up, Sparrow thought. The premonition scared him so much he reached out his hand, intending to grasp the wall, and caught only air.

Fan didn’t notice. Her fingers were idly tapping the handle of the umbrella, playing an imaginary instrument. “Speaking of pianos,” she said. “Remember that musician in 1968, the composer from Shanghai, the tall one with the long face, what was his name? They locked us in a room and made us watch his struggle session. Old guy was being kicked around on live television and we still had to call him names.”

“He Luting.”

“That’s it! Right on television, they were going to make a big example out of him. I haven’t thought of him in years. Do you remember it?”

“I remember.”

“Oh, boy. Everyone had to watch, it didn’t matter whether you worked upstairs or in the basement. So we all heard it when he shouted, ‘How dare you, how dare you….Shame on you for lying.’ That’s what he said, he kept yelling out, ‘Shame! Shame!’ Those Red Guards couldn’t believe it. I can still see their faces, big eyes and dumb-dumb mouths. Nobody could believe it, the nerve of this guy. I wonder if he’s still alive.”

“I think so,” Sparrow said.

“Shame on you! I’ll never forget.” She disappeared for a moment into her own searching. “We all knew that, once the cameras were switched off, pow, that would be the end of him. They wouldn’t let him get away with it.”

“But afterwards, were you yourself different?”

Fan looked at him, startled. “Comrade Sparrow, what kind of question is that?…how could anyone be different?” She gave an irritated sigh. “Sure this He Luting proved that it was possible to fight back, to stand up…but I still didn’t know how it was done. The Red Guards back then, the youth, you know how vicious they were…” She reached into her pocket and took out a handful of candies. “You like these, don’t you? White Rabbits. Have a few of these and don’t ask me any more questions. All right, I’m a coward! But damn your questions, they make me feel like I belong in a factory and will never deserve better.”

“Don’t be upset,” Sparrow said, accepting the candy. “I’m the same as you. I had the desire, but never the will.”

“And now?” Fan asked.

He shook his head, but it occurred to him that now, finally, when he had the will, desire itself might have disappeared. For twenty years, Sparrow had convinced himself that he had safeguarded the most crucial part of his inner life from the Party, the self that composed and understood the world through music. But how could it be? Time remade a person. Time had rewritten him. How could a person counter time itself?

—

That night, when Ai-ming came home in tears, Sparrow helplessly gave her the candy. He knew that Ai-ming stayed in the Square each day and passed herself off as a student. His daughter said that hundreds of students had lost consciousness, they were on IV drips. She had spent the day trying to keep a path clear for the stream of ambulances. How could he yell at her? More than three thousand had joined the hunger strike and some were threatening to set themselves on fire. But he saw, when he passed the neighbourhood television, that this confrontation with the government could not go on indefinitely. He watched clips of Gorbachev’s arrival in Beijing, all the members of the Politburo standing stiffly on the tarmac, their faces as grey as their colourless coats. General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang had met with Gorbachev, they had sat on chairs too large for their bodies. Comrade Zhao said that some young people had doubts about socialism, that their concerns were sincere, and for this reason reform was crucial. The anchor read without looking up. The grand celebration that had been planned for Tiananmen Square, intended to celebrate the first visit by a Soviet head of state since 1959, had been cancelled.

—

The following morning, Wednesday, Sparrow met his workmates at the Muxidi Bridge. Everyone was neatly turned out in their dark blue uniforms, while around them Chang’an Avenue swelled in a kind of euphoria and sadness. People from factories across the city arrived continuously in trucks and re-purposed buses. Fan was busy giving orders, she had a voice sharp enough to crack glass. Old Bi was there, too, with Dao-ren, who carried one side of a banner that read, “We can no longer stay silent.” Even the floor supervisors, managers and superiors were walking with them. He had heard that some, including Baby Corn, had children who had joined the hunger strike, and it was true, Baby Corn did not look well. An enlivening breeze made all the banners crease and ripple, and an expression of Big Mother’s caught in his mind, Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. At last they set out, behind the banner of Beijing Wire Factory No. 3. The sky was like a yellow curtain they could never quite pass through.

The air was tumultuous as Tiananmen Square came into sight. He saw banners announcing the Beijing Bus Company, Xidan Department Store and, shockingly, the Beijing Police Academy. Ling was here, too, walking alongside her co-workers at Radio Beijing. Men from Capital Iron and Steel waved orange flags that caught the sun. They were sturdy and mountainous, and had taken it upon themselves to direct traffic. Life was in flux, orchestral and completely unrecognizable. Through the loudspeakers a student was saying, “Mother China, witness now the actions of your sons and daughters,” while foreign journalists, having come to report on the Sino-Soviet summit, were so numerous they seemed to be replicating themselves from moment to moment. Journalists and editors from the People’s Daily walked under a red-and-gold banner, the colours of sunset. Everywhere, students, almost drunk with exhaustion, collected donations, and their plastic buckets and biscuit tins overflowed. The workers around Sparrow started buying up all the water, nourishing biscuits, popsicles and sticks of frozen fruit, and carting them to the hunger strikers. Sparrow felt as if all his past lives, all his selves, were walking beside him.

“Comrade Sparrow,” Fan said, taking hold of his arm, “are you okay? We should find some ice for your back injury—”

“I’m fine,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I never imagined so many people…”

Fan’s smile was so wide he was surprised to realize she was weeping.

On the loudspeakers, a scholar was addressing the crowds, “There are things that I can’t accept from the government, and there are extreme elements within the student movement. But history is this kind of process, it’s all mixed up….”

In two weeks, he would fly to Hong Kong to see Kai, yet he had neglected to tell Ling or his daughter this important detail, and the fact that he was hiding so many crucial things could no longer be brushed away. Chanting reverberated off all the bodies and all the buildings: Can lies go on forever? When he reached the Square, he thought, So this is what Tiananmen Square looks like when it is truly full. Even Chairman Mao never lived to see it like this. Mao’s portrait on the gate, so familiar it might as well be the moon in the sky, appeared smug and overdressed for the spring humidity. Despite the million demonstrators, the only visible police were the ones marching in support of the students. The student loudspeakers were exhorting the hunger strikers to be orderly, to “sleep neatly,” and to refrain from playing cards, because such behaviour would compromise the purity of their goals. The fasting students had no mats or tarps to lie on, only sheets of grubby newspaper. A sign read, “The Party maintains its power by accusing the People of fabricated political crimes.”

Sparrow could not imagine what this scene would like through Zhuli’s eyes, at the age she would be now. How many deceits had the Red Guards accused her of? How many crimes had the government fabricated? How could a lie continue so long, and work its way into everything they touched? But maybe Ai-ming would be allowed to come of age in a different world, a new China. Perhaps it was naive to think so, but he found it difficult not to give in, not to hope, and not to desire.

—

Everyday there were more demonstrations: a million people on Wednesday, and another million on Thursday despite rainstorms. By now the hunger strike was in its sixth day and even the official People’s Daily was reporting that more than seven hundred strikers had collapsed. When Sparrow went out, no matter the hour, he could hear ambulances racing to and from the Square. His factory, perhaps every factory in the city, had all but closed. His new composition was almost done. Reading it over, he heard a counterpoint to Gabriel Fauré’s Op. 24, a similar descending sweep, and the three twisting voices of Bach’s organ prelude, “Ich ruf zu dir,” which he had always loved. But perhaps, rather than a counterpoint, the other works were sounds overheard, lives within lives. He no longer knew. The structure of his sonata felt unbalanced, even monstrous, and even though he knew it was nearly finished, he had no idea how it would end.

He called it, tentatively, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, a title that echoed Ding Ling’s novel of revolutionary China, The Sun Shines over Sanggam River. But the Square in Sparrow’s mind was not the Tiananmen Square of 1989. Instead it was multiple places from throughout his life: the Tiananmen Square he had walked on in 1950 with Big Mother Knife. The People’s Square of Shanghai. The square courtyards of the laneway house, the sheets of Zhuli’s music, the portraits of Chairman Mao, the bed he shared with Ling, the square record jackets he had burned, the frames of the radios that he built every day. The ancient philosophers believed in a square earth and a round (or egg-shaped) sky. The head is round and the feet are square. The burial tomb is square. What might cause something to change shape, to expand or be transformed? Weren’t the works of Bach, the folded mirrors, the fugues and canons, both square and circular? But what if the piece of music in his mind could not be written? What if it must not be finished? The questions confused him, he knew they came from that other life inside him.

Ai-ming appeared in the doorway. “Are you writing, Ba?”

He put down his pencil. She was wearing clothes he didn’t recognize, a dress that must have come from the neighbour, and it made Ai-ming look more grown up, more like a northern city girl.

“Yiwen asked me to bring some blankets to Tiananmen Square,” she said. “These are donations from the neighbours, but she couldn’t carry them all. Ma is going to help me. Do you want to come, too?” Ai-ming appeared thin, exhilarated. In the last few weeks, she had said nothing of Canada.

It was almost midnight. Sparrow said yes. Yes, he would go with them. Perhaps tonight he would tell them both that he was leaving for Hong Kong. He would be gone briefly; before they knew it, he would be home again. He would not abandon his life, but find a new beginning that included them.

Outside, Ling was stacking the blankets onto their bicycles, securing them with twine. Every movement she made was precise, intentional. He had always loved this quality of hers.

“You’ve been composing,” she said.

“A new sonata. It’s nearly finished.”

“I’m glad, Sparrow.” Her face was guarded yet, in its curiosity, open to him.

He wanted to tell her that attachment, to another person, to the past, was shifting from moment to moment. Set in motion again, his own life was finally becoming clear. But Ling knew, he thought, of course she already knew this. So many people, sent to labour camps like Ba Lute, taken away like Swirl or Wen, reassigned to distant provinces like Ling and Big Mother, had been denied a basic freedom, the right to raise their own children.

They set off, Ai-ming leading, turning through the maze of alleyways that bypassed Chang’an Avenue. Ahead of Sparrow, Ling’s hair twisted in the breeze. Her movements were strong and graceful, and the almond scent of her skin seemed to float back and hold him, once more, in thrall, following her, he had the sensation of rising up a flight of stairs.

Even now, so late at night, there were people everywhere. Banner after banner read, “Chairman Deng Xiaoping, step down!” He pedalled faster. He was side by side with his wife and daughter now, and they were folded into the tens of thousands who occupied the perimeter of Tiananmen Square day and night.

They got down and began pushing their bicycles, Ai-ming leading the way. Inside the Square, a student marshal with startlingly long arms recognized her and came to assist. When they reached the hunger strikers, Sparrow unknotted the twine and was about to carry the blankets inside when the long-armed student stopped him. “Only students,” he said sharply. “No outsiders.” Ai-ming had run ahead. In the lamplight, he could see the faint glow of her shape. She was speaking to a tall, pale girl with very short hair, the neighbour’s daughter, Yiwen. The girl looked desperately thin. Some of the hunger strikers were fast asleep, a few boys were singing quietly, the camp smelled of urine and garbage. Doctors and nurses in smocks and blue jeans hurried past. One nurse was slumped over a table. “Quiet, quiet,” another whispered loudly, “can’t you see they’re trying to rest!”

A wiry old man in a blue uniform ran up. Excitedly, joyfully, he announced that the new independent workers’ union had officially called for a city-wide general strike. Sparrow was stunned, but no one else seemed to react. Ling, too, was speechless. She whispered to him, “How do they dare? How do we dare?” Minutes later, a girl ran in and said that General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang and Premier Li Peng were on their way to the hunger strike command headquarters. The tent hustled into activity, and then nothing, as if news continuously arrived, burst, rained down, evaporated and was no more. Ai-ming had wrapped her arms around the neighbour girl, they stayed that way for a few moments, their eyes closed, the girl rocking back and forth, weeping. An old woman came by the entrance, she was delivering water donations and at the same time eating a fried dough stick, and the guard hissed at her, “No food here! No food!” and the old woman, pale with shame, turned and fled.

