They stood together in the Square where funeral wreaths softened the emptiness. The architecture was intended to make a person feel insignificant, but Ai-ming felt confusingly large, there was so much room here, a child could run in any pattern, make any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.
“I want to know what it’s like in a young country with lots of space,” she said. “If you say something out loud, you hear your own voice differently.”
Sparrow nodded.
She said, “Canada.”
—
In Sparrow’s mind, lines of Chairman Mao came back unbidden.
We had much to do
and quickly.
The sky-earth spins
and time is short.
Ten thousand years is long
and so a morning and an evening count.
Near to them, in front of the Great Hall of the People, the first line of police, too, seemed to be melting. It could be, Sparrow thought, that a person does not even know that they have gone quiet. Qù could be a substance that begins as a strength and transmutes, imperceptibly, into loss.
They had reached the southern edge of the Square.
Now Ai-ming asked him, “Why did the students kneel down?”
“I imagine…they wanted to show respect. They followed the ways in which petitioners have always approached the government.”
“But why did no government official come out?”
“Because…even though they were kneeling, if a member of the government had come and addressed their demands, the students would have been in a position of power.”
The sun was luminous but the wind was cold. His daughter hugged herself tightly. Paper flowers jumbled over the ground, paper carnations grew from the trees, though some had fallen and been mashed by the everlasting stream of bicycles. He heard their tinkling bells and also a music in his head, shaken loose, the Twelfth Goldberg Variation, two voices engaged in a slightly out-of-breath canon, like a knot that never got tied. He could still write music. The thought jolted him. It might be possible to procure a piano, he could visit the Central Conservatory and ask for the use of a practice room. But then Sparrow had an image of himself, waiting beneath their turning fans, and smiled to think of himself appearing in his Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 uniform and his blue worker’s cap. The absurdity of it made a deep impression. His age struck him forcefully, as if some blindfold had momentarily loosened and allowed him to see things as they were.
He wanted to take Ai-ming’s hand. Sometimes, when Ai-ming bruised her knee on the table or suffered some psychological melancholy, it seemed to lodge inside him as well. Where did the line between parent and child exist? He’d always tried to refrain from pushing her in one direction or the other, ever fearful he might drive her towards the Party, but what if his silence had let her down or failed her in some crucial way? But maybe, he thought, a parent should always have failings, some place into which a child can sink her teeth, because only then can a child come to know herself. He thought about those young students kneeling with their petition. Eventually, they would be arrested. It was inevitable.
“What happened to all that music, Ba? What if…I wish you’d been able to get away, to the West or some other place. I think, if it weren’t for me, maybe you would have tried to live a more honest life.”
Had he been dishonest, Sparrow wondered. To whom had been dishonest? Hadn’t he said what needed to be said?
“Forgive me for speaking so directly, Ba. Only…you raised me to think my own thoughts, even if I couldn’t say them aloud, isn’t that so? I think the time has come to say, sincerely, what I feel.”
The brutality of children never ceased to surprise him.
He had to stop and rest. His heart was beating strangely and his hands felt full of paper cuts, even though there was no visible injury. Ai-ming caught hold of his arm. She looked suddenly alarmed and he wanted to smooth the terror from her face. Big Mother Knife and Aunt Swirl used to trace their fingers over his forehead, his eyebrows; when he was a child, it would help him fall asleep. But that was almost fifty years ago, when Shanghai was occupied. How funny, Sparrow thought, to think that he had been a child of a former world. When had he ceased to be that person? Ai-ming pulled him to a sidewalk bench and then she ran to fill her tea thermos. She also came back with fish balls on a stick. They looked so unappealing his mouth twisted in disgust. Relieved, Ai-ming laughed. He drank the tea and she ate the fish balls, savouring their saltiness as only a young person can. He fought the urge to put his arm around her. Did he want to hold on to her to keep her safe, he wondered, or just to keep himself from being lonely? Ai-ming was eighteen years old and she was ready to find a new beginning, entirely different from his own. This realization shocked him: Ai-ming was still so young, and already she had judged him.
—
Over the weekend, the Square came into Sparrow’s thoughts like a continuous sound. He had heard from his co-workers that hundreds of thousands of people continued to gather there, they were writing public messages, using Hu Yaobang’s funeral as a pretext to mourn others, those who’d never been given a proper burial.
On Tuesday, when Sparrow arrived home from work, Ai-ming and Ling were engrossed by the apricots they were eating and barely noticed him. He changed out of his factory clothes. The previous night, while his wife and daughter slept, he’d written a wall poster to bring to the Square. Now he tucked the narrow roll of paper into his coat.
By the time Sparrow reached Tiananmen Square, it was twilight; thousands of others like him had come to feel the breeze of the open air. Walking across the Square’s infinite greyness, he felt as if he had been exiled to some distant moon. The memorial to Hu Yaobang remained, more flowers had arrived and more posters. In 1976, after Premier Zhou Enlai died, similar events had taken place. Beijingers had come to the Square and mourned openly, provocatively; his death had allowed people to demonstrate loyalty to the disappeared, to people like Zhuli. The government must know that allegiance to the dead was a stubborn loyalty that no policy could eradicate.
He took the poster from his coat. Nearby two girls were mixing glue, and he asked for their assistance. “No problem, grandfather!” one said. She had a Shanghai accent. “I’ll stick that up for you.” She read over his poster, nodded with a kind of bureaucratic approval, and pasted it up in a prominent position. Sparrow had copied a quote from the scholar Kang Youwei, whose treatises he had read in Kai’s room, with the Professor, San Li, Ling and the Old Cat, and still remembered: “And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered help to them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.”
The contours of Hu Yaobang’s portrait were disappearing bit by bit. In the openness of the Square, he allowed himself, for the first time in many years, to remember. Zhuli was in Room 103 playing Prokofiev. His Symphony No. 3 had been finished in his head a thousand times, but he couldn’t hear the ending. Perhaps the places in ourselves that appear empty have only been dormant, unreachable.
Zhuli, he thought. I’m sorry that I came too late. Of course he knew that she had forgiven him long ago, so why did he hold on to this guilt? What was the thing he was most afraid of?
—
The next afternoon, Sparrow gazed once more into the chassis of the Model 3812 radio. At the next work station, Old Bi and Miss Lu were arguing over the ongoing demonstrations, which had spread to a boycott of classes at thirty-nine universities by sixty thousand students. Despite the fact that university students were now banned from factory grounds, someone had managed to smuggle pamphlets into the cafeteria, “Ten Polite Questions for the Chinese Communist Party.”