As usual, Ma let me think what I wanted.
In the meantime, she altered her diet and dealt with the unending bureaucracy of sick leave, sick pay, health and life insurance, the web of paperwork and medication that quickly encircled her life, so that the measurement of time became divorced from the rising and the falling of the sun, and became instead about the intervals between treatment regimens, hospital stays, meal times, rest and recovery. She made a will and left a sum of money to Ai-ming, which to this day has not been claimed; neither I nor my mother’s lawyer have been able to locate her. That year, I published a paper in a prestigious mathematics journal and I am glad that Ma lived to see this small success, this glimpse of a future stability.
During those long hours at the hospital, I willed myself to understand everything there was to know about algebraic geometry; somehow, the impossibility of my task saved me. I wrote my papers and tried to find my mother’s strength within myself. In the last two years of her life, I changed. Ma’s diagnosis was an end but also a beginning, a period of time intensely lived. We were lucky because, finally, we had time to talk, to go back to subjects we might not have raised in a lifetime of reserve, of quiet. In those two years, I knew only two constants: mathematics and Ma. I learned a great deal about the tenacity of love and also the terrible pain of letting it go. The brevity of my parents’ lives has shaped me.
In 1999, Ma asked me to find Ai-ming. “You’re the only one who knows,” she said.
What did I know, I wondered, what had I truly understood back then? “I’ll try, Ma.”
“I couldn’t find her. I tried so hard but I couldn’t do it. There’s no more time.”
But what if there had been an accident? What if Ai-ming had passed away? I wanted to say these things but could not imagine speaking the words aloud.
The painkillers made her words slow and heavy. “She went back to Beijing. Maybe Shanghai. I’m sure of it.”
“I’ll look, Ma.”
“I wrote a letter to Ai-ming.”
“How?”
“I sent it to her mother in Shanghai. But it was returned, her mother had moved. There was no forwarding address. I called that number so many times.” Ma’s eyes filled with tears. “I promised her mother that I would take care of Ai-ming. I gave her my word. They were family to us.”
“Please don’t be upset,” I said. “Please. I’ll find them.”
“Look straight ahead and don’t turn back. Don’t follow illusions, don’t forget to come home.” It was as if she could see into the future, she knew I would take on my father’s regret and guilt. “You’re listening to me, aren’t you, Marie? Li-ling…”
“You don’t have to worry about anything, Ma. I promise.”
Not once did she ask for my father, yet I believe that somehow it was the same, that to hope for Ai-ming was also to hope for his return.
Before she passed away, Ma gave me a photograph Ai-ming had left us. The picture was a duplicate of one Ai-ming carried, which had belonged to her father. It showed Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. On the back, my mother had written Shanghai Conservatory of Music, 1966.
—
My mother died fifteen years ago but I have been thinking about her more than ever, the way it felt when she put her arms around me, about her qualities, especially her loyalty, pragmatism and quickness to laughter. She wanted to give me a different example of how to live my life and how to let hers go. And so, at the end, her words were contradictory. Look forward or look back? How could I find Ai-ming and also turn away from my father? Or did she think both acts were the same thing? It’s taken me years to begin searching, to realize that the days are not linear, that time does not simply move forward but spirals closer and closer to a shifting centre. How much did Ma know? How will I know when to stop looking? I think it’s possible to build a house of facts, but the truth at the centre might be another realm entirely.
It’s possible that I have lost track of the dates, the time, the chapters and permutations of the story. That afterwards, I reconstructed what I could about Ai-ming’s family and mine. Years later, certain images persisted in my memory–a vast desert, a poet who courted beautiful Swirl with a story not his own, music that made not a sound–and I returned to them with greater frequency. I wanted to find her again, to let her know what I remembered, and to return something of what she had given me.
Even now, I send letters to all the last known addresses.
When I walk through our old neighbourhood, Ai-ming’s voice comes back, as does my mother’s. I wish to describe lives that no longer have a physical counterpart in this world; or perhaps, more accurately, lives that might continue if only I had the eyes to see them. Even now, certain memories are only growing clearer. “Once more, Sparrow recited the letter he had received from Wen the Dreamer. It had its own cadence now, the pulse of a libretto: My dear friend I trust this letter finds you well! And that you remember me / your dreaming friend….”
THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, Sparrow had told Swirl and Big Mother about the letter, reciting it by heart. Big Mother had punched her knee joyfully, and then punched the other one. “The puny bird picks up all the news!”
“So it’s true,” Swirl said. “I knew it was true.” For a moment she appeared as Sparrow remembered her, long before the camps, a teenaged girl outrunning the war. “If he contacts you again, tell him to go to the plant and flower clinic of the Lady Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground. Lanzhou City, Gansu Province.”
“Notes from the Underground,” Sparrow repeated. “Lanzhou City.”
“You’ll take care of Zhuli, won’t you?”
“Between Ba Lute and me, Zhuli will want for nothing. I promise.”
“Be vigilant and keep your wits about you,” Big Mother said. “Shanghai is full of walking sticks.” She meant informers and spies. Beside her, the rucksacks, packed and waiting, hunched together like conspirators.
“I will.”
Light from the moon slid through the window, gathering in Big Mother’s water basin. Slapping her belly like a drum, she recited,
“Moonlight in front of my bed
I took it for frost on the ground
I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon
Lower it, and think of home.”
To Sparrow, she said roughly: “Watch over your father. He has no clue how to live without me.” Her eyes reddened.
“Be careful, Ma.”
Big Mother laughed, a cackling that sliced across moon and water.
Perhaps one day in the future, Sparrow thought now, as he lay in bed, he would write an opera about the life of Wen the Dreamer. And now the messenger sets out to Hubei Province to find the mysterious Comrade Glass Eye, bringing a copy of a copy of a copy of the Book of Records. The opera would open with a flourish, with the bravado of Shostakovich, before modulating towards the aligned, careful beauty of Kurt Weill, a libretto from Mayakovsky:
The streets our brushes
the squares our palettes
The thousand-paged book of time
says nothing about the days of revolution.
Futurists, dreamers, poets
come out into the street
and Li He:
Yellow dust, clear water under three mountains
the change of a thousand years is rapid as a galloping horse.
In the distance China is nine wisps of smoke
and in a single cup of water the ocean churns.
Could such an opera be more than an idea, a counterfeit, an imitation? Could he sit down and write an original work, a story about the possible future rather than the disputed past?