Ling tried to intervene. “She’s a citizen only trying to help.”

“No food here!” the student shouted.

“Be quiet,” the slumping nurse cried. “Just be quiet, please!”

Ai-ming emerged, crying freely, and together they pushed their bicycles around the scattering of people. It was late and they were hungry, so Ling led them to Comrade Barbarian. The kitchen was still open, though the menu was limited, the waitress said that the owner was making regular deliveries to the Square to support the student marshals and volunteers. They ate in silence and Sparrow finally said, “Ai-ming, you have to look after your health.” His daughter stared at her plate. Streaks of dried tears had left white patches on her skin. “But what about you, Ba?” she said. “In a week, you’ve aged a decade.” Ling sighed. “Come on. Everyone eat.” When they went back out, speakers were being dragged around even though it was almost three in the morning. People had come out all over again because the student broadcast centre was repeating the news that General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang had indeed arrived, along with Premier Li Peng, and they were meeting with representatives of the hunger strike. After Deng Xiaoping, they were the highest-ranked leaders in the country. Sparrow was so exhausted, he felt as if his shoes were glued to the concrete. He did not know how many minutes passed before a staticky broadcast finally dribbled out of the speakers. It was now four in the morning. The sound was not good, words were lost. General-Secretary Zhao kept clearing his throat and starting over.

The first clear words that filtered through were, “Students, we came too late.”

The Square itself seemed to widen, like something pulling apart.

“Students, I am sorry. Whatever you say and criticize about us is deserved. My purpose here now is to ask your forgiveness.”

He saw a look of pain pass over Ling’s face. Only it wasn’t pain, he realized, but fear. The General-Secretary’s voice was reedy, he seemed to be struggling against overwhelming emotion. “You cannot continue to…after seven days of hunger strike…to insist on continuing only until you have a satisfactory answer. You are still young and have much time ahead of you.”

People from the restaurant had all come out now, Sparrow saw the waitress and two cooks, and a few old diners in their undershirts. A jumble of teenagers. “It’s the same as always,” one of them shouted. “They want us to be obedient and go home!” Murmuring all around, approval or disapproval, Sparrow could not tell.

“You are not like us,” Comrade Zhao continued. “We are already old and do not matter. It was not easy for the country and your parents to nurture you to reach university. Now in your late teens and early twenties you are sacrificing your lives. Students, can you think rationally for a moment? Now the situation is very dire, as you all know. The party and the nation are very anxious, the whole society is worried, and each day the situation is worsening. This cannot go on. You mean well and have the interests of our country at heart. But if this goes on it will go out of control and will have various adverse effects. All in all, this is what I have in my mind. If you stop the hunger strike, the government will not close the door on dialogue, definitely not! What you have proposed, we can continue to discuss. It is slow, some issues are being broached. I just wanted to visit you today and at the same time…tell you how we feel, and hope that you will calmly think about this. Under irrational circumstances, it is hard to think clearly. All the vigour that you have as young people, we understand because we, too, were young once, we, too, protested and we, too, laid our bodies on the railway tracks without considering the consequences. Finally, I ask again sincerely that you calmly think about what happens from now on. A lot of things can be resolved. I hope that you will end the hunger strike soon and I thank you.”

The broadcast devolved into static.

Sparrow looked up at the sky, it was too bright in the city to see any stars, everywhere he looked was a deep blue, a never-quite-black.

“What does it mean?” Ai-ming said.

Ling was weeping.

“I want to go home,” Ai-ming said. She was still so young but why did she already look so empty? “I want to go home.”

Now it was Sparrow who led them, silently, as if they were thieves, through the dark night, past speakers where Zhao Ziyang’s address was being replayed, “Students, we came too late, I am sorry…” past groups of people listening for the first time, past blossoming trees and a row of magnolias whose flowers he couldn’t see, but whose fragrance remained in the air, unrelenting, intoxicating.

Late the next morning, when he woke, disoriented, he heard Yiwen telling everyone that General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang had been removed from office. Someone inside the Party had leaked this information. Demonstrations had broken out in 151 cities and the government intended to declare martial law. The army had already arrived at the perimeter of the city.

—

The national examinations still had to be written. To Ai-ming, the entire process was plainly ludicrous. Theory and practice, practice and theory, if she analyzed another poem by Du Fu she might go into exile herself. She was curled up on the sofa, eating a cucumber, when Sparrow appeared, groggy, all the hair on his head mashed to one side. After wishing him good morning, she asked him, “Were you fighting someone in your sleep?”

Sparrow smiled confusedly. He took the cucumber from her hand and started to eat it.

Radios blared in the alleyway, families were shouting at each other about matters big and small, but she and Sparrow both pretended they heard nothing. Ai-ming told him that, early this morning, she had been determined to study. She’d opened the exam catalogue and found herself at the 1977 questions. That year, the national essay had been: “Is it true that the more knowledge, the more counter-revolutionary? Write at least 800 characters.” What if a similar question appeared on this year’s test? For over an hour, she’d struggled to compose an opening line. The page was still blank. She could no longer make sense of the word counter-revolutionary.

Sparrow crunched the cucumber and listened.

“How can I write the examinations?” she said. “How should I…”

“Don’t worry so much about the essay question.” Her father’s voice sounded thick, like a full sponge. “Why don’t you go back to studying literature or mathematics?”

She nodded but this wasn’t what she meant. It was the whole idea of answering, the fear that every word had multiple meanings, that she was not in control of what they said.

Sparrow said that he was going to the factory to see what was happening.

Had he forgotten what year this was? And why did he look like he was in pain? It was only now that she realized he was wearing his factory uniform. “But Ba!” she said. “Everyone says the army will come in from that side, from Fengtai.”

He nodded without hearing. “Ai-ming, don’t go to the Square today. Promise me.” He looked at the door then back again. “Where’s your mother?”

“Radio station.”

“Oh.” He nodded but his eyes were glassy. “Ai-ming, I have a friend in Canada who might sponsor you. I’m willing to do everything I can. I’m going to meet with him in Hong Kong in June—”

“What friend? You’re going to Hong Kong?”

“—but first you must write the examinations and you must do well. Without a high score, even sponsorship won’t help you…” He was talking in a kind of perturbed state. Was it a trick, she wondered. So that she would stay where she was, live inside books, ignore what was happening to her thoughts? And who was this friend?

“I’ll excel in the examinations.”

When she said this, the Bird of Quiet looked incredibly glad, like a child. She tried to steel herself against her father’s innocent smile.

“You’re a good child, Ai-ming. A good daughter. I’m a lucky father.”

Sparrow left for the factory. Ai-ming changed her clothes, pulling on a dress of Yiwen’s. In the courtyard, she took Yiwen’s clothes down from the laundry line, stuffed them into a bag along with a toothbrush and washcloth, books, and a few coins her mother had given her. She hopped onto her bicycle and hurried out.

—

The city seemed loosened by the heat. She pedalled hurriedly to Tiananmen Square but found it unexpectedly quiet. One of the student marshals, a physics student who called himself Kelvin, told her that Yiwen had gone out with a “battalion” to the western suburbs in an effort to blockade the roads and prevent the army from reaching the Square. Ai-ming turned around and cycled back the way she had come.

At the Muxidi Bridge, nobody could pass: bicycles, buses with punctured tires, burned-out sofas, shouting people, and stockpiles of wood overflowed the intersection. When Ai-ming finally made it across, she glimpsed broken glass, swerved hard and nearly collided with a scooter. The driver’s “Sorry, sorry!” fluttered backwards. Her front tire made a sad, sucking noise before going flat. She got down and began pushing the bicycle on. The scraping of the rim against concrete made her teeth ache. Unable to see through her tears, Ai-ming locked the stupid, useless, unforgivable bicycle to a tree, took the bag of clothes and kept walking. Her whole body was coated in sweat. A bus came and she jumped on, but almost immediately the bus stopped. She tumbled out with the other passengers: here was the army now.

Army trucks, stretching as far as she could see.

Ai-ming walked towards them. Tears, confusion, hysteria. The military trucks were surrounded by people. “Brother soldiers!” an old man was shouting. He lurched in front of Ai-ming. His blue factory uniform sagged around him like a riverbed. “Do not become the shame of our nation! You are the sons of China. You, who should be defending these students with your lives! How can you enter our city with guns and bullets? Where is your conscience?”

A few officers tried to make themselves heard above the commotion, they said their only mission was to keep the peace. Everyone was hysterical and calling out.

An ancient grandmother had taken it upon herself to lie down in the road, in front of the trucks. “Who are you retaking the streets from, eh?” she said hoarsely. “I’m no rebel! I was living here when your great-grandfather still wore short pants!”

A man in a factory uniform, carrying dozens of individually wrapped cakes, began dropping them, indiscriminately, over the railings of the trucks. “My daughter is in the Square,” he said. “My only child. I appeal to your courage! I appeal, I appeal…”

Ai-ming could not see Yiwen anywhere, it was a thousand times more crowded here than it had been at Tiananmen Square. She hugged the bag of clothes to her chest and stood in the mayhem, hungry, thirsty, shivering with fear, ashamed at having disobeyed her father. A soldier her age stared at her with palpable longing. How did I end up here? Ai-ming thought. This is my country, this is the capital, but I don’t belong in Beijing. Where is Yiwen? If I only I could find Yiwen, I would know what to do.

The afternoon was disappearing but the crowds only grew larger. Some soldiers climbed out of their vehicles and stood in the road, humiliated. Some were in shock, some looked angry, some wept.

—

On the fifth floor of the factory, all the seats were empty. Sparrow sat at his work station, basking in the absolute stillness. This was the first peace he had known in days, and the quiet inside him now felt freed, it sat on the table, uncaged, like a house bird. Despite the emptiness, he felt as if his co-workers had left an afterimage: every work station belonged unassailably to someone. Perhaps, in a moment, Dao-ren, Old Bi and Fan would reappear, and it would be Sparrow himself who would dissolve, as if he had always been the illusion. The freedom of departure comforted him, and he put his head down on his arms and fell into a sound, peaceful sleep.

—

It was nearly ten at night by the time Ai-ming found Yiwen, huddled with two other girls. One was called Lily and one was called Faye. The girls were draped over one another and looked like a single body with three heads. Yiwen’s father had told her that, until she quit the student demonstrations, she was no longer welcome at home. She had been sleeping in Faye’s dormitory room.

After learning that all three had been part of the hunger strike, which had officially been called off this afternoon, Ai-ming coaxed them to a nearby noodle stall.

The vendor was a sleepy-eyed woman with a thick northeastern accent. “Take your money back,” she said to Ai-ming, after the other girls had floated away to a table. “No, no, I mean it. I’ve got nothing to offer you kids but these noodles. They’re good noodles but they won’t change the world.”

Embarrassed, Ai-ming thanked her.

“So, what do you study?” the vendor asked.

Ai-ming looked into the woman’s puckered, hopeful face. “Um, Chinese history.”

The woman pulled her head back like a bird. “What’s the use of that? Well, at least you know that my generation was tossed around by Chairman Mao’s campaigns. Our lives were completely wasted…We’ve pinned all our hopes on you.”

“The other girls study mathematics,” Ai-ming said, trying again.

“That’s what we need!” the vendor said, smacking her chopsticks against the metal pot. “Real numbers. Without real numbers, how can we fix our economy, make plans, understand what we need? Young lady, I don’t mean to be rude but you should really think about studying mathematics, too.”

“I will.”

She carried the noodles to their table. There was something wary in the girls’ eyes, but they softened when they saw the food.

“What will you do now?” Ai-ming asked.

Lily swallowed a mouthful of noodles. “What can we do? I’m afraid to go back to the university. Maybe it’s all a trap and they’re waiting to arrest us on campus. In 1977, Wei Jingsheng got seventeen years in solitary confinement for writing one wall poster.”

“We can’t let them take the Square.” Yiwen’s voice seemed to come from the plastic tabletop. “We have to stop them here, in the streets, we have to fight the army. We can’t let them through.”

