Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

away from her. I went into my bedroom and closed the door.
    —
    The room felt very small. Family , I whispered to myself, was a precious box that could not open and close at will, just because Ma said so. Ba’s picture on my dresser hurt me so much. No, it wasn’t the picture of him, but the feeling it caused, this chafing emotion that turned everything, even my love for Ma and Ai-ming, bitter. I wanted to throw the picture on the floor but I was afraid that it was real, that it contained my father himself, and if I damaged it, he would never be able to come home. The rain outside hammered against my thoughts. Down the windowpane, it changed and slipped, and all those rivulets of water, growing large and small, joining and shivering, began to confuse and mesmerize me. Was I as insignificant as that? Would I ever change anything? I suddenly remembered the scent of my father, a sweetness like new leaves or freshly mown grass, the smell of his soap. His voice with its oddly formal syntax, “What does daughter wish to say to Father? Why is daughter crying?” His voice like no voice that had ever lived.
    I remembered, against my will, how I’d overheard Ma saying that when Ba was found, he’d had almost no belongings. She’d been speaking on the telephone, long distance, to a friend in Hong Kong. She said that the suitcase, full when he left, was empty. He’d gotten rid of everything, including his wedding ring, his Sony portable CD player and his music. He hadn’t even been carrying a photograph of us. The only note he left was not a goodbye. All it said was that there were debts he couldn’t pay, failures he couldn’t live with, and that he wished to be buried in Hong Kong, at the Chinese border. He said that he loved us.
    Once each year, my father used to take us to the symphony. We never had good seats but Ba said it didn’t matter, the point was to be there, to exist in the room while music, however old it mightbe, was being renewed. Life was full of obstacles, my father used to tell me, and no one could be sure that tomorrow or next year, anything would remain the same. He told me that, when he was a young boy, his adoptive father, the Professor, had gone with him to the symphony in Shanghai and that the experience had changed him forever. Inside him, walls that he had never realized existed suddenly revealed themselves. “I knew I was destined to have a different kind of life,” he said. Once he became aware of these walls, all he could think about was how to pull them down.
    “What walls?” I had asked.
    “Mìng,” he said. “Fate.” It was only later, when I looked up the word again, that I saw that mìng 命 meant fate but it also meant life.
    The knock on the door brought me back to the rain, to the room and myself.
    —
    “Ma-li,” Ai-ming began, sitting at the foot of my bed. She had turned the desk lamp on, and she looked like a pale shadow I had cast. “I shouldn’t have read your father’s diaries. This is what I wanted to tell you. I’m truly sorry, Ma-li. Please forgive me.”
    The quiet intensified. I was sitting as far away from her as I could, on top of my pillows.
    Ai-ming whispered, “I am truly a very fearful person.”
    “What are you afraid of?”
    “That your mother will ask me to leave. I can’t survive by myself again. I know I can’t.”
    Shame welled up in me. Her words reminded me, somehow, of Ba. “You’re family, Ma said so.”
    “It’s just, Ma-li, our lives are confused. And there is this…heartbreak between your family and mine.”
    I nodded as if I understood.
    Ai-ming continued, “My father loved music, like yours. He used to teach at the Shanghai Conservatory, but that was before I was born.”
    “What did he do afterwards?”
    “He worked in factories for twenty years. First, he built wooden crates and, later on, he built radios.”
    “I don’t understand. Why would he do that if loved music?” The rain was falling so hard it was hitting the window