—
In the spring of 1970, Big Mother Knife finally returned to the laneway house on Beijing Road. There, she found her entire family missing. Even Mr. and Mrs. Ma were gone; their oleanders had grown wild, blanketing both wings of the house. She smashed all the crockery. She did it carefully, disposing of her favourites immediately, all the while singing: “Comrades, amputate the branches and tear down the leaves….” Her neighbours thought she had lost her mind and backed into their doorways when they saw her coming. By the end, as she was smashing an insipid vase Ba Lute had once given her, despair overwhelmed her. When she crushed it under her shoe, the smallest pieces reminded her of little teeth.
“Make revolution,” she thought bitterly. “I will make the biggest revolution of them all.”
In the bedroom, she found a dress of Zhuli’s and one of Ba Lute’s straw shoes, and she sat down with them, uncomprehending. All the musical instruments and scores were gone. That night, she took the train west to destitute Anhui Province, where Ba Lute had been consigned to a re-education camp. It took three days to reach him and, when she finally did, they wept and argued and fought nonsensically. Ba Lute could not even speak Zhuli’s name; for the last four years he had kept Zhuli’s suicide from her, going so far as to make up stories about her whereabouts and her accomplishments: At this juncture, it is not advised for Zhuli to write to you. She has been offered the opportunity to study in Paris. Big Mother spat the words back at him. Now Ba Lute told her that he had personally written a letter to Chairman Mao, who could not possibly know all that was being done in his name. Society was in disarray.
“You wrote to Chairman Mao? You ridiculous oaf of a man.”
“Our own sons denounced me,” Ba Lute said, broken. “Da Shan and Flying Bear say they want nothing to do with us. But I have faith that Chairman Mao, our Great Leader, our Saving Star, will redeem us.”
It was, and would always be, the only thing he ever said that made her weep. “How can he redeem us? Can he turn back time? Can he give a child back her life? You didn’t even have the courage to give her a proper burial!”
“Big Mother, it was impossible. Don’t you understand? It was the transformation of the world.”
“That poor child,” she said, turning away.
For days and then months, she thought only of Zhuli. Swirl and Wen the Dreamer had left Mongolia and crossed into Kyrgyzstan where they awaited word from their daughter, but Big Mother could not imagine telling them that she was dead and had been dead since 1966, that she had taken her own life. How could Swirl accept it? Her sister had already lost one child, the little boy who fell from the tram so long ago. Disbelief would push Swirl to come home, she would return to Shanghai at the cost of her life. If Swirl was rearrested…Big Mother could not finish the thought. She could not do it.
Back in Shanghai, Big Mother put in a request to be transferred to Sparrow’s town, Cold Water Ditch. Finally, after a year of badgering her superiors, deploying gifts, reciting Chairman Mao’s most obscure poetry, and confusing everyone with both intimidation and deference, her request was granted. Travel permit and registration papers in hand, she left Shanghai by train. A premonition told her she would never see the city again: by the time the wheel of history tumbled forward and this country awoke once more, she would be stone blind. Annoyed, she glared into the overloaded compartment and cursed every blurry face, every hand, every belly, every cadre, every little Red brat. And then, feeling guilty, she closed her eyes and cursed herself.
The decrepit train hobbled on, into the humid South. Some little turd had drawn a lopsided egg on the dusty window, or maybe the egg was a zero left behind by someone with bad handwriting. What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn’t zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? Thanks to the painful slowness of the train, she had another fifty hours to think this over. Big Mother sighed and slapped her knee so violently she grunted in pain. None of the other passengers cared. “This silly melon of a train!” she shouted. “It stops at every clump of bushes! By the time we get there you kids will be grandparents and I’ll be dead! We’re going so slowly we might as well be going backwards!” A murmur of agreement slid down the length of the compartment, easeful and reassuring as the midnight breeze.
PART ZERO
Music which is so dear to me, and without which, more than likely, I couldn’t live a day.
–DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
You may say that that is not love, and I would laugh at you for presuming to know what another’s love isn’t and what his love is.
–ZIA HAIDER RAHMAN, In the Light of What We Know
WHEN JIANG KAI, MY FATHER, left China in 1978, one of his suitcases was filled with more than fifty battered notebooks. The notebooks contained drafts of self-criticisms whose final pages must have been submitted, years earlier, to a superior or an authority figure. Self-criticism, samokritika in Russian, 检讨 (jiǎn tǎo) in Chinese, required that the person confess his or her mistakes, repeat the correct thinking of the Party and acknowledge the authority of the Party over him or her. Confession, according to the Party, was “a form of repentance that would bring the individual back into the collective.” Only through genuine contrition and self-criticism could a person who had fallen from grace earn rehabilitation and the hope of “resurrection,” of being returned to life.
I arrived in Shanghai on June 1, 2016. From my hotel room, I looked down at a city wreathed in mist. Skyscrapers and condominiums shouldered together in every direction, erasing even the horizon.
How the city mesmerized me. Shanghai seemed, like a library or even a single book, to hold a universe within itself. My father had arrived here in the late 1950s, a child of the countryside, in the wake of the Great Leap Forward and a man-made famine that took the lives of 36 million people, perhaps more. He had perfected his music, dreamed of both a wider world and a better one, and fallen in love. Day after day, Kai had bent over his desk, feverishly writing and copying pages, revising and reimagining his life and his moral code. We were not unalike, my father and I; we wanted to keep a record. We imagined there were truths waiting for us–about ourselves and those we loved, about the times we lived in–within our reach, if only we had the eyes to see them.
Summer fog slowly erased Shanghai from view. I stepped away from the window. I showered, changed and went down to the subway.
Underground, people gazed at screens or tapped at phones, but many drifted, as I did, through their thoughts. Near me, an old woman discreetly savoured cake, phones chimed and honked, a mother and daughter repeated the multiplication table and a child refused to disembark.
Unexpectedly, the train braked. The old woman stumbled, her cake went flying, and she fell into my lap.
For a moment, she was suspended in my arms, our faces inches from one another. A big whoop went up from people around us, followed by jovial applause. A child reprimanded her for eating on the train, another wanted to know what kind of cake it was. The woman laughed, the sound so unexpected, I nearly dropped her. She was in her late sixties, around the same age Ma would be now. In my imperfect Mandarin, I tried to give her my seat, but the woman waved me off as if I had offered her a ticket to the moon.