The Party favoured them with a traditional laneway house, not far from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. It was two storeys, with an inner courtyard and spacious side wings, with room enough for five families, yet despite the dire housing shortage, only two other people shared the courtyard: a husband and wife surnamed Ma, who had lost all three sons in the fighting. Together with Ba Lute, they painted the words, “Trust the Party in Everything” on their common brick wall, their feet tapping an intricate rhythm all the while.
Big Mother was the only one who didn’t have the heart for music. Here in her childhood city, she found herself dreaming of her dead parents and her missing brothers, of Swirl’s lost husband and child, fantasizing that they, like Ba Lute, would miraculously appear. She was going blind in one eye (“From looking at you,” she told her husband) and she saw that her youth, those years of catastrophe and flight, of running along a precipice, had come to an end. Gone were the crushing sorrows and terrors, and gone, too, was her independence. She feared she had no idea how to live in peace.
Worse, she had somehow ended up married to the king of slogans. Everything was ideological with the man. Ba Lute demanded shoes made of humble straw rather than everyday cloth and, in addition to committing the blackboard news to memory, he read the Jiefang Daily religiously, his arms open as if to hug the words of Chairman Mao. The Great Helmsman, her husband informed her one morning, had said love was no excuse for withholding criticism.
“When did I ever spit the word love at you?” she said. “You Communists are all delusional.”
Aghast, her husband twitched his cigarette at her. “If you had seen me at Headquarters, you would know how my comrades respected me!”
“Forgive me…I was lugging your son around on my back. I walked five thousand li hoping to trip over your big face again! Meanwhile, where were you? Off at ‘Headquarters,’ playing the piano and dancing polkas. You melon! Who’s the true revolutionary hero?”
He dismissed her. It didn’t matter. Their incompatible love made her feel hollow, as if the world had turned out to be flat after all. In honour of her husband’s hero status, Big Mother Knife had been assigned an excellent administrative job at the Shanghai No. 2 Electric Wire Company. The twice-daily political meetings were so endless and excruciating she wanted to stick her fingers in the sockets.
By now, Sparrow was eleven years old, and his parents’ arguments floated past him as lightly as a whistle of wind. In addition to his regular schoolwork, Ba Lute was tutoring him in music theory and jianpu, a notation using numbers, lines and dots
which Sparrow had first encountered when he was three years old, long before any other writing had entered his life. His father said that jianpu notation was accessible to everyone, and even the humblest daughter of the humblest peasant could read it. Numbers could describe another world. Now, while his father sulked and his mother shouted, he swayed at his desk, singing and singing again this exhilarating music in front of him, his audition piece for the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Every hair on his head seemed to flutter like wings. The score his father had given him to learn was Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor, arranged for the Chinese two-stringed violin, the erhu.
BY FEBRUARY, AI-MING HAD been with us only two months, but it felt as if she had been there always. One night, I remember, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 came on the radio. Partway through the third movement, Ai-ming sat down and gazed into the speakers as if into the face of a person she knew. Even I, as young as I was, felt disturbed by the music and the emotions it communicated. Or perhaps this is all hindsight, because later, through the Book of Records, I learned that Shostakovich had written this symphony in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Terror when more than half a million people were executed, including some of Shostakovich’s closest friends. Under terrible pressure, he composed the symphony’s third movement, a largo that moved its audience to tears by restating and dismantling the theme of the first movement: what initially had seemed simple and familiar, even artless, was turned inside out and refolded into another dimension. The first movement had been deceptive. Inside, concealed and waiting to be heard, were ideas and selves that had never been erased.
I was doing the dishes when the movement began, and at its close they were still unfinished, my hands wrinkled in the cold water, my fingers relaxed against the serrated edge of a knife.
“When I was little,” Ai-ming said, standing up, “the radio played only eighteen pieces of approved music. Nothing else. We called them the yàngbǎnxì, revolutionary operas. But often, Ma-li, I would catch my father listening to illegal music.”
Her father, the sparrow. “Listening like a bird?” I asked, immersed in the story that was now part of our day-to-day routine.
Unexpectedly, she sang a line of notes, and the music, as natural to her as breathing, contained both grief and dignity. It seemed to expand inside my thoughts even as it disappeared; it was so intimate, so alive, I felt I must have known it all my life. When I asked her if it was Shostakovich, she smiled and said no. She told me this music came from her father’s last composition. “That’s how Sparrow was, he wanted to exist through music, too. When I was small, he played his hidden records only at night, never in the day. In the village where I grew up, the nighttime sky felt everlasting.”
“But, Ai-ming, how can music be illegal?” The idea seemed so absurd, I almost laughed.
She frowned at the dishes in the sink which appeared to have multiplied rather than diminished, took the washcloth and shifted me firmly aside. She let the cold water out and started again.
Many nights, Ai-ming said, ignoring my question, her father’s music pulled her from sleep. Sparrow, she slowly pieced together, had been one of Shanghai’s most renowned composers. But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades. Ai-ming heard him humming fragments of music when he thought no one was listening. Eventually she came to understand that these fragments were all that remained of his own symphonies, quartets and other musical works. The written copies had been destroyed.
Ai-ming might wake hearing Shostakovich or Bach or Prokofiev; she knew them all, but their music didn’t interest her. Beside the hump of her grandmother’s snoring body, she fidgeted, hoping that Big Mother Knife would wake; half-asleep, she said things Ai-ming wasn’t supposed to hear.
“I was a nuisance,” Ai-ming told me. “To wake her up, I would loudly sing ‘One’s Young Life Is Like a Flower,’ which was also illegal at the time. My grandmother taught it to me by accident and I could do a perfect imitation of her.” At my request, Ai-ming demonstrated. Big Mother Knife, with her delicate hands and wrestler’s shoulders, her brittle yet sonorous alto, her curled hair like a cotton ball, came to life before my eyes: Ah, my beloved country, when will I fall into your embrace?
Most nights, Big Mother woke, cursed her grand-daughter angrily and fell back asleep. But now and then, she softened.
“My stories are too old for you,” she might say. “You don’t have the brains to understand them.”
“Maybe you don’t tell them well.”
“My stories are too vast. You haven’t got the patience. Go play in the dirt instead.”
“I have more patience than you.”
“Belligerent child!”
In these moments, Ai-ming knew her father was eavesdropping. She could hear the muffled hiccups of his laughter. The smell of his tobacco slid over them, as if he was right on the other side of the wall.
“I assumed,” Ai-ming told me, “that when Big Mother’s stories finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, ‘But that’s how the world is, isn’t it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world?’
“She would say, ‘Are you ready? This next story will last so long you’ll forget you were ever born.’