“The Square is our headquarters,” Lily said. “If we lose the Square, we lose everything. Everything. Do you even know what they did to the protesters in 1977? That’s what scares me. Nobody even remembers.”

The table was low compared to the height of the chairs, and it made them all lean forward as if they were planning a conspiracy. Lily, Faye and Yiwen kept talking, using other military terms. How could they talk about fighting the army? Ai-ming found her thoughts drifting nervously; if she didn’t hear them, she wouldn’t be implicated. Yiwen picked up her hand and held it, squeezing it so hard that a jolt of pain flashed in Ai-ming’s eyes. On the public speakers, the grating repetition of the martial law announcement had started up again. In accordance with Article 89, Item 16, of the Constitution of the People’s Republic…Waves of sound broke through the street, “Down with Li Peng! Down with Li Peng!” Still the voice on the loudspeaker crept out, insistent: Under martial law, demonstrations, student strikes, work stoppages, are banned…

“We’ve got to sleep here in the road, right in front of the trucks,” Faye said. She had sleepy eyes and a demure chin, making her words all the more shocking. “I don’t care what happens to me anymore. I don’t care. What future is there for us anyway?”

“I’m so tired,” Yiwen said. “Doesn’t it seem a lifetime ago that Hu Yaobang died and we all brought flowers to the Square? That was April 22. All we wanted was to deliver a funeral wreath to the Great Hall of the People. That was the beginning, wasn’t it? What’s the date today? May 20. Only four weeks since Comrade Hu’s funeral.”

Was that really how it had begun? Ai-ming wondered. Could it have been so simple?

Girls at a nearby table sang an old Cultural Revolution song, and the words seemed both to lull the students and rouse them.

“All these songs,” Yiwen said. Her hand felt small and damp. “I never understood. I thought they were real.”

“They were just words,” Ai-ming said.

Lily looked at her, forthrightly, calmly. “But what else did we have?”

When they finished eating, Lily and Faye went off to look for friends from Beijing Normal, and never returned. Ai-ming and Yiwen joined the other students sleeping on newspapers on the ground. Ai-ming lay on her back. From here, the tanks appeared even more monstrous. Frightened, she closed her eyes against the increasing clarity of the stars. The most important people in her life were Sparrow, Ling, Big Mother Knife, Ba Lute, and now Yiwen, and it was like they had all been raised on different planets.

“It’s easy to say we’ll sacrifice our lives for the country,” Yiwen said quietly. “At the beginning it feels very brave. Is that what you meant, Ai-ming? You said it was just words. You think that the things that matter are more difficult than words — to retreat from a confrontation, for instance, to work at changing something, truly changing something.” She lifted her hand towards the bodies and the tanks. “Ai-ming, you’re studying history to prepare for the examinations. What if revolution and violence are the only way?”

Beside them, army soldiers were speaking softly in their uncomfortable trucks. They were so crowded that the soldiers had to take turns even to sit down. Ai-ming tried to clear her thoughts. All these slogans and songs had been handed down, she thought, and if the words were not theirs was the emotion that propelled them borrowed, too? What about the students’ desire, their idealism, their righteousness, how many contradictory desires did it serve? Once idealism had belonged to Chairman Mao, the revolutionaries, the heroic Eighth Route Army. Had their generation inherited it? How could a person know the difference between what was real and what was merely illusion, or see when a truth transformed into its opposite? What was theirs and what was something handed down, only a repetition? The loudspeakers kept cutting into the air: Under martial law, soldiers are authorized to use all necessary means, including force….Hadn’t the government, too, stolen their words from somewhere else? People are forbidden to fabricate or spread rumours, network, make public speeches, distribute leaflets, or incite social turmoil….As if words alone could make reality, as if there were no people involved, as if words alone could make someone a criminal, or conjure crimes from the air. Hadn’t the Red Guards tried to destroy the old language and bring to life a new one? What if one had to create a whole new language in order to learn to be oneself? She said to Yiwen, “I think we keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.”

Yiwen’s head nodded against her shoulder.

They both smelled the same, like the noodles they had eaten and also the ashy ground. How did Yiwen see her? Was she a sister, a friend, a confidant, something else? Here is the one thing in my life, Ai-ming thought, that has no parameters. She wanted to tell Yiwen how she felt, but she was afraid to damage everything they had.

“I can’t sleep,” Yiwen said. “Tell me a story.”

Ai-ming could think of nothing, no words that belonged to her. I’m eighteen years old, she thought, and I still haven’t begun to know my own thoughts. She felt as if a part of herself was being left behind. She squeezed her eyes shut and recited the only words that came to her, the poem at the opening of Chapter 41 of the Book of Records: “ ‘Of course, no one knows tomorrow. Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything will pass.’ ”

—

It was dawn by the time Sparrow cycled home from the factory. The 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations rippled through his headphones, and the music felt both long and momentary. For this new recording, Glenn Gould had instilled a continuous tempo, a pulse, so that all thirty variations more clearly belonged to a unified piece. A few weeks after the 1981 recording was released, Glenn Gould had died suddenly at the age of fifty. Sparrow had not learned of Gould’s death until years later, and convinced himself the radio announcer was mistaken. So much so that, a few months ago, when a letter from Kai mentioned the death of Glenn Gould, Sparrow had been upset by it all over again. What kind of man had the celebrated pianist been? he wondered. If Gould had been prevented from playing the piano for twenty years, what other form might his music have taken?

It must have rained not long ago. The air felt renewed, the dawn light was the colour of pearls, unreal against the pavement.

Turning onto Guang’an Road, he almost fell off his bicycle when he saw the army trucks. They were surrounded by a restless crowd, people in their nightclothes and others on their way to work. Hastily, he swung his bicycle around and detoured south. The Goldberg Variations continued in his ears. But when he tried to reach the centre, he met checkpoint after checkpoint. Beijing, with its grid of ring roads and bridges, had been solidly designed to protect its heart, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Smaller roads were manned by students, but along all the major thoroughfares, Beijing residents had set up human barricades, crowds so dense no army truck could hope to cross without meeting violent resistance.

He pressed on through ever more congested streets.

Sparrow smelled bonfires even though nothing burned. The smell brought back an image of Wu Bei, struggling to stand on his tiny chair as the Red Guards humiliated him. The monster is waking, Teacher! You have stepped on its head countless times, and now the monster is crawling out of the mud. At the barricades, as if in uneasy counterpoint, people chanted, “We must turn over and awaken! We must sacrifice and serve the Revolution!” Yet Gould continued, unrolling one variation and tipping in slow motion towards the next. By the time Sparrow reached home, it was nearly ten in the morning. The rooms were empty. He sat at the table and drank a cup of tea. Noise from the ongoing demonstrations filled the room. Radio Beijing didn’t broadcast music anymore, instead the loudspeakers kept repeating the fact of martial law. He regretted all the radios he had ever built. He wanted to find some way to cut all the wires, to hush all the voices, to broadcast stillness, quiet, on this city that was coming unmoored.

—

Late in the afternoon, he woke suddenly. Here was his daughter’s face hovering above him, slowly sharpening. “Ba,” she said. “Ba!” She kept repeating that representatives from Wire Factory No. 3 were in the living room. He got up. Ai-ming brought him a basin of cold water. Sparrow dunked his face, thinking he had been reprioritized out of his job. Instead, he came out to find Miss Lu and Old Bi, in their factory uniforms, sitting on the sofa, eating peanuts. They smiled nervously when Sparrow said, “Have you just come off your shift?”

Miss Lu recovered a peanut that had fallen between two cushions. When she had it firmly between her fingers, she pointed it at him and said, “Old Bi and I have finally decided to join the independent union. They’ve been canvassing in Tiananmen Square, you know? The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation.” She cracked the shell and threw the peanuts into her mouth.

Old Bi leaned forward. “Let’s just say we’re tired of sitting on the hilltop and watching the tigers fight. Maybe you are, too, Comrade Sparrow, and if so we should stick together.”

Ai-ming had followed him out, he could hear the flat squeak of her slippers behind him.

“Yes, okay.”

Old Bi and Miss Lu kept looking at him, as if they were still waiting for an answer.

How could he learn to see around corners? What mistake was about to lunge towards him?

Miss Lu said, “You need to show your work unit ID and register your real name. We understand if you’d rather not. After all, you’ve got a family to think of…”

“Wait. I’ll get it.”

Sparrow went to the bedroom, found his ID card and put it into his pocket. A new letter from Kai was sitting on the dresser, in plain sight. Ai-ming must have placed it there. She had followed him in the bedroom, but before she could say anything, he told her he was going to the Square. “I want you to stay inside.” He said it sharply, as if she had already disobeyed him. He picked up the letter and placed it, too, in his pocket.

“But, Ba…”

“For once, Ai-ming, do as I ask.”

Outside, he watched, lightheaded, as Old Bi unlocked his bicycle. As they left the alleyway, Sparrow pedalled behind them. Miss Lu was balanced on the back of Old Bi’s bike, and her old-fashioned cloth shoes sat daintily in the air. She stretched a hand out, handing him a cigarette. It was a good brand, Big Front Gate.

“Baby Corn was on the barricades last night,” Miss Lu said. “He told us two million Beijingers are on the streets. He said he ripped up his Party membership card.”

The cigarette tasted opulent in his mouth.

“It’s all getting so emotional,” Old Bi said. “All these tears and threats are obscuring the bigger issues. We could help these students steer the ship but who listens to the older generation?”

Smoke clouded from Miss Lu’s mouth. “That’s right. We had our day and look how well we served the country. Oh yes, we Red Guards were very first class, very rational.”

Old Bi pretended he hadn’t heard.

They came to a large tent on the northwest corner of the Square, temporary headquarters of the independent union, where a lineup of uniformed workers stretched along the boulevard. Jokes were passed from person to person like midday snacks. Two hours later, upon reaching the front, Sparrow signed his name below thousands of others. He felt too afraid to be afraid. A giddy volunteer informed him, hands gesticulating, that workers were organizing themselves into various battalions, some were in charge of gathering supplies, some would battle the army at the roadblocks, and others had joined the Iron Mounted Soldiers, a motorcycle reconnaissance network.

Distracted by the sound of helicopters, Sparrow told the volunteer he would do whatever was needed, but he didn’t own a motorcycle.

“Oh-oh,” Fan said, suddenly appearing with her booming voice. “Be practical, Old Sparrow! You’re not a kid anymore! I don’t see you leaping up on barricades, just falling off them!”

“Falling down is also a form of obstruction.”

Fan rumbled a laugh, gave him a stinging slap on the back, and then another.

On a nearby bench, Old Bi and Miss Lu were sharing a cigarette, entranced by the workers’ radio broadcast, read by a young woman with a heart-shaped face and a soprano voice.

Sparrow went outside and onto the Square. Conditions had deteriorated, the students looked bedraggled and destitute. There was garbage everywhere and the camp smelled very bad. One after another, people scrambled up to the microphone, identifying themselves as teachers, intellectuals, or student leaders.

He watched for a long time. Their speeches (“No kneeling!”) grew increasingly vehement until, driven by their passions (“No compromise!”) and by the high tide of emotions, they, too, finished by asking the protesters to stand firm and risk everything (“No retreat!”). The sky opened and heavy rain broke free. Tarps collapsed onto the huddled students, and he heard them cry out, a mix of laughter, groaning and cursing. Banners drooped, flags stuck to their poles, a pair of abandoned shorts and a few wet T-shirts sat like turtlebacks before the portrait of Chairman Mao. Sparrow saw a tall girl standing alone, a pink headband in her hair, and wondered if it was Yiwen, the neighbours’ daughter. The rain blurred her figure, and he felt he was looking into the past, or into a future that would not arrive. He heard footsteps behind him and turned. Fan was running towards him, a graceful hop-skip-jump-jog, holding a bright blue umbrella like a prize in the air.

