The people around her were weeping. At the front, the student leaders began to sing the Internationale.
Arise, slaves, arise!
Do not say that we have nothing.
We shall be the masters of the world!
This quote reveals the origin of the title phrase. Occurring very near the end of the book, the singing is the climax of a tense standoff in Tiananmen Square between soldiers and protesting students. The soldier engage a military tactic of advancing upon their enemy in way that creates a funnel in which the soldiers represent the wide end and their opponents are squeezed into the tight end. It is a successful strategic move for the purpose of forcing the abandonment from a certain space of those who are wanted there. Amid the screaming and weeping and attempts to fight back, suddenly leader of the student opposite break out in the anthem of the revolution no matter the country. Although The Internationale has its origins in France, it has been re-appropriated and its lyrics tweaked to fit the needs of the country adopting it. A Chinese translation is used here, but a search for lyrics of the inspiration tune will reveal a wide variety of different words, thoughts and expressions. The particular line about not saying we have nothing is a fairly unique one not really representative of most other versions.
“If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how we can talk to one another? We will never find common purpose. I believe in the Party, of course, and I don’t want to lose faith. I will never lose faith…”
Since the bulk of this novel takes place in or is related to communist rule in China, it may not be the easiest task for many readers to locate something to which they can relate. This is an example of an exchange that many Americans can relate to intensely. Basically, what Tofu is talking about in the conversation taking place here has to do with ideological indoctrination, propaganda, and the challenge of thinking for yourself. While the topic of his concern is Chairman Mao’s instruction to defend the communist revolution by identifying that which is counter-revolutionary, the thoughts expressed here could just as easily be applied to the stark divide partisan divide separation the Right and Left in America in the wake of Donald Trump’s four years as President.
It was a few months later, in March 1990, that my mother showed me the Book of Records. That night, Ma was seated at her usual place at the dining table, reading. The notebook in her hand was tall and narrow, the dimensions of a miniature door. It had a loose binding of walnut-coloured cotton string.
The first-person narrator who opens the story fairly quickly comes upon the Book of Records mentioned here. As the story book unfolds, its narrative focus widens outward to cover a variety of characters and situations far beyond the narrow focus that it seems it will pursue. The book has boasts a large cast of characters, many of them substantially significant but with individual narratives that do necessarily cross paths for the purpose of unification like one might expect. These multiple strains of subplots do wind up having a unifying effect, however, and that effect traces directly to the mysterious text discovered. The Book of Records will prove to be a sort of hidden treasure or treasure map itself that binds the disparate elements of the story together and makes it a coherent whole.
