On Huaihai Road, Wen was asking her to be his wife.
Swirl remembered the quiet of the bed when she had woken suddenly. She had picked up her son’s perfect hand, and a grey sadness seemed to move from his chest into hers, and in that moment, when she knew her child was dead, she lost her parents, her brothers and her husband all over again. Unable to stop crying, she had refused to let go of the child’s body. But he grew rigid and cold in death. Only Big Mother had finally managed to lift the body from her arms.
“Miss Swirl,” Wen said now, as shoppers with empty bags wandered past, “I promise you that for all our life together, I will seek worlds that we might never have encountered in our singularity and our solitude. I will shelter our family. I will share your tears. I will bind my happiness to yours. Our country is about to be born. Let us, too, have the chance to begin again.”
“Yes,” Swirl said, as if his words were a prayer. “Let us.”
3
ONCE, AI-MING SAID TO ME, “Ma-li, I’m sure I’ve disappeared. Have I? Can you really see me?” She lifted her right hand and then her left, ever so slowly. Unsure if she was teasing or not, I echoed her movements, imagining I was at the mercy of the wind, pushed forward, turned sideways, only by forces unseen. “I’m invisible, too, Ai-ming. See?” I pulled her into the bathroom where we stared at our reflections as if they, and thus we, ourselves, were a mirage. It’s only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.
It was 1991, mid-March, and Ai-ming had been with us for three months. Ma was working all the time now, and had taken an extra job to cover expenses for Ai-ming, for the future. I decided to use my Chinese New Year money, my lucky money, to treat Ai-ming to dinner. My plan was to take her to my father’s favourite restaurant. The night we set out, the weather was mild, and we held hands as we walked beside the shrubs on 18th Avenue, past sagging houses and unkempt lawns, beneath cherry blossoms that perfumed even the saddest-looking blocks.
At Main Street, we turned north. I remember that an old grey cat lay in the middle of the pavement and didn’t move as we approached, she only stretched one foot further away, and swiped her tail from from side to side. The restaurant seemed to step out from the shadows wearing a vest of lights. It was a Polish place called Mazurka. It was warm inside and a quarter full, and there were white napkins and heavy utensils, and tea lights in miniature glasses. With Ai-ming, I felt grown-up and worldly, a true sophisticate. She, after all, came from Beijing, a city that, in 1991, had eleven million people. Ai-ming had explained to me the law of large numbers (LLN), and the various methods of constructing a mathematical proof, including the the “proof without words” which used only visual images. I marvelled at statements like
If we know x, we also know y, because…or
If p then q…
In the summer of 1989, while still in Beijing, Ai-ming had sat the national university entrance examinations. Shortly after, she had been offered a place in the newly established computer science department at Tsinghua University, the most prestigious scientific university in China.
“I should have gone,” she told me. “But how could I?”
Her decision not to attend Tsinghua, a principled but reckless choice, astonishes me now. But when I was eleven years old, I told her it all made sense.
Over cabbage rolls and perogies, Ai-ming told me that she was grateful for my mother’s generosity but she felt unworthy. She felt vulnerable in the daytime, afraid to be seen, but she needed to be courageous and start her life again. Ai-ming told me that solitude can reshape your life. “Like a river that gets cut off from the sea,” she said. “You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself. That’s how I feel. Do you understand, Ma-li?”
I remembered a night before Ai-ming came to live with us, when I had submerged my face under the bath water and imagined what it would be like to stop breathing, to stop time, as Ba had done. I said I understood. How I yearned to understand everything.
The candlelight grazed all the objects of the room. The waiter spoke to us kindly, as if we had come from very far away, from a place where words waited for their echo. I feared my childhood would pass before he finished a sentence. And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists had proved it was, so perhaps Ai-ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.
By then, Ai-ming had decided that she would attempt to enter the United States. The amnesty for Chinese students arriving after the Tiananmen demonstrations had ended, but, in March, a school friend of her mother’s wrote to say that the U.S. Congress was considering a new immigration bill, similar to the 1986 blanket amnesty that had pardoned 2.8 million illegal aliens and granted them permanent residence. The stipulation then had been that the applicant had to have been residing in the United States for at least four years; no one knew what the new restrictions might be. The friend, who lived in San Francisco, offered Ai-ming a place to live temporarily; she said that to delay was foolish.
My mother had already obtained a forged passport for Ai-ming and other related papers. Neither of us wanted her to leave, but the decision was not ours. My mother’s low income meant that we did not qualify to sponsor Ai-ming’s immigration to Canada.
Ai-ming felt sure that one day, later in our lives, I would visit her in the United States. She would boast that she knew me because, by then, I would be well known. “An actor,” she guessed. I shook my head. “A painter?” “No way.” “A magician!” “Ai-ming!” I groaned, aghast. She smiled and said, “A writer? Sentences are equations, too.” “Maybe.” “An expert in substituting numbers for numbers.” I had no idea what that was but I smiled anyway and said, “Sure.” Only later did I find out it was the Chinese term for algebraic number theory. She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry. I felt she saw into me, past every facade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one’s life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security — Ai-ming’s love, the love of an older sister — out of my childhood and into my adult life.
Or perhaps it could be that I have taken all our remaining conversations, all the half-finished and barely begun ones, and put each word into this particular night, that I have projected back in time some explanation for the inexplicable, and the reasons that I loved her and waited eagerly for each and every letter until the day arrived when no more letters came. Did she try to return to Shanghai and to her mother? Did she make a success of herself in the United States? Had there been an accident? Despite my efforts, I still do not know. It could be that I am misremembering everything. I had only a small understanding of the things that had happened in her country, my father’s country, in 1989, at the end of spring and the beginning of summer, the events that had necessitated her leaving. Here, inside my father’s favourite restaurant, I asked the question I had been longing to speak aloud, to ask if she been part of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
Ai-ming hesitated for a long time before answering. Finally, she told me about days and nights when more than a million people had come to the Square. Students had begun a hunger strike that lasted seven days and Ai-ming herself had spent nights on the concrete, sleeping beside her best friend, Yiwen. They sat in the open, with almost nothing to shelter them from the sun or rain. During those six weeks of demonstrations, she had felt at home in China; she had understood, for the first time, what it felt like to look at her country through her own eyes and her own history, to come awake alongside millions of others. She didn’t want to be her own still river, she wished to be part of the ocean. But she would never go back now, she said. When her father died, she had been dispossessed. She, too, had passed away.