Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Marie Jiang, also known as Jiang Li-Ling, reflects on how traumatic 1989 was for her and her mother. Her father, a former concert pianist, abandoned them and then shortly after killed himself when Marie was ten years old.

At 31, working as a mathematician at a Canadian university decades after her father committed suicide and shortly after her mother died, Marie heard Bach coming out of a shop in Vancouver’s Chinatown. The music pulled her into a memory of her father driving through the rain and “humming” when she was little (4). She remembers very little about her father, so this memory feels especially precious.

Marie reflects on how her father, whom she calls Ba, disappeared at the same time as the riots in Tiananmen Square. Her mother watched footage of the protests religiously, leaving Marie to absorb the “chaotic, frightening images” at the same time that she was trying to absorb her father’s absence (5). She tried to maintain her Chinese calligraphy lessons during this time, but she felt overwhelmed by her inability to understand so she quit. As winter came on, the police came and informed them of her father’s suicide and all semblance of normalcy in her household went kaput.