—

He was assigned to the blockade at Muxidi Bridge, which was so close to home it was like watching over his backyard. Sparrow and a dozen neighbours took up a position on the roof of a city bus, whose tires had been punctured. Songs from the 1920s and 1930s proliferated around them, and neighbours, including Ling, handed out candy nougats, tea and pastries. All night, he followed Ling’s figure in the crowd below. She was distributing copies of an unauthorized supplement to the People’s Daily, printed covertly by the newspaper’s staff. In the last week, Sparrow had hardly seen her. Ling was never home, she had thrown all her energy into the ongoing dispute at Radio Beijing. Journalists and editors, including Ling, had come down firmly on the side of the students and were no longer waiting for official approval before broadcasting their reports. The Ling he had first met in Kai’s room, the sharp-eyed philosophy student, had been biding her time and here she was now, as if she had never been away. In fact, all over Beijing, people who had seemingly resigned themselves to always wearing ten layers of coats were now shedding them all at once. They carried themselves differently, they were proud, even joyful, in bloom.

Battling sleep, Sparrow found himself remembering the swaying of the Wuhan bus, when he and Kai had gone in search of Comrade Glass Eye, when a red-cheeked girl had fallen asleep in Sparrow’s lap as he played “Bird’s Eye View.” He, too, had felt purely happy then. The music had seemed to scour everyone clean. Perhaps the messages of the students had done something similar: simplified ideas had set in motion a train of desires. A slogan on a headband or a T-shirt, “Give me liberty or give me death,” had led to a hunger strike and a political impasse, and both the will and desire to change one’s conditions.

On the second night, Sparrow was told to bring a cotton mask, towels and handkerchiefs, because the army was expected to use tear gas.

And yet, and yet. The next morning, the People’s Liberation Army started up their convoys, and began reversing out of the neighbourhood. The exhausted soldiers waved as they departed, some weeping and others laughing. Bright ropes of flowers flooded the streets they had left behind.

On Saturday, Ai-ming came home breathless, jubilant. She said that the students had entered into discussions with the government, and agreed to a full withdrawal from Tiananmen Square. “Yiwen is coming home.” She turned to Sparrow and said, “You don’t have to sit on that broken bus anymore pretending to be a fighter.”

When he touched his daughter’s cheek, Sparrow felt almost harmed by the softness of it. “Will you eat at home tonight, Ai-ming?”

“I’ll even cook. And you’ll be sorry you asked!”

Ling went out to buy groceries. The news of the students’ decision had not yet been broadcast, but in the alleyways, everyone seemed to know what had occurred. The streets vibrated with a hopefulness she had not witnessed since the first years of the Republic, as if all the years between then and now had only been a hallucination or a detour. Returning home, she ran into Yiwen’s father at the water spigot. Yiwen had not been home since the start of the hunger strike, yet it was her father, Comrade Zhu, who had lost so much weight. Seeing Ling, he said, “These children, ah! You give your life to them and they crush your heart!”

Ling took out the good cut of beef she’d bought and gave it to her neighbour. He lifted both hands, refusing. “Take it,” she said. “The students have called off the demonstrations. Now you can welcome Yiwen home.”

Water overflowed the bucket and Zhu turned the tap off. “You see how it is,” he said, accepting the gift, and beckoning her into his flat. “We sacrificed everything so that Yiwen could get a good education. She’s our only child. When Yiwen was accepted into Beijing Normal, I held the letter in my hands and wept. The first time I had wept in forty years! I thought I might have a heart attack. Yiwen is the first in both our families to go to university. She’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever known. I tried to make her understand how fortunate she was, to be born into this time, to have opportunities we never had.” He shook his head. “But these kids think it’s all up to them. They have no understanding of fate.” He took a container from his ice box and gave it to her. It was a chicken, already marinated. She tried to refuse but he wouldn’t hear of it.

“Perhaps it was us,” Ling said, picking up where they had left off. “We understood fate all too well.”

“Ah,” he said. “You’re right about that. Our children have ‘stood up,’ and now it’s we, their parents, down on our knees and begging forgiveness! But okay, okay, whatever. Look,” and Zhu pulled a small badge from his pocket. “I even joined the Beijing autonomous residents’ federation. You should join, too. There are all sorts of initiatives under discussion.”

—

Late that night, Radio Beijing announced that the students had overturned their own decision. They had decided to stay in the Square after all, until the Party conference scheduled for June 20. The date jolted Sparrow. It was the same day he was scheduled to fly to Hong Kong to see Kai. The radio also announced that General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had already been removed from his post, had been stripped of all remaining duties and placed under house arrest.

Through the window of the little office, he saw Ai-ming and Yiwen sitting in the courtyard. They were holding hands and looking up at something in the sky. At the stars, he thought, or at the helicopters, maybe one could no longer be untangled from the other. His sonata for piano and violin, the first piece of music he had written in twenty-three years, was finished, he could do no more. He made a clean copy, signed his name and wrote the date, May 27, 1989, and the title, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. He put the copy in an envelope to send to Kai. He wished to hear it performed, and he remembered how, despite his protests, Zhuli used to play all his half-finished pieces. When he looked over the music, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it had come from someone else entirely, or more accurately, that it had been written by himself and another, a counterpoint between two people alive and awake, young and old, who had lived entirely different worlds.

Outside were the usual voices — rainfall, laughter, a radio, sirens, good-natured bickering — but here in this room was music that existed in silence. In the Shanghai Conservatory, he remembered, paintings showed musicians playing the qin, a silk-stringed zither, only the qin had no strings as if, at the moment of purest composition, there was no noise. Sparrow had never made a sustained sound, the music came in beginnings and endings like the edges of a table. The life in the middle, what was it? Zhuli, Kai. Himself. Twenty years in a factory. Thousands of radios. A marriage and family. Nearly all of his adult life: the day after day, year upon year, that gives shape to a person, that accrues weight.

He saw himself putting down his pencil and standing up from the desk. He saw himself walking out of this room, this alleyway, this city, without turning back.

The following morning he woke early, put on his uniform and returned to work.

3

AS I WAITED IN Shanghai, one life unexpectedly opened the door to another. Three days after I met with Tofu Liu, he telephoned me. His niece at Radio Beijing had put him in contact with someone I should meet: Lu Yiwen, the close friend of a Radio Beijing editor who had passed away in 1996. This was the same Yiwen who had known Ai-ming and her parents in 1988 and 1989. I felt the impossible had occurred: I had plucked a needle from the sea.

Tonight, June 6, 2016, I went to her flat on Fenyang Road, near to the Shanghai Conservatory.

Yiwen was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman in her mid-forties. She wore jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals, and her long hair was tied up in a loose knot. She spoke with an intensity that I found riveting. She was restless, she made large gestures as she spoke, as if she were drawing on a screen. We spoke in English. After graduating with a degree in Chinese language and history from Beijing Normal, she had overturned her life and applied to study electrical engineering at Tokyo University. To her surprise, she had been accepted. She had only returned to China the previous year. She was divorced and had a teenaged daughter.

Yiwen had much to tell me. A story is a shifting creature, an eternal mirror that catches our lives at unexpected angles. Partway into our conversation, I opened my laptop and showed her a scan of the composition, The Sun Rises on the Peoples’ Square. I began humming the notes.

“This is Sparrow’s music,” Yiwen said immediately. “But…”

“How do you know?”

“He was singing it all the time. I used to hear him in the evenings, walking home late at night. In 1989, we lived in the Muxidi Hutong, all the flats were small and very close together, we were living almost one on top of the other. Sparrow would pass by my window on the way to his flat. And I could hear him in the little study, where he used to do his writing. His music was like something in the air.” Yiwen leaned closer to the computer. “But how on earth did you get this?”

“A friend performed it for me. A few years ago. I’ve learned to read the music a little.”

“But how did you find a copy of the music? It was destroyed in 1989. Ai-ming had only nine pages. I saw it destroyed.”

I told her that Sparrow had sent it to my father in a letter dated May 27, 1989. That I had only found it a few years ago, in a Hong Kong police file. It had been among my father’s possessions when he died.

Yiwen became suddenly emotional. “Ai-ming thought it was gone.”

“Do you know where Ai-ming’s mother is? I’ve tried to find her but the address I have—”

“Ling? But she died in 1996.”

A wave of emotion gathered in me; I had always suspected Ling had passed away, yet still I had hoped. I thought for a moment, collecting myself. “Ai-ming had a great-aunt who used to own a bookstore. She was very elderly….”

“The Old Cat. She lives in Shanghai. She turned a hundred this year and when you ask the year of her birth, she says she’s been alive forever. I’ll write down her address for you. She doesn’t have a telephone.”

Yiwen continued, “In 1996, Ai-ming came back from the United States.”

“Sometime in May,” I said.

“Yes, mid-May. She came to Beijing for her mother’s funeral. The situation was difficult. Her U.S. visa had never come through and she didn’t have a Chinese hukou, a residency permit, any longer. She took a risk and went to the public security bureau to request one, but they denied her…I saw her a few times while she was in the city. Her mother’s death was unbearable for her. Ai-ming wasn’t well. She told me she was going to live with her grandmother in the South. Later on, about a year later, so 1997 or 1998, she wrote me a letter. She said she was going to Gansu Province in Western China. She asked me to come with her. I was living in Tokyo at that point. I asked her if she was kidding, why in the world was she going to the desert in the middle of summer? All I wanted was for Ai-ming to come to her senses, to see reason. But I said things…I was extremely harsh in my letter, I said too much…I never heard from her after that. It must have been…early 1998.”

The dates matched my own. The things I felt were inexpressible.

“I was young, I didn’t understand. Everything that happened during the demonstrations, the way it ended, the way people died, had left me angry and cynical,” Yiwen said. “Ling’s death changed everything for Ai-ming. Actually…after Ai-ming went away the first time, to Canada in 1990, I became very close to her mother, I admired Ling and saw how courageous she had been. I began to see my life in a different way. She was the one who encouraged me to apply to the University of Tokyo. Ling made it possible for all of us to start our lives again, but she herself never had the chance.” Yiwen stood up and went out of the room. When she came back, she carried two items. The first, a picture of Ling, Sparrow and Ai-ming taken in 1989. They were standing in the centre of Tiananmen Square. The second, Chapter 23 of the Book of Records, which Ai-ming had copied out and given to Yiwen for her twentieth birthday.

“I didn’t know how Ling was connected to your family in Canada. I only knew that a lot of letters went back and forth. But Ai-ming never told me the details, even when she came back in 1996.”

“And Ling, she never told you?” I asked.

Yiwen looked at me searchingly, as if I was the one with the answers to give her. “It was just the way life was back then,” she said finally. “People lost one another. You could be sent five thousand kilometres away, with no hope of coming back. Everyone had so many people like this in their lives, people who had been sent away. This was the bitterness of life but also the freedom. You couldn’t live against the reality of the time but it was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private. You had to keep something for yourself, and to do that, you had to turn away from reality. It’s hard to explain if you didn’t grow up here. People simply didn’t have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted. Everything was decided by the Party. When the demonstrations began, the students were asking for something simple. In the beginning it wasn’t about changing the system, or bringing down the government, let alone the Party. It was about having the freedom to live where you chose, to pursue the work you loved. All those years, our parents had to pretend. To see the future in a different light takes time. But we thought everything could begin with this first movement.”

We sat in silence for a moment. The notebook — Ai-ming’s handwriting, Chapter 23–felt both real and weightless in my hands, so near and so far away. “What made you decide to come home?”

Yiwen set the notebook on the table, beside a photograph I had given her, showing Ai-ming, Ma and me, in 1991. “The first movement is finished. It will never come back again. But, Marie, how can I put it? It might be finished, it might be over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped hearing it.”

—

Just recently, I began listening to the transcriptions and reimaginings of Bach’s music written by the Italian pianist Ferrucci Busoni; these albums had been part of my father’s music collection and now they are part of mine. Three hundred years separate the births of Bach and Busoni, yet I find these transcriptions intricate and terribly beautiful. Why did Busoni transcribe Bach? How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before? What answer would my father give?

