Free Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel by Madeleine Thien

you’re the one I come back to,” he mumbled, eyes closed. “Home from the tiresome world.” Big Mother wanted to insult him but she restrained herself. Her husband’s lips were thin with sadness and his face had aged. Even his grey stubble looked desolate. Outside the window, the landscape hurried past as if it to erase everything that had come before.
    —
    A year passed, and then four or five, in which Big Mother Knife rarely saw her sister. Swirl and Wen now had a daughter, Zhuli, who had been born a ten-pound juggernaut before stretching into a lithe and sweet-natured child. “The girl,” wrote Swirl, “sings all the time. This child is the mystery at the centre of my life.”
    Big Mother wrote back, “They turn into wretches.”
    It was 1956 and Big Mother’s family had been in Shanghai for almost a decade. In quick succession, she had given birth to two more fluffy-haired boys with soft, triangular eyebrows. Ba Lute had insisted on naming them Da Shan (Big Mountain) and Fei Xiong (Flying Bear). What next, Big Mother had shouted at him, Tasty Mutton? The walls of the alleyway house had begun to press in on her like a jacket grown too tight. This morning, for instance, Da Shan was jabbing all ten fingers into his younger brother’s screaming face. Meanwhile, Sparrow was deaf to everything but the records he had borrowed from the Conservatory. Her oldest son was about to graduate with a double major in piano and composition but, night after night, he sat with his foolish foreheadpressed to the gramophone, as if the machine was his mother. He was transcribing Bach’s Goldberg Variations into jianpu and the bourgeois music fluttered through the house, on and on, until Big Mother heard it even when the rooms were silent. Meanwhile, her hero husband was busy leading another land reform campaign, he was always away, overthrowing a landlord’s family, repossessing fields of mung beans, flax and millet, and maybe the air itself, on behalf of the People. And if it wasn’t land reform, it was song and dance troupes, political study sessions, Party meetings, or private flute lessons for yet another influential cadre. Did he even teach at the Conservatory anymore? At home he was petulant and insufferable, and looked at Big Mother and the boys as if at a very dirty window. She ignored him. It wasn’t difficult. The insults that should have pricked her heart were as harmless as porridge.
    Still, those pretty piano notes were mocking all the movements she made. They dripped from the kitchen to the bedroom to the parlour, seeping like rainwater over the persimmons on the table, the winter coats of her family, and the placid softness of Chairman Mao’s face in the grey portrait framed on the wall. She thought he looked doughy, not at all like the handsome, intrepid fighter he had once been. Regret crawled through her heart and limbs; did it crawl through Chairman Mao’s? Despite her best efforts, loneliness was encroaching upon Big Mother Knife.
    Around noon, after the boys had left for school, Ba Lute unexpectedly arrived home. Her husband carried his army bag over his shoulders, and grinned as if he’d just won a nasty brawl. His padded coat was the same oyster-shell blue as the winter sky, except for a streak of what looked like blood, and it saddened Big Mother that the outside world, with all its hatreds, both petty and historical, had come inside her home.
    “Stupid me,” she said. “I thought the war ended in 1949.”
    Ba Lute had been gone for six weeks and, at the thought of seeing his family again, had broken into a run as soon as he entered the laneway. His wife’s indifference made him feel like abeggar. Big Mother was still in her nightdress and her curly hair stood up on her head like cotton batting. He couldn’t decide whether to scold her or comfort her.
    He threw down his copy of Jiefang Daily and a pack of Front Gate cigarettes. “The Party has launched another bold campaign. Aren’t you