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

interested? And why aren’t you dressed?”
    “Oh, good. A new campaign. As Chairman Mao says, ‘After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be the enemies without guns.’ ”
    He ignored her tone. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
    “They closed our office because the pipes froze,” Big Mother said. “Everything flooded. We’re a unit of more than two hundred people and the committee has to find a new space for us. So I’ve been liberated.”
    “That’s no excuse to stay indoors and feel sorry for yourself!”
    Big Mother eyed her husband.
    He sighed and tried to soften his tone. “Isn’t there anything to eat?” He took off his coat and went to the water basin, drinking straight from the dipper. Underneath all the padding, she saw that Ba Lute’s clothes seemed far too large, as if he had halved in size. Perhaps he had donated his flesh to the peasants. She got up, smashed around and finally slapped some food down in front of him. Ba Lute acted as if hadn’t eaten in a week. After polishing off a mountain of rice and a leg of chicken, their entire meat ration for the week, Ba Lute conceded he had missed her.
    She sniffed. “Is it so bad out there?”
    “The usual.” He found a clean cloth and wiped his mouth, then his whole face, pressing down on his eyes. Ba Lute had always been too round and cocky for his own good. This new thinness gave him a vulnerable, starved look, which confused her. He ran the cloth over the back of his neck. “Our land reform policy is glorious, but the People are in disarray. Still, it’s necessary work we’re doing. No one can say otherwise.” Without seeming to realize he was doing it, he started humming “Weeds Cannot Be Wiped Out.”
    “You and land reform,” she said. “You’d think your mother gave birth to the idea.”
    Ba Lute was so startled that he laughed. He checked himself and said abruptly, “Go to the devil, how can you joke like that? You’re going to get yourself killed.” As he put the cloth down, his hands shook. “Big Mother, you’ve got to learn to hold your tongue.”
    She looked at the bone on his plate. Picked clean. “You’re home for awhile, are you?”
    “I am.”
    “Good. Because I’m going to Bingpai to see my sister.”
    “Eh?” he said. His eyebrows lifted so high she thought they would fly away. “But what about your husband?”
    She picked up the bone and chewed on the end. “He’ll survive.”
    Ba Lute smiled but then, thinking over what she said, frowned. He slapped his hand on the table, working himself up into a grand annoyance. “Big Mother, listen here. Don’t you know we’re right in the middle of a life-and-death campaign? Please! Don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you, there’s a war going on in the countryside.”
    “It’s always a war with you people.”
    “There you go again! Now just hold on and think it through.”
    Once Ba Lute got going, she couldn’t stop him. She stared hungrily at his empty plate.
    “Some of these peasants, these desperate people,” he continued, “have to be forced to remember every humiliation. Forced! They have to be driven nearly out of their minds with grief before they can find the courage to pick up their knives and drive the landlords out. Of course they’re afraid. In the whole history of the world, what peasant revolution has ever made a lasting change?” He rubbed his bald head again. “I know what I’m talking about, don’t think I don’t. Anyway, it was all calming down but the new campaign stirred everyone up again. Encouraging the masses to criticize the Party! And now they’ve done it….”
    “My work unit has already issued me a travel permit.”
    “Your husband forbids it.”
    “Chairman Mao says women hold up half the sky.” She took his plate, picked up the chicken bone and flung it towards the scraps bucket. She missed. The bone hit the wall and stuck there. “Be a model father,” she said, “and