In 1989, when he left my mother and me, he waited in Hong Kong for Sparrow to come. I was so young when he abandoned us; the regrets he carried can never be known to me. I fear to imagine his suffering and yet the details I know will not leave me. Pills and drinking, my mother was later told. A debilitating depression. Gambling. Perhaps he felt that what had happened to Sparrow must be his fault somehow, that the Hong Kong visa, the travel papers, the ticket, had made Sparrow a target. Of course, it wasn’t true, but Ba couldn’t know that, and he came to what seemed a logical explanation. He had betrayed my mother and me, and didn’t know how to go back, to become what he was. Sparrow, Zhuli, the Professor, his own family, they were gone; all the selves he had tried to be, everything that he had lost, could no longer be denied. My father loved Sparrow almost all of his life; of this I have no doubt. It was early in the morning, still dark, when he went to the window of his ninth-floor room. He climbed out. Nobody looked up, nobody saw him, he was entirely alone. I understand that he wanted to stop his heartbreak, no matter the cost, and to end the enormity of his emotions. Maybe he hoped we, his family, would forget, but my mother and I, waiting in Vancouver, held on to the person we had known. Ma had truly loved him — the part of him that he had shown her.

Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn’t render each variation false. I don’t believe so. If he were still alive, that is what I would tell him.

I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself. In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go. That’s what I would tell my father. To have faith that, one day, someone else will keep the record.

2

MONDAY AND TUESDAY FELT like a single continuous day in Sparrow’s life.

Production had slowed to almost nothing, Old Bi and Miss Lu were listless, and Dao-ren looked as if she was dismantling radios rather than building them; but Sparrow felt glad for the distraction of work and actually surpassed his quota for the day. Music joined all the movements he made, it slid between his thoughts like a staircase reaching in multiple directions, until he was nothing more than sound. Around him conversation continued: rumours and truth crumpled together. Someone said that the People’s Liberation Army was planning a coup. Miss Lu reported that police had arrested a dozen members of the Iron Mounted Soldiers, who had renamed themselves the Flying Tigers. Old Bi said that high-ranking generals in the army had been purged, and that new battalions of the PLA would re-enter Beijing tonight.

“Tomorrow,” Miss Lu said.

“Never,” said Fan.

Meanwhile, in the Square, Hong Kong entrepreneurs had donated hundreds of brand new tents and the students had erected a statue, the Goddess of Democracy. A new open-air forum, the Tiananmen University of Democracy, had been inaugurated the previous night.

On Wednesday, Fan did not arrive for her shift.

By Thursday, the temperatures were reaching forty degrees and the wires in Sparrow’s hands felt alive. On Radio Beijing, a powerful member of the standing committee said that the youth were “good, pure and kind-hearted,” and were not the problem. It was the workers, in particular the leaders of the autonomous union, who had created a cancer cell made up of the “dregs of society.”

But where was Fan?

On Friday, Old Bi came in late. His normally neat and clean hair was damp with sweat, and he had to smoke three of his Big Front Gate cigarettes in quick succession before he could tell them what had happened. Old Bi described the crowds in front of the public security office on Qianmen Avenue. “They’ve been arresting people all week,” he said. “So I went up there to find out what happened to Fan. These bastards asked me why I was looking for a counter-revolutionary. A political criminal! They said, ‘Run along home before we arrest you, too.’ ‘Oh, really?’ I said. ‘For what crime?’ ‘Comrade, you’re in violation of martial law.’ ‘Fuck me,’ I said. ‘You’re in violation of the Constitution!’ ” Old Bi took out another cigarette. “Idiot that I am, I was wearing my ID card on my shirt. They wrote everything down.”

Miss Lu yanked the cigarette out of Old Bi’s mouth. “You shouldn’t have gone by yourself! You have no self-control.”

Sparrow poured him a cup of tea.

“I’m going back tomorrow,” Old Bi said, grabbing back the cigarette. “They can’t arrest us all.”

That night, Sparrow called Cold Water Ditch. Big Mother Knife was out of breath from being summoned to the neighbourhood phone. After she had huffed for some minutes, she told him that the student demonstrations had spread to Shenzhen and Guangzhou. When he asked if she had joined the protests, she shouted, “Deng Xiaoping and those old farm tools in Beijing should retire! All those old men, it’s like they breathe through the same nostril!”

Beside Sparrow, the caretaker of the phone, Mrs. Sun, was smoking and pretending to read the People’s Daily. Her children clambered around her like sparks going off.

On the other end of the line, Big Mother had grown quiet and Sparrow thought she was done speaking.

He was in the middle of saying goodbye when Big Mother interrupted to tell him she had news. Last week, she had received a letter from Aunt Swirl and Wen the Dreamer.

“Ma,” he said.

“Don’t interrupt!” she shouted. And then, sighing, “I’m getting old. I keep losing my train of thought.”

Now Big Mother filled in the years, speaking rapidly as if she were running across a narrow beam. Back in 1977, Wen had nearly been rearrested. If it weren’t for his friend, Projectionist Bang, they could never have gotten away. They had retreated deeper into Kyrgyzstan. Last year, word finally reached them that Big Mother’s petitioning had been successful: during the reforms initiated by Hu Yaobang, the convictions against Wen the Dreamer had been overturned and his criminal label had been removed. “It only took ten years,” Big Mother said bitterly. Swirl and Wend were coming home. In the letter, Swirl said they’d already crossed Inner Mongolia and reached Lanzhou. After nearly twenty years in the desert regions, they wanted to visit the sea. They planned to stop in Beijing before continuing on to Shanghai and Cold Water Ditch. Big Mother had already given them Sparrow’s address, even though it would be another few months before the official paperwork reached them. He should expect them in the winter.

“Will you recognize Swirl?” his mother asked.

“Always,” he said. Sparrow shifted the phone to his other ear. “Do they know everything that’s happened?”

He feared he had inadvertently pushed his mother off the balance beam and that she had toppled over and fallen into the quiet. But Big Mother’s voice, when it came back, was steady. “She knows. They both know.”

Over the line, the faint echoes of other conversations broke through and fell back.

“My son, have you been writing music?”

Sparrow, surprised by her question, answered truthfully, “Yes.”

“Well, what is it?”

“A sonata for piano and violin.” He wanted to tell his mother about an entirely different recording, Bach’s six sonatas for the same two instruments. Throughout his life, Bach had returned to these six pieces, polishing and revising them, rewriting them as he grew older. They were almost unbearably beautiful, as if the composer wanted to find out how much this most of basic of sonata forms-exposition, development, recapitulation-could hold, and in what ways containment could hold a freedom, a life.

His mother sounded illogically near. “What did you name it? I hope you didn’t just give it a number.”

Sparrow smiled into the phone. He was aware of Mrs. Sun staring up at the ceiling, at a particularly large spider. “I called it The Sun Shines on the People’s Square.”

“Did you?” She gave a big, round pop of a laugh.

He couldn’t help but laugh as well. “Yes, I did.”

“You’ll find a way to play it for Swirl and Wen the Dreamer?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a joyful title, isn’t it?” his mother said.

He nodded, surprised by the grief that overtook him. He remembered something Zhuli had once said. Luckily, joy seeps into all your compositions. Some part of him had always existed separately, it had continued even after he had ceased to listen. “Yes.”

—

The next day, Saturday, Ai-ming slept until noon. It was so hot, even the bed felt as if it were melting. Last night, she and Yiwen had stayed late at Tiananmen Square, where the rock star Hou Dejian had given a concert, his voice reverberating up to Chairman Mao’s portrait like a dream they were all letting go.

Now Ai-ming sat up, sweaty, nauseous, the whine of electric guitars pulsating in her head. She felt as if she had not slept at all. The racket of the helicopters continued, they were circling Beijing again, dropping pamphlets. She sat up. The calendar said June 3, the month of May had vanished, dissolved by history. Today, Ai-ming would copy Chapter 23 of the Book of Records as a birthday present for Yiwen. This evening, she would go to Tiananmen, but she would come home early, she would have a good rest.

—

At home that afternoon, Sparrow fell into a deep sleep that went undisturbed by the loudspeakers, whose broadcast repeated stubbornly: Beginning immediately, all Beijing citizens must be on high alert! Please stay off the streets and away from Tiananmen Square! All workers should remain at their posts and all citizens should stay at home to safeguard their lives. What did he dream? Later on, Ai-ming often wondered because, when Sparrow came out of his room around dinner time, he was calm, even elated. He was carrying a small bundle of papers that were taped together and folded, accordion style. He sat down on the sofa beside Ling, oblivious to the broadcaster’s repeated warnings. Perhaps Sparrow, like Ai-ming, did not believe that the army would re-enter the city. Sparrow was humming a piece of music, an enlargement of the pattern of notes he had been humming for weeks. Directly above him, the Spring Festival calendar showed two plump goldfish: good fortune gliding over his head like clouds.

Ai-ming listened to his humming. The music was not a lament, and yet it had a lifting, altering sadness impossible to pin down.

Ling was reading yesterday’s paper. She stared, as if hypnotized, at the same page. Side by side, Ai-ming’s parents appeared joined at the hip, although Ling leaned slightly away, as if to make space for another person. Ai-ming studied her father closely. His bad haircut had grown out a little, making the Bird of Quiet look like someone who had once been very handsome.

She stretched out her hands. After three hours of copying Chapter 23, when May Fourth arrives in Hohhot and begins her journey into the desert, all the little bones in her fingers hurt.

The noise of the helicopters was maddening, as if their only purpose was to agitate everyone’s nerves. A sharp sound cracked against the windows and then the door. She and Ling jumped but Sparrow simply turned, as if he’d been expecting an intruder all along. A woman’s raspy voice cried out, “Comrade Sparrow! Comrade Sparrow!”

When no one else moved, Ai-ming went to the door and pulled it open.

The woman had a narrow nose, surprisingly large eyes and a small, pointy chin. What was the stain on her dress? Mud. Dried red mud. And she had a new bruise, very swollen, just below her left eye.

“Fan,” her father said.

“Sparrow, help us…please.” Fan was shuddering as if from cold. “Old Bi, Dao-ren, we have to bring them here….”

Ai-ming stepped away from the door.

“They were hit at Gongzhufen. We have to hurry. The army is coming in!” She stared at Ai-ming with an unreal placidity, blank terror.

“Gongzhufen…” Sparrow said.

Ling was looking at Sparrow’s sheaf of papers, she had picked them up off the sofa and was staring at them as if no one and no sound had entered the room. Sparrow went and spoke into her ear. Ling stood up.

“Ai-ming,” her father said, turning. “Stay with your mother. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You promise to stay here?”

She nodded.

“Ai-ming, promise me that you won’t leave the house. I have to go now.”

Why was he shouting? Or perhaps he wasn’t shouting. He was speaking quietly yet his voice seemed to be pounding in her ears.

“Yes, Ba.”

He paced the room in a confused way, looking for something. His coat? His ID? The bundle of papers? A letter? Whatever it was he had wanted to bring with him, he abandoned it. He gave Ling one last look, a smile to reassure her, before hurrying after Fan.

Ai-ming followed them to the door.

“She’s a co-worker,” Ling said. “She works at the wire factory.”

Ai-ming saw her father’s bicycle wobbling down the alleyway into the shadows. A vanishing colour caught her eye, a pink dress, a flash of orange light. The stuttering vibration of helicopters made it impossible to think.

“Shut the door, Ai-ming.”

She turned to find her mother beside her.

“Shut the door,” Ling repeated, doing it herself.

Her mother was holding that sheaf of papers and Ai-ming saw line after line of musical notation, a language she had never learned to read. At the top, three words were visible, For Jiang Kai. “He’ll be home soon,” Ai-ming said. Her own voice sounded silly to her, flattened.

“What do you know about it? What have you ever known about your father?”

Dazed, Ai-ming said nothing.

