ALL THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER Ai-ming and Ma drove away, I sat at the window reading Ma’s copy of David Copperfield. Again and again, I returned to the opening lines: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Around seven at night, Ma finally came home. I watched her walk across the inner courtyard and ascend the stairs, moving slowly as if the stairs grew invisibly steeper. Her green coat, delicate as a summer leaf, was so familiar to me, she’d had it since before I was born. I watched it rise through the stairwell, as if against the flow of time. Seeing me through the glass, she smiled and began to move faster. She was carrying a parcel in her hands, a small, white bakery box.
I ran to the door and opened it, pulling Ma inside.
I had prepared a meal of rice, cucumbers and hardboiled eggs; as we ate, Ma filled the silence by describing, in detail, how the day had unfolded. The border guard, yawning, had waved them through. On the outskirts of Seattle, they’d run into morning traffic. They’d stopped for hamburgers. Ai-ming had bought my favourite sponge cake, and sent it home with Ma in the white bakery box. Ma had waited until Ai-ming boarded the Greyhound, she’d watched the bus pull away and disappear.
After dinner, Ma telephoned Shanghai, speaking for over an hour with Ai-ming’s mother. I sat beside her on the sofa, near enough that her voice covered me.
In bed that night, I concentrated with all my strength, hoping I could hear my father’s voice if only I listened hard enough. Light and shadow slid across the ceiling, now here, now gone, and as I thought about the reasons Ba had left this world, sadness overwhelmed me. Yet the wind sounded against the windows and in the next room, Ma still breathed and changed and dreamed. I wanted to go to her, I wanted to find a way to protect her. Ai-ming had left me a letter which I picked up again:
“We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds joined wingtip to wingtip And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree. / Earth endures, heaven endures, even though both shall end.”
Ai-ming was the link between us, my father and hers, my mother and me. Until we knew she was safe, how could we possibly let her go? At that time, I thought I never would.
“In the fall of 1965,” I told the windows, the room, the photograph of my father on the desk, “on the night before Sparrow’s twenty-fourth birthday, a young man, wearing an overcoat far too big for his skinny body, arrived in the night.”
THE HOUSEHOLD–BA LUTE, Big Mother and the two boys, Zhuli and Swirl (newly released, within days of her friend, the Translator)–was fast asleep, but Sparrow was still writing. Outside, a shadow appeared in the laneway. As Sparrow worked on his Symphony No. 3, he could hear the scratching of their steps, back and forth, around and back. The noise crept into his music: a low bassoon interfering with the bass line, now here, now gone.
Irritated, Sparrow set down his pencil. He picked up the lamp, descended the stairs and exited into the courtyard, listening: no sound at all. He flung open the back gate.
The stranger cried out, making them both fall sideways.
Embarrassed, Sparrow shook the lamp. “Speak, Comrade!” he said, as gruffly as he could. “How can I assist you!”
At first, only the wind replied. And then the stranger said, his voice no louder than a sigh, “I’m looking for Young Sparrow.”
He was very slight, very short and surely no one to be afraid of, but still the lamp in Sparrow’s hand trembled. “Young Sparrow? What do you want with him?”
In the stranger’s hand, a crumpled envelope appeared. Even in the low light, Sparrow knew the handwriting immediately. It was the very same calligraphy he had gazed at ever since he was a teenager: square yet full of ardour, telling the story of Da-wei and May Fourth. The stranger shivered miserably and yanked his hand back. He was nervous, but not in the smug, twitchy way of a spy or a jailer. Rather, the young man seemed horrified by the width of the alleyway.
“I am he. That is, I’m Sparrow. What do you need, Comrade?”
The stranger shook his head.
“Is that a letter for me?”
“I have what you would call…news.”
“Quickly, come inside.” The stranger shook his head. Sparrow had to prevent himself from dragging him bodily into the house. “Have you eaten yet? Come. No one will harm you.”
The young man glanced past him. The shadows were not kind to him; everything about him was meagre and crushed. “I will not come in,” he said softly, as if counselling himself. “No, no. I will not! Absolutely, definitely not.”
Sparrow reached into his pocket. Last night, an official in the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection had paid him twenty yuan for private lessons–the official wanted to learn Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata–and the large bills were still on him. “Comrade, if you cannot stay and join me for a meal, please accept this small, inconsequential gift.” He had intended to pull out just one bill, but all four came out.
The young man blinked, stunned.
Sparrow hesitated. Then, firmly, as a father might, he took the letter from the stranger’s hands and put the money there instead. Now that it was leaving him, Sparrow felt a pang of confusion and remorse; he did not have another fen in his pocket. Still, he held the young man’s gaze. “Accept the money or come inside.”
The stranger opened his hand and stared at the miraculous bills. “I would not take anything from the family of Brother Wen,” he whispered. “But my circumstances…well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He looked at Sparrow directly, and it was clear that the stranger was no more than eleven or twelve years old. A child.
And then the boy, his destitution and Sparrow’s money vanished down the laneway. Except for the envelope in Sparrow’s hands, it was as if the child had never been.
He shut the door and retraced his steps through the inner courtyard. Upstairs, from the balcony, he looked out in the direction the boy had run. Dawn had begun to crease the sky, and already the ration line on Beijing Road was forming, growing longer by the moment, but the child was long gone.
The envelope was addressed, not to his parents, not to Aunt Swirl or Zhuli, but to “Young Sparrow.” He crouched down with the lamp, opened the envelope, slid out the single sheet of paper and began to read.
—
At dawn, Zhuli came out onto the balcony. She called down to Mrs. Ma who was waiting her turn at the water spigot, wished her good morning, grinned at Sparrow, took his empty teacup away and returned with it full and steaming. She sat on a broken chair and said, “Love letter?”
He grunted.
“Dear cousin,” she whispered, “Happy birthday! May this be the year your thrilling Symphony no. 3 is performed in the concert hall before Chairman Mao himself and our devoted Premier Zhou Enlai! Before President He Luting and all the grand musicians of the Shanghai Conservatory! May the bouquets at your feet be fragrant and plentiful, and may the soloist of your next piano concerto be a certain elegant boy from Changsha–”
“Zhuli, if you don’t hurry, that boy from Changsha will have reserved the best practice room. You’ll have to play your violin in the street.”
“You’re right! Jiang Kai practises more than anyone in the Conservatory. Except me. But you know,” she said, her voice dropping even lower, “the piano in Room 103 is ancient and all the pianists avoid it. For a violinist, there’s so much space it’s practically a villa.” She shoved him on the knee. “But, really, who is the letter from?”
He had turned the envelope over before she recognized her father’s handwriting. “Premier Zhou Enlai, inviting me to perform at his grand reception where–”
“The envelope is too plain.”
“Herr Bach, asking me to–”
“The envelope is too new.”
“The neighbourhood grandma, asking why I compose for the degenerate piano rather than the glorious guqin.”
She nodded. “I see. Cousin,” she said, after a moment, “this morning I found the bag of dried peas that went missing. They were in the sleeve of my mother’s coat.”
“What did you do?”