Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel Read Free

neighbours. Across the courtyard, I saw a miserable Christmas tree. It looked like someone had tried to strangle it with tinsel.
    Rain gusted and the wind whistled. I brought my mother a glass of eggnog.
    “Is it a good letter?”
    Ma set the pages down. Her eyelids looked swollen. “It’s not what I expected.”
    I ran my finger across the envelope and began to decipher the name on the return address. It surprised me. “A woman?” I asked, suddenly afraid.
    My mother nodded.
    “She has a request,” Ma said, taking the envelope from me and shoving it beneath some papers. I moved closer as if she was a vase about to slide off the table, but Ma’s puffy eyes conveyed an unexpected emotion. Comfort? Or maybe, and to my astonishment, joy. Ma continued: “She’s asking for a favour.”
    “Will you read the letter to me?”
    Ma pinched the bridge of her own nose. “The whole thing is really long. She says she hasn’t seen your father in many years. But, once, they were like family.” She hesitated on the word family. “She says her husband was your father’s composition teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. But they lost touch with one another. During the difficult years.”
    “What difficult years?” I began to suspect that any favour would involve American dollars or a new refrigerator, and feared that Ma would be taken advantage of.
    “Before you were born. The 1960s. Back when your father was a music student.” Ma looked down with an unreadable expression. “She says that your father made contact with them last year. Ba wrote to her from Hong Kong a few days before he died.”
    A string of questions rose in me. I knew I shouldn’t pester her but at last, because I wished only to understand, I said, “Who is she? What’s her name?”
    “Her surname is Deng.”
    “But her given name.”
    Ma opened her mouth but no words came out. Finally, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Her given name is Li-ling.”
    She had the same name as me, only it had been written in simplified Chinese. I reached for the letter. Ma put her hand firmly over mine. Forestalling my next question, she lunged ahead. “These thirty pages are about the present not the past. Deng Li-ling’s daughter arrived in Toronto but her passport can’t be used. Her daughter has nowhere to go, she needs our help. Her daughter…” Nimbly, Ma slid the letter into its envelope. “Her daughter will come and live with us for a little while. Do you understand? This letter is about the present.”
    I felt sideways and upside down. Why would a stranger live with us?
    “Her daughter’s name is Ai-ming,” Ma said, trying to lead me back. “I’m going to telephone now and arrange for her to come.”
    “Are we the same age?”
    Ma looked confused. “No, she must be at least nineteen years old, she’s a student. Deng Li-ling says that her daughter…she says that Ai-ming got into trouble in Beijing during the Tiananmen demonstrations. She ran away.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “Enough,” my mother said. “That’s all you need to know.”
    “No! I need to know more.”
    Exasperated, Ma slammed the dictionary shut. “Who brought you up? You’re too young to be this nosy!”
    “But–”
    “Enough.”
    —
    Ma waited until I was in bed before she made the telephone call. She spoke in her mother tongue, Cantonese, with brief interjections of Mandarin, and I could hear, even through the closed door, how she hesitated over the tones which had never come naturally to her.
    “Is it very cold where you are?” I heard Ma say.
    And then: “The Greyhound ticket will be waiting for you at…”
    I took off my glasses and stared out the blurred window. Rain appeared like snow. Ma’s voice sounded foreign to me.
    After a long period of silence I re-hooked my glasses over my ears, climbed out of bed and went out. Ma had a pen in her hand and a stack of bills before her, as if waiting for dictation. She saw me and said,