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

eyes and Ai-ming set the notebook aside.
    In teahouses and restaurants, Big Mother Knife and her younger sister, Swirl, could sing harmonies so bewitching that problems large and small disappeared beneath the enchantment of their voices. They travelled from town to village, Ai-ming said, performing on makeshift stages, their dark hair bright with flowers or strings of coins. Story cycles like The Water Margin or Wu Song Fights the Tiger could last a hundred chapters, and the old storytellers could spin them out over months, even years. Listeners couldn’t resist; like clockwork they arrived, eager to hear the next instalment. It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.

    IN THOSE DAYS , your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese. How easy it was to mistake your brother for a traitor or your beloved for an enemy, to fear that you yourselfwere born in the wrong moment of history. But in the teahouses, anyone could share a few songs, anyone could lift their wine cup and toast the validity and the continuity of love. “People knew family and kinship were real,” Big Mother said. “They knew regular life had once existed. But no one could tell them why, just like that, and for no good reason at all, everything they cared for was being ground to dust.”
    She was eighteen when she named her newborn baby Sparrow, a humble name rarely used for boys. The little sparrow was a bird so common that gods and men, idealists and thieves, Communists and Nationalists, would pass over him in disdain. The peaceful sparrow was weightless because he had no baggage to carry and no messages to deliver.
    Throughout his childhood, Sparrow was startled awake in little towns. Teahouse patrons shouted drunkenly beside his mother and aunt, the men thundering like trombones and the women trilling like flutes. By the age of five, he was earning his keep, performing “Song of the Cold Rain” or “In That Remote Place,” ballads so stirring that even those with nothing but dust in their pockets tried to feed him something, a nibble of turnip or a crust of bread, or even a puff from their foot-long tobacco pipes. “Here is the little sand sparrow (or golden wing, or red sparrow or stone sparrow),” the grandmothers would say, “come to peck at our hearts again.”
    Once, in the chaos, they passed a troupe of blind musicians in an abandoned village. The troupe walked–hand to elbow, elbow to hand–guided by a sighted girl who was only eight or nine years old. Sparrow asked his mother how the blind musicians, swaying forward like a rope in the dust, could hide themselves when the warplanes came, strafing houses and refugees, trees and rivers. Big Mother answered brutally, “Their days are numbered. Can a single hand cover the sky?” It was true. Year after year, the roads cratered and collapsed, entire towns vanished, crushed into the mud, leaving behind only garbage, dogs and the putrid, sicklysweet smell of bodies numbering in the hundreds, the thousands, and then the millions. And yet the lyrics of ten thousand songs (“You and I are forever separated by a river / my life and thoughts go in two directions…”) crowded out everything in Sparrow’s memory so that, as an adult, he retained very few memories of the war. Only this troupe of blind musicians could not be erased. Once, at the start of the war and then, astonishingly, near the end, they had reappeared with the sighted girl, now a teenager, coming from nowhere, disappearing to nowhere, a ribbon slipping endlessly between the buildings, their instruments humming as they passed. Were they real? Without realizing it, had he, Big Mother and Swirl, like the