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

like flecks of silver. Without warning, I pictured Ma waiting at the bus stop, her coat sticking to her, the wind and the wet chilling her bones.
    “I met your father,” Ai-ming said, evading my question. “When I was a little girl, Jiang Kai came to my village. My father was very happy to see him after so many years. It was 1977 and Chairman Mao had died and it was the beginning of a new era. Many things were changing but, even so, my father was careful about showing his emotions. But I saw how much Jiang Kai’s visit meant to him, and that’s why I’ve always remembered it. And then, after my father died, Jiang Kai called us. Your Ba was in Hong Kong. I spoke to him on the telephone.”
    “Ai-ming, I don’t want you to talk about my Ba. I never, never want to hear his name.”
    “Mmmm,” she said. She put her hands inside her coat pocket and immediately took them out again.
    “Why are you always so cold!?” I asked, confused.
    She clapped her hands together to warm them. “I left Beijing in winter and I think the cold got stuck in my bones because I can’t get warm anymore. My mother and my grandmother helped me leave China. They were afraid because…I couldn’t pretend. I couldn’t go on as if nothing had changed.” Ai-ming burrowed further inside her coat. She looked terribly young and alone.
    “You miss your mother a lot, don’t you?”
    Ai-ming nodded.
    Something clicked in my mind. I clambered off the bed and went out. The notebook with her father’s writing, the Book of Records, was easy to find. I picked it up, knowing it would please her. But when I offered the notebook to Ai-ming, she ignored me.
    I tried again. “Ma told me it’s a great adventure, that someone goes to America and someone else goes to the desert. She said the person who made this copy is a master calligrapher.”
    Ai-ming emerged from coat. “It’s true my father had excellent handwriting, but he wasn’t a master calligrapher. And anyway, no matter how beautiful the Book of Records is, it’s only a book. It isn’t real.”
    “That’s okay. If you read it to me, I can improve my Chinese. That’s real.”
    She smiled. After a few moments of turning pages, she returned the notebook to the bedcover, which had become a kind of neutral ground between us. “It’s not a good idea,” she said. “This is Chapter 17. It’s useless to start halfway, especially if this is the only chapter you have.”
    “You can summarize the first sixteen chapters. I’m sure you know them.”
    “Impossible!” But she was laughing. “This is how I used to badger my grandmother into doing things she had no intention of doing.”
    “Did your grandmother give in?”
    “Occasionally.”
    I pulled the blanket around me as if the question was settled.
    “Before you feel too comfortable,” Ai-ming said, “I should tell you that my grandmother was known to everyone as Big Mother Knife.”
    “That’s not a real name!”
    “In this story, every name is true.” She tilted her head mischievously. “Or should I be saying Girl? Or Ma-li? Or Li-ling? Which one is your real name?”
    “They’re all real.” But even as I said the words, I doubted and wondered, and feared that each name took up so much space, and might even be its own person, that I myself would eventually disappear.
    Perplexed, I curled up into the empty space between us. Ai-ming was still turning the pages of the notebook. I asked what Big Mother Knife looked like. Ai-ming stroked my hair and thought for a moment. She said that everything about Big Mother was both big and small: long eyebrows over slender eyes, a small nose and big cheeks, shoulders like hilltops. From the time Big Mother Knife was a little girl, she had curled her hair; by the time she was old, the curls were so fine and thin they seemed made of air. Big Mother had a jackdaw laugh, a terrible temper, and a shouting voice, and even when she was a small child, nobody dared to treat her lightly.
    I closed my