The next day, Sparrow sat her down in front of the record player and played all the music he could find. Her cousin listened with his eyes closed and Zhuli copied him and did the same. Inside her head, the music built columns and arches, it cleared a space within and without, a new consciousness. So there were worlds buried inside other worlds but first you had to find the opening and the entryway. Sparrow showed her how to remove the record from its paper sleeve, how to set it on the turntable, how to place the needle in its groove. Everything in Big Mother Knife’s house was careful and considered; a world away from the bullying she had recently endured. Everything in Ba Lute’s home made music. Zhuli watched them all playing their instruments, she watched their hands and bodies, she let the music write itself into her memory. She felt, as with the qin, that she had always known this music. That they recognized one another.
There was a small violin that belonged to Flying Bear, which he shunned. One day she sat beside it for several hours and finally, she placed it on her lap like the old qin and tentatively plucked the strings. She did this day after day but her cousin told her: “It’s not a zither and, in any case, you are too young to learn the violin.” She continued for nearly a week and finally Sparrow took the violin from her, lifted Flying Bear’s bow and began to play. It was too small for him, and his body folded around the instrument as if to prevent its voice from escaping. Zhuli recognized that voice, she felt she had known it longer than she had known life. Sparrow became her first violin teacher. Later, when she was eight, he passed her on to Professor Tan at the Conservatory. She accepted every word, gesture and criticism; her teacher was blunt and, during his tantrums, Zhuli feared he would smash her violin on the floor or break it on her head. But it was all drama. Professor Tan recognized that, in each piece that she played, she heard more and more music. But what was music? Every note could only be understood by its relation to those around it. Merged, they made new sounds, new colours, a new resonance or dissonance, a stability or rupture. Inside the pure tone of C was a ladder of rich overtones as well as the echoes of other Cs, like a man wearing many suits of clothes, or a grandmother carrying all her memories inside her. Was this what music was, was it time itself containing fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, and all the ages, all the generations? What was chronology and how did she fit into it? How had her father and mother escaped from time, and how could they ever come back?
When Ma finally returned home after six years in the desert camps, Zhuli wondered what words she could possibly say to her. There were no words adequate to the feeling between them. One night, Zhuli played the opening of Handel’s Xerxes for her mother. It was the simplest of songs, romantic, maybe even deadly with bourgeois sentiment, of course it was no Stravinsky, and yet in the middle of the aria, Zhuli felt as if her arms and her body were disappearing. She felt the only reality was this wire of tension between herself and Ma: it was the one true, unfinished movement of her life. In this room, there was only the act of listening, there was only Swirl, a counting down and a counting up, the beginning that could never be a real beginning. Her mother stared at her as if she did not recognize her daughter.
“Ma,” Zhuli had wanted to say, “it was my fault. I found this opening in the ground….I should have been sent away, not you. But don’t you see how long I waited for you, don’t you see how much I have tried to improve myself. I only exist now, I only…” If she put the violin down, would the real Zhuli, the one they had left behind, appear as surely as night after day? If there was no me, she thought, Great-grandfather West’s container would never have been discovered. Her parents would not have been condemned. These notes would not sound. An insignificant soul like hers could break the world but never remake it. What was the world becoming? Her mother was sickly pale and the hollows in her face reminded Zhuli of the grave itself. One blunt motion and Swirl would fold. And yet, Zhuli thought, we are alive now. I am alive. My mother is alive. It is a new age, a new beginning, and we are here.
7
IN THE SPRING OF 2000, after my mother passed away, I gave myself entirely to my studies. The logic of mathematics — its methods of induction and deduction, its power to describe abstract shapes that have no counterpart in the real world — sustained me. I moved out of the apartment that my mother had been renting ever since she and Ba first came to Canada, and in which I had grown up. Desperate to leave it behind, I cobbled together every penny I had and bought a dilapidated apartment on Alexander Street. The windows looked straight out into the port of Vancouver and, at night, the endless arrivals and departures of multi-coloured shipping containers, what they held, what they divulged, comforted me.
I kept my parents’ papers in the bedroom closet and a Cantor quote taped to the walclass="underline" “The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom,” and, like a child, I distracted myself by imagining numbers so immense, so limitless, they far exceeded all the atoms in the universe. Numbers, real and imaginary, were a language inside me, equations were branchings of substance and shadow, relationships and interrelationships, randomness and pattern, the fractional, incomplete yet consistently ordered world we live in. I listened to my father’s records but thought only of intervals, frequency and temperament, of the expression of numbers in an audible world.
By the time I turned twenty-five I had finished my Ph.D. and, thanks to a well-received paper I had published in Inventiones Mathematicae, I was offered teaching positions in Canada, the United States, Korea and Germany. To the surprise of my professors, I chose to stay in Vancouver. A year later, I was teaching Galois theory, calculus and number theory, as well as a seminar on the symmetry and combinatorial structure of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I had a small, but close, circle of friends. In and out of my research time, I continued to be preoccupied by Ma’s death and by the statistical improbability of finding Ai-ming. My mind was full of numbers; I was not lonely.
Yet I understood, even then, that my life was strange, shaped by questions that seemed to have multiple and conflicting answers.
—
In 2006, the year I turned twenty-seven, I made my first visit to Hong Kong.
For the next ten days, I disappeared into the crowds, nightclubs and bars of Mong Kok, returning to my rented room at 7 a.m. and sleeping until mid-afternoon. Ever since Ma’s death, work had been my entire existence; I had become, without knowing it, the perfect caricature of a reclusive professor, or as G.H. Hardy described mathematics, “the most austere and the most remote.” In the concentrated work of trying to prove a theorem, social life fell by the wayside. But, here, in Hong Kong’s neon lights and perpetual noise, I let myself be someone else entirely. Walking home as the city woke, miles from sober, I felt happy for the first time in many years.
Finally, the day before I was due to fly home, I willed myself to find the dwelling in which Ba had been living — the last one, since he had moved several times during the final months of his life. The address, 9F, Alhambra Building, 202 San Tin Dei, was known to me from police and coroner reports, which concluded: “The deceased, Jiang Kai, burdened by gambling debts, suffering from acute depression, committed suicide by jumping from his ninth-floor window.”