Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel by Madeleine Thien Page A

the third night, Big Mother lay on the kang beside her sister and the child, Zhuli, who was already five years old. The child snored vigorously. The kang, heated from below by a charcoal stove, looked like a relic from somebody’s tomb. To make space, Wen’s elderly mother had gone to stay with a relation.
    Despite the relative warmth of the heated bed, her sister was shivering.
    “Tell me something,” Swirl said suddenly. “Just a few words to distract me from this place.”
    Big Mother swallowed several times to alleviate the dryness in her throat. Outside, Wen was smoking; the thin walls might as well be cloth. She told her sister about Sparrow and his brothers, about the jianpu music that ran from page to page. Sparrow never stopped composing. He didn’t breathe, she thought, he only emitted music. “My boys are energetic and have more hidden thoughts than a cartload of books. A mother never knows her children as well as she imagines.”
    “How true, how true,” her sister breathed.
    Big Mother said she’d been back to an old teahouse where they used to sing, the Purple Mountain Teahouse. “They’ve changed the name,” she said. “It’s now the Red Mountain People’s Refreshment House.” Swirl giggled. “The rooms are closed and all they serve is tea and melon seeds. But, still, the usual crowd comes to chatter, drink a little or fill their canisters. There are evensingers who perform the new repertoire, ‘The East Is Red,’ ‘Song of the Guerrillas,’ and all that. It’s stirring, who can argue! Even I want to overthrow something when I hear it. But revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile. There’s no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows. Of course,” Big Mother continued hurriedly, “in the New China such sorrows as we knew are long gone.” She went on to describe a few of the patrons, including the ones who still came with their orioles and thrushes, and the storytellers and balladeers who now told the epic of Chairman Mao’s Long March, in fifty dogged episodes.
    “Do you remember that book I told you about,” Swirl asked. “The thirty-one notebooks? The Book of Records.” Her voice barely reached Big Mother, even though they were curled together on the narrow kang.
    “You burned it, I hope? Anything that inspires such devotion is surely banned.”
    “Burn the Book of Records?” her sister asked. A flash in her voice. Indignation. “How could I?”
    “To save yourself,” Big Mother said.
    “To save myself, I couldn’t.”
    The book was still in its hiding place inside the family home. Tucked into the pages were all the letters Wen the Dreamer had written to Swirl. When those hungry spirits found no silver coins, they would open the walls. Nothing hidden would remain unseen. Swirl described the coded names, how the ideograms used for Da-wei and May Fourth changed, and seemed to refer to compass points on a map. Big Mother felt a terrible chill. The love letters would be bad enough but what was in that book anyway? What if it turned out to be written by a Nationalist traitor? They would all be screwed to the eighteenth generation.
    “I need to go back to the house,” Swirl said. “I have to get those notebooks back.”
    “Don’t be a fool.”
    The words were spoken harshly but Swirl didn’t seem to hear.“Wen’s grandfather was a copyist, too, did you know? There are books hidden in the ground that have been preserved for centuries, all the books that Old West brought from America.” She pulled the cover up to her chin so that only her eyes and the bridge of her nose were visible. “Everything on this earth has its lifespan and then, it must be natural, we have to make it disappear. As if the new didn’t come from the old. As if the old didn’t grow from the new.”
    Big Mother hesitated and then she asked softly, “But what is this upheaval?”
    “Haven’t you seen it? I thought the land reform campaign had reached everywhere. During