Ai-ming felt sure that one day, later in our lives, I would visit her in the United States. She would boast that she knew me because, by then, I would be well known. “An actor,” she guessed. I shook my head. “A painter?” “No way.” “A magician!” “Ai-ming!” I groaned, aghast. She smiled and said, “A writer? Sentences are equations, too.” “Maybe.” “An expert in substituting numbers for numbers.” I had no idea what that was but I smiled anyway and said, “Sure.” Only later did I find out it was the Chinese term for algebraic number theory. She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry. I felt she saw into me, past every facade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one’s life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security–Ai-ming’s love, the love of an older sister–out of my childhood and into my adult life.
Or perhaps it could be that I have taken all our remaining conversations, all the half-finished and barely begun ones, and put each word into this particular night, that I have projected back in time some explanation for the inexplicable, and the reasons that I loved her and waited eagerly for each and every letter until the day arrived when no more letters came. Did she try to return to Shanghai and to her mother? Did she make a success of herself in the United States? Had there been an accident? Despite my efforts, I still do not know. It could be that I am misremembering everything. I had only a small understanding of the things that had happened in her country, my father’s country, in 1989, at the end of spring and the beginning of summer, the events that had necessitated her leaving. Here, inside my father’s favourite restaurant, I asked the question I had been longing to speak aloud, to ask if she been part of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
Ai-ming hesitated for a long time before answering. Finally, she told me about days and nights when more than a million people had come to the Square. Students had begun a hunger strike that lasted seven days and Ai-ming herself had spent nights on the concrete, sleeping beside her best friend, Yiwen. They sat in the open, with almost nothing to shelter them from the sun or rain. During those six weeks of demonstrations, she had felt at home in China; she had understood, for the first time, what it felt like to look at her country through her own eyes and her own history, to come awake alongside millions of others. She didn’t want to be her own still river, she wished to be part of the ocean. But she would never go back now, she said. When her father died, she had been dispossessed. She, too, had passed away.
Ai-ming told me that I would always be family to her, I would always be her little sister, Ma-li, Marie, Girl. With my many names, I felt like a tree with crowns of branches. She sang snippets of songs Big Mother had taught her and we laughed all the way home. When we arrived, I felt that, little by little, our arms disappeared, the shape of our bodies ceased to exist, even our faces, so that inside we were well and truly hidden, erased from the world. But this did not seem a loss; we embraced the possibility of being part of something larger than ourselves.
Back in our apartment, Ai-ming had not turned the lights on. She made tea and we lay in the darkness and stared out the windows, into the courtyard and the neighbouring, mysterious homes. Ai-ming continued to tell me the story of the Book of Records, which was not, after all, a recapitulation of those thirty-one notebooks, but about a life much closer to my own. A story that contained my history and would contain my future.
WHEN SWIRL AND Wen the Dreamer married in Bingpai in 1951, the singers and booksellers of Shanghai arrived bristling with musical instruments and hand-copied books. Wen’s uncles slapped his back, sucked the ends of their long pipes and shouted, “Your wife is a treasure. Old West is smiling down on you!” They played cards and smoked so heavily, the resulting thick fog washed out into the road and confused passing bicyclists. The Old Cat, in a three-piece suit, danced with such elegance that even Ba Lute, itchy in his peasant clothes, wept as he played. Afterwards, the Old Cat proposed a toast to “that infamous explorer, that giant among men, Da-wei!” Everyone drank, most thinking this must be the scoundrel who had broken her heart. The party seemed to expand beyond its limits, twirling forward like a well-known song with extra verses.
Sparrow had written a piece of music, a truncated sonata with main theme and development, and he hummed it to Wen the Dreamer as the sun rose into the fog on the second day. In the echoing hum after he had finished, Wen said, “You are, of course, an acolyte of the illustrious Herr Bach?”
Sparrow didn’t understand four of the words in that sentence but he nodded just in case.
“In that case, I have something for you,” Wen said. He presented him with three precious records, imported from America.
Finally, on the third day, as the afternoon drew to a close, Swirl and Big Mother Knife sang a duet, and in their singing bade farewell to one another, to the narrow beds and the childhood fears they had shared, and the open roads that had marked this passage from one breath of life to the next. “I have fulfilled my duty to our parents,” Big Mother told herself. Swirl would live here, in the village of Bingpai, in Wen the Dreamer’s family home. She clutched her sister one more time, before turning away.
Everything passes, Big Mother thought, as she sat in the low bunk of the train returning home.
Dry shells of sunflower seeds cracked like kindling beneath her shoes. Ba Lute had met old friends from Headquarters and gone to play cards in their private compartment; Sparrow was reading a discarded copy of Literary and Artistic Issues in the Soviet Union. The landscape passed in waves of green and yellow as if the country were an endless unharvested sea. West of Suzhou the train stopped and goods were hustled out by a long line of porters. Big Mother stared out the window and saw a woman her age standing on the opposite platform, a small child in front of her. The little girl seemed lost in thought. The mother’s hands rested protectively on the child’s shoulders. Big Mother closed her bad eye and pressed the other to the glass.
The woman, on closer inspection, was crying freely. Tears slipped unchecked down her cheeks. Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army moved behind her, circling the mother and child with a sly friendliness. The whistle sounded and the doors of the train slammed closed. Still the woman didn’t move.
The train pulled away and the mother, child and soldiers vanished from sight.
Ba Lute returned, half-drunk, his limbs clumsy. He tried to fold himself into the space beside her, only partly succeeding. “Despite your meanness, you’re the one I come back to,” he mumbled, eyes closed. “Home from the tiresome world.” Big Mother wanted to insult him but she restrained herself. Her husband’s lips were thin with sadness and his face had aged. Even his grey stubble looked desolate. Outside the window, the landscape hurried past as if it to erase everything that had come before.
—
A year passed, and then four or five, in which Big Mother Knife rarely saw her sister. Swirl and Wen now had a daughter, Zhuli, who had been born a ten-pound juggernaut before stretching into a lithe and sweet-natured child. “The girl,” wrote Swirl, “sings all the time. This child is the mystery at the centre of my life.”