Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“’A life can be long or short but inside it, if we’re lucky, is this one opening … I looked through this window and made my own idea of the universe and maybe it was wrong. I don’t know anymore, I never stopped loving my country but I wanted to be loyal to something else, too.’” (260)

Vancouver, 1991: Ten-year-old Marie and her mother have invited a guest into their home: Ai-Ming, a young woman who has fled China following the protests in Tiananmen Square. Ai-Ming tells Marie the story of her family in Revolutionary China – from Mao Zedong’s ascent to power, to the Cultural Revolution, and finally to the events leading to Beijing demonstrations of 1989.

China (Shanghai/Beijing) 1950s-1989: Three musicians – the genius show more composer Sparrow; his ethereal cousin and talented violinst Zhuli; and their best friend, the enigmatic and headstrong Kai, a gifted pianist – study at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s. Through Mao’s Cultural Revolution, they struggle, each in their own way, to remain loyal to the China they love, to each other, and to the music they have devoted their lives to. As the relentless denunciations and humiliations of contemporary society force them to re-invent both their private and their artistic selves, their decisions and their fates will reverberate through the years – and have deep and lasting consequences for both Marie and Ai-Ming.

It’s no surprise that Do Not Say We Have Nothing is sweeping the literary prize world. The novel is hauntingly intimate as well as historically ambitious – and beautifully written. For one who knew so little of Revolutionary China, I put this book down feeling better informed as well as fulfilled by a remarkable story. Thien’s characters – and the lives they lived in Revolutionary China – are unforgettable. My single suggestion for improvement is that a more ruthless editor might have made the novel a somewhat shorter one. But Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a highly recommended read! I will be following Thien to see what she does next.
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Most Powerful Quote: on the emotional distance between people, even family, who survived Revolutionary China:
“People lost one another. You could be sent five thousand kilometres away, with no hope of coming back. Everyone had so many people like this in their lives, people who had been sent away … You couldn’t live against the reality of the time but it was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private. You had to keep something for yourself, and to do that, you had to turn away from reality. It’s hard to explain if you didn’t grow up here. People simply didn’t have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted. Everything was decided by the Party.” (417) show less

I'm going to be pushing this book to friends. Tracing two families, in particular through the friendship of Kai, Sparrow and Zhuli, through the civil war, the cultural revolution, the Tiananmen Square protests and the liberalisation of China. It sweeps across China and beyond, as exiles are sent to the far reaches of this enormous country, as well as encompassing the experiences of change in the almost unrecognisable cities. As well as the horror of the actions of the revolutionary guard there is also joy, such as shared company on the top of a bus, squashed in with other students.
"He watched the lowlands disappear, giving way to higher altitude and drier winds. Quilts were unrolled, thermoses opened and whips of steam plaited together show more and curled into the night sky. Sparrow slept under the protection of stars and a half moon..."
In case this sounds too worthy - it made me laugh as well. Unlike other stories with a contemporary narrator, I genuinely felt the connection and relevance of Marie's story too, united by a samizdat story circulated around China hand to hand.

"I leaned over the notebook and stared at the gathering of words. Chinese characters tracked down the page like animal prints in the snow.
"It's a story," Ma said.
"Oh. What kind of story?"
"I think it's a novel. There's an adventurer named Da-Wei who sets sail to America and a heroine named May Fourth who walks across the Gobi Desert..."
I stated harder but the words remained unreadable.
"There was a time when people copied out entire books by hand," Ma said. "The Russians called it samizdat, the Chinese called it...well, I don't think we have a name. Look how dirty this notebook is, there's even bits of grass on it. Goodness knows how many people carried it all over the place....it's decades older than you Li-Ling. "
I wondered: What wasn't?"
In choosing to focus on a musical family the author has been able to ask all sorts of questions about what you do when the thing that makes you you is banned, or you are told you have to do a different job. And the characters all have different responses, which feels real too.
"...the music had no beginning, it persisted, whether she was there or not, awake or not, aware or sleeping. She had accepted it all her life, but lately, she had begun to wonder what purpose it served. Prokofiev, Bach and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation and Chairman Mao occupied for others. Why was this? How had she been made differently? After her parents had been taken away from Bingpai, she had been cut into an entirely different person.
There was a man limping across the park, one hand holding a rip in his shirt, as if this unsightliness bothered him more than the blood that ran down his face."