“Do you know he could have composed for the Central Philharmonic, he could have studied abroad, he could have had a different life, if only he was a completely different kind of person….” Ling shook the papers slightly. “But he wouldn’t be with us, he wouldn’t have chosen us, would he? If he’d been given the choice.” The papers in her hands seemed to proliferate. “Your father has always been a good man but kindness can be a downfall. It can make you lose perspective. It can make you foolish.”

Ling sat down on the sofa.

“Ma?”

“Why did he go with her?” Ling said. “Doesn’t he know what’s happening out there? Does he think that this life doesn’t matter? Does he really believe that he can carry on as if he is invisible?”

—

At first, the gunfire had been intermittent, shocking, but now it came steadily, a drilling in the night. When Ai-ming could stand it no longer, she hid in the study, surrounded by her books, The Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky, The Analects, The Rain on Mount Ba. In the courtyard outside, the scramble of voices grew increasingly frantic.

Two hands rapped softly on the glass. The pink headband in Yiwen’s hair was as startling as daylight. Ai-ming pushed open the window.

“Come out,” Yiwen whispered. Her eyes were wide, she’d been crying.

Ai-ming looked around the room. A pair of plastic sandals, her mother’s, were turned over beside the book trunk. Ai-ming slipped them on. She climbed onto the desk and dangled first one leg and then the other out the window. She felt Yiwen’s warm hands gripping her ankles, pulling her insistently down. She jumped.

Halfway out of the courtyard, Ai-ming realized she’d forgotten to close the window. “Wait, wait, Yiwen,” she whispered, turning to go back. As she reached the window, she saw a figure hovering in the doorway, moving towards her. She told herself that the shadow was only in her mind. Ai-ming pushed the glass closed.

“Ai-ming!” she heard. “Ai-ming, where are you going?”

She kept running.

“Ai-ming, come back.”

—

These streets, covered with smoke, could not be hers. Ai-ming’s bicycle swerved around the debris: overturned chairs, bricks that seemed to have come from nowhere, tree branches, abandoned cars, a wagon in which two children were sitting, staring mutely out. Behind them, at the Muxidi intersection, she saw overturned buses and smoke billowing from at least a dozen fires.

“Yiwen, where are we going?”

But the other girl kept pedalling. “How could they,” Yiwen said. She was somehow both calm and distraught. “How could they?” She pedalled furiously as if someone was chasing them.

Small clusters of bicycles moved in every direction. A truck filled with boys, heading towards Muxidi, swerved past. The boys shouted that they were on their way to the barricades. To her relief, Chang’an Avenue grew less chaotic as they approached Tiananmen Square. On and on the boulevard went, the sounds of fighting diminishing. The Square rose before them, she saw the tent city, grey and sturdy against the concrete, and the Goddess of Democracy, shining like a trick of light.

“We can’t go back,” Yiwen said. “They’re killing people at Fengtai. They’re killing people at Gongzhufen. Right in the street, at the intersection. I saw it, Ai-ming. I saw it. At first it was only tear gas but then there were real bullets, there was real blood, they’re following people through the alleyways—”

“Gongzhufen?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Ai-ming’s legs kept moving, the bicycle rushing forward, but she felt as if she were falling. “I have to go back. My father’s at Gongzhufen.”

“Are you crazy?” Yiwen was crying so hard she could not possibly see in front of her. “They’re shooting. The People’s Liberation Army is shooting. I saw three or four people hit right in front of me. The bullets, it’s as if they explode inside the person—”

“No, the army wouldn’t dare. They must be rubber bullets.”

“They wouldn’t!” Yiwen shouted, hysterical. “People were crying, Why are they shooting us? Why are they shooting? And then they couldn’t run away because of the roadblocks. Our roadblocks. All the roadblocks we set up. They couldn’t climb over them.”

In the Square, an immense crowd of students was still gathered at the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Yiwen’s bicycle rolled to a stop.

“But what now?” Ai-ming whispered.

Yiwen was looking directly at her, but Ai-ming had the disturbing sensation that she, Ai-ming, was not really there. She saw stains on Yiwen’s dress, the muddy darkness of blood. Someone else’s? she thought, her heart pounding, surely someone else’s.

“What have we done?” Yiwen said. “What have we done?”

—

Sometimes the army trucks burst forward without warning, heedless of who stood in the road. Every moment there were yet more soldiers and yet more people, as the ones trying to escape collided with those who had only been onlookers, or who had been standing outside their buildings, or had been on their way to or from work. Sparrow and Fan had run almost all the way back to Muxidi and they were both gasping for breath. In the alleyways, soldiers materialized as if they were born from the ground. The crowd was not running away, but only back and forth, back and forth, like toys on a string. Electric buses, which had once formed a barricade, were now wrecks of charred metal.

“Don’t let them pass,” Fan was saying. “They’re murderers. Don’t let them get through to the Square.”

Teenagers stumbled by, carrying an injured girl in their arms.

A voice on a loudspeaker said, “Go home, go home.” Someone was crying for help.

The tanks came forward again. He heard the dull knocking of bricks against metal.

“Fascists, fascists…” Sparrow turned. Was it Fan? He couldn’t see her. How neatly and quietly the soldiers had appeared behind him, shoulder to shoulder, their guns raised. But they walked past Sparrow as if he was not there. Behind them, a woman lay injured on the road. Two men ran and began to pull her backwards. The soldiers shot repeatedly at a single person he couldn’t see.

Fan was shouting, “Animals! Inhuman animals!” Smoke fell as if from the trees.

The loudspeaker broke though the noise, “Go home go home go home.”

“Little Guo, where are you? Little Guo!”

“He’s hit, he’s hit! Someone help us!”

Fan was supporting a man who leaned heavily on her shoulder, he was tall, heavy-set, and wearing a navy blue worker’s uniform, and his full weight came down like a falling pole as Sparrow rushed to help. Stumbling forward, Sparrow feared he would bring them all down. He caught hold of something, a piece of metal. He pulled away as it began to singe his hand.

“Careful, careful,” Fan mumbled, as if she were in a dream, as if she were guiding a line of small children across the road. “Don’t let them reach the students.”

His hand felt as if it were melting. The man leaning against him said, “Please don’t leave me. Promise me, please. You can’t leave me.”

“I won’t leave you. Tell me your name.” The steadiness of Sparrow’s voice felt unreal and far away. “Where did you get hit?” The blood had covered up the original wound.

“It’s inside me,” the man said, crying now. “They did this to me.”

Another person rushed over with a flatbed tricycle, everyone was shouting, the wood of the cart was slick with blood and a thick grime. The big, injured man was jostled in, alongside the woman Sparrow had seen earlier. Her eyes were open, they looked at him with a question. The driver began to pedal, they tried to help him by pushing the cart on both sides. “Which way?” the driver shouted. “Which way?”

“Go west, get to Fuxing Hospital.”

“No, no, get him over to the centre on Zhushikou—”

“Wait, wait, there are more people here…”

Two more bodies were hurried into the cart.

“Save yourselves!” the injured man moaned, feverish. “Can’t you see they’re shooting?”

Sparrow thought of his bicycle, he would need it but where had he put it? A man was pouring gasoline on a hulk of metal, crying, “Animals! Butchers! Down with the Communist Party!” Smoke rushed into Sparrow’s chest, it filled his throat and vision. He felt an anger that had seemed long gone, or had never existed in him before. Through the jostling crowd, he thought he saw Fan and went towards her.

—

At the Muxidi intersection, Sparrow found himself on streets that he knew, and he recognized familiar buildings and the houses of his neighbours, things that made him feel irrationally safe. The noise was overpowering, exploding canisters of tear gas, people shouting, petrol bombs flaring along the road, crawling up over the army tanks. A long vibration suddenly exploded somewhere near. If he closed his eyes for too long, rows of buildings might be erased, just as lines of people, too, were vanishing. The soldiers had been singing the words of Chairman Mao: If no one attacks me, I attack no one. But if people attack me, I must attack them. Sparrow walked towards the armoured trucks where soldiers moved in glacial, melting shapes: Kneeling. Shooting. Standing. Creeping forward. Their olive green uniforms, the hard shell of their helmets, seemed out of keeping with their young faces. Too young, they looked the same age as Kai and Zhuli had been long ago. They walked impossibly slowly, as if the soldiers’ bodies were balloons and their guns were made of lead. He heard the flat crack of a concrete block hitting an armoured tank. Sound accelerated. One tank rushed towards the place he had been standing only a moment before. He thought he was still there, watching the tank grow larger. The people running appeared to be suddenly unmoving. All of the shapes he saw became sound, the cracking of trees, the swinging of a rifle, the edges of a bayonet. He felt the whistle of bullets passing near, but the crack of the rifles was delayed, the noise coming a second, two, three, later.

Sparrow did not know where Fan was. He recognized the closed storefront of a train ticket office, and saw a couple huddled there. Loudspeakers above continued urging them to Go home, Go home….but PLA soldiers were coming out of their trucks and infiltrating the small streets and alleyways. The man was dressed smartly and had wavy hair and a thin face, the woman was carrying a small child in her arms. “We have to go,” the man was saying. “No, no,” she whispered. “We’re trapped, they’re shooting back there.” The surreal sound of a pop song was tinkling down from above, someone had left a radio or a television on. Gunfire punctured the alleyway, making sparks of light. Sparrow wanted to protect them, but did not know how to give them the same terrifying invisibility that he seemingly possessed. The woman’s dark hair gleamed wetly, and he saw now that a long stain of blood was moving from her hair, down her clothes, over the child in her arms, and dripping onto the sidewalk. The man was sweating. His dress shirt had the softness of an old newspaper. “Give her to me,” the man begged. The woman refused, hugging the child closer. “Why are they shooting?” the man said brokenly. “How can they?” More armoured trucks were rushing along Chang’an, as if they were late for an appointment further ahead. “Don’t be scared,” the woman said to the motionless child. “We’re almost there, stop crying. We’re almost there.” Now the trucks stopped and more soldiers poured out. “Fascists, fascists!” an old man shouted. He was wearing shorts and a white undershirt. He was instantly surrounded by three soldiers. Sparrow saw a teenager with a camera, the camera hovering in front of his face. The soldiers turned and shot him. Sparrow began to run towards the teenager, shouting. The soldiers kept firing. One came forward in a vicious motion and bayoneted the boy in the stomach. The teenager gripped the bayonet with both hands, screaming, trying to pull it out. By the time Sparrow reached them, the soldier was gone and the student was curled up on the ground, blood and internal organs coming out of his body. The strap of the camera, twisted around his wrist, was moving in a hallucinatory way. Bricks rained down on the soldiers and one fell, the crowd suddenly doubled, tripled, surrounding the vulnerable soldier. A burning mattress flew in slow motion onto an army truck. Someone had thrown it from an apartment above, and the mattress was exploding as it fell. “Why have you come here?” a woman wept. “You’re not wanted here. Don’t you understand? They’ve tricked you. It’s all lies!” If no one attacks me, I attack no one! “How can you turn your guns on us?” “We won’t kneel down anymore!” But if people attack me, I must attack them. “Murderers, murderers…” “Shame, shame on you!”

Sparrow crouched beside the teenager, who stared up at him as if towards a face he knew, the only visible person. “Tell me your name,” Sparrow said. He was shouting, he worked anxiously, trying to stop the flow of blood with his hands and then with his shirt. The boy said his name was Guoting and that he was a student at People’s University. “What did they do to me?” the boy asked curiously. Sparrow did not have the words. It seemed only yesterday that he was walking his baby daughter around and around the courtyard of their home in the South, whispering lullabies, Ai-ming, turn your eyes to the sky, don’t look at the ground. Look elsewhere, Ai-ming…But this year, he had turned forty-nine years old and time, which for so long had seemed to stretch unbearably, was now contracting. He held the boy’s hand and saw blood expanding towards him. “Guoting,” he said firmly to the boy. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t leave you. Look up at the sky. See how it belongs to us…” The soldiers were not leaving any room for people to turn back or retreat. The noise of the crowd shattered his thoughts. A soldier who had fallen into the hands of the crowd was crying out for mercy. The boy on the ground was dying. Could the middle of his life have come now, delayed, twisting around again, retrieving him? Minutes later, Sparrow stood up and the boy’s lifeless body was carried away on a cart. The streets seemed simultaneously empty and full.

