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.
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.”
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