(Do I need to say I want this one to win the Booker? ) show less

Do Not Say You Have Nothing follows three generations of an extended family from the 1930s to 1990s through the tumultuous regime of Mao and his Red Guards, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution when countless innocents were slaughtered or forced into labour camps for ‘re-education’.

A gentle and talented composer who grew up listening to the songs that his mother and aunt sang in tea-houses, Sparrow attends Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s with his younger cousin, Zhuli, a violinist, and their pianist friend, Kai, when their lives are suddenly ripped apart by political turmoil.

Seemingly overnight, classical western music is considered ‘counter-revolutionary’. Hounded by Red Guards, their zeal fired by ignorance show more and malice, few of the most gifted musicians managed to survive. What follows is a deeply moving account of innocents caught in the midst of political upheaval, as friends and relatives betray one another and families are torn apart.

Haunted by loss and grief, Sparrow turns away from music, letting go of the symphonies he’s composed. For twenty years, he works in his designated job building radios, until the students’ uprising in 1989 when he suddenly finds himself composing again.

The dual timeline is masterfully executed, with the novel beginning in 1980s Vancouver, so interwoven with real life I had to check to make sure it was a novel and not a biography I had picked up.

The author has not only vividly recreated a tumultuous time period in China’s recent history, she has peopled her story with a cast of utterly believable and memorable characters.

The theme of oppression is expressed as dissonance – when who we are on the outside does not match who we are on the inside. In an oppressive regime, with no basic human rights - no freedom to raise your own children, to choose your vocation, where you live, when families can be torn apart for trumped-up charges, one must put up a front in order to survive, and endure.

Threaded through the narrative threads is a ‘Book of Records’, a fictional account documenting the travels of two lovers kept apart. One of them is named May Fourth (an allusion to the mass protest on May 4, 1919 in Beijing, led by university students), a reminder that 70 years later, on June 4, 1989, history repeats itself in Tiananmen Square.

It is said that those who forget the past, who refuse to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. But is it human nature to forget? Or are those conditioned by a lifetime of fear too traumatized to speak of past atrocities?

In his exile, Wen the Dreamer adds the names of his fellow prisoners (all accused of fabricated political crimes) to his copies of the Book of Records, lest we forget those who suffered at the altar of corrupt leaders and their ideology.

Like parts of a symphony, the various threads of narrative are woven together with intention and recurring thematic motifs. We are repeating ourselves, the author seems to be saying, from one generation to the next, making copies of lives that are unconsciously influenced by our upbringing, just as Sparrow’s mother and aunt can hear the songs of his childhood in his final composition - a sonata for violin (Zhuli) and piano (Kai).

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a symphony of contrapuntal writing that is layered and nuanced, understated yet heartbreaking. Sparrow represents all those whose talent was muffled, guilty of nothing more than surviving when their loved ones did not.

In light of what’s happening In the world today, this might serve as a reminder that freedom of expression is always the first to fall in an oppressive regime, that complacency – the unwillingness to speak up – can ensure not only a lifetime but generations of suffering.

Keeping a record, bearing witness, giving voice to the voiceless, attesting to the atrocities perpetrated to the innocent, lest we forget, lest we make the same mistake all over again – that may well be the ultimate goal of this important work. show less

Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows an unorthodox structure to explore at a personal level two social/political paroxysms suffered by China in the 20th Century: the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard scourge of the mid 1960s and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. These two iron-fisted crackdowns battered and splintered a family of musicians and poets, members of which had to flee to the desert of Kyrgyzstan, were driven to suicide, or were murdered by the People’s Liberation Army at Tiananmen. At its core, then, the novel exposes mob rule and official paranoia for the horrors that they are, and shines a spotlight on Chinese character, with its youthful impatience for change and its view of justice, and show more the blind, intolerant authoritarian reactions to such impulses.

The novel gains its power by unfolding this intractable and unfortunate conflict from the inside out: Ba (daddy) Lute and Big Mother Knife head a tight-knit family of musicians and itinerant storytellers which becomes ground into the dirt — hounded as fugitives, driven to suicide, or simply murdered by troops. The blind, impersonal machinery of the authoritarian gods functions in strokes broad and minuscule, and crushes creativity that would never harm a rational regime.