The couple he had seen earlier were now standing in the intersection. Lights from the tanks found them, and the woman carrying the child darted into an alleyway. The man, frozen with fear, remained where he was. My love, the woman cried, desperate. My love. All the noise of the street came to Sparrow as he began to run towards the line of soldiers, it ran beneath all the sound in his head. He no longer felt any fear. Big Mother’s voice came to him: “Never forget: if you sing a beautiful song, if you faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon the musician.” As a child, he had hidden away in the practice rooms of the Conservatory, repeating Bach’s canons and fugues until his fingers were numb. He had not been afraid, then, that his hands, his eyes, his mind, had given themselves over to something else. Zhuli played the opening aria from Xerxes for her mother. He wrote the words, I will come, and mailed this letter to Kai. He remembered the train platforms crammed with young people, the great exodus of a million people to the countryside, an endless motion of blue and grey coats. He remembered carrying Zhuli home. The weight of her body, her head against his shoulder. He saw Kai seated before the piano, playing the symphony never completed. The words and passages he remembered surprised him. All the pages had glued themselves together, he saw there had never been any hope of reaching the end. The lights from the trucks and tanks were blinding. The woman’s voice no longer called, and he knew that the father had gotten away, he was safe. He stopped running, his hands up for them to see. His daughter, his wife. What had any of them done that was criminal? Hadn’t they done their best to listen and to believe? There was nothing in his hands and never had been. The crack of the gun was delayed and came to him too late, but the sound gave him the sensation of closing a thousand doors behind him. Light from the tanks found him, as if they could collect all the irreconcilable parts of his life. No matter how many lights they shone, they could never take away the darkness. Daylight was blinding, but in the dark he still existed. What did they see, he wondered, his hands still open. Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see?

—

At the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, Ai-ming lay on the concrete, looking up at a sky grey with smoke. Despite the humidity, someone’s thin blanket covered her feet, and another was draped over her shoulders. Dishevelled, hysterical students kept arriving, crying out that the army was shooting in Muxidi, that the hospitals in the west of the city, from Fuxing to Tongren, were overrun with the dead, that the wounded numbered in the thousands. Street by street, no matter how many Beijing residents stood on the road, the People’s Liberation Army was forcing its way into the centre. She pulled Yiwen closer to her. “We have to leave before it’s too late. Please.”

Yiwen stroked Ai-ming’s hair in a listless daze. “It’s already too late,” she said. She was no longer crying, it was as if she had already gone away. “Hours ago, it was already too late.”

Rumours kept circulating as the minutes dragged on. Dead at Fengtai, at Muxidi, at Xidan. The loudspeakers jolted into life again, only now it wasn’t the student broadcasters but the government who had control: For many days the PLA has maintained the highest degree of restraint, but it is now determined to deal resolutely with the counter-revolutionary riot….She closed her eyes. How could it be so humid and cold at the same time? An air of unreality pervaded everything she saw. Citizens and students must evacuate the Square immediately. We cannot guarantee the safety of violators, who will be solely responsible for any consequences….The concrete shook as if from a disturbance directly below them. “What time is it?” Ai-ming said to no one, and a handful of voices answered. Three o’clock, two minutes after, almost three. She had not seen the fire in the northwest corner begin, but now it rushed high into the night, scattering light on the waiting soldiers. The fire consumed the ransacked tents, the makeshift tables and all the papers of the independent workers’ union. “I hope they burned their lists,” Ai-ming said. “I hope they remembered to make all the names disappear.” Rioters have savagely attacked soldiers of the PLA. Cooperate with the PLA to protect the Constitution and to safeguard the security of the country….

A boy with an enormous rifle was dragged screaming out of a tent. The boy wept that the soldiers had shot his older brother in the back. “My brother is dead!” he shouted. “He’s dead, he’s dead! I’ll kill them! Let me kill them!” A student marshal smashed the rifle again and again on the concrete until it snapped. “Do you want to get us killed, too?” he said. Another put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and pulled him away.

What could anyone say? Yiwen’s fingers in her hair moved slowly, as if winding down.

Now the army had them surrounded. A professor, Liu Xiaobo, and the musician, Hou Dejian, had been on hunger strike in support of the students, and now they hurried from their tents, running back and forth to the regiment of soldiers a few hundred feet away. They were trying to negotiate a retreat. Clusters of people followed them, broke away, rejoined. Meanwhile, leaders gave speeches about the necessity of non-violence and the purity of sacrifice. “I am not afraid,” Yiwen kept whispering, her entire body trembling. In a burst of shouting, soldiers who had been hiding in the National Museum now marched out, thousands of them, the long bayonets on their rifles lifted in a glittering parade. Around the perimeter of the Square, Ai-ming could see tanks. She felt almost grateful when the lamps in the Square clattered off, the loudspeakers were cut, and this new quiet surrounded them like a tunnel. It was too late to leave, too late to turn around.

The students huddled up on the first tier of the Monument were in chaos, shouting through their loudspeakers, trying to organize a vote in the darkness.

“Who is determined to stay and who wishes to leave?”

Hou Dejian managed to get hold of a loudspeaker. “Students, a peaceful evacuation is still possible.” He said that the army had agreed to open a corridor and let them exit through the southeast corner of the Square. They would not be harmed.

“Shame! Shame, cowards!” The hissing around Ai-ming nearly drowned him out.

A few voices shouted that a rebel army, led by Zhao Ziyang, was on its way to rescue them.

A student beside Ai-ming stood up. “We have to hold out until 6 a.m. The United States Army is going to intervene.”

“Hou Dejian, shame! Shame!”

“We must stay. Out of our sacrifice will be born a new China!”

At the northern perimeter of the Square, the soldiers began shooting into the sky. The cracking of hundreds of rifles made it seem as if the air itself was exploding. A lamp above them was blown out. A boy beside Ai-ming was so terrified he fainted. He was shaken roughly back into the present.

The vote began. Each person called out, simultaneously, their vote. She herself shouted, “Leave!” and beside her, Yiwen countered, “Stay!”

The voices died down. She heard the buzzing of the lamps, already dark but still burning out, and Yiwen’s exhausted, almost inaudible voice, “Stand firm, stand firm. How can we let it end like this?”

The soldiers were moving quickly. She saw the rustling of their lines rising towards them.

“We’re leaving!” a girl ahead shouted. “They voted to leave.”

Her words were met with rage. “It’s not true!” “We want to stay!” “More people voted to stay!”

Yiwen stumbled to her feet. “Other people died for us!” she cried. “Now we’re going to collaborate with their murderers? Have we no shame?” Others called out similar words, but the shouting mutated into exhausted crying. They had been in the Square more than five hours, and only now did Ai-ming find herself breaking down, thinking of the promise she had made to her father, unable to comprehend how Yiwen was ready give up her life and the lives of others. For what? To hold Tiananmen Square, which had never belonged to them.

“Line up, line up in rows often…”

“Get in your battalions! Lock arms!”

She joined arms with Yiwen and with a tiny girl beside her. There were thousands, perhaps several thousand, students still here. University banners were awkwardly raised, they shook as if already falling. Yiwen and Ai-ming were displaced and found themselves walking under the flag of Beida. This is the first and only time, Ai-ming thought, that I will belong to Beijing University. The achievements she had once wanted for herself seemed a lifetime away, they were the aspirations of a completely different person.

Tanks were entering the Square, they made a shattering vibration. People around her began screaming and Ai-ming turned and saw the place where the Goddess of Democracy had been standing. The statue was light, almost constructed of air. The army, she thought numbly, did not need tanks to push her over. They could have done it with their bare hands. The shaking of tanks and helicopters continued, as if the concrete itself was being ripped apart. Would they have a parade now? she wondered. Now the soldiers were pressing in from both sides, funnelling the students between a narrow corridor of bodies. She saw a soldier strike a boy ahead of her with his baton. Behind him, a girl turned and spat in the soldier’s face. But still the procession kept pushing inexorably forward. The people around her were weeping. At the front, the student leaders began to sing the Internationale.

Arise, slaves, arise!

Do not say that we have nothing.

We shall be the masters of the world!

The soldiers stared.

The students left the Square. She and Yiwen broke off from the procession and walked home. In a daze, they scrambled down side streets, avoiding the sound of gunfire. By the time they arrived back in the alleyway, the sun had risen and the sky was white.

1

DAY AFTER DAY, they went to the hospitals to search for Sparrow but finally, after three weeks, Ai-ming refused to pretend. Instead, she let her mother go alone while she sat in the little room, staring at the sheaf of pages taped together like an accordion book. Unfolded, Sparrow’s composition hung down on both sides of the desk and touched the floor. This music, she thought, was the record of something her father had never heard with his own ears, he’d had no access to a violin let alone a piano. It had only ever existed in his mind and now here, silently, on paper. On the back, he had copied out a quote, “Beauty leaves its imprints on the mind. Throughout history, there have been many moments that can never be recovered, but you and I know that they existed.” The afternoon disappeared and twilight retreated into darkness. She heard a rattling at the glass and looked up expecting to see her mother, but instead it was Yiwen, impossibly pale, impossibly beautiful.

“Ai-ming, Mrs. Sun sent me to find you. Someone’s looking for your father, they’ve called in on the neighbourhood line.”

Yiwen’s face reminded her of something or someone else. What was it? Won’t you come with me! I want to grab your hands. Come with me…

“Give me your hand, Ai-ming. Let’s go together.”

Ai-ming began folding up her father’s composition and then stopped and left it where it was. The window scratched her bare legs as she climbed through, and she wondered if she’d grown to a monstrous size. The things she touched seemed out of proportion to the shape of her body. Outside, the concrete against her bare feet was warm, a heat that burned through her body and vanished into the air.

They went to Mrs. Sun’s flat, which normally housed the telephone station in the window. The phone had been moved inside. “For security,” Mrs. Sun was saying now, as she pulled Ai-ming into the room. It was crowded with too much furniture, as well as the Sun grandparents, nephews, son and grandchildren, but they all squeezed back, away from Ai-ming as if she were an unpleasant, desert wind. Mrs. Sun appeared, leading Ai-ming firmly towards the telephone. In Ai-ming’s hands, the receiver felt slippery, as if it was sweating. She held it close and said, “Yes.”

“Hello?” The caller had a smooth, melodious voice. His Shanghai accent was odd, slightly flattened. “I’m looking for Comrade Sparrow.”

She felt as if the walls had grown fifty pairs of eyes. Mrs. Sun’s youngest grandson had sidled up to her and was hugging Ai-ming’s knees. “My father isn’t here. I’m sorry, who’s calling?”

He said his name was Jiang Kai, that he was calling from Hong Kong and that he was a pianist. He might as well have been speaking in code, the words made no impression on her whatsoever. “When will your father be home?” he asked. “It’s urgent that I reach him.”

She recognized the man’s name, but in the confusion of the room, whatever knowledge she had dissolved like a lump of soil in her hand. “I don’t know.”

“Tomorrow?” Jiang Kai said hopefully. “I was afraid…I’ve been following the news on television.” His voice appeared and disappeared. “Do you know when I might speak to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you Miss Ai-ming?” his asked. “Is this Ai-ming?”

“Yes.”

“I need to speak to your father, Ai-ming. Is everything okay? Please trust me…”

“We checked the hospitals,” Ai-ming said.

“The hospitals?”

“I don’t know.” She was afraid her voice would break and if she began crying again she would never be able to stop. The phone felt preposterously large against her ear. “You should write to my mother. I don’t know.”

“What’s happened? I’m a friend of your father’s, Sparrow was my professor at the Shanghai Conservatory. I live in Canada and I can help, please let me help.”

