In Toronto, she waited for my mother to call her.
In Vancouver, I reached out and took her suitcase.
It is a simple thing to write a book. Simpler, too, when the book already exists, and has been passed from person to person, in different versions, permutations and variations. No one person can tell a story this large, and there are, of course, missing chapters in my own Book of Records. The life of Ai-ming, the last days of my father: day by day, year by year, I try to see a little more. In Shanghai, Tofu Liu told me that Bach reworked psalms and folk songs, Mahler reworked Li Bai and Wang Wei, Sparrow quoted Prokofiev in his own compositions, and others, like Zhuli and my father, devoted themselves to interpreting this music that was never written for them. The entire book of records is lost, but some objects and compositions remain. In Dunhuang, where Ai-ming stayed with Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, forty thousand manuscripts were recovered in a cave sealed around 1000 AD. In 1900, when an earthquake caused the rocks to split, an abbott, the guardian of the caves, discovered the cache, towers of pages preserved by the dry air of the desert. Mixed in with Chinese prayers were documents in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uighur, Sogdian, Judeo-Persian, Syriac and Khotanese; a Parthian fragment written in Manichean, a tantric instruction manual in the Uighur alphabet, a past due bill for a camel. Ballads, inventories, circulars and donations. A letter to a husband that reads, “I would rather be a pig’s wife than yours.” Astronomical maps. Board game instructions. A guest’s apology for getting drunk and behaving badly. A poem for a beloved donkey. The sale of a brother. Variations of Sparrow’s complete composition, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, can be heard all over China. In shopping malls, public parks, private homes, on personal computers, in night clubs; on headphones in Tiananmen Square, that place that Chinese architects once imagined as the zero point, the location that determines all others. Maybe no one knows where the original recording came from, or that it arrived, like a virus, over the internet. The composer’s name may ultimately be lost. Mathematics has taught me that a small thing can become a large thing very quickly, and also that a small thing never entirely disappears. Or, to put it another way, dividing by zero equals infinity: you can take nothing out of something an infinite number of times.
To date, Yiwen and I have left innumerable copies of the Book of Records online and even in bookshops in Beijing, Shanghai, Dunhuang, Hong Kong. When I met the Old Cat in Shanghai, she showed me her copy of the thirty-one chapters of the Book of Records copied by Wen the Dreamer back in 1950.
The Old Cat told me that one day in the near future this library, which itself had gone through so many transformations, would pass from her hands into Ai-ming’s keeping. She said, “I understood from the time I was a child that the boundless vista is at the perilous heights.” Later, as if speaking to another, she said, “Ling, you must give my regards to the future.” And then the Old Cat, who was wearing a suit as she sat in her wheelchair, who carried a bright silver pen in her pocket, smiled at me. She said, “My goodness. How much you resemble your father.”
When she said this I understood that these pages, too, are just one variation. Some must remain partial chapters, they have no end and no beginning.
I continue to live my life, to let my parents go and to seek my own freedom. I will wait for Ai-ming to find me and I continue to believe that I will find her — tomorrow, perhaps, or in a dozen years. She will reach up for a book on a shelf. Or she will switch on the radio, she will hear a piece of music that she recognizes, that she has always known. She will come closer. At first, she will disbelieve and then a line will come back to her, words she overheard on the street long ago but has never fully forgotten.
Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep.
Remember what I say: not everything will pass.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Charles Buchan and Sarah Chalfant, my gratitude and love. Your confidence and wisdom have sustained me.
Thank you to Lynn Henry at Knopf Canada, Bella Lacey at Granta Books and Christine Popp at Luchterhand Literaturverlag, for their profound insight, generosity and commitment to this book of records. I am deeply fortunate to have traveled this road with you.
I am grateful for financial support from Simon Fraser University, University of Guelph, Nanyang Technological University Singapore and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Thank you to Katharina Narbutovič and the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm who hosted my partner, and welcomed me not only as family but as an artist in my own right. Do Not Say We Have Nothing began in the freedom and openness offered to us in Berlin.
To my students and fellow faculty in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at City University of Hong Kong, which was closed down as a result of internal and external politics, and to my friends in Hong Kong, thank you for six beautiful years.
A small group carried me through difficult times, financially, artistically and spiritually. Thank you Ellen Seligman, Y-Dang Troeung, David Chariandy, Sophie McCall, Steven Galloway, Sarah Blacker, Phanuel Antwi, Johanna Skibsrud, Amanda Okopski, Priya Basil, Xu Xi, Sara O’Leary, Anita Rau Badami, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Michelle Garneau, Dionne Brand, Guylaine Racine, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Claudia Kramatschek and Tobias Wenzel.
To Emily Wood and John Asfour, and to my mother, Matilda Thien, who left this world far too soon. As John wrote, “When death catches me on the sidewalk of a poem, I will only regret not having had you in my arms long enough.”
To my father and Katherine Luo, for their love and faith. To Rawi Hage, for everything.
Not everyone who supported and strengthened this story can be named. To my beloved friends in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing and Dunhuang, thank you for accompanying me through this book of records and an alternate memory of history. Remember what I say: Not everything will pass.
NOTES
“Watch little by little the night turn around…” Adapted from Pink Floyd lyrics for “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” adapted from Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin’s “Untitled Poem(iii)”, from Poems of the Late T’ang, transl. by A. C. Graham (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), 147.
“You and I are forever separated by a river…” “A Trip to Xinjiang”, News Plus, China Radio International, Beijing. November 1, 2013. Radio.
Lyrics from a folk song translated from Russian to Chinese, collected by musician Wang Luobin who once dreamed of studying at the Paris Conservatory. At the age of 25, he encountered and fell in love with Xinjiang music and, over decades, traveled throughout the region, collecting and adapting more than 700 songs into eight albums. He spent 19 years of his life imprisoned.
“My youth has gone like a departing bird…” “A Trip to Xinjiang.”
“I would also like to be wise…” Bertolt Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” transl. by John Willett, The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century German Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 71.
“The marriage of a girl, away from her parents…” Adapted from Wei Yingwu, “To My Daughter on Her Marriage into the Yang Family,” in Witte Bynner, The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, Being Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang Dynasty, 618–906 (New York: Knopf, 1930), 212.
“When the mind is exalted…” adapted from Wei Yingwu, “Entertaining Literary Men in My Official Residence on a Rainy Day,” The Jade Mountain, 208.
“How can you ignore this sharp awl that pierces your heart?…” From a song by Jesuit missionary, China scholar and musician, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), as quoted in Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese (New York: Algora Publishing, 2004), 59.