Thien introduces each chapter with a few pages portraying events in the immediate past — the novel was published in 2016 in Canada — and from the viewpoint of Mali, a young woman of Chinese birth who immigrated to Vancouver with her mother in the 1990s. This device grounds the narrative in the present and gives it weight. The framing of the main story this way gives it an exalted, poetic feel, and the characters a heroic tenor. These are the strengths of this very accomplished piece.

This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and this reminded me of the type of fiction honored by the Nobel Committee: its politics clearly reflected those of the Committee, while the writing, though effective, doesn’t always soar to the artistic — character, plot, image, structure, diction — heights of other deserving novels. It’s a powerful, plaintive, memorable novel, make no mistake. As a first-hand narrative of paranoid, cynical, out-of-ideas leadership fomenting groupthink, theft and murder on the part of mindless, lawless mobs, I’ve never read its equal. And probably never will again.

https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2025/01/do-not-say-we-have-nothing-by-madele... show less

Initially set in Canada, Li-Ling (aka Marie) tries to understand what led to her father’s suicide. This goal takes her back multiple generations to the Cultural Revolution in China. Her investigation is assisted by Ai-Ming, a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square. These two young women find that their family histories are interconnected.

It is an ambitious undertaking, a sweeping story of two families with ties to Chinese musicians. During the Cultural Revolution, people in the arts became a target for “reeducation through labor.” It gets at the heart of the artist, trying to hold onto their love of music and art while surrounded by an increasingly restrictive society.

Thien writes beautifully, show more with an emotional intensity. It is not a quick or easy read and requires the reader’s focused attention to keep track of the many individuals, family relationships, and historical events. I was particularly riveted by the dramatic account of the Tiananmen Square protests. I appreciated the numerous references to classical music and literature.

It is a story of the impact of historical events on the individual, and the many types of tragedies they experienced. It is also a poignant story of trying to preserve the essence of that which makes life worth living. It is a story of great love and great loss. It is ultimately a story of refusing to accept the denial of self (such as self-expression, identity, prior allegiances, and personal interests) required by the Party. show less

Do Not Say We Have Nothing traces the impact of China's political revolutions on two families from the mid-20th century to the present day. Marie, the daughter of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver, begins her story in 1989, with her father's death. The story reaches back in time to the Cultural Revolution, when Marie's father, Kai, was a student at a Shanghai music conservatory. His life intertwined with that of Sparrow, a composer and professor at the conservatory, and Sparrow's cousin, Zhuli, another student at the conservatory. The three are separated when the events of the revolution catch up to them. The story continues with Sparrow's daughter, Ai-ming, and her aspirations of attending a Beijing university. The student protests at show more Tiananmen Square change the direction of her life. A mysterious Book of Records provides a link from the past to the present.

The book's recurring themes include music, mathematics, Chinese characters and their shades of meaning, the social and psychological effects of the lack of self-determination, familial duty, love, and friendship. The first section covering the end of the Communist Revolution through the first years of the Cultural Revolution is the strongest part of the book. The characters are well rounded and the physical setting is vivid. The second half that centers on the events of Tiananmen Square isn't as sharply focused, and Ai-ming is not as fully developed as the other major characters in the book. Perhaps that's intentional, though. As a child of the Cultural Revolution, her life has always been controlled by the state. The well-deserved attention this book has received from major literary prize committees has it poised to become Thien's breakthrough novel.

This review is based on electronic advance reader copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley. show less

Thien's magnum opus reminded me of The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, a fictionalized biography of Shostakovich trying to survive under the thumb of Stalin. Thien's book is an ambitious, multi-generational, multi-layered story, beginning in Vancouver but focusing on the cultural revolution in China. Thien's quiet writing belies the emotional depth of a story that describes people trying to endure and retain their human spirit through their love of music and art. It is advisable to pay attention because, although brilliant, this is not an easy read that has many characters and a lot happening with the risk of significant ramifications. By the time I reached the events at Tiananmen Square I was completely hooked. I wish I had known more show more about Chinese history and government before I started. show less