Her father ran up the narrow road of the Conservatory as if someone up ahead was calling him.
Beside her, Ba Lute moaned, “Ai yo! These young pianists have no understanding of contrapuntal anything. Loud and fast, that’s the only thing they know.”
“But it sounds good, grandfather.”
“Because you have no ear. You never had one, poor kid.”
Which was true. Just the other night, when he tried to give her an erhu lesson, he had screamed at her, “How can a budding scientist be incapable of keeping 4/4 time? Even a buffalo can do it!”
Now Ai-ming took his papery hand. Ba Lute had gotten plump in the belly but not in the legs and he resembled a pear on toothpicks. She feared he would totter over and be crushed.
“Hey, you! Little Sparrow! Slow down,” he shouted.
When her father turned, Ai-ming imagined the sparrow he might have been when he was a boy, a burst of song and a rush of feathers. Big Mother had told her that in the early 1960s, Conservatory students had been sent out to the fields to wage war. They played their instruments loudly and dissonantly from morning until night so that no little birds could land in the fields and eat the grain. Day after day, thousands of sparrows, killed by exhaustion, had fallen dead from the sky. “Yet another solicitous idea from Chairman Mao,” Big Mother had said solemnly. “Who said Western music never killed anyone?”
Something so barbaric would never happen now. To mark the beginning of 1988, Big Mother had given her a New Year’s calendar with the words, “Happiness Arrives,” written in running characters above the plump faces of the Gods of Harmonious Union. Those words lifted her thoughts as she tugged on Ba Lute’s hand. Happiness arrives. Pretty violinists, wearing brightly coloured dresses, parted around them. She would like to be a musician, Ai-ming thought, simply to look like them. But no, she had always preferred to dismantle a record player than to listen to any old sonata.
“Oh, oh,” Ba Lute said. “This old fart is running out of air.”
“Don’t rush. We’re not going anywhere.”
“How true, how true.”
The Bird of Quiet remained where he was, waiting patiently, as if he existed in a different dimension from the students zipping past. They were electricity, Ai-ming thought excitedly, sizzling electrons, and her father was the electron gate. Or they were time and he was space. Ai-ming remembered how, when Chairman Mao still breathed, she had regularly written criticisms of her father. (“I cry bitter tears knowing that I am the daughter of a bad element, capitalist-roader….” “In this war, there are no civilians!”) She’d been only a kid at the time, so her father had to help her write the tricky characters. When Chairman Deng came to power, criticisms like these were no longer so common. She and her father had never talked about them. Now, it seemed almost funny to remember that she had called him a snake or a demon, and even a snake-demon, that she had denounced him so naturally. He had taught her how to protect herself by hiding inside the noise.
“Why did we come anyway?” Ai-ming asked. “The Shanghai Conservatory only makes him feel bad.”
“Eh, it’s not my fault. Your father wanted to come. He has old friends here, you know.”
But there were no old friends, or none that came out to see him. He went into one building and out another, searching for someone, and she and Ba Lute waited under various flowering trees. Before they left, her father went into one of the practice rooms. Ai-ming sat on a chair in the corner as her father played the piano, she had never heard him do so before, had not quite realized he was even capable. His entire body, the way he moved, changed. Most of the pieces she recognized from the records (Bach’s Partita No. 6, Couperin, Shostakovich) but there was another piece, a complex figure that seemed to disassemble as she listened, a rope of music, a spool of wire. It seemed to rise even as it was falling, to lift in volume even as it diminished, a polyphony so unfathomably beautiful it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. When it stopped, tears came abruptly to her eyes.
After a moment, her father pushed the bench back. He closed the lid without a sound.
“What music is that?” she asked.
He turned to her and smiled. Ai-ming grinned, too, unsure. She felt an inexpressible sorrow welling up in the room.
“It’s nothing,” Sparrow said.
“Nothing?”
He stood up and went to the wall. “It’s mine,” he said. The lights were off so when he hit the switch they turned on, and he stared up at them, confused, and flicked the switch once more. The number 103 was stencilled in neat black ink on the wall.
“What do you mean it’s yours?”
“It’s me,” he said, more to the light switch than to her. “Music I wrote a long time ago, part of a symphony I never finished.” He went out. In the courtyard, the sun’s glare faded all the colours. “I hadn’t expected to remember, I was sure that after all this time it had completely disappeared.”
She followed him out, the music circling in her mind.
She wondered how many things a person knew that were better forgotten. Her father had looked at the piano as if it were the only solid thing in the room, as if everything and everyone else, including himself, were no more than an illusion, a dream.
—
From the moment she had first looked into the belly of a radio, Ai-ming had known her vocation: to study computer science at Beijing University and to be part of the technological vanguard. Wasn’t it obvious to everyone? Computers would one day hold up half the sky.
When she made this grand announcement to her family, Ai-ming had been six years old. Her father had continued eating but Big Mother had applauded, saying, “So not everyone in this house is half-dead after all.” That year, 1977, the competition had been epic: more than five million people wrote the university entrance examinations, competing for 200,000 precious places. Chairman Deng Xiaoping had reopened general admissions, and this was the first time since 1966 that university entrants would not be selected by the Party. In town, during the student parades, Ai-ming had even waved a banner (“The People love the students!”). How entrancing they were! Exhausted from studying yet defiantly awake. On the day of the exam, the first bells signalling the start of test-taking had brought everything to a stop, no traffic, no noise, no bickering, even Big Mother stopped shouting at passersby. Many weeks later, when the results were announced, the university entrants became the new heroes, young men and women who sweated over books instead of ploughs, who held up not one Little Red Book, but a giant stack of possibilities that teetered towards the skies. Their minds were ever-expanding factories crunching through raw material and spitting out answers. To get an education, Ai-ming thought, is glorious. To go to Beijing University one day would mean freedom.
In 1988, after studying sixteen hours a day for a full year, it was finally Ai-ming’s turn to endure three days of testing on nine subjects. Happiness arrives, she told herself. The first essay question was: “Light and shadow—‘All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.’—Leo Tolstoy. Discuss.’ ” The second was: “Take inspiration from the philosophy expressed by Ruan Yuan’s ‘Poem on Wuxing.’ ” She wrote more than nine hundred characters on each and, by the end of the first day, was giddy from nervous exhaustion. The overhead lights were distractingly bright, they made warning signals in her eyes. The exam was followed by an interminable wait, by tears and sleeplessness and tantrums. Her impressive scores got her hopes up but in the end, although she made the cut-off for South China Institute of Technology, her scores were not good enough for Beijing University or Tsinghua, or her third choice, Fudan. She would not be able to leave the province. All that week, comrade neighbours fell over themselves to congratulate her father and grandparents because Ai-ming was the only one from Cold Water Ditch going on to university. The neighbours couldn’t understand why Ai-ming was inconsolable, curled up in her room, crying her eyes out.