The nights continued, growing ever warmer. He wrote to Kai to say, “Yes, I will come,” and having sent the letter off, lost himself by walking the Muxidi alleyways, listening to another of Ai-ming’s tapes, this one Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which had gone unperformed for twenty-five years. What would it be like to go to Canada at this stage in his life? What if Kai could sponsor Ai-ming? He would pay the money back. But what about Ling and this life? What about his parents? In what way was he still a composer if he had made not a sound for more than twenty years? There were no answers to his questions.
Yet the knowledge that he would see Kai brought him an undeniable, undiluted pleasure. Upon sending the letter, Sparrow had felt abruptly changed. That a few simple words could transform him, Yes, I will come, unsettled him. But why should he continue to fear? Wasn’t society changing? Nearly a month had passed since Hu Yaobang’s death, a month in which Beijing students continued to boycott classes. There were rumours that high-ranking members of the Communist Party were prepared to sit down with the students, face to face, and take part in a televised dialogue. If so, this would be the first time such an event had occurred in Sparrow’s lifetime; he could not fathom it, and remembered, still, He Luting, his head forced down by Red Guards.
A change in the system of government had the power to change the fundamental construction of the world he knew. He would go to Hong Kong. A truthful end could come at last. He and Kai were no longer young, they had families of their own. It was difficult to move on without an end…but move on to what? He could not think so far into the future and if he thought of Ling, all his childish imaginings evaporated. Everything changed in a day, an hour, a moment. In the past, he had misread events, he had reacted too slowly. Sparrow had made mistakes but he promised himself he would not make them again. Now, in the afternoons, when he came home from work, Sparrow sat down at Ai-ming’s desk and composed. The old Symphony No. 3 was gone, he could no longer retrieve what it might have been, and so he had started a new work, a simpler piece, a sonata for piano and violin. The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu once described his own work as “a picture scroll unrolled,” and Sparrow felt a kinship with this image. He could hear this sonata in his head as surely as he could hear Bach and Shostakovich on the cassette player. The sonata was real and had already been created. One’s own mind, the saying went, concealed more information than five cartloads of books. It was like learning to breathe again, not just with his lungs but with his whole mind.
On May 13, the students went on hunger strike. Sparrow was working in Ai-ming’s room when the announcement was broadcast on the radio. He sensed that the piano and violin piece was unfolding at a sped-up tempo, and he erased the last hour’s work and began again, re-counting the measures, altering the space between development and return, two themes supporting one another. The line of the piano was difficult to hold, but the violin felt supple and unceasing. It was not heroic, it wished only to play for itself alone, even if it knew such a thing was not truly possible.
A commentator on the radio argued that these revolutionary youth were part of a deliberate attempt to humiliate the government and the nation. “Why else begin a hunger strike two days before our historic summit with Mikhail Gorbachev? This is the first visit from a Soviet leader in forty years….” Another said the students’ intentions were good, but their methods were immature, and it was imperative that they refrain from damaging the nation’s image. The news also seemed to be wrestling with its own head; the newsreader announced that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang favoured far-reaching press reforms, so that content and analysis would be decided by news editors and not Party officials. A sharp pain in Sparrow’s back flared unexpectedly, and he felt like an old piano that couldn’t be tuned.
At work the following day, the factory was unproductive. Half his co-workers had signed on to the new independent workers’ union operating from under a tarp on Chang’an Avenue. They had gone so far as to identify themselves by their real names, even showing their work badges. His co-workers only wanted news of the Square. Sparrow hadn’t yet signed on, he was trying to imagine himself boarding the plane for Hong Kong. Kai had been true to his word and Sparrow’s exit visa had been approved. For the first time in his life, he would travel outside China. Kai had begun to float other ideas. We could teach at the Hong Kong Conservatory. I have also made inquiries at the Vancouver Conservatory of Music. What have you been composing? Send me what you have. He began to suspect that Kai was living an illusion more complex than his own.
Fan, who worked the line with him, tapped her pencil on his desk. “Comrade Sparrow,” she said. “You look hideous. Do you have a fever? Is it contagious? Maybe you should get home and rest.”
Fan was still so young, Sparrow thought suddenly. If Zhuli were alive, she would be thirty-seven years old. These days, she entered his thoughts freely, as if some barrier between them had broken down.
“I’m not…”
“Go on. Production is non-existent anyway.” Fan got up, he could see her in the next aisle talking to the floor supervisor, known to everyone as Baby Corn, Sparrow didn’t know why. His hands were trembling. Perhaps he did have a fever. Baby Corn came over, deferential, as if Sparrow were his ancestor.
“Comrade Sparrow, you’re looking dead on your feet. Take the afternoon off. You’re back on shift tomorrow anyway, aren’t you?”
“I would prefer to stay.” Sparrow was afraid he would be criticized, later on, for not working to his full capacity. They would use this weakness to reprioritize him and lay him off. If he lost his job, they might revoke Ai-ming’s Beijing papers, and she would not be allowed to sit the university examinations.
“I insist,” Baby Corn said, distracted. He wandered a few steps away and gazed into the large face of his brand new watch.
“Come on,” Fan whispered. “He’s a real pain when he’s angry. Besides, you look awful…Did you injure your back? At your age, you’ve got to take better care of yourself.”
As he left, he heard the newsreader saying that talks between the government and the students, scheduled for the morning, had been cancelled. Outside, even the breeze felt sticky. He had started cycling to and from work because the buses were not reliable. Ling had told him that youth from across the country were pouring into Beijing by the tens of thousands. They were painting democracy slogans on train cars so that wherever the trains went, the student messages, too, would go. Sparrow pedalled slowly across the factory grounds, ashamed of his exhaustion. If he was not careful, they would all be calling him Grandfather, which was ludicrous because he was not even fifty.
He ended up on Chang’an Avenue, his bicycle inching through traffic as if he were part of a larger procession. He hadn’t meant to go to Tiananmen Square, it was only that he neglected to turn right after the Muxidi Bridge, and had continued straight. Chang’an Avenue was jammed; now he couldn’t turn around even if he wanted to. He had grown up in Shanghai, the most modern of Chinese cities, and yet he felt like an outsider here, out of his depth. The flood of Beijingers carried him forward until, glimpsing the Square, he saw that it was once more overrun with banners representing more universities than he could count. And now Sparrow truly did not wish to be here. Loudspeakers were broadcasting continuously. A young woman’s frail voice crackled over the street: “The country is our country. The people are our people. The government is our government. Who will shout if not us? Who will act if not us?”
Sparrow got down from his bicycle and began to push it. The young woman was using the exact words of Chairman Mao, written when Mao Zedong was a young fighter.
Beside Sparrow, an enormous man with a grizzled face was reading the newspaper as he walked.
“This hunger strike,” Sparrow said to him. “Is it real? Will the students really refuse food?”