“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.
CODA
IN MY MIND, AI-MING’S story has a hundred possible endings. Perhaps she simply wanted to leave the past behind and she took on a new identity and a new life. Perhaps she became involved in something she could not speak of to us. Perhaps her counterfeit papers came back to haunt her. In recent years, this last possibility consumed me, for there were stories of Chinese migrants lost in the maze of detention centres; many had arrived in the United States in the years following the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and had never obtained proper papers. In the early 1990s, the United States had passed the Chinese Student Protection Act, offering permanent residence to students involved in the protests. However, they were eligible only if they had arrived in America between June 5 1989, and April 11, 1990. Ai-ming had crossed the border in May 1991. Ten years later, in 2001, when detentions in the United States skyrocketed, those without papers were swept up in the crackdown.
Sometimes, in Vancouver, I go to the apartment where my mother, my father and I used to live. I imagine that Ai-ming and I, in the most extraordinary of circumstances, will meet one another there. The street is the same, the apartment blocks have barely changed. Sometimes people’s lives fold back together, sometimes all they need is a meeting place, good fortune, faith. Years ago, Ai-ming told me that her mother used to stand in the intersection of Muxidi, waiting for Sparrow, remembering, long after his life had ended.
—
June 20, 2016. In Shanghai, two lamps shone by the window where Professor Liu stood holding his violin. With his great, white eyebrows, he reminded me of a snow lily. The pianist, Mrs. Wang, in a midnight-blue silk dress, sat at the piano, ready.
Beside me, Professor Liu’s daughter, our sound engineer, gazed sternly into her laptop. She dragged her headphones off, massaged her forehead and dropped the headphones back on. In Shanghai dialect, she asked for a sound check. The musicians played the opening of Bach’s Sonata No. 4 in C Minor.
There were thirty people in the room, mostly musicians and composers, some of whom had known Sparrow decades ago. In the first row, Yiwen was hugging her daughter to her side. To her left was Ai-ming’s great-aunt, the Old Cat.
The room stilled. Professor Liu lifted his violin. Sparrow’s Sonata for Piano and Violin, dedicated to my father, began.
At first, the violin played alone, a seam of notes that slowly widened. When the piano entered, I saw a man turning in measured, elegant circles, I saw him looking for the centre that eluded him, this beautiful centre that promised an end to sorrow, the lightness of freedom. The piano stepped forward and the violin lifted, a man crossing a room and a girl weeping as she climbed a flight of steps; they played as if one sphere could merge into the other, as if they could arrive in time and be redeemed in a single overlapping moment. And even when the notes they played were the very same, the piano and violin were irrevocably apart, drawn by different lives and different times. Yet in their separateness, and in the quiet, they contained one another. Long ago, Ai-ming copied out a poem for me:
We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world
That we wished to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree.
Earth endures, heaven endures, even though both shall end.
Sound waves walked across the computer screen, recurring yet unpredictable, repeating yet never the same. I saw the Old Cat’s head, nodding. Against the window, the curtains continued to move.
In this room, there was only the act of listening, there was only Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. A counting down and a counting up, an ending that could never be a true ending. The not yet was still to come, and the book remained unfinished. We loved and were loved.
Ai-ming, I thought, you and I are still here.
Around us, the first movement expanded, turning like smoke.
IN DUNHUANG, in the far west of China, Swirl, Wen the Dreamer and Projectionist Bang were sorting through photocopies. It was 1990. Ai-ming sat across the table from them, watching the slight movement of their three grey heads. They were all staying in the rooms of Projectionist Bang, resting for several weeks so that onward travel arrangements could be made. Here, the summer sky was a deep, silvery white.
Projectionist Bang, who had a face like a dried pink plum, made his living sweeping the grounds of the famous Mogao Caves. Ai-ming liked to hear about the caves, and so she asked him now which was his favourite. Projectionist Bang welcomed the interruption. He said that some of the Mogao Caves were painted with visions of paradise, images that dated to the fourth century. “But the painters’ idea of paradise was only a copy of life on earth,” he said. “Dancing, wine, books, meat and music. Paradise offers all the things we’ve never learned to properly distribute, despite the excellence of our residents’ committees and our people’s communes.”
Behind his small brick house, the dirt road led out into the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Just this morning, a camel train had swayed by, returning home after a seventy-eight-day journey across the Gobi, the emptied humps of the animals sagging over like devastated pillows. Having never seen a camel in her life, Ai-ming had thought their humps were injured. Projectionist Bang had laughed so hard, his hearing aid had fallen out. Ai-ming had wanted to disappear into the ground, or though the nearby gate of Jiayuguan, the Gate of Sorrows, where the western reach of the Great Wall came to an end. She had once fancied herself a scholar, but she didn’t even know that a camel’s hump emptied and grew soft like a deflated balloon.