Do Not Say We Have Nothing

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

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

Do Not Say We Have Nothing has such richness of language, theme and story that it’s hard to know where to begin. Connections between family and friends; music in one’s life and culture; stories and the recording of them; loss, grief and memory; the cost and the need of revolution – Madeleine Thien treats these with compassion, subtlety and ambiguity, but she leaves it for the reader to determine their significance.
Thien writes with emotional intensity that brings a reader into the character’s struggles, whether it’s in the nationalist war for the independence of China, a family victimized by politicized mobs in the “Cultural Revolution” or young people trying to correct the errors of the Communist Party at Tiananmen show more Square. In the context of these vast social movements, Thien also deals movingly with individuals trying to relate to each other as friends, family members and colleagues. And she explores the inner lives of her characters as they try to express themselves through stories, music, even mathematics.
For me, the themes about revolutionary change are among the most interesting, and unusual, in a novel. The great hardships of the war to free China from Japanese occupation, and then to install the Communist government, are the starting point of the novel’s histories. Music and stories help connect people and help them deal with the hardships. Skipping over the starvation of the “great leap forward,” the novel then takes up the “great proletarian cultural revolution.” We see this from the point of view of its victims, who are manipulated into destroying each other as political factions fight for control of the state. Here, revolution seems completely destructive down to the soul and psyche of those involved – much like the ultimate betrayal by Winston Smith in 1984. Music and stories are wiped out.
This gets reversed in the Tiananmen uprising, when we see the passion for change on the part of the students, and also of the residents of Beijing and throughout China. Again, this has extreme costs but Thien also brings the reader into the hopes and energies of those affected by the uprising, and shows the great creativity it unleashed in music and writing. (I found this section particularly fascinating, as it shows the involvement of ordinary people across China in supporting the students, something that I wasn’t aware of before. If it’s an accurate picture, it’s easy to see why the party bureaucracy repressed the Tiananmen revolt so viciously.)
This is where the title becomes clear – it seems to mean: Do not say we have nothing when we have our links to each other that keep us moving ahead, even when it seems we have nothing else.
Interweaving all of this makes for complex writing, so the book is a slow read. But Thien’s writing is so evocative, that I was happy to give it plenty of time. It’s both beautifully descriptive and allusive, so it’s worth a little contemplation to see what the writing reveals about the characters and the story. Like poetry, rushing through the text would miss its richness and meaning. Also, since it’s open to interpretation, I think every reader will take a different understanding of the story.
For example, the Book of Records is never explained, but it seems to represent both creativity and history, inspiring and connecting people, but repressed by the Party regime. Like the creativity of the musicians, its survival is the possibility of renewal in spite of censorship and repression.
Initially, I wasn’t sure I would like the book. But Thien’s storytelling is so engaging that she overcame my resistance, and I completely fell for the story. 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

I enjoyed and got totally caught up in this multi-generational story of life in China during the cultural revolution and the Tianamen Square uprising. The book made me think about identity. Most of the characters are musicians, where their work and their creativity are one and the same. And what if your music -- your very sense of yourself -- is not allowed? Or if you are told you will have a different job? It makes me appreciate the accomplishments of individual people in such a regime.

The book also made me think about freedom. When so much of your life -- your work, where you live, where your spouse lives -- is controlled, it must be hard for those who leave such a regime (say, by emigrating) to adjust to the kind of freedom we enjoy show more in Canada. The very lack of oppression here can be a burden to some extent -- at least for a while.

Great writing, strong characters....well worth reading. show less