She felt nauseous. The letters, the foreign stamps, the record player, the stranger with the pure white shirt. The name Kai could be written, or overheard, so many ways. She had never guessed it always was the same person. “You should write to my mother. I don’t…I can’t.” She was crying now, out of confusion. “He always wanted to play the piano.”

“What?” There was a pause and then, “Ai-ming, are you still there? Please don’t hang up!”

He was shouting and she was sure the Sun family and Yiwen could hear the panic spilling out of the phone, and this realization terrified her.

“I don’t know if you’ll see him soon,” Ai-ming said. “He isn’t here. I don’t know. He isn’t here.”

“Ai-ming,” he said.

“I have to go.”

“Wait, please—”

“I’m sorry, I’m very sorry that I can’t help you. I’m sorry you can’t help him.”

She pulled the receiver away from her ear and held out the phone to no one.

Mrs. Sun bundled forward. Her eyes were red, as if she had been squeezing them shut. She took the receiver. Jiang Kai was still speaking. Mrs. Sun broke into the crackling noise. “Comrade Sparrow hasn’t come home since the night of June 3. Don’t upset his daughter. She really doesn’t know, poor girl. She’s only a kid…”

Yiwen was holding her hand. Who was trembling? Was it her or the other girl? Why were they shivering so much?

The wall of Sun family members had broken into conflicting voices. “Didn’t you hear they were burying bodies in a schoolyard not far from here? The school is complaining about the smell…” “What nonsense! When will you learn…”

Ai-ming stepped carefully over the children and around the Sun grandmother who had sunk deeper into her chair. More people had come into the flat, but she and Yiwen pushed between them, out through the crowded doorway and into the alley. Whispering voices seemed to catch like needles on her clothes, on her hands and feet. To scrub them off, Ai-ming ran ahead, straight out of the laneway, afraid that if she screamed, if she let any noise escape, something terrible would happen. On the street, she collided with a couple walking by, the woman jolting into the man, the man stumbling sideways and dropping his bag of fruit. Behind her, Yiwen was already apologizing, and the man, irate, yelled at them to be more careful. “Imagine if we’d been…” But he didn’t finish his sentence. “Look,” he said, picking up his plums. “They’re all bruised now.”

The street was surreal in its regularity. Someone had cleared the rubbished bicycles away. Night workers were sweeping the sidewalks, the grocer pulled down his metal shutter, copies of the People’s Daily were pinned up on bulletin boards. Ai-ming stopped to read a page, “The pernicious effects of bourgeois liberalization and spiritual pollution are to blame for this counter-revolutionary riot…” There followed a report about the heroic sacrifices of the People’s Liberation Army. But other parts of the paper wrote of heavily armed soldiers and machine gun killings, as if the paper itself was fracturing into different voices. Ai-ming turned away. Yiwen was telling her that at Beijing University, Tsinghua and Beijing Normal, Premier Li Peng was being denounced as an enemy of the people and tens of thousands of students were throwing their Youth League or Party memberships into a heap, and setting them on fire.

“But the government won. It’s over,” Yiwen said. “It’s finished, isn’t it?”

Ai-ming could say nothing. Everyone said that the foreign newspapers were reporting a massacre in Tiananmen Square, but she had been in the Square. She had seen the students walk away. Didn’t they know the tanks had come from the outside? Didn’t they know about the parents, the workers, the children who had died?

She remembered, in April, riding her bicycle down Chang’an Avenue, how this wide street had felt like a path not only to the middle of the city, but to the centre of her life. The open, unwalled space of the Square. She thought of the records of Prokofiev and Bach and Shostakovich that Sparrow used to bury under the floor in Cold Water Village, she thought of Big Mother Knife and Ba Lute who were on their way to Beijing. She thought of her mother’s face, once so impassive, now incapable of hiding her pain. How could this be the same street? How could these be the very same walls? How could she ever pretend that it was?

They walked back down the alleyway. The door was open. In a dream, Ai-ming entered, thinking that Sparrow had come home. All the cupboard doors in the kitchen had been flung open. She heard a noise in the back room, her bedroom.

“Wait,” Yiwen said. “Don’t go in.”

Ai-ming pulled her hand out of Yiwen’s. She kept going. In her parents’ room the dresser had been overturned.

She could hear voices, a woman and a man.

She turned the corner and entered. All her books lay jumbled on the floor. Neither the woman nor the man were familiar to her, nor were they wearing a uniform of any kind. The woman asked for Sparrow’s residency permit and his factory badge. Her voice was almost kind. Ai-ming shook her head. The man was busy rummaging through papers. He tore up her study notes. He began to tear up the piece of music that had been sitting on the table, her father’s composition. The man did it tiredly, almost without thinking, that’s what it looked like to Ai-ming, as if he was just folding laundry or washing dishes. She began to cry for help. Yiwen was there, she shouted at the strangers to get out, to leave them alone. The woman told them to find Sparrow’s work unit ID because they would be back. For reasons Ai-ming could not understand, the man and woman went out through the window, climbing out into the alleyway. Yiwen tried to pick up the pieces of the composition but Ai-ming said, “Leave it, leave it.” She knelt down on the floor. She pulled the pieces from Yiwen’s hand and began to tear them up into smaller and smaller pieces. She wanted it all to disappear. Yiwen kept shouting at her, calling her name, grabbing pages back. It was only later, when Ai-ming finally stopped shaking, that she saw what she had done.

Yiwen salvaged what she could. But in the end, she and Ai-ming were only able to piece nine pages back together. The rest of Sparrow’s composition was gone.

—

Ling opened the front door soundlessly, slipped off her shoes and went into Ai-ming’s room. The moon was faint, the night was utterly quiet, and her daughter slept, curled up on her side, one hand splayed open. The book Ai-ming had been reading weeks before, The Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky, lay on the floor beside her, still open. Three days had passed since officers from Public Security had entered the apartment. Ai-ming had tidied the room and gotten rid of the mess the agents had left behind, but still Ling imagined she could see their footprints beside the desk, as if they had been chiselled into the floor.

Ling sat down on the floor, beside the footprints.

Ai-ming seemed to turn slightly. In sleep, her daughter’s fear lifted momentarily, so she appeared younger, more like the child she had been.

She wished to crawl into the bed beside Ai-ming, to fall asleep and wipe away her own thoughts. Since June 4, her colleagues at Radio Beijing had been pressured, one by one, into writing denunciations of the student movement; a few had been purged. Life had gone on; it had slipped backwards. It was only a matter of time, Ling knew, before she, too, gave in. The new political study sessions, mandatory for everyone, required them to pledge their support to the Party. If someone believed differently, dreamed differently, society could make sure there were no longer jobs, or space, for them. How easily the day-to-day had resumed.

In any case, her colleagues, too, had seen what she had seen, and they, too, had joined in the weeks of demonstrations. But Ling had gone to the hospitals alone on June 4. She had seen all kinds of people jeering the soldiers, screaming, weeping. Businessmen in suits, cadres from the street offices and residents’ committees, nurses, construction workers, factory men. At Fuxing Hospital, on the ground and in the courtyard, and in a bicycle shed, were bodies. Two long sheets of paper affixed to a wall listed the names of the known dead. She had seen the corpse of a young man, the strap of his camera still looped around his wrist. She had seen women her own age. Bodies lay even at the entrance. A nurse came, begging her to give blood. The hospital had run out, she said, and people were needlessly dying. “At Muxidi. At Xidan…” Around Ling, people moved too fast or too slow. She had given blood in a chaotic room, and then continued on to the Children’s Hospital, the Post Hospital, and then to the Beijing Medical Centre. The injured multiplied and became never-ending. She had looked into every face and examined every piece of clothing. Looking at feet and shoes, at mouths, at eyes, multiple gunshot wounds, wrecked bodies. In the morgue, they were laid on straw mats or strips of stained white cloth. There was a book of records. If the name was unknown, the nurses and doctors had listed the deceased’s sex and estimated age, the objects in his or her pockets, the colour of a jacket or the pattern of a shirt. After leaving People’s Hospital, she had run into soldiers. They had fired at civilians in a senseless, indiscriminate manner, shouting out that the passersby were counter-revolutionaries. Hooligans. Ling had pedalled blindly home, too distraught to be afraid. When she reached her own door, she had gripped the handle, unable to move, an icy numbness spreading out from her heart. In the first few days, she had felt almost nothing.

Now, in Ai-ming’s bedroom, she could see, as clearly as if it were in her hands, the statement she had written but had not yet signed, supporting the use of force by the army against the demonstrators. Pledging her allegiance to Deng Xiaoping, to Premier Li Peng and the Communist Party. She saw the hospitals. She thought of Kai, the Professor, Zhuli, the Old Cat. She saw decades of deception and love, and also a lifetime of fidelity. She saw false surfaces that slice through everything, two-dimensional edges that could cut to the very centre of things.

Moonlight slid against her daughter’s face, making it appear angular, smooth and cold. She stood up and went to the outer room. Sparrow’s record player had a film of dust that bothered her and she instinctively took a cloth and proceeded to wipe it carefully, every side of it. When she was done, she opened the lid. The record inside was a recording by Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, Bach’s Sonata No. 4 in C Minor. What was the last thing Sparrow had said to her? What was the last look he had given her? Their lives were bound together, Ling knew. She set the needle down and music swayed into life, the steady river of the piano, the lyrical exactitude of the violin.

Afterwards, when she lifted the record and replaced it in its cardboard sleeve, Ling found letters. All the letters written from Canada and Hong Kong.

At work the next day, the new director of the station summoned Ling to his office. He informed Ling that her husband’s body had been recovered on the morning of June 4, and that he had already been cremated.

“His body?” she said. The ceiling fan spun so slowly, as if all the electricity in the building was being funnelled out.

“You should collect his ashes from the crematorium. I have the address here. Within three days, if the ashes are not collected, the crematorium will have no choice but to dispose of them.”

“How did my husband die?” she asked.

He stared at the papers in front of him. “A stroke.”

They both looked at one another. Ling wanted to close her eyes, but her mind refused to let her. “But where did he suffer this stroke?”

The director slid the sheet towards her. “At home.”

She stared down at the page, and the space awaiting her signature, unable to react.

“Actually, since you’re here,” he continued, “we’re having difficulty with another matter. Your daughter is registered to write the university entrance examinations next month. Unfortunately, since she’s a relatively new Beijing resident, we’ve run into some obstacles. Political background checks, you understand…of course, I’ll do all I can to secure a place for her.”

He closed his hands together as if they contained something precious.

“It appears your husband was in contact with a number of people who harbour resentments towards the Party. Any information you can provide would help us in our work. Some are already charged and are in detention. This is a serious class struggle and we must each do our part. The Party will not let you down. The Party understands that many good cadres were led astray by a dangerous few. The Party says: to those who confess, leniency; to those who resist, severity.”

What shook Ling most was that she wasn’t even angry. Anger, too, could dissipate, but this emptiness that took its place might never be released.

“He’s already dead,” she said at last. When the director said nothing, she asked him, “What more do you want from him? I gave my life to the Party. I gave my life. What more do you want from me? I have nothing more to say.”

When she looked up, the director appeared genuinely ashamed. He remained silent.

She picked up the pen and signed her name.

Afterwords, the world outside was made only of intersecting flat surfaces, angle after angle, peel it back and she would only find more of the same, yet another surface. A lifetime of carefulness and sacrifice meant she had no one in whom to confide. At the crematorium, she was given a cardboard box of ashes. They had run out of wooden boxes. Perhaps inside the paper would only be another box, and then another and another, and so on until infinity. Trembling, she undid the string and lifted the lid. Around the bits of bone, the ashes were matted together, they had a softness and a lightness that broke her. She replaced the lid, tied the box to her bicycle and pedalled home.

Nothing remains unchanging, she thought. Her legs pedalled quickly as if they could leave her self behind. She had seen too much. Yes, things could still change, not for her, not for Sparrow, but for Ai-ming. She could not stop her own heart from breaking. But for her daughter behind this mountain was another mountain, behind this sea, another sea.